It is a great joy for me to speak this evening in the artistic setting of the church of Saints Simon and Jude, in a city so rich in history, culture, and faith. Mantua, a city that boasts so many illustrious citizens:
Virgil, quel savio gentil, che tutto seppe (“That gentle sage, who knew all things.” Inferno, Canto VII); Sordello, the troubadour who inspired the Supreme Poet’s invective against Italy,
di dolore ostello, nave senza nocchiere in gran tempesta, (“Inn of sorrows, ship without a helmsman in harsh seas.” Purgatorio, Canto VI, Mandelbaum translation) a sentiment which is true today more than ever; Vittorino da Feltre, Christian pedagogue; the Gonzaga princes, who gathered famous artists in their court, among them the composer Angelo Monteverdi. The fiftieth anniversary of this eminent musician is related to another event. In 2017 we celebrate the tenth anniversary of the publication of the motu proprio
Summorum Pontificum by which Pope Benedict XVI restored dignity to the venerable Tridentine liturgy, calling it the “extraordinary form” of the one Roman rite. Reflecting on the characteristics of this liturgical form,
a passage from the Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium comes to mind as a springboard for this conversation:
Evangelization with joy becomes beauty in the liturgy, as part of our daily concern to spread goodness. The Church evangelizes and is herself evangelized through the beauty of the liturgy, which is both a celebration of the task of evangelization and the source of her renewed self-giving.
I would like to develop my thoughts in two points.
1. The Tridentine liturgy is beautiful
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| Mass celebrated by the community of the FSSP’s German seminary at the Buxheim Charterhouse, on the feast of the Immaculate Conception, 2016. (Reproduced by permission of the FSSP.) |
We might say that there have been two complimentary conceptions of beauty in the history of Western civilization . The first considers beauty as the pulchrum, a proportion and harmony of parts, the perfection of form, integrity and elegance. It is an Apollonian conception found especially in the art of Greece. It appeals to reason and insists on the objectivity of the beautiful. The other conception, expounded especially by Kant, interprets beauty as a species, a sort of luminosity that breaks in upon an object, expands its substance, orienting it outside of itself and putting it in relation with the subject . The whole is in the fragment, as Urs von Balthasar would have said, that great Swiss theologian who, in his monumental work The Glory of the Lord, developed a convincing re-reading of theology in an aesthetic key. It is not by chance that there was a great harmony of thought and feeling between Hans Urs von Balthasar, theologian of beauty, and Joseph Ratzinger, pope of the liturgy and vindicator of the rights of the Latin Mass. They share a Dionysian conception of beauty that appeals to the senses and focuses on the subject. Both these aesthetic conceptions are in agreement that beauty is always very attractive. For this very reason, in Thomistic philosophy it is associated with the other transcendentals of being--unity, truth, and goodness--as part of the moral and spiritual fruition of the subject who experiences it. Now if we apply these categories to the Tridentine liturgy, we will easily grasp why it is beautiful.
The Tridentine Liturgy is harmonious. Like a perfect diptych, its first panel opens with the “Mass of the Catechumens,” and the second with the “Mass of the Faithful.” The second part is the more important since during it the Sacrifice is offered, and so it also lasts longer. The first part has its own interior coherence: it humbly leads us into the presence of God through the prayers at the foot of the altar, with their sublime penitential orientation. Out of this humility, which is the proper basis of the relationship between creature and Creator, sinner and Redeemer, springs the supplication of the
Kyrie and the prayer of the Collect. At this point, we are ready to be instructed by the Wisdom of God that is revealed in salvation history and unfolds the truth that leads us to Heaven, for only the humble will “hear” and be glad, as the Psalm says. We find a copious sprinkling of Scripture passages and Psalm verses—a prayed Bible!—that make up the text of the Introit, Gradual, Tract, Alleluia, and then the pericopes of the Epistle and the Holy Gospel. In every place we find the proportion that is the intrinsic property of beauty: texts that, except on a few special occasions, are neither too long nor too many, as is the case with the biennial or triennial cycle of the Novus Ordo. Though it had the laudable intention of offering a semi-continuous reading of the entirety of Sacred Scripture, this cycle ends up “wasting” a great number of texts that the average faithful cannot remember and, sometimes, not even hear, not only because of
the length and difficulty of certain passages, but also because they are read by lectors insufficiently prepared for their task, chosen in obedience to the equality called for by an erroneous understanding of
actuosa participatio. Length and bad diction are signs of vulgarity, not beauty.
