I apologize for my absence these past weeks. Hopefully, I will be able to begin posting more regularly again. I have been and continue to be working on something very big which I hope to share soon enough. You won’t be disappointed.
Today, I share with you some fruits of the time I recently spent in the Apostolic Archives (formerly the “Secret Archives”). Below, I present, without commentary, an unsigned letter which was sent to Leo XIII about a certain Archbishop Langénieux. My translation and transcription (from Italian). Some parts are/were a little difficult.
AAV, Index 1302, b. 11, sf. 68, n. 1-4
Necessary and secret information for the Supreme Pontiff Leo XIII
In France, everyone knows that the Bonapartist party makes continuous applications to the Holy See so that Monsignor Langénieux, Archbishop of Reims, may be elevated to the dignity of Cardinal.
If, hypothetically, this promotion took place, it would only be the effect of the favor, and would produce only bad results.
And what everyone notices that M. Langénieux was a close friend of Monsignor Darboy Archbishop of Paris, who was always an enemy of the Holy See. These two ecclesiastics and M. Degury Curé della Maddalena often went to Napoleon III to urge him to bring down the Temporal Power of the Pope.
M. Langénieux preached Lent at the chapel of the Tuileries palace where he flattered the Emperor a lot, and to thank the preacher he invited him to have lunch with him at the Court, and restored the decoration of the Legion of Honor with a beautiful goblet. At the same time, Archbishop Darboy appointed M. Langénieux to the care of souls in one of the largest and richest parishes in Paris, that of Saint Augustine.
During the government of the Commune, while the good priests as true soldiers of Jesus Christ remained with fidelity and courage in the service of their churches, the Curé Langénieux abandoned his parish, and went to hide in the house of a Bonapartist family, to the chagrin and detriment of his parishioners.
After the re-establishment of social order in France, the Bonapartists were looking for a Church there to celebrate, on August 15th – Saint Napoleon – according to their expression, as they had always done under the empire, but from which they received a clear and irrevocable rejection by several respectable Curates of the Capital.
M. Langénieux, who knewrefusal well, went in person to see two rich ladies, who are the most influential in the Bonapartist party, and told them that he was very willing to place his parish church entirely at their disposal. This offer was accepted instantly and with great pleasure; all the Bonapartists, carrying a bunch of violets on their chests, went to the church of Sant’Agostino, and the Curé Langénieux sang the Solemn Mass in music to celebrate Bonaparte. At the end of the Mass, the Bonapartist men and women went – quickly – to the sacristy to shake hands with the Curé Langénieux, who had been so amiable and complacent towards them.
The house of God was thus profaned on the day of the greatest Feast of Mary Most Holy. This profanation caused an immense scandal in the city of Paris, and bad publicists took advantage of it to write against all the clergy and the Holy See.
This serious inconvenience was renewed in the following two years.
For the sake of brevity, the description of other mistakes committed by M. Langénieux. They are known to all the Parisian clergy, who would bring them out if need demanded it. It is only added thatLangénieux often goes to Paris to see the imperialist families with whom he is in continuous and intimate correspondence. The two Buonapartist Ladies said: “Our dear friend Curé Langénieux will soon be named Bishop, then Archbishop, then Cardinal; we are powerful enough to obtain this favor from the Archbishop of Paris Monsign. Guibert, and of the Holy See; we need it to boost our political party, and to make everyone believe that the Pope is on our side.”
M. Langénieux, in fact, was immediately appointed first Vicar General of Paris, to the prejudice of the other priests who had already been Vicars General for a long time before him. Shortly thereafter, he was proclaimed Bishop of Tarbes, and then promoted to the Archbishopric of Reims.
As, in France, a priest-curé has never been seen to make three leaps up the hierarchical career in less than two years, so the members of the clergy say that M. Langénieux is a Bonapartist jumper and that if, in addition, he reached the end of his excessive ambition, by all he would be called the Cardinal of the powerful Bonapartist ladies.
In order for a Prelate to be promoted to the sublime dignity of cardinal, it is absolutely necessary that he has already rendered great services to the Holy See, to the Church, and to the person of the Pope; he also must not belong to any political party. Now, what good has M. Langénieux done for the Holy See, for the Church, and for the Pope? NOTHING!!! and it is a manifest fact that he is constantly toiling for the chimerical restoration of the empire, which has done so much harm to the infallible Vicar of Jesus Christ, and which he would do even more if he returned to the throne of France.
Non potest arbor mala bonos fructos facere. [A bad tree cannot produce good fruit.]
In France there are several Bishops and Archbishops, who have bleached their hair in the exercise of the holy ministry for the salvation of souls, and who with admirable zeal have written many pastoral letters, many pamphlets, and also great and luminous works to defend the holy cause of the Holy See. It would therefore be an act of justice if the Supreme Pontiff deigned to give those excellent Prelates the Cardinal’s Hat before M. Langénieux, who is still young, and must henceforth deserve it through a completely different conduct from that which he has held to this day.
The bad results of the hypothetical promotion of Monsignor Langénieux would be the following.
The Bonapartists are so small in number that they will never be able to succeed in their mad enterprise. The French, generally speaking, abhor the Bonaparte dynasty because it has always been their scourge. The so-called son of Napoleon III finds himself exiled from France, and is a man without wit, without intellect, without courage; if, by chance and by an impossible plebiscite, he were called to the throne, after six months he would be driven out by a terrible revolution, which would massacre all the clergy and burn the churches, because the majority of votes would be attributed by the revolutionaries to clerical influence similar to that of 1849, 1850, and 1852.
No doubt the Republicans will rule France for a long time; and to displease the Pope they would suppress the budget of Catholic worship, if the Pope gave the cardinal’s hat to Monsignor Langénieux, the active and intrepid Bonapartist.
Pius IX, of holy memory, did not want to receive the ex-empress Eugenia in private audience, but when begged repeatedly and deceived by the Bonapartists domiciled in Rome, and by Cardinal Bonnechoses, Archbishop of Rouen, he received iher Immediately afterwards; out of a spirit of unjust vengeance, the republican government of France began to persecute the Religious Corporations there, and now it continues with the intention of harming the Church and afflicting the Pope.
When the republican government will be used by the application of its bad laws, the Princes of the Royal Family of Orleans, who have become legitimate heirs to the throne after the death of the Count of Chambord, will definitively take over the reins of power to govern their country. Then, they would probably never take care of the restoration of the Temporal Power of the Pope, if M. Langénieux were to be named Cardinal, because they would consider such appointment as a great service rendered by the Holy See to the good partisan party. The whole of Europe knows that the Brothers(?) Principi (Princes?) have been too badly treated by Napoleon III. Unfortunately men do not forget offenses and do not forgive.
