Cardinal Ratzinger on the Contemplation of Beauty

ROME, MAY 2, 2005 (Zenit.org).- ZENIT is reprinting this message that Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (now Benedict XVI) sent to a meeting of the ecclesial movement Communion and Liberation in August 2002. The group was meeting in Rimini, Italy.

"The Feeling of Things, the Contemplation of Beauty" By Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger

Every year, in the Liturgy of the Hours for the Season of Lent, I am struck anew by a paradox in Vespers for Monday of the Second Week of the Psalter. Here, side by side, are two antiphons, one for the Season of Lent, the other for Holy Week. Both introduce Psalm 44 [45], but they present strikingly contradictory interpretations. The Psalm describes the wedding of the King, his beauty, his virtues, his mission, and then becomes an exaltation of his bride. In the Season of Lent, Psalm 44 is framed by the same antiphon used for the rest of the year. The third verse of the Psalm says: "You are the fairest of the children of men and grace is poured upon your lips."

Naturally, the Church reads this psalm as a poetic-prophetic representation of Christ's spousal relationship with his Church. She recognizes Christ as the fairest of men, the grace poured upon his lips points to the inner beauty of his words, the glory of his proclamation. So it is not merely the external beauty of the Redeemer's appearance that is glorified: rather, the beauty of Truth appears in him, the beauty of God himself who draws us to himself and, at the same time captures us with the wound of Love, the holy passion ("eros"), that enables us to go forth together, with and in the Church his Bride, to meet the Love who calls us.

On Monday of Holy Week, however, the Church changes the antiphon and invites us to interpret the Psalm in the light of Isaiah 53:2: "He had neither beauty, no majesty, nothing to attract our eyes, no grace to make us delight in him." How can we reconcile this? The appearance of the "fairest of the children of men" is so wretched that no one desires to look at him. Pilate presented him to the crowd saying: "Behold the man!" to rouse sympathy for the crushed and battered Man, in whom no external beauty remained.

Augustine, who in his youth wrote a book on the Beautiful and the Harmonious ["De pulchro et apto"] and who appreciated beauty in words, in music, in the figurative arts, had a keen appreciation of this paradox and realized that in this regard, the great Greek philosophy of the beautiful was not simply rejected but rather, dramatically called into question and what the beautiful might be, what beauty might mean, would have to be debated anew and suffered. Referring to the paradox contained in these texts, he spoke of the contrasting blasts of "two trumpets," produced by the same breath, the same Spirit. He knew that a paradox is contrast and not contradiction. Both quotes come from the same Spirit who inspires all Scripture, but sounds different notes in it. It is in this way that he sets us before the totality of true Beauty, of Truth itself.

In the first place, the text of Isaiah supplies the question that interested the Fathers of the Church, whether or not Christ was beautiful. Implicit here is the more radical question of whether beauty is true or whether it is not ugliness that leads us to the deepest truth of reality. Whoever believes in God, in the God who manifested himself, precisely in the altered appearance of Christ crucified as love "to the end" (John 13:1), knows that beauty is truth and truth beauty; but in the suffering Christ he also learns that the beauty of truth also embraces offence, pain, and even the dark mystery of death, and that this can only be found in accepting suffering, not in ignoring it.

Certainly, the consciousness that beauty has something to do with pain was also present in the Greek world. For example, let us take Plato's "Phaedrus." Plato contemplates the encounter with beauty as the salutary emotional shock that makes man leave his shell and sparks his "enthusiasm" by attracting him to what is other than himself. Man, says Plato, has lost the original perfection that was conceived for him. He is now perennially searching for the healing primitive form. Nostalgia and longing impel him to pursue the quest; beauty prevents him from being content with just daily life. It causes him to suffer.

In a Platonic sense, we could say that the arrow of nostalgia pierces man, wounds him and in this way gives him wings, lifts him upwards toward the transcendent. In his discourse in the Symposium, Aristophanes says that lovers do not know what they really want from each other. From the search for what is more than their pleasure, it is obvious that the souls of both are thirsting for something other than amorous pleasure. But the heart cannot express this "other" thing, "it has only a vague perception of what it truly wants and wonders about it as an enigma."

