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Chapter 3:
Chapter 3: The Style of the
Liturgy
Style is chiefly
spoken of in a universal sense. By style we understand those particular
characteristics which distinguish every valid and genuine production or
organism as such, whether it is a work of art, a personality, a form of
society, or anything whatever; it denotes that any given vital principle
has found its true and final expression. But this self-expression must
be of such a nature that it simultaneously imparts to the individual
element a universal significance, reaching far beyond its own particular
sphere. For the essence of individuality embraces within itself a second
element; it is true that it is particular and unreproducible, but it is
at the same time universal, standing in relationship to the other
individuals of its kind, and manifesting in its permanent existence
traits which are also borne by others. The greater the originality and
forcefulness of an individual thing, the greater its capacity of
comprehensively revealing the universal essence of its kind,1 the
greater is its significance. Now if a personality a work of art, or a
form of society has, by virtue of its existence and activity, expressed
in a convincing manner that which it really is, and if at the same time
by its quality of specialness it does not merely represent an arbitrary
mood, but its relation to a corporate life, then and to that extent it
may be said to have style.
In this sense the liturgy undoubtedly has created a style. It is
unnecessary to waste further words on the subject.
The conception can, however, be given a narrower sense. Why is it that
in front of a Greek temple we are more intensely conscious of style than
we are in front of a Gothic cathedral? The inner effect of both these
structures is identically powerful and convincing. Each is the perfect
expression of a particular type or form of space-perception. Each
reveals the individuality of a people, but at the same time affords a
profound insight into the human soul and the significance of the world
in general. Yet before the temple of Paestum we are more strongly
conscious of style than we are before the cathedrals of Cologne and of
Rheims. What is the reason? Why is it that for the uncultured observer
Giotto has the more style in comparison with Grunewald, who is without
any doubt equally powerful; and the figure of an Egyptian king more than
Donatello's wonderful statue of St. John?
In this connection the word style has a specialized meaning. It conveys
that in the works of art to which reference has been made the individual
yields place to the universal. The fortuitous element--determined by
place and time, with its significance restricted to certain specific
people--is superseded by that which is essentially, or at least more
essentially, intended for many times, places and people. The particular
is to a great degree absorbed by the universal and ideal. In such works
an involved mental or spiritual condition, for instance, which could
only have expressed itself in an abstruse utterance or in an
unreproducible action, is simplified and reduced to its elements.2 By
this process it is made universally comprehensible. The incalculable
ebullition is given a permanent basis. It then becomes easily penetrable
and capable of demonstrating in itself the interweaving of cause and
effect.3 The solitary historical event serves to throw into relief the
vital significance, universal and unaffected by time, which reposes
within it. The figure which appears but once is made to personify
characteristics common to the whole of society. The hasty, impetuous
movement is restrained and measured. Whereas it was formerly confined to
specific relationships or circumstances, it can now to a certain degree
be accepted by everyone.4 Things, materials and instruments are divested
of their fortuitous character, their elements revealed, their purpose
defined, and their power of expressing certain moods or ideas is
heightened.5 In a word, while one type of art and of life is endeavoring
to express that which is special and particular, this other, on the
contrary, is striving to hold up to our view that which is universally
significant. The latter type of art fashions simple reality, which is
always specialized, in such a manner that the ideal and universal comes
to the fore; that is to say, its style is developed and its form is
fixed. And so whenever life, with its entanglements and its
multiplicity, has been simplified in this way, whenever its inner
lawfulness is emphasized and it is raised from the particular to the
universal, we are always conscious of style in the narrower sense of the
word. Admittedly it is difficult to say where style ends and arrangement
begins. If the arrangement is too accentuated, if the modeling is
carried out according to rules and ideas, and not according to its vital
connection with reality, if the production is the result, not of exact
observation, but of deliberate planning, then it will be universal only,
and therefore lifeless and void.6 True style, even in its strictest
form, still retains the developed faculty of convincing expression. Only
that which is living has style; pure thought, and the productions of
pure thought, have none.