Ecclesiastical history tells M. Langénieux, Archbishop of Reims, that the greatest persecutors of the Catholic Religion have always been, and will be, the high ranking members of the Catholic clergy with ambitious spirits.
Experience teaches that the best way to prevent is to predict. This is so true that the Holy See in its infinite wisdom has, at all times, refrained from making promotions which could be considered as favorable to any political party whatsoever.
Three years ago, the ensign of Mac-Mahon, a spirit of the Bonapartist ladies, asked the Supreme Pontiff for the cardinal’s hat for Monsignor Langénieux, Archbishop of Reims, and immediately received a negative answer from Pius IX, who is today in the Kingdom of the Blessed.
He who has taken the liberty of writing this sheet with good intention humbly begs the Holy Father Leo XIII to affix that he deign, as a matter of charity, to ensure that it is not read by any other person.
…the Siege of Jerusalem, the major event of the First Jewish-Roman War, entered its final phase: occupation and plundering. The Temple had been destroyed about a week earlier. (For once, the image that is above, which is the default image for my posts, is spot on. The Dome of the Rock/Al-Aqsa Mosque, the prominent gold roof atop the walls, is where the Temple used to be.) This had come after months of siege, which had reduced the city to absolute mayhem and despair, which included cannibalism.
It’s suspected that stones from the Temple were put into the Roman monument memorializing the event, the Arch of Titus.
In 878, Pope John VIII was busy crowning Louis the Stammerer as King of West Francia. Yep, that was his name. This was Louis’ second crowning, for some odd reason, as King of West Francia. He’d been crowned the previous year in October by the Archbishop of Rheims – Archbishop Hincmar. Presumably, when he succeeded his younger brother – Charles the Child – as King of Aquitaine, he was also crowned. Later on, King Louis the Stammerer, who was never emperor for some other odd reason, gave a few counties of his kingdom away to – Wilfred the Hairy. With his second wife, he had a child born after his death who was the eventual heir to the throne after his older brothers died: Charles the Simple.
In 1159, Pope Alexander III was elected, though he had to deal with an anti-pope (Victor IV – one of FOUR anti-popes during his reign) who for a while commanded the allegiance of most European kings. (Alexander wept openly at the news of Victor’s death and allegedly scolded the cardinals who were happy about it.) His papacy lasted just under 21 years. His reign oversaw the controversy around St. Thomas Beckett and King Henry II. He canonized Beckett, too.
This is an excellent film, despite some liberties begin taken with the history. The anathema scene is particularly good – starts around 1:27:33.
This was the second Englishman he canonized, the first having been Edward the Confessor. He also convened and led the Third Lateran Council, which settled on a canon that to this day regulates conclaves (2/3 majority votes). Alexander was quite interested in the missions as well, especially in Scandinavia and the Baltic region.
In 1630, the city of Boston was established. Go Red Sox.
In the Wild West of Northfield, Minnesota, on this day in 1876, Jesse James and his James-Younger Gang tried to rob a bank but were thwarted by heavily armed townsfolk. Yee-haw!
In 1901, the Boxer Rebellion ended in the Qing Dynasty (China).
On a cheerier note, 20 years later (1921), the Legion of Mary was founded in Dublin. Today it is the largest lay apostolate in the world. Maybe there is even a chapter at your local parish!
On the very same day, the first annual Miss America pageant began.
Moving to Africa, Desmond Tutu became the first black man to lead the Anglican Diocese of Cape Town in 1986. On the same day, the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet was almost assassinated by Communists – 5 of his bodyguards died. Exactly ten years later in 1996, hip-hop phenom Tupac Shakur was shot. He died 6 days afterward.
In 2008, the US federal government took over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, during the recession occasioned by the housing bubble caused by sub-prime mortgages. Here’s a great rundown of that whole catastrophe.
You have never heard of Esarhaddon. You might have heard of his father, but you have not heard of him.
I am watching the ongoing fiasco in the USA with a lot of interest – perhaps with more interest than is appropriate. (If you do not know that there is a fiasco, well, you are in for a surprise when the mainstream/legacy media is finally forced to cover what is actually about to happen in the courts.) The whole world is focused on American politics at the moment, and it seems that it is all so extremely consequential. For some people, surely it is consequential, in an individual existential sense, whether in terms of careers or direct effects from public policy that is actually at stake (which is not nearly as much as people tend to think, at least with respect to the U.S. presidency). Others think it is just about the end of the world if their candidate doesn’t win – and this sad phenomenon was quite famously on display in the aftermath of 2016. When people choose to define the meaning of their lives by the presence of a few people in Washington D.C., the individuality of one’s own life is forgotten, let alone the perspective of eternity.
Again, you have never heard of Esarhaddon. He was considered “Lord and King of the Universe.” And of all men, in terms of temporal, political power, he may indeed have the best claim of anyone in world history, or at least he is in the top 10 or so. (Mansa Musa would be another good contender, along with Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, and a few Roman Emperors.) But you have never even heard of him.
Esarhaddon was the Emperor of Assyria at its absolute apex, from 681-669 B.C. His career included most significantly successfully conquering Egypt. (He is mentioned indirectly in 2 Chronicles 33:11 when the extremely wicked King Manasseh of Judah was captured by him – who then prayed to God and was eventually freed – but be honest, you do not recall that verse!) However, we know from his private letters that he was a very depressed and disturbed man. He was especially distraught over the premature death of one of his children – not unlike Pharaoh (or later, ironically, King David). For all his immense power, he could not stop the death of his family or of himself, and he could barely function in his imperial duties, often withdrawing for months at a time from public life. (In a strange and rather unique practice, there would be a “substitute king” for 100 days – after which period, the unfortunate man taking the emperor’s place would be executed. In fact, Esarhaddon once used this to dispose of one of his great political rivals…) Assyrians would have surely been as attentive to the goings-on of the imperial court as Americans are to the White House. How relevant is Assyrian politics now, except for the sake of understanding world history and especially Scripture?
You know Esarhaddon’s father, Sennacherib, whose march on Jerusalem is addressed in Isaiah 10 and 2 Kings 18-19 – likely the only reason you would have heard of him. You also might have even heard of Esarhaddon’s son, Assurbanipal (whose rule led to the end of the Empire), although that’s not so likely. But you’ve never heard of Esarhaddon. That’s worth considering. He is dead, he is forgotten, and his empire is gone too. So much for Esarhaddon, “Lord and King of the Universe.”
