Monastery of the Holy Cross

Articles tagged with reason

Ascension

As the Catholic Church in the United States celebrates the solemnity of the Ascension today, I noticed that the reading assigned to the office of Vigils for this day, Ephesians 4: 1-22, clearly relates to themes I’ve been developing in recent posts. Today would be a good opportunity to look a bit deeper at the theological underpinnings of the following themes: 1) differentiation of responsibility in a healthy community; 2) that this differentiation promotes maturity, and 3) maturity is about rationality. 

One preliminary point is of great importance: while the Church has traditionally separated the dates for the celebration of the Resurrection, Ascension, and Pentecost (the sending of the Holy Spirit), these should be understood as one Mystery. Thus, the Ascension is not only the enthronement of the risen Jesus at the right hand of God, it is also the birth of the Church (Christ’s resurrected Body, into which the baptized are incorporated). Liturgically, this birth of the Church is connected to the sending of the Holy Spirit, which Christ promised before His Ascension.

Paul, then, begins this meditation (which he writes from his jail cell in Rome), emphasizing the unity of the Church:

“I, then, a prisoner for the Lord, urge you to live in a manner worthy of the call you have received, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another through love, striving to preserve the unity of the spirit through the bond of peace: one body and one Spirit, as you were also called to the one hope of your call; one Lord, one faith, one baptism; one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.” [Ephesians 4: 1-6]

In our highly polarized environment, calls to unity are often heard as covert means of suppressing diversity. Indeed, one frequent criticism of Catholic Christianity targets the heavy freight of dogma to be taken on faith. This would seem to be the opposite of the rationality that I recently claimed comes from faith. From the standpoint of this criticism, faith would be submission to an authoritarian imposition of ideas and, therefore, a stifling of personal inquiry and questioning.

Thus, it is of some importance that Paul immediately switches to diversity within the Body:

But grace was given to each of us according to the measure of Christ’s gift. Therefore, it says:

“He ascended on high and took prisoners captive;
he gave gifts to men. [N.B. “gifts” in this context refers to the Holy Spirit]”…

And he gave some as apostles, others as prophets, others as evangelists, others as pastors and teachers, to equip the holy ones for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ,” [vv. 7-8, 11-12]

Here we see the differentiation of responsibility. Not everyone is given responsibility for preaching or teaching. At Vatican II, this idea of Paul’s received a significant development. It was recognized that the Church, existing in the world, needs the expertise of lay persons who understand finance, law, medical ethics, economics, history, and so on. These can be seen genuinely as gifts from the Holy Spirit for the building up of the body of Christ. No longer does all of the responsibility fall on bishops and priests. Bishops need to consult with lay experts in a variety of fields precisely in order to hammer out theological positions.

From another perspective, dividing responsibility reduces anxiety and thus promotes mature reflection. The great sociologist, Mary Douglas, in her underappreciated book Natural Symbols makes this point from another perspective. She compares different types of community organization, and shows that small groups with a lack of differentiation of roles tend to suffer from fear of the world, witch hunts, and the like. By contrast, large, differentiated societies tend to promote intricately intertwined and symbolic understandings of the world. They tend to be quieter, more conducive to scientific and artistic achievements. This is not to say that they have no problems whatsoever. But it supports the overall principle that dividing up areas of responsibility reduces systemic anxiety. It also supports the notion that entry into the Church promotes rationality.

The next section of Ephesians amazes me:

“until we all attain to the unity of faith and knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the extent of the full stature of Christ, so that we may no longer be infants, tossed by waves and swept along by every wind of teaching arising from human trickery, from their cunning in the interests of deceitful scheming. Rather, living the truth in love, we should grow in every way into him who is the head, Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, with the proper functioning of each part, brings about the body’s growth and builds itself up in love.” [vv. 13-16; my emphasis]

The unity of faith and knowledge is “of the Son of God,” Who is Truth. Since “all things came to be through Him [John 1: 3],” a true understanding of the cosmos opens up in the community of faith.

In other words, unity comes not from unthinking submission to dogmas imposed by authoritarian means. We all know, of course, that sometimes each of us must make an act of faith that an expert knows more than we do, and the expert can’t explain everything about a topic quickly. This act of faith presumes that what the expert knows is true, and that if we had enough time and training and facility, we would see the same truth as the expert, precisely because a mark of Truth is that it is the same for everyone. Thus unity arises from knowledge of the truth, and this acquired knowledge is a communal, cooperative affair. None of us is responsible for knowing everything. We must rely on “faith” that others will point us to truths that we cannot investigate entirely for ourselves.