In the 14th century, in the book "The Life in Christ" by the Byzantine theologian, Nicholas Cabasilas, we rediscover Plato's experience in which the ultimate object of nostalgia, transformed by the new Christian experience, continues to be nameless. Cabasilas says: "When men have a longing so great that it surpasses human nature and eagerly desire and are able to accomplish things beyond human thought, it is the Bridegroom who has smitten them with this longing. It is he who has sent a ray of his beauty into their eyes. The greatness of the wound already shows the arrow which has struck home, the longing indicates who has inflicted the wound" (cf. "The Life in Christ," the Second Book, 15).

The beautiful wounds, but this is exactly how it summons man to his final destiny. What Plato said, and, more than 1,500 years later, Cabasilas, has nothing to do with superficial aestheticism and irrationalism or with the flight from clarity and the importance of reason. The beautiful is knowledge certainly, but, in a superior form, since it arouses man to the real greatness of the truth. Here Cabasilas has remained entirely Greek, since he puts knowledge first when he says, "In fact it is knowing that causes love and gives birth to it. ... Since this knowledge is sometimes very ample and complete and at other times imperfect, it follows that the love potion has the same effect" (cf. ibid.).

He is not content to leave this assertion in general terms. In his characteristically rigorous thought, he distinguishes between two kinds of knowledge: knowledge through instruction which remains, so to speak, "second hand" and does not imply any direct contact with reality itself. The second type of knowledge, on the other hand, is knowledge through personal experience, through a direct relationship with the reality. "Therefore we do not love it to the extent that it is a worthy object of love, and since we have not perceived the very form itself we do not experience its proper effect."

True knowledge is being struck by the arrow of Beauty that wounds man, moved by reality, "how it is Christ himself who is present and in an ineffable way disposes and forms the souls of men" (cf. ibid.).

Being struck and overcome by the beauty of Christ is a more real, more profound knowledge than mere rational deduction. Of course we must not underrate the importance of theological reflection, of exact and precise theological thought; it remains absolutely necessary. But to move from here to disdain or to reject the impact produced by the response of the heart in the encounter with beauty as a true form of knowledge would impoverish us and dry up our faith and our theology. We must rediscover this form of knowledge; it is a pressing need of our time.

Starting with this concept, Hans Urs von Balthasar built his "Opus magnum of Theological Aesthetics." Many of its details have passed into theological work, while his fundamental approach, in truth the essential element of the whole work, has not been so readily accepted. Of course, this is not just, or principally, a theological problem, but a problem of pastoral life that has to foster the human person's encounter with the beauty of faith.

All too often arguments fall on deaf ears because in our world too many contradictory arguments compete with one another, so much so that we are spontaneously reminded of the medieval theologians' description of reason, that it "has a wax nose": In other words, it can be pointed in any direction, if one is clever enough. Everything makes sense, is so convincing, whom should we trust?

The encounter with the beautiful can become the wound of the arrow that strikes the heart and in this way opens our eyes, so that later, from this experience, we take the criteria for judgment and can correctly evaluate the arguments. For me an unforgettable experience was the Bach concert that Leonard Bernstein conducted in Munich after the sudden death of Karl Richter. I was sitting next to the Lutheran Bishop Hanselmann. When the last note of one of the great Thomas-Kantor-Cantatas triumphantly faded away, we looked at each other spontaneously and right then we said: "Anyone who has heard this, knows that the faith is true."

The music had such an extraordinary force of reality that we realized, no longer by deduction, but by the impact on our hearts, that it could not have originated from nothingness, but could only have come to be through the power of the Truth that became real in the composer's inspiration. Isn't the same thing evident when we allow ourselves to be moved by the icon of the Trinity of Rublëv? In the art of the icons, as in the great Western paintings of the Romanesque and Gothic period, the experience described by Cabasilas, starting with interiority, is visibly portrayed and can be shared.

In a rich way Pavel Evdokimov has brought to light the interior pathway that an icon establishes. An icon does not simply reproduce what can be perceived by the senses, but rather it presupposes, as he says, "a fasting of sight." Inner perception must free itself from the impression of the merely sensible, and in prayer and ascetical effort acquire a new and deeper capacity to see, to perform the passage from what is merely external to the profundity of reality, in such a way that the artist can see what the senses as such do not see, and what actually appears in what can be perceived: the splendor of the glory of God, the "glory of God shining on the face of Christ " (2 Corinthians 4:6).

