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Introduction
Decades ago, a priestly colleague told me the following story: For some time, he had noticed a young man of student age who occasionally turned up among the attendees of his Masses. This stranger attended the service but never received Holy Communion. He also quite obviously did not seek contact with the other believers, but quickly withdrew each time.
“That’s his right,” the priest thought to himself, but as an apostolically minded person, he wanted to at least make an effort to get to know the Mass-goer. So one day he caught up with him, had a rather superficial conversation with him, invited him to various spiritual events, and also tried to introduce this loner to some zealous Catholics his age. The young man’s reaction was extremely cool. A few days later, a letter arrived in which he explained himself.
He first let the priest know in no uncertain terms that he was not interested in any catechesis, prayer events or getting to know pious people. Then came the strange statement: “I may be a Catholic, but I’m no Christian.” He does not believe in Jesus of Nazareth, the Messiah and Son of God. Rather, his interest was focused solely on the ancient form of the mass. It gave him the experience of the sacred, the divine. In it, he sees a rite whose basic elements coincide with the sacrificial acts of archaic cultures.
For him as a European, something of the numinous radiates here in the midst of the industrialized and engineered environment and the intellectual atmosphere, which has been banalized and corrupted by egalitarianism, loss of identity, and arbitrariness. This is something that Africans, for example, could experience in their old tribal rituals. Therefore, it was only for this reason that he visited churches where the rite of the Roman Mass liturgy is performed in as traditional a manner as possible. He asked to be spared further offers in the future.
The Catholic liturgy as an experience of the divine, detached from Catholic dogma and ecclesiastical morality. As a medium through which the spirit of the Westerner can plunge into those primal depths of numinous human experience from which the various cultic traditions arise and in which they, the exoteric forms of the different religions, coincide esoterically... It would be an exaggeration to say that this “traditional” or “perennialist” view is widespread in our country. But it does occur. It places itself with us against the modern cult of arbitrariness and equality, but at the same time against us in our belief in Jesus Christ as the only savior of mankind.
The incident described makes it clear where one can end up without a reference to an objective truth, even in the context of tradition-oriented Catholicism: “Catholic, but not Christian.” The Catholic cult is no longer regarded as an expression and reality of the universal redemptive work of the God-man Jesus Christ. Rather, it represents the more or less successful epiphany of an indeterminate divine, which can also be found in other, possibly essentially different forms.
Such an inclination is unlikely to exist in the very few Catholics who show commitment to the Missa Tridentina. Almost without exception, our group of people shows a pronounced attachment to the Church’s doctrine and defends it against the widespread denials, reinterpretations, and silences on the part of official preachers. And yet, the danger of neglecting the question of truth and, as a result, of the various areas of Catholic life drifting apart is by no means averted. Even among adherents of the traditional form of the Mass, it can happen that reference to the Gospel and to religious doctrine takes a back seat to the aesthetic experience. Even among these people there are those who (as a fellow priest remarked wittily) advocate a liturgy before Vatican II but a morality after Vatican II. It therefore seems appropriate to focus on the matter of truth, the all-encompassing, connecting and permeating truth. I will start by giving a brief overview of the path to be taken:
1. The lost center. Pluralism and uniformism, these two contradictory tendencies of our time, have a common origin: the loss of the fundamental and connecting basis.
2. The triad. Truth, goodness and beauty sound harmoniously together, with truth forming the fundamental tone.
3. The foundation of the Christian creed. Neither utilitarian reasons nor aesthetic preferences nor ethical claims, but rather the truth is the ultimate reason for which one is or becomes Catholic.
4. What is truth? Pilate’s question is answered with a few philosophical and theological thoughts.
5. The separation of truth from good. Unfruitful faith and toxic moralism are the consequences. The traditional liturgy, in its truth, bears witness to the good.
6. Veritatis Splendor. Separating the beautiful from the true leads to aestheticism. On the other hand, the traditional liturgy makes it clear that beauty is the “splendor of truth.”
