“Messe Dialoguée en Français”: A Glimpse into the Devolution of Liturgy in the 1940s

It is understandable that many would see liturgical disaster as a unique product of the last Council, and particularly of the implementary body headed by Annibale Bugnini, the Consilium ad exsequendam. Others who have read more widely will understand that it is linked to the gradual radicalization of the Liturgical Movement, as it went from the restorationist and educational model of Dom Guéranger to the pastoral utilitarianism of the postwar period. Relatively few, it seems to me, recognize that the roots of this disaster go far back to (in varying ways) the Protestant Revolt, the Enlightenment, and the age of industrialization.

Lately, a number of fine studies have been published that help us to see these more remote pretexts and premises of the liturgical reform of the 1960s, when the program of the Synod of Pistoia finally entered every suburban parish.

Nico Fassino’s recent article in the The Pillar, “The surprising history of the Children’s Mass” tells us:

It is commonly believed that Children’s Masses are a unique development of the modern liturgical reforms, a direct outgrowth of the Second Vatican Council. In reality, however, special Masses for children – including what might now appear to be shocking liturgical innovations – stretch back more than a century before the Second Vatican Council.
     These Masses began as a 19th century attempt to grapple with dramatic social changes and challenges wrought by the modern world. They gained widespread popularity and even gave rise to the creation of vernacular participatory Mass methods for adults years before Vatican II.
     In total, hundreds of editions of these methods for children and adults were published, running to millions of cumulative copies, between 1861 and 1961. They were published with approval, printed for decades, and used with permission around the world.
     This is the story of the surprising origins of “Children’s Masses” in the early 1800s, their widespread popularity around the world, their sudden fall from favor immediately before the Second Vatican Council, and their rebirth during the initial years of the revised Roman Missal of Paul VI.

While Fassino shows us how deeply the rot of bad liturgical ideas had already set in well before the Council, it also happily shows how men of principle strongly resisted this literally juvenile mentality. One does not have to question the good will of these would-be reformers in order to see that such efforts at promoting “participation” are bought at the expense of “dumbing down”—a superficialization that subtly implies that liturgy is a thing for children to grow out of, not a thing to which we are apprenticed in a lifelong process of assimilation.

Similarly, John Paul Sonnen relates the story of “The First Permanent Altar Facing the People in the United States,” which, as it happens, was installed as early as 1938, at a time when it would have been officially forbidden!

Archbishop John Gregory Murray (1877-1956), a native of Connecticut, became the Archbishop of St. Paul (Minnesota) in 1931. During his 24-year tenure he became a frequent visitor to the monks of St. John's Abbey in nearby Collegeville, Minnesota. In those years St. John’s was the largest Benedictine Abbey in the world and they had made a name for themselves as the American epicenter of the Liturgical Movement and what came to be called the liturgical apostolate, coming into fashion after the First World War. 

       In 1938 Archbishop Murray laid the cornerstone of the new English Gothic Revival church of the Nativity, under construction in a beautiful new residential neighborhood in St. Paul’s Groveland neighborhood. The architect of the church was a non-Catholic by the name of James B. Hills. It was during this time that Archbishop Murray approved a plan that was heretofore unheard of: the altar in the basement crypt chapel was to be set permanently facing the people.

       In those days this represented a forbidden stratum of liturgical experimentation that was not yet conceived by most, or sanctioned with approval by the Holy See. An innovation in its day, such a thing had not been tried anywhere in the country. Proponents of the Liturgical Movement in northern Europe had been slowly promoting the idea of Mass facing the people, but it was still a novelty concept in the rest of the world. 

Here is the altar John is talking about, in the only photo that has survived of it (today the room is a recreational space):

We can see this sort of thing in a 1930 photo from the Abbey of Maria Laach in Germany, a hotbed of progressive liturgism. Note that here, there is a more deliberate effort to make the altar look like a meal table:

Returning now to Fassino’s statement that “vernacular participatory Mass methods for adults” were being promoted “years before Vatican II,” I thought readers of NLM would appreciate seeing the photos of a section contained in a Missel-Vespéral Romain edited by the redoubtable Dom Gaspar Lefebvre, OSB, and published in 1946. The reader who kindly shared these photos noted that she also has another edition of the same missal from 1942, which contains the same section.