To admire the icons and the great masterpieces of Christian art in general, leads us on an inner way, a way of overcoming ourselves; thus in this purification of vision that is a purification of the heart, it reveals the beautiful to us, or at least a ray of it. In this way we are brought into contact with the power of the truth. I have often affirmed my conviction that the true apology of Christian faith, the most convincing demonstration of its truth against every denial, are the saints, and the beauty that the faith has generated. Today, for faith to grow, we must lead ourselves and the persons we meet to encounter the saints and to enter into contact with the Beautiful.

Now however, we still have to respond to an objection. We have already rejected the assumption which claims that what has just been said is a flight into the irrational, into mere aestheticism.

Rather, it is the opposite that is true: This is the very way in which reason is freed from dullness and made ready to act.

Today another objection has even greater weight: the message of beauty is thrown into complete doubt by the power of falsehood, seduction, violence and evil. Can the beautiful be genuine, or, in the end, is it only an illusion? Isn't reality perhaps basically evil? The fear that in the end it is not the arrow of the beautiful that leads us to the truth, but that falsehood, all that is ugly and vulgar, may constitute the true "reality" has at all times caused people anguish.

At present this has been expressed in the assertion that after Auschwitz it was no longer possible to write poetry; after Auschwitz it is no longer possible to speak of a God who is good. People wondered: Where was God when the gas chambers were operating? This objection, which seemed reasonable enough before Auschwitz when one realized all the atrocities of history, shows that in any case a purely harmonious concept of beauty is not enough. It cannot stand up to the confrontation with the gravity of the questioning about God, truth and beauty. Apollo, who for Plato's Socrates was "the God" and the guarantor of unruffled beauty as "the truly divine" is absolutely no longer sufficient.

In this way, we return to the "two trumpets" of the Bible with which we started, to the paradox of being able to say of Christ: "You are the fairest of the children of men," and: "He had no beauty, no majesty to draw our eyes, no grace to make us delight in him." In the passion of Christ the Greek aesthetic that deserves admiration for its perceived contact with the Divine but which remained inexpressible for it, in Christ's passion is not removed but overcome.

The experience of the beautiful has received new depth and new realism. The One who is the Beauty itself let himself be slapped in the face, spat upon, crowned with thorns; the Shroud of Turin can help us imagine this in a realistic way. However, in his Face that is so disfigured, there appears the genuine, extreme beauty: the beauty of love that goes "to the very end"; for this reason it is revealed as greater than falsehood and violence. Whoever has perceived this beauty knows that truth, and not falsehood, is the real aspiration of the world. It is not the false that is "true," but indeed, the Truth.

It is, as it were, a new trick of what is false to present itself as "truth" and to say to us: over and above me there is basically nothing, stop seeking or even loving the truth; in doing so you are on the wrong track. The icon of the crucified Christ sets us free from this deception that is so widespread today. However it imposes a condition: that we let ourselves be wounded by him, and that we believe in the Love who can risk setting aside his external beauty to proclaim, in this way, the truth of the beautiful.

Falsehood however has another strategem. A beauty that is deceptive and false, a dazzling beauty that does not bring human beings out of themselves to open them to the ecstasy of rising to the heights, but indeed locks them entirely into themselves. Such beauty does not reawaken a longing for the Ineffable, readiness for sacrifice, the abandonment of self, but instead stirs up the desire, the will for power, possession and pleasure. It is that type of experience of beauty of which Genesis speaks in the account of the Original Sin. Eve saw that the fruit of the tree was "beautiful" to eat and was "delightful to the eyes."

The beautiful, as she experienced it, aroused in her a desire for possession, making her, as it were, turn in upon herself. Who would not recognize, for example, in advertising, the images made with supreme skill that are created to tempt the human being irresistibly, to make him want to grab everything and seek the passing satisfaction rather than be open to others.

