A beautiful beginning to the New Year

The Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar complained passionately about the disappearance of beauty from philosophy and theology. By the 19th century there had arisen in the human mind artificial divisions among truth, goodness and beauty. By the 20th, theologians stopped writing about the beauty of God. Balthasar tried to make up for this with his seven-volume work, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics.

Having mentioned Balthasar, I feel timid about adding my own thoughts about beauty, except to cite the traditional definition that beauty is balance. We are instinctively drawn to balance, and the well-trained eye can see, and the well-trained ear can hear, esthetic harmony. Although the contemporary art world, with its obsession with shock and originality, has tried to divorce art from beauty, advertisers constantly use beautiful images and stirring music to attract viewers and listeners to their products.

I enjoy flipping through the gorgeous photographs of fashion magazines, but I resent that beauty is so carefully employed to sell products, often useless products like overpriced skin cream. It smacks of idolatry, and I think so much care and attention should be lavished instead on the worship of God. The beauty of creation mirrors the beauty of God, so how much more fitting it is to employ beauty both to draw people to the worship of God and to praise Him.

Liturgical language and visual art are desperately important — and a quick check of eBay shows what we have lost by way of vestments alone — but I make a special plea on behalf of music. This is partly because I am the sister of graduates of Toronto’s St. Michael’s Choir School and the wife of a former choir boy for St. Paul’s Episcopalian Cathedral, Dundee, Scotland.
The Christian musical tradition is ancient and glorious. It has been passed from generation to generation. For centuries children have been trained to become talented church musicians by conscientious teachers inspired by such geniuses as St. Hildegard, Byrd, Tallis, Palestrina, Monteverdi, Victoria, Bruckner and Elgar. These composers wrote settings for the Mass and other ancient prayers, updating traditions rather than replacing them. Today, unfortunately, we are more likely to hear their work in the classical music section of HMV than we are in a Catholic church.

However, I am extraordinarily blessed in that my little group of local Extraordinary Form of the Mass enthusiasts includes a number of musicians who were well-trained in the Church’s ancient traditions. And they are quite flexible. When Mass is celebrated in a church, they sing in the choir stalls in the back. When Mass is celebrated in the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter’s (FSSP’s) tiny house chapel, they sing around the harmonium in the carpeted hallway outside.

On the first of January, Mass was in the house chapel, and during the Offertory, a tenor sang the opening bars of Claudio Monteverdi’s “Christe Redemptor Omnium.” A bass took up the next. The sun was shining through the windows; the priest was wearing a golden chasuble. The ancient Mass was already beautiful, but the music — touchingly rendered by three men and a harmonium — palpably lifted my heart to the beauty of God.

Scholars believe that “Christe Redemptor Omnium” (Christ, Redeemer of All) is a sixth-century hymn although such an authority as Dom Gueranger attributes its composition to the fourth century St. Ambrose of Milan, teacher of St. Augustine. Traditionally it is the office hymn for Vespers on Christmas Day. In 1612 Pope Urban and a team of Jesuit liturgists carried out a reform of the ancient hymns in the breviary, fixing the metre and making the Latin rather more classical. This led to the text Monteverdi set in 1640. (Subsequent generations have found these changes ill-advised and have restored many of the hymns to their original form.)

Claudio Monteverdi (1567- 1643) was the most important Italian composer of his lifetime and was trained by the choirmaster of his hometown cathedral. He began publishing his music at the age of 15 and became a court musician to Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga of Mantua. Soon after the Duke’s death in 1612, Monteverdi won the position of choirmaster of St. Mark’s Cathedral in Venice. His setting for “Christe Redemptor Omnium” could be considered part of his mature period, a fine example from a long and prolific career.

And so I reflect that many centuries and much work, a Christian textual tradition and a Christian musical tradition, learned skills and inspiration, dedicated teachers and talented pupils, led to that moment of beauty in a cold house chapel in Edinburgh. What a shame if such traditions end or are warped past all recognition. To lose beauty is to lose truth and goodness, too.
 

(Cummings McLean is a Canadian writer and author of Seraphic Singles.)