Useful Repetition in the Divine Office

On Thursday, February 14, I gave a lecture at St Mary’s parish, Norwalk, Connecticut, on “Poets, Lovers, Children, Madmen—and Worshipers: Why We Repeat Ourselves in the Liturgy.” (The full text of the lecture may be found here.)

Ever since I first read the words of Sacrosanctum Concilium §34 about how “useless repetitions” (repetitiones inutiles) needed to be removed from the traditional Roman liturgy, I have been on the lookout for instances of repetition as I pray the old Divine Office — or to be more precise, the monastic office as it stood in the 1940s — and as I attend Mass in the usus antiquior, and receive or observe other sacraments in the older use. After over twenty years of observation and reflection, I have still not been able to find a single example of a repetitio inutilis.

Yes, yes, I know the examples that people like to toss out, and in my foolish youth, I would do the same thing. It sounds sophisticated to be able to criticize liturgical practices that have endured for centuries: “You know, those poor Catholics were so conservative that they just kept these irrational customs in place, even though we now see clearly that they make no sense. Far better to streamline the rite, make it more logical.”

That juvenile point of view was replaced by a growing appreciation for the subtlety of the elements of the liturgy, small and large — even those that seem to have come about “by accident.” As Padre Pio once said: “With God, there’s no such thing as chance.” Such appreciation requires both the patience to await meaning and the imagination to see it, neither of which seem to be widespread in our times.

Examples from the Divine Office

After the hour of Prime [1] the Martyrology is read, and then prayers before the day’s work. These prayers commence with a triple “V. Deus, in adjutorium meum intende. R. Domine, ad adjuvandum me festina,” followed by a Gloria Patri, a Kyrie/Christe/Kyrie, a Pater Noster, versicles, another Gloria Patri, and an oration.

There is a lot of repetition here. I have no elaborate rationale to offer, but my experience, having prayed it for a long time, is that this arrangement has a steadying effect and is well suited to begging God’s help at the start of the day's work. The one who begs asks for what he needs more than once, indeed insistently. This is the origin of the Jesus Prayer and of every litany that has ever existed. Praying the Lord’s Prayer a second time, only a few moments after having said it at the end of Prime, typically alerts me to the fact that I had not prayed it the first time with due attention, which prompts me to make my second go at it more earnest. The same is true of the doxology: resisting the temptation to rush through it, one enters more deeply into the origin and goal of all of our actions, the supreme actuality of the Blessed Trinity.

A second example, and one of the most familiar: the Benedicite. Talk about a repetitious prayer! But once one is familiar with it and realizes that we are standing in for the whole of creation, transforming its mute necessities into voluntary praise, there is a special privilege in uttering the verses and a comfort in their lilting succession, like the rolling of waves: “Benedicite omnia opera Domini, Domino: laudate et superexaltate eum in saecula. Benedicite, Angeli Domini, Domino: benedicite caeli, Domino.”

The interruptions of the pattern prompt a reawakening of attention. After saying “Benedicite” 17 times, we say: “Benedicat terra Dominum.” After 8 more iterations of “Benedicite,” we say: “Benedicat Israël Dominum.” Then “Benedicite” is said 5 more times, until we reach “Benedicamus Patrem et Filium cum Sancto Spiritu” and “Benedictus es, Domine.” 30 times we say “Bless” as an imperative; 3 times we say “Let this or that bless” in the subjunctive; and 1 time we say “Blessed art Thou” in the indicative. A pronounced Trinitarian and Christological numerology undergirds this hymn, which is placed on our lips as a kind of litany of blessing admirably suited to Sundays and Holy Days.

A third example, also from Lauds, is the daily repetition of Psalms 148 to 150, which was done by everyone in the West for at least 15 centuries but now remains alive only among the monks and nuns who retain their ancient cursus. This trio of psalms puts on our lips some form of laus or laudare 23 times, giving Lauds its very name, and emphatically stamping it the principal office of pure praise in the Church. There is something captivatingly beautiful in a prayer that has no obvious “use value,” one that is not directed to obtaining a benefit or ridding oneself of an evil. The “gratuitous” repetition, as one might call it, both symbolizes that for-itselfness and serves as a vehicle for inculcating it in us impatient beings who are too often preoccupied with ulterior motives.

A fourth example is the refrain quoniam in aeternum misericordia ejus, repeated 27 times in the recitation or chanting of Psalm 135. A psalm praising the eternity of God’s mercy distantly echoes eternity in its unchanging refrain, like an anchor holding a ship in place, despite the churning waves. It may be hard at times to keep our minds from wandering as we repeat the phrase, but obviously the divine Teacher designed this psalm, as He did all the others down to their last letter, with the spiritual needs of each and every disciple in view.