So it is that Christian art today is caught between two fires (as perhaps it always has been): It must oppose the cult of the ugly, which says that everything beautiful is a deception and only the representation of what is crude, low and vulgar is the truth, the true illumination of knowledge. Or it has to counter the deceptive beauty that makes the human being seem diminished instead of making him great, and for this reason is false.

Is there anyone who does not know Dostoyevsky's often-quoted sentence: "The Beautiful will save us"? However, people usually forget that Dostoyevsky is referring here to the redeeming Beauty of Christ. We must learn to see him. If we know him, not only in words, but if we are struck by the arrow of his paradoxical beauty, then we will truly know him, and know him not only because we have heard others speak about him. Then we will have found the beauty of Truth, of the Truth that redeems. Nothing can bring us into close contact with the beauty of Christ himself other than the world of beauty created by faith and light that shines out from the faces of the saints, through whom his own light becomes visible. ZE05050220

Interesting observations, and now you've made me learn some things.

The RC regs on liturgical music have been deliberately confused by a bunch of wonk/termites (I'll not go into the rest of their personal, ah, problems) since VatII; but if one goes back to Pius X's writings on the topic, one gets a better sense of what prevailed from at least (circa) 1500-1965. B-16's writings are closely aligned to the work of Pius X.

Prior to VatII, there was a distinction between the 'High' (sung) Mass and the 'Low' (spoken) Mass--that no longer exists as it was known.

During the Low Mass, there was almost no singing, although there could be a hymn prior to (and after) the Mass. In the High Mass, the Proper Chants were sung, as were parts of the Ordinary of the Mass. The Propers were most often sung in Gregorian Chant OR in psalm-tone, and like the music Agrarian refers to, the Propers had a thematic unity with the rest of the readings of the Mass. In shorthand, it was 'tightly wound.'

However, in addition to the Ordinary and Propers, the choir could also sing voluntary motets which were not necessarily thematically-consistent with the Propers/Epistle/Gospel. Some of the motets utilized texts from Scripture; others used particular prayers (e.g., an Ave Maria or Panis Angelicus, respectively.)

Hymnody was restricted to popular devotions--not Masses. NO language other than Latin was permitted during the course of a Mass. The vulgar was allowed before or after a Mass ONLY.

The Bugnini/Weakland implementing commission made two significant changes: they erased the difference between the 'High' and 'Low' Mass, and allowed hymnody to be used during Mass, in the vulgar. IMHO, these changes must be examined carefully in light of B-16's work on Sacred Music (a glimpse of which can be inferred from the posted thread-head.)

Allowing hymnody has led to an even LESS 'tightly wound' schematic of worship than was present until 1965. The vast majority of hymns familiar to Catholics were not necessarily based on themes integral to various liturgies--rather, they were seasonal, Marian, or Eucharistic. These three classes, then, HAD to serve. Ironically, while allowing 'popular participation' the richness of each Sunday's theme-scheme was truncated, because current praxis does NOT require the priest (or anyone else) to sing or even recite the Propers--the Introit, Offertory, and Communion versicles. And because it is not required, it is not done, period.

So we have 'given a haircut' to the Mass; where the hair used to be specific and ornamental, it is now a military 'butch.' The best the iconoclasts can say is that 'there is still some hair there.'

Without extensive comment, the remaining hair has also taken on some characteristics which are unsettling--the equivalent of very bad purple or red-dye jobs...

I think that there is much to be said which is positive about the post-1500 well-composed Mass Ordinaries and voluntary motets. It is legitimate to argue that many of these demonstrate the Church's "universality," as a variety of cultural influences were 'baptized' into the service of the Church (for example, Durufle's 4 Motets, compared to Mozart's 'Ave Verum.') But as Ag. points out very well, the situation today is almost 'no bounds;' and it is confusing.

Your explanation of how hymns inappropriate to the liturgy became part of the mass is very interesting. Basically what you're saying is that they essentially eliminated the high mass, and then allowed popular devotional material to be integrated into a low mass. In other words, it's why modern American masses feel so familiar to Lutherans and Methodists nowadays.

I'm away from my home computer, but will make some comments by way of describing how Orthodox chant works.

First, there is no high/low distinction in Orthodoxy. One either does the Liturgy or one doesn't. It is always sung/chanted (the terms are interchangable -- I prefer "chant", since it is a term that can't be used for inappropriate forms of music. One can hardly say that a choir "chants" a florid Italianate Russian setting of the Cherubic Hymn.

