Review of Cosima Clara Gillhammer’s Light on Darkness: The Untold Story of the Liturgy

In his book The Restoration of Christian Culture, John Senior writes:

Whatever we do in the political and social order, the indispensable foundation is prayer, the heart of which is the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, the perfect prayer of Christ himself, Priest and Victim, recreating in an unbloody manner the bloody, selfsame Sacrifice of Calvary. What is Christian Culture? It is essentially the Mass. That is not my or anyone’s opinion or theory or wish but the central fact of two thousand years of history. Christendom, what secularists call Western Civilization, is the Mass and paraphernalia which protect and facilitate it.

Senior goes on to describe the Mass as emanating outwards to all aspects of life. What is done on a stone altar inspires the construction of a beautiful church. The church inspires a garden and clerics to tend the church and the people who flock to it. Next to the church and the garden a cemetery is made for those who died as faithful servants of what is done on that altar; and around the church-grounds people build their houses and sow their fields, until a community is formed. That community needs laws, and the laws cannot help but be influenced by the sense of justice that radiates from the center of its citizens’ lives. And before you know it, you have a Christian world built around the Mass.

The most recent attempt to uncover that world is Cosima Clara Gillhammer’s Light on Darkness: The Untold Story of the Liturgy. Gillhammer contends that the liturgy of the medieval Christian West exerted a greater impact on art and culture than is generally appreciated. “The liturgy forms the fabric of Western creative imagination,” she writes. “It provides the very images, words and concepts with which we think and tell stories” (253). To substantiate her claims, the author organizes her chapters based on different themes: Petition (the Psalms), Love (the Song of Solomon and the Blessed Virgin Mary), Hope (Advent), Suffering (Holy Week), Grief (the Stabat Mater), Joy (the Easter Vigil and Easter Sunday), Death (the Dies Irae), Revelation (the Apocalypse), Time (liturgical seasons), and Space (Holy Week).

Light on Darkness does not presuppose any knowledge of the Catholic Faith: on the contrary, it sometimes reads like a Dummies’ Guide to Christianity. One chapter, for example, walks the reader through the Creed before proceeding further. Clearly, the intended audience is not limited to Catholics but seeks to persuade a broader demographic of the liturgy’s impact on Western culture.

Not all of Gillhammer’s genealogies are equally persuasive or relevant. It is true that (the Protestant) George Herbert’s poems communicate a “union with God in terms of a banquet,” but there is no evidence that he developed this idea thanks to Catholic liturgy rather than a direct reading of the Sacred Scriptures. And although I loved Gillhammer’s explanation of liturgical time as an example of Kairos (the time when God acts) rather than Chronos (mere sequential time), she does not explain in what ways the Kairos of the Roman rite changed the West or its culture.

The book also contains a few errors. A sentence on page 39 gives the impression that Psalm 51(50) was recited every day of the year during Lauds, but it was not said on feast days, which were many. The suppression of the Alleluia does not occur at the beginning of Lent (in the traditional calendar) but at the beginning of pre-Lent or Septuagesimatide. And in her discussion of liturgical time, Gillhammer conflates the idea that time is relative with the idea that time is subjective. What Einstein meant by his general and specific theories of relativity is not the same as my experiencing a one-hour department meeting as lasting an eternity.

Nevertheless, Light on Darkness abounds in fascinating facts. Did you know that:

The haunting sequence Dies Irae in the Requiem Mass is the “most frequently cited musical motif” in the history of Western music (187). In film alone, it has appeared in The Exorcist (1973), Jaws (1975), Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope (1977), Mad Max (1979), The Shining (1980), The Lion King (1994), Mulan (1998), X2 (2003), The Return of the King from The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2005), and Watchmen (2009).

The liturgical application of (seemingly racy) passages from the Song of Songs to the Blessed Virgin Mary created a new way of thinking about love. “What engagement with the Song of Songs achieves is not so much an avoidance of erotic language and sexual subject matter,” Gillhammer writes, “as a deliberate and creative use of such language in engaging with religious matters” (53). The author goes on to describe the impact of this new approach from the secular poetry of the Middle Ages and Renaissance to the poems of Walt Whitman.

The Impropreria or Reproaches in the Good Friday service generated a new genre of English literature in which the fallen nature of man dialogues with the goodness of God.

The concept of felix culpa (O happy fault) in the Easter Vigil proclamation the Exsultet has found its way into artistic expression, from Middle English to James Joyce.

The beautiful sequence Stabat Mater for the feast of Our Lady of Sorrows went on to inspire artists to think of new ways of envisioning compassion, from Michelangelo’s Pieta to the Pieta of Kathe Kollwitz (d. 1945).

The celebration of the Resurrection in the liturgy led to the resurrection of the theatre in the Christian West, from biblical dramas on Easter (and Passion Plays on Good Friday) to Corpus Christi plays to “mystery plays” to the works of William Shakespeare. Hamlet is much more liturgical than you think.

Despite a few hiccups, Light on Darkness is an engaging and worthwhile read. Among its many virtues is its refutation of the myth that Catholic Christians were disconnected from the liturgical life of the Church because they were denied so-called “active participation.” The book convincingly demonstrates that liturgy was in the very air that our medieval and Renaissance forebears breathed and that the results of this insufflation are beautiful. John Senior would be pleased, I think, with Gilhammer’s explication of the central fact of two thousand years of history.

This review appeared in The Latin Mass magazine 35:2 (Summer 2026), pp. 56-57. Many thanks to its editors for allowing its publication here.

Note

[1] The Restoration of Christian Culture (Ignatius Press, 1983; reprinted, Roman Catholic Books), 16-17.