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| The Diptych of Jeanne of France, by the workshop of Rogier van der Weyden, 1452-70 (Musée Condé, Chantilly) |
The Offertory begins. The sacred silence and the kneeling position of the faithful give the moment its peculiar solemnity. The prayers of the priest have an especially harmonious structure: the offering of the host and chalice, the personal apologies, the prayer to the Most Holy Trinity. As these ancient and venerable prayers are being offered, they are accompanied by the precise, delicate gestures typical of the Tridentine liturgy, and that give the rite its unmistakable
pulchritudo. These gestures are just one example of the ordered variety that makes the liturgy Vetus Ordo so truly beautiful. There are also the bows toward the cross, the kissing of the cruets by the ministers and of the altar by the priest, and even the affectionate glances toward the sacred vessels and their contents. Christ, Our Lord, is loved because he is beautiful and is beautiful because he is loved. I could go on showing how the extraordinary form of the Roman rite is beautiful because it unfolds without excess or imperfection, with calm and proportion like a melodious chant. But we should move on to other considerations.
Let us try to apply the other conception of beauty to the Tridentine liturgy. The senses of one who assists at it are touched by the Sacred, the
mysterium tremendum et fascinans, to use the famous definition of Rudolf Otto. They are pervaded by a thrill of spiritual joy, to invoke the great bard of the divine beauty, Augustine of Hippo. The Sacred, i.e. the perception of God that follows his manifestation, excites both reverence and adoration, because he is tremendum; and love and attraction, because he is
fascinans. Can anyone deny that reverence and adoration are especially present in the Tridentine liturgy, while unfortunately they are not well preserved in the Novus Ordo? Who would not agree with the claim that the priest—mark you, the priest, the
sacrum dans and not the president of the assembly—ministers, and faithful, are all intimately drawn, (while each remaining in his proper place), toward the center of all and everything, the Crucified One enthroned on the altar, where the Sacrifice of the Cross is presented to everyone’s gaze, so that everyone may love it? This manifestation of the Sacred, transcendence and immanence, Heaven and earth, divine and human, is not merely the religious archetype identified by Otto, but the incarnation of the divine Word that wills to use the Sacred to reveal his Beauty in a human form: the divine person of Our Lord Jesus Christ, who has united human nature to his divine nature, and thus rendered his divinity accessible to human senses. This logic of the incarnation extends to the sacred liturgy because—as the Fathers of the Church taught and the Catechism of the Catholic Church has recalled in a timely manner—
quod redemptoris nostri conspicuum fuit, in sacramenta transivit. (“what was visible in our Savior has passed over into his mysteries”: CCC 1115, citing Pope St Leo I, Sermon 74, 2). Beauty strikes the senses, and the Tridentine liturgy strongly affirms the aesthetic dimension.
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| Ss Paul Miki and Companions |
In the Latin Mass, our view is directed to a triple focal point: the crucifix, the altar and what takes place there, and the tabernacle. Our attention is seized by the fairest among the children of men: “they will look upon the one whom they have pierced” (John 19:37). Our eyes linger, feasting on the beauty of the colors of the walls, their costly ornament. We follow the ministers’ sacred dance, sober and constrained to careful, rhythmic movements, and from time to time our eyes wander to the decoration of the Temple, which recounts, in various styles, the story of the salvation recalled in each holy Mass. We hear words uttered in a raised voice, in a language different from our ordinary language, because it is reserved for dialogue with God, like a code that heightens understanding and connection between those who adopt it, a sort of familial register sons use to address their Father. It is a beautiful language, as only Latin can be, with its figures of sound and word, with a compact but still mobile construction that comes from its unmistakable literary style. Further, we hear the great silence that shrouds the priestly prayers, above all the Canon Missae, because the Mystery of God who pours out his blood for me, a sinner, because he loves me and saves me, can only be uttered
submissa voce. Like all great and sublime things, he loves silence, which invites everyone to recollection and earnest prayer. We are charmed by the celestial charms of the sacred music, the sound of the organ, the Gregorian chant that floats mystically on high. We smell the delicious perfume of the incense that rises to Heaven just like our prayer, and the odor of the candles, symbols of the hearts that pine with longing for Heaven. All this proclaims a hope that the world does not know, and the Church of the last few years, not comprehending the grandeur of the Vetus Ordo, seems to have forgotten. Immersed in secular matters, and entranced by transient fashions, she has become like chaff scattered in the wind.