Will normal people 2,600 years from now have ever even heard of Trump or Biden? Who knows. But they will have heard of Jesus of Nazareth. And all that time from now, Jesus of Nazareth will remember each of us, as well.
“Holy Mother Church holds all lawfully acknowledged rites to be of equal right and dignity; that she wishes to preserve them in the future and to foster them in every way.” We find this statement in the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy of the last ecumenical council (§4). Here many will say, not without irony, that the subsequent radical reform of the Roman rite (or rather its destruction followed by the creation of something completely new) showed very well what such “preservation in the future and fostering in every way” mean in practice. However, such an abandonment of an existing rite, even though not to such extent and not on the universal level, is not something unprecedented in the history of the Church’s liturgy. In the course of the 17th century the Cistercian Order almost unanimously abandoned its rite of the Mass so as to accept the Roman rite with few features of their own rite.
What were the reasons for which the authorities of the Order decided to stop using the proper Cistercian rite? To answer to that question, we must know something about its history and its character.
The Cistercian Order was founded in 1098 in Burgundy in France out of a desire to renew the monastic life by returning to the literal adherence to the Rule of Saint Benedict. However, while the Rule speaks much about the structure of the canonical hours, it is completely silent about the rite of the Mass. What is more, Saint Benedict does not even indicate how often the Mass should be celebrated in the monastery. So, the first generations of the Cistercian monks had to find other principles to arrange the rite of their Mass. One of the principles was authenticity; they decided to use only renowned sources. This mainly regards the textual layer of the rite. The chant books were copied in Metz which at that time enjoyed the reputation of having the purest Gregorian tradition. Also, the texts of the missal (called at that time the “sacramentary”) were taken from the most respected churches of Burgundy.
Other principles were simplicity and poverty. One can say that properly these two principles shaped mostly the external layer of the Cistercian rite. The substance of the rite – taken from the existing monastic customs and from neighbouring churches – remained intact, but the Cistercians decided to remove or simplify all that they saw as accidental and superfluous.
Let us take a look at a typical conventual mass celebrated every day at a Cistercian abbey. The first difference with respect to the other rites at the time was the scarcity of ministers: for Sundays and feasts the priest was accompanied by a deacon and subdeacon, while on ordinary days even the subdeacon was unnecessary.
Just after the preparatory prayers at the foot of the altar, the ministers proceeded to the preparation of the chalice, but the pouring of the water was reserved to the priest. Once the lesson had been sung, the subdeacon could join the choir to help in singing.
Hauterive
Before the gospel, the deacon asked the abbot for his blessing. After the Credo, the deacon brought the sacred vessels (let us remember – these already contained the wine with water) to the altar, but there was no special offertory prayer other than In spiritu humilitatis. Then, only on feast days and only at this moment, incense was used. The way of incensing was quite curious: the priest traced a circle over the offerings with the thurible, then incensed the right side of the altar, the left one and again the right and the left side of the base of the altar. After that, he gave the thurible to the deacon who in turn incensed the right side of the altar cross and then went behind the altar to the left side to do the same there.
The Canon of the mass was substantially identical to its counterparts elsewhere. It is important however to point out two particularities: first, the elevation of the sacred species was introduced somehow reluctantly and gradually, so it became universal only in the 15th century. Secondly, kneeling was practiced to a limited degree. The community knelt down for the Canon only on ferial days, while the sacred ministers did not kneel ever.
The Pater noster was followed by a series of prayers for peace and, at least at the beginning, for the reconquest of the Holy Land. Also, the way of distribution of the Holy Communion was quite remarkable. The sign of peace was given uniquely to those who were to receive Communion. In conformity with the Rule of Saint Benedict, the monks approached the altar by seniority, they knelt on the highest degree and received the species of bread directly on the tongue. Similarly, kneeling on the left side of the altar, they drank the consecrated wine without touching with their hands the chalice held by the deacon and subdeacon. Then they passed to the sacristan standing between the altar and choir and drank a little bit of unconsecrated wine in order to “purify themselves,” probably from the possible remnants of the sacred species in the mouth.
At this point the role of the celebrant was practically over. He had only to wash his hands at the piscina (i.e. a kind of a little well placed at the right side of the altar), recite the postcommunion prayer, and then could go back to the sacristy, with no final blessing, which is noteworthy. In the meanwhile, the sacred ministers were occupied with purification of the sacred vessels, not upon the altar but at the ministerium (i.e. credence table). The rite of purification was quite complex: it consisted of several ablutions with wine and water and even of licking the paten.
Even this summary description of the Cistercian Mass gives one an idea of the extreme simplicity and sobriety of the medieval rite. However, not only this was its weak point. The situation was even more difficult, since there was no detailed and exhaustive description of its ceremonies. Actually, the medieval Usus contained special chapters speaking about various types of the mass (conventual with two ministers, conventual with one minister, private mass), but those descriptions were anything but complete and satisfying. As long as the Order was vivacious, conscious of the richness of its proper tradition, the new generations of priests were taught the rite by their elders. By contrast, after the Council of Trent, when a new generation of men joined the Order, the sense of the Order’s own identity, expressed in large part by liturgical customs, faded more and more. Those men knew almost exclusively the post-Trent Roman rite which at that time was spreading with astonishing success, enjoyed the authority of the pontiff, corresponded to the spiritual tastes and needs of the epoch and, last but not least, was meticulously described.
We can suppose that all those factors provoked a gradual abandonment of the medieval Cistercian rite. The first step towards its romanisation, made 1611, was a permission to say private masses according to the Roman missal granted to the monks of the Order. To facilitate that new possibility, in 1617 the Roman Ritus servandus was inserted into the new edition of the Cistercian missal, since there was no Cistercian counterpart to it. In the following year the general chapter formally adopted the Roman Ritus celebrandi. Liturgical unrest was in the air. Claude Vaussin, who was elected general abbot in 1645, decided to publish liturgical books that would put an end to the increasing liturgical confusion, and doubtlessly also to the fights between the “traditionalists” and the partisans of the Romeward trend. Eventually, in 1656 under his authority the Breviarium cisterciense juxta Romanum was published, and one year later came the analogous Missale cisterciense juxta novissimam Romani recognitum correctionem. Thus, the traditional Cistercian rite (with the small exception of the Congregation of Castile) ceased to exist. While the romanisation was not total and complete, as there remained, for example, several Cistercian features for the rites of Holy Week, the rite’s substance was henceforth purely Roman.