Caravaggio’s depiction of Christ presented by Pilate. “Behold the man,” ironically points to the fulfillment of what God initiates in Genesis 1: 26. Whereas all other creatures spring to life when God says, “Let there be…” in the case of “man,” God says “Let us make man.” Here He is.

What is more, this faith and knowledge moves us toward maturity. “To mature manhood,” translates the Greek phrase, eis andra teleion. Knowing precisely what Paul means here is not easy because of the elasticity of the word andra, the dative form of the word for an adult man. We could, for example, translate this as “to mature adulthood.” However, it is also possible that andra is being used as a synonym for the more common Greek noun anthropos, which appears later in this same chapter, verses 23-24:

“be renewed in the spirit of your minds,and put on the new [man],* created in God’s way in righteousness and holiness of truth.”

This “new man” is Jesus Christ Himself, the goal [telos, from which we get teleion, or “matured”] of all creation. By our incorporation into His Body, we enter into that new society in which reason is allowed fully to flourish by faith. 

It is of Christ that Pilate says, “Behold the man [anthropos]” just before His Crucifixion. In John’s Gospel, this is the hour in which all things are “finished” [tetelestai–from the same root as “mature” above]. It is also the moment at which Christ gives over the Spirit [John 19: 30].”**

Mature adulthood then, arises from our discovery of ourselves as members of a new community, rooted in Truth and Love. When we accept this new identity (the “new name” of Revelation 2: 17), and stay at our assigned posts, we can trust that God will mysteriously bring about the fulfillment of the resurrection by the renewal of our minds by the Truth. This will allow us to live authentically and avoid being taken in by human trickery–a valuable skill at any time, but perhaps especially in our present moment.

* The New American Bible Revised Edition unhelpfully translates this as “new self.” I’ve inserted “man” instead of “self,” for reasons that should be fairly clear.

** I am indebted to Fr. John Behr for this paragraph.

Reason and Faith

I was a big science fiction fan as a kid. I read everything I could find by Isaac Asimov, and I memorized episodes of Star Trek. In high school, I subscribed to Asimov magazine, and it was from reading the short stories and novellas therein that I came to the realization that the Golden Age of science fiction was long gone. So I was somewhat prepared to be cynical when Star Trek: The Next Generation debuted my senior year.

“The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.”–Isaac Asimov

On the whole, I enjoyed the show, but a comparison between the two Star Treks at the time confirmed for me that the adventure, mystery, and humanity of the original was losing out to militarism, expertise, and a kind of bureaucratic stuffiness in the new series. Later seasons managed to fix many of the glaring problems of the early seasons, but I had lost interest by then, and was devoting my creative energies to music and Shakespeare.

One episode summarized the problems for me. All I can remember about it was that some kind of tear had opened up in the space-time continuum (!), and if the Starship Enterprise couldn’t get there and knit it up somehow, that reality would cease to exist. No pressure! Beneath the surface of this implausible plot device, it would appear that human beings have become responsible for literally everything. 

And isn’t this how we all feel sometimes? We are urged to feel simultaneously responsible for:

Reducing global temperatures
Every questionable thing the President says or Tweets
Making sure people in Michigan don’t die of COVID-19
Figuring out how to get our two-year-olds into Stanford
Ending terrorism (or evil itself, if George W. Bush is to be heeded)
Getting the bishops to be more disciplined
Making sure no kids anywhere get bullied
Donating to groups fighting cancer, Alzheimers, et al
Ending poverty
Murder Hornets

Now I assume that, most of the time, our conscious minds understand that we can’t do everything. But the cumulative effect of the impulse to solve every problem is chronic anxiety. As I wrote in the previous post, this is, in fact, a recipe for irrationality. To assume responsibility for all of the world’s problems is fundamentally unreasonable, but we rarely permit ourselves to admit this squarely. The result is a worldview with a large, false supposition built in.

According to family systems therapy, stress is not produced by overwork. Rather, overwork is one symptom of stress that has its roots in being overly responsible. Our present stressed-out overfunctioning is further fueled by a simplistic notion that our American political system is a democracy. It’s not, in fact. We live in a representative democracy, more formally called a republic. The reason I point this out is that a flat ideology of “democracy,” suggests that we are all responsible for everything in our country, and that the only way to address this responsibility is through constant monitoring of the news and constant argument. And it’s exhausting!