The sense of touch is also involved: kneeling at various points in the Holy Mass permits the faithful to touch the earth, and from this position to render adoration, thanksgiving, supplication, and impetration. The sense of touch is denied contact with the eucharistic species because the consecrated Host is received directly on the tongue, an eloquent gesture that expresses all the sanctity of the Sacrament received with faith. Only the priest is permitted to touch the Body and Blood of Christ, and only with extreme delicacy, as if caressing it. In fact, on the day of his priestly ordination, his hands were anointed with the chrism, a biblical-liturgical sign of the Holy Spirit, the divine Person who through the epiclesis performs that miracle of miracles, the consecration. “Taste and see that the Lord is good!” (Psalm 33:9), the Psalmist exclaims. The Vetus Ordo liturgy frequently repeats this verse to dispose the faithful to partake of the Body and Blood of Christ with a hunger at once spiritual and material, provided they are suitably disposed to do so.
To sum up, dear friends, we must find, perceive, and enjoy the beauty of the One who has been pierced. This is a “synaesthetic” experience that affirms sensual richness—for the sacraments are
propter homines (“for us”), as Thomas Aquinas would say—so that the manifestation of the All in the fragment, of God in the space and time of the unbloody renewal of the sacrifice
hic et nunc, may irradiate the Divine Mystery that is in itself the revelation of beauty. Confronted with this liturgy that is so potently theocentric and therefore respectful of all anthropological structures, we cannot help but remark, with a note of sadness, that the Novus Ordo is more impoverished, more rational, more prolix, even to the point that it becomes irritatingly and insufferably wordy in the hands of certain showman priests and ministers. A liturgy celebrated in this way is relentlessly narcissistic and vulgar.
Permit me to conclude this point about the beauty of the old liturgy with a Marian reflection. Our Lady,
Tota Pulchra, is the creature in whom all beauty, insofar as it is
pulchritudo and
speciositas, is gathered to a Mass. The Tridentine liturgy cannot help but invoke her in the heart of the Mass: in the prayer that offers the sacrifice to the Most Holy Trinity, and in the Communicantes of the Canon. An irrepressible longing for Heaven rises from the thought of the Holy Virgin, who descends more beautiful than the dawn (Cant. 6, 9) to soften the pains of this life, where we can always count on her powerful patronage.
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The Christ Child and Virgin Mary in the Company of the Saints, by Duccio di Buoninsegna, the central front panel of the dismembered altarpiece of Siena Cathedral known as the Maestà, 1311, now located in the cathedral Museum. ( Public domain image from Wikipedia.)
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2. The Beauty of the Tridentine Liturgy and Evangelization
Recall the opening citation from
Evangelii Gaudium, which pointed out the relationship between the
via pulchritudinis of the liturgy and the two-fold evangelical movement of the Church. The Church first allows herself to be evangelized so that she can then evangelize the world. Let us explicate this point. More than ever, the Church today needs to be oriented to Christ, her Head, her Spouse, her Founder. Christ is her Gospel, the good news that brings joy to her youth and fills her with authentic joy and hope. Unfortunately in the past few years, with a rapidity that should raise serious questions and concern, the Church has become engrossed with issues of a sociological nature, all affecting more or less the Church’s moral teaching. Many dubious proposals have been made by pastors, even those who bear serious ecclesial responsibilities, that are frankly incompatible with Gospel. The Church feels the need to be re-evangelized and led back to Christ. Pope Benedict XVI made extraordinary efforts in this direction, and his trilogy on Jesus of Nazareth is an expression of a Christocentrism founded on Scripture and the sound doctrine of Tradition. He always wanted to promote a reform of the liturgy, and this program found a great expression in
Summorum Pontificum.
The Tridentine Mass is truly evangelical because it is Christocentric. Just think of its conclusion: the proclamation of the prologue of the Gospel of John. It is like a hinge joining the liturgy to the daily life to which we are about to return. It proclaims the heart of the Gospel, the Mystery of the incarnation, with the beauty we have been speaking of: the hieratic movement of the priest toward the Gospel side, the reading, the genuflection at the words
et Verbum caro factum est, and during the Sung Mass, the musical piece performed by the schola cantorum. The Church is evangelized during the celebration of the Tridentine Mass because, as the fourth-century Father of the Church and author of very valuable liturgical-mystagogical catecheses, Cyril of Jerusalem, said, the teachings of Sacred Scripture must be gathered into a summary, the
regula fidei (“the rule of faith”), the Creed of the catechism. But the Tridentine Mass itself is a catechism in action, tying us intimately to the Gospel of Christ. “What are the two principal mysteries of the Faith?” asked the unsurpassable Catechism of St Pius X. The Mass tells us. We profess our faith in God’s unity and trinity when we turn to the three divine Persons at the beginning of the Mass in the nine-fold Kyrie eleison, three times invoking the Father, three times Christ, and three times the Spirit. We adore their majesty when we sing the Gloria. We implore them to accept our offering at the Offertory. We express our desire for them to accept the sacrifice in the prayer just before the final blessing. As for the mystery of our Lord’s incarnation, passion, and death: how many signs of the cross does the priest trace out, especially during the Canon? The whole ancient liturgy and all of its texts are steeped in the theology of the Fathers of the Church, rather than the ideas of the experts and specialists of the twentieth century, and its rites are a compendium of the Holy Gospel, the Church’s real treasure that has been translated into doctrine and summarized in the Catechism.
