Is the Latin Mass beautiful?

UPDATE: I've made some changes to the last paragraph of this post.

Believe or not, this really is related to this morning's post about whether the Traditional Latin Mass is Romantic or Modern.

To answer this afternoon's question is a lot easier than this morning's. We simply use the classic cop out: that depends on what you think is beautiful. (Which, if you're keeping score, is a point for the modern side of this morning's question.)

But it doesn't get us very far because it is a cop out.

Here is the problem. Imagine someone who converts to Catholicism from Anglicanism. Now, not all Anglican services are beautiful (most these days are ugly and plain) but some are beautiful. When the Anglicans decide to do it right, they have some really, really beautiful liturgy. Okay, so what happens when someone whose idea of beautiful liturgy has been conditioned by years of The Book of Common Prayer (BCP) goes to a Traditional Latin Mass (TLM)? The answer is that confusion happens.

The effect is a little like what it would be like for a hard core fan of American football to go to a game that was described as being like football only to find that, while players dressed, huddled and lined up like the football they knew, there was no actual ball. So the payers would line up, then break and huddle again and line up but never anything that our poor football fan would recognize as action.

To go back to the BCP service. What makes it beautiful? What plays the part of the ball in football and makes the action progress? The answer to that is, the language makes it beautiful. Appreciating the beauty of a BCP service is mostly a matter of appreciating the language. There may well be music and vestments and incense too, but the language is what makes it special.

There is some beautiful language in the TLM but it's in Latin! And you can't hear most of it.

If you ask any fan of the TLM about that, they won't even have to think about their answer. They will say: "It doesn't matter that you can't understand or hear the language because ...

... it's not being prayed to you!"

The priest says, or, even better, sings, the mass to God for you and not to you for God. Your role in the thing is supportive.

If you're not familiar with the TLM, let me tell you about something that shakes most people: you're not allowed to say the words of the Our Father, or Pater Noster, because this is Latin after all, along with the priest. We're only allowed to say the last line, "Sed libera nos a malo", which is said as a response to the priest having said the rest of the prayer first. Even fans of the TLM sometimes bristle at that. I was at a mass last week where the priest turned to the congregation after the mass was over and chastised "the faithful" because some had joined in with him.

Why can't we? Because, as Lady Marchmain would say, it's not in the logic of the thing.

Here is a fascinating quote about Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (love that name) from a book I've been rereading:

The commission essentially made Viollet-le-Duc's reputation as one of the most important, even infamous, architects of the nineteenth century. Almost solely responsible for creating a new field of restoration architecture, he challenged the neoclassicism of the Académie des beaux-arts, whose traditionally conservative architects tended to dismiss Gothic buildings as ornamental, or at best superfluous. Viollet-le-Duc set out to prove them wrong, by insisting not on the beauty but on the extremely rational basis of Gothic architecture—the structural significance of every buttress and gargoyle. (Decadent Enchantments P7)

And, if you are going to get the Traditional Latin Mass, that is way to approach it. Don't look for beauty, look for the rational basis of the thing. There is a carefully reasoned significance to almost every detail of the TLM. Appreciating it means understanding those signifiers and how they fit into the underlying logic of the thing.

And getting to the point where you can do that is hard work.  You have to go at least 20 times before you start to get the sense of thing. And you have to start at home and prepare for the experience by reading the missal and figuring out, studying and, yes, memorizing the mass so that you can participate in it by not just following along but letting your heart leap along with it. You get to the point where you don't need to say the words of the Pater Noster because your heart feels every word the priest says and you affirm those words by responding "Sed libera nos a malo" at the end.

And that only gets you to the point where the mystery begins ...

More on this next week, but the the direction I'm going is to affirm that the TLM shows the way to be really modern. In a good way.

The Traditional Latin Mass: Romantic or Modern?

I know, talk about questions that no one is asking. And why would anyone ask such a bizarre question?

I think it's a question we should ask.

