Great stuff on the loss of the sacred, from Gary Wills in Bare Ruined Choirs (a bracingly cynical read).
He points out the obvious, that the Council was conceived and run by the Pope, the bishops and a select number of theologians, not by the faithful. “The Mass was not brought into the vernacular for him–the laity did not ask for the change … the innovations were made in the name of freedom, though they had to be imposed on many laymen, and Latin was not even retained as an option, as a gesture to men’s right of choice. The priest, you see, was the one being freed–the priest, with his face to the wall before him, his only contact with the congregation a brace of juveniles (aka altar boys).”
“Escape from Latin involved for these men more than the Latin Mass; it meant the breviary as well, and–most important–it meant escape from the years of theology learned in Latin by rote … Vatican II was a theologians’ rebellion, that of the periti (expert consultants) against the Curia. The Latin theology class was resented even more than that of the Mass–and both were resented by younger faculty and the recently ordained, not by laymen.”
The layman came to church “to do things–witness the miracle, and believe in it; consume the eucharist, and believe in that. Belief, as a result of the priest’s formulation (and of the people’s expectations, formed on that), had been ritualized; it was not a thing one heard about or held by intellect, but a rite to be gone through. Change the rite, and belief would inevitably change, despite all assurances that it was changeless. A Monsignor addressing the Latin Mass Society of England in 1967 put the matter with stark truthfulness: ‘The Blessed Sacrament has been removed from the high altar by the simple expedient of turning the altar around.’ When the shrine, a thing removed, was brought down into the congregation’s midst, the whole genius of devotion at (and to) that shrine evaporated.”
Tags: loss of the sacred, mystery, Vatican II
As cosmologists noodle the question of whether the known universe is all there is, or if parallel universes exist, or if there is other way of looking at things we haven’t yet thought of, they are continually pushing back the boundaries of knowledge. The boundaries of knowledge are also being pushed back as we learn more about the world through various scientific endeavors from the cosmic to the sub-atomic, and through continuing insights into human and social behavior. There’s a lot of knowledge out there and just in the nick of time we’ve invented digital storage, the Internet and the Web to help manage it all. We’re swimming in information and none of us will ever be able to truly absorb even a fraction of it.
Nevertheless, no matter how much knowledge expands, the basic mystery of existence still persists, that strange core of unknowing at the heart of everything.
Tags: knowledge, mystery
One of the interesting things I think we can observe by rationally inspecting existence is that it is essentially mysterious: in the most basic sense, none of us have any idea how we got here or where we go when we depart. We can also observe that to be completely logical, we have to acknowledge that reason must accept mystery as a phenomenon, since the mystery of existence is an essential aspect of reality that must be reckoned with if we are to be truly rational. This then irrevocably changes the realm of things to which reason may be applied. Reason tells us that mystery, because it is mystery, cannot be parsed, solved, computed, proven or otherwise processed; it must simply be recognized and acknowledged.
There are a number of different ways to handle this observation. You can just ignore it and expect everything to be knowable and provable. Or you can say that you can know mysterious things by faith independently from knowing them by reason, giving your faith a free pass into irrationality. Or you can just deal with things as they are, trying to draw the line between reason and mystery in just the right place, neither accepting things that can in fact be reasoned about, nor expecting reason to prove things it can’t.
Tags: faith and reason, mystery
