By JAMES MONTI
Dietrich von Hildebrand (1889-1977) was wont to cite an observation from Plato’s Phaedrus: “The vision of the beautiful, as Plato says, causes the soul ‘to grow wings’ ” (Transformation in Christ, Manchester, NH, Sophia Institute Press, 1998, p. 231). In the context of the sacred liturgy, such a winged ascent to “the things that are above” (Col. 3:1) can only be made with reverence. Without reverence the soul cannot become airborne, without reverence it cannot ascend to what is above.
In a recent conversation, Dr. Alice von Hildebrand proposed to me the following definition for sacred music: sacred music is “beauty married to reverence.” How is this so? To begin with, the beauty of a genuine work of sacred music arises from the composer’s reverence for his subject matter, as Pope Benedict XVI has explained: “. . . the beginnings of great sacred music necessarily lie in reverence. . . .” (“Liturgy and Church Music,” Sacred Music, vol. 112, no. 4, p. 21)
Such music in turn inspires a response of reverence in the listener, the worshiper. For the beauty of a work of sacred music directs our gaze toward loving contemplation of “the beautiful face of Christ” (Pope Benedict XVI) unveiled in the sacred liturgy. In doing so, the music summons us to respond to the face of Christ, the face of Him whom angels adore, with reverence, with the utmost reverence.
To say that in sacred music beauty is “married” to reverence is to imply a “spousal” bond between beauty and reverence, and that the two become as one. This mirrors the marriage between Christ and His Church. For Christ is Beauty personified, and His Church in her response of total self-donation to Him, her heart trembling with ardent love for Him, is so consumed with humble reverence that she becomes, as it were, Reverence personified. And she expresses her love in song, for, “The singing of the Church comes ultimately out of love” (Pope Benedict XVI, The Spirit of the Liturgy, San Francisco, Ignatius Press, 2000, p. 142).
Pope Benedict insightfully observed that “faith becoming music” follows logically from the Incarnation. He notes a progression that begins with God taking human, physical flesh in the Incarnation, from which proceeds the Sacraments with their physical signs of water, oil, etc.; these Sacraments, in turn, with their physical dimension, need to be “immersed” in a fitting physical setting, a liturgy that in likeness to the Incarnation enters the realm of the five senses. In this communication of the divine to the senses, music has an exceptional role to play, by which man’s “deeper levels of comprehension and response” are tapped (“Liturgy and Church Music,” Sacred Music, vol. 112, 1985, no. 4, p. 19). For music has a way of more deeply penetrating and permeating the soul and mind than visual art. Truly sacred music fills the heart with its pervasive fragrance.
Alice von Hildebrand stressed to me that sacred music must by its very mission and purpose summon the heart to reverence. She explained that popular music is incapable of fulfilling this mission, that popular music is geared toward making one feel light-hearted, toward “letting oneself go” as Dietrich von Hildebrand used to put it. Such music cannot illicit a spirit of reverence, and thus music written in the style of popular music is unfit for the mission of sacred worship. Indeed much of contemporary popular music lures the heart to irreverence, to the rejection of beauty, reveling in what is evil, vile, obscene and ugly, becoming as it were, the music of Hell.
In the garden of Eden God condemned Satan to crawling on his belly and eating dust in punishment for having tempted Eve; ever since then, Satan has sought to drag man down, to make him crawl on his belly with him and eat dust with him in the mire. Satan wants music that will keep man’s eyes turned downward, fixed upon the earth, upon the mire, lest he raise his eyes and see God.
Contemporary music is so often characterized by a pounding, animalistic rhythm. Reverence, by contrast, approaches that to which it is directed with a measured, thoughtful, careful step, an approach slowed by awe in drawing near.