During the first half of the 20th century there was a considerable renewal of the Cistercian Order in both branches (the Strict and Common Observances) which led at least three monasteries (Hauterive, Poblet, and the now-closed Boquen) to restore the primitive rite that had fallen into disuse, but even those attempts ended in a debacle after the introduction of St. Paul VI’s Novus Ordo Missae.
As we can see, the necessity of protecting the liturgical richness of the Church has not only been urgent in our own times. Undeniably, the abolition of the traditional Roman rite was something unusual in the history of the Church; however, the abandonment of the primitive Cistercian rite shows to us a phenomenon which differed only in scope, not in quality. The lesson that we can take from this is that every liturgical tradition is worthy of protection and cultivation. Nowadays many speak about regionalization, decentralization, and the exaltation of minorities, but few are able to apply these principles to the liturgical life of the Church. If we believe that the Holy Spirit leads the Church and inspires various communities growing in Her bosom to express their faith, their charism, and their way of life, even through liturgical forms, a blind unification cannot be understood as anything other than a big mistake and a deep impoverishment.
Fr. Grzegorz Brodacki, O.Cist. is a priest and monk of the Cistercian Archabbey of Jędrzejów in Poland.
There is a well-known principle of studying history known as the “criterion of embarrassment.” We see it vindicated in our own day in America every time some self-righteous SJW campaigns to demolish a statue of a Confederate general or what have you, and they call it “progress.” The Romans called it “damnatio memoriae” – the destruction of a person’s memory. It often involved scraping out their names from stone epitaphs… not far off from the methods of the SJW’s. And we see similar things done throughout the world in every age in an attempt to cover up the bad things to make the culture look better than it really is.
The Egyptians did it too. Those of us engaged in apologetic work will sometimes hear the claim that there are “no records” of the Jews having been in Egypt or having left it, therefore, etc. (Never mind the fact that Egypt is like an iceberg – we’ve only discovered the tip.) There are at least two problems with this, corresponding to each part of the claim.
First off, what rich society wants to dedicate precious resources to memorialize their slaves? Even the amateur historian knows, for instance, that even though it appears that we have loads of knowledge about Heian Japan, this knowledge almost exclusively concerns the “1%” of the population – the imperial families, those closely related to them, their hobbies and personal endeavors, and a bit about the military class. We know next to nothing about the lives of the average farmer or merchant, despite knowing all about the aristocratic Fujiwara clan. And that’s how we should expect it.
In the second place, military defeats were embarrassing events for the pharaoh, signaling divine disapproval and encouraging enemy attacks. If I recall correctly, there is not a single known ancient Egyptian record of their nation suffering a military loss. So why should we expect a record of their abject humiliation by their slave-class? That would be extraordinary.
The Jews, on the other hand, are extraordinary indeed. They bucked this dominant trend of self-chronicling. Instead of highlighting their victories to the total eclipse of their failures, the most cursory glance at the Torah – let alone the Prophets – reveals a people obsessed with detailing their own corruption and failure, set in contradistinction to the fidelity and glory of their God.
This is remarkable. It is not how human beings operate. This is “Jewish PR.”
In “Church PR,” there are several things to keep in mind:
The potential public scandal of a revelation
The reputation of the individual perpetrator(s)
The risk of a later revelation
The good of the victim(s)
It seems that in general there has been extremely poor evaluation of the last two items over the past few decades. I should not have to defend that position these days.
Protecting the public good name of the Church is certainly laudable. And it is surely unwise to be too quick to publish names and unnecessarily destroy reputations and cause furor, especially over mere accusations or the mildest perceptions of impropriety. But we should have no “criterion of embarrassment” in Church PR.
Christ did not instruct the Apostles to cover up the actions of Judas, and the Jews were quick to recall how terrible many of their ancestors were. The animating principle there was not a thought about “what people will think,” but rather, “what God will do.” For the faithful have always known that His power is made perfect in weakness. (2 Cor. 12: 9) In a crisis, a little panic and ineptitude from leaders is understandable, but those who try to make the institutional Church look “stronger” than it really is may as well throw the sleeping Jesus off the boat like dead weight and try to save themselves from sinking in the storm. (Mt. 8: 23-27)
The right order of priorities in any kind of impropriety on the part of Church officials seems to be the reverse of what I have written above… The good of the victim must be the fundamental value, and this should only increase in importance given due consideration of the possibility of later revelation, a situation which almost invariably makes things worse. Then the good name of the perpetrator must be considered in accord with right reason. Finally, almost as an afterthought, one might see if there is a way to minimize the public nature of the affair for the good of the Church’s popular image, without affront to any other values. If that’s not possible, then it’s on God to make it work long-term, just like with ancient Israel.
We are only partially responsible for how people see the Church. God gives sufficient grace to everyone, after all. When we are put in a position where we have the immediate power and authority to help individuals who have been harmed by the institutional Church, then we are entirely responsible for attending to their legitimate grievances, whatever the broader consequences. Let the world know that Judas did something bad. Tell them that he was a bad priest. Better now than later, because in the meantime there will be a festering cover-up implicating more and more people, and crimes which could have been prevented by absence or deterrence will go unstopped.
That’s what happens when the Church uses Egyptian PR… the mighty are cast down from their thrones. (Lk. 1: 52)
Main image: “The Weighing of the Heart” from the Egyptian Book of the Dead (even the ancient Egyptians believed in final justice)
Just as the woman with the hemorrhage reached out to touch the hem of Jesus’ tunic, so do post-modern secular Westerners reach out to touch the hem of scientists’ lab coats. Despite the plain fact that any given scientist or doctor or other “expert” will be tend to be specialized in only some tiny sliver of his or her field, hopeless intellectual wanderers will gather at the feet of these people to learn all the mysteries of the universe… which is dumb. How did this happen?
Let’s take a step back.
The manifesto of the post-modern Westerner par excellence is this: “Real knowledge is only of irreducible information about the material world, and I can manipulate that same material world however I want in order to express myself and fulfill my desires.”
Herein we see two strands of thought colliding, one about the mind and one about the will: positivism and existentialism. Historically, they are not friends. How they have become fused together in post-modernity is a strange tale.
Today we will break open the first clause – real knowledge is only of irreducible information about the material world, the positivist element.
From the outset, we must make a distinction between “positivism,” which is an epistemic and social theory, and “logical positivism,” which is something more metaphysically aimed. My goal here is to show the roots of the broader idea of positivism, how it found its academic zenith in logical positivism, then how the aftermath of its fall has affected Western philosophy and science at large as well as in the minds of millennials.
