Schmemann’s Critique of the West (Part 3): Secularism and Liturgy

Our Lady’s Church (13th century), Lissewege, Belgium (source)

Having summarized Schmemann’s objections (Part 1) and begun to respond to them (Part 2), today, in this concluding part, I will take up two questions.

First, did Aquinas “cause secularism,” as it were, with his distinction between first cause and second cause?

There are two extremes and a mean on this question.

At one extreme, the world has its own causality independent of God, which amounts to saying that God mostly does not exercise causality in this world. At the other extreme, there is only God’s causality, because the world has no causality. In the mean, God has causality and the world has causality, but the world’s causality is dependent on God’s. Aquinas in in the mean and secularism is in the first of the two extremes. It is probably true that thinkers before Aquinas could wander into the second of the two extremes at times, and so Aquinas’ move from the second extreme back to the mean can look like a movement toward the first extreme.

Later on, nominalist thinkers did set up a kind of divide between God and the world that led towards secularism. Schmemann’s critique is not entirely without merit, but he has picked the wrong enemy, for Aquinas is not a nominalist or a dualist.

(All the same, as a friend of a friend pointed out, Schmemann had liturgics of the 1950s-1970s in view as he composed his critique. He was right to recognize that Western Christianity since the late Middle Ages seems to have been overtaken by a creeping nominalism, one that seems connected, in turn, to a new concept of absolute Church authority, and which alone made possible a kind of nominalist, rationalist, and positivist liturgical reform that would be unthinkable in the East. Like Geoffrey Hull, Schmemann is asking himself: “How did it come about that this concept of liturgy ‘makes sense’ in Roman Catholicism (and Protestantism), when the same approach would be unthinkable in Orthodoxy?” That remains a valid question.)
 

Aquinas among the Fathers of the Church (excerpt from a painting by Zurbaran)

Second, does Aquinas differ from the Fathers on the relationship between liturgy and sacrament?

Schmemann is right to point out that there was no place for “liturgy” in the systematic theological treatises of the Middle Ages. There were commentaries on the liturgies, but within the developing system of theology there was not a slot for “liturgy” the way there was for “sacrament.”

However, this was not due to Aquinas’ metaphysics but because the contents of the theological system were at least partially determined by the history of controversies. There were controversies about sacramental validity, etc., but there weren’t controversies about liturgy such as we have today. The absence of a treatise on liturgy is not because Aquinas had divorced sacrament from liturgy but because it had never occurred to anyone divorce the two. It was inconceivable.

One finds a similar lacuna in the medieval system regarding “church”: there is no treatise on the Church, although one finds a brief treatment of Christ as Head of the Mystical Body. This is not at all because Aquinas or his contemporaries did not believe in the Church or did not have thoughts about it, but because controversy had never made it a definite subject as later happened in the Reformation debates.

As regards thinking of “sign” as a participation in the signified, I would point to the book Cur Deus Verba, where Dr. Jeremy Holmes develops Aquinas’ own thought to make this very point. I would also note again that some kind of contrast between “figure”/“type” and “truth” was made throughout Patristic times, and the division between “thing” and “sign” was made by St Augustine, so it seems petty to run down the medievals for making similar distinctions.

I think Fr. Schmemann’s problem is not so much with sign/thing as with the very notion of transubstantiation. To avoid transubstantiation, he says that when we enter into the liturgy we pass from this world into the kingdom of heaven, and in that kingdom the bread is the body of Christ. The bread is not the body of Christ in this world, but only in the kingdom of heaven. Once we have entered the kingdom by entering the liturgy, then there is no need for a particular moment of change in the bread; Schemann says that the action of the Holy Spirit is not to change the bread but to reveal that the bread is the body. This view would exclude, for example, the Western practice of Eucharistic adoration.

Needless to say, the idea that in the realm of liturgy the bread is shown to be always/already the body of Christ is, curiously, to repeat Berengarius’ error in a more subtle manner: the liturgy shows the bread as a sign of the body, but a sign it remains, with no basis for stating that the consecrated bread is, in truth, in reality, objectively, the body of Christ, such that the worship of latreia is rightly given to it (or rather, to Him who is present to us by means of the Eucharist). One wonders if we are not confronted once again with the fundamental error of Platonism, whereby the sensible is (merely?) an image of the idea or the form, “participating” in it, yes—but not the idea or the form really present in our midst. This Platonism has been a far greater temptation in the East, where it has even threatened, at times, to undermine the core mystery of the Incarnation of the Logos in the flesh.