A final example, and of a rather different character, is the indirect repetitiousness found in Psalm 118, recited daily in the Roman Breviary and once a week in the monastic (namely, divided over the little hours of Sunday and Monday). It takes no great intimacy with Psalm 118 to see that it is conceptually highly repetitive, weaving as many variations with “law, testimonies, commandments, statutes, precepts, judgments, justifications, and sayings” as the psalmist can devise. The Church puts this psalm consistently before us in order to fix our meandering minds and rebellious hearts on the unchanging law of the Lord, which is ultimately His eternal law, His very self, His mercy expressed to us as a rule of life in which we will find life. The layout of the psalm implies that in all the variety we see, in all the vicissitudes we suffer, and even in the seeming pointlessness of the neverending cycle to which Ecclesiastes bears witness, there is a single order of wisdom, a single manifestation of the mystery of God’s love.

So far I have spoken only of textual repetition, but a thorough treatment of our subject would have to include repetitions and seeming redundancies in personnel, ceremonial, gestures, and chant.

The Fate of Repetition

Some of these elements of repetition in the Divine Office were retained in St. Pius X’s breviary and later on in Paul VI’s Liturgy of the Hours, but sadly, many of them were lessened or abandoned. As the Mass was simplified by the reformers to make it briefer and self-explanatory, transparent and accessible, so too was the Office simplified and abbreviated for busy clergy — and this, in spite of the fact that a majority of the Council Fathers, judging from their speeches in the aula, supported neither major changes in the Mass nor a major reduction of the breviary.

Nevertheless, after decades of the new liturgy running alongside the somewhat unexpected survival of the old, it has been possible not only to conceptualize but to experience how the trend toward simplification, the abandonment of formalities, and the rude dismissal of aesthetic principles has brought about a damping of spiritual impact and a lessening of spiritual discipline.

Even the late Fr. Robert Taft, outspokenly anti-Tridentine though he was, admitted this point:

The West might learn from the East to recapture a sense of tradition, and stop getting tripped up in its own clichés. Liturgy should avoid repetition? Repetition is of the essence of ritual behavior. Liturgy should offer variety? Too much variety is the enemy of popular participation. Liturgy should be creative? But whose creativity? It is presumptuous of those who have never manifested the least creativity in any other aspect of their lives to think they are Beethoven and Shakespeare when it comes to liturgy. [2]

What he failed to note, however, is that the liturgy as it came down to us is already the equivalent, albeit on a far greater scale, of a symphony by Beethoven or a romance by Shakespeare. Like the cycles of medieval mystery plays, traditional Catholic worship has a depth, variety, color, and subtlety that defies simple explanation and resists simplification. Patterns of intelligent repetition are one of its most common and effective means for achieving a formal expression of earnestness and a mounting intensification of desire.

Whether, in practice, repetition always retains this value is a subject for the examination of conscience, but it is surely not difficult to see why it is a feature of every historic Christian liturgy, indeed of every religion known to man. From this perspective, the rather ruthless purge of repetitions from the Divine Office, the Mass, and many other rites is yet another angle from which to demonstrate the essentially unhistorical, unliturgical, and irreligious drive behind the liturgical reforms of the last century.

NOTES

[1] It may be noted in passing that the suppression of the very ancient office of Prime, in and of itself, is sufficient to prompt serious doubts about the entire campaign of revision announced in Sacrosanctum Concilium, and allows us to bury once and for all the lie that the liturgical reform was about “restoring ancient worship.” See Wolfram Schrems, “The Council’s Constitution on the Liturgy: Reform or revolution?,” published online at Rorate Caeli on May 3, 2018.

[2] “Return to Our Roots: Recovering Western Liturgical Traditions,” published online at America, May 26, 2008.

Visit www.peterkwasniewski.com for information, articles, sacred music, and Os Justi Press.

“Preach the Gospel to Every Creature”: The Benedicite

Detail from Edward Arthur Fellowes, Benedicite Domino

“And he said to them: Go ye into the whole world, and preach the gospel to every creature” (Mark 16, 15). How do we preach the gospel to every creature — including stones, trees, brute animals?

We cause them to participate in the Gospel by elevating, as much as possible, each rank of being, through our cognition of them and our appreciation of their beauty, their intricacy, their strength, their usefulness [1]; through domestication of them if they are susceptible to human reason in this manner; and through the sacred liturgy, when it takes up each order of being and harnesses it for the worship of God: a church built of stone, vessels made of metal, vestments woven of silk and linen, windows crafted from glass, flowers on the altar, the blessing of fields, livestock, gardens, and wine. We preach the Gospel to them by preaching it through them, thus making them partakers of the mission of the Word and of the Church.