A brief sketch of the positivist genealogy will suffice. We recall Descartes to point out his obsession with certitude, just as we note the empiricist thrust of Bacon, Locke, and Hume. We must mention Kant, both as the originator of the analytic-synthetic distinction (which will become enormously important) and as an influence to Hegel, who is notable for his approach to philosophy as something integral with history. Condorcet and Diderot should be pointed out as influential, being the greatest embodiments of the French Enlightenment, wherein reason and revealed religion are opposing forces. Marx, though he would reject positivism as a social ideology, helped inspire it along the same lines as Hegel had. The penultimate step was Henri de Saint-Simon, whose utopian socialism was all the rage during the French Revolution which was attempting to put his political theory into political practice.
Of course, these men were not positivists. It is Henri de Saint-Simon’s pupil, Auguste Comte, who brings us this unwanted gift of an empiricism so strong it entirely and unabashedly rejects any and all metaphysical knowledge outright. This led Comte to build a reducible hierarchy of the sciences based on their certainty or “positivity,” and he claimed (rightly) that the trend of empirical studies was heading toward a “social science.” This conception of a reducible scientific hierarchy – one where, for instance, biology can be put in terms of chemistry, and chemistry in terms of physics, etc. – was a rather new way of thinking… Previously, it had been more or less taken for granted that each science has its own irreducible terms and methods, even admitting some kind of hierarchy (such as with the classical progression of the liberal arts).
Not only was Comte the first real philosopher of science, he was also the first sociologist. According to Comte, humanity was passing from its first two stages, the theological and the metaphysical, into the third and final “positivist stage” where only empirical data would ground truth-claims about the world. Having evolved to a higher clarity about what the world is, and having built up enough of the more basic physical sciences to explore how that world works, sociology could finally occur. Mathematical evaluation of social behavior, rather than qualitative analysis, would serve as the proper method of the “queen of the sciences” in this new age.
Comte outright jettisoned religion qua supernatural and revelatory, but his intensely Catholic upbringing had driven into him such a habit of ritual that he could not altogether shake the need for some kind of piety. What was a French Revolution atheist to do? Well, start a “religion of humanity,” of course. (The “positivist religion” never became a major force, especially since Freemasonry already filled the “secular religion gap,” but it did catch on in some areas. Take a closer look at the Brazilian flag and its meaning, for example…) We should also note, for the record, that Comte was only intermittently sane.
The epistemic side of positivism almost ended up just as much of a flop as the pseudo-religion side of it. Unfortunately for the West, Durkheim and Littré became interested, and they, being altogether sane, effectively diffused Comte’s ideas and their own additions through the West at the start of the 20th century. Eventually, a group of like-minded academes started habitually gathering at a swanky café in Austria to discuss how filthy and naïve metaphysics was compared to the glories of the pure use of the senses and simple mathematical reason – the Vienna Circle was born.
Together with some Berliners, these characters formulated what came to be known logical positivism. When the shadow of Nazism was cast over Germany, some of these men journeyed westward to England and America, where their ideas were diffused.
The champions of logical positivism were Hans Hahn, Otto Neurath, Moritz Schlick, Rudolf Carnap, A.J. Ayer, and Bertrand Russell. While Russell is no doubt familiar to some readers (think “tea pot”), the others fly lower under the radar. It is Ayer’s formulation of the logical positivist doctrine which we will use, however, for our analysis.
“We say that a statement is factually significant to any given person, if, and only if, he knows how to verify the proposition which it purports to express – that is, if he knows what observations would lead him, under certain conditions, to accept the proposition as being true, or reject it as being false.” (Language, Truth, and Logic, 35)
Got that? What this means, in the context of the whole book, is that in addition to statements which are “analytic” (“all bachelors are unmarried”) being true necessarily, only statements which we can actually use our 5 senses to verify the truth of can be meaningful – that is, able to be true at all. These are “synthetic” statements. If I say that Pluto is made of bacon grease, I am making a meaningful statement, even though I cannot actually verify it; it suffices that it is hypothetically possible to verify it. If I say that the intellect is a power of the soul, this is not meaningful, since it cannot be verified with the senses. For the details, see Ayer’s book, which is rather short.
Needless to say, it is rare that a school of thought truly dies in academia. A thorough search of university philosophy departments in the Western world would yield a few die-hard fans of Plotinus, Al-Gazali, Maimonides, and maybe even Heraclitus. Perhaps the best or even only example of ideological death was logical positivism. W.V. Quine’s landmark paper “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” was such a blow to the doctrine that eventually Ayer actually admitted himself to be in massive error and repudiated his own work.
What was so blindingly erroneous about logical positivism?
First, the analytic-synthetic distinction, as formulated by the logical positivists, is groundless. Analytic statements supposedly don’t need real referents in order to be true, but they are instead simply about the meanings of words. For some kinds of statements which employ basic affirmation and negation, this might work, as it is simply just a dressing up of the principle of non-contradiction. Fine. But if one wants to start using synonyms to take the place of some of the parts of these statements, the distinction begins to disappear… What the relationship is between the synonym’s object and the original word’s object cannot be explained without a reference to real things (synthetic!), or without an ultimately circular appeal to the analyticity of the new statement through a claim of the universal extension of the synonym based on modal adverbial qualifications (like the word “necessarily,” which points to an essential characteristic which must either be made up or actually encountered in reality and appropriated by a synthesis). In other words, it is analytic “just because.” (Thus, the title of Quine’s paper: Two Dogmas of Empiricism. Read more here.)
Beyond that, logical positivism is a self-refuting on theory its face… If meaningful statements can only be about physically verifiable things, then that statement itself is meaningless because it is not analytic (or is arbitrary if it is, and we go back to the first problem) and cannot be verified with the senses so is not synthetic… How does one verify “meaningfulness” with the senses? Logical positivism is a metaphysical theory that metaphysics is meaningless. Once again, this can only be asserted, not discovered. Except with this dogma, it evidently claims itself to be meaningless.
But the cat was out of the bag: “Metaphysics has completely died at last.” Logical positivism had already made its way from the salons of Austria to the parlors of America and lecture halls of Great Britain. The fuel was poured on the fire that had started in England by Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore after they had decided to reject the British Idealism that dominated the scene by creating an “analytic” philosophy that didn’t deal with all those Hegelian vanities that couldn’t be touched with a stick or put in a beaker. Russell’s star pupil, Ludwig Wittgenstein, would also come to be a seminal force in strengthening the analytic ethos, after having already inspired much of the discussion in the Vienna Circle. Though Quine did indeed destroy the metaphysical doctrine that metaphysics is meaningless, the force of positivism continued nonetheless within this “analytic” framework – and it is with us to this day en masse in university philosophy departments, which has led several generations of students to miss out on a solid education in classical metaphysics and philosophical anthropology.