The photos were sent page by page; I cropped them and combined them for ease of viewing, which explains the mismatches from left to right. (As always, click to enlarge.)

Title page and copyright page

What is most striking about this entire method, which, as Yves Chiron describes, was also practiced by (indeed, pioneered by) Bugnini in Italy, is how much blathering is going on. Throughout the Mass there is “Une Voix,” presumably a layman, who acts as the reader or “commentator” in some cases; and there are many short texts and some long texts that “Toutes” (All) are supposed to say.

The priest, meanwhile, is doing his part at the altar in Latin, so there is a parallel Mass: his in Latin and everyone else’s in French.

A rather heavy-handed attempt is made to bring out the Trinitarian structure of everything: the Kyrie, the Gloria, the Credo... Yes, of course, it’s there and it’s important, but whatever happened to not hitting people over the head with a didactic shovel?

There is a lot of chatter DURING the Roman Canon, as Une Voix laboriously explains to Toutes that now we are praying for the Church militant, now we are offering the Victim, now we are praying for the dead... What strikes me the most is how the pious paraphrase being spoken throughout by the people is so much akin to the “methods of hearing the Mass” that the same Liturgical Movement held in such disdain! It’s as if they simply transferred private devotion into a public mode. This was surely a far cry from Pius X’s “don’t merely pray at Mass, pray the Mass!”

It is actually refreshing to see the act of Spiritual Communion placed right where it is, as a gentle reminder that not everyone should go up to Communion, but only those properly disposed to do so. And thankfully, this act is left... unannounced and unrecited by Toutes. Sadly, even the Last Gospel has to be paraphrased and simplified.

Even the thanksgiving after Mass is corporate and vocal.

It is very difficult to read a method like this and not to wonder, “What in the world were they thinking?” Just because you recite a lot of pious phrases about the Mass all along does not mean you are participating in the holy oblation, the ultimate sacrifice. In fact, you might just miss it altogether by skating on the surface and having no opportunity for recollection, assimilation, and self-offering from the depths of one’s soul.

In his 1975 Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii, Pope Paul VI—who only six years earlier had unleashed on the world a Mass that was patterned after this kind of “Messe Dialoguée en Français”—lamented: “Modern man is sated by talk; he is obviously tired of listening, and what is worse, impervious to words.”

Physician, heal thyself.

Visit Dr. Kwasniewski’s Substack “Tradition & Sanity”; personal site; composer site; publishing house Os Justi Press and YouTube, SoundCloud, and Spotify pages.

A Follow-up on Vocal Prayer and Mental Prayer: Wisdom from Benedict XVI

As we approach the one month anniversary of the death of Joseph Ratzinger, I wish to share with NLM readers one of my favorite parts of the ever-quotable Jesus of Nazareth series — namely, the place in volume 1, From the Baptism in the Jordan to the Transfiguration, where Ratzinger is commenting on the Our Father.

He has what strikes me as a perfectly balanced understanding of the relationship of vocal prayer to higher forms of prayer: he sees how they are intrinsically and necessarily connected, so that the lower is not reduced to a ladder to be kicked away. Since my own article “The Denigration of Vocal Prayer in the Name of ‘Mental Prayer’: A Recipe for Disaster” was misunderstood by some as a denigration of mental prayer (!), I thought it would be worthwhile to share the wisdom of Benedict XVI on the matter. After the selection from this book, I have included a pertinent passage from Spe Salvi.

* * *

This is what prayer really is — being in silent inward communion with God. It requires nourishment, and that is why we need articulated prayer in words, images, or thoughts.

The more God is present in us, the more we will really be able to be present to him when we utter the words of our prayers. But the converse is also true: Praying actualizes and deepens our communion of being with God. Our praying can and should arise above all from our heart, from our needs, our hopes, our joys, our sufferings, from our shame over sin, from our gratitude for the good. It can and should be a wholly personal prayer.

But we also constantly need to make use of those prayers that express in words the encounter with God experienced both by the Church as a whole and by individual members of the Church. For without these aids to prayer, our own praying and our image of God become subjective and end up reflecting ourselves more than the living God. In the formulaic prayers that arose first from the faith of Israel and then from the faith of praying members of the Church, we get to know God and ourselves as well. They are a “school of prayer” that transforms and opens up our life.