Some broader points need to be made as part of a judicious response.

There is much truth in what Schmemann says, as (in general) is true of the Eastern Orthodox critics of Western rationalism. Those who wish to pursue this line of argument still further should consult Geoffrey Hull’s The Banished Heart, which will make the reader either a Roman traditionalist, a Byzantine Catholic, or an Eastern Orthodox. We might as well candidly admit that there has been a tendency in the West, in theological discourse, to isolate sacraments from liturgy, and then to isolate within sacraments the “matter and form” that makes them valid. This reduction to validity is at the root of all modern Western liturgical woes.

Joseph Ratzinger recognized the same thing, and so (as he points out) did the Liturgical Movement at its best. In the Preface to The Organic Development of the Liturgy by Alcuin Reid, OSB (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005), Ratzinger writes:

The author [Alcuin Reid] expressly warns us against the wrong path up which we might be led by a Neoscholastic sacramental theology that is disconnected from the living form of the Liturgy. On that basis, people might reduce the “substance” to the material and form of the sacrament and say: Bread and wine are the matter of the sacrament; the words of institution are its form. Only these two things are really necessary; everything else is changeable. . . . As long as the material gifts are there, and the words of institution are spoken, then everything else is freely disposable. Many priests today, unfortunately, act in accordance with this motto; and the theories of many liturgists are unfortunately moving in the same direction. They want to overcome the limits of the rite, as being something fixed and immovable, and construct the products of their fantasy, which are supposedly “pastoral,” around this remnant, this core that has been spared and that is thus either relegated to the realm of magic or loses any meaning whatever. The Liturgical Movement had in fact been attempting to overcome this reductionism, the product of an abstract sacramental theology, and to teach us to understand the Liturgy as a living network of Tradition that had taken concrete form, that cannot be torn apart into little pieces but has to be seen and experienced as a living whole. Anyone who, like me, was moved by this perception at the time of the Liturgical Movement on the eve of the Second Vatican Council can only stand, deeply sorrowing, before the ruins of the very things they were concerned for.

Indeed, the traditionalist movement is premised on not reducing the virtue of religion—the habit of right worship—to mere validity and licitness. This is a point I discuss throughout The Once and Future Roman Rite, a book that responds, to some extent, to the Schmemannian critique (see especially chapters 5, 6, and 10).

That being said, many Eastern Orthodox thinkers suffer from the polemical defect of being able to find little or nothing good to say about the West, which they believe to be in permanent and irreversible decline ever since the “schism” of 1054. Lossky and other Orthodox intellectuals in Paris even made up a lot of stuff about the Eastern tradition to ensure it would stand as far as possible from the Western tradition. Serious scholarship does not support this almost Manichaean picture of “East = good, true, beautiful / West = evil, false, ugly.” St Thomas Aquinas was sensitive to the complex form of the liturgy, as we can see in Question 83 of the Tertia Pars, where he comments in some detail on the shape of the Roman rite as he knew it, and never betrays the slightest inkling that he views all of that as arbitrary scaffolding around a magical transubstantiation. The careful studies of Abbé Franck Quoëx support this reading of Aquinas.

While Orthodox authors captivate with their poetic grandiosity, metaphysically their accounts often fall apart. For example: even if the entire liturgy is “divine” and must be embraced and entered into with reverence, there has to be a moment of consecration, before which the elements are only bread and wine, and after which they are Christ Himself. After all, He is always present “spiritually” or “mystically” in a soul in a state of grace and in the mystical body of the Church, but He is not always and everywhere present in His body, blood, soul, and divinity as He is upon the altar of sacrifice and in Eucharistic communion. This difference is the basis for the exaltation of the Divine Liturgy and of the Eucharist in the Christian life (just have a look at Nicholas Cabasilas). Whatever language we use to point out that difference—as we saw last week, “real” can certainly be defended, especially if it is contrasted not with mystical but with metaphorical or rational, that is, a linguistic or mental entity—the difference must be pointed out.

Some in the East almost seem to make a boast out of their imprecision (“everything is sacramental... everything is Christ... the liturgy is Christ,” etc.), but this can work only if people are content to rest in a hazy cloud of incense and not ask any further questions. “In what sense is everything sacramental? Is Satan sacramental? Is dung? Is an iPhone? In what sense is Christ in all? Is he in the apostates? In the act of sinning or the sinful will?” Any intelligent reply rests on distinctions: “Things are signs of God to the extent that they are good... Christ is present in the nature of the will but not in its voluntary disorder...” The moment any such distinctions are introduced, a person is well on his way to scholasticism of one kind or another: this is just how the human mind works—and it’s a perfection if it is done well.
 