In sociology there arose the “antipositivism” of Max Weber, which insisted on the need for value-based sociology – after all, how can a society really be understood apart from its own values, and how can a society be demarcated at all without reference to those values, etc.? A liquid does not assign a value to turning into a gas, which it then acts upon, but a group does assign a value to capitalism, or marriage, or birth status which it then acts upon.
In the broader realm of the philosophy of science, Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn’s postpositivism came to the fore. Science in general cannot be best explained without regard for some kind of value, but that the possibility of and/or actualization of the falsification or failure of a scientific theory is the characteristic feature of the sciences – in contrast to the optimism of the positivists that we can “just do science,” and that that will be useful enough.
In “science” itself, an air of independence was diffused. Scientists do “science,” other people do other things, and that’s that; never mind that we have no idea how to define “science” as we understand it today, and never mind that values are always brought to bear in scientific evaluation, and never mind what might actually be done with what potentially dangerous knowledge is gained or tool developed. A far cry from the polymaths, such as St. Albert the Great or Aristotle, who never would have considered such independence.
Then there are the “pop scientists” who try to do philosophy. A few examples of many will have to suffice to show that there exist three traits among pop scientists who are the go-to sources on religion and philosophy for countless curious millennials and Gen-Xers alike.
The first is an epistemic myopia, which derives immediately from positivism: if you can’t poke it or put it in a beaker, it’s not real. (Yes, it is a little more complicated than that, but you’ve read the section above describing positivism, right? Empirical verification is the only criterion and process for knowledge… Etc.) This is often manifested by a lack of awareness that “continental philosophy” (as opposed to analytic philosophy) often works in totally immaterial terms, like act, or mind, or cause, or God. This immediately creates equivocation – a pop scientist says “act” and thinks “doing something,” for example.
The second is an ignorance of basic philosophical principles and methods, which follows from the first characteristic. If you don’t know how to boil water, don’t go on “Hell’s Kitchen” – everyone will laugh at you and wonder what you are doing there in the first place. We might do well to have a philosophical version of Gordon Ramsay roaming about.
The third is the arrogance to pontificate on philosophy and theology nonetheless, and this of course follows from the second characteristic. They don’t know what they don’t know, but they got a book deal, so they will act like they are experts.
Everyone knows Dr. Stephen Hawking. (They made a movie!) But did you know that the average 6-year-old could debunk the central claim of his most recent book? It is now an infamous passage:
“Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing.” (From The Grand Design)
I can hear the 1st graders calling out now: “But gravity’s not nothing!” And they would be right. The myopia of Dr. Hawking (and Dr. Mlodinow, his co-author) is evident in the inability to grasp that, as Gerald Schroeder pointed out, an immaterial law outside of time that can create the universe sounds a lot like, well, God. The ignorance of basic philosophical principles, in this case, the most basic, is clear from realizing that “gravity” can’t be both SOMETHING AND NOTHING. Then, the arrogance to go on pontificating anyway is self-evident by the fact of the existence of the book, and then a TV series which aired shortly afterward wherein we find philosophical reflection which is similarly wanting.
If you really want to do a heavy penance, watch this “discussion” between Hawking, Mlodinow, Deepak Chopra, and poor Fr. Spitzer – I had the displeasure of watching it live several years ago:
Then there are folks like Dr. Michio Kaku. He regularly shows up on those Discovery Channel specials on string theory, quantum mechanics, future technology, yadda yadda. All well and good. But here’s an… interesting quotation for our consideration:
“Aquinas began the cosmological proof by postulating that God was the First Mover and First Maker. He artfully dodged the question of ‘who made God’ by simply asserting that the question made no sense. God had no maker because he was the First. Period. The cosmological proof states that everything that moves must have had something push it, which in turn must have had something push it, and so on. But what started the first push? . . . The flaw in the cosmological proof, for example, is that the conservation of mass and energy is sufficient to explain motion without appealing to a First Mover. For example, gas molecules may bounce against the walls of a container without requiring anyone or anything to get them moving. In principle, these molecules can move forever, requiring no beginning or end. Thus there is no necessity for a First or a Last Mover as long as mass and energy are conserved.” (Hyperspace, 193-195)
The misunderstandings here are as comical as they are numerous… The conflation, found explicitly in the full text, of the first 3 Ways as “the cosmological proof,” which obscures the issue, the belief that “motion” is a term about something necessarily physical, the thought that only recently did we discover that matter and energy don’t just appear and disappear, and then the most obvious blunder – Thomas does NOT start any of the 5 Ways by saying anything like “God is the First Mover, therefore…” There is no such ungrounded assertion which “dodges the question,” as Kaku puts it. One must wonder if he even bothered to read the original text – which is readily available. Kaku has even weaker arguments (unbelievably) against both the “moral proof” (which is a characterization I have never heard of the 4th Way until Kaku’s book, which troubles me from the start) and the teleological proof on top of this disastrous critique, but I won’t bore you. (Basically: “Because change and evolution.” Read it for yourself.)
Once again, we see three qualities: epistemic myopia (as evidenced, for example, by the error about “motion”), ignorance of the most basic philosophical principles (albeit these are a little more complicated than the one Hawking whiffed on), and the arrogance to pontificate about God and the act of creation nonetheless.
Next you have a man like Richard Dawkins, one of the nastiest examples of publicly evangelical atheism the world has to offer at present. Here’s one particularly embarrassing quotation from his seminal anti-theistic work, The God Delusion:
“However statistically improbable the entity you seek to explain by invoking a designer, the designer himself has got to be at least as improbable.” (p. 138)
Can you see the three characteristics? Material beings only (or at least “things” with “parts”), no idea what metaphysical simplicity is and how it relates to God in Western philosophy, and yet here we have one book of many which address this theme.
It is not that these folks don’t believe in classical metaphysics – it’s that they don’t understand them in the least. They play a game of solitaire and claim to be winning a game of poker.
We won’t even get into discussing Bill Nye the Eugenics Guy… for now.
Okay, yes, quote-mining is easy. But this is the cream of the crop from a very large and fertile field. I am not sure I recall ever reading an important and sensible argument about religion or metaphysics from a world-renowned scientist who lived in the past 50 or so years. Someone prove me wrong in the comments.