In his rule, St Benedict coined the formula Mens nostra concordet voci nostrae — our mind must be in accord with our voice (Rule 19,7). Normally, thought precedes word; it seeks and formulates the word. But praying the Psalms and liturgical prayer in general is exactly the other way round: The word, the voice, goes ahead of us, and our mind must adapt to it. For on our own we human beings do not “know how to pray as we ought” (Rom 8:26)–we are too far removed from God, he is too mysterious and too great for us. And so God has come to our aid: He himself provides the words of our prayer and teaches us to pray. Through the prayers that come from him, he enables us to set out toward him; by praying together with the brothers and sisters he has given us, we gradually come to know him and draw closer to him.

In St Benedict’s writings, the phrase cited just now refers directly to the Psalms, the great prayer book of the People of God of the Old and New Covenant. The Psalms are words that the Holy Spirit has given to men; they are God’s Spirit become word. We thus pray “in the Spirit” with the Holy Spirit.

This applies even more, of course, to the Our Father. When we pray the Our Father, we are praying to God with words given by God, as St Cyprian says. And he adds that when we pray the Our Father, Jesus’ promise regarding the true worshipers, those who adore the Father “in spirit and truth” (Jn 4:23) is fulfilled in us. Christ, who is the truth, has given us these words, and in them he gives us the Holy Spirit.

This also reveals something of the specificity of Christian mysticism. It is not in the first instance immersion in the depths of oneself, but encounter with the Spirit of God in the word that goes ahead of us. It is encounter with the Son and the Holy Spirit and thus a becoming-one with the living God who is always both in us and above us. […]

The fact that Luke places the Our Father in the context of Jesus’ own praying is therefore significant. Jesus thereby involves us in his own prayer; he leads us into the interior dialogue of triune love; he draws our human hardships deep into God’s heart, as it were.

This also means, however, that the words of the Our Father are signposts to interior prayer, they provide a basic direction for our being, and they aim to configure us to the image of the Son. The meaning of the Our Father goes much futher than the mere provision of a prayer text. It aims to form our being, to train us in the inner attitude of Jesus (cf. Phil 2:5).

This has two different implications for our interpretation of the Our Father. First of all, it is important to listen as accurately as possible to Jesus’ words as transmitted to us in Scripture. We must strive to recognize the thoughts Jesus wished to pass on to us in these words. But we must also keep in mind that the Our Father originates from his own praying, from the Son’s dialogue with the Father. This means that it reaches down into depths far beyond the words. It embraces the whole compass of man’s being in all ages and can therefore never be fully fathomed by a purely historical exegesis, however important this may be.

The great men and women of prayer throughout the centuries were privileged to receive an interior union with the Lord that enabled them to descend into the depths beyond the word. They are therefore able to unlock for us the hidden treasures of prayer. And we may be sure that each of us, along with our totally personal relationship with God, is received into, and sheltered within, this prayer. Again and again, each one of us with his mens, his own spirit, must go out to meet, open himself to, and submit to the guidance of the vox, the word that comes to us from the Son. In this way his own heart will be opened, and each individual will learn the particular way in which the Lord wants to pray with him. [1]

* * *

For prayer to develop this power of purification, it must on the one hand be something very personal, an encounter between my intimate self and God, the living God. On the other hand it must be constantly guided and enlightened by the great prayers of the Church and of the saints, by liturgical prayer, in which the Lord teaches us again and again how to pray properly.

Cardinal Nguyen Van Thuan, in his book of spiritual exercises, tells us that during his life there were long periods when he was unable to pray and that he would hold fast to the texts of the Church's prayer: the Our Father, the Hail Mary and the prayers of the liturgy.

Praying must always involve this intermingling of public and personal prayer. This is how we can speak to God and how God speaks to us. [2]


NOTES

[1] pp 130-33 in Jesus of Nazareth, vol. 1
[2] Encyclical Letter Spe Salvi, n. 34

“Liturgy, Devotions, and Mental Prayer in the Christian Life” — Guest Article by Dom Alcuin Reid

The following was written by Dom Alcuin Reid OSB and published as part of the Monastère Saint-Benoît’s Time After Pentecost Newsletter 2020. Given its pertinence to the discussion sparked by my article on Monday, I thought it would be appropriate to share it with a wider audience—which we do with Dom Alcuin’s permission. PAK

A number of enquiries have been received recently regarding the place of mental prayer and devotional practices in Christian and monastic life. These responses are published in the hope that they may be helpful.

