Praxiteles

That is a bit OTT old boy!

And a new OFFICIAL liturgical website has just been launched

http://www.ecclesiadei-pontcommissio.org/

Just how does the Coyne HACK deal with the scenario in the Sixtine Chapel of the 6 January 2008 when the Pope returned to the original High Altar to celebrate Mass according to the New Rite? I suspect that Passy Jones and Kevin Seasoltz find this hard to swollow!

The Pope “baptizes”, not only children, but liturgy ad orientem, ad Deum, versus Apsidem
by Shawn Tribe

An important event has occurred in the life of the Roman Church.

More significant even than the Pope’s re-orientation of the liturgy by means of the arrangement of the versus populum altar — though going hand in hand with that important development — the Pope has now given an important public witness and example of the acceptability of the celebration of the sacred liturgy “ad orientem” — that is, with the priest, in this case the Pope himself, and the faithful directed together in a common sacred direction, turned towards the Lord, towards the symbolic “East” of the liturgy. This is the first such public manifestation (as compared to this practice in the Pope’s private chapel) for quite some time and that it has occurred within the Vatican itself is also significant.

The liturgy celebrated is that of the Baptism of the Lord. Baptism, of course, is the beginning of new life and the initiation into Christian life and perhaps in a fitting bit of symbolism, the Pope has sent forth a clear message, a re-baptism if you will of the place of common sacred, liturgical direction in the life of the church.

While the Council itself never abolished this ancient liturgical practice of the Christian East and West, and while liturgical law has always allowed this, as I have said before, the example — and particularly the public example — of the Pope does matter for Catholics. This is a teaching moment and it can be reasonably expected that this will send a clear message that ad orientem is conciliar and has a central, normal place in the liturgical life of the Church. This will no doubt also be an example that priests will feel now feel more empowered to follow.

This event is significant enough that the NLM made a point of rising in the middle of the night to bring you images and news of this as it happened:

Any news of the famous Ballincollig Conference organised by the CLoyne HACK and the Cork County Council?

Reports would be very interesting.

Most interesting would be an account of the obviously biased theological presentation.

