Cardinal Ratzinger on Liturgical Music

B) The sociological challenge vs. true Christian anthropology

(The Image of the World and of Human Beings in the Liturgy and Its Expression in Church Music pp. 111-127.)

"Conversation with God transcends the boundaries of human speech" (111); therefore it calls on music, both vocal and instrumental, for help.

After the Second Vatican Council there were disputes over the right form of music in worship. The initial clashes were between pastoral expediency ("We worship in the vernacular now . . .") and musicians who maintained that their traditional repertoire had intrinsic and pastoral value. The question underlying such differences of opinion then was: how do we apply liturgical directives? More recently, a second wave of controversy has been "pushing the questions forward, as far as the foundations themselves." The issue has become: what is liturgical action in the first place, what are its anthropological and theological foundations?

Symptomatic of the new thinking is the Nuovo dizionario di liturgica (1984), article on canto e musica. It declares the starting point of liturgy to be the gathering of two or three in the name of Christ (Matt. 18:20). This sounds harmless enough, but it gains revolutionary momentum when the verse is isolated and pitted against the entire liturgical tradition. Such a definition places the group before the Church and brings "autonomous" individuals into conflict with an "authoritarian" institution. "It is evident that with the adoption of sociological language the prior adoption of its evaluations has also occurred" (113). New music good; old music bad! Gregorian chant and Palestrina are seen as "tutelary gods" for those in power who, threatened by cultural change, cling to an ancient repertoire.

Cardinal Ratzinger turns the hermeneutic of suspicion back on the liturgical theorists. "There is of course not only an idolization of sociology at work here but also a complete separation of the New Testament from the history of the Church" (114). The notion, that the Church has been in decline since Jesus began it, is a familiar Enlightenment myth, which ultimately becomes an excuse for cut-and-paste editions of the Bible (like Jefferson's) or the Marxist texts of the Missa Nicaraguensis sung in the 1980s.

What are the new and better ideas of the liturgical experts? They insist on two basic values: "The 'primary value' of a renewed liturgy is, we are told, 'the full and authentic action of all persons.'" The people of God proclaims its identity in song. The second value judgment follows: music is the power that brings about cohesiveness within the group. Celebration, ergo, becomes creativity; the "how" becomes more important than the "what."

Condensed in this way, the argument reads like a lampoon. Yet Ratzinger's full analysis of the effects of modern "scientific" sociology upon liturgical music is trenchant. "I would not be speaking of all this in so much detail if I thought that such ideas were attributable to only a few theoreticians" (115). It is all too common that "so-called creativity, the active participation of all present, and the relationship to a group in which everyone is acquainted with and speaks to everyone else" are mistaken for the real categories of the conciliar understanding of liturgy.

The philosophical basis of this sociological "take" on liturgy is the view that power opposes freedom. This assigns, a priori, a negative quality to the concept of "institution" and reduces the object of hope from Paschal redemption to social progress. Herein lies the tragic paradox of this trend in liturgical reform: the institutional Church is seen as a hindrance to freedom, yet liturgy without the Church is a self-contradiction. "Here it has been forgotten that the liturgy should be the opus Dei in which God himself first acts and we become redeemed people precisely through his action. [If] the group celebrates itself . . . it is celebrating nothing at all since it is no cause for celebration" (117).

In actuality, the Church is the communio sanctorum of all places and all times (118). Romano Guardini has elaborated upon the momentous consequences of realizing that the communion of saints (and not the Base Community) is the true subject of the liturgy. The Church's liturgy has an objective and positive character, because it lives in three ontological dimensions: cosmos, history and mystery. Liturgy has a cosmic dimension because as believers we do not create it, but participate in something greater that transcends us all. As a result of its historic dimension, it develops as a living thing while maintaining its identity (cf. the discussion of biblical culture, above). Finally, liturgy's dimension of mystery means that we do not initiate the liturgical event; rather, it originates in a call and a divine act of love, to which our response is obedience.

This vantage point is of great importance for the artistic questions involved in preparing liturgical music. The music of emancipation is inconsistent with true liturgy. Furthermore, creativity that ignores the creaturely status of man "is by its very nature absurd and untrue since humans can only be themselves through receptivity and participation." The real human condition is that we stand in need of a redemption which human effort cannot bring about.

Our faith is Logocentric, and so must our worship be (cf. logike latreia Romans 12:1). "The 'Word' to which Christian worship refers is first of all not a text, but a living reality: a God . . . who communicates himself by becoming a human being. This incarnation is the sacred tent, the focal point of all worship which looks at the glory of God and gives him honor" (121).

"Liturgical music is a result of the claim and the dynamics of the Word's incarnation. . . . Faith becoming music is a part of the process of the Word becoming flesh" (122). At the same time (one might say: in counterpoint), the flesh becomes "logocized" or spiritualized, restoring harmony to postlapsarian creation. "Wood and brass turn into tone; the unconscious and the unsolved become ordered and meaningful sound."

Our Incarnate Lord, who was raised up on the cross, raised up our fallen human nature. Western music, from Gregorian chant through Renaissance polyphony to Bruckner and beyond, lives from this great synthesis "of spirit, intuition and sensuous sound . . . . [T]he liturgical music of the Church must be subject to that integration of the human state which appears before us in incarnational faith" (124).

Practically speaking, the prerequisites for sacred music include "awe, receptivity and a humility that is prepared to serve by participating in the greatness which has already gone before" (125). Furthermore, the Church has posted road signs: the great liturgical texts (Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, Agnus Dei) and the references in her official documents to Gregorian chant and Palestrina as models providing orientation.