Need we be separated over the All-Holy Theotokos? (source)

Moreover, Church history reveals many unfortunate cases where a difference in vocabulary need not have been a doctrinal obstacle but ended up becoming one either due to a mistaken apprehension of what each side was saying or, worse, due to a stubborn insistence on a single way of speaking even when argument has shown there can be various ways of expressing a truth. Transubstantiation is an excellent example; the Immaculate Conception yet another. In their passion to condemn everything Western, Eastern writers even manage to contradict, irony of ironies, the witness of the Church Fathers. Have a look at the patristic quotations on behalf of the substantial change in the Eucharistic gifts (whatever one wishes to call it), in Ludwig Ott’s Fundamentals (new ed., 405–6).

Another way in which the modern Eastern apologists fictionalize and mythologize their own tradition is by downplaying the quite extensive Byzantine scholasticism and even Byzantine Thomism. Some argue that Gregory Palamas and Thomas Aquinas are not as opposed to each other as customarily assumed. If we take the conventional view of Palamas, how amusing it is that Orthodox thinkers thunder against the West for “driving a wedge” between God and creation by means of a distinction between uncreated and created grace—and then they seem to drive a wedge into the divine nature by means of a distinction between God’s “essence” and His “energies”! The obvious distinction between the infinite, eternal, uncreated cause and the finite, limited, created effect is elided, while a far from obvious distinction that threatens the simplicity of God is produced ad hoc. When challenged, the “mystery card” is played: more clouds of incense.

In any case, for Aquinas, at least, real and mystical are not in opposition to each other, nor does Aquinas have to be pushed in a rationalizing/rationalistic direction. Is there contrary evidence from within the Western tradition—in the rites themselves and in the habits of the faithful—that this rationalism was not normative? Do we have the wherewithal in our own tradition to respond to its besetting temptations and vices?” Every tradition has its own temptations and vices; any honest person will admit it.

All Western traditionalists are characterized by a fundamental agreement that liturgy has intrinsic, immense, and independent value and should not be reduced to sacramental validity; nay, that the proper context for understanding what sacraments are, who their ministers and recipients are, what a proper intention is, etc., is precisely the traditional rites themselves, which are therefore indispensable. All one has to do is participate in a solemn High Mass to see that the West never entirely lost its liturgical-cosmic-sacramental sensibility. It is right there, “baked into” the rich and resplendent rites, which are anything but reductionist or minimalist.

True, we are suffering greatly from the triumph of the Pistoian rationalism and utilitarianism that hijacked the liturgical reform and now infests nearly every aspect of the Church’s life; but we can also see a zealous countermovement, a creative minority, that is poised to fill the pews when the twentieth-century experiment has finally exhausted itself in institutional bankruptcy.

Here are some pieces one could look at, having Schmemann’s objections in mind:

• On “Pinpointing” Consecration: A Letter for the Feast of St. Thomas Aquinas
• East-West Disagreements about the Epiclesis and Transubstantiation
• Counterpoints to the Hieromonk’s Letter
• The Byzantine Liturgy, the Traditional Latin Mass, and the Novus Ordo—Two Brothers and a Stranger
• The Four Qualities of Liturgy: Validity, Licitness, Fittingness, and Authenticity

Guest Article: The Ancient Cosmological Roots of Facing North for the Gospel

NLM is pleased to offer our readers an extremely interesting essay by Dr. Jeremy Holmes, Professor of Theology at Wyoming Catholic College. Dr. Holmes has contributed other pieces to NLM in the past, such as this and this. The current piece was first published on his personal blog New Song on August 8.

A Draconic Interpretation of Liturgical North

Dr. Jeremy R. Holmes

If you have ever been to a traditional Latin Mass, you no doubt noticed that the altar servers make a big ceremony out of carrying the big book to the left side of the altar before the priest reads the Gospel. Is there some kind of symbolism going on with left and right? Are we supposed to think of those who stand at our Lord’s left and right at the judgment?