Humour me and start by considering that the TLM is a revival, a restoration. That, in itself, may seem crazy. Surely, you may think, it was continuously celebrated. The "spirit of Vatican 2" fabulists may have done all sorts of crazy things but they didn't succeed in entirely eradicating the TLM! Well, it's complicated.

For starters, the TLM was changed over the years and it was especially changed in the years leading up to Vatican 2. You can find comments from before the time of John 23 where people deplore how the once-great liturgy has been debased beyond recognition. They didn't mean the order of the mass but the ways in which it was celebrated. And that is the problem: there is no shortage of missals, but how do you interpret them?

I don't know what was going on world-wide but I do know that the people who fought to "preserve" the mass that I knew in the 1970s and the 1980s were often uncertain about what exactly they were preserving.

At first, the project was a matter not of re-establishing the Latin mass but of finding places where it was still said. I remember my father driving us to a little white clapboard church in a little community on the edge of the city when I was a kid. But this mass, even though it seemed interminable to my sister and I, was a low mass, not sung, and not elaborate. The little church had neither the resources nor the knowledge to celebrate a solemn mass. Already, a lot had been lost.

 And the Latin Mass had been modified a lot. When the reformers set about imposing the newer Liturgy (and that "imposing" is not a value judgment but simple fact) they ended up dividing the few remaining Latin Mass churches into isolated communities. There were "convents" here and there where the community was able to resist the pressures of the local bishop and continue to celebrate in the old form. These communities had to be careful, however, that they didn't achieve too high a profile for if large numbers of the outside community started attending, their internal matter could become a diocese matter and, therefore, subject to the authority of the bishop. Why does that matter? Because these communities had a local practice and no way of comparing with what was going on elsewhere.

There had also been a lot of experimentation with the Latin Mass in the 1940s and 1950s, most notably with the dialogue mass. This mass allowed the congregation, rather than just the server, to make some of the responses. But which ones and how much? Again, local practice varied.

This is not a scholarly examination of what happened and I'm not the person to do it. My anecdotal evidence, for what it is worth, is that the return of the Latin Mass was very much a restoration. It might seem that it was simply a mass of pulling out the old hymnals, of which there are thousands upon thousands still floating around (I own a least a half dozen myself) and following the directions. But that is never true because any ritual involves hundreds of interpretative decisions (compare various attempts to do authentic recreations of what the music of Haydn and Mozart "originally" sounded like). I remember listening in to many long, and often heated arguments, about what should and should not be done.

It's not quite like creating an authentic performance of Gregorian chant or even of Bartok, but there are very real questions. I mention Bartok because there are recording of Bartok playing his own piano music and, when these were studied, scholars quickly determined that he played his own music in a  style that differed significantly from current practice. Bartok died in 1945!

And I'll stop there for now. More this afternoon.

The advice they give: Studies that prove things about sex that we'd rather not face

There is a video over at the Wall Street Journal that has been in the top five most viewed things at their site all week long. The subject: What Motivates Married Couples to Have Sex? That alone tells you something important, namely that a lot of married men want to figure out how to encourage their wives to be more motivated about sex.

If you watch the video and read the accompanying article carefully, you'll notice that the research the experts are citing makes them a little uncomfortable. They go to great lengths to talk around the subject. Right from the start, the author of the article, Elizabeth Bernstein, classifies these reasons as "positive" and "negative". She says that "people" who have sex, "to feel closer to their partner", have good sex and people who have sex "so their partner won't be angry" have not so good sex. (The authors of the study used the words "approach" and "avoidance" rather than "positive" and "negative".)

Well, you could classify those reasons as "positive" and "negative" or "approach" and "avoidance" but I don't think that gets you very far. The "negative/avoidance" reason could just as easily be phrased in a positive way. You could just as truthfully say that "people" who have sex, "to feel closer to their partner", have good sex and "people" who have sex "so their partner will be happy" have not so good sex. Now they are both positive/approach reasons! Feel better?