7. Conclusion. The triad of truth, the final chord of the Holy Mass, is the conclusion of this reflection.
1. Lost Center
In conservative circles, it is good (or bad) manners to criticize two things. On the one hand, people are opposed to the religious and ideological confusion that dominates society and has also found its way into the Church. On the other hand, they denounce the egalitarianism that speaks sonorously of diversity but ultimately does not tolerate any deviation from a strictly prescribed opinions.
The two phenomena seem to be in opposition to each other. Those who demand and promote pluralism do not want uniformity. And those who affirm a total to totalitarian uniformity, marching in tightly closed ranks behind the banners of decency, composure, and wokeness, should not enjoy the potpourri of arbitrariness.
Strangely enough, however, the two contrary positions almost regularly converge. It is precisely the propagandists of colorfulness who insist on unquestionable convictions, non-negotiable values and a non-discussable scientific consensus. They therefore demand boundaries and restrictions, firewalls that must be maintained at all costs. For them, everything can and should be talked about, but the “limits of what can be said” (as it is almost poetically expressed) must not be shifted.
Where does this contradiction come from? Or is it none at all? Do pluralism and uniformism perhaps belong together somehow?
In fact, a more precise analysis could show that both arise from one and the same principle and have a common root. Or rather, their principle is precisely that they have no root, no truly supporting and unifying principle. The ideology of “diversity,” like all totalitarian efforts at unity, comes from a common source—namely, the deconstruction practiced by philosophers, psychologists, sociologists, and even theologians, who have set out to eliminate the previously generally assumed objective order in the realm of the mind.
In its place, there is now chaos, a yawning, empty abyss, similar to the Tohuwabohu before the creative, ordering word of God. Except that this present-day chaos does not want to find its way back to a cosmic order. Rather, the law of horror vacui applies here: a worldview void cannot persist. It absorbs, as it were, the nearest filler material into itself. And so the “loss of the center”, which Hans Sedlmayr described in 1948 in his book of the same name (still worth reading today), using the example of art, not only leads to a disintegration of previously connected elements; rather, other principles strive for dominance.
Biblically speaking, “powers and principalities” dominate things that have become rootless and directionless. Or, to quote Ernst Jünger’s much-cited words from 1943: “The abandoned altars are inhabited by demons.” But the work of demons is the illusory emancipation of man in order to lead him into bondage, from pluralism into total uniformism.
But instead of falling back on lamentations critical of modernity and pessimistic about culture, we want to go in search of the root. It is important to rediscover the unifying and pivotal point, that supporting, cohesive, and ordering principle that has been obscured by subjective, relativistic, and nihilistic cloud formations. It should become obvious what the seemingly lost but in reality always lasting center consists of. The abandoned altars must be cleansed and become again places of worship of the one true God and divine truth.
So what has been lost in the “loss of the center”? What has made the center empty? What is the missing element? To illustrate the gap, let us cite a successful contemporary author, the poet, Protestant pastor, and liturgy scholar Christian Lehnert. In his “Fliegende Blätter von Kult und Gebet” (Flying Leaves of Cult and Prayer), he describes the situation as follows:
In fact, however, this pairing makes sense where there is no fixed benchmark, no valid standard for judging the opposing views. In that case, it must inevitably appear as if we are dealing with charismatic, liberal, conservative, and esoteric movements simply as different currents within the no-longer-so-“monolithic” Roman Catholicism. The female rush into the traditional male domain of the sacrament of holy orders and the nostalgic-to-reactionary longing for the old rites might then be two opposing yet somehow related variations within the general centrifugal vortex.
In any case, the process does not cause Christian Lehnert to sound the alarm. Rather hopefully, he continues:
The author was consulted here because he clearly expresses what is missing—but expresses it by remaining silent. For the gap opens up precisely where, in the context of religion, only “beauty and love” are mentioned. Both are certainly essential to Christianity: the engaging figure, the splendor with which it appears, and the love, the goodness with which it is effective in the world. But I suspect that most readers will miss an element where the good and the beautiful are mentioned: the truth.