It turns out that the ceremony has nothing to do with left and right. [1] According to the rubrics, the priest reads the Gospel toward the north. In fact, what we usually see at a Low Mass or High Mass is a compressed version of the full ceremony of a Solemn Mass, where the subdeacon chants the Epistle on the right side and the deacon, after a procession with candles, chants the Gospel on the left side of the Church, facing directly toward the north. We’re all aware that churches are traditionally oriented toward the east, and east is important because the rising sun symbolizes Christ coming. But in liturgical terms, north is also important because, by a long tradition, the north represents the dark realm where the light of the gospel has not yet shone. We read the Gospel toward the north to represent the Church’s mission to the unevangelized.

In the Solemn Mass, the deacon (below, left) chants the Gospel to the north

In fact, after the Council of Trent permission was given for churches to be oriented not just toward the east but in other directions, if needed for some reason—any direction, in fact, except to the north. No church shall point in the direction of evil.

Where would such an idea come from? Some biblical texts come to mind. For example, Jeremiah 1, 14, “From the north shall an evil break forth upon all the inhabitants of the land; for behold, I will call together all the families of the kingdoms of the north.” There are many such passages, because Israel’s great enemies, Assyria and Babylon, were north of the promised land. In Ezekiel 8, 3, an idol was set up in the Temple in the inner court that faces north. Such scattered hints congeal into a solid tradition with time, so that, for example, Hildegard of Bingen’s mystical vision Scivias speaks of the north with horror:

Ach, ach! In the north, I have been attacked and plundered with the eyes and with the joy of knowledge, with my garment completely torn. I was removed from my rightful place, and I was led into another place which lacked any beauty and honor where I was subjected to the worst servitude. [2]

At first glance, it all seems a bit arbitrary. Scripture is not uniformly negative about the north. The east’s importance rests on the obvious and glorious fact of the sun’s path, while north’s infamy seems to rest on a bit of ancient geography and the dim memory of a sour moment in Israel’s history.

To go deeper, we have to question our assumptions. What exactly does “north” mean?

North

The ancients knew nothing of magnetic north, of course. They found the north by looking to the heavens: before the advent of electric lights, it was obvious to everyone that all the constellations in the night sky rotate around the north star. As the sun’s rising is the overwhelming fact of day, the north star’s constant and central presence is the obvious fact of night, second to the moon in brilliance but second to none in reliability. But what in fact is the north star?

It turns out that the earth’s rotation is not entirely steady. It wobbles a bit, a phenomenon called “precession”. So over the course of about 26,000 years, a line drawn through the earth’s axis describes a complete circle in the sky, and along the way, various stars become the “north star,” i.e., the star currently aligned with the earth’s axis. [3] Today, the north star is Polaris, but as recently as 4,000 years ago the north star was Thuban, located in an entirely different constellation. [4] Egyptian temples were specially built so that Thuban would be visible through a door on one particular side. [5] If you go out at night and find Thuban in the sky, you are looking at the north star as Abraham would have known it when God called him in about 2000 BC.

This is more than a bit of trivia. While our names for the constellations are Latin translations of Greek names, the Greeks got their traditional constellations from civilizations before them. If we map out the traditional constellations, they rotate around Thuban: in other words, the constellations familiar to us today were “discovered” at least 4,000 years ago. [6] That’s far too old for the Greeks to have invented them.

So who invented them? The traditional constellations give us no names for anything within 36 degrees of the South Pole, so whoever first invented them must not have been able to see anything that far south. If we know exactly how far south their view of the night sky extended, then we can deduce how far north they were: they were located at a latitude of about 36 degrees north. This is too far south to be Greece—and the Greeks were already out of the running on the basis of chronology. On the other hand, it’s too far north to be Egypt, that most ancient of civilizations. What great people existed more than 4,000 years ago and was located at a latitude of 36 degrees north?

The answer is simple: the great civilizations of the fertile crescent, beginning with the Sumerians and continuing with the Babylonians. And in fact we do know that the civilizations of the fertile crescent maintained a lively interest in astronomy—hence the “magi from the east”.

To sum up: we assume that north means toward Polaris, but the heavens as we know them were mapped out more than 4,000 years ago in Sumeria, when Thuban was the north star.

