A bit of history: Fr. Perrone, Detroit, Music

Translation project completed: Book to be published

H. G. Stoker, Conscience: Phenomena and Theories, translated by Philip E. Blosser (University of Notre Dame Press, March, 2018)

I have been waiting long to see this project to completion -- a translation of a book by H. G. Stoker, possibly the most exhaustive study of conscience in any language -- and from a perspective informed by phenomenology and the traditions of Christianity. It's more expensive than I would like, but it's not overly technical and should interest a wide audience -- anyone interested in conscience, its psychology, religious and moral significance, how it 'works,' historical theories about it (from ancient Greece, through Medieval thinkers to the likes of Kant, Nietzsche, Cardinal Newman, and F.J.J. Buytendijk), terms used for it in multiple languages, it's development, reliability, and whether it is primarily intellectual, intuitive, volitional, or emotional. The book will go on sale the end of March.

For more details, see the promo page over at the University of Notre Dame Press (Here)

Conscience: Phenomena and Theories was first published in German in 1925 as a dissertation by Hendrik G. Stoker under the title Das Gewissen: Erscheinungsformen und Theorien. It was received with acclaim by philosophers at the time, including Stoker’s dissertation mentor Max Scheler, Martin Heidegger, and Herbert Spielberg, as quite possibly the single most comprehensive philosophical treatment of conscience and as a major contribution in the phenomenological tradition.

Liturgy and Beauty: An Essay

Note: What follows is an essay based on a presentation I delivered recently to the Oakland County Latin Mass Association at the Academy of the Sacred Heart in Bloomfield Hills, MI, on October 16, 2016. It is posted here temporarily at the request of some in the audience and for the benefit of anyone else interested in the presentation who could not attend it. The material in it is drawn from research done for a course in aesthetics I used to teach at Lenoir-Rhyne University in North Carolina, and is distilled here, often with little more than a passing suggestion as to how to 'connect the dots' mentioned; but hopefully it will be sufficiently accessible to tickle the reader's fancy and suggest some fruitful ways of thinking about things like liturgy and beauty.

Liturgy and Beauty
(©All rights reserved)

by Philip Blosser
C. S. Lewis somewhere distinguishes two different attitudes we may entertain while assisting at liturgy: that of the reverent participant, and that of the detached critic. An attitude of reverence typically allows us to be drawn spontaneously into liturgical worship without undue distraction. The attitude of the critic, however, interferes with worshiping God. The critic is seriously hindered from even finding God at Mass.

The German Catholic author and critic, Martin Mosebach, laments that the jarring liturgical innovations of recent decades have been largely responsible for provoking this kind of a critical attitude among the faithful. Today, he says, we ask questions like:

What is absolutely indispensable for genuine liturgy? When are the celebrant’s whims tolerable, and when do they become unacceptable? We have got used to accepting the liturgy on the basis of minimum requirements, whereas the criteria ought to be maximal. And finally, we have started to evaluate liturgy – a monstrous act! We sit in the pews and ask ourselves, was that Holy Mass, or wasn’t it? I go to church to see God and come away like a theatre critic.¹

One of the most significant factors behind these unfortunate developments, I would argue, is the loss of what I would call ‘liturgical fittingness” – a fittingness, or aptness, or harmony between the external forms of liturgy and the act of worship these forms are meant to express – a fittingness between the art, architecture, vestments, postures, gestures, and actions involved in the liturgy, on the one hand, and the attitudes of reverence, honor, majesty, and adoration due to God as our sovereign Creator and Savior, on the other. Further, I contend, such fittingness is at the heart of what we traditionally call beauty.

Beauty…. What is ‘beauty’? Building on centuries of earlier reflection on the subject, St. Thomas Aquinas answers this question by first observing that beauty is that which pleases upon being seen (id quod visum placet). Certainly that sounds right. Beauty delights us. It enthralls us. It can elevate our souls and fill us with ineffable longing for that which is eternal.