Now I'm going to put it yet another way with the intention of making you uncomfortable: What this study really says is that married women who have sex with their husbands for selfish reasons have better sex. Because that is what that result really says. Mary says that she wants sex because she wants to feel closer to her husband.

But, but, but, selfishness is bad isn't it? Well, maybe. But you might also say that there are good selfish reasons and bad selfish reasons. If Mary says she wants to have sex because she wants to feel closer to her husband that is one kind of selfish and if she says she wants to have sex to conceive a child because that is the only thing she ever really wanted out of this useless marriage in the first place and she is damn well going to get what she wants before she divorces that bastard and makes him pay child support so he isn't around here getting on her nerves all the time that is another kind of selfish reason. Put yourself in the position of her husband and ask yourself which one you want. You can measure the "selfishness" of your actions in terms of how you feel inside when you do them or you can measure it in terms of the actual effect your actions have on other people.

By the way, you may have noticed that I said women rather than married people in general. Well, look at this little vignette from the case of a Julie and Rob Binton mentioned in the article that Elizabeth Bernstein wrote about the study and see if anything jumps out at you. Julie, we are told, just wants to zone out in front of the TV at the end of her day.

But some nights, her husband, Rob, reaches over to rub her shoulders and offer her a back rub. And then Ms. Brinton thinks: "Has it really been three weeks? I guess we should probably have sex."

"I will do it for him," says Ms. Brinton, 34, who lives in Mesa, Ariz.

Mr. Brinton, also 34, appreciates his wife's gesture. "But afterward," he says, "I always feel guilty, that I've been selfish."

Yeah, it's not "people" that we are talking about but women people. This study establishes that women who have sex for selfish reasons have happier marriages than women who, as Julie puts it, "Do it for him". This shouldn't surprise us because other studies have found the same thing.

We should also take a closer look at the "positive" reasons that the authors of the study are so keen to have us see as the real cause of happiness. Bernstein gives as an example of a positive reason the woman who says that she wants to feel closer to her partner. Okay, now read how Julie describes the feelings that actually worked for her.

About a year ago, Ms. Brinton decided she and her husband needed to work on their sex life. "I thought, 'I want to enjoy sex. I want to feel connected to my husband. I want to reclaim my sexuality.'"

So she started doing things to make herself feel sexy: She bought new lingerie and started reading erotic romance novels.

She wanted to "enjoy sex". She wanted to "reclaim her sexuality". She wanted to "make herself feel sexy". And she wanted to "feel connected to her husband". Only one of those statements is about her husband. Three are about her. (And notice that the words "approach" and "avoidance" are just stupid in this case. They are just two more examples of words that people use when they want to make what is really a discussion about the pursuit of human virtue, in this case womanly virtue, appear clinical and scientific.)

Again, it's "selfishness". It's good selfishness when we consider that Julie might also have accomplished her goals by finding another sex partner. What redeems her selfish goals is not only that she decided to pursue them within the marriage but that it also met his selfish needs by solving his problem of "But afterward, I always feel guilty." He doesn't have to feel guilty if she wants to feel sexy.

The advice that should be given to women is that if they want a happy marriage they should work on claiming or reclaiming their sexuality. They need to figure out what works for them—what really works for them and not what they feel, because of peer pressure or "morality", should work for them—and apply it to their lives.

I think the key question here is, as I noted above, what is the actual effect our actions have as opposed to how do we feel inside. Suppose I buy you dinner at your favourite restaurant as a gift "for you". All through the meal I'm focused on you and your happiness but you can't help but notice that I toy with my food and take no pleasure in eating it. Can you really enjoy that meal? You'd get more pleasure if you left me at home and went out and paid to have that meal with someone who really enjoyed it.

Now, the Lemon Girl likes Vietnamese food and I don't. I, on the other hand, like satay dishes a lot more than she does. We can both meet these needs by going to different restaurants. Why not do the same thing with sex? People do cheat sexually, of course, but very few people start off meaning to cheat or casually agree to "go to different restaurants" every now and then.