The famous hymn of the Benedicite, taken from chapter 3 of the book of Daniel and incorporated into the Latin Divine Office, strongly underlines this truth. My attention was first drawn to this hymn by a reflection of Thomas Storck’s entitled “All Ye Works of the Lord, Bless the Lord: A Rural Meditation from Daniel 3,” published in the singularly charming but long-defunct journal Caelum et Terra. [2] In the intervening years, I have grown familiar with this hymn from Sunday and festal Lauds, and have noticed, if I pray it slowly enough and think about what I’m doing — addressing imperatives to all of creation! — that something in it always stirs some faint memory, fosters a present gratitude, and incites a longing for a new heavens and a new earth where righteousness will be at home.

More recently, I came across this exquisite passage in a book on the spirituality of Mother Catherine-Mectilde de Bar, foundress of the Benedictines of Perpetual Adoration:

Man finds himself to be as the heart of creation. In our body, the heart is, in effect, only a small organ, and nevertheless it vivifies all the whole. In the same way, man, although tiny in the place he occupies on the earth, animates it in its totality. When the heart loves, it is the whole man that loves. And in the same way, when man adores his God, it is the whole universe that, in him, adores and glorifies its Creator. … Man is the priest of the universe: through his nature, at once bodily and spiritual, he is the intermediary between the visible world and the invisible world, between ponderous matter and the God who is Spirit. He alone is capable of offering that “worship in spirit and in truth” which the Father seeks and which Christ demands of the Samaritaness for quenching the thirst of His Heart. [3] 

“Man is the priest of the universe … the intermediary between the visible and the invisible…” Our Lord Jesus Christ, whose coming in the flesh and whose Second Coming in glory we linger over each Advent season, is the Last Adam, the perfect Man, the divine Man, the Eternal High Priest — the one Mediator between God and man, visible and invisible. In the Son, “ponderous matter and the God who is Spirit” are united indivisibly, inseparably, unconfusedly. In the Heart of Jesus is the perfect glorification of God by material creation. His human knowledge of worldly things elevates them as no other man’s knowledge can do; His love and use of them bestows upon them a dignity they could never have by themselves. In Christ the world encounters its Maker, returns to its origin, attains its end.

When Our Lord prayed the Benedicite, as He surely must have done, He was uttering to each kind of thing the echo of the creative word that called forth its realizations ex nihilo, the vivifying word that sustains them in essendi, the commanding word that harnesses them for salvation, the fearsome word that dooms them to finitude and fire at the end of time. In the Benedicite uttered by His holy lips, the creature heard itself called as if by name, called to bend before the Name above all other names. In particular, the things taken up by Christ as the matter of the sacraments acquired special status: they became, as it were, the aristocracy of material beings, a rank they will occupy until the world is no more. They have become quasi-natural signs of their Mediator.

*          *          *

At the end of the Benedicite, this hymn of creation to its Creator, we are given a fireworks finale of seven categories of humans, signifying the totality of the human race. If we add beasts of burden, which are the only animals that participate in human life through their cooperative labor, we can count eight categories:

Benedicite, omnes bestiae et pecora, Domino,
     benedicite, filii hominum, Domino.
Benedic, Israel, Domino,
     laudate et superexaltate eum in saecula.
Benedicite, sacerdotes Domini, Domino,
     benedicite, servi Domini, Domino.
Benedicite, spiritus et animae iustorum, Domino,
     benedicite, sancti et humiles corde, Domino.
Benedicite, Anania, Azaria, Misael, Domino,
     laudate et superexaltate eum in saecula.

8) Bestiae et pecora. Beasts and cattle are owned by another and profitable to their owners. They are elevated by their participation in human life and labors; we elevate them by imposing on them the rule of reason. Some higher animals even imitate the works of reason as from a distance, as can be seen with sheep dogs, guard dogs, guide dogs, or police dogs, which do some of what a rational animal would do, because they are capable of learning.

7) Filii hominum. “Children of men” emphasizes generation — namely, that we are “from another”: we receive our humanity, establishing the basic anthropological pattern that “you are not your own” (1 Cor. 6, 19) and “what have you, that you have not received?” (1 Cor. 4, 7). So, even as the higher beasts receive their guidance, their training, from their human master and thereby come to participate in his reason, so man receives guidance and training in virtue from God. No man is self-sufficient or autonomous.

