Praxiteles

El Greco

St Martin of Tours

And for some more El greco – whom we have seriously overlooked over the past 213 pages!

His famous agony in the garden.

Kenneth Clarke on the Espolio:

IT SHINES like an enormous jewel. Spanish cathedrals are full of jewellery crowns and chalices and encrusted altars but their splendor becomes boring, like a lazy, monotonous chant. El Greco’s jewel is also a passionate cry. This huge ruby set in topaz, aquamarine and smoky quartz is also the seamless garment of Our Lord, which is about to be torn from Him. The emotion I feel as I stand dumbfounded before the Espolio in the sacristy of Toledo Cathedral is that same amalgam of awe, pity and sensuous excitement which I feel in reading certain poems by Crashaw and Gerard Manley Hopkins. The richness and iridescence of the materials, by challenging my senses, give me a flash of spiritual insight which a more reasonable consideration could not achieve.
This comparison with jewellery occurs to everyone who looks at the Espolio, and is not an isolated fancy, for one has a feeling that the colour and disposition of jewelled bindings or enamelled altars were often in El Greco’s mind when he began a composition. Little as we know about his origins, we can at least be sure that he was brought up in the Byzantine tradition of art. How far this influenced the imagery of his later paintings seems to me debatable; but I believe that he did retain throughout his career that fundamental premise of Byzantinism, that beauty of materials gold, crystal, enamel and translucent stones gives art its splendour and its power to arouse our emotions.

He made his way into Europe through the meeting ground of East and West, Venice; but we have no idea how old he was when he got there. indeed we know absolutely nothing about him until November 10, 1570, when the Roman miniature painter Giulio Clovio recommended him to his patron Alessandro Farnese as ‘a young Cretan, a disciple (discepolo) of Titian. Can this be taken to mean that Titian, at the age of ninety, with a well organized studio, had accepted the young Cretan as a pupil? Or does it mean only that El Greco was the devout admirer of Titian, which would commend him to Alessandro Farnese? Of the second fact there can be no question. The later paintings of Titian, the Munich Crowning with Thorns, or the Annunciation in S. Salvatore, painted probably when El Greco was in Venice, have a burning beauty of colour which plays on the emotions as El Greco felt it should. Titian certainly meant more to him than Tintoretto and Bassano, although a few tricks of mannerism which appear in the work of all three give an illusion of similarity.

What else he saw in north Italy is only conjecture, although I think he must have looked attentively at the work of Tibaldi in Bologna, and perhaps at the Correggios in Parma. And then in 1570 he was in Rome. Michelangelo had died six years earlier, but Roman art was still reeling under the impact of his genius. The painters worked in a post-Michelangelesque trance. They extracted from his designs hieroglyphics of the human body and a repertoire of poses and gestures which they used without any of his original conviction. Not since the early middle ages had European art departed so far from visual and substantial truth; and this unreality, as great as that of his own Cretan icon painters, certainly appealed to El Greco more than the solid abundance of Paul Veronese.

In one respect the Roman mannerists must have seemed to him inadequate in their colour. Following, as they believed, the example of their master Michelangelo, they considered colour as a mere bedizening of form and a concession to the senses which detracted from the high seriousness of art. We may suppose that it was this which led El Greco to speak disparagingly of Michelangelo, for even if he did not say (as was reported of him) that he could repaint the Last Judgement with more decency and no loss of effect, he unquestionably did say to Pacheco that Michelangelo was a good man, but didn’t know how to paint. But he could not shake off what Blake might have called the outrageous demon of Michelangelo. His naked figures, sprawling, inverted, drastically foreshortened, are often copied directly from the despised Last judgement; and without Michelangelo’s frescoes in the Pauline Chapel the Espolio would have taken a different form. I feel this in the man bending forward to prepare the Cross, in the three women who emerge from the bottom of the frame, and above all in the effect of life pressing round a dedicated victim, which is also the theme of Michelangelo’s Crucifixion of St Peter. As the memory of this sublime work, with its circle of doomed humanity in a desert concentration camp, passes through my mind, I look again at the Espolio and realize how completely different it is from anything in Italian painting.