Now the liturgy--at any rate, as far as the greater part of its range is
concerned--has style in the stricter sense of the word. It is not the
direct expression of any particular type of spiritual disposition,
either in its language and ideas, or in its movements, actions and the
materials which it employs. If we compare, for instance, the Sunday
Collects with the prayers of an Anselm of Canterbury, or of a Newman;
the gestures of the officiating priest with the involuntary movements of
the man who fancies himself unobserved while at prayer; the Church's
directions on the adornment of the sanctuary, on vestments and
altar-vessels, with popular methods of decoration, and of dress on
religious occasions; and Gregorian chant with the popular hymn--we shall
always find, within the sphere of the liturgy, that the medium of
spiritual expression, whether it consists of words, gestures, colors or
materials, is to a certain degree divested of its singleness of purpose,
intensified, tranquilized, and given universal currency.
Many causes have contributed to this result. For one thing, the passing
centuries have continually polished, elaborated and adapted the form of
liturgical expression Then the strongly generalizing effect of religious
thought must be taken into account. Finally, there is the influence of
the Greco-Latin spirit, with its highly significant tendency towards
style in the strict sense of the word.
Now if we consider the fact that these quietly constructive forces were
at work on the vital form of expression, not of an individual, but of an
organic unity, composed of the greatness, exclusiveness and strength of
the collective consciousness that is the Catholic Church; if we consider
further that the vital formula thus fashioned steadily concentrates its
whole attention upon the hereafter, that it aspires from this world to
the next, and as a natural result is characterized by eternal, sublime
and superhuman traits, then we shall find assembled here all the
preliminary conditions essential to the development of a style of great
vigor and intensity. If it were capable of doing so anywhere, here above
all should develop a living style, spiritual, lofty and exalted. And
that is precisely what has happened. If we reflect upon the liturgy as a
whole, and upon its important points, not upon the abbreviated form in
which it is usually presented, but as it should be, we shall have the
good fortune to experience the miracle of a truly mighty style. We shall
see and feel that an inner world of immeasurable breadth and depth has
created for itself so rich and so ample an expression and one at the
same time so lucid and so universal in form that its like has never been
seen, either before or since.
And it is style in the stricter sense of the word as well--clear in
language, measured in movement, severe in its modeling of space,
materials, colors and sounds; its ideas, languages, ceremonies and
imagery fashioned out of the simple elements of spiritual life; rich,
varied and lucid; its force further intensified by the fact that the
liturgy employs a classic language, remote from everyday life.
When all these considerations are borne in mind it is easy to understand
that the liturgy possesses a tremendously compelling form of expression,
which is a school of religious training and development to the Catholic
who rightly understands it, and which is bound to appear to the
impartial observer as a cultural formation of the most lofty and
elevated kind.
It cannot, however, be denied that great difficulties lie in the
question of the adaptability of the liturgy to every individual, and
more especially to the modern man. The latter wants to find in
prayer--particularly if he is of an independent turn of mind--the direct
expression of his spiritual condition. Yet in the liturgy he is expected
to accept, as the mouthpiece of his inner life, a system of ideas,
prayer and action, which is too highly generalized, and, as it were,
unsuited to him. It strikes him as being formal and almost meaningless.
He is especially sensible of this when he compares the liturgy with the
natural outpourings of spontaneous prayer. Liturgical formulas, unlike
the language of a person who is spiritually congenial, are not to be
grasped straightway without any further mental exertion on the
listener's part; liturgical actions have not the same direct appeal as,
say, the involuntary movement of understanding on the part of someone
who is sympathetic by reason of circumstances and disposition; the
emotional impulses of the liturgy do not so readily find an echo as does
the spontaneous utterance of the soul. These clear-cut formulas are
liable to grate more particularly upon the modern man, so intensely
sensitive in everything which affects his scheme of life, who looks for
a touch of nature everywhere and listens so attentively for the personal
note. He easily tends to consider the idiom of the liturgy as
artificial, and its ritual as purely formal. Consequently he will often
take refuge in forms of prayer and devotional practices whose spiritual
value is far inferior to that of the liturgy, but which seem to have one
advantage over the latter--that of contemporary, or, at any rate, of
congenial origin.