The position of the reader/psaltis/canonarch/chanter is still a very important one in Orthodoxy -- in the Greek practice in particular, there is a strong tradition of having one or two men who chant the responses, either leading the congregation, which joins in on the fixed and familiar parts, or doing it without congregational participation on the variable material.

The bottom line is that one doesn't need a trained choir to do sung services, although it certainly adds "polish" to the services. Timothy (Bp. Kallistos) Ware has a beautiful passage in "The Orthodox Church" that describes the reaction of an Englishman to attending a service in a little room in London where a priest, a deacon, and a solo chanter did a service by themselves that took his breath away.

My next comment is that older monophonic forms of chant, Western or Eastern, can easily be chanted well by one or two chanters, or by a trained choir. Once Catholic music made the turn into polyphony, it became the province of trained and even professional singers. There are parts of our services that should be sung by the trained singer(s) on kliros, and the Russians adopted some pretty florid stuff that requires a top-notch choir and isn't material on which it is easy for people to sing along. But in general, traditional chant forms in the Orthodox Church are actually fairly easily learned by the congregation over time with repetition. I would assume that the same is true of basic traditional Western monophonic chant.

As a side-note, when I browse through modern Catholic missals, the songs I encounter are just plain hard to sing. They use odd intervals, odd syncopations, etc... They look simple on the page, but I can only imagine what they sound like with a congregation trying to sing them. By contrast, we have chant melodies that look tough on the page, but in practice they are easily memorized and applied to text by people sight-reading material. Again, there has got to be traditional stuff in the ancient Catholic tradition that would do the same thing.

The other very important point that I touched on earlier is that the currently used Orthodox liturgical tradition that has done such a tremendous job of teaching and preserving the faith is not just our Divine Liturgy. Most parishes do Vespers on Saturday evening or Matins on Sunday morning, and many (like mine and Kolokotronis's) have both. There is a lot of fixed and variable material in these services. All has been "scrubbed" over centuries of use for beauty and doctrinal purity. The Orthodox parish norm is actually the monastic cycle. In practice, the entire cycle isn't done, and there are some abbreviations, particularly at Vespers and Matins, in many parishes. But the standard toward which we all look is the full monastic daily cycle.

Catholic parish practice has mostly devolved over the centuries to a single service. It is why so much damage was able to be done just by reworking that one service in the NO. Part of this is the result of having services that were not in the vernacular. But again, these services and hymnology very much exist in the Western tradition -- why aren't they being used? There are multiple traditional "canons" of the mass in the Western (and Eastern, for that matter) tradition. Why weren't those used if they wanted variety, instead of these newly composed things? There are countless pieces of patristic hymnology that are there, most of them translated into English. Why weren't they pressed into use. I guess I just don't understand...

With regards the virtual suppression of 'patristic hymns' and the promotion of 'new hymns,' (not to mention 'new psalm-tones, new Ordinary settings, etc. ad nauseam,) a few observations from a practitioner...

In 1965, THE gold-standard hymnal was "Our Parish Plays and Sings," published by The Liturgical Press c/right 1959. It had about 90 hymns, plus several Chant ordinaries, psalm-tones, and other miscellaneous pieces of music.

It no longer exists, despite its utility.

By 1970, with the readings-cycle now increased to 300% of the prior Rite, "hymnals" became almost useless and were replaced by fascicles--missalettes--which contained the readings and hymns, as well.

There were a few trends, in addition. "New" music had to be created, because through vote-manipulation the Bishops' Subcommittee on Music had licensed folk/folk-rock/"guitar" music. Weakland of Milwaukee was a principal engineer of this fraud, which actually did NOT have any legal force.

Regardless, "new music" was created and sold. If that music utilized the new English translations, the royalties HAD TO GO TO ICEL, the sole body responsible for the English translation.

As a result, only a couple of publishers were quick enough on their feet to make the transition to a "fascicle" house--and they printed the "new music" (think St. Louis Jesuit crap) as part of the missalette. Other hymnbook publishers died on the vine, unless they had significant libraries of "other music" they could sell.