6) Israel is brought into being by the Word of the Lord, by His promise, covenant, and mighty deeds. It is the Lord who chooses, who loves, who bestows value on the creature, on the nation, on the people He calls His own. He loves us not because we are already beautiful, but in order to make us beautiful and worthy of His love. “Not because you surpass all nations in number is the Lord joined unto you, and hath chosen you, for you are the fewest of any people; but because the Lord hath loved you” (Deut. 7, 7). “Because thou wast forsaken, and hated, and there was none that passed through thee, I will make thee to be an everlasting glory, a joy unto generation and generation” (Isa. 60, 15); “You have not chosen me, but I have chosen you; and have appointed you, that you should go and bring forth fruit.” (John 15, 16)

5) Sacerdotes Domini. Building on the foregoing, the phrase “priests of the Lord” reminds us that the priest is one who is chosen, called, ordained. “Neither doth any man take the honour to himself, but he that is called by God, as Aaron was.” (Hebr. 5, 4) Just as a Christian cannot baptize or confirm himself, a priest cannot ordain himself but must always be ordained by another. All spiritual generation in Christianity, like all paternal biological generation, has its source in the divine Fatherhood, source of the godhead of the Son and Holy Spirit, source of the whole of creation and all of its differentiated powers.

Here, I cannot refrain from quoting Cardinal Ratzinger’s perceptive remarks about the problem of women’s ordination, as seen through the lens of a prominent feminist theologian:

Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza … took a vehement part in the struggle for women’s ordination, but now she says that that was a wrong goal. The experience with female priests in the Anglican Church has, she says, led to the realization that “ordination is not a solution; it isn’t what we wanted.” She also explains why. She says, “ordination is subordination, and that’s exactly what we don’t want.” And on this point her diagnosis is completely correct.
          To enter into an ordo always also means to enter into a relationship of subordination. But in our liberation movement, says Schussler-Fiorenza, we don’t want to enter into an ordo, into a subordo, a “subordination,” but to overcome the very phenomenon itself. Our struggle, she says, therefore mustn’t aim at women’s ordination; that is precisely the wrong thing to do. Rather, it must aim at the cessation of ordination altogether and at making the Church a society of equals in which there is only a “shifting leadership.”
          Given the motivations behind the struggle for women’s ordination, which does in fact aim at powersharing and liberation from subordination, she has seen that correctly. But then one must really say there is a whole question behind this: What is the priesthood actually? [4]

This final question rings out again and again, piercing through the din of controversy and the darkness of abuse, with a resounding answer in the bimillennial witness of faithful Catholic priests, imitators of and participants in the very priesthood of Jesus Christ, of whom they are living icons. No, true Christianity is not “a society of equals” with a “shifting leadership”; it is a hierarchical society, much like the cosmic order depicted in the Benedicite, reflected in the descending alignment of priest, deacon, subdeacon, and servers in a solemn Mass.

4) Servi Domini. What are we, fundamentally? The Benedicite answers: “servants of the Lord” — servants who do their Master’s bidding. “Behold as the eyes of the servants are on the hands of their masters, as the eyes of the handmaid are on the hands of her mistress: so are our eyes unto the Lord our God, until he have mercy on us.” (Ps. 122, 2) The Aristotelian category usually translated as “relation” is, in Aristotle’s Greek, pros ti, or in Latin, ad aliquid — a much more concrete way of speaking: to be in relation is to be “towards something.” The servant is something of the master’s; he exists towards the master. His eyes are riveted on the Master’s hands, awaiting the signal for work or for rest. The servant depends on the master; without him, he is nothing.

Does this not help us also to see the place of man in the material universe? It is entrusted to man as its master; the world and all that is in it is meant to be his servant. Even as the catalogue of creatures in the Benedicite looks to man for its ultimate explanation and elevation, so man looks to God, and in a special way to Christ, as his Dominus and Magister.

3) Spiritus et animae justorum. “Ye spirits and souls of the just, bless the Lord!” How tightly linked are the verses of this hymn! As we just saw, a servant is, by definition, something of his master. Here, the virtue by which we single out the holy ones in heaven is justice — the virtue that is inherently relational. Aristotle and Aquinas teach us that temperance, fortitude, prudence, and all the other moral and intellectual virtues are about a perfection of oneself in oneself, but justice is the perfection of oneself towards another. The classic definition of justice is “that by which we render to another what is his own.” We cannot have justice towards ourselves, strictly speaking, but only towards another in whose debt we stand.

On the supernatural plane, we have our justice, our righteousness, not from ourselves but from Christ, by whom and in whom we are justified. Our justice, moreover, consists not in the flesh but in the rightly-ordered soul, where the lower is subordinated to the higher, and the highest in us is submitted to the Highest in Himself. “Spirits and souls of the just,” all ye angels and saints, bless the Lord for His mercy in saving you from perdition!