What if we’re not responsible for all that other stuff? Who might be? What if we felt that, behind it all, the maintenance of the space-time continuum was God’s prerogative and not ours? I often find that God raises up ingenious and courageous helpers at fortuitous moments. These helpers see the same problems I see, but have the intelligence, experience, and resources that I lack. It’s always possible, too, that a problem can’t be solved immediately. I will return to that possibility below.

“We feel that we must disagree with those prophets of doom who are always forecasting disaster.”–Pope Saint John XXIII

Pope Saint John XXIII offered this prayer each night before bed: “Well Lord, it’s your Church, you take care of it; I’m going to sleep.” Similarly, when Napoleon Bonaparte confronted Cardinal Consalvi and threatened to destroy the Catholic Church, the Cardinal’s response was, “Your majesty, we, the Catholic clergy, have done our best to destroy the church for the last 1,800 years. We have not succeeded, and neither will you.”

These are quotes by men of deep faith, but they are also clear-eyed realists. There’s nothing childish about this faith. It’s an acknowledgement that there are powers at work in the world well beyond what we can touch. Our task is to figure out our assignment and then resolve to stay at our posts. The pagan heroes of old understood that fate was not something that they could determine. It was, however, theirs either to reject or to accept nobly and graciously. By accepting fate, heroes also accepted the relatively confined spheres of action in which it is enacted. Beowulf died slaying the dragon that was threatening his native Geatland (southern Sweden), but the dragon never was a serious threat to the lands of most other contemporary peoples. Peruvian dragons were, presumably, for Peruvian heroes to deal with. And in heaven, the great band of dragon-slayers will have its own special space at the bar where they will hang out and share stories from every corner of the globe.

Realism is central to thinking rationally about our options for acting. Hyper-responsibility inclines us either to grandiose, impossible projects, or to paralysis. Bipolar disorder happens when someone oscillates between these two unrealistic options. Some choose to escape this oscillation by a strategic retreat into chronic complaint. None of these approaches are reasonable, nor are they mature. Hidden fears are continuing to contaminate our thinking.

Faith is a gift from God. This gift frees us from fear, and it frees us to risk the good even when we might suffer for it. In our present climate, I suspect that many of us are tempted to choose lesser goods because, in a highly polarized environment, we fear failure, rejection, and ostracization. If we remember that our Leader leads by way of the Cross, we can let go of the notion that the suffering we experience is a sign of God’s rejection or our failure. Nor is it our responsibility even to change those who cause us suffering, any more than Christ felt it important to win over Pilate and the Sanhedrin.

Faith is often presented as the opposite of reason, but this is a mistake. The opposite of reason is reactive fear. Faith is the friend of reason. In fact, it is the precondition for the full flowering of reason.

Fear and Reason

Fear is a part of our bodily constitution. It comes with being a member of the animal family. In evolutionary terms, it has served us and our fellow animals well. Fear rapidly mobilizes our energies to face down danger or to flee from it. Both reactions give us a better chance of surviving immediate danger. This means that natural selection has favored the cultivation of the fear-response in us.

“Nothing resembles an angry cat…more than an angry cat.”–Anthony Storr, “Aggression” The breakdown of distinctions caused by fear, anger, and violence makes reasoning impossible.

For us rational animals, however, fear also presents specific dangers of its own. When I was in high school, my family had a beautiful but terrifying dog, a black Labrador/German Shepherd mix. She was a great guard-dog for a single-mother family, but her attack instincts were sometimes, let’s say, inappropriate. Once, when one of my mother’s piano students came for her lesson and rang the doorbell, our dog shattered the glass of the front door in warding off this thirteen-year-old girl student. Our dog frequently would get very upset about the presence of my male friends, though once she decided you were safe, she was as devoted afterward as she had been suspicious before. The difficulty for us is that there were few things that we could say to our dog to convince her that her responses were irrational. This is why Aristotle refers to humans as rational animals; among the members of the animal kingdom, we have learned how to temper the fear response by muting it, thinking through the situation, and then deciding whether fear is warranted. If it is, we have a larger repertoire of responses than fight or flight. We can make a plan that takes into account potential long-term effects of any hypothetical actions. Dogs, intelligent as they are, lack most of what makes this possible for humans.

In Catholic moral theology, we speak of the “age of reason.” Very young children do not yet have the full faculty of reason, and, as a result, tend to act on the promptings of feelings. One of the responsibilities of parents is to respond to the emotions of children in such a way as to facilitate the emergence of reason in the child. As parents know, the ongoing achievement of rationality is directly linked to an ability to manage one’s emotions, especially fear. Maturity is marked by rational reflection and reason-based decision making. Immaturity is marked by impulsivity and emotional reactivity. Another shorthand way to summarize this would be to say that the mature adult tends to respond to life, whereas the immature person tends to react.

