The Need for Sacred Space

A section of the
tapestry of the
Communion of
the Saints in the
Cathedral of Los
Angeles 

I mentioned in a recent posting that while I am committed to the Liturgical Reforms instituted by the Church during and after the Second Vatican Council, I still think we have a long way to go in developing the liturgical forms these rites take to bring out and maximize their spiritual depths.  There are several obvious flaws: while the language of the earlier translation was banal and without poetic tones, the current translation is not only equally prosaic, but aurally incomprehensible.  The translation principles of Liturgiam authenticam are fundamentally flawed and, as anyone who as a student had to unravel the complexities of Cicero knows, one cannot bring Latin syntax into intelligible English.  We need a translation which is not only substantially (as opposed to literally) faithful to the original, but which has some literary polish to it.  And then there is the music.  Directors of music and liturgy (though I suspect that most often the real problem are the priests) need to get over their fear of “bringing out old treasures as well as new” from their storeroom (cf. Matt 13:52).  It has taken us centuries to build up a repertoire of great music for the liturgy and it will take us centuries more to add pieces of equal value and worth.  In the meantime we should not be afraid to selectively use the treasures of the past even if they are in a language many (ok, most, almost all) people do not understand.  On the other hand, the Mass is not colonial Williamsburg and the new must be used alongside the old even if most of the new is not of the same excellence.  And much of the new, by the way, is of the same excellence.  Composers such as John Rutter, John Tavener, Bob Chilcott, Herbert Howells, or Malcolm Archer are contemporary musicians writing excellent Church music.  And of course there is a difference between worship and concerts.  While there is no problem in having the occasional soloist or choral piece, especially during a time appropriate to reflection, better to have music that invites the congregation to participate more fully in the liturgy and not just render them passive attendees.   

But where I would really like to begin is with architecture. I realize that we are entering an extremely subjective topic: much of it comes down to a matter of personal taste.  I am a huge fan of contemporary architecture.  As with contemporary classical and ecclesiastical music, not all contemporary architecture is good.  Some of it is ridiculous and some is even horrid—I think, for example, of the post-modern Canadian Embassy in Washington DC.  Some of it is magnificent, though located in an inappropriate context: for example, the East Wing of the National Gallery of Art (ironically located directly across Constitution Avenue from the aforementioned Canadian Embassy) or les pyramides du Louvre in Paris.  (Both these buildings are the work of I.M. Pei, and while superb in themselves are somewhat alien to their immediate surroundings.)  The Sydney Opera House is an example of a fascinating structure in a perfectly located environment.  The Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Alexandria Egypt is another outstanding example of contemporary architecture.  I could go on, but let me move to church architecture. 

As much as I like contemporary architecture, I have yet to see where it has been made to work well for liturgical space, at least in large spaces.  The monastery chapel of the Carmelite Nuns in Baltimore is an example of a contemporary small worship space that is conducive to prayer.  I found the chapel of the Benedictine nuns at Jamberoo Abbey in Australia to be similarly prayerful.  I also found the same in the Abbey Church of Our Lady of the Genesee upstate New York.  But when this translates to large space such as a parish church or a cathedral, I have yet to find good examples of contemporary church architecture.  The Abbey Church of Westminster in Mission, British Columbia is absolutely horrible.  I have very mixed feelings about the Cathedral in Los Angeles.  I was deeply moved when I visited there, but I think I was (and continue to be) overwhelmed by the tapestry of the Procession of the Saints from the baptistery to the altar.  Take away the tapestry and I am not so sure about the interior of the building while the exterior looks like a TD Bank on steroids.  It is actually, I think, an eyesore.  (Again, I realize this is very subjective.)  As long as we are using the steroids analogy, Saint Mary’s Cathedral in San Francisco is nothing more than an overgrown agitator from a washing machine.  The two British examples of contemporary church architecture: the Catholic Cathedral at Liverpool and the Anglican Cathedral at Coventry would have both been better unbuilt. 