Those who honestly want to come to grips with this problem in all its
bearings should for their own guidance note the way in which the figure
of Christ is represented, first in the liturgy, and then in the Gospels.
In the latter everything is alive; the reader breathes the air of earth;
he sees Jesus of Nazareth walking about the streets and among the
people, hears His incomparable and persuasive words, and is aware of the
heart-to-heart intercourse between Jesus and His followers. The charm of
vivid actuality pervades the historical portrait of Christ. He is so
entirely one of us, a real person--Jesus, "the Carpenter's Son"--Who
lived in Nazareth in a certain street, wore certain clothes, and spoke
in a certain manner. That is just what the modern man longs for; and he
is made happy by the fact that in this actual historical figure is
incarnate the living and eternal Godhead, One with the body, so that He
is in the fullest sense of the word "true God and true Man."
But how differently does the figure of Jesus appear in the liturgy!
There He is the Sovereign Mediator between God and man, the eternal
High-Priest, the divine Teacher, the Judge of the living and of the
dead; in His Body, hidden in the Eucharist, He mystically unites all the
faithful in the great society that is the Church; He is the God-Man, the
Word that was made Flesh. The human element, or--involuntarily the
theological expression rises to the lips--the Human Nature certainly
remains intact, for the battle against Eutyches was not fought in vain;
He is truly and wholly human, with a body and soul which have actually
lived. But they are now utterly transformed by the Godhead, rapt into
the light of eternity, and remote from time and space. He is the Lord,
"sitting at the right hand of the Father," the mystic Christ living on
in His Church.
It will be objected that in the Gospels of the Mass we can still follow
the historical life of Jesus in its entirety. That is absolutely true.
But if we endeavor to listen more attentively, we shall still find that
a particular light is thrown on these narratives by their context. They
are a part of the Mass, of the "mysterium magnum," pervaded by the
mystery of sacrifice, an integral part of the structure of the
particular Sunday office, current season, or ecclesiastical year, swept
along by that powerful straining upwards to the Hereafter which runs
through the entire liturgy. In this way the contents of the Gospels,
which we hear chanted, and in a foreign language, are in their turn
woven into the pattern. Of ourselves we come to consider, not the
particular traits which they contain, but their eternal,
super-historical meaning.
Yet by this the liturgy has not--as Protestantism has sometimes accused
it of doing--disfigured the Christ of the Gospels. It has not set forth
a frigid intellectual conception instead of the living Jesus.
The Gospels themselves, according to the aims and purpose of the
respective Evangelists, stress first one, then another aspect of the
personality and activity of Christ Facing the portrait contained in the
first three Gospels, in the Epistles of St. Paul Christ appears as God,
mystically living on in His Church and in the souls of those who believe
in Him. The Gospel of St. John shows the Word made Flesh, and finally,
in the Apocalypse God is made manifest in His eternal splendor. But this
does not mean that the historical facts of Christ's human existence are
in any way kept back; on the contrary, they are always taken for granted
and often purposely emphasised.7 The liturgy therefore has done nothing
that Holy Scripture itself does not do. Without discarding one stroke or
trait of the historical figure of Christ, it has, for its own appointed
purpose, more strongly stressed the eternal and super-
temporal elements of that figure, and for this reason--the liturgy is no
mere commemoration of what once existed, but is living and real; it is
the enduring life of Jesus Christ in us, and that of the believer in
Christ eternally God and Man.
It is precisely because of this, however, that the difficulty still
persists. It is good to make it absolutely clear, since the modern man
experiences it more especially. More than one--according to his
instinctive impulse--would be content to forego the profoundest
knowledge of theology, if as against that it were permitted to him to
watch Jesus walking about the streets or to hear the tone in which He
addresses a disciple. More than one would be willing to sacrifice the
most beautiful liturgical prayer, if in exchange he might meet Christ
face to face and speak to Him from the bottom of his heart.