When we permit ourselves to react, or even to overreact, we move in the direction of immaturity and even infantilization at times. Adult temper tantrums are no different than kid temper tantrums.

Mature persons are not therefore unfeeling, however. We will still have the immediate bodily responses to typical stimuli: fear, joy, anger, hunger, and sexual arousal. What will change about us is that we will know how to anticipate the trajectory of these feelings. We will know how to step back from immediate engagement, especially from those emotions that are most likely to lead to trouble if acted upon. The stimulus and its initial emotional response, in other words, will just become more information. That first impulse of fear, or perhaps more often, a sense of something being not quite right, is often a signal. Perhaps we need to pay attention to our surroundings a bit more perceptively in order to judge correctly what is going on. Some of us are better at making these detections in personal relationships, accurately reading body language, for example, to gauge what is being left unsaid. Others tend to excel in situational awareness, the ability to spot potential dangers before they arise, and to sense the presence of danger by knowing how to interpret inconsistencies in large-scale spatial arrangements. This is a good, mature use of initial emotional responses or “gut feelings.”

All of the above helps to explain some difficulties facing us as we try to make prudential responses to the pandemic. The worst-case scenarios present significant dangers to our whole way of life. As I wrote earlier, fear is not an unreasonable response to a number of possible futures. But if we allow fear to become chronic, if we continually marinate ourselves in the scariest projections, we run the risk of making our response less mature and less rational. In point of fact, we have, as we all know, lots of time to decide how to deal with the pandemic. We are not faced with a saber-toothed tiger ready to devour our children, a danger that requires a decisive, forceful response.

The quarantine that most of us are experiencing ratchets up chronic fear in another way. Every fellow human being is to be treated indefinitely as a potential vector and danger. That means that grocery shopping has suddenly been transformed into a dangerous activity. Every single action that requires us to come into proximity with someone else, we are told, is dangerous. This itself seems like a recipe for chronic fear and, therefore, unfortunately, immature responses to the actual threat.

George Orwell warned about the dangers of a breakdown in trust between fellow citizens, and the relation of this breakdown to the breakdown of reason.

This situation is clearly unsustainable and poses, in my view, much more dangerous long-term consequences. If we continue to treat all social interactions as fearful, we run the very real risk of infantilizing ourselves and making rational discourse impossible. When reason is not an available option, we are left only with power and force. Totalitarian governments know this, and so the cultivation of fear is an ineliminable feature of all dictatorships. Mind you, I am not saying that we are living in such an environment—yet. But at the very least, it seems important to me to treat the resumption of social interactions as a necessary goal, and to find ways to discuss with others in our extended families, neighborhoods, and workplaces, goals for making this happen as safely as possible. This will work most effectively if, in our personal lives, we are taking steps to cultivate our own rationality and maturity by reflecting regularly on what kind of information we really need (rather than letting hyperlinks lead us by the nose into what an anonymous person wants you to read, perhaps for motives of advertising revenue) to make informed decisions, and finding ways to identify the sources of fear and to assess them as we would any other threat.

Last of all, we should aim to hold before our minds eye the examples of heroes whose lives we wish to imitate. This is one reason that I urge our monks to read the lives of the saints frequently, and to make friends with them. The saint is a person of “heroic virtue,” and therefore, courage. In my next post, I would like to share with you my thoughts about why the saints are also models of rationality.  

Can Faith Be Argued?

“We begin from faith, not reason. ‘Credo ut intelligam.’ But how does one argue faith?”

A friend recently asked me this question on a Facebook thread. The thread was about the degenerating relationship between the sexes, though the problem is clearly a more general one. That problem is one inherent in human nature and one that the institution of culture address: how do we resolve disagreements? I suspect that most of us, without reflecting on the problem, assume that we reason toward agreement. This would be terrific were it so; but this requires that we share premises and that we are skilled at drawing logical inferences from premises and applying them to particular cases. In other words, it requires that we be virtuous, using charity with our fellows and cultivating prudence.

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Anxiety as Byproduct of the Rejection of Natural Law

Saturday, my host family took me to visit the town of Ely, which is near Cambridge where I’m enjoying a short sabbatical. Much of the medieval cathedral and its monastic buildings are still in existence. While I was there, the Worchester Cathedral Chamber Choir offered a short concert of pieces by Elgar, Handel, John Ireland, and others. Afterward, we all had tea. It was a splendid day.