The zeitgeist also had negative effects on parish choirs and organists (who needs them? Bongo-groups are cheaper and just fine...), AND by the 1980's, the capital cost of the new publishing technologies was extremely burdensome.

More publishers died, or were purchased. Coca Cola actually owned the library of at least two major RC music publishers by 1985.

Real hymnody (such as that found in the older English and German books from the 1700's/1800's, is not being written, with few exceptions.

So: the publishers which had actual artistic standards are virtually all gone. What remains are those which were able to pay ICEL's demands and purchase/print "new" music, pushed very hard by the powers-that-be (Weakland) during the 1970's.

The same 90 or so "old hymns" are in most hymnals and fascicles--along with another 90 or so pieces of "new" garbage. The garbage is pushed by the now-graying but still influential revolutionaries--ironically, the "old hymns" are the ones which are actually sung by people in the pews.

The money went to ICEL and to certain authors who were NOT compensated for the quality of their offerings. The money did NOT go to those who published artistically-sound materials for choirs (few were there) or organists with artistic training (even fewer of these are around.)

Follow the money and you'll find the dreck.

Why did the people and the priests put up with it?

According to Thomas Day in "Why Catholics Can't Sing," this was not so much a revolution as an outworking of something that was already pretty badly broken. Day says that the Irish ran the show in American Catholicism (largely true) and they they were brought up with a certain suspicion of very elaborate church music because they associated it with Anglicanism during the penal years in Ireland. (When Anglicans had big stone churches with bells, pipe organs, and choirs, and Catholics met for Mass around large rocks in open fields.) Day's point is that, with rare exceptions (often involving German or Italian prelates or congregations), music in the American Catholic Church has never been especially dignified or noteworthy.

You also have to remember that the Tridentine Mass was not really a participatory experience for the laity -- it was a dialogue between the priest and the server (Low Mass) or between the priest and the choir (High Mass). Oddly enough, we've now come full circle, because most Catholic parishes have an overmiked cantor or two who do most of the singing; the people in the pews just sit there. When my previous parish went from more traditional fare to a tinkly piano player and bad contemporary hymnody, many of the people stopped singing. (Some of them, like me, just left another parish.)

Anyway, because of the non-participatory nature of things, people "put up with it" because it wasn't something they were really involved in in the first place.

Not all parishes use the missalettes exclusively. Parishes with good music use the Adoremus hymnal, or the Collegeville hymnal, or another one ... St. Michael (?).

Then there's the baleful influence of Oregon Catholic Press ... purveyor of the worst of the worst ...

Well, with due respect to Shakespeare (and Kolokotronis!) -- the first thing to do is to burn all the missalettes. And as a former church organist, the second thing to do is to leave that thing alone. The Western tradition has such rich material, and it all goes unused.

The whole idea that people need to be following along and participating with every single word in order to be praying is a pernicious one. I can tell you that while we have liturgy books available to the congregation (although we've changed to some different translations, so they mostly go unused now), the only parts where there is and ever was genuine participation (and the participation is great on those parts) are the things people learn by heart over time -- things that are unchanging (I think you call these the "ordinary." I am NOT an anti-congregational singing person (there are some of those in the Orthodox Church, and I confess to formerly being one of them. It is just that when people are flipping through books, they generally aren't listening and praying.)

The ideal service is one where there are fixed portions that people know by heart and sing along on to traditional chant melodies, and variable material done by a trained chanter or choir, to whom the congregation listens attentively without flipping through a book.

Having seen the wretched stuff put out by the cabal out in Oregon, and seen the hundreds of copies of material sold to each parish each year of their material -- I quite believe that there is a significant "follow the money" component at work here.

But really, maybe I'm being too simplistic, but an enterprising choir director/chanter and a cooperative priest could put together beautiful services in English and save the congregation a lot of money in the process. The priest would need to be willing to be educated, and be willing to educate the parish.

Most musically educated Orthodox choir directors in the Slavic tradition, anyway, own music-notation software and produce and share their work for nothing with each other. We aren't composing new melodies and certainly aren't composing new text (that is only done if there is a new saint or something). We are applying and adapting traditional chant melodies to English translations of the liturgical texts that have been in use in Greek and Slavonic forever. Then, it's sharing photocopies of photocopies of photocopies....although in the modern era, everything is going to pdfs.