The first difference lies in the treatment of space. Instead of solid figures occupying a definable area, as they had done in Italian art since Giotto, and still do in the dizzy perspectives of Tintoretto, El Greco’s figures fill the whole surface of the picture with shallow intersecting planes. The abstract substructure of the picture and that in the end is where the force of any picture lies is more like a cubist Picasso of 1911 than a work in the Renaissance tradition. The conflicting stresses of the planes, and the way in which one suddenly shoots behind another, lead us to look all the more eagerly at the central area of red.

At this point I think once more of the Espolio in terms of its subject and become more fully aware of the vividness of El Greco’s imagina tion. It is the moment at which Christ is about to be deprived of His splendid earthly raiment, which is also the symbol of His kingship The world of men presses round Him. Two of them look in our direction and seem to act as intermediaries: a stupid, puzzled military man and an elderly administrator, his face bristling with negation, who points a commanding finger at Our Lord. For the rest, a few are brutal and join in the persecution with relish, but the majority are ordinary men from the streets of Toledo and the surrounding fields, looking exactly as they did when they came to be painted in El Greco’s studio. It is the number and closeness of the heads that is terrifying, for they have become a crowd and as such they resent Our Lord’s isolation. His thoughts are already concentrated on another world. The gaze or gesture with which this is expressed show some of the rhetorical pietism of the Counter Reformation, and used to cause me a moment’s embarrassment. They do so no longer, but I record the fact as it may be one reason why the Espolio has been less admired outside Spain than El Greco’s other masterpieces.

In the lower half of the picture, separated from the crowd, are those directly concerned with the sacrifice, the Marys and the executioner who prepares the Cross. Between them, painted with extreme delicacy, is Christ’s foot, and I notice that the three women are looking fixedly at the nail with which it will soon be pierced. But, like the men, their faces show no emotion. That is one of the strange features of the Espolio. One has only to think of how other great masters of Christian drama, from Giotto and Giovanni Pisano to Titian and Rembrandt, would have treated the theme, to recognize the dreamlike unreality of El Greco’s imagination. Apart from a conventional heavenward rolling of the eyes, the faces of his figures are without expression. He is like a classical dramatist who does not feel it necessary to distinguish the idioms of different characters. In fact the emotions of his figures are expressed through their gestures, and of this the Espolio gives a most moving example, the gesture of Christ’s left hand which, passing under the arm of His tormentor, pardons the executioner at work on the Cross.

El Greco received a part payment for the Espolio in 1577. it is the first surviving record of his having gone to Spain and settled in Toledo and he may well have been living there for some time before being given the most important commission which the city had to offer. Two years later he brought a lawsuit against the cathedral authorities in order to obtain further payments. The expert witness was a Toledan goldsmith named Alejo de Montoya who said that the Espolio was one of the best pictures he had ever seen, and estimated its value at a large sum, which apparently was paid. it seems that the young Greek was accepted by the Toledans as a great master and one of the glories of their city. He may well have hoped to take the place of his master, Titian, in the confidence of Philip II, but in this he was disappointed, for the King was understandably alarmed by that extraordinary work, the Martyrdom of St Maurice, and preferred the commonplace and circumstantial style of Titian’s Spanish pupil, El Mudo. Ecclesiastical authorities, however, continued to patronise El Greco, either because he provided images of fashionable ecstasy, or because nothing better was available, or because he was obviously a man of superior powers: perhaps from a mixture of all three, for the motives of a committee ordering a work of art are always very mixed. There is evidence that he was admired by the finest spirits of the day; and Toledo, at the time of his arrival there, offered the most intense spiritual life in Europe. St Theresa of Ávila, St John of the Cross and Frey Luís de León were all in Toledo when the Espolio was being painted. At a later date Góngora, Cervantes and Lope de Vega lived in the town, and El Greco probably met them. There is no question of his highly eccentric style being (as is sometimes the case) the result of provincial isolation.

