Love among the ruins, Part I (Catholic Liturgy, TLM)

The Cafeteria Is Closed ^ | September 21, 2007 | Gerald Augustinus

[maryz]

Love among the ruins, Part I

Reading Martin Mosebach's phenomenal book, Heresy of Formlessness, is no easy task. His language (I am reading the German original) is of the utmost quality, his imagery beautiful, his sentiment convincing. He makes the point I've been trying to make, only a thousand times more aptly. His arguments for the classic Roman rite are inaccessible to the bureaucratic of spirit. Whoever approaches liturgy with the logic of a laundry detergent ad ("Now with 30% more Scripture !") or the mindset of a Club Med animateur will never be open to the beauty of the rite before we all became Protestants, so to speak. (It is eerie to see how Protestant 'reformators' demands were fulfilled one by one in the 20th century, from Hus to Luther.)

No true poet would ever choose Bugnini's product, just as no true musician would choose Haugen over Palestrina. Martin Mosebach is a poet, a novelist of the highest rank, the winner of the Georg Buechner Prize, the most important one for a novelist. His style is viewed as the non plus ultra by all the grand newspapers in the German tongue, be it the NZZ or Die Zeit.

The book Heresy of Formlessness is an unusual book for a novelist, of course. But what better than beautiful language to defend a beautiful rite.

I've never read anything like it. The title may sound a bit stern, but it's actually a labor of love. Of love and sadness. Together with Mosebach one mourns what was lost when the Church decided to do what before only Protestants had done - storm and smash the altars, smash the icons. Death by committee. Liturgy by accountant. Like letting a USCCB sub-committee compose a love letter to one's wife. Arrogance beyond imagination, to, like Mao, forsake what had been nurtured over the centuries and replace it with a potted plant. As Christopher Hitchens wrote, 'the Roman Catholic Church has never recovered from abandoning the mystifying Latin Rite'. Don't get me wrong, the 'ordinary' mass is valid, but it's like expressing one's love with the quality of a Shakespeare sonnet versus a Hallmark card.

Since this is a series, you'll have to be patient. Not the entire point will be made in one or two installments. In any case, do buy the book.

Here a passage I've translated myself, on sacrifice. Here Mosebach quotes Fr. Pawel Florenski, whom Stalin had executed.

Our liturgy is older than us and our parents, older than even the world itself. The worship of God (Gottesdienst) is not invented but rather discovered and won, gained: what always has been, that is more or less the nature of prudential prayer. The orthodox faith has absorbed the inheritance of the world, and we have infront of us the pure grain, freed from all chaff, the very nature of humanity. Therefore it is beyond doubt that our liturgy comes not from man, but from angels."

Mosebach then writes

Requirement to experience the Christian cultus in such a manner is submission under a form that erases every trace of subjectivity. In the earliest days of Christianity, the Church Father Basil taught that liturgy was revelation, like Scripture and was not to be touched. This was the custom until the pontificate of Paul VI. Of course, this approach did not prevent the liturgy from modification, but these changes happened organically, not arbitrarly, unintended, not for an agenda, they grew from cultic practice, like a landscape changes over the millennia through the influence of wind and water. In antiquity, the interruption of tradition was referred to as Tyrannis. In this sense, the modernizer and progress-believer Paul VI. was a tyrant of the Church.
...
I ignore this attack on the Divine liturgy. People of the stone age have an undeveloped relationship with time. They cannot relate to the concept of future, of the past they assume it was quite like the present.

(Earlier, he'd referred to himself as belonging to the 'stone age')
What follows now is one of the most important points I've come across and of which I'd been entirely unaware. I'm curious to see whether you think it's as important as I do.

Goethe (the grand German poet) encountered the young Empress Maria Ludovica in Karlsbad in the year 1812; when the Empress heard what deep impression she'd made on Goethe, she let him know the 'high and definitive opinion' that she did not want to be 'recognized or assumed, under no pretense' in any of his works because, quoth the Empress, 'women are like religion; the less one speaks about them, the more they gain.'

That is a beautiful maxim that we'd do well to observe, and I am not happy to go against it by speaking about religion in its practical aspects, namely liturgy. Possibly the worst damage, the worst spiritual loss caused by the reform of the Mass of Pope Paul VI. and the developments started by it, is this: that we now have to talk about liturgy. The people who want to conserve it, who want to pray it true to its spirit who have remained faithful to it under the greatest of sacrifices, have lost something inestimable: the innocence to accept it as something God-given, as something given to man from the Heavens.

As defenders of the great, the holy liturgy, the classical Roman liturgy, we all have become big and small liturgical scholars. The scientific, archeological and historical veneer of the reform has forced us to counter its argumentations, and led us to a treatment of rite and liturgy that has to deeply go against the grain of a religious person.

We have been seduced into a scholastic-lawyerly mindset when addressing liturgy: What is absolutely necessary in order for something to still be a liturgy? What degree of arbitrariness is still tolerable, and what is not? We have gotten used to accepting minimum requirements as categories for judging liturgies, when only the maximum is of importance. And that we have begun to judge liturgy at all is an unthinkable process. We have been sitting in the pews, asking ourselves: Was this Holy Mass or was this not Holy Mass?

I enter church to encounter God, and I leave it a theater critic.

And one last quote, after all, I have to save something for future post, even though I could go on forever:

It has been said that monarchy is dead if it needs a capable monarch for survival, because a monarch in the original sense is not legitimized by his talent but rather by his birth.

This saying applies even better to the liturgy: It is dead when its execution needs a pious and good priest. It should never be possible for the faithful to view liturgy as the achievement of the priest. It is not the result of a fortunate coincidence, of personal charisma, nobody can claim credit for it. In it, time is suspended - the time within liturgy is different from that elapsing outside the church walls. It is the time of Golgotha, the time of the one, the unique sacrifice -'hapax' - and this time contains all times and none. How can you make it comprehensible, visible to a person that he leaves the present, when the space he enters consists of nothing but highly individual present? How wise was the old liturgy when it decided to withdraw from the congregation the face of the priest - his distraction, his coldness, and, more importantly, his piety and emotion?

[maryz]

I think you’ll all appreciate this.

[ELS]

Mosebach bump

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