Your observation that attempts at mental prayer can often become self-centred even when using methods to focus on God or His mysteries, etc., points to all too true a reality. I am meditating, I am doing the doing &c. Of course this is in order to place myself in and under God's gaze and grace and to open myself to His doings, but it seems all too easy not to get to this stage, or to be distracted from it by preoccupations, etc.

And yes, praying the Divine Office or assisting at Holy Mass or another liturgical rite is quite different. It is a different dynamic, a different psychology, because—almost regardless of me—the Church is doing the doing and what I must do is 'plug myself into' that doing, into that objective reality, become caught up in it, in Christ acting in and through it, and thereby be brought into that encounter which is in fact prayer. That, of course, is why the richness and beauty of the rites are so important: so as to 'catch' our various psyche's in the differing states they are in today and transport them (us) into this encounter. One catches more bees with honey, than vinegar... Spartan rites connect with and catch up fewer people... (And in the current crisis, with most having practically no liturgical life, one must wonder just what damage is being done. We are essentially liturgical creatures. Without this being lived out we could easily become rationalistic protestants...).

What you wrote earlier about modern devotions and forms of prayer rings very true in monastic ears. There is, really, no such thing as “monastic” spirituality; rather monastic spirituality is that of the Church herself—of drinking deeply from the living streams of grace flowing through the Sacred Liturgy, including of course the reading of the Sacred Scriptures in their proper ecclesial context, including the mediation on them by the Fathers and the mediation of them by the Sacred Liturgy as developed in Tradition. Personal or private prayer wells up from this and, in silence and recollection, digests or contemplates the riches into which the Church immerses us in her Sacred Liturgy. This is Christian prayer, liturgical and private, connected and integral. The two should be connected.

Of course the Church has blessed and permitted spiritual and devotional practices which can seemingly be not so connected or integrated: to be sure they are not of themselves bad, and indeed in many circumstances these may be the best one can do. But one can do no better than to be immersed in, to be truly living from, the Sacred Liturgy, and thereby to be optimally empowered to live it out in one's particular vocation. This is something that the authentic liturgical movement had sought to recapture for all of Christ's faithful (not excluding the clergy!).

Practically speaking, pray parts of the Divine Office. The Office is the prayer of the Church, it is the Sacred Liturgy. Of course, its sung celebration is the norm. Whether lay, religious or cleric, whoever prays it— even ‘privately’—prays it with the whole Church as part of the Liturgy. Frustration with devotio moderna practices is not unique at all. It is a sign of a soul that seeks much more than 'stop gap' measures.

Some groups, even “traditional” ones, give the impression that individual mental prayer is the fundamental starting point for all Christian life. This can sometimes be the case in post-reformation devotio moderna communities or orders. But that is an error. To take part in the Divine Office and Mass, to live the sacraments and the sacramental rites, blessings, processions, etc: that is the staple diet of any Christian. That is where we read the Scriptures, where we sing the hymns developed in Tradition, serenade Almighty God with the verses and canticles that have arisen out of the Church’s love and supplication over the centuries. That is prayer. Christian Prayer. Ecclesial prayer. Full stop.

From fully and consciously praying the Sacred Liturgy optimally celebrated various sentiments and desires should arise in each of us, depending on our circumstances, vocation, maturity, etc. And in those concrete circumstances, if recollection is preserved, we find ourselves contemplating (digesting/ingesting) the riches upon which we have been fed in the Sacred Liturgy. This is most sublimely done in lectio divina, of course, where we probably don't need that much more than the liturgy itself as a stimulus. And retaining this sense of recollection and its fruit, contemplation, which is surely the end of Christian and monastic life, enables us to live the liturgy and to live from it, as we engage in 'other' works and duties throughout the day.

Engaging in what moderns call “mental prayer” can seem to be at best an effort to ‘produce’ contemplation by means of a short cut (i.e. without the liturgical life and nourishment that is its true source) for people who do not have the necessary recollection in their life and work. In so far as this goes, it can be a good. At worst it can be a denial of the normative manner in which the Church prays and be posited as an alternative or almost Pelagian ‘direct’ means of reaching God, without the need for ‘mere externals’ such as the liturgy. If one goes too far down that path one eventually arrives at Protestantism.