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Does Chant Style Matter? Part 1

Pray Tell Blog recently posted my review of Benedicta, a CD collection of Marian chants sung by the monks of Norcia. It’s really two reviews in one. One part of me admires the lovely singing, the warmth of tone, and the ringing intonation of the brothers’ voices. On this level, the recording stands up with the better chant recordings I’ve heard. The other part of me is uneasy, however, about some choices the monks made. Among these choices was their use of the “Solesmes method” of interpretation (which, as I understand, is no longer used even at Solesmes Abbey itself), which I identified as part and parcel of the larger problem of presenting the chants without context. The lone comment on the blog suggests that it shouldn’t matter whether the Solesmes method or some other approach is used. What matters is that the music is beautiful.

Even before reading the comment, I was puzzling over what I take to be the importance of getting past the Solesmes method. Is my position truly defensible? Or is it a personal preference? I believe that my position is rational, and therefore to be preferred to a ‘pre-rational’ assessment.

But defending my position will take some work. Let me give an example of the uphill battle we’re talking about here.

I was at a reception after Vespers recently, speaking with two members of our own Schola Laudis. I mentioned to them that one of the things driving my interest in chant and Renaissance music at the liturgy is that I was seeking a rational way to go forward with the composition of church music. I meant by this that we should have reasons for choosing one type of music over another. When it comes to church music, it seems that we are usually content with saying that we want music that is beautiful. Fair enough. Would it be too pedantic of me to ask why we consider some music to be beautiful and other music to be maudlin, ugly, or overly sentimental? Some people consider “Send in the Clowns” to be a beautiful song (me…not so much, though I get its appeal). I personally find the Prelude to Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde to be quite beautiful, in its way. These are not, and should not (I think) be models for church music. Many people, on the other hand, find Gregorian chant dull, elitist, hard to understand, difficult to sing with any connection to one’s emotions, etc. Yet church documents make very clear that this style is the basis of our sacred music tradition.

Much of what we take to be beautiful depends on our cultural upbringing and, one hesitates to point it out, on our level of achievement in virtues like moderation, chastity, and humility. Lacking such virtues might lead us to prefer ecstatic music to sober music, manipulative music to ordered music, or simply music that we liked as children to music that adults tell us we’re supposed to like when our tastes develop a bit more.

Therefore, simply saying that music ought to be beautiful is not specific enough. Church music needs to be beautiful to certain types of persons. And those of us who are not yet those sorts of persons need to be able to make an act of faith that the beauty of such music will become more apparent as we grow in virtue and knowledge. Furthermore, I think that it is reasonable, based on experience, to hope that exposure to “virtuous” music will actually assist us in growing in virtue (this argument goes back at least to Plato, though it is much contested). We have more likely been exposed to the opposite phenomenon, someone descending into vice accompanied by depressing, libidinous, or cruel music.

What remains, then, is for me to explain why the approach taken by the Norcia monks is delightful on one level, but, in my opinion, does not quite approximate the beautiful in the fullest sense. Furthermore, I should be able to show that their recording falls somewhat (not entirely, mind you) short of what it could have been because of specific choices that they made: the use of the Solesmes method, and the somewhat random manner in which the chants were selected (random with regard to liturgical rationales). These proofs will have to wait for a later post.

Bonus tracks: Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde…music that is not quite chaste, deliberately eliding tonal boundaries in a manner uncomfortably parallel to the elision of marital boundaries in Wagner’s personal life at the time of its composition. He was falling in love with Mathilde Wesendonck, and perhaps carrying on an affair with her. Wagner’s indiscretions resulted in his separation from his wife Minna.

Here’s my example of ‘ecstatic’ music, “Giant Steps” by John Coltrane, a piece not without its own kind of beauty and order, yet clearly not in any way a model for church music.

And surely you didn’t think I’d leave you without “Send in the Clowns…”

 

 

Hand On What You Receive

Key concept #2: Traditions are arguments before they are agreements. And then they are arguments after they are agreements.

(h/t to Adrian Belew)

This appears to me as one of Alasdair MacIntyre’s most important insights. He borrowed the idea from Blessed Cardinal Newman, and he refined it considerably.

Why is this important? For several reasons, though I will mention two today.

