The Liturgical Movement that is Needed: Part II

The unbearable lightness of sham Christianity

Do not circumcise your wallet, you pleasure-seeking people, for your sickness is not there. -St. Francis de Sales, Sermon for the Feast of the Circumcision of Our Lord, Jan. 1, 1622.

In the previous post, I tried to articulate the type of liturgical movement that is needed for lasting and widespread cultural renewal. This broader understanding of “liturgical” has its basis in mind and imagination. It is the conviction that life is serious business, requiring of us manners and rituals and formalities. The liturgy of the Church is foundational for broader liturgical renewal.

I defined “liturgy” according to its Greek root as “public office” or “public duty.” There is indeed something very public about liturgical living. Manners are how we relate in the proper way to other people. Many of the rites and rituals that we perform daily, from saying grace before meals to allowing another person to go ahead of us at the check-out line, are done publicly. The handing down of these traditions of religion and civility (gentlemanliness, in the words of Burke) occur through intimate life in the home and deep connection with our children and grandchildren.

This is the type of liturgical living that Edmund Burke believed raised up our collective social life and elevated human beings to a position of dignity.

The ways in which we ought to treat one other, the courtesies we ought to extend, the modest ways in which we ought to dress and speak, must ultimately be “furnished from the wardrobe of the moral imagination,” Burke says. In other words, living liturgically is an art not a science. The properly formed imagination, not reason, must provide the standards of conduct. This challenges much of what many of us have been taught about the role of reason in guiding moral action. Reading the precepts of natural law, scholastic philosophy, the Baltimore catechism, are all good things, but ultimately these will only have a lasting impact on a mind that has already been prepared to accept these truths. Such formation comes at a tender age through narratives of the saints, reading scripture, prayer life, fairytales, good literature, hymns, folk songs, time spent in nature, enjoying classical art, and the general atmosphere of the home. Character formation happens on an almost visceral level, through the concreteness of experiences that play to the imagination.

How to form the moral imagination is largely the purpose of this Substack. I explore literature, and especially children’s literature, and other works of culture and imagination in order to illustrate their profound effects on the mind and on action and also to draw out the broader cultural significance of such works. What, for example, do modern children’s books reveal about the imagination of America and the West? What do classic books teach children today? Toward what does the imaginative vision of this book point? Does it draw children upward toward a higher existence or inward toward self-centeredness? It is not always obvious at first glance at a book or show. The devil is in the detail.

The posts of this Substack assume that the imagination rather than reason is responsible for our moral choices and our worldviews. The conservative world would do well to focus on the role of imagination in culture and in the formation of children. By the time students are in high school, their imaginations have largely been formed and their worldviews set.

Plato, in his Republic, said that the story and song that children are exposed to must be carefully controlled so that these youngsters grow to be worthy guardians of his just city. He understood the power of imagination. Where Plato erred was in believing that right reasoning is the way to combat the force of imagination. Rather, it is the properly formed moral imagination that must combat the malformed romantic imagination. The battle is between two different qualities of imagination, not between right reason and wrong imagination.

Irving Babbitt (1865-1933), whom I continually return to for his unmatched insights into the imagination, identified and defined these two different types of imagination. If you’re interested in what the romantic imagination is, take a look at my post about the children’s book What Do You Do with an Idea? This book perfectly illustrates the romantic imagination. Its author can be said to possess a quintessential romantic mind. Once you get to know the romantic imagination by seeing its fruits, you’ll start to readily identify it (and keep your kids far away from it).

Which brings me to the purpose of this post, which is to continue a meditation on the liturgical movement that is needed to sustain lasting renewal in the culture. Edmund Burke identified the spirit of religion as one of the twin pillars of the chivalric culture of old Europe. But Burke does not dwell on the quality of religion that is needed. For that, it is useful to turn to Babbitt. Babbitt, in the early twentieth century, argued that “sham spirituality” has infected the modern world and Christianity.

When it comes to diagnosing the major ailment in the Catholic Church and in mainline Protestant churches, Babbitt’s understanding of sham spirituality sheds much light. Many of us have heard of the problem of modernism that began to creep into Catholicism at the turn of the twentieth century. Today, we see that much of this philosophy against which earlier popes warned has been embraced by the post-Vatican II Church. Yet, the problems that have become the Church’s had already been problems of the wider culture and the Protestant denominations. Modernism itself is a product of the cultural disease that began to spread in the eighteenth century. Jean-Jacques Rousseau is the touchstone of a type of romantic thinking that spread far and wide in the West at the time of the French Revolution. Sham spirituality is almost synonymous with the romantic imagination.