And here is another little item to contemplate

THE SPIRIT OF THE LITURGY, by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger
Reviewed by Brian W. Harrison
THE SPIRIT OF THE LITURGY, by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger
(translated by John Saward); San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000.
The majority of important works on the Catholic Church’s sacred liturgy have tended to take a rather specialized approach, focusing on only one or just a few of its various areas: theological, historical, pastoral, cultural, artistic, musical, or the minutiae of rubrical questions. This little volume (232 small-sized pages) by Cardinal Ratzinger – who, in addition to his work as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has long shown a deep interest in, and knowledge of, liturgical matters – sets out to provide a brief overview of all these different facets of the Church’s central acts of worship. In doing so, he avowedly takes his inspiration from a book of the same name published back in 1918 by the renowned German-Italian theologian Romano Guardini: his idea is to seek and elucidate the unifying ‘spirit’ which should always underlie the celebration of the Eucharistic sacrifice, in the present post-Vatican-II context of unprecedented and often ill-advised liturgical change.
Ratzinger divides his reflections into four sections, beginning with the most general questions (“The Essence of the Liturgy”) and ending with the most specific (“Liturgical Form”), in which he considers certain key ritual gestures and practices which have been the subject of much debate in recent decades. In between these first and last sections, the author adds a second on the theme “Time and Space in the Liturgy”, wherein he deals with such issues as the calendar, liturgical seasons, the significance of church architecture, the positioning of the priest and the location of the tabernacle. A third section (“Art and Liturgy”) deals with the place of sacred images and sacred music in our worship.
In the first section – the most dense and abstract part of the book – we are treated to a sweeping panorama in which liturgy is set against the background of nothing less than the entire creation. With fresh insights into the implications of key Old Testament themes, Ratzinger shows how the fitting worship of God can be seen as the goal of the created universe itself – a goal symbolized first in the “Sabbath rest” of the Creator, destined for reflection in the day set apart each week for worship. He then shows how worship is deeply woven into the very fabric of the foundational events of Israel’s history as a people: the Exodus, the Promised Land, and the divine election of Israel itself, are basically a means to a ‘liturgical’ end: the end that in a world corrupted by sin, idolatry and error, God shall once again be recognized for who He is, so as to be given fitting glory and honor by his earthly creatures.
Cardinal Ratzinger takes up the theme of sacrifice, reaching as far back as the drama of Abraham and Isaac, and elucidates the transition from the liturgy of the Old Covenant to that of the New, emphasizing the ‘incarnational’ aspects of the ancient Temple worship with its sacrifices of irrational animals and birds, looking forward unconsciously to that true ‘Temple’ which is the Lord’s own Body, offered willingly and knowingly in that perfect sacrifice in which it is ‘destroyed’ and ‘raised up in three days’. In recent decades we have seen a notable ‘protestantizing’ tendency promoted by those Catholic liturgists who unilaterally stress the ‘Word’ aspect of our worship (Scripture and preaching) at the expense of the central sacrificial character of the Mass. Ratzinger links this to the fact that, in much recent theology, “the exclusive model for the liturgy of the New Covenant has been thought to be the synagogue – in strict opposition to the Temple, which is regarded as an expression of the [old] law and therefore as an utterly obsolete ‘stage’ in religion.” In synagogue worship, of course, there were (and are) no sacrifices – only prayers, psalms and preaching. Ratzinger severely rebukes this notion (p. 49):
The effects of this theory have been disastrous. Priesthood and sacrifice are no longer intelligible. The comprehensive “fulfillment” of pre-Christian salvation history and the inner unity of the two Testaments disappear from view. Deeper understanding of the matter is bound to recognize that the Temple, as well as the synagogue, entered into Christian liturgy.
Ratzinger stresses that, even for the Jews themselves, the synagogue service was “ordered to the Temple and remained so, even after its destruction … in expectation of its restoration” (p. 48). For the synagogue recognized its own ‘Word-centered’ worship as partial, local and incomplete (in contrast to a ‘non-sacrificial’ religion such as Islam, for instance, where the ‘liturgy of the Word’ along with pilgrimage and fasting, “constitutes the whole of divine worship as decreed by the Koran”). As the one, central Temple and its sacrifices were for the Jews the expression of Israel’s complete and universal worship, so the sacrifice of the one true Temple which is Christ’s own Body – immolated on the Cross and made present throughout the world ‘from the rising of the sun to its setting’ in the Eucharistic sacrifice – constitutes the final and necessary replacement and perfection of those ancient rites.
This also has implications for that recently fashionable tendency to ‘fragment’ the liturgy in a ‘populist’ or ‘democratic’ way, reinventing it ‘creatively’ according to the supposed ‘needs’ of each local community. As Ratzinger stresses, the continuity between the ancient Temple sacrifices and the Mass means that “universality is an essential feature of Christian worship”:
It is never just an event in the life of a community that finds itself in a particular place. No, to celebrate the Eucharist means to enter into the openness of a glorification of God that embraces both heaven and earth, and openness effected by the Cross and Resurrection. Christian liturgy is never just an event organized by a particular group or set of people or even by a particular local Church.
Having set the liturgy in its broadest historical – and indeed, cosmic – context in his first section, Ratzinger goes on to develop the idea of time in the liturgy, stressing the intermediate or ‘in-between’ status of the whole Christian dispensation. As pre-Christian time was the period of worshipping God in ‘shadows’ (the sacrifices of the Old Law), and as the full reality of worship in the beatific vision will not be attained until the glorified life of the Resurrection, so Christian liturgy is situated halfway, as it were, between these two poles. Being more than a mere shadow, yet less than the full eschatological reality which is yet to come, the Church’s worship can be described as an ‘image’ of the eternal heavenly Liturgy. Ratzinger sees this ‘between-time’ status of the New Covenant as manifested in “the three levels on which Christian worship operates” (p. 54): it looks back to the foundational events of salvation history, culminating in the Cross and Resurrection of the Saviour; it celebrates these events liturgically, above all in the re-enactment of Jesus’ words and actions at the Last Supper, through which His unique sacrifice is made present and effective; and it looks forward to our perfect union with Him in glory – a union which begins even now as we are ‘taken up’ into Christ and incorporated more fully into Him by our reception of His Body and Blood.
As time has its sacred symbolism, so does space – the place of worship and its appropriate ordering and disposition. Ratzinger again draws attention to the way in which Catholic churches manifest the succession between Old and New Covenants: the central altar as the place of sacrifice, inherits and replaces the role of the Temple, while the lectern, pulpit or ambo for the proclamation of God’s Word to the assembled people follows naturally from the disposition of the synagogue, with its ‘Shrine of the Torah’ honouring the inspired Scriptures. In this context the author gives us a fascinating excursion into the origin of worshipping ad orientem – towards the East. While synagogue worship was oriented toward Jerusalem, the place of the Temple, Christians now look toward Christ, whose future coming in glory is aptly symbolized by the brilliance of the rising sun. As is well known, Cardinal Ratzinger has been among those favoring a return to the traditional position of the priest at Mass, in which both he and the people are turned together towards Christ. Here (p. 68) he tells us that:
In the early Church, prayer towards the east was regarded as an apostolic tradition. We cannot date exactly when this turn to the east, the diverting of the gaze from the Temple, took place, but it is certain that it goes back to the earliest times and was always regarded as an essential characteristic of Christian liturgy (and indeed of private prayer).
These are strong words. Can something believed to be an “apostolic tradition”, and indeed, an “essential characteristic” of Christian liturgy, be so readily discarded as it has been since the 1960s? The position versus populum, now almost universal in celebrations according to the post-conciliar Roman Missal, was in fact unheard-of for fifteen centuries after Christ, and had its origin in the heretical Eucharistic theology of the Protestant Reformers. Ratzinger dedicates an entire chapter (“The Altar and the Direction of Liturgical Prayer”) to this question, pointing out that Vatican Council II never even suggested this novel change of position, and exposing the principal arguments in favor of it as being historically unfounded. “The turning of the priest toward the people has turned the community into a self-enclosed circle. In its outward form, it no longer opens out on what lies ahead and above, but is closed in on itself” (p. 80)
This ‘self-centredness’ of the community is in turn linked to the new emphasis on the Mass as a ‘meal’. The liturgical innovators have assured us that the altar “had to be positioned in such a way that priest and people looked at each other and formed together the circle of the celebrating community. This alone – so it was said – was compatible with the meaning of the Christian liturgy, with the requirement of active participation” (p. 77). But even this concept of how a ‘meal’ would have been celebrated in biblical and patristic times – ‘gathered round the table of the Lord’, as a popular post-conciliar ditty puts it – is woefully anachronistic! Ratzinger quotes (p. 78) the noted French scholar Fr. Louis Bouyer, whose research has shown that:
In no meal of the early Christian era, did the president of the banqueting assembly ever face the other participants. They were all sitting, or reclining, on the convex side of a C-shaped table, or of a table having approximately the shape of a horseshoe. The other side was always left empty for the service. Nowhere in Christian antiquity, could have arisen the idea of having to ‘face the people’ to preside at a meal. The communal character of a meal was emphasised just by the opposite disposition: the fact that all the participants were on the same side of the table.
Ratzinger concludes with even stronger words, insisting that “a common turning to the east during the Eucharistic Prayer remains essential. This is not a case of something accidental, but of what is essential. Looking at the priest has no importance. What matters is looking together at the Lord” (p. 81) To this reviewer, this chapter alone is well worth the price of Cardinal Ratzinger’s book.
The section on the arts and liturgy is largely historical in emphasis. It includes a chapter on the use of images which stresses their essential connection with the Incarnation. This fundamental Christian truth was implicitly placed in jeopardy by the 8th-century iconoclast movement which sprang up in the east, partly as a result of the radically anti-Incarnational influence of Islam. Ratzinger’s treatment of liturgical music in the following chapter is also historically based, beginning with the observation that the Hebrew and Greek words for ‘sing’ and ‘song’ are among the most common in the Bible (309 occurrences in the Old Testament and 36 in the New). The Psalms constituted the central point on continuity in the transition from the worship of the synagogue to that of the infant Church, and were quickly supplemented by new Christian canticles, notably the Bendedictus and Magnificat.
Perhaps the most interesting part of this discourse comes with the author’s observations on the link between sacred music and the logos – the Word revealed in Christ. He points out that from the beginning the saving actions of God narrated in Scripture formed the main theme of liturgical music – a fact which has given singing clear priority over merely instrumental music in the liturgy. Nevertheless, since music transcends the rational level of mere speech, it also gives an opening to the action of the Spirit who intercedes for us “with sighs too deep for words” (Rom. 8: 26): the Word thus supersedes mere human words, in what Ratzinger calls a “sober inebriation” (p.150). Finally, since it was the Word which created the cosmos, Ratzinger discerns a link between the beauty of music, whose melodies and harmonies are based (as the ancient Pythagoreans realized) on mathematical laws and proportions which are also reflected throughout the universe, and the glory of Creation. If the words of liturgical song proclaim mainly the work of the Logos for our Redemption (salvation history), the music itself proclaims His might, wisdom and power in the entire cosmos. Cardinal Ratzinger excoriates (p. 148), as a symptom of contemporary Western cultural decline, the current popularity of “rock” music among the young, linking it directly to their alienation from true worship:
