Music in the History of the Western Church. Dickinson Edward
must inevitably absorb somewhat of the dignity of the rite to which it ministers. And when the music in itself is the product of the highest genius and is rendered with reverence and skill, the effect upon a sensitive mind is more solemnizing than that obtained from any other variety of musical experience.
This secret of association and artistic setting must always be taken into account if we would measure the peculiar power of the music of the Catholic Church. We must observe that music is only one of many means of impression, and is made to act not alone, but in union with reinforcing agencies. These agencies – which include all the elements of the ceremony that affect the eye and the imagination – are intended to supplement and enhance each other; and in analyzing the attractive force which the Catholic Church has always exercised upon minds vastly diverse in culture, we cannot fail to admire the consummate skill with which she has made her appeal to the universal susceptibility to ideas of beauty and grandeur and mystery as embodied in sound and form. The union of the arts for the sake of an immediate and undivided effect, of which we have heard so much in recent years, was achieved by the Catholic Church centuries ago. She rears the most sumptuous edifices, decorates their walls with masterpieces of painting, fills every sightly nook with sculptures in wood and stone, devises a ritual of ingenious variety and lavish splendor, pours over this ritual music that alternately subdues and excites, adjusts all these means so that each shall heighten the effect of the others and seize upon the perceptions at the same moment. In employing these artistic agencies the Church has taken cognizance of every degree of enlightenment and variety of temper. For the vulgar she has garish display, for the superstitious wonder and concealment; for the refined and reflective she clothes her doctrines in the fairest guise and makes worship an aesthetic delight. Her worship centres in a mystery – the Real Presence – and this mystery she embellishes with every allurement that can startle, delight, and enthrall.
Symbolism and artistic decoration – in the use of which the Catholic Church has exceeded all other religious institutions except her sister Church of the East – are not mere extraneous additions, as though they might be cut off without essential loss; they are the natural outgrowth of her very spirit and genius, the proper outward manifestation of the idea which pervades her culture and her worship. Minds that need no external quickening, but love to rise above ceremonial observances and seek immediate contact with the divine source of life, are comparatively rare. Mysticism is not for the multitude; the majority of mankind require that spiritual influences shall come to them in the guise of that which is tangible; a certain nervous thrill is needed to shock them out of their accustomed material habitudes. Recognizing this fact, and having taken up into her system a vast number of ideas which inevitably require objective representation in order that they may be realized and operative, the Catholic Church has even incurred the charge of idolatry on account of the extreme use she has made of images and symbols. But it may be that in this she has shown greater wisdom than those who censure her. She knows that the externals of religious observance must be endowed with a large measure of sensuous charm if they would seize hold upon the affections of the bulk of mankind. She knows that spiritual aspiration and the excitement of the senses can never be entirely separated in actual public worship, and she would run the risk of subordinating the first to the second rather than offer a service of bare intellectuality empty of those persuasions which artistic genius offers, and which are so potent to bend the heart in reverence and submission.
In the study of the Catholic system of rites and ceremonies, together with their motive and development, the great problem of the relation of religion and art meets us squarely. The Catholic Church has not been satisfied to prescribe fixed forms and actions for every devotional impulse – she has aimed to make those forms and actions beautiful. There has been no phase of art which could be devoted to this object that has not offered to her the choicest of its achievements. And not for decoration merely, not simply to subjugate the spirit by fascinating the senses, but rather impelled by an inner necessity which has effected a logical alliance of the special powers of art with the aims and needs of the Church. Whatever may be the attitude toward the claims of this great institution, no one of sensibility can deny that the world has never seen, and is never likely to see, anything fairer or more majestic than that sublime structure, compounded of architecture, sculpture, and painting, and informed by poetry and music, which the Church created in the Middle Age, and fixed in enduring mould for the wondering admiration of all succeeding time. Every one who studies it with a view to searching its motive is compelled to admit that it was a work of sincere conviction. It came from no “vain or shallow thought;” it testifies to something in the heart of Catholicism that has never failed to stir the most passionate affection, and call forth the loftiest efforts of artistic skill. This marvellous product of Catholic art, immeasurable in its variety, has gathered around the rites and ordinances of the Church, and taken from them its spirit, its forms, and its tendencies; – architecture to erect a suitable enclosure for worship, and to symbolize the conception of the visible kingdom of Christ in time and of the eternal kingdom of Christ in heaven; sculpture to adorn this sanctuary, and standing like the sacred edifice itself in closest relation to the centre of churchly life and deriving from that its purpose and norm; painting performing a like function, and also more definitely acting for instruction, vividly illustrating the doctrines and traditions of the faith, directing the thought of the believer more intently to their moral purport and ideal beauty; poetry and music, the very breath of the liturgy itself, acting immediately upon the heart, kindling the latent sentiment of reverence into lively emotions of joy and love. In the employment of rites and ceremonies with their sumptuous artistic setting, in the large stress that is laid upon prescribed forms and external acts of worship, the Catholic Church has been actuated by a conviction from which she has never for an instant swerved. This conviction is twofold: first, that the believer is aided thereby in the offering of an absorbed, fervent, and sincere worship; and second, that it is not only fitting, but a duty, that all that is most precious, the product of the highest development of the powers that God has given to man, should be offered as a witness of man’s love and adoration, – that the expenditure of wealth in the erection and decoration of God’s sanctuaries, and the tribute of the highest artistic skill in the creation of forms of beauty, are worthy of his immeasurable glory and of ourselves as his dependent children. Says Cardinal Gibbons: “The ceremonies of the Church not only render the divine service more solemn, but they also rivet and captivate our attention and lift it up to God. Our mind is so active, so volatile, and full of distractions, our imagination is so fickle, that we have need of some external objects on which to fix our thoughts. True devotion must be interior and come from the heart; but we are not to infer that exterior worship is to be condemned because interior worship is prescribed as essential. On the contrary, the rites and ceremonies which are enjoined in the worship of God and in the administration of the sacraments are dictated by right reason, and are sanctioned by Almighty God in the old law, and by Christ and his apostles in the new.”45 “Not by the human understanding,” says a writer in the Caecilien Kalendar, “was the ritual devised, man knows not whence it came. Its origin lies outside the inventions of man, like the ideas which it presents. The liturgy arose with the faith, as speech with thought. What the body is for the soul, such is the liturgy for religion. Everything in the uses of the Church, from the mysterious ceremonies of the Mass and of Good Friday, to the summons of the evening bell to prayer, is nothing else than the eloquent expression of the content of the redemption of the Son of God.”46
Since the ritual is prayer, the offering of the Church to God through commemoration and representation as well as through direct appeal, so the whole ceremonial, act as well as word, blends with this conception of prayer, not as embellishment merely but as constituent factor. Hence the large use of symbolism, and even of semi-dramatic representation. “When I speak of the dramatic form of our ceremonies,” says Cardinal Wiseman, “I make no reference whatever to outward display; and I choose that epithet for the reason that the poverty of language affords me no other for my meaning. The object and power of dramatic poetry consist in its being not merely descriptive but representative. Its character is to bear away the imagination and soul to the view of what others witnessed, and excite in us, through their words, such impressions as we might have felt on the occasion. The service of the Church is eminently poetical, the dramatic power runs through the service in a most marked manner, and must be kept in view for its right
Gibbons,