So, pray the Sacred Liturgy as fully and as richly as possible, and then give Almighty God space through the allocation of digestion time (lectio divina) and preserve that recollection as best as possible throughout the day so that the interiorization process can continue and nourish you further. That should lead to all that “mental prayer” includes, and a lot more besides, and indeed it will do this more naturally and ecclesially, in a manner thoroughly integrated with the liturgical life of the Church.

The Denigration of Vocal Prayer in the Name of “Mental Prayer”: A Recipe for Disaster

Psalter of Jean, Duc de Berry (Paris, Bib. N., MS. fr. 13091), 14th cent.

Those who have studied the history of spirituality are aware of the mighty shift that occurs in the West between what might be called devotio antiqua or devotio monastica and devotio moderna (originating in 14th-15th centuries). The former is, to speak colloquially, a “bread-and-butter” spirituality: liturgy and lectio divina are the main courses — public divine worship and private reading (of Scripture, of Church Fathers, of commentaries on the Psalms) accompanied by vocal prayer, as kindling for contemplation; and all of it tightly surrounded with bodily asceticism. This, broadly speaking, just is monastic spirituality.[1]

Once the shift toward a new spirituality began, it was, one might say, destined to arrive at the modern concept of “mental prayer” and, more particularly, something like Ignatian exercises. In this brief study I have no intention of attacking devotio moderna as such, much less Jesuit or Carmelite trends, but rather would like to consider what happens when a certain kind of attitude toward mental prayer begins to detract from and ultimately undermines the value of vocal and therefore liturgical prayer. It seems to me that this is a key development for understanding the progressive neglect and denigration of the liturgy until it became seen as more or less raw material for devotional exploitation.[2]

The recently deceased Greek Orthodox theologian Kallistos Ware (1934–2022), may he rest in the Lord’s peace, makes an excellent point about why the early monks of the Church undertook such extreme, and to us often shocking, austerities:

There is one feature of the unrelaxed severity and discipline of early monastic life that certainly ought to be adverted to and that offers a clue to the reasons why some men resolve to join a religious community; namely, the undeniable correlation between hardship and an intense marshalling of inner, and frequently unsuspected, resources. Words cannot really encompass what happens here. But the fact seems well established. In the evidence of the Gulag Archipelago, in the testimony of men like Solzhenitsyn, Tertz, Panin, and Shifrin, in the records of the tidal wave of misery let loose by German Nazism, there is a persistent and humbling proof of the capacity of individuals, trapped amidst the worst conditions of deprivation, to unlock an inner dynamism, which often is manifested as a commanding faith in God and which must never be confused with the understandable motive of escapism. It has happened too often in the twentieth century to be trivialized or explained away; and somewhere within it lies a common bond with the ordeals, voluntarily undertaken, and the achievements of the first monks of the Church. Sharp differences of time and circumstance do not alter the shared character of the early saint and the prisoner of our day who has climbed beyond gross suffering and oppression to arrive at a level of richness beyond all common imagining.”[3]

This, of course, is only a partial view of the nature and motivation of monastic austerities. But the very limitations of this view enable it to convey a clearer message. How many people think of the religious life in this way, as a voluntary self-sentencing to a lifetime of the Gulag (as it were), in order to reap the spiritual harvest that such a sentence will bring? But that is clearly what the first monks understood themselves to be doing. They did not think of the sufferings involved as an initial stage that would eventually be left behind; they thought that these sufferings would come to seem less troubling and significant simply because of the growth of a love of God that would put them in the shade, even as the sufferings themselves continued or increased.

Velazquez, St Anthony Abbot and St Paul the Hermit (ca. 1634)

Works on spiritual theology from at least the sixteenth century onwards have a grave disadvantage. At some point, the understanding of the connection between prayer and the saying of the Divine Office seems to have been lost. The standard approach in these works is to distinguish between vocal prayer and mental prayer; to treat these two forms of prayer as mutually exclusive, by defining vocal prayer as prayer vocally expressed in outward words, and mental prayer as prayer expressed purely mentally without any sounds or words; and to describe mental rather than vocal prayer as the way through which a religious attains perfection.