“Rock” . . . is the expression of elemental passions, and at rock festivals it assumes a cultic character, a form of worship, in fact, in opposition to Christian worship. People are, so to speak, released from themselves by the experience of being part of a crowd and by the emotional shock of rhythm, noise, and special lighting effects. However, in the ecstasy of having all their defenses torn down, the participants sink, as it were, beneath the elemental force of the universe.
What is this other than a new form of idolatry? The folly of trying to attract young people to the Church by integrating ‘rock’ and similarly debased forms of music into her liturgical expressions should be obvious.
The final section of the book (“Liturgical Form”) deals with certain more specific areas of the liturgy and contains some of the distinguished author’s most interesting observations. The chapter entitled “Rite” seems especially opportune in the context of today’s anguished, soul-searching discussions – so common now among those who love Catholic tradition – as to whether the massive changes to the historic Roman Rite introduced after Vatican Council II have in effect been so great as to abolish that rite, replacing it by a new and completely different one. Unfortunately, Ratzinger does not tackle that question directly – a particularly delicate one for him, no doubt, given his position of great responsibility in the hierarchy. Nevertheless, he does give us insights which are pertinent to the question. He maintains, for instance, against the contemporary passion for liturgical ‘creativity’, that there can be no such thing as the legitimate ‘creation’ of a totally new liturgical rite, because the historic Eastern and Western rites all have their roots in one of the three ancient primatial sees of Rome, Alexandria and Antioch, and so form part of – or are at least inseparably linked to – Apostolic Tradition. And this, by definition, is a patrimony which must forever be preserved in the Church. The last-mentioned of these three sees, the capital of ancient Syria and the first center of gentile Christianity, is prominent already in the Book of Acts. It is to Antioch, the original ‘See of Peter’ before he went to Rome, that most of the Eastern rites trace their origin: Byzantine, West Syrian (Malankara and Maronite), and East Syrian (Chaldean and Malabar). Alexandria, linked to the Evangelist St. Mark and the liturgy that bears his name, was the origin of the Coptic and Ethiopian rites. (The origin of all Western rites in that of Rome is of course well known.) The Armenian rite is in a category all of its own, but even here, as Ratzinger points out, “Tradition traces [it] back to the Apostles Bartholomew and Thaddeus” (p. 162). Thus, “individual rites have a relation to the places where Christianity originated and the apostles preached: they are anchored in the time and place of the event of divine revelation” (p. 163).
This insight has relevance in regard to the modern enthusiasm for ‘inculturation’, with its concomitant danger of introducing such radical local novelties into the established liturgy as to obscure or even uproot its apostolic origins. Some liturgists have argued that all liturgical rites ever since the beginning have been nothing other than diverse fruits of inculturation, drawing the conclusion that as the ancients were liturgically ‘creative’ and ‘innovative’ in accordance with the ‘needs’ of their particular cultures, so we can and should be equally inventive in the light our own supposed cultural ‘needs’ (feminization, democratization, etc.). Ratzinger (pp. 163-164) does not agree:
The Christian faith can never be separated from the soil of sacred events, from the choice made by God, who wanted to speak to us, to become man, to die and rise again, in a particular place and at a particular time. . . . The Church does not pray in some kind of mythical omnitemporality. She cannot forsake her roots. She recognizes the true utterance of God precisely in the concreteness of its history, in time and place: to these God ties us, and by these we are all tied together. The diachronic aspect, praying with the Fathers and the apostles, is part of what we mean by rite, but it also includes a local aspect, extending from Jerusalem to Antioch, Rome, Alexandria, and Constantinople. Rites are not, therefore, just the products of inculturation, however much they may have incorporated elements from different cultures. They are forms of the apostolic Tradition and of its unfolding in the great places of the Tradition.
Indeed, far from emphasising ‘creativity’ and ‘spontaneity’ in liturgy, we should be suspicious of such tendencies. In regard to the great historic rites, Ratzinger adds bluntly (p. 165):
Unspontaneity is of their essence. In these rites I discover that something is approaching me here that I did not produce myself, that I am entering into something greater than myself, which ultimately derives from divine revelation. This is why the Christian East calls the liturgy the “Divine Liturgy”, expressing thereby the liturgy’s independence from human control.
In the West, especially in recent centuries, the gradual centralizing tendency affecting all of Church life means that the Pope took an increasingly direct and personal role in liturgical legislation. Nevertheless, Ratzinger has no hesitation in declaring (pp. 165-166) that even the Supreme Pontiff’s authority is limited in this area:
After the Second Vatican Council, the impression arose that the pope really could do anything in liturgical matters, especially if he were acting on the mandate of an ecumenical council. Eventually, the idea of the givenness of the liturgy, the fact that one cannot do with it what one will, faded from the public consciousness of the West. In fact, the First Vatican Council had in no way defined the pope as an absolute monarch. On the contrary, it presented him as the guarantor of obedience to the revealed Word. The pope’s authority is bound to the Tradition of faith, and that also applies to the liturgy. It is not “manufactured” by the authorities. Even the pope can only be a humble servant of its lawful development and abiding integrity and identity. . . . The authority of the pope is not unlimited; it is at the service of Sacred Tradition. . . . The greatness of the liturgy depends – we shall have to repeat this frequently – on its unspontaneity (Unbeliebigkeit).
The final chapter, entitled “The Body and the Liturgy” is also full of interest, in the light of certain current liturgical controversies. Ratzinger approaches the well-worn conciliar shibboleth of “active participation” – participatio actuosa – from a fresh angle. It has become rather commonplace among tradition-conscious Catholics to observe, correctly, that “active” participation in the Mass is essentially spiritual in nature and so does not necessarily have to mean constant visible or external action. Ratzinger also makes this point, but then poses a new question. Noting that “the word ‘part-icipation’ refers to a principal action in which everyone has a ‘part'” (p. 171), he then asks: What, exactly, is the central actio in which the people are supposed to “participate”? His answer, based on his reading of the liturgical and patristic sources, is that this actio is quite simply the Canon – the Eucharistic Prayer. In a sense this is obvious, for every Catholic knows that this great prayer, in which Christ becomes present par excellence in His Body and Blood in the renewal of the Sacrifice of Calvary, is the centrepiece of the entire celebration. But in the context of the present question this answer is not quite so obvious; for the Eucharistic Prayer is, of course, that part which is most especially reserved to the priest, by virtue of his sacramental ordination, and during which the laity, it might seem, are necessarily less “active” than they are at almost any other moment of the Mass!
Ratzinger explains his answer by emphasising, first (p. 173), that this central actio of the Mass is fundamentally neither that of the priest as such nor of the laity as such, but of Christ the High Priest:
This action of God, which takes place through human speech, is the real “action” for which all creation is in expectation. The elements of the earth are transubstantiated, pulled, so to speak, from their creaturely anchorage, grasped at the deepest ground of their being, and changed into the Body and Blood of the Lord. The New Heaven and the New Earth are anticipated. The real “action” in the liturgy in which we are all supposed to participate is the action of God himself. This is what is new and distinctive about the Christian liturgy: God himself acts and does what is essential.
How, then, can we mortals ‘participate’ at all in a divine action? Precisely, answers Ratzinger, by virtue of the Incarnation and its redemptive consequence: our incorporation as members of the very Body of Christ. While the ordained priest’s role is essentially distinct here from that of the laity, priest and laity alike must join in the one ‘action’ of Christ by prayerfully uniting ourselves with His own self-offering to the Father, begging to be taken up ever more fully into Him, becoming ever more integrally members of His Body, “one spirit with him” (I Cor 6: 17). All other “activity” in the Mass is therefore secondary to this and has value insofar as it contributes to our deeper union with Christ. Our reception of Holy Communion itself will be fruitful precisely to the extent that we are inwardly prepared by prayer to receive the Lord’s Body.
Cardinal Ratzinger concludes with some valuable reflections on specific liturgical gestures and postures: that most ancient, primordial Christian gesture, the Sign of the Cross; the indispensable role of kneeling, presented with its abundant biblical foundations; the appropriateness of standing and sitting at different moments, and the inappropriateness of “liturgical dance” in any shape or form! Here too (p. 198), Ratzinger is again very blunt, warning against any tendency to turn the liturgy into a form of entertainment wherein attention is self-consciously drawn to merely human attractiveness or achievement:
Dancing is not a form of expression for the Christian liturgy. In about the third century, there was an attempt in certain Gnostic-Docetic circles to introduce it into the liturgy. For these people, the Crucifixion was only an appearance. . . . Dancing could take the place of the liturgy of the Cross, because, after all, the Cross was only an appearance. The cultic dances of the different religions have different purposes – incantation, imitative magic, mystical ecstasy – none of which is compatible with the essential purpose of the liturgy as the “reasonable sacrifice”. It is totally absurd to try to make the liturgy “attractive” by introducing dancing pantomimes (wherever possible performed by professional dance troupes), which frequently (and rightly, from the professionals’ point of view) end with applause. Wherever applause breaks out in the liturgy because of some human achievement, it is a sure sign that the essence of liturgy has totally disappeared and been replaced by a kind of religious entertainment. Such attraction fades quickly – it cannot compete in the market of leisure pursuits, incorporating as it increasingly does various forms of religious titillation.
Interestingly, however, Ratzinger sees no incompatibility between this unequivocal judgement against ‘liturgical dance’ and approval for those forms of ‘inculturation’ which the Vatican’s Congregation for Divine Worship has allowed (since its Instruction of 1995) for certain African liturgies. He says (p. 199):
None of the Christian rites include dancing. What people call dancing in the Ethiopian rite or the Zairean [Congolese] form of the Roman liturgy is in fact a rhythmically ordered procession, very much in keeping with the dignity of the occasion. It provides an inner discipline and order for the various stages of the liturgy, bestowing on them beauty and, above all, making them worthy of God.
While this may well be true in the case of the Congolese liturgy in question (which this writer has never witnessed), one suspects that in the inevitable extension of such gestures, the line of division between ‘dance’ on the one hand, and ‘rhythmically ordered’ movements on the other, might in practice turn out to be rather fine and difficult to draw.
Although one would have liked to see some treatment of certain current liturgical questions which Cardinal Ratzinger does not discuss in this volume – the future of the ‘Tridentine’ Mass and the possibility of ‘intermediate’ forms combining elements of the 1962 and 1969 Missals, the use of Latin in general, Communion in the hand, the question of liturgical feminization (female altar service, ‘inclusive’ language, etc.) – The Spirit of the Liturgy contains much depth and wisdom, and will certainly assist any reader to appreciate more fully the riches and the beauty of the historic Catholic liturgical tradition. Finis.
The Spirit of the Liturgy, by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (translated by John Saward); San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000.

