Twenty years ago, a German Catholic author made the case for a Mass that was not just an obligation, but a work of art.
Twenty years ago, a German Catholic author made the case for a Mass that was not just an obligation, but a work of art.
W hen the German novelist, playwright, and litterateur Martin Mosebach published his book The Heresy of Formlessness, the Roman Liturgy and its Enemies, he could not have possibly anticipated the next 20 years of drama. But somehow, his life had prepared him for it. In this beautiful and personal reflection on religious faith and ritual, he recalls his Protestant father’s devotion to reading the scriptures while his mother made her quick appearance at Mass. From his father he learned passages like, “Iniquity came forth from Babylon, from elders who were judged, who were supposed to govern the people.”
He had written a book that had defended the old Roman Rite — the traditional Latin Mass of the Western Church, 30 years after the Roman Church had tried to discard it. The old Mass had devotees — among them American conservatives with a literary bent like Patrick Buchanan and the founder of National Review, William F. Buckley Jr. But Mosebach had taken up the cause of the old liturgy itself. But in 2002, the Traditional Mass was at a low ebb, barely tolerated by the Vatican, championed by religious groups who were excommunicated, and celebrated mostly in forgotten places. To make it one’s cause was to place oneself at the margins not just of the modern world, but of the modern Church. It was like confessing an enthusiasm for leprosy itself.
And yet, though this ancient rite is celebrated by less than one half of 1 percent of the Catholics in the world, even fewer at the time that Mosebach took it up, it is safe to say that the status of the old Mass and its devotees have become the preeminent theological controversy in the Catholic Church over the last 20 years. Mosebach’s countryman, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, became Pope Benedict XVI and liberated all priests of the Catholic Church to use the liturgy. His successor, Pope Francis, while Benedict was still living, made constant rhetorical war on young traditionalist clergy, before declaring Benedict’s experiment a failure and launching a campaign of suppressing the old Mass as a threat to the Church itself.
The great benefit of Mosebach’s reflection on the Mass springs out of his vocation as a storyteller and librettist. To become good at this art, the author must consider every detail, every color chosen, the rhythm of prose on the page as it becomes dialogue, and the meaning behind each object touched or passed over by the players in the drama. He looks at the ritual itself as “one of those naïve folk who look at the surface, the external appearance of things, in order to judge their inner nature, their truth, or their spuriousness.” He is something like a spiritual materialist, holding that “all matter is so full of spirit and life that they simply pour from it.”
In one provocative chapter, Mosebach tries to explore the thesis that contradicts his own: the idea that Christianity does not need a ritual. Wasn’t Christ constantly setting aside the ritual law, relativizing the letter of the law by championing its spirit? Did not Christ move through ancient Israel in such a way as to practically forbid his followers from setting up shrines to him? And ultimately, did he not prophesy the destruction and religious displacement of Jerusalem itself, the holy city meant to be an image of the heavenly temple?
The anti-ritualism of the modern mind suspects that there always is a dichotomy between the outward appearance and the inward reality. As one of Mosebach’s English reviewers put it, this anti-ritualist attitude shaped the new Mass. “Since nearly everything is optional and unnecessary, the Ordinary Form [the post-Vatican II Mass), for Mosebach, perpetually communicates the disunity of spiritual intent and external gesture. The plethora of options for both laity and priests in the liturgy contributes to the sense that physical gestures and symbols are merely sentimental adornments to real internal worship.”
Ultimately he defends the old Mass as a work of art, integrated throughout with spiritual realities, and utterly reverberating in all its details — even the details that at first confound us — with the saving action of Christ himself. This understanding ultimately crushes the “defense” put up for the reformed liturgy, that it is “valid” — i.e., that it legally does the job of making the sacrament happen. For Mosebach, the Council of Trent was correct when it said the Mass “contains nothing unnecessary or superfluous,” in a passage I’ll quote at length:
The Mass is not a legal act, something that becomes “valid” in the presence of minimal requirements. Just imagine a canon lawyer trying to explain to a confused and hapless visitor at a modern Sunday celebration that what has taken place contained the various elements (“firstly, secondly, thirdly”) and that therefore it was a “valid” Mass — he could even stamp a document for him, certifying that he had fulfilled his Sunday duty! No: the Mass is not some basic core activity to which various decorations can be added, according to opportunity, in order to heighten the participants’ awareness. The rites “contain nothing unnecessary or superfluous”. Who would dare to pretend to find “unnecessary or superfluous” things in a great fresco or a great poem? A masterpiece may contain gaps, less felicitous parts, repetitions, things that are unintelligible or contradictory-but never things that are unnecessary and superfluous. At all times there have been people who made themselves ridiculous by trying to eliminate the “mistakes” in masterpieces, applying their halfbaked scholarship to Michelangelo’s frescos and Shakespeare’s tragedies. Great works have a soul: we can feel it, alive and radiant, even where its body has been damaged. The liturgy must be regarded with at least as much respect as a profane masterpiece of this kind. Respect opens our eyes. Often enough, even in the case of a profane work of art, if we study conscientiously and ponder the detail, especially the apparently superfluous detail, we find that the offending element comes unexpectedly to life; in the end it sometimes happens that we come to see it as a special quality of the work. This is always the case with the rites of the sacred liturgy. There is nothing in them that, given intensive contemplation, does not show itself to be absolutely saturated with spiritual power. I would urge everyone to study and ponder the meaning of any element of the rite — particularly those parts that the reform of Pope Paul VI regarded as unnecessary and superfluous” (flying in the face of the warning given by the Council of Trent) — and they will find the Council of Trent splendidly justified.
For Mosebach, our bodies have a form intended by God, so does the world, so does history itself. We are liturgical creatures — and we know this by the way we build our lives through habit and variation, through repeated re-learnings and re-presentations of the meaning of life. Our mistake was in thinking that we would meet God as abstractions, that faith was a set of mental propositions that require only our inward ascent.
But God clothed himself as a man. The Temple garment was torn. The bell rings, and our knees fall and touch the earth, our tongues confess the prescribed words. Spiritual realities have form.