Saturday, October 27, 2012

Word made flesh vs Word made words

A new monk of the old school makes a good point:

"the root cause of defects in the liturgical reform, both shortly before and after the Council, was a false anthropology stemming from the Enlightenment. In particular, the Enlightenment suffered from a truncated view of man's nature that exaggerates the exercise of rationality, particularly through verbal instruction, while neglecting the immense role played by the five senses, the symbolic imagination, and memory, as well as the appetitive side of human nature. Drawing upon the anthropology articulated in St. Thomas's Summa, Fr. Cassian maintained that modern man is no different in essence from what man has ever been, and that, consequently, a desire to adapt the liturgy to modern man rather than steeping modern man in the spirit of the liturgy had the potential to promote the very "industrial rationalism" of the modern age that the Liturgical Movement in many ways sought to combat with its emphasis on gesture, ritual, symbol, and fine art."

Although far from self-consciously rationalistic, the Reformers were obsessed with verbal instruction, that is, with information. Any images that did survive were emptied of their capacity for mystical participation and reduced to the status of visual aids.

'via Blog this'

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