And here is another useful document – The General Instruction to the Roman Missal, especially the parts concerning the construction of new churches and the conservation of old ones

http://www.usccb.org/liturgy/current/GIRM.pdf

And here we have a very interesting article
Benedict XVI Has a Father, Romano Guardini
He was the guide of the young Ratzinger, who has not ceased to draw inspiration from his thought. Forty years after the death of the great Italian-German intellectual, an analysis of his influence on the current pope

by Sandro Magister

ROMA, October 1, 2008 – This very same time of the year, forty years ago, Romano Guardini (1885-1968) died in Munich. In her biography of him, Hanna-Barbara Gerl called the Italian-German philosopher and theologian “a father of the 20th-century Church.”

Guardini’s books nourished the most lively segment of Catholic thought during the 1900’s. And one of his students was special – he’s the current pope. When he was a student not much over the age of twenty, Joseph Ratzinger had the chance not only to read, but also to listen in person to the man he chose as his great “master.”

As theologian, as cardinal, and also as pope, Ratzinger has repeatedly acknowledged in his books that he intends to proceed along the pathways opened by Guardini. In “Jesus of Nazareth,” he declares from the very first lines that he has in mind one of the classics by his master: “The Lord.” And in his “Introduction to the Spirit of the Liturgy,” he shows right from the title that he takes his inspiration from one of the masterpieces of Guardini himself, “The Spirit of the Liturgy.”

At the fortieth anniversary of his death, in Italy, Germany, and other European countries there will be symposiums, seminars, and conferences dedicated to him, seeking to analyze his extraordinary contribution to philosophical and theological thought.

But one of the most interesting areas to explore is that of the connections between the life and thought of Guardini, and of the current pontiff.

This is what is done in the following essay, written by one of the leading experts in this matter, Silvano Zucal, a professor of philosophy at the University of Trent and the editor of the complete critical edition of Guardini’s works, published in Italy by Morcelliana.

The article was published in the latest issue of “Vita e Pensiero,” the magazine of the Catholic University of Milan.

Ratzinger and Guardini, a decisive encounter

by Silvano Zucal

In this essay, we would like to call attention to the relationship between Romano Guardini and Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI. The pope has called Guardini “a great figure, a Christian interpreter of the world and of his own time,” and he often turns to Guardini, in almost all of his writings.

In reality, Ratzinger considers Guardini’s voice still relevant, one that, if anything, should be made audible again. The Italian-German thinker, in fact, did not only write many books that have been translated into a variety of languages, but in his time he succeeded in shaping an entire generation, a generation of which the pontiff himself considers himself a member.

But before we delve into Guardini’s vision, proposed again by the current pontiff, let’s explore the surprising biographical connections between the two personalities.

A unique “encounter” between the two appeared during Benedict XVI’s visit to Verona on October 19, 2006. It should be remembered that Verona is the city where Guardini was born, on February 17, 1885. And the pope was deeply moved to receive, in Verona, the gift of a copy of the certificate of Guardini’s baptism, which had taken place in the church of San Nicolò all’Arena. There is, in this sense, a singular convergence of destinies between Romano Guardini and Joseph Ratzinger. Guardini would be taken from Italy in his early infancy, becoming “German” in terms of his intellectual and spiritual formation. After his years teaching in Berlin, from 1923 to 1939, in the period following the second world war, after three years teaching in Tubingen, from 1945 to 1948, he would for the rest of his professional life teach “christliche Weltanschauung,” the Christian worldview, in Munich. Guardini’s chosen home city was therefore Munich, where he would die in 1968.

Ratzinger would make the same journey, but in reverse. After teaching dogmatic and fundamental theology at the high school in Freising, he would continue his teaching activity in Bonn (1959-1969), the city where Guardini was educated and began his career, in Munster (1963-1966), and, finally, in Tubingen (1966-1969), where Guardini had also taught for three years. Beginning in 1969, Ratzinger would instead teach dogmatic theology and the history of dogma at the University of Regensburg, but on March 25, Pope Paul VI would make him archbishop of Munich and Freising. Just as for Guardini before him, Munich seemed to be the definitive stage for Ratzinger as well.

But their paths diverged. If the Veronese philosopher would be called to remain in the north for good, in the city of Munich that he loved so much because he felt that it was a sort of city-synthesis in which even his Italian soul could feel at home, the German bishop’s destiny would instead take him to the south. And he would not return home again, not even when the desire to go back to his Bavaria was compelling, and seemed near at hand. Rome and Italy would become his definitive spiritual “homeland.”

Apart from these two paths, interwoven but in opposite directions, these two extraordinary figures would also have the opportunity to meet personally. Ratzinger would be not only one of Guardini’s readers, but also his occasional listener, as the great theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar had also been, in Berlin. In the period from 1946 to 1951 – the very same years in which Ratzinger was studying at the philosophy and theology high school in Freising, just on the outskirts of the Bavarian capital, and then at the University of Munich – Guardini assumed in that same city, at the university and in the Church of Munich, the role of intellectual and spiritual leadership that all acknowledged was his. For Ratzinger, who was just over twenty years old at the time, the fascination of a figure like Guardini was unquestionable, and would strongly impact his own intellectual perspective. When, beginning in 1952, he began teaching at the same school in Freising where he had been a student, the echo of Guardini’s lectures sounded loudly in that little town, which took in all of the cultural and intellectual activity of the nearby Bavarian capital. And the relationship between the future pope and the “master” Guardini became extraordinarily intense.

There are, in fact, many elements common to these two thinkers, who would later become decisive figures for the twentieth-century Church. If the one would become a cardinal, and then pope, Guardini would also be offered to be made a cardinal, although he would refuse. Both were preoccupied with rediscovering the essential in Christianity by seeking to respond to Feuerbach’s provocation. Guardini would write a splendid book about this in 1938, entitled “The Essence of Christianity,” while Ratzinger would dedicate to this topic his “Introduction to Christianity,” written in 1968, undoubtedly his most famous work and, in all likelihood, his most important.