I think the reason for this really jumps out at us if we look at another study that was written up in a really short article in Salon. That "really short" part matters. The headline reads:

Study: Non-monogamous couples as happy as other couples

And then we get this paragraph from which I have removed one word:

Researchers looked at consensual non-monogamy — relationships in which both adults agree to have multiple sexual or romantic partners — among ___ couples and found nearly identical levels of satisfaction as those in monogamous partnerships.

Convinced? Here is the quote with the missing word back in:

Researchers looked at consensual non-monogamy — relationships in which both adults agree to have multiple sexual or romantic partners — among gay couples and found nearly identical levels of satisfaction as those in monogamous partnerships.

Well, that kinda changes things doesn't it? Lest you think I'm making a point about same-sex relationships, ask yourself whether you think lesbian couples would be as happy with non-monogamy. (That's a rather odd word, don't you think; it's sort of like saying "non-truthful" so as to avoid saying "lying". It should tell us something that humanity has gotten along for several millenia now without ever having had to come up with a word for "consensual non-monogamy".)

If we read on, we find that "consensual non-monogamy" is a lot like anal sex—meaning that despite positive press in outlets like Salon, the vast majority of people decide they don't want to do it. "People" here again acting as a stand in for "women".

There are very few studies on consensual non-monogamy out there, perhaps because it appears to be so rare. Currently, between 4.5 to 10 percent of all relationships fall into this category, but the number could be higher.

If the vast majority of people choose not to do something it's usually for a good reason.

That's also one very weaselly paragraph. Yeah, the number could be higher. It could also be lower. And that there is a variation of more than 100 percent in the cited numbers tells us that we should be very dubious.

And I would want to know a lot more about how consensual non-monogamy works out in practice before reaching any sort of judgment. For starters, what's the break-up/divorce rate among these couples. And how does the power relationship work? Or, to put it more graphically, who does most of the sleeping around? It's one thing if Mary agrees to non-monogamy because that is what she really wants and another thing altogether if she does it because she thinks that is the only way she can keep her partner from leaving her.

To get back to my main point, sexual faithfulness means not holding yourself back. Doing something "for the other person" is to withhold yourself. Your spouse could get the same deal from a prostitute and probably feel slightly less guilty doing so. You are also telling them that you see sex as purely a physical outlet for them by doing this.

Jesus famously said that a man who looks at another woman lustfully has already committed adultery in his heart. He was deliberately using hyperbole to shock us when he said that and not saying that looking really amounts to adultery. You could make an equal hyperbolic claim that a woman commits adultery when she walls off her sexual life. That, in my experience is what women who cheat do. But it is also a betrayal if you wall off your sexuality but don't take another partner. You may feel better about yourself because you're not betraying him by having sex with another but you are withholding yourself.

From the comments

Gaius writes:

Maybe my least favorite part of the TLM is the fact that the scripture readings are sung in Latin. I know the Sanctus, the Credo, and the Gloria but there's no way I'm going to understand the Gospel reading sung in Latin.

That's a very good point. Even most people who have studied Latin could not follow the sung epistle and Gospel readings. Which defeats the point of having scripture readings in the Mass in the first place. We do this so that people can have the Word (capitalization intentional) fed to them through their ears. That is not achieved if everyone simply turns to the place in their missal where the translation is provided and reads along.

Now, critics of the current mass will rush in here to say that the reading at many Novus Ordo masses is so bad that it may as well be in Latin and that is true (no one should be reading along with the lector at Mass). But that is an issue of execution whereas it doesn't matter how well delivered the singing (or reading at a Low Mass) is at a Latin Mass.

The first in a series of posts on the Traditional Latin Mass

I went to a Latin mass for All Saints Day. The reasons for my doing so, as they say on FaceBook, are "complicated" so I won't go into them here.