At the same time it is arguable that El Greco exploited his isolated position, which for thirty-five years gave him something like a monopoly of painting in the district. It is even possible to say that he exploited his visionary power. Like other painters whose ideas have come to them with unusual completeness and intensity Blake is an obvious example he was prepared to repeat individual figures or whole compositions as often as was required. This is a characteristic of all magic art: once the image is charged with its meaning it need not, or must not, be varied. The magic animals in palaeolithic cave paintings have identical outlines in northern France and southern Spain. No doubt El Greco was satisfied that lie gave his clients good magic. He had, Pacheco tells us, a large room containing small replicas in oil of all the pictures he had ever painted in his life. His customers could take their choice. Of the Espolio, there still exist eleven replicas of all sizes, and five versions in which the upper half has been made into an oblong picture. Individual figures are treated in the same way. The Virgin’s head is used again in groups of the Holy Family; the lefthand Mary appears several times as St Veronica with the sudarium. With subjects more in demand the numbers increased; there are over twenty replicas of the St Francis in meditation, most of them the work of assistants. However ‘modern’ El Greco may be in some respects, he certainly would not have subscribed to our modem notion of ‘a work of art’. His pictures were partly objects of devotion, icons in which the image represented an unalterable fact; and partly saleable commodities, which could be made wholesale once the prototype had been established.

And yet the critics of the 1920’s who saw in El Greco the precursor of modem painting were right. Partly owing to the coincidence in his formative years of two non realistic styles the Byzantine and Mannerist and partly owing to a naturally metaphysical turn of mind, El Greco was the first European painter to reject the main premises of the classical tradition. He thought surface more important than depth, and suddenly brought a head to the front of a design if it suited him; he thought colour more important than drawing, and scandalized Pacheco by saying so; and he sought to communicate his emotion by pictorial means, even if it involved distortion or an almost incomprehensible shorthand. Since the early middle ages no other painter had dared to let his sense of rhythmic necessity carry his hand so far away from observed facts, or rather, from that convenient version of the facts which had been sanctioned by academic convention. In the Espolio these characteristics are still contained in the habitual forms of mannerism: that is why for three hundred years it was the most acceptable of his works. In his later work, when he had evolved his own handwriting and his brush scrawled across the canvas like a storm across the sky, he seems closer to our own unsettled feelings; but his imagination never burnt more intensely than in the holy fire of Toledo Cathedral.

Lucas von Hildebrandt

The seminary chapel in Linz, originally built for the Teutonic Knights.

And for our particularly avid readers, here we have another article on the direction liturgical theology is increasingly. This article is taken from Antiphon (2006), the journal of the the Society for Catholic Liturgy:

“The Genius of the Roman Liturgy”
CIEL Colloquium 2006
Shawn Tribe
The Growth of a New Liturgical Movement
Even a cursory glance at the current landscape of the Church, from the
pope down to the laity, strongly suggests that a new liturgical movement
is taking shape. Characterized by a hermeneutic of continuity,
this movement is dedicated to the revival of solemnity and decorum
in the liturgical life of the Roman Rite according to the principles
established by the Second Vatican Council.
The success of this movement will not rest exclusively either on
the classical (or Tridentine) liturgical communities or on the “reform
of the reform,” but rather on the synergy of both of these dynamics
as today’s Catholics strive to enhance their worship by a profound
understanding of and love for the Roman-Rite liturgy. The excesses
often associated with post-conciliar liturgical reform, pointedly
identified in several books and articles by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger,
then prefect of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith and
now Pope Benedict XVI, will find correction in this necessary and
beneficial synergy. While the desired result of greater fidelity to the
authentic liturgical tradition of the Roman Rite remains to be seen,
careful study of sources and sound pastoral application have their
role to play as part of this process.
CIEL and the Study of Roman Liturgical Tradition
The Centre International des Études Liturgiques (CIEL) is an organization
that takes its place within the new liturgical movement from
the perspective of the classical liturgy, pursuing the careful study of
the Roman liturgical tradition and of the liturgical books in use prior
to the reforms ushered in after Vatican II. Although its academic focus
remains fixed primarily on the classical Roman liturgy, interest and
participation in its research nevertheless arise from a cross-section of
those working within both the classic and the current Roman rites.
Past CIEL colloquia have addressed such topics as “Theological
and Historical Aspects of the Roman Missal,” “Liturgy, Participation,
and Sacred Music,” “Altar and Sacrifice,” and “Liturgy and the
Antiphon 10.3 (2006): 314-322
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Sacred.” Recently, CIEL hosted its eleventh annual colloquium at
Merton College at The University of Oxford, the oldest university
in the English-speaking world. The theme of the eleventh CIEL colloquium
was “The Genius of the Roman Liturgy: Historical Diversity
and Spiritual Reach.”
Liturgical Praxis
Each full day of the colloquium was punctuated with the liturgical
offices of lauds, vespers, and compline, celebrated in the thirteenthcentury
chapel of Merton College according to the 1962 Brevarium
Romanum. Furthermore, solemn Mass was celebrated daily in accordance
with the 1962 Missale Romanum. All these liturgies were marked
by due solemnity, reverence, and excellence. The external participation
of the congregation in all the chants, both of the Masses and the
hours, was at once precise and uplifting.
Liturgically, the colloquium observed two important feast days: the
Exaltation of the Holy Cross (14 September), and the Seven Sorrows
of the Blessed Virgin Mary (15 September). The first solemn Mass,
celebrated by Fr John Emerson fssp, on the Exaltation of the Cross,
marked the actual anniversary of the dedication of Merton College;
hence Mass was sung in the chapel for the intention of the members of
the college, living and dead, for the first time since probably the reign
of Queen Mary I (1553-58). Fr Armand de Malleray, fssp, Secretary
General of the Priestly Fraternity of St Peter, preached the homily.
The Most Reverend David McGough, auxiliary bishop of Birmingham,
celebrated a solemn pontifical Mass to conclude the colloquium.
Overview of the Speakers
Twelve papers were delivered in the course of the colloquium. Presenters
included some of the most recognized names in Catholic liturgical
scholarship, men and women whose work is acknowledged with praise
by the highest authorities in the Church. The colloquium afforded a
welcome opportunity for these scholars to confer with their colleagues
and to share the results of their research, thereby facilitating a crossfertilization
of ideas and perspectives.
Speakers included Professor Eamon Duffy of Cambridge University
(author of The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England,
1400-1580); Fr Uwe-Michael Lang of the London Oratory (author
of Turning towards the Lord: Orientation in Liturgical Prayer); Dr László
Dobszay (author of The Bugnini-Liturgy and the Reform of the Reform);
M. l’Abbé Claude Barthe (author of Beyond Vatican II: The Church at
a New Crossroads); Rev. Dr Alcuin Reid (author of The Organic De316
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velopment of the Liturgy); Rev. Dr Laurence Hemming (of the Society
of St Catherine of Siena and author of numerous philosophical and
theological works); Dr Lauren Pristas (of Caldwell College, New
Jersey, and author of studies on the revision of the prayers that occurred
in the liturgical reform as well as the Society of St Catherine
of Siena Research Fellow in Liturgical Theology); Fr Gabriel Diaz (a
Russian Catholic priest in Paris, France); Fr Nicola Bux (a professor in
Bari, Italy and consultor to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the
Faith); Dr Christina Dondi (of Lincoln College, Oxford); Dr Sheridan
Gilley (emeritus of Durham University); and Fr Joseph Santos (of
Providence, Rhode Island).
