Mccabe--5 of 5
WHY A DEAD LANGUAGE IS USED IN THE LITURGY
The reader must not lose sight of the guiding idea of this booklet. It is an examination of the claim that the Catholic creed inspires great art: that it was the main inspiration of the superb art of the Middle Ages, and that the general mediocrity, or the lower general level, of art since the 16th Century is due to the destruction of the influence of the Church over half the world. This is one of the smooth generalizations which an age that has become, for not very creditable reasons, complaisant to the Church accepts too easily from the apologist. As history it is on a level with the mendacious claim that the Roman Church gave the world schools broke the fetter's of the slave, and inspired mercy and philanthropy.
Specially rich periods of artistic, production have always been limited in point of time. They may last 50 years or several centuries but they end in mediocrity. Such periods are also commonly periods of growing skepticism -- compare the great art- period of China, Athens, Persia, and Arab Spain and Sicily -- and the greater artists share this with the general educated class. But the temples and priesthoods are the richest employers, and the artist is concerned only that his art shall do justice to his subject. He may in a sense find an idea (of a Mother of God, for instance) inspiring though he does, not regard it as a truth or as an idea corresponding to reality. I have given ample evidence of this.
As to the common Catholic sophism that the reduction of the Pope's sphere of influence accounts for the cessation of medieval art we saw that the answer is easy. Two arts, literature and music, have been far greater since the Reformation than they were in the Middle Ages, and they ought to be particularly useful for expressing religious ideas. But Catholics have had a miserably small part in proportion to their numbers, in the finer creations of those arts. The medieval Church employed but did not inspire artists -- a rare Fra Angelica does not alter the general truth -- and it is plausible to think that the immense reduction of its wealth after the Reform affected this. But their reduction does not explain the death of art in Catholic, Spain or the predominance of secular art in France. Anyhow, the Church is now richer and more powerful than ever, and the non-Catholic world has been duped or bribed into such an attitude that it would welcome Catholic artistic production of a high order. You cannot even speak of the chill of a hostile environment, even if you think that such a thing does prevent a great artist from expressing himself. Yet the Church, while it boasts that it has more members than ever and certainly has far more wealth than ever, cannot inspire great art in its own body. Four-fifths of its best modern art, its music, was composed by the type of men it professes's to abhor above all others -- apostates'. "The Church and its great art" is part of the dupery it practices on the modern mind. But if I had been content to say so boldly, or to refer the reader to other writings of mine, I should have been unconvincing, so in this booklet I have had to give considerable detail. I trust it has interested the reader.
There remains the question why the Roman Church employs a dead language, Latin, in its services. It is, of course, not unusual for priests to continue to read the sacred books of a religion in the language, which may otherwise be dead, in which they were written. The Jews still have the Old Testament read in Hebrew: the Moslem even in Turkey and elsewhere read the Koran in Arabic. But in the Church of Rome practically the entire service on Sundays and the morning service on all days is in Latin. The Greek Church and its various national daughters have the services in ancient Greek, but their motive is the same as that of the Roman hierarchy. It is not as is sometimes suggested, in order to affirm and sustain the international or Catholic character of the Church. lt has a double object. Locally it helps to maintain the very emphatic line that is drawn between the clergy and the laity and strengthen the position of the former as a separate and very much higher caste; and, especially, it is one of the most effective means of reminding Catholics everywhere of their connection with and object dependence upon the Vatican and the Papacy.
A Catholic church has the upper (away from the door) end, or usually about a fourth or fifth of the area, isolated by a decorative low iron rail beyond which the laity must never go. Most of this is empty space to add to the impressiveness of the altar at the extreme end at which, raised by a number of steps above the body of the church, the priests, in vestments of colored silk -- the color changing according to the saint, or mystery honored on that day -- over long white linen robes, the priests perform their ceremonies. Remember the Catholic belief that on that altar Jesus Christ is physically and bodily present under the "accidents" of a wafer or very thin cracker, and you will realize the feeling, almost of awe, with which the devout Catholic follows the evolutions in the distant sanctuary. The setting is exactly the same as in a theater, and, though the body of the church is not darkened, at the evening service the light about the altar is increased by an immense number of candles in shining brass candelabra, flowers are used lavishly, and the sanctuary is gradually filled with a slight haze from the fumes of incense. It is a continuation of the old pagan tradition. So the priests of Isis or Mithra once impressed their followers. Indeed it goes back to the sacrifices in the Jewish temple, the pageants on the great festivals of ancient Egypt, even the mysteries performed at the summit of lofty pyramid temples in ancient Babylon and Assyria while the crowd stood in silence in the court-yard. To some extent the modern theater, which was not in its beginnings a revival of the Greek theater, is developed from this clerical show. Simple theatrical features were added to the ceremony in the sanctuary to please the totally illiterate congregation and out of these developed the early "miracle play." Large numbers of non-Catholics attend Catholic services, generally standing near the door, just to see the quaint free spectacle at the far end of the church.
The use of Latin has an obvious advantage in spectacles of this sort, but it has others which are not obvious. The morning service, the mass, is so rigorously confined to Latin that in my sacerdotal days we had to chant even the final prayer for the king in Latin! On Catholic doctrine there is no disadvantage whatever in this use of Latin. The mass is not a "Service" in the ordinary sense. What happens in the mass is that the priest offers a real sacrifice to God. Don't ask me to explain here how Jesus Christ (God) is offered to a God who is not Jesus Christ, as in what sense it is a real sacrifice. I did enough cold dissection of the amazing doctrines of the Roman Church in the 16th book and do not care to return to that tedious occupation. It is enough to say that the Church theory is that the priest in every mass "repeats, the sacrifice of Calvary" an all that the people have to do is to be present on their knees with bowed heads and silent lips..