In this schema, vocal prayer is seen as valuable a) as prayer for beginners, b) as being a keeping of the regulations of religious societies that require forms of vocal prayer and thus as being a necessary exercise of obedience, c) as fulfilling the obligation of the Church to offer a corporate worship to God. The saying of the Divine Office by monks is classified as vocal prayer; and in consequence it ceases to be seen as the main form of monastic prayer, the opus Dei, and the principal path to monastic perfection. Mental prayer practiced outside the Divine Office is described as the prayer in which perfection is attained.

A lamentable example of this attitude can be found in Dom Augustine Baker’s Holy Wisdom, a work of spiritual guidance written specifically for Benedictine monks that is in many other respects excellent. Dom Augustine makes these comments on the prayer of the first monks:

Now to the end that, by comparing the manner of living observed anciently by religious persons with the modern in these days, it may appear what great advantages they enjoyed towards the attaining of perfection of prayer beyond us, we may consider: 1. their set devotions, what they were; and, 2. their daily employments during the remainder of the day. As concerning the first, their appointed devotions, either in public or private, was only reciting the psalter, to which they sometimes enjoined a little reading of other parts of scripture. For as for the aforementioned conventual mental exercise of prayer, it was very short, being only such short aspirations as God’s Spirit did suggest unto them in particular, as it were the flower of their public vocal prayers. Yea, and in private, when they did purposely apply themselves to prayer, they seldom varied from the manner of their public devotions; for then they also used the psalter.

So far, so good! But then he goes on:

It cannot be denied but that in ancient times many holy souls did attain to perfect contemplation by the mere use of vocal prayer; the which likewise would have the same effect upon us if we would or could imitate them both in such wonderful solitude or abstraction, rigorous abstinences, and incredible assiduity in praying. But for a supply of such wants, and inability to support such undistracted long attention to God, we are driven to help ourselves by daily set exercises of internal prayer to procure an habitual constant state of recollectedness, by such exercises repairing and making amends for the distractions that we live in all the rest of the day.

A curious form of argument: since we moderns are rather lazy, averse to solitude, abstinence, and assiduity, and vocal prayer is much too time-consuming, we have to find a form of prayer that is more like a concentrated vitamin.

Notwithstanding God’s hand is not shortened, but that if He please He may now also call souls to contemplation by the way of vocal prayer, so as that they are their general and ordinary exercise; which, if He do, it will be necessary that such souls should, in their course, observe these following conditions:
       The first is, that they must use a greater measure of abstraction and mortification than is necessary for those that exercise mental prayer. The reason is, because internal prayer, being far more profound and inward, affords a far greater light and grace to discover and cure the inordinate affections; it brings the soul likewise to a greater simplicity and facility to recollect itself, &c., and therefore vocal prayer, to make amends, had need be accompanied with greater abstraction, &c.
       The second condition is, that those who use vocal prayer must oblige themselves to spend a greater time at their daily exercises than is necessary for the others, to the end thereby to supply for the less efficacy that is in vocal prayer.

The desert fathers, St. Benedict, and the great monastic figures of Catholic history would have been quite surprised to discover that the public, formal, solemn, corporate vocal prayer of the Church has less efficacy than a (somewhat solipsistic) “internal prayer.”

The third is, that in case they do find themselves at any time invited by God internally to a pure internal prayer (which is likely to be of the nature of aspirations), they then must yield to such an invitation, and for the time interrupt or cease their voluntary vocal exercises for as long time as they find themselves enabled to exercise internally. These conditions are to be observed of all those who, either in religion or in the world, desire to lead spiritual lives, and cannot without extreme difficulty be brought to begin a spiritual course with any kind of mere menial prayer....
       The use of voluntary vocal prayer in order to contemplation may, in the beginning of a spiritual course, be proper: 1. For such simple and unlearned persons (especially women) as are not at all fit for discursive prayer; 2. yea, even for the more learned, if it be used as a means to raise and better their attention to God; yet so that it must always give place to internal prayer when they find themselves disposed for it.

Vocal prayer is either something to occupy the “weaker sex” or a set of training wheels for the bicycle.