Pope Benedict and the Liturgy
Eamon Duffy, professor of the history of Christianity and president
of Magdalen College at Cambridge University, delivered a paper on
“Pope Benedict XVI and the Liturgy.” Duffy traced the development of
the present Pontiff’s liturgical thought, from his upbringing in Bavaria
to the times surrounding the council and finally to the present. Duffy
highlighted the influence of the Liturgical Movement on the young
Ratzinger and, in particular, the writings of Romano Guardini. On
the one hand these influences underscored the central importance of
the liturgy in the life of the Church, yet on the other they served as
conduits for some of the modernizing tendencies of the times. They
prompted Ratzinger during the Second Vatican Council to criticize
the pre-conciliar liturgy and to point out the need for reform. Duffy
highlighted the change in direction that Ratzinger’s thought would
take after the council, when the ends of the Liturgical Movement
underwent radicalization, shifting from a balance of organic reform,
prudent conservation, and careful restoration to a more fundamental
liturgical change. Ratzinger regarded this as disastrous, representing in
his view an essential betrayal of the work and goals of Guardini and
the original Liturgical Movement. Duffy further pointed out that Ratzinger
served on a committee of cardinals who judged that the adoption
of the missal of Paul VI in 1970 did not in fact abrogate the missal
promulgated by Pius V in 1570 and revised over the course of four
hundred years. According to Ratzinger, the attempt in many quarters
to prohibit the missal of 1570/1962 was unprecedented, constituting
a break with tradition that led to unintended consequences.
For Ratzinger, the Church’s liturgy is something received rather
than conceived. The sacred liturgy is not something we invent but
rather a body that develops organically and gradually over time;
Catholics are caretakers of it in every generation. Furthermore, the
liturgy is not a self-centered affair; it focuses primarily on God. Duffy
CIEL Coloquium 2006 317
concentrated on Ratzinger’s critique of the exaggerated emphasis on
the dimension of the Mass as “meal,” a notion promoted by liturgical
reformers to the exclusion of other important dimensions of the
Eucharist. From this emphasis on the Mass as a communal meal came
a number of new emphases, most particularly that of the orientation
of the priest at the altar. This led after the council to the celebration
of Mass nearly exclusively versus populum.
Liturgical Latin and the Concept of Sacred Language
Father Uwe-Michael Lang of the London Oratory, currently a research
fellow at Heythrop College, University of London, addressed “The
Early Development of Christian Latin as a Liturgical Language.”
Lang outlined the historical development of Christian Greek and
Latin, pointing out examples of their inherent differences. He also
gave a general consideration of the principle of sacred or hieratic
language, including its history and its fundamental characteristics
as inherently conservative and stylistically different from common
linguistic usage.
The paper hinges primarily on that distinction. Although in some
cases the idiom of hieratic language was the result simply of liturgical
language remaining fixed while common language developed, Lang
points out that this was never the case with Christian Latin, which
was highly stylized and thus never a part of the common or vulgar
tongue. Lang further discussed the gradual shift in the Latin Church
from the dominance of the Greek language to that of Latin, a shift
that played an important role in aiding the Church in evangelizing
pagan Roman society, particularly the aristocratic classes. But, as Lang
noted, the assumption that this was a concerted, principle-based effort
to vernacularize the Roman liturgy would be faulty: the Latin used
in the liturgy would have been rather difficult for the average Roman
to understand – not to mention those cultures within Europe whose
languages were not cognate with Latin.
The Integral Place of Chant within the Roman Liturgy
Professor László Dobzsay teaches at the Liszt Ferenc Academy of
Music and is a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. In
“Music Proper to the Roman Liturgy,” Dobszay considered the place
of the proper Roman liturgical chants in the liturgy. He began with
a comment that while most scholarship on the liturgical reform has
focused on the Ordo Missae, the Roman liturgy is not made up solely
of the Ordo Missae but is concerned as well with the euchological
content of the propers of the liturgy, the cycle of scriptural readings,
the divine office, and the administration of the sacraments. It further
318 shaw n tribe
pertains to the music of the Roman liturgy, particularly the chants
of the Roman Church, the ultimate focus of his paper. Analyzing the
question in detail, Dobszay argued that the chant does not merely
accompany the liturgical rite but is a fundamental component of it,
for it exercises an integral role in delivering the content of the sacred
liturgy of the day. In this regard, the proper chants are as fundamental
to the Roman liturgy as are the other prayers and readings. Dobszay
thus asserts that to exclude these chants actually compromises the
message of the liturgy.
Organic Development and Sacrosanctum concilium
In “Sacrosanctum concilium and the Organic Development of the Liturgy,”
Rev. Dr Alcuin Reid challenged those involved in liturgical
debates to set aside simplistic, dated characterizations and assertions
