The Truth Behind Popular Piety

The news release came from the Eastman School of Music. A scholar there, Michael Alan Anderson, has found that the full prayer Ave Maria comes not from the 16th century, as conventionally believed, but rather from hundreds of years earlier when composers where commonly experimenting with petitionary supplements to add to the first part of the prayer that comes from scripture.

I wish I could say that I find this mind blowing but I’ve run across dozens of examples of current prayers and songs, particular in the area of chant, that scholars previously believed were of Renaissance origin that really turn up in earlier Medieval manuscripts. It is true, for example, of the song Veni, Veni that is being sung in most parishes this season of Advent. For years I had heard this song put down as a 19th-century fake. Then great chant scholar Mary Berry found it in a 14th century French prayer book.

The lesson of these constant discoveries is that we are too often presumptuous in believing that modern practices have relatively modern origins. In fact, the search for an “origin” often leads to mysterious unknowns. Tradition is often the most reliable guide even and especially if the controversy turns on unknowns. Even the most celebrated authority on a subject can be profoundly mistaken, while the humblest peasant with pious prejudices can in fact “know” more than we give them credit for knowing.

The hubris of modern intellectuals supposes that rationalistic methods can reveal all truth. The idea is that science and study are really the only ways of knowing things, while tradition tells us nothing. Legend is unreliable, in this view; it is just a jumble of superstitions. The evidence of the senses ought to be our only guide for knowing what is true, while truth itself is only a tentative notion that must be constantly subject to revision in light of the latest revelations from evidence.

This apparatus can pose a serious threat to a robust religious faith, and the reason has nothing to do with fear that science will somehow unearth things that we do not want to know or believe. The problem is actually more profound: a science that looks only at evidence of the senses is going to leave out vast amounts of truth, confusing scraps of information with the entire body of known things.

So it is with liturgical studies in general and chant in particular. It’s true that scholars can find vast amounts of musical material that would seem to suggest a Renassiance origin to many modern practices, prayers, and chants. But remember the context here. Printing had only been invented in the modern form in the 15th century. In the 16th century, they were extreme luxury goods like jewels or large houses and super-fancy cars.

Something like a book was not a thing that any common person could have ever hoped to own until the 19th century. It wasn’t until midway through the 20th century when books became totally ubiquitous, and not even until the last twenty years that we can find whole stores that beg you to take books of every kind away at rock-bottom prices. So it makes sense that fewer and fewer manuscripts would be available the farther back in time we look. And there was also a greater chance that the manuscripts would be lost.

Music poses special difficulties. Until innovations in the 10th century, there was no clear way to pass melodies on to the next generation through a manuscript. There was no clear method for writing music down. So even if you had a great song, you simply had no apparatus to insure its long life apart from singing to others and hoping that others will transmit it.

There is a magical property to music in this sense: it is not physical but it still truly exists. It has a form, a shape, an existence as robust and real as any physical thing. It can be transported through the air, and it can be replicated infinitely without depreciating the original in the slightest bit. It can be changed and transformed while doing no harm to the original. This is what allowed music to travel the centuries long before it could ever be written down.

But how is a scientist to account for the transmission of a song through popular use in the absence of written manuscripts? Ultimately it cannot. The evidence is long gone. But does that fact alone diminish the validity of the truth? Not at all. It is for this reason that we should not dismiss pious traditions that date song, prayers, and practice to the first millennium to the first millennium and even to the Patristic or Apostolic Age or to the Holy Spirit. None of this can be proven but tradition can embody more truth and wisdom than science itself can reveal no matter how long the investigations continue.

It is for this broad reason that the application of the rationalist principle – that we ought only to practice and believe the things that experts can defend through cognitive understanding – can never be applied to the dangerous job of liturgical reform. We do not always known why things are they way they are.

No one can be an expert in all things liturgical. No one generation can fully understand simply because every generation exists within a cultural and social context that blinds us to certain form of truth. True liturgical expertise requires the cumulation of many centuries of knowledge, even two millennia of understanding. And that is absolutely impossible.

Thus is there a strong case for a variety of conservatism with regard to liturgy. We are better off deferring to what exists rather than attempting to reform it according to the cognitive comprehension of a single generation. What might, for example, seem like “needless repetition” to us might in fact represent something very profound that was known in the past and might be known in the future. To eliminate that repetition is to cut of a means of transmitting knowledge and truth to the next generation.

Many scholars today, humbled by terrible events in the liturgical world, have come to understand that rationalism was the core error of the generation that reformed the liturgy following the Second Vatican Council. To undo those wrongs today introduces a danger of repeating those same errors, as appointed experts feel the rush of power that comes with the responsibility for rewriting and redoing the texts, songs, and practices. I hope that everyone in that position will pray for humility above all else, and we should also pray for them to practice it.

Now with the third edition of the English Missal one year from implementation we face times that are both exciting with promise and fraught with great danger. Let us always defer to the longest possible tradition rather than attempt to reinvent anything. Insofar as it is possible, we should never stop to listen, learn, and defer. Sure as we presume to know more than what has always been known we will see our work discredited by those who come after us.

It is for this reason that I’ve developed a bias after years of watching liturgical and musicologist pick apart our history and tell us what is and what is not valuable. If we want to know what is true, we are better off talking to the “workers and peasants” about what is meaningful to them rather than depending on the latest revelations from the academic journals. Popular piety may not be substitute for scholarly investigation but it can often reveal the limitations of rationalism as it applies to matters of faith.