The Heresy of Formlessness

I just finished Martin Mosebach's The Heresy of Formlessness: The Roman Liturgy and Its Enemy. Many of Mosebach's proposals for the "reform" of the Roman liturgy have since been enacted by Pope Benedict XVI's Summorum Pontificum. Nonetheless, this book has become something of a classic in post--Vatican II synodal conversations regarding "modern" liturgical practices in the Church. Growing up a Lutheran, the organ and hymnal were owed a primary place in my liturgical imagination, and so, I appreciated the crossover hymns from my childhood worship and my converted adult Catholic identity. Mosebach contends, however, that hymns are, in and of themselves, a product of the Protestant Reformation that, in an appeal to ecclesial unity, were imported into the Novus Ordo liturgical celebration. Mosebach writes, "I am firmly conscious, in fact, that vernacular hymns have played perhaps a significant part in the collapse of the liturgy. Just consider what resulted in the flowering of hymns: Luther's Reformation was a singing movement, and the hymn expressed the beliefs of the Reformers. Vernacular hymns replaced the liturgy, as they were designed to do; they were filled with the combative spirit of those dismal times and were meant to fortify the partisans. People singing a catchy melody together at the top of their voices created a sense of community, as all soldiers, clubs, and politicians know" (40). And yet, Mosebach continues, "In the liturgy of the Mass, however, there was no place for hymns. The liturgy has no gaps; it is one single great canticle; where it prescribes silence or the whisper, that is, where the mystery is covered with an acoustic veil, as it were, any hymn would be out of the question" (ibid.). Mosebach finds beauty and significance in Gregorian chanting and even in the orchestral Missa arrangements at coronations because of the continuity of development of the Mass over time rather than a startling rupture of tradition imposed on the liturgy in the twentieth century.

The radical changes in the Roman liturgy, per Mosebach, parallel the radical redefinitions of art and aesthetics that occurred contemporaneously. "Prior to this revolution, art, particularly in its most sublime works, had always fulfilled a function: it had ennobled a space or preserved someone's memory. Artists painted church walls with the bible pauperum and created devotional images that gave a specific direction to prayer" (76-77). Meanwhile, "Modern art, celebrating its triumph, uttered its own non serviam. No longer would it serve. It demanded for itself the reverence---undiminished---that heretofore had been directed to its subject matter. The Church should long have been aware that the art she had fostered in her own bosom was trying to free itself from its mother" (ibid.).

Mosebach's criticisms of the "youth movement" prove particularly prescient in this immediate aftermath of the "Youth Synod" that just adjourned in Rome. In its promotion of "synodalism," I can't help but worry over the increasing regional/diocesan factionalisms that will overrule the Magisterium of the Universal Church not unlike the Protestant denominationalism that has dispersed Christians one-thousand-times over. But to Mosebach's point, a defining hallmark of the twentieth century is an unhealthy obsession with the cult of youth. And yet, ironically, it is precisely this youthful-centric ideology that has come back to haunt those young people, now aged and elderly, who first benefited from this youth-obsessed modernity: "The twentieth-century cult of youth culminates in a cruel curse: while the aging process cannot be stopped, the aging human being is not allowed to mature and is condemned, until his life's end, to play the long-dead games of his youth" (81).

Another disturbing emphasis of this current Youth Synodalism in our Church is the repeated emphasis on the "spirit of the times." As a student of Hegel, I came to reject this emphasis on the zeitgeist that Hegel maintains is the driving force of all spirit toward absolution. From a Christian perspective, I interpreted---perhaps naively to my fellow philosophy scholars---that the zeitgeist itself was a stand-in for the demoniacal, for satanic energy, for the devil himself. My interpretation that the zeitgeist is, in fact, the demonic energy of apocalyptic destruction, has only been reinforced and bolstered the more that I study and reflect on the progression of time and the will toward power and destruction that time seems to necessitate. Imagine my alarm when the leaders of our Church appealed to the "spirit of the time" as a primary motivation for this new "synodalism" that Pope Francis has endorsed. Mosebach similarly sounds the alarm over this zeitgeist positivism: "Liturgical archaeologism, like all forms of historicism and restorationism---in the world of art, too---falls under the accusation Faust makes against his acquaintance, Wagner, drunk with too much history: 'Call it you may "the spirit of the times": / It is the spirit of the powerful, to which the times must bend" (173).

Finally, I appreciate Mosebach's defense of the extraordinary Rubrics of the former Missal. Although entirely cumbersome at the beginning, the devotion and discipline and practice of the liturgy, over time, leads to perfect freedom and emancipation rather than bounded subjugation. In his ongoing comparison of religion and art, Mosebach writes, "Now, however, after more than a century of the destruction of forms in art, literature, architecture, politics, and religion, too, people are generally beginning to realize that loss of form---almost always---implies loss of content. Rubrics that, at some particular time in history, may have presented an obstacle to this or that individual in his spiritual life could actually promote this spirituality today.... Formerly, seminarians learned rubrics so well they could perform them in their sleep. Just as pianists have to practice hard to acquire some technique that is initially a pure torture, but ultimately sounds like free improvisation, experienced celebrants used to move to and fro at the altar with consummate poise; the whole action poured forth as if from a single mold. These celebrants were not hemmed in by armor-plated rubrics, as it were: they floated on them as if on clouds" (206).