Dietrich von Hildebrand on beauty, 4: Raising hearts to God

A.W. Pugin's stunning chapel at St Edmund's College, Ware, draws the eye,
and thus the attention and the heart, to the centre of the Sacrifice of the Mass.

Concluding this series of quotations from Dietrich von Hildebrand's Trojan Horse in the City of God, mostly from chapter 26, a final section addresses the question of the role of beauty lifting our hearts to God: perhaps a hackneyed phrase, but for something which, surely, we all feel. It is a theme taken up in recent times by Pope St John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI, who talk of the via pulchritudinis, the Way of Beauty, as a form of evangelisation.

Beauty helps form us in the Faith and helps us to become holy. If we take this idea seriously, we will concur with the attitude of the Liturgical Movement which wanted to rid the liturgy and devotions of aesthetic elements which struck the wrong note, in the first half of the 20th century: most obviously, sentimental hymns and art. Far, far worse, however, is the invasion of our churches by various forms of pop music in more recent decades. It is not just a matter of giving the audience aesthetic pleasure, but of engaging with them in the right way and to the right end: this brings us back to the earlier arguments in this series, against aestheticism and on the question of beauty as an adequate expression of worship, serving worship and not distracting us from it to its own, alien, theme.

Dietrich von Hildebrand on beauty, 3: Irrelevance

The vast baldachino of Westminster Cathedral, built to frame and
emphasise the central rites of the Mass.

The final argument against the importance of beauty considered by Dietrich von Hildebrand in Trojan Horse in the City of God is that beauty is simply irrelevant to the proclamation of the Gospel and the salvation of souls.

He argues that while it may not be necessary, it does not follow that it is not significant.

First, the adequate expression of our worship requires beauty.

Second, beauty in the liturgy lifts our souls to God. 

This post is concerned with the first of these ideas; the second will be expounded in the next post. The first is the less familiar idea of the two, but it is an important one. Public worship is by definition a public act; it must involve words and rites of some kind: it must find some kind of expression, or it is not happening at all. What kind of expression should it have? Something ugly, plain, utilitarian or functionalist? No: Catholic liturgy, like the liturgies of all traditional religions, seeks its expression in the most beautiful fashion possible.

In this way, beauty is appropriate to the liturgy because it is called for by the greatness of the liturgy itself, and the God the liturgy serves. This is sufficient justification. Nothing we can do will be too good, too beautiful, to give expression to our worship.

Dietrich von Hildebrand on beauty, 2: Evangelical poverty

The tiny and rather plain Oxfordshire church of Holy Trinity, Hethe, was extravagantly
painted for its centenary in 1930, making it one of the wonders of the Birmingham Archdiocese.

Dietrich von Hildebrand, in his book Trojan Horse in the City of God, goes on from the argument in the last post about aestheticism to consider the argument, against taking beauty seriously, that it is opposed to evangelical poverty.

That there is no such opposition is clear from the example of people like St Francis of Assisi and St Jean Vianney. They displayed evangelical poverty but remained deeply appreciative of beauty in the liturgy. Some liberals simply can't understand this and attempt to sweep this fact under the carpet, but a fact it remains. Vianney used to buy expensive silks from Lyon for liturgical use: Lyon was then the centre of the silk trade in France. On the other hand, the comfortable air-conditioned offices so beloved of our liberal masters in government as in the Church really are opposed to evangelical poverty.

It is not really so difficult to understand. Stripping the church of its furnishings and installing carpets and comfortable chairs is about making us comfortable and being careless about the beauty which should be offered to God. The more traditional approach of making do with hard pews and drafts but lavishing silk and gilding on the sanctuary is about making do with less for ourselves and honouring God. Does it really need to be said that it is the latter which is in accord with evangelical poverty, and not the former?

Dietrich von Hildebrand on beauty, 1: Aestheticism

The small church of SS Gregory & Augustine in Oxford, with the recently installed paintings
the Catholic artist James Gillick.

I'm going to post a few really helpful passages from Dietrich von Hildebrand's Trojan Horse in the City of God, on the subject of beauty in the liturgy.