But if this were all that could be said about beauty, we would have a problem. For, if beauty were no more than that which pleases us, it would be purely subjective. It would amount to saying that what makes something beautiful is the fact that we happen to like it. Certainly there are many who would agree with this view. We see it the philistine relativist who says: “Different strokes for different folks.” But relativism about beauty seems to have been an ingrained prejudice even before the advent of postmodern relativism. For example, we find this view affirmed in the old adage, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” Or in the maxim De gustibus non est disputandum (“There is no disputing about taste”).

But if this were true, it would mean that we couldn’t dispute matters of taste and beauty, which is clearly not true. It would mean that fans of the “recent liturgical unpleasantness” of the last half-century were beyond criticism in their preferences. It would mean, for example, that they couldn’t be criticized for claiming that Marty Haugen’s hymns (I use the term loosely) are every bit as ‘beautiful’ as Palestrina’s motets, simply because they happen to like Marty Haugen’s wares, just as some philistines prefer Twinkies or Hostess Cupcakes to fine French or Italian cuisine. (A good book on recent Catholic hymnody is Thomas Day's Why Catholics Can't Sing: Catholic Culture and the Triumph of Bad Taste [New York: Crossroad, 1990].)

But thankfully St. Thomas doesn’t stop here. He goes on to say that beauty is characterized by three more properties: (1) Integritas – by which he means integrity, wholeness, completeness, perfection, or what we’ll call unity; (2) Claritas – by which he means clarity, splendor, brilliance, radiance, or what we’ll call brightness; and (3) Consonantia – by which he means a certain consonance, harmony, an apt fitting together, or what we’ll call fittingness. (By ‘fittingness’ here we mean not only the harmony between the parts of a work of art, but also the harmony between the work of art and the values it seeks to express, or, in the case of liturgy, the values appropriate to the worship of God.)

Now what is remarkable about these last three characteristics of beauty is that, unlike the first one mentioned by St. Thomas – namely, that which pleases us, or that which we just happen to like – these last three characteristics are objective. They are properties of the object we’re talking about, rather than of our subjective responses. This is what allows us to say that just as truth is the proper object of right knowing, and good is the proper object of right willing, so beauty is the proper object of right admiration. Knowing the truth assumes that we are able to distinguish between reality and illusion, like the difference between what really happened in the Spanish Inquisition and the revisionist falsehoods attributed to it in popular mythology. Willing the good assumes that we are able to distinguish between real and merely apparent goods, like the difference between growing in virtue and growing in popularity. Admiring the beautiful assumes that we are able to distinguish between what deserves to be called beautiful, like Michelangelo’s Pieta, and what doesn’t but merely happens to please us, like Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans.

But how can we know what should be judged beautiful and what shouldn’t? St. Thomas already points us toward the answer by listing three objective characteristics that all beautiful things have: unity, brightness, and fittingness. These suggest that our judgments about beauty needn’t be arbitrary, but can be based on objective qualities that a work of art or music or liturgy may have.

Take fittingness. One of the easiest ways of understanding how fittingness works is through metaphor and simile. “My face was red as a beet.” “He had a voice like a foghorn.” “He has guts.” “This is a ticklish problem.” “This is a dark day in American politics.” “The hours dragged on.” “I felt like a dishrag after that.” “His face clouded over.” “She was wearing a loud perfume.” “Harod is a fox.”

The point of interest here is how our meaning spans the gulf between Harod and the fox, for example. Literally it isn’t true that Harod is a fox. Harod is a person. But figuratively we know what the metaphor means, because Harod is sly and cunning like a fox. So the equation is apt. It fits. It is fitting. The way we see this isn’t through intellectual analysis but through imaginative synthesis. We intuitively grasp the fittingness of the putting these two things together.

We also can illustrate fittingness by matching various nursery rhymes with different ways of walking: For example, “Fee, fi, fo fum” goes together with stomping like a heavy-footed giant, whereas “Hi diddle diddle” goes together with light-footed leaping or prancing. We see the same principle in how we call orange a ‘warm’ color or blue a ‘cool’ color; or in the study that showed that most people associate Shakespeare’s Hamlet with the color purple or burgundy, but almost never with yellow or green;² or in the remarkable phenomenon synesthesia, first noted by Goethe in the 19th century, who noted that music sometimes produced various color impressions in certain people;³ or the fact that tones a seventh apart are almost always associated with restlessness, while tones an octave apart are associated with rest or tranquility.