The two also shared a concern for the Church, for its meaning and destiny. If Guardini would prophesy in 1921 that “a process of great consequence has begun: the conscience of the Church is awakening,” Ratzinger would, in more dramatic fashion, pose the ecclesiological problem just as radically, beginning with what he believed to be the overturning of Guardini’s thesis: “The process of great consequence is that the Church is being extinguished in souls, and scattered in communities.”

It should be enough to remember, in this sense, the vast resonance of the somber statement made by Ratzinger on June 4, 1970, at the Bavarian Catholic Academy in Munich, in front of thousands of people, on the topic, “Why am I still in the Church?” At that time, he said, “I am in the Church for the same reasons why I am a Christian: because one cannot believe on one’s own. One can be Christian only in the Church, not alongside it.”

The two also shared a similar preoccupation about the future of a Europe that tends to repudiate its past. It should be enough to think about the lecture on Europe by Guardini, and the statements of Ratzinger, who even as pope has recalled the meaning of Europe and of its roots, maintaining that Europe is “a binding heritage for Christians.”

THE LITURGICAL QUESTION

One crucial point of encounter between the current pope and Guardini is undoubtedly the liturgy. Both are united by a shared passion for this. In order to make his debt to Guardini clear, Ratzinger entitled his book on the topic of the liturgy, published on the feast of St. Augustine in 1999 and extraordinarily successful (four editions in one year), “Introduction to the Spirit of the Liturgy,” referring to the famous “The Spirit of the Liturgy” by Guardini, published in 1918.

Ratzinger himself writes in the foreword to his book: “One of the first works that I read after beginning my theological studies, at the beginning of 1946, was Romano Guardini’s first book, ‘The Spirit of the Liturgy’, a small book published at Easter of 1918 as the inaugural volume of the series ‘Ecclesia orans’, edited by Abbot Herwegen, reprinted a number of times up until 1957. This work can rightly be considered the beginning of the liturgical movement in Germany. It contributed in a decisive manner to the rediscovery of the liturgy, with its beauty, hidden richness, and greatness that transcends time, as the vital center of the Church and of Christian life. It made its contribution to having the liturgy celebrated in an ‘essential’ manner (a term rather precious to Guardini); the desire was to understand it on the basis of its interior nature and form, as a prayer inspired and guided by the Holy Spirit himself, in which Christ continues to become present for us, to enter into our lives.”

The comparison continues. Ratzinger compares his own intention to that of Guardini, maintaining that they are one and the same in spirit, even if their historical contexts are radically different: “I would like to hazard a comparison, which like all comparisons is to a great extent inadequate, but aids understanding. One could say that the liturgy at the time – in 1918 – was in some ways similar to a fresco that had been preserved intact, but almost entirely plastered over; in the missal that the priest used to celebrate it, its form was fully present, as it had been developed from its origins, but for believers it was mostly hidden by instructions and forms of prayer of a private character. Thanks to the liturgical movement, and, – in a definitive manner – thanks to Vatican Council II, the fresco was brought back into the light, and for a moment we all stood fascinated by the beauty of its colors and its forms.”

But after the cleaning of the fresco, for Ratzinger the problem of the “spirit of the liturgy” is returning today. To continue with the metaphor: for the current pope, various mistaken attempts of restoration or reconstruction and disturbances caused by the great volume of visitors have brought the fresco into serious risk and threat of ruin, if the necessary measures are not taken to put an end to these harmful influences. For Ratzinger, this is not a matter of returning to the past, and in fact he says: “Naturally, one must not plaster over it again, but a new understanding of the liturgical message and its reality is indispensable, so that bringing it back to the light should not represent the first step in its definitive ruin. This book is intended to be a contribution to this renewed understanding. Its intentions therefore substantially coincide with what Guardini proposed in his time; for this reason, I intentionally chose a title that expressly recalls that classic of liturgical theology.” And in the text that follows, especially in the first chapter, he addresses Guardini’s ideas, and his famous definition of the liturgy as a “game.”

In his commemorative address in 1985, Ratzinger instead dwelt on the historical-philosophical foundation of the liturgical renewal proposed by Guardini. In the 1923 work “Liturgical Formation,” the philosopher hailed the end of the modern era in the spirit of liberation, because it had represented the ruin of the human being, and, more generally, of the world, a schizophrenic separation between a disembodied and deceitful spirituality and a brutish materialism that is simply a tool in the hands of man and his objectives. “Pure spirit” was sought, and abstraction was the result: the world of ideas, of formulas, of apparatus, of mechanisms, of organizations. Ratzinger emphasized that Guardini’s avoidance of the modern coincided with his enthusiasm for the medieval paradigm, well illustrated in a book by a martyr under Nazism, Paul Ludwig Lansberg, “The Medieval and Us,” published in 1923. For Guardini, this did not mean abandoning himself to a romantic view of the Middle Ages, but learning its permanent lesson. The celebration of the liturgy is the true self-fulfillment of the Christian, and therefore in the struggle over symbolism and the liturgy, what is at stake – Ratzinger notes, following Guardini’s teaching – is the development of the essential dimension of man.

The future pope would also dwell upon Guardini’s statements in the letter that he sent in 1964 to participants at the third liturgical congress in Magonza, which contained this famous question: “Is liturgical action, and above all what is referred to as ‘liturgy’, so historically connected to the ancient and medieval world that, for the sake of honesty, it should now be entirely abandoned?” In reality, this contained another dramatic question: Will the man of the future still be able to carry out that liturgical action which requires a symbolic-religious sense that is now dying out, in addition to the mere obedience of faith?

Without his earlier optimism, Guardini glimpsed the face of postmodernism with features that were very different from the ones he had hoped for before. This was a genuine spiritual shock, due to the technological civilization that had invaded everything, as previously expressed in his “Letter from Lake Como” in 1923. For this reason, Ratzinger emphasizes, “something of the difficulty of recent times is found, despite his joy over the liturgical reform of the council developed on the basis of his own work, in his letter of 1964. Guardini exhorted the liturgists gathered in Magonza to take seriously how far away are those who consider the liturgy as something that can no longer be celebrated, and to reflect on how it is possible – if the liturgy is essential – to come closer to it.”

THE FUNDAMENTAL THEOLOGICAL OPTION

Guardini, Ratzinger recalls, found himself in the thick of the drama over the modernist crisis. How did he emerge from it? Faithful to the lesson of his first master, Tubingen theologian Wilhelm Koch, but also attentive to the limits and risks of this perspective, he went in search of a new foundation, and found it beginning with his own conversion. “The brief episode,” the future pope emphasizes, “of how Guardini returned to the faith after losing it has something great and moving about it precisely in the modesty and simplicity with which he describes this process. Guardini’s experience in the attic and on the balcony of his parents’ home bears a truly striking resemblance to the scene of the garden in which Augustine and Alypius saw their lives unfold before them. Both cases are the revelation of the innermost part of a man, but in looking inside what is most personal and most hidden, in listening to the heartbeat of a man, one suddenly perceives a trace of history writ large, because it is the moment of truth, because a man has encountered the truth.”

