Love songs to the dead: the liturgical voice as mentor and reminder

Cross Currents, Winter, 1998 by Catherine Madsen

At this point of decline, when powerful emotion is lost to theology and liturgy, religion itself forgets that anything is holy. It settles for doctrine and sentiment. It drives out its artists, or tells them to subordinate their own perceptions of the holy to tried and accepted interpretations; it interposes convention like an acoustical damper between the artist and the demands of the holy. It cultivates maudlin loyalties and undemanding art forms - Langer speaks scornfully of "the saccharine Virgins and barbershop harmonies" that the church condescendingly offers the people (402-3) - rather than stamina and self-critical feeling. It recoils from emotional integrity as it would from demonic temptation; it can no longer see the purpose of art, believing that beneath the thin crust of morality there lies only chaos.

Why, when liturgy refuses to be artistic, should art want to be liturgical? Why should poetics want to go near religion? Why, in this country, are we so godsick that even artists should insist on laying their exacting tastes on the altar as if they were gifts? No less an artist than Goethe said art, and science too, were complete in themselves:

Wer Wissenschaft und Kunst besitzt, hat auch Religion; Wer jene beide nicht besitzt, der habe Religion!

Who has science and art has also religion; who has neither, can have religion! When religion renounces intellect, intellect can carry on fine by itself, immersed in pure fact, engaged in the alchemical marriage of fact and imagination that engenders science and art. Religion's business is only to be religion: to recite a dead formula till all the meaning goes out of it, to limit imagination, to persecute pregnant girls.

If only he had been right. If only art did not regenerate religion with every strong metaphor; if only science did not lead right back to religion, drawn to it ineluctably as the apple to the ground. We are creatures of ritual. Langer understands what is lost when art and religion uncouple: art "loses its traditional sphere of influence, the solemn, festive populace, and runs the danger of never reaching beyond the studio where it was created" (403). The populace is deprived of solemnity - look at the relentless drive for "fun" in every public gathering and medium - and the artist is deprived of intelligible worship. And artists do want worship. Humanism is not essentially secular. We do not want only to sing the Song of Songs in an arrangement by Palestrina - or even by Schutz - in a concert hall, to people who will applaud. We want also to sing it in liturgical trope in the basement of the funeral parlor to someone whose eyes will not open.

I have encountered only one writer on liturgy who consistently understands this apparently futile compulsion, the need for direct ritual action, as a human end worthy of our best judgment. The Benedictine scholar of liturgy Aidan Kavanagh insists that liturgy is "primary theology," from which creed and systematic theology only derive. He writes from within the Catholic context and with particular crotchets about the modern scene with which one may quarrel, but also with exemplary intelligence, energy, and what artists are inclined to call a good crap detector. His book On Liturgical Theology is the most useful starting place I have encountered for liturgists of any persuasion, if they are willing to translate his religious vocabulary into their own.