Each November, the Church spends the final month of the liturgical year remembering in a particularly intense manner the souls of the faithful departed. With nature itself going into a deathlike state in late autumn, this time of remembering to pray for the dead likewise reminds us to remember our own mortality.
A “Restoring the Sacred” column several years ago explored the rich theological content of the Requiem Mass in the Traditional Latin liturgy. It seems an opportune time to return to this subject in order to take a closer look at one of the musical texts of this centuries-old liturgy, the sequence Dies Irae, and to question frankly why it was expelled by the formulators of the reformed liturgy.
Recently, I was looking through a book from 1990 that was published to serve as a pastoral guide to the current funeral rites of the Church. I was particularly interested to see what the author had to offer in the chapters concerning the history of the funeral rites. While I did find some informative historical materials cited in the author’s presentation, it soon became clear that he was of the opinion that the funeral liturgy had been essentially thrown off course during the Middle Ages through the introduction of the sequence Dies Irae, the Offertory Domine Iesu Christe, Rex Gloriae, and the Responsory Libera me, Domine, de Morte Aeterna (for the “rite of absolution” at the end of the Mass). According to the author, these texts departed from what was originally an atmosphere of light and hope in the funeral liturgy of the early Church and fostered in its place an attitude of fear and gloom.
Implicit in this negative view of the Dies Irae and the two above-named chants is that their sobering picture of divine judgment is the product of a morbid medieval imagination out of step with the Gospels and the early Christian perception of death. Yet such an assessment is flatly contradicted by the fact that the words of these texts and their imagery are drawn directly from the words of our Lord in describing His Second Coming and from the numerous other prophecies of the end times found in both the Old and New Testaments.
This biblical origin for the words and images of the Dies Irae can be seen readily from the very first verse, in which the day of Final Judgment is called a “day of wrath” that will bring the dissolution of the world into ashes:
“Day of wrath, that day / the earth shall dissolve into ashes. . . . How great will be the terror to come, when the Judge is going to come, / all things to examine strictly. / The trumpet spreading its stunning sound / through all the land’s tombs, / all shall He summon before His throne. / Death and nature shall be astounded, / when [all] creatures shall rise, / to answer Him who judges them” (vv. 1–4).
To begin with, we are seeing here the imprint of a key passage from the prophetic Book of Zephaniah that inspired much of the sequence’s dramatic imagery:
“The great day of the Lord is near, / near and hastening fast. . . . A day of wrath is that day, / a day of distress and anguish, / a day of ruin and devastation, / a day of darkness and gloom, / a day of clouds and thick darkness, / a day of trumpet blast and battle cry . . .” (Zeph. 1:14–16).
More important, the Dies Irae presents the end of the world in precisely the manner our Lord Himself does in foretelling the end times:
“. . . The sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens will be shaken; then will appear the sign of the Son of Man in heaven, and then all the tribes of the earth will mourn, and they will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory; and he will send out his angels with a loud trumpet call, and they will gather his elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other” (Matt. 24:29–31).
“Truly, truly, I say to you, the hour is coming, and now is, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live. For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself, and has given him authority to execute judgment, because he is the Son of Man. Do not marvel at this; for an hour is coming when all who are in the tombs will hear his voice and come forth, those who have done good, to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil, to the resurrection of judgment” (John 5:25–29).
Some might ask what the end of the world has to do with the death of an individual Christian before the end of time. The answer is that our Lord is not going to wait until the end of the world to send each of us to our eternal fate; that judgment and sentencing will come when the world as it were comes to an end for each of us personally, when we die. So it is appropriate to weave into the funeral liturgy the great prophecies of the end of the world.
Did not our Lord prophesy these things for a reason? Did our Lord really intend that His Church hide these words of His in a closet so as not to make people “uncomfortable”?
The Dies Irae continues with two more aspects of the Final Judgment, both taken directly from the Scriptures:
“The inscribed book is brought forth, / in which all is contained, / whereby the world is to be judged. / The Judge there when He shall sit, / whatever is concealed, He shall lay bare, / nothing shall remain unpunished” (vv. 5–6).
Our Lord Himself declared that “nothing is covered that will not be revealed, or hidden that will not be known” (Matt. 10:26). That this uncovering of what is secret pertains to the divine judgment of concealed sins is made manifest by St. Paul, who speaks of the Last Day as the occasion when “God judges the secrets of men by Christ Jesus” (Rom. 2:16).
Already in the Old Testament we find the prophet Daniel speaking of a heavenly court being convened with the “Ancient of Days” taking His seat upon a throne of fire, in the course of which “the books were opened” (Dan. 7:9–10). This image of a written record of judgment is ultimately revealed as “the book of life” in the Book of Revelation, where it appears amid an apocalyptic setting no less harrowing than what the author of the Dies Irae envisions:
“Then I saw a great white throne and him who sat upon it; from his presence earth and sky fled away, and no place was found for them. And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened.
“Also another book was opened, which is the book of life. And the dead were judged by what they had done. And the sea gave up the dead in it, Death and Hades gave up the dead in them, and all were judged by what they had done. Then Death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. This is the second death, the lake of fire; and if anyone’s name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire” (Rev. 20:11–15).
The remaining 13 verses of the Dies Irae as well as its concluding versicle shift from describing the Final Judgment to the supplication of God’s mercy. In these verses the suppliant humbly begs for forgiveness, trusting that the “King of tremendous majesty” who shall judge him is likewise the “Fount of Mercy” who suffered and died for his salvation (vv. 8–10).
Of course, for critics of the Dies Irae, the image of man in these verses as a lowly creature needing to plead on his hands and knees for forgiveness is scorned as demeaning and “too negative.” But for those who have truly understood and taken to heart our Lord’s parable of the tax collector whose humble, self-deprecatory prayer with bowed head found favor with God in stark contrast to the boastful prayer of the prideful Pharisee (Luke 18:9–14), such humble supplication is the surest road to heaven.
Voicing what was a common opinion in the literary and artistic world of his time, English scholar George Saintsbury (1845–1933) hailed the Dies Irae as “the greatest of all hymns, and one of the greatest of all poems,” containing “nearly or quite the most perfect wedding of sound to sense.”
Saluting “the grace and the grandeur, the passion and the art of this wonderful composition,” Saintsbury concludes, “After the Dies Irae, no poet could say that any effect of poetry was, as far as sound goes, unattainable, though few could have hoped to equal it, and perhaps no one except Dante and Shakespeare has fully done so” (The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory, William Blackwell and Sons, Edinburgh and London, 1897, pp. 9–10).
Similar words of praise are to be found from other literary scholars, and the roster of great composers who quoted fragments of the melody of the Dies Irae in their musical compositions is staggering. Placing this cultural assessment of the Dies Irae as an artistic masterpiece side by side with the consideration that it is a truly faithful expression of what sacred Scripture has attested concerning the Final Judgment and our need for humble repentance in facing the inescapable reality of death, one must ask in all frankness, just what motivated the members of the Consilium for the Implementation of the Constitution on the Liturgy (Sacrosanctum Concilium) to purge from our liturgical patrimony one of the greatest texts in the history of Western civilization?
Fortunately, the Dies Irae has a safe and secure home in the Traditional Latin Mass, from which it will never be expunged, and it is also preserved in the current Liturgy of the Hours during the 34th week in Ordinary Time.
We all need to be confronted by the message of Dies Irae — that for each of us death shall be our own personal “end of the world” for which we need to prepare. May its words and music inspire us to plead for the souls of all our beloved faithful departed, and when our own time to depart from this life comes, may it inspire those we leave behind to plead for us.