Rooted in feeling and the Rousseauean idea of “pity” over action, sham spirituality is a pretense to religion without any of the real substance. Instead of the ever-present danger that original sin poses to human beings and peaceful political life, sham spirituality hails the natural goodness of man. Grace and the sacraments, self-control, even law and order, are an unnecessary hindrance to man’s freedom and “authenticity.”

“What is disquieting about the [present] time,” Babbitt wrote in 1924, “is not so much its open and avowed materialism as what it takes to be its spirituality.” Materialism is a problem, Babbitt admitted, but the deeper issue is the ersatz Religion of Humanity that has swept the secular world and is infecting the Christian churches as well. We see evidence of this today in the interesting phenomenon of woke capitalism. Designer jeans labeled “sustainable,” bottled water that “saves” Africans, and boxed cereal that conserves wildlife are examples of the postmodern yearning to turn consumer choices into substantive morality. Sham spirituality has managed to turn acquisitiveness into a religion. Paying more for a product in the hopes that the premium will help to save the planet is a form of secular tithing meant as a shortcut to the ethical life. Four hundred years ago St. Francis de Sales warned against this thinking. It is worth quoting in full because it pertains exactly to what I am discussing:

“[O]ur spiritual circumcision ought to be done on that part of our person most damaged. Many, if not all, Christians are willing enough to undergo spiritual circumcision in order to take part in today’s feast [the Feast of the Circumcision of our Lord (replaced with the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God in the Novus Ordo] but unfortunately they make this circumcision in that area which needs it the least! There are some who are imprisoned in sensual pleasures . . . They are in constant pursuit of these brute pleasures. When they want to undergo a spiritual circumcision they take money and give alms. Now of course it is a good thing to circumcise one’s wallet in this way and give alms. . . But do you not see that that spiritual circumcision is not what is really needed in this case? Do not circumcise your wallet, you pleasure-seeking people, for your sickness is not there. Rather, circumcise your heart, by cutting off evil language, friendships and conversations; cut off this evil flirting and other such foolishness. Begin there if you want to undergo a good circumcision. But they do not do it. Instead, they continue to follow their animal instincts while congratulating themselves on giving alms, fully convinced that they have satisfied everything in that.”

Left: “Luce”. Right: altar painting at Saint Sigismund parish church in Strobl, Salzburg. “Francis de Sales in his Study” by Peter Anton Lorenzoni (1760). Lorenzoni has a wholly different imaginative conception of life than Simon Legno, the creator of the Vatican “mascot” called Luce. These two artistic representations are products of entirely different worldviews.

Today, those who embrace this sham spirituality have gone a step further and tithe to secular “causes” in the form of paying more for consumer goods. This is a part of the general reinterpretation of Christ’s exhortation to love neighbor to mean “love humanity,” which can be done with little effort. In place of action is sentiment. In place of prayer and fasting is yoga and Fair-Trade coffee.

Much of the disorder in mainstream Catholicism today is a result of sham spirituality having infected the mind of the Church and the Church now being one of its purveyors.

We can recognize this pseudo-Christian faith for its romantic dreaminess, fixation on material ends, and general lack of seriousness. This doppelgänger of Christianity never inconveniences us. We are to “come as we are” and stay that way.

There is an unbearable lightness in sham Christianity.

And this is why many Protestant denominations and Novus Ordo Catholic parishes are finding that the younger generations would prefer to skip the Sunday kumbaya-singing and peace-be-with-yous and just go straight to the boozy brunch. We are entering a time in which people are turning one of two ways, either abandoning Christianity entirely or entering into it seriously. The halfway house of the last half-century is coming to an end it would seem. The Latin mass and Orthodox Christianity are growing while other denominations and many Novus Ordo parishes are dwindling.

The Mass sets the tone. If the holiest day of the week and the most holy hour of that day conveys to the minds of Catholics something that is not so very serious after all, then what are we to take seriously? The Eucharist? Our bodies? Our thoughts? Our marriages? Forming our children? How could any of it be very serious business if even the sacrifice of the Mass feels light, possibly perfunctory, and bookended with chatting, laughter, and a certain jocularity?