Unlike most people, however, I have a long history with the traditional Latin mass (TLM). My father was a huge fan of it so I went often as  child and continued to do so long after it had disappeared from most parishes. I was still occasionally going to the TLM well into my twenties. I went quite often in university for the not terribly profound reasons that there was a church offering it right down the hill from my campus and I found the women that went more attractive than most of the women I would see at the regular mass available on campus.

Anyway, I eventually gravitated towards the Novus Ordo (that's the official name for the mass most Catholic churches use). I hadn't been in more than a decade until last Friday.

Before going back, I dug out one of my old missals and reviewed what was in it. There is surprisingly little difference between the two masses when you consider them on paper. If you'd never been to the TLM and looked at the missals, you could be forgiven for thinking that the Novus Ordo was just a streamlined version of the TLM. You'd quickly realize that was an illusion very quickly if you actually went to one. The main difference between the two masses is one of execution.

On the other hand, there is an argument that says, actually, there is very little difference between them and the seeming differences of execution are a consequence of the TLM usually being well-executed and the Novus Ordo being badly executed. This argument goes on to say that if the Novus Ordo was said as it should be said, it would come to resemble the TLM much more than it currently does.

So, what's it like

The first thing that hit me was the start. The thing about the TLM is that it just starts. No MC comes out to say good morning and tell you how welcome you are. Similarly, no cantor comes out to tell you what this morning's hymns are or to make you practice the refrain to the psalm. No one says, "Please stand and join us in our opening hymn." No, the music just begins and the altar boys, deacon, subdeacon and priest just begin processing (this was a solemn mass).

That may seem like a small thing but it really hammers home an important truth and that is that the mass (any mass TLM or Novus Ordo) is an event that happens independent of your presence. It doesn't require you.

In modern parlance, this sort of attitude, and there is lots of it in the  TLM, is treated as a barrier to full participation. That's not crazy, there are hurdles you have to clear to fully participate in the TLM—not the least of which is figuring out what is going on—but these aren't necessarily barriers.(Although any hurdle will be a barrier to the person who can't clear it.)

By way of analogy, is courtship a barrier to love? From the point of view of the lonely person it can often seem to be. Why do I have to go through all this ritual when I just need a little love? Of course, the person who just wants sex and isn't particularly interested in love will say the same thing. But is it just trust issues that make us go through courtship? Do we do all this just to get to know one another? Or is there something about going through all those steps, and facing the fear of rejection,

I wonder if the traditional rites of the mass don't serve a function like that. The TLM makes you work for certain but that work could be the making of a deeper bond. That is to say, far from being a barrier to full participation, these hurdles actually make for a more profound participation in the long run.

I don't know the answer to that. There will be more posts on the subject here on an irregular basis.

A little light culture: It's a nice day for a white wedding dress

It didn’t matter that I had never dreamt of my wedding day or created inspirational tulle-filled scrapbooks as a little girl; I still knew exactly what was expected of me, and I did not want to disappoint.

That's TracyClark-Flory writing at Salon.  She planned to have a "feminist wedding" but found that, as the day got closer and closer that it was slipping away from her.

White dresses are a major sticking point. Did you know that white dresses used to symbolize virginity? Actually, no they didn't.* But that urban myth apparently makes it difficult for a feminist to wear one at her wedding.

The problem here is that there is no problem. A real act of rebellion would be to wear a white dress anyway even though you weren't a virgin. Well, it would be if anyone was trying to stop you. You can do anything you want at your wedding. You can wear school-bus yellow or silver lamé if that appeals to you. You could get married naked at a nudist colony, or wearing scarlet leggings and a teal blue tank top in Las Vegas, or dressed up like your favourite super hero in a movie theatre you rent for the occasion.

There are 923 words in Clark-Flory's essay. The word "I" appears 51 times. The word "my" occurs 25 times. "Me" makes 7 appearances. The word "he" referring to her future husband occurs twice (and both times he is urging her to stand up for her feminist principles). The word "his" referring to her future husband does not appear even once. The word "we" referring to something they are doing together appears once ("we got engaged") and, most tellingly, the "our" makes zero appearances.

