Dr Esolen Is Now On Substack

I’m sure that our readers are familiar with Dr Anthony Esolen, professor and writer-in-residence at Magdalene College in New Hampshire, for his regular contributions to a variety of Catholic publications, various lectures, a well-regarded translation of the Divine Comedy, etc. His essays cover a huge range of topics, and are always worth reading. He has recently started his own Substack page, called “Word and Song”, to which his wife Deborah also contributes, a celebration of all the good things in our culture which are worth knowing.

Here is his own description of it: “It’s our way of introducing people, in a cheerful way, to some of the beauty of our English and Christian heritage. Every week there will be a Word of the Week, that is, a foray into the fascinating and often whimsical and sometimes deeply revealing origins and histories of English words. There will be a Poem of the Week, with a short introduction, so that people will know what to look for, and this will include an audio version too, so people can hear the work recited or performed, as they should experience poetry, which was not meant simply to be read in silence. There will be a Hymn of the Week, a presentation of some sacred poem meant to be sung at Mass or at some form of Christian worship, and, like the Poem of the Week, there will be a short introduction or analysis, to help open up the poem to people who may never have heard it before, or, if they have heard it, who have never given it much thought. There will be a Film of the Week, that is, a film recommendation, with a link to the film or to some scene from it, and, as always, an introduction. There will be a Poetry Aloud section, this too for each week, wherein I read, for paid subscribers, a longer poem, saying a few words about it beforehand. Sometimes a Song, the section that my wife is in charge of, features a popular or folk song, from the time before obscenity and tunelessness began to rule the day: songs that everybody used to know and love. Finally, there will be monthly or bi-monthly podcasts, of lectures I have given or articles I have written, articles which I will read aloud. Some of the material -- the podcasts, the longer poetry readings, the audio versions of the Poem of the Week -- will be for paid subscribers only; all the rest will be available free.” Auguri, professore! 

Lectures on How Modern Music and Modern Art Corrupt the Faith: Anthony Esolen and James Patrick Reid

The Institute of Catholic Culture is scheduling in September two interesting-looking talks on the intersection of modernity and culture, which are available to all for free.

The first is given by artist James Patrick Reid and is called “Corrupted Concepts: Modern Art & the Philosophy of Nature”; it will be offered online on September 1 at 8:00 pm EDT.

The second is by Prof. Anthony Esolen and is entitled “Music & the Corruption of Catholicism”; it will be given on September 15 at 8:00 pm EDT.

You can enroll online through the links above.

Matisse

St Cecilia by Artemisia Gentileschi

Pablo Picasso

King David by David Clayton

Anthony Esolen on the Hymn Problem

Our readers will surely be familiar with the writings of Dr Anthony Esolen, who teaches at Thomas More College in New Hampshire, from a variety of Catholic publications. Every time I mention the topic of Biblical translations and how awful they are, I link this article of his from 2011, in which he explains the underlying principles of Nabbish, the language in which the North American Bible is written. “If the reader wants to learn Nabbish ... he may ask himself, ‘What are the things that make poetry lovely or memorable?’ and eliminate them.”

In an article published two days ago at Crisis, “Novus Quodlibet: The New Whatever Liturgy”, he tackles, with his usual wit, the problem of the hymns, or rather, one of the problems with the hymns.

“If you go to Mass every Sunday and every holy day during the year, and if four hymns are sung at each Mass, this gives you the opportunity to sing over two hundred different hymns. Need I say that, outside of the Christmas carols and three or four old Easter hymns, the typical Novus Quodlibet church boasts a repertoire of eight or nine? The same, the same, the same, like the drip, drip, drip of cold rain, without meaning, without artistic coherence, and without any feint toward the whole of the liturgical year and the history of salvation. (my emphasis)

h/t Kathy Pluth

Many of them are narcissistic, rather like ‘I Feel Pretty’ from West Side Story. ‘Let us build the City of God,’ really? I cannot build the City of God. I can be made, by God, into a stone for the building of that spiritual city, but the action is his, not mine. ‘We have been sung throughout all of history’? I haven’t been sung even once in my whole life, and if I ever were to be, I would surely want to slug the singer. ‘Here I am, Lord, is it I, Lord?’ Why, who ever would have thought!