“Truth, Beauty, Good” is proclaimed in large letters on the frieze below the gable relief of the Alte Oper in Frankfurt. This triad is the ideal of Weimar Classicism, which Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Epilogue to Schiller’s Bell from 1805 expresses in view of his poet friend who recently passed away:
2. The Triad
It is tempting to speak of a triad here. This chord is a phenomenon whose importance for the entire development of music since the emergence of polyphony can hardly be overestimated. Its specific sound is so much a part of the fabric of all tonally bound music that we take it for granted from Palestrina to the regrettable popular music of the present day. It is difficult for us to understand why the interval of the third was not considered pure harmony until the beginning of the modern era, and why polyphonic pieces therefore ended either on a unison root or on the root with the fifth.
A triad consists of the root, the fifth, and then an added major or minor third, depending on the major or minor color sought. It can be played in different positions: in the root or third-fifth position, with the root at the bottom; in the first inversion as a sixth chord, with the root at the top; and in the second inversion, the fourth-sixth chord, in which the root is between the other two. Even someone who is unfamiliar with musical notation and has no knowledge of chords will readily perceive when listening to the three variants of the triad that the root note remains the same in each case and that its rank is in no way denied even when the fifth or the third is in the highest position.
It is only through the root that the other two notes are given their significance. Let us imagine a C major triad consisting of the root C, the fifth G, and the third E. Without the C, the mode (major or minor) and the key are not recognizable. E and G could also be the fundamental and third of an incomplete E minor chord missing the fifth, B. Only with the C does the G become identifiable as the fifth (and thus as the main note of the so-called dominant) and the E as the major third. Even C and E, when played together, do not provide sufficient information about which mode and which key are present, because if you add an A to the two notes, you get the parallel minor chord to C major, that is, A minor.
So much for a brief excursion into the superficial aspects of music theory. In our considerations, we are dealing with a triad that is quite different from the acoustic one. But because there are such obvious analogies between the two—the structure of root, the third, and the fifth on the one hand, and the triad of truth, goodness, and beauty on the other—and because some aspects that can be easily recognized in the musical triad will be discussed later, the detour was not nugatory.
Whether one speaks of the “true, good, beautiful” in line with Goethe or, with a slight modification, of the “true, beautiful, good” in line with the inscription at the Alte Oper in Frankfurt, one has already decided which of the three elements is the main one. In both lists, the true comes first.
It is precisely this element that Christian Lehnert withholds when he says “what Christianity has always been” is “beauty and love” (or, let’s say, goodness).
My thesis is that the justly lamented “loss of the center” consists in the withdrawal of truth. The fundamental tone was taken from the triad. Without truth and the claim to truth, Christianity lacks the basis, the root from which it draws its life-forces and juices. A vacuum then opens up that virtually invites destructive powers and forces to penetrate and begin their work of destruction.
No matter how much love and beauty may be invoked and celebrated, without a religious connection to the Truth they will degenerate into more or less random products that arise from artistic talent or moral sentiment but will lack inner necessity and a clear sense of purpose. Only truth offers a guarantee of true good and true beauty.
(To be continued.)
NOTES
[1] Lehnert, Christian: Der Gott in einer Nuß. Fliegende Blätter von Kult und Gebet. Berlin 2017. S. 189.
“That’s his right,” the priest thought to himself, but as an apostolically minded person, he wanted to at least make an effort to get to know the Mass-goer. So one day he caught up with him, had a rather superficial conversation with him, invited him to various spiritual events, and also tried to introduce this loner to some zealous Catholics his age. The young man’s reaction was extremely cool. A few days later, a letter arrived in which he explained himself.