This is no longer an encounter with God in the universal sense, but with “God in the concrete.” At that moment, Guardini, Ratzinger stresses, understood that he held everything in his hand, his entire life, and had to decide how to spend it. His decision was to give his life to the Church, and from this arose his fundamental theological option: “Guardini was convinced that only thinking in harmony with the Church leads to freedom, and, above all, makes theology possible. This approach is of new relevance, and should be taken into consideration in the deepest way possible, as a requirement of modern theology.”

For Guardini, there can be no constructive theological understanding as long as the Church and dogma appear only “as limitation and restriction.” This led to his provocative motto, from the theological point of view: “we were definitely not liberals,” a motto that alludes to the fact that for him, divine Revelation presented itself as the ultimate criterion, the “originating element” of theological understanding, and the Church was “its bearer.”

Dogma thus became the fruitful ordering of theological thought. The effective foundation of his theology was, therefore, the experience of conversion, which for Guardini constituted the transcendence of the modern spirit, and especially of its subjectivist post-Kantian tendency. For our thinker, therefore, “reflection is not at the beginning, but experience is. All of this presented itself later as content, and was developed on the basis of this original experience.”

In describing the fundamental structure of Guardini’s thought, the future pope dwells upon what, in his view, constitute the principal categories within the unity of liturgy, Christology, and philosophy.

First of all, there is “the relationship between thought and being.” This relationship implies attention to the truth itself, the search for the being behind doing. It should be enough to consider Guardini’s words in his trial lecture in Bonn: “Thought seems inclined to turn reverently again to being.” Following in the footsteps of Nicolai Hartmann, Edmund Husserl, and above all Max Scheler, Guardini’s proposal, for Ratzinger, expressed “optimism over the fact that philosophy was starting out again as a questioning of reality itself, a beginning that guided it in the direction of the great syntheses of the Middle Ages, and of the Catholic thought formed by these.” For Guardini – the future pope emphasizes – the truth of man is essentiality, conformity to being, or even better, the “obedience to being” that is above all the obedience of our being before the being of God. Only in this way does one attain the power of the truth, the decisive and directional primacy of logos over ethos on which Guardini always insisted. What he wanted, Ratzinger explains, was always “a new advancement toward being itself, the search for the essential that is found in the truth.”

The obedience of thought to being – to that which reveals itself and is – therefore gave rise to many other categories in Guardini’s though, which the future pope sums up as follows: “Essentiality, to which Guardini opposes a merely subjective truthfulness; the obedience that follows from the relationship with the truth of man, and expresses the way in which he becomes free and becomes one with his own essence; in the end, the priority of logos over ethos, of being over doing.”

To these must be added two other categories that emerge from Guardini’s methodological writings: the “concrete-living” and “polar opposition.”

The “concrete-living,” in addition to being a general category of Guardini’s thought, also assumes, according to Ratzinger, a Christological value: “Man is open to the truth, but the truth is not in some place, but rather in the concrete-living, in the figure of Jesus Christ. This concrete-living demonstrates itself as truth precisely through the fact that it is the unity of apparent opposites, because the logos and the a-logon are united in it. The truth is found only in the whole.” The “apparent opposites” are alluded to in the other fundamental methodological category, that of the “polar opposition” of the opposites that, in their tension, make reference to each other: silence-word, individual-community. Only those who know how to keep these together can abandon any form of dangerous exclusivism and all harmful dogmatism.

A WARNING FOR THE FUTURE

On March 14, 1978, the Bavarian Catholic Academy awarded the “Romano Guardini Prize” to the prime minister of Bavaria, Alfons Goppel, and according to custom, the head of the Bavarian bishops’ conference – Joseph Raztinger – was asked to deliver the “Laudatio.” It was a text of extraordinary density, in which he reviewed the various dimensions of the “political”: politics as art, the grounding of politics in territory, responsibility toward the state, the relationship between truth and conscience in the political realm.

In this last passage, Ratzinger once again took up Guardini’s teaching: “In Germany, we have experienced that kind of tyranny which sentences to death, prohibits, confiscates. The unscrupulous exploitation of words is a particular kind of tyranny which in its own way sentences to death, prohibits, confiscates. Today there are certainly sufficient reasons to express similar warnings and to remember the forces that are capable of preventing this kind of tyranny, which is visibly increasing. Romano Guardini’s experience of Hitler’s bloody tyranny and his vigilance before new threats led him, during his last years and almost against his own temperament, to issue dramatic warnings about the destruction of politics through the annihilation of conscience, and drove him to call for a proper interpretation, not a merely theoretical one, but a real and effective interpretation of the world according to the man who acts politically on the basis of faith.”

Guardini proposed important themes like these to the German academic world from Berlin to Tubingen to Munich. According to the future pope, the thinker had a controversial relationship with the German universities, which beginning with his professorship in Berlin made him suffer “because of the impression that he was outside of the methodological canon of the university, and that quite clearly he was not recognized by it. He consoled himself with the fact that, with his own struggle to understand, interpret, and give form, he might be the forerunner of a university that did not yet exist.” Ratzinger here makes a note that brings to mind the recent controversy over his canceled visit to the University of Rome “La Sapienza”: “It is to the credit of the German university that Guardini was able to find room there, with all of his experience, and was able to feel it increasingly as the place of his specific vocation.” Only Nazism temporarily took his teaching post away from him, and, in the memory of that tragic event, following the war – the future pope highlights – in an intense academic address on the Jewish question, Guardini passionately defended the university as the place for investigation into the truth, where human affairs and events are measured according to the full scope of the past, without the onslaught of the present, where responsibility for the community should be vigilant.

The Third Reich would not have come to power, Ratzinger reminds us in the words of Guardini, if the German university had not met its “downfall” due to the removal of the question of the truth on the part of the dominant academic models: “At that time, Guardini stated his position with a heartfelt appeal that ordinarily seemed entirely foreign to him, opposing the politicization of the university and its infiltration by party leadership, political chatter, the noise of the streets, and he cried out to his listeners: Ladies and gentlemen, do not permit this! This concerns that which is common to all of us, our future.”

__________

The magazine of the Catholic University of Milan in which the article was published:

> Vita e Pensiero

__________

A memorable reflection by Guardini, in an article from http://www.chiesa:

> “Holy Week at Monreale,” the Author: Romano Guardini (12.4.2006)

__________

English translation by Matthew Sherry, Saint Louis, Missouri, U.S.A.

@tomahawk wrote:

Prax. I have no interest in dominating or flogging this issue to death but rather re-visit the past both sides need to be openminded to allow us all to move forward

Could not agree more but it would be better to leave the past in the past and think of the future.

On the question of politicising the FOSCC, it occurs to me that rather than taking an active or passive approach to the upcoming eections, it might be better to use the option of “endorsement” What woud youthink?

@tomahawk wrote:

I do agree with you Prax. that the controversy has been very unpleasant for people on both sides and no side has the monopoly on hurt.In order for us to bridge the divide the practice of mocking and slagging off those we disagree with (as in message no.4729) should cease as indeed should the constant undermining of the Bishop. We all need to be adult in our approach and try to develop cordial relations with each other and look for a formula which would allow us out of the impasse and move forward in christian unity. For all of this to happen we need to be openminded and less entrenched in our positions, our fellow countrymen in the north of this country have have bridged a much greater divide after hundreds of years of conflict.

Tomahak! many thanks for this very sensible approach. Openmindedness is indeed a very great quality and one which needs cultivation through education, experience of life, and the philosophical quest for wisdom in truth. I am sure that when some of those those involved in the Cathedral controversy in Cobh begin to cultivate the urbane attitude favoured by yourself, then of course, progress can be made.