that would simply demonize agendas or groups in order to consider
anew the Second Vatican Council’s call for organic development
within the liturgy. Reid himself contributed to this effort by examining
Sacrosanctum concilium (SC) and by considering further how authoritative
commentators of the time understood its mandate. These, he
proposed, provide us with tangible and credible interpretive keys for
resolving the questions of our own day.
According to Reid, the keys for understanding SC and its call
for liturgical reform may be found laid out from the beginning in
the document itself in its general principles for the restoration of the
liturgy. There we find, for instance, the call for active participation
in the liturgy on the part of the faithful. The path to this goal, however,
is not through an “activist” interpretation, but rather through
sound liturgical education. In reference to the more specific liturgical
reforms called for by SC, the methodology of those reforms was to
be organic in nature, and where need for reform was genuinely and
certainly required, it was to rest on careful consideration of historical,
theological, and pastoral developments. Reid carefully pointed out
that this proposal met no controversy among the council fathers and
was even more narrowly delineated to ensure clarity in the manner of
reform. The council fathers did not consider this to be an open door
for radical innovations but simply prudent liturgical reform. Expert
commentators of the time further confirm this intention. Reid mentioned
that, prior to the vote on SC, the council fathers were assured
that, although there was a call for some reform of the Ordo Missae,
the rite of Mass which had developed down the centuries was to be
retained. In order to clarify this, Reid shared the results of his 1996
survey of the remaining council fathers, many of whom confirmed
CIEL Coloquium 2006 319
the conservative intention of the document and of their fellow fathers
of the council.
Reid concluded with a criticism of the liturgical positivism that
has insinuated itself into both the liturgy and the exercise of authority.
This has led to a further principle of “organic progression” that allows
for a relativist approach to the Roman liturgical tradition, reforming
the liturgy ostensibly within the context of organic development and,
ultimately, to the conciliar decrees themselves. Tangibly, it constitutes
a de-objectivization of the Roman liturgy in favor of a subjectivist
understanding whereby we might form the liturgy as we think it ought
to be, and in turn we give that subjective determination the objective
weight of the tradition and of legitimate authority. Reid surmises
that if we use the interpretative keys found within SC, look to the
interpretation of the experts of the time, and consider the testimony
of the council fathers, it becomes clear that the principle of organic
liturgical development was not respected, and it is only reasonable
to look again at liturgical reform.
The Rites of the Military Religious Orders
Doctor Cristina Dondi of Lincoln College, Oxford, presented “The
Liturgies of the Military Religious Orders,” which concentrated on
the liturgical books of the Knights Templar and the Hospitallers. This
study detailed their liturgies’ relation to the liturgy of the church
of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, which itself was derived from,
according to Dondi, a variety of western sources in accordance with
Latin usage at the end of the eleventh century. She further explored
variations in the local liturgical usages of these orders, whether or not
they adapted to local liturgical customs or festivals, and their development
in other locales, through the advent of the printing press and
beyond the Council of Trent.
Corpus Christi and the Liturgical Year
Doctor Lauren Pristas of Caldwell College, New Jersey, addressed
“The Development of the Feast of Corpus Christi and its Place in
the Church’s Sacred Year.” Pristas examined the relationship between
the celebration of the Lord’s Day and the mysteries of the liturgical
year from both historical and theological perspectives, considering
how the Church presents to us the mystery of our redemption.
Pristas then examined the origins and development of the feast of
Corpus Christi itself, furnishing a theological consideration of its
place within the Church’s liturgical year and the illumination of the
paschal mystery.
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Roman Liturgical Poetry
Father Gabriel Diaz, a Russian Catholic priest residing in Paris,
presented “Poetry in the Latin Liturgy,” a detailed look at the early
history of Christian poetry and hymnody. He particularly noted the
eloquent expressions in the hymns of St Ambrose of Milan (c. 339
– 397), who created a Christian poetic language and who might be
considered the father of Christian hymnody. Diaz commented likewise
on the poetic works of Prudentius (348 – c. 404), which were culled
for the composition of liturgical hymns, and on the hymns Fortunatus
(c. 530 – c. 609) composed specifically for various liturgical events.
Through this ongoing venture in hymnography, the Latin liturgy was
gifted with such poetical masterpieces as Pange lingua gloriosi and Veni
Creator Spiritus. After this initial cataloging, Diaz discussed the introduction
of hymns into the divine office and concluded with a critical
consideration of the reforms to Christian liturgical poetry undertaken
by the humanists of the sixteenth-century Renaissance.
