The Splendor of the Truth

  "Joy alone is the mother of sacrifice, because sacrifice is not reasonable if it is not attracted by the beauty of the truth. It is beauty—'the splendor of the truth'—which calls us to sacrifice."Monsignor Luigi Giussani

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And thus where it is prescribed to bow reverently, it is well of the celebrant of the Mass to supplicate his Creator and Savior on his knees with the utmost devotion, reverence, and honor, to glorify Him on his knees. And this for recognizing himself to be earth and dust in consideration of so great a God with all possible humility and reverence, by which means these outward things are signs of interior things; and the Creator Himself ought to be honored and praised by His creature for the benefit of having been able to have known Him... Therefore, they are to be put to shame if perchance they should turn lukewarm, or more so, haughty and ignorant, who on this occasion do not fear with an erect neck scarcely to bend one knee to their Creator, Savior, and awesome Judge...

John Bechoffen, Quadruplex missalis expositio,  (Basel, Switzerland: Michael Furter, 1505; digitized text, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich, 2007), sig. D2v-D3r), quoted in James Monti, A Sense of the Sacred: Roman Catholic Worship in the Middle Ages (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2013), 65. The translation into English is Monti’s own.  See also: https://bildsuche.digitale-sammlungen.de/index.html?c=viewer&bandnummer=bsb00003960&pimage=1&v=100&nav=&l=en# (I originally found the quote in James Monti, “Late Medieval Liturgy: A Celebration of Emmanuel - ‘God with Us,’” in T&T Clark Companion to Liturgy, ed. Alcuin Reid (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2007), 96).

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The greatness of the liturgy depends -- we shall have to repeat this frequently -- on its unspontaneity (unbeliebigkeit).

Joseph Ratzinger, Joseph Ratzinger Collected Works, ed. Michael J. Miller and trans. John Saward, Kenneth Baker, S.J., Henry Taylor, et al, vol. 11, Theology of the Liturgy: The Sacramental Foundation of Christian Existence (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 2015), 103.

The particular quote comes originally from Ratzinger’s The Spirit of the Liturgy (originally: Einfüng in den Geist der Liturgie).

The series as a whole (JRCW) is edited by Gerhard Ludwig Cardinal Muller (current Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith) in conjunction with the Institut Papst Benedikt XVI. in Regensburg: Rudolf Voderholzer, Christian Schaller, Gabriel Weit.

The original German edition: Theologie der Liturgie: Die sakramentale Begründung christlicher Existenz, Gessammelte Schriften II (Freiburg im Breisgau: Verlag Herder GmbH, 2008).

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We should note, also, that in unfragmented medieval Christian culture, formation in the meaning and role of the liturgy and in the manner in which one participated in it occurred naturally, intuitively as it were, and was not a matter of extraneous instruction. The Sacred Liturgy was a natural and fundamental reality in the world in which one grew up -- not something in which one had to be didactically catechized or take a course or studies in order to understand. Students of this period do well to take account of this cultural reality, so profoundly different to our own.

Alcuin Reid, “In Pursuit of Participation -- Liturgy and Liturgists in Early Modern and Post-Enlightenment Catholicism,” in T&T Clark Companion to Liturgy, ed. Alcuin Reid (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2016), 134.

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In reality what happened was that an unprecedented clericalization came on the scene. Now the priest - the 'presider', as they now prefer to call him - becomes the real point of reference for the whole liturgy. Everything depends on him. We have to see him, to respond to him, to be involved in what he is doing. His creativity sustains the whole thing. Not surprisingly, people try to reduce this newly created role by assigning all kinds of liturgical functions to different individuals and entrusting the 'creative' planning of the liturgy to groups of people who like to, and are supposed to, 'make their own contribution.' Less and less is God in the picture. More and more important is what is done by the human beings who meet here and do not like to subject themselves to a 'pre-determined pattern.'

Joseph Ratzinger, Joseph Ratzinger Collected Works, ed. Michael J. Miller and trans. John Saward, Kenneth Baker, S.J., Henry Taylor, et al, vol. 11, Theology of the Liturgy: The Sacramental Foundation of Christian Existence (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 2015), 49.

The particular quote comes originally from Ratzinger’s The Spirit of the Liturgy (originally: Einfüng in den Geist der Liturgie).

The series as a whole (JRCW) is edited by Gerhard Ludwig Cardinal Muller (current Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith) in conjunction with the Institut Papst Benedikt XVI. in Regensburg: Rudolf Voderholzer, Christian Schaller, Gabriel Weit.

The original German edition: Theologie der Liturgie: Die sakramentale Begründung christlicher Existenz, Gessammelte Schriften II (Freiburg im Breisgau: Verlag Herder GmbH, 2008).

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The worship of the golden calf is a self-generated cult. When Moses stays away for too long, and God himself becomes inaccessible, the people just fetch him back. Worship becomes a feast that the community gives itself, a festival of self-affirmation. Instead of being worship of God, it becomes a circle closed in on itself: eating, drinking, and making merry. The dance around the golden calf is an image of this self-seeking worship. It is a kind of banal self-gratification. The narrative of the golden calf is a warning about any kind of self-initiated and self-seeking worship. Ultimately, it is concerned, no longer with God, but with giving oneself a nice little alternative world, manufactured from one's own resources. Then liturgy really does become pointless, just fooling around. Or still worse it becomes an apostasy from the living God, an apostasy in sacral disguise. All that is left in the end is frustration, a feeling of emptiness. There is no experience of that liberation which always takes place when man encounters the living God.

Joseph Ratzinger, Joseph Ratzinger Collected Works, ed. Michael J. Miller and trans. John Saward, Kenneth Baker, S.J., Henry Taylor, et al, vol. 11, Theology of the Liturgy: The Sacramental Foundation of Christian Existence (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 2015), 12.

The particular quote comes originally from Ratzinger’s The Spirit of the Liturgy (originally: Einfüng in den Geist der Liturgie). 

The series as a whole (JRCW) is edited by Gerhard Ludwig Cardinal Muller (current Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith) in conjunction with the Institut Papst Benedikt XVI. in Regensburg: Rudolf Voderholzer, Christian Schaller, Gabriel Weit. 

The original German edition: Theologie der Liturgie: Die sakramentale Begründung christlicher Existenz, Gessammelte Schriften II (Freiburg im Breisgau: Verlag Herder GmbH, 2008). 

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Or it may be that the poetry of World War I, at least in its lyrical mode, was itself the last flowering of the Age of Innocence that preceded the war, that the horrors of the trenches sparked this final blossoming, as friction gives rise to fire; that the daily nightmare unfolding before the soldiers sharpened their sense of beauty, prophecy, and mission. If this is so, one may regard the traditionalism of the Inklings, not as a return to the past, but as the past still alive in the present, as the spirit of World War I poetry, the last articulation of ordered innocence, finding new voice amidst the nearly incessant wars of flesh, mind, and spirit that marked the twentieth century.

Philip Zaleski and Carol Zaleski, The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2015), 70.

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True theology, the theology of the saints, with the central doctrines of revelation always in view, inquires, in a spirit of obedience and reverence, what processes of human thought, what modes of approach are best fitted to bring out the meaning of what has been revealed. That meaning does not involve teaching anything occult or abstruse, but bringing men and their whole existence, intellectual as well as spiritual, into closer relation with God. Any intellectual procedure that does not serve this purpose is assuredly not an interpretation of revelation, but one that bypasses its true meaning and, therefore, an act of disobedience.

Hans Urs von Balthasar, “Theology and Sanctity,” in Explorations in Theology: The Word Made Flesh (San Francisco: Ignatius Press), 196.