I guess I am in nostalgic Catholic mode today. I am listening to a variety of performances of the old Requiem Mass sequence, Dies Irae, Day of Wrath. It is a medieval poem by the Franciscan Thomasso Celano and it is a no-holds-barred celebration of the apocalypse, the epic destruction of this world by a just and angry God, from the point of view of a single terrified sinner asking Christ for mercy and protection.
I can recall serving the funeral Mass as a ten-year-old altar boy: especially one day in winter, with a thunderstorm raging, sheets of rain pouring down the sides of the old German Gothic church of St. Boniface, whose larger-than-life ceiling mural showed him in full pontifical dress, huge ax by his side, standing with his foot on the felled oak of Odin; a small but densely decorated holy place populated by polychrome statues of saints, drenched with the smell of incense, the Latin muttering of the priests, the choreography of the rites, the flickering of many candles, and then the power of organ and voice descending on us from the choir loft, flooding the coffin and the mourners with the first eight notes.
It was not the hyper-restrained a capella chanting of chaste French Benedictines, but the local outburst of our forte and tremolo-loving organist with the solo blast of the frustrated opera-singer now consigned to belting out parish requiems. More faithful, I think, to the hymn's origins. A performance somewhere in the middle here:
Dies irae, dies illa
solvet saeclum in favilla,
teste David cum Sybilla.
O day of wrath, that day
dissolves the world into smoldering ashes,
as witness David and the Sybil.
solvet saeclum in favilla,
teste David cum Sybilla.
O day of wrath, that day
dissolves the world into smoldering ashes,
as witness David and the Sybil.
Things only got worse!
When the liturgy was white-washed in the 1960's, this was removed from the funeral Mass, along with the black vestments and the weeping. The modern-world-loving priests who removed it "replaced (it) with texts urging Christian hope and arguably giving more effective expression to faith in the resurrection." At my Dad's recent funeral Mass, not only did the priest indulge in all kinds of unreal and verbose therapeutic sentimentality, but the music had devolved into a soap opera of effeminate pablum. I am not at all sure that that old rites should have been replaced.
You might not have liked Dies Irae's grim view, but you can't deny that it was dramatic, both in text and in melody, and it embodied an archetypal truth. Traditional Christianity's final cosmic explosion has now become the property of Gaia-worshipping eco-fanatics. Theologians became uncomfortable with the ancient hymn, but musicians have always loved it. Along with Mozart and Verdi, there's the contained histrionics of Jenkins, and on YouTube you can find contemporary rock, hiphop anime, and trance mixes of it.
Obviously something there in the Old Religion that the Enlightened Way of "effective presentation" lacks on this Day of the Dead, All Souls 2009.
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3 comments:
Unless "Resurrection" is assumed to be a welcome event, I'd suppose that Dies Irae or "The Day of Wrath" (which I first heard in a class you T.A.'d for) would "give effective expression to faith in the resurrection"! If this grand oeuvre doesn't inspire fear that Death isn't the end, perhaps the cause is its operatic impacts which distracts from the imagining of damnation as everlasting time in torture -- a zillion years go by, but one has not a minute less to spend in enduring agonies! As St Anselm proves, the slightest offense against an infinite God incurs infinite, everlasting guilt.
Fear of Hell has been a far, far more effective motivator in Christianity than has hope of Heaven. Perhaps ordinary Christian blokes feel merely bored listening to a performance of the Day of Wrath, and everything "eternal" feels unbelievable within horizons of boredom. Heaven too was described in boring ways, and accordingly Christians felt not much longing for attaining an eternity of blessedness. Avoiding an eternity of hellfire was a different matter entirely.
The wicked man or even the well-adjusted live-and-let-live worldling might fancy that if they can get through "this life" he is in the clear. Not so, prophesies the Christian cleric: you will be personally, bodily resurrected as an individual! "I don't care if I miss out on your 'heaven'!" retorts the worldling; "I don't want to sacrifice and ruin my 'this life' for an eternal life that I may not even enjoy." Ah! but you are forgetting the danger of resurrection not into a "final destruction," which is over and done with in an instant, but into an everlasting ongoing torture in Hell -- if you have not lived this life in such a way to satisfy God's requirements! This is the Christian kerygma that has required resoluteness in worldlings who wish to "stay the course" and not knuckle under to the Christian clergy: dismissing Christian authorities runs an enormous risk -- what if they are right?!?!