We purchase very little material, other than the original sets of service books, which last forever. The Greek Archdiocese is different -- they produce a book every year for Matins/Orthros that is disposable (text only -- any psaltis will know all the melodies by heart.) But each parish only needs to buy one copy each year for use on kliros!

I guess what I'm saying is that from my simplistic Orthodox perspective, it seems to me that you are never going to go back to the Latin mass and the 1959 hymnal that you talk about. But what you could do that would be truly revolutionary (and in line with what B16 seems to believe), would be to model the way you do liturgics on how we Orthodox do it -- but having all of your source material be from the liturgical history of the Western church. You would be the true progressives, unlike those boring, graying hippies...

Think big! Be radical!

"Why Catholics Can't Sing" was a very englightening book for me to read many years ago, and it explained a lot.

It is interesting what you say about the "overmiked cantors" today. I didn't know about that. Mikes are evil. If a church is too big for a solo cantor's voice to carry well, then you need a group of cantors/choir to carry it. What do you think the Greeks did in the Hagia Sophia?

And my other question would be to ask why people don't eventually follow along and sing with the cantor. My guess: there is such constant changing of text, music and melodies that no one has a chance to learn anything by heart? A related guess: the melodies simply aren't memorable or user-friendly?

Both things are death on congregational singing, and are *not* traditional practices by Orthodox lights, anyway.

I understand that things were "already pretty badly broken": B16's writings indicate that he was a reformer in the Vat II days for considered and valid reasons. But I just don't see that the choice has to be between the current state of affairs in Catholic music and the old days of non-congregational participation in either its high or low mass manifestation.

Campion's post adequately covers most of it.

When you stop to think of it, though, there's another problem, which has to do with the USA--genuine art-music is simply not produced here, and has not been for (arguably) 40+ years. Bernstein did some, Copland did some--it's very hard to come up with others.

Creators of art (strictly speaking) are waning, and have been waning, in this country and Western Europe, since the 1920's. There are a few in England, largely unknown here, and there may well be a few in the USA--who are also largely unknown.

Mel Gibson made a great work of art. Name another, in any field, since 1990...

The Irish influence never got much traction here in German/Polish Milwaukee, but "church music" is dead here, too, with a few exceptions. I think that most pastors simply did not have an interest, and certainly many of them were confused by the "spirit of the Council"--and our Archbishop was not particularly helpful.

I think Day was close--but not really correct. I think that the reason the music died was that by and large, pastors and parishioners just didn't give a damn.

As to why we didn't string up the Bishops...same reason. From the way you gentlemen Kolo/Ag have described your communities, there is a vastly more "communal" feel than that present in the RC parishes in worship, specifically. We all have the fish-fries, and socializing--but it's my impression that the RC's are much more "private" regarding worship. Regardless of the hand-holding, "greeters," and all that--

So those who objected were looked at as rather odd folks--and were definitely ostracized and marginalized by the Revolutionaries. They were ignored, or metaphorically murdered, by the Establishment and its well-orchestrated Zeitgeist.

Besides, we've been told that it is a grave sin to slap the s*&^ out of a priest.

"From the way you gentlemen Kolo/Ag have described your communities, there is a vastly more "communal" feel than that present in the RC parishes in worship, specifically. We all have the fish-fries, and socializing--but it's my impression that the RC's are much more "private" regarding worship. Regardless of the hand-holding, "greeters," and all that--"

One of the Truths which Orthodoxy stresses is the concept of the Eucharistic and Liturgical Community. We work out our theosis, at least the vast run of us, in these Liturgical communities. There is a sort of Christian communalism in Orthodox Churches which mirrors that of the villages back in the old country. To tell the truth, though, I think that the communalism of the villages is a result of the Orthodoxy of those places and not the other way around as I have experienced the same feeling in parishes made up totally of converts. Perhaps that's why we are so serious about preserving our Liturgies etc.; we're just more connected to them as communities than the equivalent Roman parish might be. Its also possible that the "spectator" quality of the role played by the laity for centuries in the West contributed to this,

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