But as for that vocal prayer, either in public or private, which is by the laws of the Church of obligation, no manner of pretenses of finding more profit by internal exercises ought to be esteemed a sufficient ground for any to neglect or disparage it; for though some souls of the best dispositions might perhaps more advance themselves towards perfection by internal exercises alone, yet, since generally, even in religion, souls are so tepid and negligent that if they were left to their own voluntary devotions they would scarce ever exercise either vocal or mental prayer; therefore, inasmuch as a manifest distinction cannot be made between the particular dispositions of persons, it was requisite and necessary that all should be obliged to a public external performance of divine service, praising God with the tongues also (which were for that end given us), that so an order and decorum might be observed in God’s Church, to the end it might imitate the employment of angels and glorified saints in a solemn united joining of hearts and tongues to glorify God. This was necessary also for the edification and invitation of those who are not obliged to the office, who perhaps would never think of God, were they not encouraged thereto by seeing good souls spend the greatest part of their time in such solemn and almost hourly praying to and praising God.

The utilitarianism in the foregoing argument is a most remarkable thing, and even more remarkable that it was thought appropriate by Baker’s contemporaries that one might argue in such a manner.

Now, whereas to all manner of prayer, as hath been said, there is necessarily required an attention of the mind, without which it is not prayer, we must know that there are several kinds and degrees of attention, all of them good, but yet one more perfect and profitable than another; for, first, there is an attention or express reflection on the words and sense of the sentence pronounced by the tongue or revolved in the mind. Now this attention being, in vocal prayer, necessarily to vary and change according as sentences in the Psalms, &c., do succeed one another, cannot so powerfully and efficaciously fix the mind or affections on God, because they are presently to be recalled to new considerations or succeeding affections. This is the lowest and most imperfect degree of attention, of which all souls are in some measure capable, and the more imperfect they are the less difficulty there is in yielding it; for souls that have good and established affections to God can hardly quit a good affection by which they are united to God, and which they find gustful and profitable for them, to exchange it for a new one succeeding in the Office; and if they should, it would be to their prejudice.

The varied and successive meanings of psalm verses is here described as a distraction to union with God. In some way, this is true, but Baker’s approach is strangely dualistic. Surely, the point of the repeated vocal prayer is to praise God as He wishes, to form the nous of the praiser in a certain way, to prepare the soul for God, and indeed, to encounter Him in His word?

The second degree [of attention] is that of souls indifferently well practised in internal prayer, who, coming to the reciting of the Office, and either bringing with them or by occasion of such reciting raising in themselves an efficacious affection to God, do desire without variation to continue it with as profound a recollectedness as they may, not at all heeding whether it be suitable to the sense of the present passage which they pronounce. This is an attention to God, though not to the words; and is far more beneficial than the former. And therefore to oblige any souls to quit such an attention for the former would be both prejudicial and unreasonable. For since all vocal prayers, in Scripture or otherwise, were ordained only to this end, to supply and furnish the soul that needs with good matter of affection, by which it may be united to God, a soul that hath already attained to that end, which is union as long as it lasts, ought not to be separated therefrom, and be obliged to seek a new means till the virtue of the former be spent.

King David in Prayer: Master of the Ingeborg Psalter (French, after 1205)

The actual verbal content is indifferent to the internal affection, and one should stop paying attention to the words in order to cultivate the interior state for as long as possible. Words in this analysis are nothing more than timber, chopped up and fed into the furnace of the heart. It sounds wonderfully pious, but so profoundly anti-intellectual a stance finds its eventual outlet in what Knox calls “enthusiasm” and what we are familiar with in the charismatic movement’s cultivation of an exalted state. Why did God bother to reveal “the sense of the present passage” or even to use “words” at all? Baker continues:

A third and most sublime degree of attention to the divine Office is that whereby vocal prayers do become mental; that is, whereby souls most profoundly and with a perfect simplicity united to God can yet, without any prejudice to such union, attend also to the sense and spirit of each passage that they pronounce, yea, thereby find their affection, adhesion, and union increased and more simplified. This attention comes not till a soul be arrived to perfect contemplation, by means of which the spirit is so habitually united to God, and besides, the imagination so subdued to the spirit that it cannot rest upon anything that will distract it. Happy are those souls (of which God knows the number is very small) that have attained to this third degree, the which must be ascended to by a careful practice of the two former in their order, especially of a second degree! And therefore in reciting of the Office even the more imperfect souls may do well, whensoever they find themselves in a good measure recollected, to continue so long as they well can, preserving as much stability in their imagination as may be.