Where is the angle to be found from which this difficulty is to be
tackled and overcome? It is in the view that it is hardly permissible to
play off the spiritual life of the individual, with its purely personal
bearing, against the spiritual life of the liturgy, with its
generalizing bias. They are not mutually contradictory; they should both
combine in active co-operation.
When we pray on our own behalf only we approach God from an entirely
personal standpoint, precisely as we feel inclined or impelled to do
according to our feelings and circumstances. That is our right, and the
Church would be the last to wish to deprive us of it. Here we live our
own life, and are as it were face to face with God.8 His Face is turned
towards us, as to no one else; He belongs to each one of us. It is this
power of being a personal God, ever fresh to each of us, equally patient
and attentive to each one's wants, which constitutes the inexhaustible
wealth of God. The language which we speak on these occasions suits us
entirely, and much of it apparently is suited to us alone. We can use it
with confidence because God understands it, and there is no one else who
needs to do so.
We are, however, not only individuals, but members of a community as
well; we are not merely transitory, but something of us belongs to
eternity, and the liturgy takes these elements in us into account. In
the liturgy we pray as members of the Church; by it we rise to the
sphere which transcends the individual order and is therefore accessible
to people of every condition, time, and place. For this order of things
the style of the liturgy--vital, clear, and universally
comprehensible--is the only possible one. The reason for this is that
any other type of prayer, based upon one particular set of hypotheses or
requirements, would undoubtedly prove a totally unsuitable form for a
content of different origin. Only a system of life and thought which is
truly Catholic--that is to say, actual and universal--is capable of
being universally adopted, without violence to the individual. Yet there
is still an element of sacrifice involved in such adoption. Each one is
bound to strive within himself, and to rise superior to self. Yet in so
doing he is not swallowed up by, and lost in, the majority; on the
contrary, he becomes more independent, rich, and versatile.
Both methods of prayer must co-operate. They stand together in a vital
and reciprocal relationship. The one derives its light and fruitfulness
from the other. In the liturgy the soul learns to move about the wider
and more spacious spiritual world. It assimilates--if the comparison is
permissible--that freedom and dignified restraint which in human
intercourse is acquired by the man who frequents good society, and who
limits his self-indulgence by the discipline of time-honored social
usage; the soul expands and develops in that width of feeling and
clearness of form which together constitute the liturgy, just as it does
through familiarity and communion with great works of art. In a word,
the soul acquires, in the liturgy, the "grand manner" of the spiritual
life--and that is a thing that cannot be too highly prized. On the other
hand, as the Church herself reminds us--and the example of the Orders
who live by the liturgy is a proof of this--side by side with the
liturgy there must continue to exist that private devotion which
provides for the personal requirements of the individual, and to which
the soul surrenders itself according to its particular circumstances.
From the latter liturgical prayer in its turn derives warmth and local
color.
If private devotion were non-existent, and if the liturgy were the final
and exclusive form of spiritual exercise, that exercise might easily
degenerate into a frigid formula; but if the liturgy were
non-existent--well, our daily observations amply show what would be the
consequences, and how fatally they would take effect.
ENDNOTES
1. The essence of genius, of the man of genius (e.g., of the Saint), and
of the really great work or deed consists in this, that it is
immeasurably original and yet is still universally applicable to human
life.
2. Cf. the inner life in Ibsen's plays, for instance, with that of
Sophoclean tragedy, the "Ghosts," perhaps, with "Oedipus."
3. Cf. the line of action adopted by, e.g., Hedda Gabler and Antigone.
4. Such is the origin of social deportment and of court usage.
5. Such is the origin of symbols--social, state, religious and
otherwise.
6. It is this which differentiates various classical periods from the
classical age.
7. As, for instance, in the beginning of the Gospel of St. John.
8. Even if here, as in the whole range of spiritual things, the Church
is our guide. But she is so in a different manner than where the liturgy
is concerned. |
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