Praxiteles, for instance, is aware that a proposal for an altar, modelled on the Basel altar piece, to be placed in the present sancturay, was made some time ago to the Restoration Committee people but not a single word wass heard about it.

Then, D. O’Callaghan, in his (hardley less than urbane) book Hand to the Plough, takes a stance that is utterly uncompromising and deeply entrenched. It is very doubtful that that represents an open minded approach.

As Praxiteles has said, this is not the time to raise unplesant controversies, either from the past or in the future, as the Bishop of Cloyne prepares to retire. Praxiteles would suggest that a pacific atmosphere be allowed to develop so that he can pay his adieu in a dignified manner and without having to run the gauntlet of pickets or other unseemly things. Over to you now!

And some more from the same:

A Vast, Immeasurable Sanctuary: Iconography for Churches
by David T. Mayernik

The subject of iconography, the creation or study of images with specific narrative or symbolic intent, raises complex aesthetic and philosophical questions for the modern world about the universal legibility of pictorial messages. Are symbols cross-cultural or temporal? Should messages be conveyed by realist, idealized, or abstract art? What messages can we all agree on? This complexity has virtually precluded iconography’s relevance to modernist art. But in classical art, and especially in the art of the Church, it has never lost its relevance, because the messages conveyed in religious pictures speak the same messages that have been proclaimed from the pulpit for almost two thousand years.

In any discussion of creating iconographic images for Catholic church buildings, it is first important to understand what it is that architecture can not do that painting and sculpture can. A helpful analogy might be that architecture is to music as painting and sculpture are to words: like music, architecture can be “affective,” conveying general emotive or spiritual states: solemn, joyful, serene, inspiring. It can also, like music, be stretched to convey certain figurative/anthropomorphic impressions. Paradigmatically for churches, the Latin cross plan not only alludes to the cross but to Christ crucified. The classical orders rhythmically structure space, and each can suggest a male or female reading (ideally the dedication saint of the church). But architecture by itself can not convey specific narrative or allegorical messages. Only the human figure (the timeless, universal narrative “sign”), and a commonly understood symbolic language, can tell a story visually or represent specific characters or ideas.

The Catholic church, born into a pan-Mediterranean, classical Roman culture, having endured three centuries of persecution in Rome, and having inherited that classical Humanist culture after the fall of the Roman Empire, had for almost two millennia (that is, until modernism) seen the visual arts as performing a vital role in sacred architecture. All Humanist art is rhetorical, in the sense that it wants to explain, convince and exhort, and for Catholic Humanist art this is especially true. The Roman poet Horace aphorized the relationship between the visual and literary arts as ut pictura poesis; that is, as in painting so too in poetry. Inevitably, if Horace’s poet is a painter in words, then the painter is a poet on canvas (and perhaps, as Leonardo da Vinci claimed, in fact superior to his literary cousin in his power to “re-present”). Art historians since the early 20th century have tried to recover for the arts this literary/iconographic dimension, which was almost eradicated after the Enlightenment. But only recently have they come fully to terms with the ways painting, for example, presents literary material in a unique way from the text itself. It was Pope Gregory the Great who described paintings in churches as “the bible of the illiterate”; but it has been a relatively recent mistake to interpret that relationship absolutely literally. Artists until the nineteenth century were instinctively aware of the ways in which the narrative possibilities of visual art are both limited and liberated by their two- and three-dimensional media. Most obviously, in literature stories are told sequentially over time, but paintings present only a single or limited number of “scenes.” This apparent narrative limitation of painting is transcended by some of its advantages: simultaneity, or its ability to present many kinds of information at one time (setting, facial expressions, gestures, clothing, etc.); drama, and its attendant memorability; and multiplicity, or the showing of multiple events from a story in a single frame. In a nutshell, paintings don’t tell, they show.

As important as the ways of representing a narrative are, in a Church a related, enriching issue is their disposition, that is, the spatial relationship of one painted or sculpted scene to another. The relationships are usually sequential in the case of a narrative shown in several discreet scenes; but an aspect of choice exists in where the scenes begin and end. In a medieval type of disposition known as boustrophedon (“as the cow plows” in Greek, that is, up and down the field, or left to right and then right to left), the initial scene along the upper portion of the nave wall begins at the pulpit as if emanated from the speaker’s mouth, continues down one side and returns to the altar end on the other. The distributions can also be dynamic, where relationships are established across a nave, for example, or from ceiling to wall to floor. These spatial relationships can create a dense narrative and symbolic web within a sacred space. [figure 1]

The literal narrative sense or story of a painting, relief or mosaic is often fairly easily grasped, in part because we are familiar with the stories themselves, or other painted versions of the same scene (e.g. The Last Supper). Allegory, however, is a more complex problem, in part because the nature of allegory itself has changed much over the centuries.
Allegorical handbooks became popular in the sixteenth century, and one, the Iconologia of Cesare Ripa, became the standard reference through the eighteenth century. To a certain extent, these guides contributed little new to the common repertoire of symbolic images. Their job instead was to collect and codify the development of accepted ways of representing abstract concepts (the Virtues, Grammar, War, etc.) in visual terms over the previous millennium and a half. Unlike a well-known story, allegories depend both on symbols that are fundamental to the idea which almost anyone can grasp, and more difficult imagery that needs to be de-coded. So, for example, the bridle of Temperance, signifying restraint, is a relatively simple symbol to grasp; the clock she sometimes holds (symbolizing a well-regulated life) is less obviously understood. But this is not a defect of the allegorical tradition. Iconographers of the sixteenth century stressed the fact that some effort was not only necessary to decipher the message, it was in fact part of the benefit obtained. The iconographic messages of sacred art should therefore ideally combine an immediate understanding with a deeper lesson understood after instruction and contemplation.

It is not too much of an exaggeration to say that the history of western art from Constantine until the Enlightenment is virtually identical with the history of Christian art. To the extent that all art of that period shared many of the same aspirations and means, it was an art whose ideas were poetic, whose means were rhetorical, and whose subject matter was figurative. For churches today to recover their traditional use of the visual arts is to recover the value of art as a public, hortatory, eloquent articulation of ideas and values. Hopefully, this conveys the danger of thinking of the visual arts in churches as mere “decoration.” While it can be said that there is a decorative component in what painting, sculpture, and mosaic do for churches, but that is a happy result—not a primary cause—of their presence.

So we must free ourselves from a post-Enlightenment view of art as either documentary or decorative. The nineteenth century’s Ecole des Beaux Arts, with its tendency to systematize and categorize, also left us with a highly restrictive notion of where art belongs in buildings. Essentially, Beaux Arts architects tended to put the figurative arts in boxes: in frames, niches, friezes, etc. Instead, the long history of Catholic art until that time employed highly complex ways to inextricably integrate the arts into architecture. We will spend most of the rest of this article looking at some of the ways that was done.

I have already written of the limited ways architecture by itself can be “figurative”—principally in plan, and by means of the classical orders. But there are ways the figurative aspect of traditional architecture can be amplified. Column capitals, for example, can be explicitly figurated or anthropomorphic (Romanesque examples abound); and the constituent parts of a structure can be seen in metaphorical terms—the ceiling as sky, the floor as the earth, the altar as a table or tomb (or both), and the choir apse as an earthly paradise. To a certain extent, this kind of poetic or metaphorical thinking is necessary before addressing the place of the visual arts per se.