In one experiment, people were asked to list corresponding terms under the paired terms ‘ping’ and ‘pong’, and the vast majority came up with the following correlations: light/heavy, small/large; ice cream/warm pea soup; pretty girl/matron; trumpet sound/cello sound; Mozart’s music/Beethoven’s music; Matisse’s paintings/Rembrandt’s paintings.⁴ Likewise, when asked to compare two lines, one sharp and jagged with another soft and undulating, the terms most often correlated with this lines were ‘restlessness’ and ‘tranquility.’

So what’s going on here? First, to test whether such judgments of ‘fittingness’ are arbitrary or culturally relative, a researcher named C.E. Osgood in the 1960s administered tests to English-speaking Americans, Mexican-Americans in the Southwest, Navajos, and Japanese subjects. He found approximately 90% agreement on comparisons that were considered ‘fitting.’⁵ Furthermore, there’s plenty of evidence to show that joy and hope are almost universally associated with short upward sloping lines, bright colors, and the major key in music, while sadness and despair are associated with long downward sloping lines, dark shades of gray and black, the minor key in music.

Second, a puzzling feature about such comparisons is what serves as the standard of comparison. For example, when we compare two athletes to see which can run the fastest, no question arises as to the commons standard of comparison, which is obviously speed. But when we ask why most people say that loud is more like large than it is like small, what is the standard of comparison? They’re comparing a sound with a size; and they’re saying one kind of sound is more like (or more fittingly expresses) one size than another. How strange! But what Osgood’s study shows is that several relevant factors emerge, such as potency and activity. Loud is more like large than small with respect to potency; whereas fast is more like hot than cold, and a jagged line is more like restlessness than tranquility, with respect to activity.⁶

What does this tell us? First of all, it tells us that judgments about beauty can have an objective basis. They can be based on qualities that are found in works of art, music, architecture, liturgy, and so on. In other words, such judgments don’t have to be simply arbitrary. They can reference certain characteristics like unity, brightness, and fittingness found in such works of art.

Second, this also tells us that there are certain objective characteristics in a liturgy that make it beautiful because they are fitting with respect to such qualities as reverence, holiness, majesty, and awe. Church architecture that is fitting to such qualities will exhibit characteristics of permanence, unity and verticality, as Michael Rose has shown.⁷ Vestments, postures, gestures, and actions will likewise fittingly reflect these qualities. It’s true that soldiers in the field may celebrate Mass with muddied boots in the jungles of Vietnam or in the sand-swept wastes of Afghanistan with nothing more than the hood of a jeep to serve as an altar. But even there, they attempt to salvage whatever bits of beauty and dignity they can: a white altar cloth is laid; the soldiers kneel, etc. The exception thus proves the rule: what is most apt and most fitting for divine worship is clean shoes, clean vestments, and a church with a high altar and incense and a vaulted ceiling that bespeaks transcendence and awe. What is never fitting at Mass is comportment, dress, postures, gestures, music and ambience that bespeak the carefree nonchalance of a beach party. In the presence of our Lord and Savior, our Creator and our King, what is called for is a studied solemnity, reserve, decorum, and postures, gestures, music and ambience befitting transcendence, awe, reverence and honor.

Once I was at St. Josephat for a Monday evening low Mass nearly a decade ago, and there I noticed that one thing I really like about the extraordinary form is that nothing in it distracts us from the focus of the liturgy upon our Lord. On the contrary, everything – each part of the liturgy, every carefully-prescribed gesture of the servers and priest, their ad orientem disposition, their attentiveness and reverence toward the altar and the Tabernacle and crucifix at its center, and even the silence – seem to conspire to draw our attention toward the Lord. Not one gesture by priest or servers draws attention to itself, saying "Here, look at me!" but rather draws attention to what is going on at the altar in this great mystery of Redemption. Even the long reverent silences of the Canon, far from reducing us to passive spectators, conduces to concentrate our attentiveness to what is transpiring, and so to promote – in the truest sense – our active participation in the liturgy. Here is fittingness. Here is beauty, ever ancient, ever new.

