Pugnare mihi non licet , St Martin is supposed to have said. Not everyone buys is. J. Fontaine, who edited the text of the life of Martin, says that such a declaration in Martin’s time is unbelievable: “an aggressive proclamation of conscientious objection, forty-two years after the Council of Arles, forty-three years after the victory of Milvian Bridge, when the chrismatory was stamped on the imperial flag and when the safety of the Christian empire tended to become identical with... Read more
John Paul II wrote, “Today, as yesterday, musicians, composers, liturgical chapel cantors, church organists and instrumentalists must feel the necessity of serious and rigorous professional training. They should be especially conscious of the fact that each of their creations or interpretations cannot escape the requirement of being a work that is inspired, appropriate and attentive to aesthetic dignity, transformed into a prayer of worship when, in the course of the liturgy, it expresses the mystery of faith in sound.” Another... Read more
Page again: “For those who oped to rise in the flesh for the Millennium and then the general judgement, ritual singing was a way to celebrate the continuity of bodily existence on both sides of the grade. The voice was one of the higher faculties of the body that Tertullian and others believed would survive in the blessed state where the lower would no longer be required . . . . It was an orthodox view opposed to most forms... Read more
Page again: “The musical stave was a Latin-Christian invention and was confined, for many centuries, to the Occidental lands where Latin was the exclusive language of liturgical singing. It provided the means for an aggressively expansionist civilization to train singers relatively quickly so that the flag of the Latin liturgy could be planted in Spain, in Livonia, in the Holy Land, and in a great many of the larger hospitals and chapels, often in rural or indeed wild locations. There... Read more
Christopher Page observes ( The Christian West and Its Singers: The First Thousand Years ) that the European-wide diffusion of plainsong created created for monks and clergy “a means to record contingent events so that they would be perceived, wherever the account was read, not just in terms of time measured by the hourglass or water-clock, but also sub specie aeternitas . For those entrusted to relate the major events in the life of a pious magnate or churchman, the... Read more
A TLS reviewer says this about musical meaning: “The meaning of music is inexpressible because excessive, and it is excessive because music, like the world at large, eloquently affirms that it is, beyond any question of meaning.” And add, “By becoming descriptive, music seems to give up its peculiar characteristic that, hitched to the world’s pure dynamism, consists of describing nothing in particular.” Read more
Exodus 20:8: Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. We live in a world of total labor. All time and space is valued by its use, its productivity, its function. There is no place that, in principle, withdrawn from productive use. There is no time “set aside from working hours and days, specially marked off . . . from all merely utilitarian ends” (Pieper). Work has become a cult, a religion, complete with its own holidays. Americans celebrate a... Read more
1 Corinthians 3:9-10a: We are god’s fellow workers; you are God’s field, God’s building. According to the grace of God which was given to me, as a wise master builder I laid a foundation, and another is building on it. Paul sees himself as a builder of God’s house, equipped by God’s grace to lay the foundation of the church, which is Christ. He is a craftsman and carpenter, God’s architect and God’s artist, a tentmaker, a wise Bezalel, who... Read more
Sabbath-keeping is more than just putting aside our work one day in seven. It is a way of life. Even that is too narrow. Sabbath is a way of being human, a way of being human together. God commands us to be a Sabbatical people. That sounds grand, but what does it mean? It’s easiest to begin by pointing to the pattern of our anti-Sabbatical society: The 24/7 businesses, the bombardment of news, the frantic pace. Even leisure is frenetic.... Read more
In his 1995 Foreordained Failure: The Quest for a Constitutional Principle of Religious Freedom , Steven Smith challenges the notion that there is a single ideal of religious liberty and argues that any quest for such an ideal principle is doomed to failure. Religious freedom comes in various guises and forms, and it makes no sense to discuss the situation (as is done both popularly and in American law) in terms of a “for or against” dualism. There’s the religious... Read more
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