It is with painting, sculpture, and mosaic that truly polyphonic, fugal relationships can be established between art and architecture, between art and the spectator, and between architecture and the liturgy. The following list of how figurative art has traditionally acted compositionally in Catholic architecture is not exhaustive, but rather suggestive:

framed, or in niches: this is how we are most accustomed to viewing painting and sculpture, with its advantages of clarity, and disadvantages of separateness;
framing: figures themselves can also do the job of framing, apparently holding or showing the frame or window (Bernini’s frame for Guido Reni’s Madonna);
superposition: figures atop columns or entablatures emphasize a heavenward directionality, can refer to Stylite saints, and make more explicit the anthropomorphic qualities of the classical orders;
crowning: figures or groups can mark a crescendo to a façade or interior;
substitution: the figure can literally stand in for the column (e.g., the caryatids of the ancient world at the Erecthion), literally building the temple of saints that St. Paul writes about in Ephesians;
hieroglyphics: by metonymy figurative signs can take the place of texts;
metaphor or analogy: the figure can double the function of architectural elements, making the figure architectural and the architecture figurative;
mise-en-scene: the architecture can be transformed into a stage on which is acted out the sacred drama being presented (for Bernini, in many cases this is the only function of the architecture, that is, to be a kind of datum or backdrop for the figure);
illusion: like the stage, walls can be transformed by the power of illusionistic perspective into windows onto other places and times, and ceilings can be opened to the sky and to heaven;
transformation: the walls of many Roman apses are transformed by mosaic into images of the garden or city of Paradise;
the bel composto: that is, in other words, “all of the above”—this is Bernini’s expression for the integration of the arts into a “beautiful whole.” [figure 2]
Many of the techniques listed above have the goal of breaking down the barrier between the spectator and what is represented. This is not a purely baroque phenomena, but the desire of every artist who wants to “explain, convince and exhort”—establishing a rapport, rather than a distance, between art and spectator, so that the message of the work will be felt and understood. What largely changed over the centuries was whether that rapport was physical, intellectual, or spiritual.

The strategies listed above relate to the artist’s job of weaving his or her work into its context. There are, of course, highly familiar “types” of sacred or religious art for churches, that are quickly described: altar painting and sculpture, mural cycles, memorials and tombs, stained glass, and stations of the cross. In addition, all the important elements for the liturgy can be elaborated with iconographical content: the altar itself, the ambo or lectern, the tabernacle, or the baptismal font. Ideally, every decorative detail—patterns, carving, etc.—within a sacred space should have some specific meaning or iconographic purpose.

Materials and color can also have symbolic meaning. An example of the symbolic use of materials is Bernini’s use of red Sicilian jasper column shafts in his chapel for the Jesuit novices of Sant Andrea in Rome to represent the blood of the Jesuit missionary martyrs the novices would be asked to emulate.

The Church over the centuries saw the power of iconography as a profound stimulus to the memory. In the ancient world, in fact, an elaborate memory technique was developed that used visual images as clues to remembering lengthy rhetorical, poetic or even scientific texts. Conversely, someone versed in the tradition of seeing in the mind courtyards, palaces, streets and piazzas as containers for symbols that cue the mind to remember ideas inevitably saw real buildings as repositories for symbols and ideas. A Church could therefore be a kind of memory temple, layered with stories and symbols which embed themselves in the mind and heart, something to sustain the soul when no longer there. I am convinced that the belief in the power of places to contain ideas explains in part the deeply reverential, memorable beauty of the great churches of the Catholic tradition. Recovering the potential to memorialize our faith in painting and sculpture should be the basis for recovering the traditional forms of sacred architecture.

This article has focused on two aspects of sacred art: its meaning and its place in context. It has not tackled issues of “style,” either historical or personal. But it should be evident that, entering into a discussion of a two-thousand-year-old tradition, a degree of the ideal and the timeless is necessary so that what is represented speaks to the future and not just to us. Surely, a degree of humility in the face of our great artistic heritage would demand we avoid novelty or reinventing the wheel for its own sake, and see ourselves as extending rather than overturning our traditional art forms. And one of the best hopes for a successful recovery of sacred iconography is an informed group of patrons. Priests and bishops involved in these projects as informed connoisseurs of our artistic heritage must be vital contributors to the process.

In the end, the timeless messages of sacred iconography still require the reaffirmation of the priest during the liturgy, especially in the sermon. Continually pointing out and explaining the theme of a sculpture or a stained glass window makes it come alive for the parishioners, and an art that isn’t worth reaffirming isn’t worth creating. A mural cycle loved and understood by a parish is a continuous call to prayer and contemplation. Its beauty is a vestigium of the beauty of God, and the beauty of the church building is a foretaste of the beauty of heaven. That is the role of sacred iconography.

The power of the memory is prodigious, my God. It is a vast, immeasurable sanctuary.

***

David Mayernik is an urban designer, architect and fresco painter who divides his time between the United States and Europe. He has designed the TASIS school campuses in Switzerland and England, and painted frescoes in the US, Italy, and Switzerland (for the church of San Tommaso, Agra). He has a website at http://www.davidmayernik.com.

Figure 1: Raphael’s fresco of Isaiah above Sansovino’s sculpture of the Virgin and Child and St. Anne, over the family tomb of Johann Göritz, all on a nave pier in Sant’ Agostino, Rome. Doubling of pose and gesture between the fresco and the sculpture create formal links that reinforce their iconographic interconnectedness, as does the “sculptural” quality of Raphael’s Isaiah (something he learned from Michelangelo’s Sistine ceiling).
Sketch by David Mayernik.

Figure 2: G. B. Gaulli’s fresco in a pendentive of Sant’ Agnese in Piazza Navona, Rome. Pendentives, in the transitional zone between the square or octagonal crossing of a church and the drum of the dome, being four in number, have always suggested representations of groups of four: the evangelists, the cardinal virtues, etc. In Sant’ Agnese Gaulli, presented with a wider than usual pendentive field, creates four complex groups of cardinal combined with theological virtues, and attendant figures. Here, Fortitude (with helmet and armor) and Charity witness to the cross carried by an angel; Fortitude puts aside her spear to open her arms in a welcoming gesture to the cross, proving that the richness of allegory exists not only in what allegorical figures carry or wear, but in what they do.

Figure 3: Bernini’s design for the altar at Sant’ Andrea al Quirinale, Rome. In the framed painting, “held” by angels, Saint Andrew on the cross looks up to an angelic messenger, who points up and out of the painting to the sculpted angel holding a crown, next to a cherub holding the martyr’s palm, who leads the eye up to the lantern, from which emanates the sculpted light rays and the real light illuminating the altar itself, but also the direction from which the painted scene is illuminated. Elements are constantly doubled and overlapped between sculpture and painting, breaking down the barriers between them but also between us and the events depicted; even the form of the tabernacle in front of the painting repeats the oval plan of the church.
Sketch by David Mayernik.

Figure 4: Fresco by David Mayernik of “The Vision of St. Thomas,” for the church of San Tommaso, Agra, Canton Ticino, Switzerland. The apostle, patron saint of architects, looks up to the lunette panel and a vision of the Trinity and the Civitas Dei; the fresco, on the front of an abandoned ossuary in the retaining wall which supports the actual church above, illustrates a moment in the apochryphal story of the apostle to India’s promise to an Indian prince to build him a palace in heaven rather than one on earth. Therefore, the saint looks up not only within the fresco, but also up and out of the fresco to the church of San Tommaso itself, as a concrete manifestation on earth of the heavenly palace, and so the painting has a dynamic spatial and temporal relationship to its context, “activating” it for its viewers.