He addresses a series of arguments against the importance of beauty in the liturgy, church buildings and so on. The first of these is the accusation of 'aestheticism': that those who value beauty are guilty of this error. So, what is aestheticism? Hildebrand defines it: it is an appreciation of beauty detached from the meaning of the beautiful object: in the case of the liturgy, it is an appreciation of the architecture, vestments, music, poetry and so forth without reference to the theological and moral content which these things are seeking to convey to viewer and auditor. There is such a thing as 'aestheticism', it is bad, but those attached to the Traditional Mass can make it clear that they are not guilty of it. It is, after all, perfectly obvious that that as a movement we care very deeply about the content, the meaning, of the beautiful things found in the liturgy. We aren't just as happy listening to, say, a melodious Arian hymn sung with skill, as Palestrina. The theology of an artefact is, for us, inseparable from our appreciation of its aesthetic qualities.

Mystical not ascetic: a response to Pope Francis, Part 3

Photo by Fr Lawrence Lew

Update: to ease navigation here is the complete series of posts:
Part 1: what his disctinction 'Mystical' vs. 'Asectic' means

Part 2: why traditional Catholics can better accomodate this perspective than 'Neo-Conservatives'
Part 3: why liberal Catholics shouldn't feel too comfortable with it
Part 4: what is going on with the reference to the life and family issues.
Part 5: what to make of the worry that the Vetus Ordo suffer 'ideologization'.

In my last post I argued that the veiws of Catholics attached to the Traditional Liturgy are in many ways closer to Pope Francis' preferences than those of many 'Conservative' Catholic writers. Pope Francis doesn't like centralisation in the Church: nor do we, but they do. Pope Francis condemns legalism: so do we, but they don't. Pope Francis wants a Church open to the Spirit, not concerned above all with rule-keeping and discipline: so do we, but again, Neo-Con writers too often give the impression that they do not.

This actually fits in with a certain well-worn Neo-Con argument which says that Liberals and Traditionalists are the same in their disrespect for proper authority and discipline. The people who used to make that argument are really hoist by their own petard now, and I hope they are enjoying the experience. But things are a lot more complicated than that; as I argued here, Traditionalists like the Latin Mass Society and the Traditional Orders have always gone to extraordinary lengths to keep the rules, and do so even when putting forward an argument that the rule in question wasn't really a rule at all. In the case of the obligation to ask permission for the celebration of the Traditional Mass, this argument of ours was vindicated in spectacular fashion by Pope Benedict, who wrote in Summorum Pontificum in 2007 that we'd never needed permission after all.

Another problem with applying that old Neo-Con argument here, is that it implies Pope Francis is a liberal. Again, things are more complicated than that, and this is what this post is about. What Pope Francis wants, remember, is a Church conformed to Christ. Liberals like to use that kind of phrase when they want to deny a teaching of the Church or commit some liturgical abuse, but Pope Francis actually means it. As I quoted him before, in Brazil he said

"We may become a charitable NGO, but not the Church, the Bride of the Lord."

In another sermon, he told newly ordained priests:

"Therefore, carry out the ministry of Christ the Priest with constant joy and genuine love, attending not to your own concerns but to those of Jesus Christ. You are pastors, not functionaries. Be mediators, not intermediaries."

What does this mean?

The key thing to keep in mind is the notion of conforming oneself to Christ: the concerns of Christ, not those of an organisation, however enlightened; the Church as the Bride of Christ, not an NGO. Pope Francis is talking about the Church having a spiritual identity and a spiritual mission. That doesn't mean we shouldn't be concerned about the poor - far from it. But it does mean we shouldn't conform ourselves to the World, even in order (as we might imagine) to serve the poor more effectively.

Making the streets of an English country town resound to the sound of prayer: Walsingham 2013

This is a critique of the secularisation of the Church. It is a critique of the classic liberal argument that we must stop being Catholic in any meaningful sense in order to advance justice in the world. The liberal nuns, to take an extreme example, have 'moved beyond Christ' while working for social justice.

And here's something else. Pope Francis wants us to be open to the world, not closed in on ourselves, looking inwards to an organisation which is concerned only with its own workings. This is a critique of a bureaucratic tendency in the Church which is today at its apogee, and it is liberal Catholics who are in charge of this bureaucracy  Liberals love committees: this is true across all areas of life. They flourish on comfy chairs with little plates of biscuits and matters arising from the minutes of the last meeting. This the antithesis of a bishop or parish priest taking real responsibility for his diocese or parish, being a father to it; it is the antithesis of the encounter between a pastor and Christ found in the poor and in those wounded by sin. 'Oh no, I'm not going to answer your question, that's for the liturgy committee!' 