Medieval Liturgical Allegory
Abbé Claude Barthe spoke on “Liturgical Catechesis in the Middle
Ages: The ‘Mystical’ Meaning of the Ceremonies of the Mass.” He
discussed the role of the mystical-spiritual sense or the allegorical
interpretation of the Mass. Barthe highlighted the role of the medieval
liturgical commentators and the patristic link to an allegorical
or typological interpretation of Sacred Scripture. In this exercise,
the medieval commentators looked beyond the surface of the actual
ritual gesture or work of liturgical art or architectural structure to the
deeper spiritual symbolism found therein. Barthe listed examples of
this kind of liturgical commentary and provided a summation of the
major medieval liturgical commentators. Barthe focused in particular
on William Durandus (c. 1237 – 1296), the most substantial liturgical
commentator of the Middle Ages, whose Pontificale and Rationale
divinorum officiorum explain the symbolism underlying the rites and
vestments of the sacred liturgy. From there he detailed the decline of
this allegorical tradition in explicating the rites, gestures, and accoutrements
of the liturgy, particularly after the Reformation with the
attendant rise of Renaissance humanism. Barthe further remarked
that this decline paralleled the rise of scientific criticism in relation to
biblical studies. This decline reached its nadir in the twentieth century,
when such allegorical commentaries were dismissed outright. Barthe
was careful not to repudiate the development of scientific critique
and the value of such a methodology, but he pointedly distinguished
between rationality and rationalism. There is a place for this scientific
study, Barthe noted, but there is also a place for allegory.
CIEL Coloquium 2006 321
Moving Toward an Adequate Approach
to Liturgical Theology
The Rev. Dr Laurence Hemming, dean of research at Heythrop College,
University of London, and member of the Society of St Catherine
of Siena, gave the final paper of the colloquium. In “The Liturgy
and Theology,” Hemming discussed the importance accorded by the
Second Vatican Council to the study of the sacred liturgy in relation
to other theological disciplines. In institutes of theological learning,
the liturgy is to be studied not only in itself but also in its relationship
to other areas of theology. Hemming argued that the study of
the liturgy today suffers from an exaggerated emphasis on its pastoral
dimension. Its historical development and the inner relationship of
the texts rarely impinge on actual practice and belief. Also lacking
is attention due to the other aspects mentioned by the council: the
juridical, the spiritual, and the theological. The central importance
of liturgical theology is precisely its relationship to all theological
disciplines: all other domains proceed from liturgical theology and
are subordinate to it. As Hemming puts it, theology has its home in
prayer and in openness to God, and this is first and foremost found
in the liturgy, the prayer of the Church.
In the second part of the paper, Hemming raised a rather interesting
point that must be taken into account in any adequate approach
to liturgical theology. The liturgy, contrary to widespread opinion,
is not necessarily to be immediately and universally intelligible, as
though intelligibility were an end in itself. Rather, the liturgy is the
means to intelligibility – the means, not the end, of coming to know
God. As in the Scriptures, where we are told that in faith we see now
“as through a glass darkly” (1 Cor 13:12), so too in the earthly liturgy
there naturally will be some incomprehension. In fact, Hemming
argues, some incomprehension in worship is normal and even part
of its character, insofar as it illustrates our distance from God in our
quest to draw closer to Him.
A Brief Mention
In “The Rite of Braga,” Fr Joseph Santos of Providence, Rhode Island,
outlined some of the historical and liturgical specifics of that ancient
western rite. Father Nicola Bux, a professor in Bari, Italy, and consultor
to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, presented “Theological
Foundations of the Liturgy that Are in Need of Restoration.”
Finally, Dr Sheridan Gilley delivered an informative paper titled “Roman
Liturgy and Popular Piety,” in which he traced the development
of manuals of piety for laity in England and Ireland, and the role of
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sodalities and confraternities in fostering frequent Communion and
promoting active participation in the sacred liturgy.
Conclusion
The CIEL Colloquium 2006 presented a rich mixture of academic
research in the varied field of liturgy and superb celebration of the
liturgy itself. Beyond this, it provided many opportunities for friendly
debate and discussion. It may with reason be taken as an auspicious
sign for the future of liturgical studies and praxis that within the
span of a mere few months, a number of other organizations held
similar liturgical conferences, including the Society for Catholic Liturgy
(Northampton, Pennsylvania, September 2006), the Research
Institute for Catholic Liturgy (Plymouth, Michigan, May 2006), the
Latin Liturgy Association (St Louis, Missouri, July 2006), and the
Fellowship of Catholic Scholars (Kansas City, Missouri, September
2006). Such positive signs give promise of the growing liturgical
movement of our day.
Shawn Tribe of London, Canada is a representative of CIEL Canada and the editor
of The New Liturgical Movement, a liturgy weblog.