So what is Thuban? It’s name is simply the Arabic word for the constellation of which it forms a part: Draco. [7]

The Dragon

For the ancient Babylonians, our closest witnesses to the original Sumerian tradition, the constellation Draco was Tiamat, the sea. [8] As the story goes, Tiamat was the mother of all the gods, but then turned on the gods in the form of a serpent and attempted to eat them all. [9] Marduk slew her with a bolt of lightening and then carved up her body to make the earth and the sky. It would be easy to show that the creation account in Genesis 1 specifically wishes to counter this Babylonian creation myth—note for example how God divides up the ocean to make everything. Either this myth or the Canaanite version of it is adapted to Israel’s God in many passages of the Old Testament, for example:

Psalm 74, 13: “Thou didst divide the sea by thy might; thou didst break the heads of the dragons on the waters.”

Isaiah 27, 1: “In that day the LORD with his hard and great and strong sword will punish Leviathan the fleeing serpent, Leviathan the twisting serpent, and he will slay the dragon that is in the sea.”

Isaiah 51, 9: “Was it not thou that didst cut Rahab in pieces, that didst pierce the dragon?”

Job 26, 12-13: “By his power he stilled the sea; by his understanding he smote Rahab. By his wind the heavens were made fair; his hand pierced the fleeing serpent.”

For the ancient Greeks, Draco had a parallel role. [10] As Tiamat turned on Marduk and company, so the Greeks told of the time the Titans attempted to overthrow the gods of Olympus. At one point in the battle, a dragon attacked Athena, but she slew it and threw it up into the sky where it wrapped around the earth’s axis to form the constellation we see today.

The Realm of Darkness

We are now close to answering our original question, because scholars today generally agree that the creation myth in which God combats the dragon stands in the background of Revelation 12, where the dragon is directly identified as “that ancient serpent, who is called the Devil and Satan.” (Rev. 12, 9). [11]

According to an ancient Jewish interpretation (see e.g. 2 Enoch 29:1), Isaiah 14, 12-15 already associates Satan with the northern stars:

How you are fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of Dawn! How you are cut down to the ground, you who laid the nations low! You said in your heart, “I will ascend to heaven; above the stars of God I will set my throne on high; I will sit on the mount of assembly in the far north; I will ascend above the heights of the clouds, I will make myself like the Most High.” But you are brought down to Sheol, to the depths of the Pit.

Notice that, if we take this text as referring to Satan, he is depicted as a star that rises up against God, he is associated with the stars in the north, and he is defeated in a pattern reminiscent of the myth of Tiamat or the Titans.

Revelation 12, 1-9 also describes Satan’s rebellion and defeat, but there the image of the dragon is explicit and the association with stars even clearer:

And a great portent appeared in heaven, a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars; she was with child and she cried out in her pangs of birth, in anguish for delivery. And another portent appeared in heaven; behold, a great red dragon, with seven heads and ten horns, and seven diadems upon his heads. His tail swept down a third of the stars of heaven, and cast them to the earth. And the dragon stood before the woman who was about to bear a child, that he might devour her child when she brought it forth; she brought forth a male child, one who is to rule all the nations with a rod of iron, but her child was caught up to God and to his throne, and the woman fled into the wilderness, where she has a place prepared by God, in which to be nourished for one thousand two hundred and sixty days. Now war arose in heaven, Michael and his angels fighting against the dragon; and the dragon and his angels fought, but they were defeated and there was no longer any place for them in heaven. And the great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent, who is called the Devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world—he was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him.

The stars cast down to the earth seem to be the angels who fell with Satan. That being the case, Satan himself would seem to be a star or group of stars. Interestingly, the word semeion or “portent” used to describe Satan can also refer to a constellation of stars. [12]

Given the trail of evidence I have laid out associating Satan with the north and with stars and with the dragon of ancient mythology, I don’t think it too much of a leap to see Satan as represented by the constellation Draco.

If I may push the evidence further (perhaps to the breaking point): notice that the constellation Draco, long and snaky, twines around and between the constellations of Ursa Maior and Ursa Minor, the Big Bear and the Little Bear. If Draco fell to the earth, he would bring with him first and foremost a great beast and a little beast, which happen to be the next two characters we meet in Revelation 12.

The Gospel of Light

This post has mostly been suggestive speculation, but the picture that seems to emerge is this:

For the ancient Sumerians, “north” meant toward the dragon, who ruled the sky when all was dark, but around the time when God called Abraham out of Sumeria, Thuban lost his place as the center of the night sky. This dragon was understood as the foe of the gods, and in Scripture was eventually seen as the foe of God—Satan, that ancient serpent. The reign of the dragon has been overthrown by the resurrection of Christ, the rising sun.