He first let the priest know in no uncertain terms that he was not interested in any catechesis, prayer events or getting to know pious people. Then came the strange statement: “I may be a Catholic, but I’m no Christian.” He does not believe in Jesus of Nazareth, the Messiah and Son of God. Rather, his interest was focused solely on the ancient form of the mass. It gave him the experience of the sacred, the divine. In it, he sees a rite whose basic elements coincide with the sacrificial acts of archaic cultures.
For him as a European, something of the numinous radiates here in the midst of the industrialized and engineered environment and the intellectual atmosphere, which has been banalized and corrupted by egalitarianism, loss of identity, and arbitrariness. This is something that Africans, for example, could experience in their old tribal rituals. Therefore, it was only for this reason that he visited churches where the rite of the Roman Mass liturgy is performed in as traditional a manner as possible. He asked to be spared further offers in the future.
The Catholic liturgy as an experience of the divine, detached from Catholic dogma and ecclesiastical morality. As a medium through which the spirit of the Westerner can plunge into those primal depths of numinous human experience from which the various cultic traditions arise and in which they, the exoteric forms of the different religions, coincide esoterically... It would be an exaggeration to say that this “traditional” or “perennialist” view is widespread in our country. But it does occur. It places itself with us against the modern cult of arbitrariness and equality, but at the same time against us in our belief in Jesus Christ as the only savior of mankind.
The incident described makes it clear where one can end up without a reference to an objective truth, even in the context of tradition-oriented Catholicism: “Catholic, but not Christian.” The Catholic cult is no longer regarded as an expression and reality of the universal redemptive work of the God-man Jesus Christ. Rather, it represents the more or less successful epiphany of an indeterminate divine, which can also be found in other, possibly essentially different forms.
Such an inclination is unlikely to exist in the very few Catholics who show commitment to the Missa Tridentina. Almost without exception, our group of people shows a pronounced attachment to the Church’s doctrine and defends it against the widespread denials, reinterpretations, and silences on the part of official preachers. And yet, the danger of neglecting the question of truth and, as a result, of the various areas of Catholic life drifting apart is by no means averted. Even among adherents of the traditional form of the Mass, it can happen that reference to the Gospel and to religious doctrine takes a back seat to the aesthetic experience. Even among these people there are those who (as a fellow priest remarked wittily) advocate a liturgy before Vatican II but a morality after Vatican II. It therefore seems appropriate to focus on the matter of truth, the all-encompassing, connecting and permeating truth. I will start by giving a brief overview of the path to be taken:
1. The lost center. Pluralism and uniformism, these two contradictory tendencies of our time, have a common origin: the loss of the fundamental and connecting basis.
2. The triad. Truth, goodness and beauty sound harmoniously together, with truth forming the fundamental tone.
3. The foundation of the Christian creed. Neither utilitarian reasons nor aesthetic preferences nor ethical claims, but rather the truth is the ultimate reason for which one is or becomes Catholic.
4. What is truth? Pilate’s question is answered with a few philosophical and theological thoughts.
5. The separation of truth from good. Unfruitful faith and toxic moralism are the consequences. The traditional liturgy, in its truth, bears witness to the good.
6. Veritatis Splendor. Separating the beautiful from the true leads to aestheticism. On the other hand, the traditional liturgy makes it clear that beauty is the “splendor of truth.”
7. Conclusion. The triad of truth, the final chord of the Holy Mass, is the conclusion of this reflection.
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| (source) |
In conservative circles, it is good (or bad) manners to criticize two things. On the one hand, people are opposed to the religious and ideological confusion that dominates society and has also found its way into the Church. On the other hand, they denounce the egalitarianism that speaks sonorously of diversity but ultimately does not tolerate any deviation from a strictly prescribed opinions.
The two phenomena seem to be in opposition to each other. Those who demand and promote pluralism do not want uniformity. And those who affirm a total to totalitarian uniformity, marching in tightly closed ranks behind the banners of decency, composure, and wokeness, should not enjoy the potpourri of arbitrariness.