Yet it is hard to see how one will reach the third stage — of uniting internal affection and exterior awareness of the “sense and spirit of each passage” — by denigrating the text, seeing it as something of a distraction, and encouraging a utilitarian indifference to or exploitation of it.

A once-common sight in the Catholic world: monks devoted to the opus Dei

The catastrophic effects of this understanding of the Divine Office are evident: as soon as one can find, or thinks one has found, a better and quicker route to divine affection or a better method for sparking mental prayer, one will drop the breviary like a hot potato. And yet Baker’s position is a standard one for Counter-Reformation spiritual writers. Its value to us today should be to give a clear exposition of what not to believe about the recitation of the Divine Office, and to educate us in the value of that recitation through accepting the opposite of what it says.

The ancient fathers were not able to get spiritual benefit from vocal prayer because of their great austerities; rather, they were given the grace to carry out these austerities because of their devotion to praying the Psalms. The vocal recitation of prayers strengthens our mental understanding and assent to them, rather than the opposite, so vocal prayer is in fact a higher form of mental prayer than silent prayer. It is also a public confession of faith and a public praise and petition to God, which are superior to private acts of the same character. The content of vocal prayer of the Office is higher than the content of the mental prayers that we elaborate for ourselves, even if this elaboration is done under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, because what we are praying is divinely revealed.

For all these reasons, vocal prayer of the Divine Office is better suited to lead us to perfection than purely mental prayer, and is in fact the main path to perfection, as the early monastic Fathers understood it to be. I can speak from a certain amount of experience here; starting to pray the Psalms in the Monastic Diurnal radically changed my understanding of prayer and the Christian life for the better, because I was praying what God had to say, not what I had to say. When we pray the Office, we should therefore work at understanding it and meaning it; that is the main way to pray. That is why St. Benedict says monks should devote time consistently to the study of the psalms, so that they may understand what they are praying and therefore pray better.

It is striking that biographies of St. Thérèse will state in one sentence that she greatly loved saying the office, and then proceed to summarize her sanctity by saying she put up with difficult nuns, did mental prayer, and so forth. All that is true enough; yet saying the Office was her job, so to speak, within the Church! That was the point of the kind of religious life she had chosen, and it took up a great deal of her time. Nor did she try to shirk it; nor has any of the great spiritual masters shirked it. If anything, they took it for granted as the backdrop.

Today it cannot be taken for granted. Indeed, there is evidence that, outside of the traditionalist world, the Divine Office has fallen on hard times, if not fallen into oblivion. It does not require an extensive knowledge of the history of the Church to recognize that the renewal of religious life will take place in and through the Divine Office, or it will not happen at all.

St Teresa, like St Thérèse, was devoted to the Psalms

I would like to thank Dr. John Lamont for his collaboration on this article, and especially for sharing the text from Augustine Baker.

NOTES

[1] For those who wish to follow the devotio antiqua or devotio monastica way, here is a simple plan for it. First, visit an observant Benedictine monastery and spend as much time there as you can, ideally on annual retreat. Together with such a visit, get a copy of the Benedictine office (such as the Monastic Diurnal) and learn how to pray it in Latin. Second, adopt a rule of fasting and poverty. To Love Fasting: The Monastic Experience by Adalbert de Voguë OSB is a good guide. Third, be aware of the context and limitations of the books of spiritual guidance that you will read. The traditional classic works, like those by St. John Climacus and St. John Cassian, are excellent, but one has to keep in mind that they were written for men who were already living the monastic life, and that as a result they take for granted the main features of this life. They do not say a lot about fasting, following the rule, and liturgical prayer, because their readers would get instruction on this from another source; they are meant to be a supplement to the monastic life, not a guide to the whole of it. This is why time spent with the monks or nuns is so important. For more, see my articles “What a visit to an observant Benedictine monastery can teach us”; “Even if you can’t be a monk, you can still benefit from monastic life. Here’s how”; and “Looking for a new examination of conscience? Try the Rule of St. Benedict.”

[2] I speak about this in two earlier NLM articles: “The Ironic Outcome of the Benedictine-Jesuit Controversy” and “Objective Form and Subjective Experience: The Benedictine/Jesuit Controversy, Revisited.” The former was revised and published as a chapter in my book Noble Beauty, Transcendent Holiness.

[3] Preface to The Ladder of Divine Ascent by St. John Climacus, Classics of Western Spirituality, pp. xvi–xvii.