This, by the way, actually has nothing to do with feminism, however much it may appear to. Clark-Flory's feminism is every bit as much an I-I-I-my-my-my affair as her wedding:

... I have no interest in defining what is feminist for other women. All I can speak to are my own feelings about my own feminism ...

All she can speak to are her own feelings about her own feminism. Clark-Flory has no trouble seeing that "modern girdle" is a contradiction in terms, and it is, but she can't see that "my own feminism" is no feminism at all.


* White wedding dresses became popular because Queen Victoria wore one. She picked white because she had some lace she wanted incorporated in her dress. They have remained popular since then because most women really, really, really like them.

Scott Adams' enlightenment

There are few human ventures that failed quite like the Enlightenment failed. This should be self-evident but apparently isn't. Thus we have a sort of neo-Enlightenment going in our time right now featuring such figures as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Scott Adams.

Before going on, a bit of necessary background. One fascinating thing about Enlightenment thinking is that it is just rife with mythology. You've almost certainly been exposed to some of these. The myth that the Medieval world believed that the world was flat, for example.

One of the most important bits of the Enlightenment mythology, probably the central belief of the Enlightenment faith, is that before the Enlightenment human beings imagined that they were the centre of the universe. The belief goes that people used to imagine that they lived in a cozy little universe that had been designed by God just for them. As comforting as this belief may have been, the story continues, it stood in the way of science. Then brave scientists willing to discard this warm and comforting illusion came along. By seeing the universe as a collection of impersonal events, these scientists brought about a revolution in human life that made everything better for everyone.

The claimed gains aren't just scientific but also moral. Freed from superstition, the Enlightenment also claimed that human beings were able to approach moral issues in a calm, rational way and work out rules that were better suited to our real needs and wants. This is where the self-evident failure aspect ought to come in.

Anyway, Scott Adams has trotted the Enlightenment mythology out in a piece called "Does God Have a Personality?" Go read the whole thing if you are so inclined.

Done?

The thing I hope you noticed is that Adams spends more time proving that you don't have a personality than he does on God's. He wants you to believe that everything you think of as distinctively you—your strengths, weaknesses, your hard-won achievements, your most troubling failures—is really just a series of mistakes.

The problem with the idea that God has a human-like personality is that human personalities are nothing but weaknesses and defects that we romanticize. For example, I might be kind to others because I want them to be nice to me, or perhaps I simply feel guilty when I'm not nice. God wouldn't have feelings of guilt and he wouldn't need a strategy just to be loved. He would have everything he needed all the time. Logically, God couldn't have a personality in the sense that humans do because our personalities are expressions of our defects and our DNA and our neediness.

For example, if you're ambitious, that's a romantic way of saying you're afraid of failure, or you're greedy, or you want to impress someone. God would not need any of that. Pick any human personality trait and it is either trivial or it is based on some sort of human limitation.

Even your sense of humor is based on a brain limitation. As a professional humorist, I make my living by writing thoughts that the normal human brain can't process without a hiccup that triggers a laugh response. God wouldn't have a sense of humor because he always knows how the joke ends, and no idea gives him a hiccup when processing a thought.

You can pick any personality trait and find the human defect that is behind it. Are you a highly social person? It probably means you have a fear of being alone, or you're so needy that you have to have the approval of others to feel right. 

I could go on but I won't. I leave you with this: Notice how Adams starts off trying to diminish God from having being to being merely a collection of physical laws but ends up diminishing human life. Does anything about that strike you as morally improving? The challenge for Enlightenment morality is usually described as being a matter of figuring out how we can be good without God. But that only brushes the surface. The real problem is not figuring out whether we can be good but figuring out why we would bother even trying.


PS: Notice how narcissistic Adams understanding of humour is? He understands it as being the thing that makes you laugh at his jokes.