It makes all the sense in the world that we would face the rising sun when we worship. It makes all the sense in the world that we would not face north, toward Draco, when we worship. And although it might surprise our human instincts, it makes perfect sense in God’s infinite mercy that we would proclaim the Gospel to the north, to all those under Satan’s dominion.

It often happens that the deacon facing northwards ends up facing prelates...
but this surely has no symbolic significance (especially not in the present photo).

Epilogue

On a recent camping trip, I stumbled out of our camper at 4:30 AM to check out the constellations. We were far from any electric lights, and at 8,000 feet high there was almost no humidity to dim the stars, which were dazzlingly bright. When I looked east—a great sign appeared in the heavens! I saw the morning star, and it was the biggest thing short of the moon that I have ever seen in the sky. I couldn’t believe my eyes. I stumbled back to the camper and shook my wife out of bed: “You’ve got to come see this. You’ll never believe it! I’ve—I’ve seen Mary.”

FOOTNOTES

[1] Everything about liturgy and the Council of Trent in this blog post comes from a letter from my friend Peter Kwasniewski, who over the years has collected notes from various learned tomes relating to “north” in the liturgy.

[2] Hildegaard of Bingen, Scivias, trans. Bruce Hozeski (Santa Fe: Bear & Company, Inc., 1986), 42.

[3] The content of this paragraph is from Mark R. Chartrand, National Audobon Society Field Guide to the Night Sky (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), 51-52.

[4] Ibid., 53 and 512.

[5] Ibid., 512.

[6] The information in the remainder of this section is taken from The Teaching Company’s course, Our Night Sky, taught by Prof. Edward M. Murphy. The material can be found in the first lecture, beginning at 12 minutes and 30 seconds. The shape of the argument is easy to follow, although I’m taking the specific conclusion about “36 degrees north” on faith from Prof. Murphy.

[7] Field Guide to the Night Sky, 512.

[8] Ibid., 511.

[9] My summary of the story is based on the translation in Victor H. Matthews and Don C. Benjamin, Old Testament Parallels: Laws and Stories from the Ancient Near East (New York: Paulist, 1997), 10-18.

[10] Field Guide to the Night Sky, 511.

[11] That the chaos battle myth stands behind Revelation 12 is a commonplace in scholarship. One can look in almost any contemporary more technical commentary.

[12] I accessed this in an electronic form, so I can’t give a proper footnote. But it’s the semeion entry in Lewis and Short’s huge Greek lexicon.

Seeking the Right Relationship Between Internal and External

My colleague Dr. Jeremy Holmes, professor of theology at Wyoming Catholic College, has written a response to my article from last week. We are happy to publish it here.

Tissot, Jesus and the Pharisees

Seeking the Right Relationship Between Internal and External

Guest Article by Dr. Jeremy R. Holmes

In his article “The Logic of Incarnation and the Temptation of Disincarnation,” Peter Kwasniewski argues that relativizing or marginalizing the traditional externals of the Catholic Faith has become a prevalent error of our age — one that goes to the heart of our religion, which, being founded upon the mystery of the Incarnate Word, is sacramental, liturgical, and Eucharistic in its very essence, expressed in the historical-cultural unfolding of apostolic tradition. He expresses concern that being dismissive of externals results in a kind of incoherent pluralism and relativism.

While I am sympathetic to his thesis, I would like to offer some thoughts on why this distrust (as it were) of externals arises in the first place, where it slips into error, and how we might think sympathetically about the concerns on both sides. In this way, I believe we can see, at least in a general way, what a proper relationship between and harmony of the outward and inward aspects of Catholicism would look like.

Someone needs reminding “not to get stuck on externals” to the extent that he or she actually falls prey to the belief that “just because you have the externals right, you are being a good Christian.” There are in fact Catholics who unconsciously assume they are very pious because they attend and support meticulously celebrated traditional liturgies. They go to a splendid Mass on Sunday morning, and Sunday afternoon they return home to nag their children, gossip about their co-workers, and consume whatever the Internet has to offer. These people exist. And there are traditionalist Catholics who are suspicious of anything that smacks of social action — that stuff is for liberals!

But we have to remember that these people are only one side of a divide. I remember talking with a bishop once who complained that his diocese seemed divided between those who think liturgy is important and those who think social justice is important, and he couldn’t persuade either side to think in both categories. So alongside the “extrinsicist” traditionalists described above, there are other Catholics who are offended by any insistence on liturgical beauty, because they take it as a statement against caring for the poor. Surely an insistence on externals must be pitted against heartfelt love for others!

