Repost: Peter Kwasniewski on "A Defense of Liturgy as 'Carolingian Court Ritual'"

Source: Peter Kwansiewski, "A Defense of Liturgy as 'Carolingian Court Ritual'," New Liturgical Movement blog, January 30, 2017, accessed February 2, 2017, http://www.newliturgicalmovement.org/2017/01/a-defense-of-liturgy-as-carolingian.html

Monarchy or princedom, the oldest and arguably the most natural form of political organization, has been a far more consistent part of the human experience and of the formation of Christian culture than the democratic/egalitarian ideology of “self-evident truths” of which we have persuaded ourselves in modernity. Regardless of whether we think democracy can be made to work or not, in the realm of supernatural mysteries, Christianity is purely and entirely monarchical. Against the backdrop of the Old Testament revelation of God as the (one and only) great King over all the earth, and of the people of Israel as a kingly, priestly people ruled by prophets, judges, and ultimately the Davidic dynasty, we profess that Christ is our King, the Lord of heaven and earth, of all times, past, present, and to come, of this world and of the next; that His angels and saints are His royal court; that He deigns to call us His friends and brethren, yes, but such that we know that we never cease to be His servants. We long for His courts and tabernacles. The thick “politicism” of the imagery points to the real, sovereign polity of the Mystical Body, subsisting in the Roman Catholic Church as a societas perfecta and altogether perfected in the heavenly Jerusalem, the city of the great King. Our ecclesial sacrifice, the Most Holy Eucharist, is a kingly and high-priestly oblation.

Consequently, the modern fixation on democracy, as if it were the best or the only good form of government, not only does not abolish our need for the language of kingship and courtliness, but makes it far more needed than ever before, in order to impress on our minds the way things really stand in the definitive reality of the kingdom of God. All of our democratic and egalitarian experiments will fall away at the end of time, as the glorious reign of Christ the King is revealed to all the nations, and those who have submitted to His gentle yoke will be raised to eternal life in glorified flesh while those who have rejected Him will wail and gnash their teeth, condemned to eternal fire in unending torment. The liturgy should reflect the truth of God — His absolute monarchy, His paternal rule, His hierarchical court in the unspeakable splendor of the heavenly Jerusalem — and not the passing truths of our modern provisional political organizations, or, in other words, that continual redesign of the liturgy, in language and ceremonies and ministers, for which the noveltymongers [sic] are agitating.

[...]

One of the greatest blessings of the traditional Latin liturgy, therefore, is its pure, open, unembarrassed representation of the court of the great King of all the earth, in all of its prayers, rubrics, and ceremonies, and in the magnificent art forms that emerged from its “courtliness” and reinforce the “drama” of the holy mysteries of our redemption. We find in it an uncompromised and unapologetic expression of the divine monarchy as it radiates through the panoply of sacred symbols and the ecclesiastical hierarchy endowed with fatherly potency. We are wrapped in an atmosphere of spiritual aristocracy, namely, the world of the saints, who reign with Christ as his vicegerents. After all, this liturgy was not produced by a committee of experts, as laws and bills are manufactured in contemporary parliaments or congresses, but emerged slowly over time from innumerable currents of doctrine and devotion espoused by an elite of pious souls and assimilated by God-fearing laity. The traditional liturgy, in short, challenges everything modern man has come to take for granted, everything he has persuaded himself to believe “self-evident.” It throws down the gauntlet to our modern assumptions, routines, and expectations. It is an enormous challenge to our collective social hubris and cultural pride. This is why it is hated and feared by those who embrace modernity as a primary value, giving value to all else; this is why it is passionately loved by those who recognize in it a call to a higher, deeper, and better way of thinking, loving, and living.

Repost: The Link between Politics and Religion in Pre-Modern Christian Communities

In Christian societies of the past, rulers recognized one or another form of Christianity as true in their capacity as representatives of the public reason. A community, if it is to be a community at all, must have some shared values and final commitments, which will always be in some sense theological and mythological, and it only makes sense that the political organization of the community will act on and defend these values and commitments. [... This] is still true today, but we now believe in liberalism and individual autonomy rather than Christianity. With all of this in mind, I think we need to understand that a heresy like, say, Catharism was not simply a matter of private opinion, but was instead a real challenge to the legitimacy of both the religious and political structures of the community and would have sought to establish a new state of affairs in which its own assumptions were normative. In this situation, it is obvious that rulers have a legitimate interest in defending orthodoxy.

So, contrary to the imaginings of some [...], the past was not some age of perpetual night in which sinister inquisitors went around gleefully condemning miserable peasants to be burnt at the stake for their ignorance of some recondite point of doctrine. It is also obvious that most Christian societies in the past were not fascist, though obviously this assumes that "fascist" is being used here as anything more than a meaningless smear, and that people were not one poorly worded statement away from being burnt for heresy.

In fact, if one looks at how Catholic rulers who had to deal with significant numbers of both non-Christians and non-Catholics dealt with these issues, I think one will find many examples of a fair degree of tolerance. For instance, Muslims and Orthodox Christians were treated very well under the Norman rulers of Sicily, and even in the Frankish Levant, Catholic rulers gradually became relatively tolerant and flexible. According to the twelfth-century Syriac Patriarch of Antioch Michael the Great, "although the Franks were in accord with the Greeks concerning the duality of Christ's nature . . . they never sought a single formula for all the Christian people and languages ["Christian people and languages" is in itself a pretty interesting formulation, by the way], but they considered as Christian anyone who worshipped the cross without investigation or examination." Over time, Catholics in the Levant in some cases worshipped together with local Christians or came together with them in devotion to the same saints. Since the local Christian communities, even if heretical from a Catholic perspective, did not represent an inherent threat to the religious and political orders established by the crusaders, they were given a fair degree of toleration and in some cases could do quite well in the new order.

Anyway, all of this is simply to say that I think some [people] are improperly universalizing a thoroughly modern dichotomy of public and private spheres and that this is why they are having such a difficult time understanding Christian societies of the past without caricaturing them. When fulfilling his role properly, a Catholic ruler was not just going around having people burnt for "private" opinions, but was defending the religious and political order of the community from movements that challenged both, as the two were not clearly distinguished. Eventually, religion would, at least nominally, be neutralized as a realm of political struggle while other realms would come to the fore as arenas for conflict, but I don't really see how this represents anything like moral progress. Of course, this isn't to say that heretics in the past were always treated justly or that one must support the death penalty for heretics, which would obviously lack any real meaning in modern society, but I think we should at least try to understand why Christians in the past thought and acted in the way they did without resorting to a lazy narrative of progress.

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Source: Crusading Philologist, October 25, 2014 (09:51 p.m.), comment on Melkite, "Is It the Will of the Holy Spirit that Heretics Should Be Burned?," Fish Eaters Traditional Catholic Forum, October 22, 2014, http://www.fisheaters.com/forums/index.php?topic=3466364.0. 

Repost: "Tota pulchra es" for Serpent (Palestrina)

The serpent is a Renaissance wind instrument and ancestor of the tuba. It was originally used to accompany chant and eventually was given uses in other musical settings. Below is a video of a piece by Palestrina played with several Renaissance instruments and featuring the serpent:

Here is a video where a chant from the Tridentine Missal is played using the serpent:

British Library Glossary on Illuminated Manuscripts

Gold mine!

http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts/glossary.asp