I think the flaw in contemporary church architecture is the same flaw that has made many contemporary secular buildings so hideous.  There is innovation for innovation’s sake—shock for shock’s sake.  It doesn’t lead us to prayer.  There is no sense of the sacred, of the mysterious. 

Some think that the solution is a return to previous styles of architecture.  There is a school of Catholic architecture, more or less led by Duncan Stroik of Notre Dame University, that builds churches in retro style.  I will give Stroik and his better disciples credit where credit is due: for the purity of line and the excellence of craftsmanship.  But I have to pan them for their retreating into the past rather than moving forward and making right out of the mess of modern churches. 

I remember once being on a tour of the National Cathedral (Episcopal) in Washington DC.  The National Cathedral looks like it was just lifted out of a fourteenth century village in England and plopped down on Mount Saint Albans in North West D.C.  About half-way through the tour, one member of the group raised her hand and said to the docent: “When you build an American Protestant Cathedral in a pre-Reformation European style, are you saying that neither America nor Protestantism have anything worthwhile to contribute?”  Good question.  Our American heritage has a wonderful architectural heritage of Protestant Church construction.  Look at Bruton Parish Church in Williamsburg.  Look at the First Congregational Church in Litchfield, Connnecticut.  Look at Old North Church in Boston.  Why did the Episcopalians build a “Catholic” and English Cathedral?  It’s lovely, but it is a testimony against our American culture. 

In the same way, for architects today like Stroik, James McCrery, or David Meleca to go retro says something about how they—and their clients—see our contemporary culture and that, in turns, has vast implications for our mission of “Church in the Modern World.”  Now, don’t misunderstand me, from their work I have seen—either in person or in examining photographs—I cannot say enough good about the quality of design and execution.  My problem is with the philosophical and theological underpinnings of their work.  It fits the “Reform of the Reform” mentality that the Church needs in someway to take shelter from our modern world in its past glories but this isolationism encourages a false and even gnostic ecclesiology in which the Church retreats into itself and abandons its mission to confront the world with the Gospel.  It encourages the Christian to step out of his or her world to pray and creates a false dichotomy between the (arcane) sacred and the secular rather than empowering us, as a Church, to sacralize the secular.  

Original Sin: Is There Anything New Under the Sun?