What is to set the standard for our conduct in life? It will not do to read the precepts of natural law, to rationally understand the deficiencies of the Novus Ordo liturgy, and even to recognize the inconsistencies, heresies, and blasphemies coming out of the Vatican. All of that is done on an intellectual level—and can, to be sure, help to convince and support the imagination. But alone it is not enough. We must witness with our eyes and imagination the performance of sacred rituals and the physical gestures that accompany them, including bowing, prostrations, kissing, looking toward heaven, chanting, silence, crossing ourselves, genuflecting, and all at the proper time and in the proper way.

Everything that strikes our senses in the (old) Mass conveys to the imagination the seriousness, significance, and eternal truth of what is happening.

And this experience must affect us, stir us to a different way of thinking and acting, and impress upon us, even in our weakness, a constant desire to work on ourselves so that we can be closer to Christ.

The incongruence between a Soviet-style monolithic church building and rock band, on the one hand, and the priest acting in persona Christi making the unbloody sacrifice of Christ, on the other hand, ought to be striking. But it is only striking to the imagination that has been accustomed to solemnity, reverence, quiet, and carefully performed prayer and rituals. How else could we appreciate that the Eucharist truly is the body and blood of Christ or the significance of the mass? The 70% of Catholics who do not believe in the real presence can hardly be blamed when the tone, aesthetic, gestures, and general atmosphere in the church are so very unserious.

In most Novus Ordo parishes, a kind of doublethink is required to convince oneself that what is happening has been divinely instituted by God the creator the universe. How could this be otherwise when the priest is yawning at the consecration (I witnessed this recently) and has outsourced the homily to the jokester deacon?

If the priest is yucking it up with his “audience” and grandma is putting communion in everyone’s hands, then children receive the impression that neither life nor Mass is very serious business. Their imaginations will intuit it. That is the real danger of the irreverent Mass—the risk that it communicates to children a lie about the Christian faith.

So many of the symbols that once conveyed that something very important was going on were lost after the Second Vatican Council’s “great simplification.” Just as the revolutionaries deemed “sirs” and “madams” to be superfluous to the real business of life (which it turns out meant simply looting and control), the architects of the Novus Ordo liturgy deemed many of the prayers and rites (and, as it happened, saints, fasts, feast days, and other parts of the liturgical year) to be superfluous and unnecessary.

Both of these groups of revolutionaries, the political and the ecclesiastical, operated from certain romantic convictions about the innate goodness and also supremacy of man. The Jacobins and Bolsheviks believed that the old titles and honors were not only unnecessary but pointed toward a hierarchical ordering of society that is based purely on convention. Nature prescribes democracy of the purest sort, these revolutionaries believed. Because we are all naturally good, we can all be masters of our own lives. There is no need for Church or God or King to hand down the laws to us.

As for the Second Vatican Council, major players such as Cardinal Augustin Bea, Fr. Karl Rahner, and John Courtney Murray, to name a few, were similarly of the revolutionary belief that ancient rituals simply could be eliminated without harming the integrity of the faith. “We are but too apt to consider things in the state in which we find them,” Burke said, “without sufficiently adverting to the causes by which they have been produced and possibly may be upheld.”

The orchestrators of the Second Vatican Council seem not to have realized that all of the prayers and rituals that they dismissed lightly were in fact pillars of the faith, part of a living and ongoing catechesis of the faithful, and part of the tapestry of symbols that convey to the imagination the truth of what is happening during the Mass. To shed the rituals and symbols is to remove a major point of access to truth. The written catechism is one thing, but if the symbolism at Mass isn’t there, the points will have a hard time sticking. Reason is weak compared to imagination.

Left, Maximilien Robespierre. Right, Cardinal Augustin Bea, S.J. Don’t shoot the messenger! Two revolutionaries united in their quality of imagination, dominated by abstract and romantic thinking.

The liturgical movement that is needed is one that restores the rites, rituals, prayers, fasts, feasts, and all of those “mere formalities” that have been deemed superfluous by revolutionaries in every age. This restoration must happen on a civil level and on a religious level. The cheapening of life through the degradation of manners and the stripping down of the liturgy of the Mass will contribute to our civilizational downfall in ways that the simplifiers do not appreciate. Ancient manners and rituals are not mere trifles to be tinkered with, as Burke observed. They are inextricably bound up with our imaginative conception of life. To do away with them is to teach the imagination to value something else, to believe in something other than the dignity of the person and the supremacy of God.

“Founding Mass of the Order of the Trinity” by Juan Carreño de Miranda.