The attitude of defending the Church as an institution, rather than doing what is called for by the Church's supernatural reality, is at issue in the paedophile crisis. When bishops and superiors cover up, deny the truth, move problem priests around, fight unjust legal battles and refuse to pay compensation, they are defending the Church conceived of purely as a human organisation, a bureaucracy. Such actions have been done by prelates of a range of views, but it happened at a time when liberals had a massive domination of the levers of power.

It would be a tragedy indeed if Pope Francis' desire for decentralisation led only to the morbid growth of Bishops' Conference bureaucracies, where these attitudes could continue to flourish.

In sum, Pope Francis is opposing the invasion of the Church by secular attitudes and secular goals. The point was expressed with great lucidity by Dietrich von Hildebrand, one of the founders of the Traditional movement:

It is easy to feel oneself alive and free if one forgets about the unum necessarium, the one thing necessary, and directs all one’s powers toward secular endeavors. It is easy to feel oneself bursting with energy if, for example, the clearance of slums concerns one more than transformation in Christ. What the progressives call “leaving the Catholic ghetto” is in reality giving up the Catholic and keeping the ghetto. They would replace the universal Church with the ghetto of secularism, with imprisonment in a stifling immanentism, with isolation in a world that sits in umbra mortis, in the shadow of death. To achieve a unity of religion and life by adapting religion to the saeculum does not result in a union of religion with our daily life, but reduces religion to the pursuit of purely mundane goals.

...

The fallacy in the progressivist approach is obvious. If we assert that religion should permeate our lives, the implication is that we should break through to the realization of the primary vocation, the very meaning of our lives, which is our re-creation in Christ. We should then no longer be exclusively absorbed by the immanent logic of our professional lives or by everyday preoccupations, but should see them and all things in the light of Christ. Indeed, the echo of our self-donation to Christ should resound through all the scenes of our lives.

It is the very opposite of uniting true religion with everyday life to believe that all that is demanded from a Christian is to fulfill the duties prescribed by the logic of his secular life. This would mean the absorption of religion by secular activities, so that we would be satisfied that in fulfilling the requirements of these we were doing everything that God could ask of us. In reality this is to avoid the confrontation with Christ. Those who act in this way are Christians in name only. The decisive question for the vivification of religion today is whether through the light of Christ our everyday lives will become deeply changed and adapted to Him, or whether the Christian religion is to be adapted to the immanent logic of mundane concerns.

Thinking about von Hildebrand's characterisation of the alternatives, which is Pope Francis putting forward: the progressive theory that only secular concerns are real, that (for example) in a Catholic school exam results are the only thing to think about, or, instead, the idea that even what we do in secular contexts should be suffused with the Christian spirit and give witness to the Faith? The latter approach fills liberals with horror, but it is clearly what Pope Francis is talking about.

Dietrich von Hildebrand's analysis, in his great book Trojan Horse in the City of God (1967), is so useful in this context that I've had ten pages retyped in order to make it available to a wider public. You can download the text of the chapter 'Vivification of Religion' here.

In these three posts I have not been arguing that Pope Francis is really a Trad in a false flag operation, and that tomorrow he is going to celebrate the Old Mass and do all sorts of other things we'd like. No, he is coming from a very different place. Nor is my point that his words can be twisted around to suit a traddy agenda. I'm not concerned with taking stray phrases out of context, but of the underlying argument.

Rather, my point is that if you look at the underlying argument, what he is saying is not so easily categorisable in terms of liberalism or conservatism; he recognises problems with both, even while (as it would seem) associating Traditional Catholics with problems as well. The object of my discussion has been to suggest a way in which Traditional Catholics can respond to his analysis of the problems in the Church, an analysis which represents a genuine insight, to show that we can be part of the solution, and not only part of the problem. I don't suppose we will make ourselves heard by the Holy Father directly, we don't have a loud enough voice for that, but we will have plenty of opportunity to engage with people officially directed to apply his policies, and to people impressed with his general orientation. It is to them, therefore, that we need to explain that Traditional Catholics are not hyper-conservatives with all the baggage of Ultramontanism and legalism, and that we recognise the need to conform ourselves, and the world, to Christ, and not the Church, and ourselves, to the World.

I have one last thing to add, in a final post in this series. In the spirit of freedom of discussion there is something Pope Francis said with which I wish to disagree.

