Beauty Beyond the Power of the World

Fifty years ago, confusion appeared to reign supreme in the Catholic Church. Infected, so it seemed, by the radical relativism and “hippydom” of the 1960s, many powerful figures in the Church seemed to have replaced the Holy Spirit with the Spirit of the Age. One manifestation of this modernist madness was the abandonment of beauty. Churches were built in conformity with the new brutalist architectural fashions. Romanesque and Gothic splendor were replaced with concrete ugliness. 

The Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist was shoved to one side as tabernacles were removed from altars and sanctuaries. In place of Our Lord, in the place where the tabernacle once had been, a “throne” was placed for the priest, who, taking center stage, presided over the masses on the other side of the altar from him. 

An integral part of this wanton abandonment of beauty was the effort to abolish the Traditional Mass. Ironically, protests were raised against this iconoclasm by lovers of beauty who were not even Catholic. On July 6, 1971, the London Times published the text of an Appeal to Preserve the Mass, signed by an array of celebrities and dignitaries of various religious faiths or none. The list of signatories comprised a veritable who’s who of British contemporary culture, transcending religious and political divides and representing a wide spectrum of opinions.

Although all the signatories were famous at the time, most of their names will now only be known to scholars of the twentieth century or by those old enough to remember. Agatha Christie and Graham Greene have stood the test of time, but others on the list included many significant and well-known writers, politicians, and musicians. This is the text of the Appeal to Preserve the Mass, which was sent to the Vatican:

If some senseless decree were to order the total or partial destruction of basilicas or cathedrals, then obviously it would be the educated—whatever their personal beliefs—who would rise up in horror to oppose such a possibility.

Now the fact is that basilicas and cathedrals were built so as to celebrate a rite which, until a few months ago, constituted a living tradition. We are referring to the Roman Catholic Mass. Yet, according to the latest information available in Rome, there is a plan to obliterate that Mass by the end of the current year…

We are not at the moment considering the religious or spiritual experience of millions of individuals. The rite in question, in its magnificent Latin text, has also inspired a host of priceless achievements in the arts—not only mystical works, but works by poets, philosophers, musicians, architects, painters and sculptors in all countries and epochs. Thus, it belongs to universal culture as well as to churchmen and formal Christians.

In the materialistic and technocratic civilisation that is increasingly threatening the life of mind and spirit in its original creative expression—the word—it seems particularly inhuman to deprive man of word-forms in one of their most grandiose manifestations.

The signatories of this appeal, which is entirely ecumenical and non-political, have been drawn from every branch of modern culture in Europe and elsewhere. They wish to call to the attention of the Holy See the appalling responsibility it would incur in the history of the human spirit were it to refuse to allow the traditional Mass to survive, even though this survival took place side by side with other liturgical forms.

In a bizarre role reversal, the signatories of this petition represented a secular David defending sacred tradition against the Goliath-like power of the iconoclasts in the Catholic hierarchy, the latter of whom had cast themselves in the role of heedless and heartless Philistines.

By the grace and providential design of God, the tide was turned by the election of John Paul II in 1978 and by John Paul’s appointment of Cardinal Ratzinger as the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 1981. Such was the sea change brought about by this dynamic duo that the historian Paul Johnson could publish Pope John Paul II and the Catholic Restoration only three years after John Paul’s election and the year after Cardinal Ratzinger’s appointment. A crucial part of this restoration of the Church was the restoration of the beauty and dignity of the liturgy following the desecration of the previous two decades. 

In 1985, in an exclusive interview on the state of the Church published as The Ratzinger Report, Cardinal Ratzinger spoke of the connection between the holiness of the saints and the beauty of the liturgy:

The only really effective apologia for Christianity comes down to two arguments, namely the saints the Church has produced and the art which has grown in her womb…. If the Church is to continue to transform and humanize the world, how can she dispense with beauty in her liturgies, that beauty which is so closely linked with love and with the radiance of the Resurrection? No. Christians must not be too easily satisfied. They must make their Church into a place where beauty—and hence truth—is at home. Without this the world will become the first circle of hell.

Seeking to restore the indispensable beauty of the liturgy, Cardinal Ratzinger published The Spirit of the Liturgy in 2000. This truly majestic and magisterial work of great beauty and greater scholarship illustrated how both the Novus Ordo and the Traditional forms of the Mass need to be oriented in reverence toward Christ in worship and sacrifice. Possibly the crowning achievement of one of the greatest theologians of the twentieth century, The Spirit of the Liturgy should have a sacrosanct place in the Chruch’s teaching. If it were required reading in every seminary around the world, we would have a transformed and transfigured Church within a generation or two. This work alone could serve as the grace-watered mustard seed to revitalize and reinvigorate the Faith.    If [The Spirit of the Liturgy] were required reading in every seminary around the world, we would have a transformed and transfigured Church within a generation or two. Tweet This

It is, therefore, perplexing that some people in positions of power in the Church are seeking once again to abandon beauty and tradition for the brutality and ugliness of the spirit of the age. They must be resisted resolutely, with clarity and charity, because, reiterating the words of the great and greatly missed Benedict XVI, we must make the Church “a place where beauty—and hence truth—is at home.” 

Take note of his words of wisdom: “beauty—and hence truth.” Where there is no beauty, there is no truth; and where there is no truth, there is no goodness. It is no surprise and no coincidence that the same people who seek to abandon the beauty of the liturgy are the same people who are abandoning the truth of doctrine; and they are the same people who are abandoning the goodness of traditional virtue, refusing to judge lust in any of its sordid manifestations. 

The good, true, and beautiful are inseparable because they are the transcendental manifestation of the Triune God. This was understood by that great and perspicacious observer of the human condition William Shakespeare, who used the word “music,” as Boethius had done, as a synonym for “beauty”:

The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils;
The motions of his spirit are dull as night,
And his affections dark as [Erebus]:
Let no such man be trusted. Mark the music.

Make no mistake, those who are not moved by the beauty of the spirit of the liturgy are animated by a spirit as dark as Hell. They are fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils. They should not be trusted.

As for beauty itself, Dostoyevsky was being overly optimistic when he said that it could save the world. Beauty cannot save the world from its worldliness, but it can save the Church and the culture of Christendom from the power of the world. It can do so because, like goodness and truth, beauty has a power beyond the world.