In his essay on Dante, T. S. Eliot observed that the poetic intensity of a work of art or of the spirit often lies concealed in the music of its rhythm. “I was passionately fond,” Eliot wrote, “of certain French poetry long before I could have translated two verses of it correctly. With Dante the discrepancy between enjoyment and discrepancy was still wider. . . . The enjoyment of the
Divine Comedy is a continuous process. If you get nothing out of it at first, you probably never will; but if from your first deciphering of it there comes now and then some direct shock of poetic intensity, nothing but laziness can deaden the desire for fuller and fuller knowledge.”
So it is with the Latin Mass. Nor is it only in the rhythms of its language that the poetic intensity of the Mass is made manifest. Its rhythms of motion have their own peculiar power. Eliot described the Mass as “one of the highest forms of dancing” he knew. It was this interplay of sound and movement that led him to say that “the consummation of the drama, the perfect and ideal drama, is to be found in the ceremony of the Mass.”
Oscar Wilde, who also knew a thing or two about drama, was no less beguiled by the dramatic rhythms of the Latin Mass. It “is always a source of pleasure and awe to me,” he wrote in
De Profundis, “to remember that the ultimate survival of the Greek chorus, lost elsewhere to art, is to be found in the servitor answering the priest at Mass.”
In vindicating the music of the Latin Mass and the baroque and Gregorian traditions, Pope Benedict is attempting to restore a rhythmic balance that has been lost in art, in popular culture, and in the Church itself. “The writings of Plato and Aristotle on music,” he wrote in his book
The Spirit of the Liturgy,
show that the Greek world in their time was faced with a choice between two kinds of worship, two different images of God and man. Now what this choice came down to concretely was a choice between two fundamental types of music. On the one hand, there is the music that Plato ascribes, in line with mythology, to Apollo, the god of light and reason. . . . But then there is the music that Plato ascribes to Marsyas, which we might describe, in terms of cultic history, as “Dionysian.” It drags man into the intoxication of the senses, crushes rationality, and subjects the spirit to the senses.
The Greeks cherished an Apollonian idea of order. Yet, such was their wisdom, they did not repudiate Apollo’s rival, Dionysus; they took his yelps and howls and made them into music. The dithyramb and the tragic chorus preserved the uncanny power of Dionysus while they at the same time restrained his savagery with the civilizing influences of rhythm. Thus the pope writes of “music that draws senses into spirit and so brings man to wholeness.” Such music “does not abolish the senses, but inserts them into the unity of this creature that is man. It elevates the spirit precisely by wedding it to the senses, and it elevates the senses by uniting them with the spirit.”
The pope’s critique of the “cultic character” of certain kinds of rock music — music which, he argues, converts the self into a “prison” and leaves the soul in thrall to the “elemental passions,” to “the ecstasy of having” its “defenses torn down” — is not old-fogeyism: it is a persuasive account of a civilization that is losing its sense of what Plato called
eurhythmia, order, proportion, and gracefulness
.Of course the
eurhythmia which the pope extols does not invariably lead people towards the good and the true. The music of
Tristan und Isolde went deep into the soul of Adolf Hitler; he expressed the wish that, at the moment of his own annihilation, he should hear the
Liebestod in the bunker.
The beauty of Wagner’s music did not save Hitler from damnation, and may indeed have strengthened his longing for a murderous apocalypse. But if good music does not always save the soul, bad music never does. When the electric guitar sounds during the Sacrifice of the Mass, the cherubim weep.
The pope’s attempts to revive the musical glories of a Church that inspired Mozart’s
Requiem and Beethoven’s
Missa Solemnis represent a cultural event of primary importance. If Benedict is successful, the Church, in becoming once again the patron and protector of
eurhythmia, will be better able to carry out its historic mission as an educator of the spirit.
—Michael Knox Beran is a contributing editor of City Journal. His book, Forge of Empires 1861-1871: Three Revolutionary Statesmen and the World They Made, has just been published by Free Press.< Back 1 2 