Saint Ambrose of Milan,

mentor of Saint Augustine

Yesterday I wrote on the subject of prevenient grace as the prayer over the gifts in the new translation made a reference to it, but it might be worth our while to take a look at the history of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception.  It is curious because the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception  is only held in the Western Church and not shared in the East (including those Churches which are in Communion with Rome)  which celebrates the conception of the Virgin but, because it has a very different understanding of original sin,  avoids the issue of Mary’s being conceived without (original) sin.  The Eastern Churches pass over the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception in silence—not denying it but also not teaching it.  They hold that Mary was sinless but do not attribute this to her not having been conceived subject to original sin.  As I just pointed out, the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception is dependent on one’s understanding of original sin. 
       Saint Augustine is usually “blamed” for introducing the concept of original sin into Catholic (and Protestant) theology, and this explains why the doctrine is held in the Western Church where Augustine is a major figure and not in the Churches of the East where his influence is minimal.  In fact, however, while Augustine devoted considerable paper and ink to the subject of original sin, he inherited the doctrine, at least in seminal form, from earlier Church Fathers such as Iranaeus, Tertullian, Cyprian of Carthage, and Ambrose who saw in the disobedience of Adam the origins of human rebellion against God.  One of the reasons this doctrine of original sin never “ took off” in the East is that in the early Patristic era (the second through the fifth centuries) the Eastern Churches had more of a challenge from the Gnostic heresies that tended to grossly overstress the role and power of evil and that forced Eastern theologians to stay focused on the essential goodness of God’s Creation.  To admit that human nature is somehow essentially flawed, even by the inherited effects of Adam’s sin, would have played into the hands of the sin-obsessed Gnostics.  Of course Augustine had himself belonged to a Gnostic sect and while he rejected Manicheanism even before his conversion to Christianity, he was far more given to reflect on the dark side of human nature than most, indeed any, of the earlier Church Fathers.  Augustine took the tradition of an inherited sinfulness that had come down from Tertullian through Ambrose and runs with it, developing a very negative anthropology in which the human person is enthralled by Adam’s disobedience and only by grace regains the freedom of the will.  Augustine came into conflict with a Roman priest by the name of Pelagius who argued that the human will is essentially free and able to choose between sin and grace.  This positivist view of human nature and the consequent superfluity of grace was more than Augustine could bear.  He knew from experience—his experience—the evil that lurks within the human heart.  (Sort of like “The Shadow” of old-time radio fame.)    The Church would come down on Augustine’s side—they had to as he was (and still is) the most prolific theologian in the history of the Church and lays the foundation for all subsequent Western Theology—thought in practice we Catholics have a tendency to slide into Pelagianism which is what triggers our attraction to “salvation by works.”  Anyway, as I have said, Augustine taught that the human person has inherited a nature that, while created good, is inherently flawed by the disobedience of our first parents and that this flaw, rooted in human concupiscence, is passed down from father to child through the act of sexual intercourse by which the child is begotten.  This is not to say that Augustine understands concupiscence exclusively in sexual terms.  Augustine gets a bad rap for being anti-sex while in fact he is just about anti-everything, one of those persons who believe that if something is at all enjoyable it must be sinful.  By the way, I am a big fan of Augustine and think that he is the greatest mind in the history of Christian thought so I am not slamming him but the fact of the matter is that he has an incredibly negative understanding—not necessarily wrong, just incredibly negative—of human nature. And then, if human nature is so corrupted by sin, the problem becomes how could the Blessed Mother be tainted by this human nature?  How indeed?   That is the conundrum the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception was formulated to resolve. 

Is Vatican II in Danger: VIII "the new translation."

There is one final entry I want to post on the subject of the liturgical developments of the past several years and the question of whether or not the Second Vatican Council is slowly being undone.  And perhaps not all that slowly!  Then I hope to return to some entries on the History of the Church in America, particularly several blogs on the development of anti-Catholicism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  But before we look at anti-Catholicism with the rise of the Klan and some dirty American politics, let’s deal with one more entry on the subject of the new translation of the Roman Missal that will come into effect this autumn. 

I have seen large sections of the new Missal and I honestly think several aspects of it are an improvement over the current translations.  I also think for various reasons that much of it is a step backward.   Several weeks ago I was doing a workshop at a monastery of Episcopalian nuns and was present for the Service of Holy Communion according to the current Prayer Book of the Episcopal Church in the United States.  Last Sunday, visiting friends out of town I attended their Lutheran Church for the Sunday Eucharist according to the Lutheran Book of Worship.  Both Sundays I had no problem reciting much of the liturgy from memory as the translations used in their various rites are the ICEL translations, or at least close enough to our current translation that there is no barrier to ecumenical participation.  This feature will be lost or greatly reduced as we unilaterally introduce a new translation.  It is a step backward ecumenically. In many ways this is a small issue as most of the prayers affected—e.g. the particular Eucharistic Prayers (canons), prefaces, prayers at the Presentation of the Gifts, and the invitation to Communion are unique to the Roman Rite, but the changes in the Creed, Gloria, and Sanctus give witness to an unnecessary division—not of the substance of our common faith but of an arbitrary expression of that substance. 

The second objection is that this new “translation” is not always as faithful a translation as it toots itself to be and can, in several instances, lead to false doctrine (aka heresy).  The two most serious examples are the Words of Institution and the response to the presider’s greeting. 