More Hildebrand on the Requiem

Bishop Hopes blessing the catafalque at the LMS Annual Requiem

'To see the purely human aspect of things is a necessary foundation for seeing the supernatural aspect. One who does not see the human aspect is insensitive and superficial, and his attitude is incompatible with the true faith. The deeper one sees the natural tragedy of death, then the more one is able to grasp the tremendous significance of our redemption through Christ, and the more one possesses that true faith which St Paul expresses by asking, "O death, where is your sting?" But as soon as one jumps over the human aspect without passing through, one does not ascend to the supernatural aspect, but rather replaces the natural with the supernatural aspect, which can only be attained by faith - one treats the supernatural as if it were the natural, one takes it for granted, and omits the sursum corda, that ascent into the supernatural world which is possible only in faith, If the human aspect is not duly seen, then the aspect of faith is naturalized, and dragged down to the level of the obvious. If the human aspect is suppressed or omitted, then the aspect of faith becomes ungenuine, unreal.

'Thus the Alleluia and the elimination of black vestments in the Requiem not only ignores the human aspect of death, but also distorts the supernatural perspective on death. The death of a man is the moment of judgement, it is the great and fearful encounter with the divine Judge. Although death is transfigured by hope - hope for our dead beloved one, and for all who loved him and mourn for him - this hope does not take away ultimate seriousness and holy fear. It is simply not the right form for the Mass for the Dead when this Mass gives the impression of celebrating the entrance of the deceased into eternal blessedness. ...

'The optimism of the new Mass for the Dead, as well as its tendency to introduce a harmless note into the theme of the judgement of God (there was none of this in the Tridentine Requiem) is deeply related to this-worldliness, and to a loss of a sense of the supernatural.'

Dietrich von Hildebrand, 'The Devastated Vineyard'. pp224-5

See my extracts from this book, on grief, and on truth and the via media.

Dietrich von Hildebrand on grief

I've blogged a passage from Dietrich von Hildebrand's The Devastated Vineyard not long ago; here's another one I thought worth sharing.

Many people are confused about how they should react to bereavement; some are even made to feel guilty about feeling natural grief. Hildebrand supplies a good corrective. From 'The Devastated Vineyard', pp130f 

It is a regrettable sophism to say (as it was sometimes said in sermons) that the death of a father or mother, husband or wife, or of a child, is no reason for sadness as long as they have died well, after receiving the last sacraments, as long as we can hope that they are with God. Of course the eternal happiness of one whom we truly love is the most important thing, but separation from the beloved, even if only for a time, remains a terrible cross. Whoever does not feel this cross, whoever just happily goes his way with the consolation that the beloved has found eternal happiness, is not directed to eternity in a special way--he is simply insensitive and does not want to be disturbed in the normal rhythm of his daily life. He is simply making a comfortable excuse when he emphasises that the eternal salvation of the other is the most important thing. He has forgotten that even Jesus Christ, the God-man, prayed in Gethsemane: 'Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me.' He does not understand that a cross which has been imposed on us should be suffered under as a cross. Only then can we attain to the true consolation which lies in the perspective of eternity, to the true hope of eternal blessedness.    

 

We should simply read the magnificent sermon of St Bernard of Clairvaux (no. 26 in his sermons on the Canticle of Canticles) in which he grieves over the death of his brother. Here we find first of all the lamentation, filled with deep grief, over the death of his beloved brother, and only then the ascent to the fact that death is the beginning of a life of eternal blessedness.   

It is always a disastrous mistake when we try to skip over certain phases instead of passing through them, when we violate the central value of dicretio. (I have spoken at length about this virtue in my book, 'Liturgy and Personality'.) When we do not pass through the necessary phases on our way to some end, phases which are objectively prescribed by the nature of things, and are willed by God, when we try to skip them, then we distort everything and do not really attain to our end; in fact, we falsify the end and render it mediocre.

Trads and Progressives: is the truth in the middle?

I have only recently got hold of a copy of Dietrich von Hildebrand's 'The Devastated Vineyard', a critique of the post-conciliar problems of the Church, published in 1973. Hildebrand is a fascinating figure, from a well-connected and highly cultivated family, he pursued a career in Philosophy and converted to Catholicism in 1914. He was a staunch opponent of the Nazis and fled Germany, and then Austria, and then France, as they advanced across Europe. He ended up teaching in the Jesuit university of Fordham, New York, from 1940 until his retirement in 1960.