Notes:

1. Martin Mosebach, The Heresy of Formlessness (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2006), p. 25. [back]
2. Nicholas Wolterstorff, Art in Action (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1980), p. 97. [back]
3. Lawrence E. Marks, “On Colored-Hearing Synesthesia: Cross-modal Translation of Sensory Dimensions,” Psychological Bulletin, Vol. 83, No. 3 (1975), pp. 303-331; Theodore F. Karwoski and H.S. Ogbert, “Color Music” in Psychological Monographs, Vol. 50 (1938), pp. 1-60; M. Collins, “a Case of Synesthesia,” in Journal of General Psychology, Vol. 2 (1929), pp. 12-27; Lorrin A. Riggs and Theodore Karwoski, “Synesthesia,” in British Journal of Psychology, Vol. 25 (1934), pp. 29-41. [back]
4. Ernst H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (New York: Pantheon Books, 1960), pp. 370-371. My list of terms is taken from the modified schematic based on Gombrich offered by Wolterstorff, Art in Action, p. 97. [back]
5. “Cross-Cultural Generality of Visual-Verbal Synesthetic Tendencies,” in J.G. Snider and C.E. Osgood, eds, Semantic Differential Technique (Chicago: Aldine, 1969), pp. 561-584. [back]
6. C.E. Osgood, “Generality of Affective Meaning Systems” in American Psychology, 17 (1962), pp. 19-21; but cf. Nicholas Wolterstorff, Art in Action, pp. 108-110, for a critique of Osgood’s psychologistic attempt to explain these patterns, not as direct similarities among the various qualities of reality, but as similarities of affective responses to those qualities. [back]
7. Michael Rose, “The Three Natural Laws of Catholic Church Architecture,” New Oxford Review (September 2009), pp. 28-34; cf. Michael Rose, Ugly as Sin: Why They Changed Our Churches from Sacred Places to Meeting Spaces and How We can Change Them Back Again (Manchester, NH: Sophia Institute Press, 2001). [back]

Fierce

Reading Peter Wehner's "George Orwell's Fierce Modesty" (First Things, September 7, 2016), our underground correspondent we keep on retainer, Guy Noir - Private Eye, comments:

OK, and I have thought similar thoughts. A needed word.

And Orwell actually wrote a very appreciative review of Frank Sheed's Communism and Man.

But "fierce" modesty? Where on earth did that word come from, and how does it fit at all? "Sober," maybe, "measured," "admirable," "honest," "consistent." But "fierce" ? Sounds like a Bro Country album title.

You know what we really need? A fierce resistance to defaulting to intense words to try pump up our relevance and vitality. I saw a sign for "The Surge Church." We need "robust interior lives." We have to be "Gospel centered," there is the "New" evangelization, and Orwell was "fiercely" modest. It is exhausting enough to make you want to yawn. I know every age has its phrases, but have we peaked and overshot, in an era when new books routinely come out with a page of seven to nine book blurbs hyping a little known author, and even article titles have to have so.... much ... zing!

"God give us men whom the lust of office does not kill ... the lust of office cannot buy ..."

A prayer* penned by the New England poet, Josiah Gilbert Holland (1819 – 1881), more timely now than when it was written:

God give us men! A time like this demands
Strong minds, great hearts, true faith and ready hands;
Men whom the lust of office does not kill;
Men whom the spoils of office cannot buy;
Men who possess opinions and a will;
Men who have honor; men who will not lie;
Men who can stand before a demagogue
And damn his treacherous flatteries without winking!
Tall men, sun-crowned, who live above the fog
In public duty, and in private thinking;
For while the rabble, with their thumb-worn creeds
Their large professions and their little deeds.
Mingle in selfish strife, lo! Freedom weeps,
Wrong rules the land and waiting Justice sleeps.

*Erroneously attributed to "J.B. Holland" by the Scots-American pastor, Peter Marshall (1902-1949), Chaplain of the U.S. Senate during his tenure in Washington, D.C.