All this leads us to the average “scientism” which one finds in the comboxes of Youtube videos about religion, threads on various websites, and debates on social media. Yes, there are plenty of religious people in those arenas, but the skeptics who try to make wild claims like “science disproves religion” or “evolution means God does not exist” or even just dismiss the idea of revealed religion outright with some kind of mockery ought to be seen as the children of positivism. It is the most probable explanation – the sources of their myopia, ignorance, and arrogance can usually be traced back through intermediate steps to a talking head like Dawkins who ultimately owes his own irrational ramblings to Auguste Comte.
Why is post-modern positivism so naïve? At the combox level, it is because these people, as all others, have an instinctive drive to trust in someone beyond themselves. For many it is due to circumstance and perhaps a certain kind of emotional insecurity and intellectual laziness that they latch on to the confident scientistic loudmouths to formulate their worldview – and it becomes a pseudo-religious dogmatic cult of its own, a little like Comte’s “religion of humanity.” At the pop-science level, it is just plain laziness and/or intellectual dishonesty combined with arrogance, as we have investigated. At the lecture hall level – and I mainly speak of the general closed-mindedness towards classical metaphysics found in analytic circles – it is a deeper kind of blindness which is the result of the academic culture created by the aforementioned ideological lineage. Each level has its own share of responsibility which it is shirking.
The truth is that matter is known by something immaterial – a mind or person – and this reveals to us a certain kind of hierarchy and order, seeing as matter itself does not know us. Man is indeed over all matter and ought to control it and master it, and all without the consent of matter; but this does not mean that there can’t be knowledge of things nobler and/or simpler than man, like substance or causation or God. Not looking at matter as the product of non-matter, and as being ordered to the immaterial in a certain way, is part and parcel of the New Albigensianism.
So there we have the first part of the manifesto explained. Irreducible facts (the ones devoid of metaphysics and value judgments) about the material world constitute the only real knowledge. The less reducible, the less it is really known. Even though the West is full of supposed “relativists,” it would be difficult to find a person who would truly let go of the objectivity of “science.” To say, “Christianity is your truth but not mine” is one thing; it is quite another to say something like, “Geocentrism is your truth but not mine.”
There is yet more to be explored… Next time, we will dive into the second half of the “postmodernist manifesto” with a look at its existentialist roots and how misconceptions about the relationship of the self to one’s bodily life have led to transgender bathroom bills.
Post by: Eamonn Clark
Main image: The Positivist Temple in Porto Alegre, Brazil
“I heard there was a secret chord, that David played and it pleased the Lord.” But if you can’t figure out what that chord was, maybe just try singing. God made your voice, after all.
With roots going back to ancient Judaism, singing is an integral part of Christian worship. St. Paul tells us to “be filled with the Spirit, addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with all your heart” (Eph 5:17-19). One would guess that musical instruments would be helping to make this melody, adding another musical layer and aiding proper pitch, tempo, and rhythm.
Aulos Player
However, the Fathers of the Early Church came down very hard against the use of any musical instruments in the liturgy. For example, St. John Chrysostom says rather forcefully that “where aulos-players are, there Christ is not.” By exploring their reasons, we’ll uncover some theological underpinnings to the Church’s use of chant in her liturgy.
Hebrew Psalter, 15th century AD
Jewish Roots
“Praise him with trumpet sound; praise him with lute and harp! Praise him with timbrel and dance; praise him with strings and pipe! Praise him with sounding cymbals; praise him with loud clashing cymbals! Let everything that breathes praise the Lord!” (Psalm 150:3-6)
Although the Temple at one point was known for its loud instruments, Judaism itself cast aside musical instruments in the wake of the destruction of the Temple in 70 A.D. When the Romans left Jerusalem devestated, the Jews dispersed throughout the Roman Empire abandoned their harps and lutes, as they had once done in the Babylonian Exile 600 years prior:
By the rivers of Babylon there we sat and wept, remembering Zion; on the poplars that grew there we hung up our harps. For it was there that they asked us, our captors for songs, our oppressors, for joy. “Sing to us,” they said, “one of Zion’s songs.” O how could we sing the song of the Lord on alien soil? (Psalm 137: 1-4)
Like the Babylonian Exile, the destruction of the Temple fundamentally changed Jewish worship, and the “lute and harp” lost out.
Another reason musical instruments lost out was that pagan cults were known for playing musical instruments. And since the early Jews had a real fear of obfuscating the sacred and the profane, the association of musical instruments with paganism was enough to render musical instruments unclean.
When the Early Church looked for guidance in how to conduct their worship, they seemed to follow suit. But the Church Fathers didn’t stop with just condemning the use of musical instruments in the liturgy of the Church; they went on to condemn them in other aspects of secular life. For example, St. John Chrysostom calls musical instruments “the devil’s great heap of garbage.” St. Augustine adds: “The pipe, tabret, and harp here associate so intimately with the sensual heathen cults, as well as with the wild revelries and shameless performances of the degenerate theater and circus, it is easy to understand the prejudices against their use in the worship.”
Because of this great aversion to musical instruments, early Christian liturgical music was exclusively vocal. The liturgy would be sung but only in a subdued fashion, using a form of singing called “cantillation” that resembled speech more than song.
St. Clement of Alexandria (d. 215 AD)
Patristic Interiorization
“He who sings, prays twice” – this aphorism often attributed to St. Augustine is actually a distillation of his commentary on Psalm 73:
For he that sings praise, not only praises, but only praises with gladness; he that sings praise, not only sings, but also loves him of whom he sings. In praise, there is the speaking forth of one confessing; in singing, the affection of one loving.
Perhaps better distilled as “Only the lover sings,” singing adds to our praise the element of love, the internal disposition of the heart. The act of singing, involving the mechanisms of the human voice, expresses that love of God or, even, is that love of God. Something much more profound is happening in the song of the lover than a mere doubling of prayer.
But what about musical instruments?
Although Jewish and Christian worship changed, the Old Testament did not. How did the Early Church contend with the many instances of musical instruments in the Old Testament? The Church Fathers interiorized the external musical instruments featured in the psalter. Chief among the Church Fathers in that area, St. Clement of Alexandria writes on Psalm 150:
The Spirit, to purify the divine liturgy from any such unrestrained revelry, chants: ‘Praise Him with sound of trumpet,’ for, in fact, at the sound of the trumpet the dead will rise again; ‘praise Him with harp,’ for the tongue is a harp of the Lord; ‘and with the lute, praise Him,’ understand the mouth as a lute moved by the Spirit as the lute is by the plectrum; ‘praise Him with timbal and choir,’ that is, the Church awaiting the resurrection of the body in the flesh which is its echo; ‘praise Him with strings and organ,’ calling our bodies an organ and its sinews strings, for from them the body derives its coordinated movement, and when touched by the Spirit, gives forth human sounds; ‘praise Him on high-sounding cymbals,’ which mean the tongue of the mouth, which, with the movement of the lips, produces words.
