Experiencing God

In a very accessible book explaining the theology and philosophy of St Thomas Aquinas, Fr Francis Copleston makes a lucid argument that Aquinas differed in many respects from Augustine and Anslem in that he refused to allow that God’s existence is self-evident and that mankind automatically “knows” God. Copleston defines this as a more “empiricist” view in that Aquinas argues that mankind comes to know God not just through an innate predisposition, but through experience.

How then do we experience God? There are probably as many ways to answer that question as there are ways to ask it, but that point did get me thinking. The most direct experience of God we all encounter is the mass where (as Catholics) we believe He is truely present. It was interesting to read in one of Jeff’s earlier posts “It didn’t turn out that way“ where he quotes passages from the 1976 edition of Pastoral Music such as James M. Burns bemoaning the old days when Church music “was locked into a theology that stressed the transcendence of God… Today, however, with existential theology and philosophy being the intellectual ground for many of the scholars in the Church, a tendency to reduce the transcendental aspect of worship to a more ‘realistic’ concept has appeared. The stress is on the human, the real, the ‘non-God-talk’ approach.”

The net result of Mr Burn’s thinking has been the adoption of folksy “realistic” mass settings in parishes the world over. Those of us in the UK will be sadly familiar with the Hopwood Mass, Kirkwood Mass, and the other plinky-plonky, up and down the scale, unsingable faux-folk “choones” that the ordinary is sung to. Perhaps if Mr Burns and his ilk had spent a little bit of time reading some Aquinas and contemplating his writings they might have realised the dangers inherent in the path they trod.

There is an evident truth: if we wish to experience God in order to come to believe in Him and have our faith in Him strengthened then we need to transcend the earthly and come to terms with Him in His reality. We are God’s creation and in His plan I cannot conceive of us lacking the faculties to connect with God in some way or form. Equally, I can also conceive of a gulf existing between creator and created that somehow needs to be bridged. In my understanding of His plan, God created the angels who have at various points in the history of creation and salvation been the mechanism by which God communicates heavenly beauty.

It was the message of an angel that became the Word made flesh. It was the song of the angels at the nativity which became the Gloria. It is the image of the angels that dominates the visual representations of heaven. Is it then impossible to consider that the greatest works of our musical tradition have somehow been Divinely inspired to reflect some aspect of the beauty of the continuing song of the angels in heaven? If asked, what would we consider the angels more likely to sing – Allegri’s Miserere Mei Deus of a Bob Dylan-esque pastiche of a folk song? If played a smaple of both even the most naive or agnostic would likely think the former over the latter.

Well I would argue by some form of logical extension that this is exactly the case. At the end of the preface the priest says (in its current translation) “and so with all of the choirs of angels in heaven we sing….”. The ending of the preface ought to set us up nicely to subconsciously and internally consider the awesome beauty of God ahead of Him breaching the vault of heaven to come down to earth, and just as we do so more often than not we get…. plinky-plonky folksy earthly tunes that create a disconnect between the theology being exposed and the behavior of the faithful (who are now singing something un-heavenly and “earthly” as Burns puts it) that detracts from the experience of God that Aquinas argues is so essential to our ability to know of God’s existence.

In a recent blog post by Fr Tim Finigan The hermeneutic of continuity: My mum forced me to clean my teeth he pours scorn on the argument people use for not going to Mass any more (My mum made me go), but actually, I see a reality in that. Imagine being innately designed to seek the existence of God, being innately programmed to want to experience God, being taken to the place where God can be encountered, and then being ultimately disappointed because our sensory experience of God failed. I’m not suggesting for a second that taking your children to Mass is a bad thing to do, on the contrary, but I find some sympathy in the argument that being taken to Mass as a child can be off-putting for the future when the very experience that should lead us to God falls flat on its face even as an earthly experience and then ultimately fails in its mission.