"The Young Messiah," reviewed by a Evan Pham

Evan Pham, "The Young Messiah" (Holy Smack, March 14, 2016).

Mr. Pham begins thus:

Biblical films that surprise me and move me are the only ones I recommend, and that’s not an easy thing to do since I am a very critical viewer with a high aversion to cheesiness. But I am glad to say “The Young Messiah” was worth the admission cost and worth my two hours and months of waiting. Here’s why ... [spoiler alert]

Read his entire interview HERE. Perhaps you'll find it as compelling as I did. Now I've got to see the film.

Incidentally, Mr. Pham is a former philosophy student of mine at Sacred Heart Major Seminary, now taking graduate classes there in theology. While you're at it, visit his Holy Card Archive and see some of his great productions. He has a new one of the Sacred Heart of Jesus that he just showed me today, which is amazing, but not yet posted online. The prayers on the back are consistently very well-thought-out. He will happily send them to you for any amount you wish to donate. They are beautiful.

One of my favorites is this Asian depiction of the Archangel St. Michael and his angels battling the dragon Satan in the Book Revelation, ch. 12:

Tridentine Community News - EWTN's Extraordinary Faith Episode 9: Church restoration; St. Hyacinth Mass on Sunday, March 13th; other TLM Mass times

"I will go in unto the Altar of God
To God, Who giveth joy to my youth"
Tridentine Community News by Alex Begin (March 6, 2016):

March 6, 2016 – Fourth Sunday of Lent – Lætáre Sunday

Extraordinary Faith Episode 9: Church Restoration

For the second week in a row, EWTN is debuting a new episode of Extraordinary Faith: Episode 9 – Church Restoration will air on EWTN today, Sunday, March 6, 2016 at 4:30 PM, and again on Wednesday, March 9 at 5:30 AM.

It can be frustrating to visit a church that has been “wreckovated”, or stripped of its original decorative elements. While such destruction was unfortunately the trend in the 1970s and 80s, in recent years the opposite has been happening: High Altars, Communion Rails, and beautiful sacred art are being re-installed into churches that had previously been modernized.


Our first stop in Episode 9 is St. Mary Church in Fennimore, Wisconsin. Perhaps the most notable restoration job of the past decade, St. Mary’s has impressive, brand new furnishings, including High and Side Altars, Stations of the Cross, a Communion Rail, and murals in the apse. We’ll meet the pastor and the designer behind this stunning project, which was completed for only $700,000.

Have you ever wondered who performs restorations such as these? Often the work is done by individual, local artisans, but on a global scale there is one firm which dominates the industry: Conrad Schmitt Studios in suburban Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a surprisingly large operation, employs designers and skilled craftspeople who paint sacred art, build church furniture, and design and manufacture traditional stained glass. We visit their facility and meet some of the artisans who show us their work.


Once a church has been restored, it needs ongoing TLC to make sure it remains in sparkling condition. We visit Milwaukee’s Basilica of St. Josaphat, a grand but formerly whitewashed edifice that has been restored to its original glory. Our crew captured staffers from Conrad Schmitt who were performing maintenance work on the High Altar and paintings in the sanctuary. The project leader gives us some background on the work that was done.


In the final segment of this episode, we meet Matthew Alderman, a young architect in the Massachusetts firm of Cram and Ferguson. Matthew is a rising star in the world of traditional church design, working for the firm which is best known locally for having designed St. Florian Church in Hamtramck and St. Mary of Redford Church.


Episode 9 will be posted for viewing on YouTube and on our web site, www.extraordinaryfaith.tv, one month after it debuts on EWTN. We encourage you to like the Extraordinary Faith page on Facebook, so you’ll be notified about the latest air dates and additional info about the places we visit.

St. Hyacinth Mass on Sunday, March 13

Detroit’s lovingly restored St. Hyacinth Church hosts its next Tridentine High Mass next Sunday, March 13 at 2:00 PM. Fr. Joe Tuskiewicz is the celebrant, and Joe Balistreri will lead the music.

