Signs of the Holy One: Liturgy, Ritual, and Expression of the Sacred by Michael Lang

Author:Michael Lang [Lang, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Spiritual & Religion
ISBN: 9781681496719
Publisher: Ignatius Press
Published: 2015-10-05T05:00:00+00:00

Liturgy and Music: A Brief Historical Overview

The stark analysis the theologian Joseph Ratzinger presented some years ago is, I believe, still pertinent today. Church music is not in good shape—not everywhere, not in every parish or community, but on balance and in every corner of the Catholic world. However, the search for a remedy is not straightforward. In the history of the Church, there were often struggles to determine what justly and fittingly could be accepted as musica sacra. It might be argued that there is some precedent in the early Church for the attitude of “puritanic functionalism” toward music in the liturgy. Although the singing of psalms and, as a later development, hymns and canticles had a natural place in early Christian worship, there was no continuity with the musical practice of the Jerusalem Temple, with its festive character and its elaborate use of instruments, as we see described in various psalms.26 Music in the Christian liturgy would rather seem to have continued the practice of the synagogue—if, indeed, the prayer service of the contemporary synagogue included music, which is a disputed point. At the same time, the early Christians were anxious to separate the use of music in their liturgy from that in pagan worship. A consequence of this distancing from both Temple worship and pagan ceremonies is the omission of instruments, which is still maintained in Eastern Christian traditions and has been a strong current in the Latin West as well, leaving aside the special place of the organ, which it gradually acquired beginning with the Carolingian period.27

Joseph Ratzinger insists that the sober character of liturgical music in early Christian worship cannot be interpreted as a rejection of the “sacred” and “cultic” dimension of music in favor of a more communitarian and indeed quotidian approach. Rather, it would reflect the nuanced sense of sacrality that is found in the comments of some Church Fathers on music in the liturgy.28 They saw Christian worship as the result of a process of “spiritualization” from the Temple cult of the Old Covenant with its animal sacrifices toward the logikē latreia (Rom 12:1), “worship in harmony with the eternal Word and with our reason”.29 If music was to prove adequate for the Christian liturgy, it also had to undergo a process of “spiritualization”, which could be interpreted as a “de-materialization”: music was admitted only insofar as it served the movement from the sensible to the spiritual; hence the discontinuity with the festive music of the Temple and the ban on instruments. However, there is an inherent ambiguity in the early Christians’ austere attitude toward music, which Ratzinger attributes to the influence of Platonic thought on patristic theology. The consequence of this attitude, “which more or less borders on iconoclasm”, is theology’s “historical mortgage in the question of ecclesiastical art, which comes up over and over again”.30 The burden of this “mortgage” can be seen, for instance, in Saint Thomas Aquinas’ treatment of sacred music in the Summa Theologiae.31

The development of Gregorian

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