01-14-2015, 12:28 AM
This is a very good article by the great Marcel Proust, translated for and published on Rorate. And I do emphasize that this is a very good article, which I highly recommend.
Proust argues against a bill that sought to decommission churches in France. He says that this will inevitably destroy the churches (he focus, for rhetoric reasons, on cathedrals), because without the first purpose for which they were made they lose their meaning (indeed, intentionality gives meaning), and even says that without the sacrifice of the Mass the buildings are dead:
He says that if the Church were to lose its Rite (how tragic!), even if scholars and actors were to carefully reconstruct the Mass—and many would, he claims, pay much money to see such reconstructions of the Rite that is/was the apex of art—something would indeed be lost, because faith was not there.
By the way, isn't that how we feel when we see a Bach cantata performed (sometimes even in “churches”)? Or the many religious music outside the Liturgy, or even artistic performances in churches? At least I feel very odd, maybe because I have the faith and its strange to see it so separated from the life that it should give.
Then he goes on through the symbolism of the Mass, giving bits of examples of its richness.
I wasn't expecting this article. I loved Proust when I was a boy—well, all right, every boy likes to read Proust, I suppose—but to see he speaking of the Mass in such genuinely Catholic terms and to defend the Mass not only as an aesthetic piece (though he obviously considers it that, albeit the supreme aesthetic piece) was indeed surprising. He sounds more Catholic then many priests!
Really, its reading such things that reveal a culture that was already in decline but still far superior than ours that I can understand Nietzsche's fears that we would turn up as insects by “killing God”. And to think the Church herself—at least in her human element—was complicit with such barbarism is truly sad.
http://rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/2015/01...rable.html
Proust argues against a bill that sought to decommission churches in France. He says that this will inevitably destroy the churches (he focus, for rhetoric reasons, on cathedrals), because without the first purpose for which they were made they lose their meaning (indeed, intentionality gives meaning), and even says that without the sacrifice of the Mass the buildings are dead:
Quote:Today there is not one socialist endowed with taste who doesn’t deplore the mutilations the Revolution visited upon our cathedrals: so many shattered statues and stained-glass windows! Well: better to ransack a church than to decommission it. As mutilated as a church may be, so long as the Mass is celebrated there, it retains at least some life. Once a church is decommissioned it dies, and though as an historical monument it may be protected from scandalous uses, it is no more than a museum. One may say to churches what Jesus said to His disciples: “Except you eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, you shall not have life in you” (Jn 6:54). These somewhat mysterious yet profound words become, with this new usage, an aesthetic and architectural axiom. When the sacrifice of Christ’s flesh and blood, the sacrifice of the Mass, is no longer celebrated in our churches, they will have no life left in them. Catholic liturgy and the architecture and sculpture of our cathedrals form a whole, for they stem from the same symbolism.
He says that if the Church were to lose its Rite (how tragic!), even if scholars and actors were to carefully reconstruct the Mass—and many would, he claims, pay much money to see such reconstructions of the Rite that is/was the apex of art—something would indeed be lost, because faith was not there.
By the way, isn't that how we feel when we see a Bach cantata performed (sometimes even in “churches”)? Or the many religious music outside the Liturgy, or even artistic performances in churches? At least I feel very odd, maybe because I have the faith and its strange to see it so separated from the life that it should give.
Then he goes on through the symbolism of the Mass, giving bits of examples of its richness.
I wasn't expecting this article. I loved Proust when I was a boy—well, all right, every boy likes to read Proust, I suppose—but to see he speaking of the Mass in such genuinely Catholic terms and to defend the Mass not only as an aesthetic piece (though he obviously considers it that, albeit the supreme aesthetic piece) was indeed surprising. He sounds more Catholic then many priests!
Really, its reading such things that reveal a culture that was already in decline but still far superior than ours that I can understand Nietzsche's fears that we would turn up as insects by “killing God”. And to think the Church herself—at least in her human element—was complicit with such barbarism is truly sad.
http://rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/2015/01...rable.html