Far removed from the “unrestrained revelry” of pagan culture, the human voice alone sufficed for authentic praise of God. All the references to musical instruments are made into allegories for the human body, each signifying different aspects of our physical anthropology.
But more than just our bodies, God made the whole human person – body and soul – in His image, capable of praising Him in melodious song. The early monk Cassiodorus writes that “the notes previously observed as issuing from musical instruments are now seen to emanate from the rational bodies of men.” Connecting this to the Incarnation, St. Clement of Alexandria writes:
The Word of God, scorning the lyre and cithara as lifeless instruments, and having rendered harmonious by the Holy Spirit both this cosmos and even man the microcosm, made up of body and soul – he sings to God on his many-voiced instrument and he sings to man, himself an instrument: “You are my cithara, my aulos and my temple,” a cithara because of harmony, and aulos because of spirit, and a temple because of the word, so that the first might strum, the second might breathe, and the third might encompass the Lord… The Lord made man a beautiful breathing instrument after his own image; certainly he is himself an all harmonious instrument of God, well-tuned and holy, the transcendental wisdom, the heavenly Word.
The Word of God became flesh – with human lungs, lips, tongue, and voice – and continued his eternal praise of the Father, now as one of those “beautiful breathing instruments.”
The definitive departure from “lifeless” Davidic musical instruments made room for such interpretations of the psalms. With this anthropologizing and allegorizing of the psalms with the elevated anthropology of the Incarnation, we have the beginnings of a theological foundation for liturgical chant.
Theology of the Unassisted Voice
When the Word became human flesh in the Incarnation, the study of human nature became a study of God – anthropology became a theology. Likewise, the study of the human voice reveals in some way the mystery of Christ. According to Dom Mark Kirby, the human voice in the Church’s liturgy prepares “in a kind of renewal of the mystery of the incarnation, an acoustical body for the Divine Word” (“The Psalmody of the Divine Office,” 17-18). In this way, liturgical chant is a participation in Christ’s mediation to the Father, as manifested in the Incarnation.
Here (with some help from Dom Kirby) are some theological musings on several aspects of the unassisted human voice.
Breathing: Within the Trinity, “the breath of God is indissociable from the word of God, and the word of God cannot be uttered save in a communication of the breath of God.” (“Toward a Definition of Liturgical Chant,” 15). Breathing thus images the action of the Holy Spirit in singing. In a cappella singing, pauses for breathing are left unfilled and exposed. Through the breathing necessary for supported singing, “the human person, fully alive, expresses likeness to God. Breath, life, and word constitute an inseparable triad in the divine economy of creation and redemption” (Ibid.). Together, the co-incidence of breath and word resonate in the human heart, the inner sanctuary of the temple of one’s body, where one prays to the Father in secret (Matt 6:6).
Memory: Unlike visual art which is stretched spatially, music is stretched temporally, requiring the human memory to link words across time into a coherent discourse. “Liturgical chant,” according to Dom Kirby, “being heightened discourse, engages the memory of both singer and hearer, becoming a disclosure, in time, of the timeless mystery, a contemplative unfolding of the Word” (“Toward a Definition of Liturgical Chant,” 14).
Communion: The prayer of the Christian is never solitary; every prayer is uttered in union with Christ and in communion with His Church. Chant captures this aspect of communion. The propers, antiphons, and psalmody chanted in the sacred assembly make present that communion of persons, all praying ecclesially with the voice of the Church. Chanting the prayer of the Church together leads to a uniformity without homogenization, a unity without loss of identity – each unique voice aids the others in a common song of praise. Even when chanted alone, the prayer of the liturgy is united with the prayers of all the faithful from the rising of the sun to its setting, stretching throughout space and time.
16th Century Chant Manuscript – Psalm 89: “I have made a covenant with my elect: I have sworn to David my servant. Alleluia.”
Silence: Chant begins and ends with silence: “the context of liturgical chant is, before and after anything else, silence. It originates, with the word, in silence. Like the Word, it ‘springs from the silence’” (Ibid., 20). More than merely assisting prayer, chant is prayer. In fact, chant is a participation in the highest prayer of Christ’s mediation to the Father. As such, chant should not feel rushed or busy, but must rather be irrigated with silence. The pockets of silence are little Mount Horebs wherein we hear the “still small voice” of God (1 Kg 19:12). This prayer does not need musical instruments filling in the gaps of singing and supporting the sound of the human voice with additional melodic layers. Rather, in liturgical chant, the exposed and vulnerable human person encounters the Father most authentically in silence.
What Next?
In chant, the human voice alone carries the word and expresses the fullness of the human person – body and soul. Chanting the text without accompaniment, one’s voice, one’s prayer – one’s whole person – is exposed to God. Chant is thus a full, conscious, and active participation in the prayer of the Church in the liturgy.
As the Church spread throughout Europe and the influence of paganism began to wane, musical instruments lost their negative associations. No longer seen as “the devil’s heap of garbage,” the Church began to reintroduce instruments into worship. With a little help from Charlemagne, the pipe organ became a prominent feature of medieval churches. As a “breathing” machine operated by bellows, the pipe organ was seen as an appropriate mechanical approximation of the human voice.
St. Cecilia (d. 230) anachronistically depicted playing the organ
But before the organ became a staple of church construction, the initial vacuum created by the Church Fathers’ opposition to musical instruments was filled by a theology of the unaccompanied human voice. Even though the Church no longer fears a connection to pagan worship, it was that initial aversion that occasioned the development of a robust theology of the unaccompanied voice – a theology whose praises are often unsung.
Such a theology became the basis for the great depositum orandi – deposit of prayer (to coin a phrase) – in Gregorian Chant. To this day, Gregorian chant is still “specially suited to the Roman liturgy” and “should be given pride of place in liturgical services” (Sacrosanctum Concilium 116).
Like the Early Church, the negative cultural associations of some contemporary genres of music ought to be taken into account in developing liturgical music fitted for the worship of the Father through, with, and in the incarnate Son. But more importantly, we ought not to turn our back on the larger theology of chant rooted in the Incarnation.
Christian Renaissance Movement 