In the Words of Institution for the Cup, the Latin phrase “pro multis” is translated “for many.”  Now anyone who has two years of high school Latin would ask: what is the problem with that?  Well there are two problems.  The first is the translation itself; the second is the doctrine expressed.  While “for many” would normally be a good translation of the phrase pro multis  in this case it is a distortion.  The Latin itself is a translation of the Greek in which the New Testament is written and from which these words find their role in the consecration of the wine.  Today few priests know Latin anymore (which doesn’t stop some of them from “saying mass” in it) and virtually none know Greek.  But the Latin pro multis is itself a translation of the Greek ‘oi polloi which means “the many” or “the multitude.”  These terms are inclusive; they affirm the doctrine that Christ’s blood was shed for the multitude of humanity, for all.  If it can be restricted in any way, it would mean that Christ’s blood was shed for the common sort of people, the “great unwashed” as it were.  ‘oi polloi has a sense vulgar or low class sort of people.  The problem is that Latin doesn’t have the word “the” (nor “a”) and thus “for the many” becomes in literal Latin, pro multis “for many.”  I have already mentioned the second objection that this translation produces, the doctrinal danger, of people coming to believe that Christ died for some, not for all.  This Jansenist proposition—that Christ did not die for all—was condemned by Innocent X in the Bull cum occasione in 1653.  It is Catholic doctrine that Christ died for all.  It is no coincidence that the agitation against the current translation has been in great part from Catholic sources in the United States and in Great Britain that have expressed other Jansenist tendencies. With the principle lex orandi; lex credendi  (literally “the law of prayer is the law of doctrine” meaning that the formulae by which we pray shapes the formulae by which we express our faith) we run the risk of Catholics coming to believe that Christ died for many but not for all—that are those for whom Christ did not die—and thus falling into the condemned doctrine of the Jansenists. 

The second problem with the translation is the translation of the response “et cum spiritu tuo” –“and with your spirit.”  I will grant that the translation is faithful on a literal level, but it misses accuracy because it does not take into account the shift of anthropology between the ancient Roman world and our world today.  A more accurate translation, awkward as it may be, can be rendered Dominus vobiscum: The (peace of the) Lord dwell within you.  Though “the Lord dwell within you” by itself is by no means bad, there is the implication of something even deeper, richer.  The same meaning might be conveyed as “the grace of the Lord” or some similar such phrase that implies an indwelling of God by grace.”  Similarly, taking into account the original understanding of the human person from the second- or third-century classical world, the response “et cum spiritu tuo” would better be rendered “and (his peace, or indwelling) within your deepest heart.   The problem is that the translation “and with your spirit” while literal, to the modern mind presents a two tiered world of a material or physical self and a higher “spiritual” self while the classical understanding saw spirit not so much as “soul” in the sense of the immortal or heavenly component of the human person, but as their truest and most authentic, most real, part.  This spiritus dwells within the person, where we would say today—metaphorically of course—in their heart.  It is dangerous to create a two-tiered world of “spiritual” and “earthly” realities as it leads quite quickly to a certain Gnosticism that disdains all but the “spiritual” and this ultimately leads to a denial of both the Incarnation and the Redemption. 

And this leads to the final problem I see with the new translation—not that others may not see other problems of which I am unaware.  But the entire translation effort was intended to create a two-tiered language separating the language in which we talk to God from a fundamentally different language in which we speak to our neighbor.  We should, of course, speak as well as we can to both God and neighbor but the separation of “God language” from “neighbor language” can lead to huge doctrinal problems regarding the sanctity of the world in which we live and the relationships which we have in this world—again, problems affecting doctrines of the Incarnation and Redemption.  I will be the first to say that the current translation needed a lot of work, for style as well as for precision of doctrine but the new translation is highly problematic and reveals a crisis in the modern Church where there is a cultural split that indicates a far more serious doctrinal division beneath.  As a person of faith, I am confident that all works itself out in time; as a historian I think this signals some stormy seas ahead for the Bark of Peter.