Strangely enough, however, the two contrary positions almost regularly converge. It is precisely the propagandists of colorfulness who insist on unquestionable convictions, non-negotiable values and a non-discussable scientific consensus. They therefore demand boundaries and restrictions, firewalls that must be maintained at all costs. For them, everything can and should be talked about, but the “limits of what can be said” (as it is almost poetically expressed) must not be shifted.
Where does this contradiction come from? Or is it none at all? Do pluralism and uniformism perhaps belong together somehow?
In fact, a more precise analysis could show that both arise from one and the same principle and have a common root. Or rather, their principle is precisely that they have no root, no truly supporting and unifying principle. The ideology of “diversity,” like all totalitarian efforts at unity, comes from a common source—namely, the deconstruction practiced by philosophers, psychologists, sociologists, and even theologians, who have set out to eliminate the previously generally assumed objective order in the realm of the mind.
In its place, there is now chaos, a yawning, empty abyss, similar to the Tohuwabohu before the creative, ordering word of God. Except that this present-day chaos does not want to find its way back to a cosmic order. Rather, the law of horror vacui applies here: a worldview void cannot persist. It absorbs, as it were, the nearest filler material into itself. And so the “loss of the center”, which Hans Sedlmayr described in 1948 in his book of the same name (still worth reading today), using the example of art, not only leads to a disintegration of previously connected elements; rather, other principles strive for dominance.
Biblically speaking, “powers and principalities” dominate things that have become rootless and directionless. Or, to quote Ernst Jünger’s much-cited words from 1943: “The abandoned altars are inhabited by demons.” But the work of demons is the illusory emancipation of man in order to lead him into bondage, from pluralism into total uniformism.
But instead of falling back on lamentations critical of modernity and pessimistic about culture, we want to go in search of the root. It is important to rediscover the unifying and pivotal point, that supporting, cohesive, and ordering principle that has been obscured by subjective, relativistic, and nihilistic cloud formations. It should become obvious what the seemingly lost but in reality always lasting center consists of. The abandoned altars must be cleansed and become again places of worship of the one true God and divine truth.
So what has been lost in the “loss of the center”? What has made the center empty? What is the missing element? To illustrate the gap, let us cite a successful contemporary author, the poet, Protestant pastor, and liturgy scholar Christian Lehnert. In his “Fliegende Blätter von Kult und Gebet” (Flying Leaves of Cult and Prayer), he describes the situation as follows:
Today, Christianity is moved by astonishing centrifugal forces. Everywhere groups and circles, individual devotions, syncretisms—nothing but “movements,” charismatic or liberal or conservative or esoteric preachers and healers and rememberers, nothing but brotherhoods and sisterhoods, be they interested in the Latin rite or in the ordination of women—make even monolithic Roman Catholicism tremble.[1]It is disturbing that Lehnert places two very different aspirations side by side as if they were equivalent: the Latin rite and the ordination of women. How can a theologian, even if he is a Protestant and thus an outsider, place a venerable heritage on the one hand and subversive activity on the other?
In fact, however, this pairing makes sense where there is no fixed benchmark, no valid standard for judging the opposing views. In that case, it must inevitably appear as if we are dealing with charismatic, liberal, conservative, and esoteric movements simply as different currents within the no-longer-so-“monolithic” Roman Catholicism. The female rush into the traditional male domain of the sacrament of holy orders and the nostalgic-to-reactionary longing for the old rites might then be two opposing yet somehow related variations within the general centrifugal vortex.
In any case, the process does not cause Christian Lehnert to sound the alarm. Rather hopefully, he continues:
On the supposed “field of the dead” of Christianity, things are very lively. The agile, unchanging form of Christianity, its growth in depth and height, its incompleteness, its current form towards something that is always pending—this will only show what Christianity has always been: all its beauty and love.[2]Christianity, even that within “monolithic Roman Catholicism,” is thus in a state of ferment. It is not a foregone conclusion how it will develop. Lehnert does not assume fixed constants. The only thing he is certain of is that from the seething process, Christianity will emerge more clearly and reveal itself as what it is at its core. What exactly will emerge? “All its beauty and love.”
