The wonderful film The Secret of Kells (2009) tells the story of the monastic effort to create The Book of Kells, the finest of Ireland’s national treasures, a gorgeous illuminated book of Gospels used for Mass that managed to be preserved all these centuries and is currently on display at the Trinity College library in Dublin. The film sets the forces of light, as represented by the Christian faith and those who practiced it, against the dark forces of Viking invaders who cared not for productivity, beauty, and holiness but instead practiced the more ancient skills of invading, looting, and destroying.
The monks were not satisfied merely to produce books of texts. The conviction was that these books should also be works of art, when possible. It was not too much to spend many years and even several generations to create the perfect book to be light unto all. Words alone would have served the functional purpose but there was more to functionality that mere words. There were also considerations of excellence, skill, and beauty (above all) that must be central to the effort of making a book to be used at Mass. The creation and preservation of that book was worth more than their lives, in their view, because it embodied truth and light and had a longer life than all living people.
The film puts on display a microcosm that represents a much grander effort that stretched from the Apostolic Age to the Renaissance, and that effort involved not only art but also issues of human rights, the dignity of the human person, the integrity and inviolability of human association and spaces, and the centrality of disciplined learning and sacrifice in the process of the salvation of souls. It all stems from that great lesson of the Incarnation: God loved the individual person enough to send his son to become man, who in turn made the ultimate sacrifice for the sake of our souls. In turn, we offer praise and thanksgiving through our highest efforts. Beauty becomes, says Pope Benedict XVI, “the wound of the arrow that strikes the heart and in this way opens our eyes.”
Today we take the creation of manuscripts and the spreading of knowledge for granted. What took dozens of highly skilled men many years, sometimes generations, to accomplish can now be done by anyone with a laptop computer and uploaded to a server that can create copies for anyone who wants them, many million of times per minute. This is called technological progress. Technology changes; what remains the same, or should remain the same, is the Christian ethos that gave rise to beauty in the modern world. Aesthetics and technology are really two different things; within the Christian ethos, the second can and should be used in serve of the first.
What the monks did to create and preserve manuscripts in the 8th century was also taking place in the realm of music. From the 5th century onward, there are documented efforts to codify liturgical music and build up a culture of teaching and singing that would parallel the efforts made to create and preserve manuscripts. The sung Psalms would become a form of musical illumination for the liturgy in the same way that pictures and beautiful letters would lift up mere text to become a work of art worthy of the act of worship.
In fact, the early theorists made analogies between the notes and phrases of music and the letters and syllables of text. In the same way, says the 9th century treatise Musica Enchiriadis, “the pthongi that are called sounds in Latin are the sources of sung sound, and the content of all music lies in their resolution.”
For the better part of 1500, the efforts with regard to music were focused and serious and appear wherever the Christian religion was practiced. Century by century we saw the composition of chant, along with the spreading of choir schools, manuscripts, pedagogical tools, chant masters with astonishing aural memories who could sing any chant in the Gradual, and also great singers who achieved fame in country after country.
Even after the Reformation, there was let up in the progress of the polyphonic art; it thrived in every country on all continents. Perhaps it was inevitable that the chant went through a period of languishing while the fashion of polyphony marched forward, but even here it was the monasteries that provided the right balance between preservation and progress. When the time came for Solesmes to restore the chant books after several centuries of confusion, they depended very heavily on what the monasteries had done to maintain an uninterrupted tradition of beauty in service of the liturgy.
In the postconciliar period, the idea of excellence, beauty, and preservation all gave way to a new cultural ethos that exalted various ideological aims ahead of traditional Christian aims. Suddenly, excellence came to be depreciated in favor of a manufactured idea of authenticity, and the goal of creating magnificent sounds gave way to the goal of copying stylish sounds from the secular world. God-centered liturgy became people-centered gatherings. Scholas were toppled in favor of folk groups, organists lost their positions in favor of strumming and banging, and the hard work of rendering the chant with ever greater perfection lost to the fashion for spontaneity and improvisation. Beautiful liturgical books with illuminations gave way to felt banners to broadcast to people a sense of comfort and homeyness.
These new trends not only broke a long tradition; they turned that long tradition on its head. In that sense, I don’t think it is unfair to say that the musical ethos that emerged after (but not because of) the Second Vatican Council was fundamental un-Christian, that is, contrary to all that came before. It was the equivalent of throwing out illuminated manuscripts and replacing them with newspapers, or of tearing down great cathedrals and replacing them with halls suitable for civic gatherings.
As we make our way out of this desert that has lasted forty years, we need to look to the attitudes and disciplines that were adopted by the monks of old and have always pervaded the Christian artistic sense. The goal was never merely to make things that are serviceable much less merely fashionable. The idea was to point to eternity as best we are able and not curry favor with the times. We need to have the discipline that led monks to make illuminations on manuscripts used only by one mortal person because these beautiful things were created for God above all else. Yes, they were impractical but sometimes what is practical contrasts with what is principled.
What this means for music is profound.
First, we do well to remember and appreciate the many thousands of holy men and women who struggled long before the age of recording technology and even before musical notation in order to pass from age to age the great music of the Catholic liturgy. It is a mistake to take the tools we have today for granted. These tools should be used for doing an even better job at our task than they did.
Second, we must attempt to replicate the focus on excellence in the service of God that monks of old made part of their daily lives. It is not enough to show up on Sunday, pick four hymns, sing them, and go home, while expecting everyone to value your marvelous contribution to parish life. No. Singing for liturgy requires work, learning, discipline, time in practice, and sacrifice. A true singer for liturgy never seeks out praise, never performs in an effort to elicit public adulation, never seeks to entertain. We work solely in service of the public prayer of the Church.
Third, we must restore a central focus on beauty, which means orderliness, balance, and exalted forms that point to the author, composer, and maker of all beautiful things. Fortunately for us, we are not burdened with the job of seeking out beautiful music for everything that goes on at Mass. The foundation of it all is already given to us in the form of the chant, which we have thanks to the extraordinary efforts of so many dating back to the earliest years of the faith. We only need to embrace it or, at least, see its beauty as a goal and measure all that we do in the interim against this standard.
In the sweep of time, we singers in this generation have very little time to do what we ought, very few chances to sing, as compared with all the liturgy in world history, and praise God in a way that is fitting. There is no time for laziness, no time for the production of unworthy music, no time to take shortcuts or unleash some commercially canned solution on our parishes. We can learn from those who came before and leave something wonderful for those who will come after us.
To be fair, the Vikings did care about those things. At home on their wives' farms, or in their carefully selected loot. Unfortunately, the Irish weren't usually seeing the Vikings at any other time beside their summer raider vacations.