Resurrection into Christianity's Heaven might have been a more effective motivator had it been imagined in the Islamic style (which, incidentally, I guess enables an orientationally challenged Muslim to prove he is in fact 100% hetero because he can go around in fervent hope of arriving in paradise!). But Our Lord did not promise an endless succession of dark-eye'd houris, and accordingly we haven't felt much longing for Heaven except as not-Hell, as freedom from everlasting hellfire. "Today thou shalt be with Me in Paradise" (Luke 23:43) meant a lot to us because it meant "you won't be in everlasting fire" "you will make the cut and not be consign'd to everlasting torture" (cf Luke 16:25-6. C.S. Lewis, BTW, claims that hell is only for ex-psyches who have become total ruins; but the rich man is concern'd for his brothers and thinks to save them even if he cannot be saved; Dives is not a ruin. C.S. Lewis also says deeds done with no knowledge of wrong-doing don't need forgiveness; but Christ on the Cross prays "Father forgive them [the soldiers], for they know not what they do." So look out, eh!?)
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Admittedly, neither St Paul or the Gospel of John brings in threat of hellfire. But to judge by church history, not much would have come of such speechifying without the background of fear of everlasting hellfire establish'd by the Synoptics' Jesus, just as Christianity without salvation by works -- for example, as taught by the Synoptics' Jesus -- would never have got out of the starting gate. The Synoptics' Jesus teaches salvation by a sort of works. Calvinism too: if a steady stream of religio-moral effort (works plus an inner effort of devotionalness) is forthcoming from you, the evidence suggests that you have been pre-destined to salvation; and if such effort is missing, the evidence suggests you have been pre-destined to damnation. Conclusion: you had better start willing a lot of religio-moral effort, but deem it inspired by the Holy Spirit. (Luther seems to have had to rely on Calvinism to sort-of complete what he sort-of half-attempted.) Catholicism from the rabble's devotion to the Sacred Heart and all those sacramentals (for which Pope John Paul proposed the innovation that they be Christ-centred) up to the higest reaches of dedication to the Counsels of Perfection has been sheer meriting the gift of salvation by works. Bonhoeffer: God doesn't give "cheap grace": grace must be earn'd -- by works, religio-moral effort.
Salvation by faith if it occurs at all in Catholicism or Protestantism is only the hope that God will forgive sins already committed, plus the duty of fervently emphasizing that if one does make the cut on the Day of Wrath and is spared everlasting hellfire, this will be from grace, which is merited only in that one confesses one is totally unworthy of grace and one made hopefully sufficient religio-moral effort during this life to prove that one knew one couldn't take forgiveness and so forth for granted. (Interesting to consider the attitude of the God constructed by implication from the fears induced in Christians!)
Conservative RCs tend see various diabolical forces in the reforms made in the wake (funeral wake) of the Second Vatican Council. Perhaps so, but it seems the Devil used academic "experts" to achieve his ends -- the famous periti of this Council. IMHO, it's like the whole "the" Church was given over to the more or less socially maladjusted and alienated crew of "experts" who happen'd to be Catholic, and the results are as you describe. A grand experiment work'd out between YHWH and Satan, as at the beginning of the Book of Job? Part of the weirdness is that they didn't claim to be imposing an alienating, religiously awkward and frequently purely conceptual Christianity of the experts, but a Christianity of a purely fanciful "Pilgrim People" -- as fancy'd by the experts. Various conceptualities produced simplistic banalities that allegedly express, flow from the faith and spirituality of all the non-experts -- the ordinary laity and clergy as conceived of by the experts. Thus, out with "The Day of Wrath" and Latin in general, and in with clumsy guitar music and what I once heard described as School Board English.
During these same years, the "mainline" Lutheran denomination in America got rid of their liturgy music that the actual pilgrim people more or less liked -- it was melodious, followable, singable -- and instituted, on pain of disfellowshipping of recalcitrant congregations, an experts' liturgy music that one needed a graduate degree in music theory to comprehend although not like (for sensory pleasure is diabolical according to geometers). Not that experts and their acolytes bother'd to attend the liturgies they reform'd: experts in all denominations aren't fervent church attenders.
But the big thing was "the" Church, and Satan most dramatic use of the periti of concept-driven pop banalization has been against her. I'd opine that Ian Paisley must be happy, except he seems to have changed his tune in recent years.
Eppur si muove, jpm
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P.S. I remember this dialogue from my childhood -- with another little boy my age, who moved away in grade three; so the dialogue was before then. We each return'd home after church on Good Friday, he from an Anglican Church, I from a UCCan Church. I said, "It must have really hurt a lot to be crucify'd." My friend reply'd "Aw, God strengthen'd Jesus so he could take it." I remember looking at him and silently thinking there's no evidence that God strengthen'd him, but I didn't dispel my friend's fancy since it seem'd a comfort to him. Was that the right thing to do? I've never felt sure that it was.
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