What’s more, we have to remember that this same divide cuts across all times. There were medieval peasants who thought that an external ritual or relic could absolve them of interior guilt without repentance, and there were medieval heretics who thought that the body and what we do with it makes no difference, so long as our hearts are in the right place. St. Paul had to deal both with Christians who thought that extrinsic laws were the heart of the gospel and with Christians who thought that the Cross had liberated us from all exterior obligations whatsoever.

The external/internal divide cuts across all populations, including the non-religious. There are and have been throughout history upper-class people who think that maintaining proper externals — the correct house and tableware and the best manners and tasteful clothing and everything else decorous — expressed their acceptability and even superiority, regardless of how they slept around, gossiped, and embezzled. And there are and have been throughout history lower-class people who think that their good hearts excuse them from and even exclude them from good manners and tasteful living.

The divide even cuts across each layer within the human person. There are people who believe that your salvation is assured if you walk through the motions described in the Ten Commandments, regardless of whether your heart is cold as stone. And there are people who think that good intentions are all that count in morality, so that the right intention excuses breaking any or all of the Ten Commandments.

Once we broaden our view and see this division of external versus internal in all its universality, we can see through certain fallacious “both/and” claims. To claim that it is wrong for a person to say he prefers one liturgical form over another (or wishes that others would come to prefer it, too) sounds like a plea for the “both/and” approach. After all, we let everyone have what they want, as long as they don’t exalt it into a matter of principle.

In reality, however, such an “inclusive” claim is just a form of the tired old “either/or” of externals versus internals. If you care so much about externals, then you really must not care about internals. Someone who thinks this way will be tempted to apply to the “externalists” (as he conceives them) the tough words of Jesus, that seeming foe of externals: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for you tithe mint and dill and cummin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law, justice and mercy and faith.” Unfortunately, the remainder of what Jesus says conveniently slips his mind: “These things you ought to have done, without neglecting the others” (Matt 23:23).

As so often happens, the extremes resemble one another in surprising ways. The extrinsicist rests secure in his beautiful exterior life even as he lies, cheats, and steals. The intrinsicist rests secure in what he perceives as good intentions even as he — well, lies, cheats, and steals. Hey, it’s for a good cause, right? If we don’t play hardball, the wrong party will get into national office, or the wrong man will be chosen as Pope, or those people will take over education in our district.

We should try to see both sides sympathetically. People do not usually end up on one or another side of the divide out of stupidity or malice but due to the huge difficulty of maintaining a correct balance. The temptation to internalism is real, for example, because the interior element truly is determinative: just read Psalm 49 [50]. To love God with all our heart and mind and soul is, after all, the greatest commandment. But the temptation to externalism is also real precisely because externals are important. What could be more important than the flesh of the God-made-man, which we are commanded to worship and adore?

But when Mary Magdalene clung to the feet of Jesus after His resurrection, He forbade her to touch Him, because — according to St. Thomas’s interpretation — He did not want her attached to His human flesh over His divine nature. Mary was not tempted to cling to Jesus out of contempt for the love of God or neighbor: she was tempted out of reverence for the supreme mystery of Salvation History! And neither did Jesus mean that we have to “get over” the Incarnation. For all eternity, we worship the Trinity in and through the exteriorly visible humanity of Christ the Lord (Rev 21:23).

Similarly, we need to admit that the temptation to externalism in liturgy is real, but it is real precisely because liturgy — the external thing we do — is so terribly important.

The Ecclesial Purpose of All Saints as Seen in the Martyrologies

First and foremost, a blessed Solemnity of All Saints to all NLM readers! Gaudeamus omnes in Domino, diem festum celebrantes sub honore Sanctorum omnium: de quorum solemnitate gaudent angeli, et collaudant Filium Dei. Let us all rejoice in the Lord celebrating the feast in honor of all the saints, in which solemnity the angels rejoice and praise the Son of God. (Introit, November 1st, EF & OF)

My colleague Dr. Jeremy Holmes has posted a wonderful article today at his blog, New Song, called "The Spirit of the Solemnity of All Saints." He looks at what the old and new Martyrologies tell us about this feastday, and then asks the question: What does it mean to say we observe all the saints in order that "we may be crowned by their triumph in the sight of the divine majesty unto endless ages"?

Read the article here.