He did not fit in well at Fordham, because he was not a Thomist. His philosophical background was Phenomenology, like St Edith Stein and Bl. Pope John Paul II. One of his early books, 'In Defence of Purity', strikingly anticipates many of the themes of Theology of the Body. In the 1940s, it was a common view that Catholic philosophy had to be Thomistic. Such a view is historically indefensible: however much honour the Church may, and should, accord St Thomas Aquinas, other philosophical systems and methodological approaches cannot be ruled out in advance.

In any case, he went on to be one of the great early defenders of Catholic Tradition, and founded the Roman Forum / Hildebrand Institute to carry on his work of giving a reasoned defense of the Faith in its fullness. (Dr John Rao, the Director of the Roman Forum, is giving a talk at the approaching Latin Mass Society Conference on 9th June.) Hildebrand found that many other defenders of Tradition took the same narrow-minded attitude to Catholic philosophy as his Fordham colleagues had in the 1940s. He called them 'Integrists'; I'm not sure if this is the right word but we need a label, and it'll do. It is extremely interesting to read what he has to say about them, because the Catholic traddy scene is still, and perhaps inevitably, populated by people who can be described in this way. Hildebrand examines the question of whether 'conservative extremists', 'integrists', are just as bad as the opposite, progressive extremists. He rejects it.

'The narrowness of the integrists may be regrettable, but it is not heretical. It is not incompatible with the teaching of the holy Church. It views certain philosophical theses as inseparable from orthodoxy, though they in no way are. But these philosophical theses are are also in no way incompatible with with Christian Revelation. Therefore, it is completely senseless to place those who hold a philosophic thesis to be inseparable from Christian Revelation, i.e., from the teaching of the holy Church, on a level with those who promulgate philosophic theses which are in radical contradiction to the teaching of the holy Church, ...' (Devastated Vineyard, p16)

He goes on to give a psychological explanation for the tendency to equate the 'two extremes' among Catholics inclined towards a conservative outlook.
'Men who have had to suffer much under the narrowness of spirit of the extremists, and who have been unjustly suspected of being heretics, have developed such an antipathy toward this fanaticism, and they shun and fear it so much, that they are inclined to put this evil on the same level as grave errors of faith, or indeed as explicit heresies.' (p18)

The question of what philosophical, theological, political, indeed cultural and educational attitudes are compatible with the Faith is, of course, the question of the day, and perhaps the question of every era in the Church. There will always be people who take a broad view, and people who take a narrow view. The narrow view is the safer view; the broad view promises exciting possibilities of various kinds. If we are allowed to do this, teach that, or permit the other, we may have more tools to spread the Faith, we may be able to lift burdens off people's backs. In the end the Church makes the judgement, but only after public debate, sometimes going on for centuries. The latitudinarians think everyone else is an integrist; the integrists thinks everyone else is a latitudinarian. But Hildebrand makes the important point: however wrongheaded, even destructive, an integrist may be, he does not lack the Faith. He is always on the safer side. There is no moral equivalence between someone who thinks it is not safe to say that NFP, or evolution, or women in trousers, or liturgical innovation, is compatible with the Faith, and someone who says that you can be saved through Buddha, or denies the Real Presence, or thinks there's nothing wrong with sex outside marriage. On the one hand you have someone who is, perhaps, annoying, and if mistaken is obviously mistaken on certain (highly complex) theological questions, but he is not denying any truths of Faith. On the other hand, you have someone who clearly is denying truths of Faith, even if they claim that they are merely presenting a new interpretation of it.

What is the error of someone who holds a narrow view of what is compatible with a doctrine? In a certain, sense, he hasn't got the doctrine right, because he is drawing implications from it which it does not have. But no human, on earth, is able to see all the implications of a doctrine, they are infinite. About the implications of doctrines, we work out what we can, and await the definitive judgement of the Church, which may be a long time coming. What is required of Catholics is to believe the doctrine, in the form presented by the Church, and the integrist is doing this even if he gets some of the implications wrong. But when you hear someone saying that the truth is compatible with the denial of the doctrine in its familiar formula - Jesus isn't really God, Mary isn't really sinless, there's no original sin - they are denying the doctrine, as presented by the Church, and that is a completely different matter.

These debates will always be with us. The more narrow-minded type of Catholic is on the rise, in the Church, and that is a good thing, because it is evident, to anyone willing to look, that there has been a type of broadmindedness at work for the last two generations which takes away all content from the Faith. It is compatible not so much with the Catholic Faith as with a indeterminate blancmange of positive attitudes. Yes, it is possible to be too narrow, but don't run away with the idea that this is just as bad as being a heretic.