Tridentine Masses This Coming Week

• Mon. 03/07 7:00 PM: Low Mass at St. Josaphat (Feria of Lent)
• Tue. 03/08 7:00 PM: Low Mass at Holy Name of Mary (Feria of Lent)
• Sun. 03/13 2:00 PM: High Mass at St. Hyacinth, Detroit (Passion Sunday)

[Comments? Please e-mail tridnews@detroitlatinmass.org. Previous columns are available at http://www.detroitlatinmass.org. This edition of Tridentine Community News, with minor editions, is from the St. Albertus (Detroit), Academy of the Sacred Heart (Bloomfield Hills), and St. Alphonsus and Holy Name of Mary Churches (Windsor) bulletin inserts for March 6, 2016. Hat tip to Alex Begin, author of the column.]

Year of Mercy image: If the medium is the message, what's the message here?

The underground correspondent we keep on retainer, Guy Noir - Private Eye sent me the link below with this comment:

As someone who claims advertising as their [sic] profession, this strikes me more forcefully, perhaps, than others. Nonetheless I think it extremely telling, and would place it in the same file as material on father James Martin. Whatever is and has been going on in the Church since Vatican II, it is pretty apparent to anyone with a passing interest in theology that the message if not the doctrine is being fundamentally changed.

Here's what Boniface says over at Unam Sanctam Catholicam:

In case you have not yet seen it, the above image is the official logo for the upcoming Year of Mercy. The art is the work of Slovenian Jesuit artist Fr. Marko Rupnik (click on the image for a bigger view if it is too small to see).

Notice that between Christ and the other figure, there are only three eyes, signifying apparently that "Christ sees through the eye of Adam and Adam sees through the eye of Christ." The motto of the Year of Mercy is "Merciful Like the Father", despite the fact that Pope Francis says the purpose of the year is to the demonstrate "the church's maternal solicitude."

Lest you have any doubt that this Year of Mercy will be used as a propaganda tool to push for greater acceptance of deviant lifestyles, Archbishop Reno Fisichella, spokesman for the Year of Mercy, stated that "The motto, 'Merciful Like the Father,' serves as an invitation to follow the merciful example of the Father who asks us not to judge or condemn but to forgive and to give love and forgiveness without measure.”

I offer no new commentary here, but refer you to our article "Children's Crusade and the Age of Mercy" from March 21st, 2015.

All quotes and information from this Catholic Register article.
H/T to Blog for Dallas Area Catholics

The shared eye (only three eyes between them) is a bit weird; the two black vertical beams behind Jesus' feet, like the lower parts of a St. Andrew's Cross, are also a bit curious; and I never liked this sort of overly-stylized 1960s-80s thematic art of the sort seen in too many church bulletins and CCD materials. This is partially subjective, but I have bad associations (generally shoddy art seems to go with shoddy theology). Mercy is always nice; but what in the world do people think it means apart from a context of God's justice and judgment? Nobody's going to give a fig about mercy from a Care Bear. Just to make the point, here's George Carlin as Cardinal Glick unveiling a timely icon for the Church in 1999:

Finding good: interview with Sr. Wendy Beckett, art critic and nun

"My family values" (The Guardian, May 8, 2009), an interview with Sister Wendy Beckett by Sabine Durrant:

I belong to that generation of one-parent families. For most of my childhood, my father was in the war and my mother was my predominant influence. My father came back to South Africa, a year before I left to join a convent in England. I wasn't at my best that year. I had been my mother's confidante and suddenly I was nobody. He thought I was difficult, that I wouldn't stick at being a nun. I remember him saying to my mother, "Are you sure about this, Dorothy? Isn't she rather young?" and my mother replying, "She is an odd child, Aubrey, she has wanted this since babyhood. I think we should let her." Later, he and I became extremely fond of each other.

As a doctor, he cured people as much by his sweetness as his physician's skill. He regarded money as something to be given away. When he died, my mother went to the bank, expecting there to be an appreciable sum, and, when she exclaimed in horror, the bank manager said, "But, Mrs Beckett, you know Aubrey was always giving money to poor people and unhappy people, you wouldn't have wanted him any different would you?" And my mother swallowed hard and said, "No, of course not."