Anyone in the New Hampshire area next Friday might be interested in this announcement of a lecture on contemporary ecclesiastical architecture at Thomas More College of Liberal Arts in Merrimack:

Matthew Alderman at Thomas More College
by Matthew Alderman

I’m heading up to New Hampshire this Friday to give a presentation on what one might term the decline and rise of liturgical architecture in the United States at Thomas More College, the home of an excellent sacred art program we profiled some time ago, as well as writer-in-residence and Catholic bon vivant John Zmirak. Bring your friends, fellow clergy, and anyone else who might enjoy it:

The Collapse and Restoration of Sacred Architecture in America

In the last half-century, Catholic churches have become proverbially ugly. But today, young Catholics crave not ephemeral plywood and shag carpeting but the timeless signposts of beauty and mystery. Is this a mere shift in taste, or is a deeper cultural conversion at hand?

Join Matthew G. Alderman, New York-based architectural critic and liturgical artist, as he explores the traditional Catholic quest to create the ideal sacred space, what went right, what went wrong in recent years, how Pope Benedict is fixing it, and what you personally can do to help. He will give special attention to the history of the Liturgical Movement, the significance of the Western tradition of iconography and sacred geometry, and the prospects for renewal.

Thomas More College Humanities Room

6 Manchester Street, Merrimack, NH

Friday, February 27, 8 pm.

All are welcome.

Also coming up is a lecture entitled The Restoration of Gregorian Chant in the 20th Century, given by Dr. Sam Schmitt (Ph.D. in musicology from CUA), March 20th at 8:00pm at the College.

The Archabbey of Panonhalma

The Porta Speciosa leading from the cloister to the chapel. The tympan contains a mosaic of St Martin of Tours who was born in the vicinity of the abbey.

A view of the Cathedral at Estergom with teh Danube in the bacckground and the new bridge giving access to Slovakia on the other bank.

Here is a picture of the 1821 plan for the new Estergom Basilica:

Praxiteles met Baróti in Estergom some years ago and heard him play this instrument for Solemn Vespers. The Basilica is massive and incomplete in its original project which envisaged flanking wings alson the esplanade in front of the main door.

Of interest also is the copy of Titians Assumption of Our Lady (in the Frari in Venice) over the High Altar. It must cover about a quarter acre of canvas and is, as the Hungarians like mention, the largest canvas painting in the world.

There is also an excellent diocesan museum in one of the towers of the Cathedral.