We could continue to multiply examples of how the Tridentine Mass is a catechism for everyone, including faithful evangelizers and non-believers in need of evangelization. The plan of salvation history—creation, sin, incarnation, redemption, grace, glory, and eternal life—is taken up and synthesized in the great prayers of the Church. For instance, think of the words that the priest says as he pours the water into the chalice:
Deus qui humanae substantiae dignitatem mirabiliter condidisti [creation] et mirabilius reformasti [redemption], da nobis per huius aquae et vini mysterium eius divinitatis esse consortes [divinization and the life of grace], qui humanitatis nostrae fieri dignatus est particeps [incarnation]. ~ O God, who did wonderfully create human nature, and more wonderfully still restore it, grant us through the Mystery of this water and wine, that we may be made partakers of His divinity, who deigned to become a partaker in our humanity.
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| The Confiteor in the Carthusian Mass |
Now take the Confiteor. The ritual gestures surrounding it reinvoke the whole drama of sin with great clarity and poignancy, as we kneel, beat our chests, recite the prayer, and await the priest’s absolution so sadly abolished in the Novus Ordo:
Indulgentiam, absolutionem, et remissionem peccatorum vestroum tribuat vobis omnipotens et misericors Dominus. In the Roman Canon, the priest asks the Father for the grace to pass the final judgment, the judgment that should be our only concern, though a serene one for Mary is praying for us:
ab aeterna damnatione nos eripi et in electorum tuorum iubeas grege numerari.
Once she has been evangelized, the Church is ready to evangelize. The Tridentine Mass furnishes the grace that makes her disciples into zealous apostles, and her faithful into courageous missionaries. Is this not the Mass that inspired generation upon generation of our forefathers to spread the Gospel to faraway lands, often in the midst of grave dangers? When we read the chronicles of the missionary expeditions of the Jesuits and Franciscans in Asia and Latin America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, we are surprised and moved by how concerned they were to offer the Sacrifice of the Mass in this liturgical form that casts itself completely upon God as the giver of all things, especially the grace to make efforts of evangelization fruitful.
The usus antiquior is an effective evangelizer for another reason: it speaks to the heart of those who have lost the faith or never had it. For example, today in our western society that denies its Christian roots, some people, thirsting for recollection and interior peace, turn to oriental philosophies that, despite whatever good is in them, leave the soul in its existential loneliness. They have no God to love them, to feel loved, to love. The silence and sacrality of the Tridentine Mass is a discovery that often becomes the first step toward the faith. Others, especially the young, find our “pastoral initiatives” banal, if not outright heterodox! They are looking for solid spiritual food. The Tridentine Mass offers them this substantial nourishment. Its theology coincides completely with the
fides quae (“what is believed”); here the lex credendi is the lex orandi. The simple, who are the beloved of God, intuitively recognize that something very great is taking place in the Tridentine Mass, where the priests speaks with God and all are on their knees before him. The sacred mysteries teach and evangelize them too. Every kind of person feels the fascination of the splendor of this Mass that, even when offered in a small place or with modest means, is always solemn and majestic because it is truly beautiful, beautiful with a beauty mediated through vestments, words, gestures, but founded in God the supremely beautiful. To be at this Mass is to set out on a Platonic
itinerarium pulchritudinis in Deum, which begins from material signs and ascends in steps up to Reality itself. It gazes upon creation in order to rise to the creator. The experience was described by Augustine, and I will close our conversation with his words:
Question the beauty of the earth, question the beauty of the sea, question the beauty of the air, amply spread around everywhere, question the beauty of the sky, question the serried ranks of the stars, question the sun making the day glorious with its bright beams, question the moon tempering the darkness of the following night with its shining rays, question the animals that move in the waters, that amble about on dry land, that fly in the air; their souls hidden, their bodies evident; the visible bodies needing to be controlled, the invisible souls controlling them; question all these things. They all answer you, ‘Here we are, look; we are beautiful.’ Their beauty is their confession. Who made these beautiful changeable things, if not unchanging Beauty? (St Augustine, Sermon 241. Translation slightly modified from the Vatican website.)
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| The Creation, and God Introducing Adam to Eve, by Jean Fouquet, ca. 1470 |
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