The author was consulted here because he clearly expresses what is missing—but expresses it by remaining silent. For the gap opens up precisely where, in the context of religion, only “beauty and love” are mentioned. Both are certainly essential to Christianity: the engaging figure, the splendor with which it appears, and the love, the goodness with which it is effective in the world. But I suspect that most readers will miss an element where the good and the beautiful are mentioned: the truth.
“Truth, Beauty, Good” is proclaimed in large letters on the frieze below the gable relief of the Alte Oper in Frankfurt. This triad is the ideal of Weimar Classicism, which Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Epilogue to Schiller’s Bell from 1805 expresses in view of his poet friend who recently passed away:
Meanwhile his mighty spirit onward press’dBut long before that, in ancient Greece, the triad ἀληθές, ἀγαθόν, καλόν (alethés, agathón, kalón) could be heard, at least subliminally. It permeated the Christian Middle Ages as verum, bonum, pulchrum. And it has lost none of its significance to this day.
Where goodness, beauty, truth, for ever grow;
And in his rear, in shadowy outline, lay
The vulgar, which we all, alas, obey![3]
2. The Triad
It is tempting to speak of a triad here. This chord is a phenomenon whose importance for the entire development of music since the emergence of polyphony can hardly be overestimated. Its specific sound is so much a part of the fabric of all tonally bound music that we take it for granted from Palestrina to the regrettable popular music of the present day. It is difficult for us to understand why the interval of the third was not considered pure harmony until the beginning of the modern era, and why polyphonic pieces therefore ended either on a unison root or on the root with the fifth.
A triad consists of the root, the fifth, and then an added major or minor third, depending on the major or minor color sought. It can be played in different positions: in the root or third-fifth position, with the root at the bottom; in the first inversion as a sixth chord, with the root at the top; and in the second inversion, the fourth-sixth chord, in which the root is between the other two. Even someone who is unfamiliar with musical notation and has no knowledge of chords will readily perceive when listening to the three variants of the triad that the root note remains the same in each case and that its rank is in no way denied even when the fifth or the third is in the highest position.
So much for a brief excursion into the superficial aspects of music theory. In our considerations, we are dealing with a triad that is quite different from the acoustic one. But because there are such obvious analogies between the two—the structure of root, the third, and the fifth on the one hand, and the triad of truth, goodness, and beauty on the other—and because some aspects that can be easily recognized in the musical triad will be discussed later, the detour was not nugatory.
Whether one speaks of the “true, good, beautiful” in line with Goethe or, with a slight modification, of the “true, beautiful, good” in line with the inscription at the Alte Oper in Frankfurt, one has already decided which of the three elements is the main one. In both lists, the true comes first.
It is precisely this element that Christian Lehnert withholds when he says “what Christianity has always been” is “beauty and love” (or, let’s say, goodness).
My thesis is that the justly lamented “loss of the center” consists in the withdrawal of truth. The fundamental tone was taken from the triad. Without truth and the claim to truth, Christianity lacks the basis, the root from which it draws its life-forces and juices. A vacuum then opens up that virtually invites destructive powers and forces to penetrate and begin their work of destruction.
No matter how much love and beauty may be invoked and celebrated, without a religious connection to the Truth they will degenerate into more or less random products that arise from artistic talent or moral sentiment but will lack inner necessity and a clear sense of purpose. Only truth offers a guarantee of true good and true beauty.
(To be continued.)
NOTES
[1] Lehnert, Christian: Der Gott in einer Nuß. Fliegende Blätter von Kult und Gebet. Berlin 2017. S. 189.
[2] Ebd., S. 189f.
[3] Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von: Gedichte in zeitli cher Reihenfolge. Hrsg. v. Heinz Nicolai. 10. Aufl. Frankfurt am Main und Leipzig 1997. S. 553