2) Sancti et humiles corde. The “holy and humble of heart” are, we hope and we pray, the rest of us who are not yet saved. Why does the Benedicite use these two words, sancti and humiles corde?

With the creative etymologies of St Isidore of Seville in mind, St Thomas traces the word sanctus to sanguine tinctus, sprinkled with blood, the blood of the sacrificial victim (Summa theologiae II-II, q. 81, a. 8) — as were the Hebrews at Mt Sinai, and as are Christians in their baptism into the death and resurrection of Christ the unspotted Lamb. The only ones who are holy are the ones purified by contact with the blood pleasing to God, because in this way they are themselves claimed for Him and surrendered to Him in their totality.

Humiles corde reminds us of the famous saying of St Teresa of Jesus: “humility is truth.” Truth, for St Thomas, is the adequatio rei et intellectus, the correspondence between thing and intellect, or rather, the intellect’s very identity with the knowable nature of the object. Christ came into the world to bear witness to the truth; the primary aim of the Christian must be to correspond to that truth. In this way we circle back to all the earlier verses: the generation of likeness; the priesthood as icon; servanthood; justice. Everything in the Benedicite strikes a note of “noble humility” or “humble nobility.”

Aquinas reminds us that, while things are the cause of our knowledge, with God it is the other way around: His knowledge is the very cause of things. We can see a parallel in liturgy: tradition is the formal cause of liturgy, not liturgy the cause of tradition. That is, simply making a liturgy, however “correct,” does not establish it as tradition, for tradition is something received, not produced. Once there is a liturgy in existence, it is handed down and received. To make a new liturgy is to violate humility. According to Aquinas, our faculty of understanding is active, but acts upon a world given to us through our senses, so that we are beholden to things in their prior existence, independent of us. Even if material being is elevated in our souls, knowing is being humbled by what is. For Kant, on the other hand, our faculty of understanding can be said to produce reality and synthesize it. No Kantian could recite the Benedicite, and only a Kantian would construct a new liturgy.

1) Anania, Azaria, Misael. At last, we come to the last and most surprising apostrophe in the hymn, prior to its doxology. I say surprising, not in terms of its context in Daniel 3, but for a detached liturgical hymn recited as part of Lauds: why are we addressing these three Hebrew children? A great deal has been and could be said about this, but here I will simply look at the very meaning of their names to see what they may reveal.

• Hananiah (חֲנַנְיָה‎), “Yah (i.e., Yahweh) is gracious”
• Azariah (עֲזַרְיָה‎), “Yah has helped”
• Mishael (מִישָׁאֵל‎), “Who is like God?” (compare “Michael”)

Note the progression in these names.

• The first name denotes God’s basic stance towards creation: He is gracious, He gives and gives freely, to those to whom nothing is owed. As St Thomas teaches, mercy — understood as bestowing good things on those who are in need — is the very root of all of God’s acts, because He creates from nothing, bestowing on the creature its primordial nature (see Summa theologiae I, q. 21, a. 4).
• The second name denotes God’s active intervention in history: He is not only gracious as a settled disposition, but ready to help, to intervene in one’s life, to save those who call on Him. He is not only benevolent but beneficent.
• The third name emphasizes the transcendence of God. However much He involves Himself in the course of the world and in the government of His rational creatures, God is still and always God: He is above and beyond all things and must be adored as such — as existing in and of and for Himself, and the end to which everything else is directed. Not even an infinity of universes of sinless creatures could pay Him adequate homage. Only in the Trinitarian perichoresis or circumincession is the knowledge and love of God sufficient unto Himself.

The Benedicite thus fittingly ends on the cusp of its doxology with the name of the child who reminds us that God is “beyond all praising,” and yet, that our feeble praises please Him, as the three children in the fiery furnace pleased Him when they uttered their inspired words, immortalized in the Church’s liturgy.

The Three Children in the Fiery Furnace, from the Catacombs of Priscilla in Rome.

NOTES

[1] As Aquinas argues, a stone has a nobler mode of existence as an idea in the human soul, where it is alive with rational life, than it has in itself, being a lifeless lump of matter. At the same time, ideas in the soul are accidents, while the stone is a substance, and in terms of this comparison, the stone subsists or has esse simpliciter, while the idea of a stone exists only in another, having esse per accidens.
[2] The essay may be found here, at the Storck archives.
[3] Priez sans cesse, 10–11.
[4] Salt of the Earth: The Church at the End of the Millennium (Ignatius Press, 1997).

Visit www.peterkwasniewski.com for information, articles, sacred music, and Os Justi Press.