But as the music, so the rest.”

Further down, he writes, “I am not suggesting that laymen should become liturgists. Was that not one of the plagues of Egypt? Most people are not great artists, or even good artists. The work is already given, and the task of the priest, who alone should determine what the ancillary people are doing or not doing, is to conform the praying of the Mass, in word, gesture, and spirit, to that work.”

How then, to make the liturgy back into something which forms the Christian faithful, clergy and laity, and not something which they are compelled to form, whether they will so or not?

First, it has to be recognized, and at a some point, officially acknowledged, that the nearly universal substitution of Gregorian chants by hymns is a betrayal of what Vatican II wanted. The Council wrote “The Church acknowledges Gregorian chant as specially suited to the Roman liturgy: therefore, other things being equal, it should be given pride of place in liturgical services.” That does not mean “other things being equal, except they never are...” The long-term goal of liturgical reform must always be a recognition that hymns are a non-traditional and inferior substitute for Mass chants.

Second, there needs to be a general bonfire of the vanities, the inanities, and the vacuities that currently dominate this particular musical form. As Dr Esolen says, “No need here to bring up, like ill-digested onions, the specifics.” Suffice it to say that based on the current repertoire in general use in English, a future blacklist of prohibited hymns will be very lengthy indeed.

Third and most important, each language needs a fixed repertoire of hymns that corresponds to the calendar of feasts and the liturgical year, and the use of that repertoire and no other must be mandatory when chants are not sung. The rubric in the book needs to specify, e.g. “On the First Sunday of Advent, if you do not sing the Gregorian Introit Ad te levavi, this is the only hymn which is allowed to replace it in English. On the feast of All Saints, if you do not sing the Gregorian Introit Gaudeamus omnes, this is the only hymn which is allowed to replace it in French.” Etc.

I do not propose that such a project can realistically be done right now, nor do I propose that when circumstances more favorable to a general reform come about, the project should be done all at once. It would be grossly unjust to fob off on ordinary Catholics in the pews yet another liturgical revolution for which they are unprepared and which they do not want. The only thing that would be more unjust would be to leave them to go on singing, or more likely not singing, the terrible music which dominates in so many of our churches today.

Recent Items of Interest (Passion Sunday 2016)

Here are some recent items which you might find useful and interesting.

1. Another superb series by Fr Hunwicke, this time on “Diaconia in the Tradition of the Roman Church.” (part 1; part 2; part 3; part 4; part 5). “So, despite having no mandate from the Council to change the Church’s teaching on Holy Order as expressed in her lex orandi, the activities of the post-Conciliar liturgical ‘reformers’ offered us, as they so often did, an unedifying example of illiterate mischief. As so often, they gave us a sound lesson on how to eliminate babies without losing a single drop of bathwater.”

2. Dr Anthony Esolen (another writer whose every article is worth reading) : “The Catholic Church’s priest shortage crisis: a self-inflicted wound.”

3. Russell Shaw on the “Oppressive Splendor” of serving as an altar boy back in the day. “I suppose I have gotten more sophisticated about religion since then, but I doubt that the intensity of my faith has increased much.” (Inspired by a famous photograph of an altar-boy by Henri Cartier-Bresson.)

4. Yesterday was the Saturday of the Akathist in the Byzantine Rite. (This is one of several different akathist hymns to the Mother of God.)

5. Today is Passion Sunday; the Veil of St Veronica is exposed for the veneration of the faithful in St Peter’s Basilica after Vespers. (NLM article from 2012)

6. Recordings of the Passion Sunday liturgies from our friends of the Schola Sainte Cécile in Paris.

7. Two Monks Illustrate the Bible. Part of a very funny series in which two monks discuss the contents of their manuscript illuminations.

8. A Different Kind of New Order (Just for laughs; completely irrelevant to liturgy, but one of my favorite songs of all time.)