Criticizing the use of jazz and rock music in the sacred liturgy, Dietrich von Hildebrand noted that such music is “antithetical to the sacred atmosphere of the Liturgy,” for it “draws men into a specifically worldly atmosphere” and “appeals to something in men that makes them deaf to the message of Christ” (Trojan Horse in the City of God, Chicago, Franciscan Herald Press, 1967, p. 200). Describing rock festivals as “raging anti-liturgies where people are yanked out of themselves,” Pope Benedict XVI has demonstrated that the danger from rock music extends beyond its often obscene lyrics to the music itself, and that even outside the directly sacral realm of the liturgy such music possesses the power to pervert the soul, for it is “the decisive vehicle of a counter-religion” of “anarchic ideas of freedom” and is “completely antithetical” to the Christian understanding of freedom and redemption (A New Song for the Lord: Faith in Christ and Liturgy Today, New York, Crossroad Publishing Co., 1996, p. 32; “Liturgy and Church Music,” p. 20).
In most parishes at present, the issue is no longer the liturgical use of music styled after hard rock music; rather, it is the incessant recourse to a sort of “feel nice” music, music that sounds like it was composed for a political campaign or a television commercial. That this music drags the soul down into banality rather than raising it to the things that are above is no accident. Since the 1970s this genre has been dubbed “sacro-pop,” music purposefully composed to bring the spirit of the world into the sanctuary, and imposed by a mindset that sees all traditional, pre-Conciliar Catholic music as inherently incompatible with the post-Conciliar liturgy. Such a mentality, as Pope Benedict has aptly described it, working from the false premise that “Christianity recognizes no other sacredness and no other sacred space than that of everyday life,” dictates that “music can take part in worship, so to speak, on condition that it be profane” (“Theological Problems of Church Music,” Sacred Music, vol. 135, 2008, no. 1, p. 9).
This secularization of the sacred empties ecclesiastical music of its very raison d’etre, for its object is no longer the glory of God; instead, it is turned into the insipid soundtrack of a form of worship that is “no longer going up to God, but drawing God down into one’s own world . . . a feast that the community gives itself, a festival of self-affirmation,” in which “The group celebrates itself, and in so doing it celebrates absolutely nothing. . . .” (Pope Benedict XVI, The Spirit of the Liturgy, pp. 22-23; “Liturgy and Church Music,” p. 16, respectively).
Calling for an end to the “jaded, dull music” that has become the norm in all too many places, the sacred music and liturgy scholar Dr. Jennifer Donelson observes: “Let’s stop settling for a notion of noble simplicity that is more akin to minimalistic brutalism than nobility. . . . Let’s eschew those un-baptizable and impoverished elements of American popular culture that arose from atheistic materialism or hedonism and that find no true home in the grammar of the sacred liturgy” (“The Sacred Liturgy as a Primary Source for the Artist’s Imagination,” Fellowship of Catholic Scholars Quarterly, vol. 41, 2018, no. 1, p. 107).
As Pope Benedict explains, the sacred liturgy demands “an artistic transposition of the music of the cosmos into human music which glorifies the Word made flesh,” for such music is “a necessary way of expressing belief in the world-filling glory of Jesus Christ” (“Theological Problems of Church Music,” pp. 14, 13, respectively). Glancing back at Alice von Hildebrand’s intuitive definition of sacred music as “beauty married to reverence,” by which the Church sings of her Beloved and to her Beloved, it is more than obvious that the Church’s love is too deep, too intense, too real to be expressed in what is crass, cheap or common. In marriage the bond between the bride and bridegroom is expressed with a gold wedding band. Who would dare think of using a ring of plastic instead? How then can “the marriage of the Lamb” (Rev. 19:7) be celebrated with what is patently banal?
In his work Aesthetics, Dietrich von Hildebrand observes, “Every beauty appeals to our reverence. . . . This means that beauty . . . draws us into a deep place” (Aesthetics, vol. 1, Steubenville, OH, Hildebrand Project, 2016, p. 413). In our participation in the sacred liturgy, reverence “never allows us to forget the awe in which we must always make our approach to God” (Liturgy and Personality, Steubenville, OH, Hildebrand Project, 2016, p. 41). Sacred music that is truly beautiful has the power to elicit this awe, borne of reverence, from the depths of the soul. It is the awe, the reverence, that the Apostle St. John surely must have felt when in his apocalyptic visions he beheld the beauty of “the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of Heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband” (Rev. 21:2). “Beauty married to reverence” — it is the music of this marriage that will inflame our hearts with longing for the Heavenly Jerusalem.
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