When this "solemn sacrifice" is in modern times accompanied by the operatic music of Gounod or Haydn, when the priests interrupt the solemnity in various places and sit while tenors and bass and perhaps violins and cellos, distort the language of the prayers into musical arabesques, the result is really so fantastic and. irreligious that Pius X, the blunt old peasant Pope of 40 years ago, issued a ukase that this sort of thing must stop. He wanted to bring the Church back to the use of plain chant, the simple musical notation used before operatic music was invented, at least as it was improved by Palestrina. For once a Pope found that he was not really an autocrat. Even in the Church the power of the purse is greater than the terrific powers granted in theory to the Pope. The financial loss in every country would have been immense. There would be no more "opera for servant girls"; no more "beautiful services" for artistic converts and neurasthenic ladies.
This concealment of the mutilation or massacre of the liturgy in musical services by keeping the words in Latin is balanced by the advantage in low (or unsung) masses. I explained in an earlier chapter that, although this is a long series of prayers and addresses to the Almighty of a solemnity in accordance with the Catholic theory of the mass, the people are impatient and are apt to complain of any priest who does not "get through" in less than half an hour, usually 25 minutes. The young priest has to practice for weeks before he says his first mass. He has to learn to say the prayers, some of which change with the calendar, at -- I have just tested by experience -- about 200 words a minute. It is, perhaps, fortunate for himself that the words are in Latin, for, although he is supposed to understand the very elementary Church Latin, he is less sensible of the meaning, except in the slower and more solemn passages, than he would be if they were in English.
The advantage in helping to link the entire Church with Rome, the home of the Latin tongue, is just as obvious. I have occasionally made light comments on the American apologists and priests -- if not bishops and cardinals -- who are so blatant in stressing the harmony of their faith with American ideals that they swear they would cut the connection with Rome or (which is the same thing) defy the Pope if he gave orders inconsistent with the American spirit or Constitution. Would they, on that highly fantastic hypothesis, abandon the use of Latin in the services? On what ground could they retain it? And if they turned the liturgy into plain American how would the archaic sentiments sound, and how would the mutilation of the words by priests at the altar or by non-Catholic singers in the choir impress the faithful?
They could retain it only on one ground, and it is the chief reason why the Church retains it today in every country. It is part of the paraphernalia that makes a separate and very superior caste of the priests. Like the black cassock or black suit, the reversed collar, the shaven poll which he is supposed to have, the incongruous title of "Father" for a man who professes to think paternity a weakness of the flesh, the ancient Roman (or possibly Persian and Egyptian) garb he wears at the altar, the dividing sanctuary line, the "blessing" which a good Catholic (on his or her knee's) is supposed to ask when he enters a house, and so on, it marks him off as a member of a sacred caste. In a Catholic country his indulgence in drink does not matter -- little notice is taken of this even in Eire -- and his amorous adventures are judged very humanly. As he repeatedly reminds them in sermons, his character as a man has nothing to do with the mystic and august character which "Holy Orders" have conferred on him. He can absolve sins or in certain cases refuse to absolve them and leave a man under sentence of hell. He can work the stupendous miracle of transubstantiation. When countries are still solidly Catholic, and equally illiterate and densely ignorant, he encourages the belief that his magical powers go far beyond invisible results like absolving sins or turning a bit of paste into the living body of Jesus. His curse may be a very real thing. His prayers -- at from a quarter to one or two dollars a time -- are more effective than the services of a doctor or a veterinary surgeon and must be secured for a vast range of purpose's, from blessing a new house or a new churn or fishing boat to success in an impending examination, the detection of a thief, curing a woman of sterility, or painlessly removing a gall- stone.
We need not, however, go back once more into "the really Catholic world"; though you will not forget that these are conditions in which two-thirds of the Pope's subjects live. Our broad conclusion must be that instead of the Church of Rome rendering a notable service to the race and to civilization in inspiring art it has in every age used such art as was available for the usual purposes of the Black International: the protection or augmentation of their power and wealth. It has not rendered, a service to the exploited mass of the people by bringing color and warmth into their drab lives by its services but has used art, if you can give that title to the decorations and services of the average Catholic church, to distract their attention from the absurdity of its doctrines and the extortions of the priests. In nine-tenths of its sphere of influence it uses debased forms of art to help to prevent people from reflecting, during their one hour a week in church, that what they are taught to call their faith is an idle and, in proportions to their resources, costly compliance with the traditional customs in which they were reared; and in the Churches of the more comfortable one-tenth it uses art, like any other employer and from almost any source, to help in sustaining that uncritical attitude which enables the apologist to foist amazing untruths and sophistry even upon the educated layman. Religion may or may not be "the opium of the people." Catholic art certainly is.
It is a familiar Protestant charge that religion in the Roman Church is mechanical, materialistic, a matter of physical acts and sensuous titillations. It is an entirely just charge as far as the great majority of the faithful are concerned. The Black International has in its own interest enacted that it is compulsory under the direct penalties that a man shall be in the church, looking on at a ceremony, which he only half understands, for half an hour once a week. The rest is voluntary and has to be made attractive. I have in Eastern Europe seen men standing outside the wide-open doors of a cathedral, some of them smoking cigarette's, listening to the distant mass. They are within the Catholic law. Religion is to them not a set of beliefs but a small number of compulsory movements. For the majority of the others it is a series of ceremonies which they usually -- there are, of course, special festivals at rare intervals which rouse real fervor -- follow in a frame of mind which it would be difficult to analyze and the clergy have no desire to analyze. People are "doing their duty." And if anybody thinks this a superficial statement of the situation let him wait until in the next book we squarely face the claim that the Church at least renders a great social service or "does good." |