In my previous post, I said that liturgy is ‘first theology‘. A fine sounding notion! But what do we find when we gaze out upon the liturgical scene in the contemporary Church? Lots of disagreement. In fact, you will hear Catholics say that we’ve been fighting over the liturgy for forty years or more. And this liturgical stew only got messier when Pope Benedict XVI gave priests permission for a wider use of the ‘extraordinary form’ of the Mass. So what, exactly is the material of the liturgy at this point, the material that is supposedly going to give form to prima theologia?

I would not argue that our present situation is ideal. But I also don’t believe that the situation in, say, 1950 was ideal, either, but for the opposite reason. Church tradition had come to be seen as something unchanging and unquestioned. Now, by contrast, it has come to appear as something up for grabs. The reality is something else. Tradition is an argument. And it is an agreement on what to argue about and how to argue. It is not true that tradition-as-argument means ‘anything goes’. It may appear that way in an emotivist society, such as ours is, where arguments are not rational but are exercises in emotional manipulation.

This brings me to the second point. The idea that traditions are arguments makes it possible for them to be rational. MacIntyre generally shows great respect for other thinkers, even when he strongly disagrees with them. This makes his open criticism of Edmund Burke more piquant. Why is Edmund Burke in his sights?

During and after the French Revolution, Burke began to write down his intellectual defense of Tradition. Few people are aware of just how radical many elements of the Revolution were. There were movements to change the names of the days of the week and the months of the year. There were proposals to renumber the years, using a starting point other than the birth of Christ. There were proposals to change the length of the week and the month, to remove them from the lunar associations. Why? The supposed goal was to organize society in a more rational manner. A month of 30 days or so may or may not prove functionally most effective for human organization, or so the theory went. So maybe ten months of 36 days would make more sense. Maybe eight days of work and two days off…It was all slightly crazy, though it must be stressed that this was done in the name of reason.

So what did Burke do? Did he give a defense of the rationality of tradition in the face of these assaults? Not really. In fact, in his writings he comes close to celebrating tradition precisely as irrational. And this thinking has infected us ever since. Why genuflect when you come into Church? Because the Tradition says so! And don’t ask any more questions! Why did the old Ember Days have seven readings on Saturday? Who knows? And who cares what reasons there might have been–we ‘traditionalists’ don’t need to ask these questions. [This is strongly akin to the same way in which ‘blind obedience’ came to be a religious virtue.] I’m exaggerating, but the point is, for a tradition to be rational requires something like what Newman and MacIntyre have taught us: there must be some way for those engaged in the tradition to give each other persuasive reasons for doing one thing rather than another.

As a young man, Newman discovered that the post-Apostolic Church shaped tradition be arguing about its development.

As a young man, Newman discovered that the post-Apostolic Church shaped tradition by arguing about its development.

Where we stand with the liturgy today is, I believe, somewhere before the midpoint of what I hope will turn out to be a fruitful (though tumultuous, alas) reflection on the meaning of the liturgy. Consider the choice facing a pastor who wishes to celebrate the extraordinary form of the Mass: he could, of course, simply begin offering Mass in this way because he has personal feelings in favor. But more often, what happens is that he decides to do so for reasons: to educate his parishioners on the broader tradition of the liturgy; to foster a greater sense of devotion; and so on. Now, once he gives such reasons, and hopefully he does so either in some public parish forum or to his fellow clergy in the local deanery, he is open to being criticized for his choice and for his supporting reasons. He will have to make a defense of his reasoning, and he will have to appeal to shared agreements about the liturgy in order to persuade others. He may end up abandoning the project, or he may convince others to begin celebrating the extraordinary form. Or they may continue to disagree, but now the argument has become considerably more refined on both sides (we hope). Everyone has had to reflect together, and so have become more reflective and reasoned. And out of such exchanges, the Church as a whole will gradually come to have better and better reasons for clearer and clearer choices. As poor choices are weeded out and lame reasons are abandoned, the liturgy will come to be more recognizably consistent, and–very importantly–more ‘rational’ itself. But not ‘rational’ in the Enlightenment sense–I mean this in the sense that we are to offer to God “rational worship!”

“I appeal to you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual [Greek–logiken…logical!; Latin–rationabile…rational!] worship [Rom 12: 1].” This in turn will allow us to “be prepared to make a defense [lit. “to give a reason”; Gk–logon, Latin–rationem] to any one who calls you to account for the hope that is in you [1 Peter 3: 15].”

P.S. For those of you who don’t know who Adrian Belew is, he wrote and sang (? shouted?) the lyrics to this…song:

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