The Winter 2007 issue of Sacred Music from the Church Music Association of America is now available online. This issue contains my article that is a re-working of this blog post on Christ, the Sacraments, and Gregorian Chant as art.

Genesis 3:6:

So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, and he ate.

At the point of the fall, Adam and Eve saw the pleasingness of form of the tree in opposition to what God had said to them, namely, that it would lead to death. The deception of the devil was that God had lied to them, that the fruit of the tree was really good for them whereas God had told them otherwise. Intimately bound up with the deception of the devil and the fall are the notions of truth, freedom, goodness, obedience, etc. Many important aspects of the fall must be examined. However, the fall also introduced into man’s heart a perceived split between Beauty and Truth.

The split that we experience between Beauty and Truth takes on different forms, perhaps, in every age, but it is fundamentally the same for all men with the stain of original sin. Man was made for Beauty as he was made for the Truth, and he seeks to fulfill these longings in many ways.

Classically, when the Gospel is unknown, the experience, appreciation, and appropriation of Beauty is sought through mythologies. The part of man that must be addressed through images, legends, myth, words, and song was not destroyed by the fall. Man without knowing the Gospel, then, uses primarily nature and the fundamental experiences of human life, conception, birth, mating, fighting, death, etc., to grasp at some encounter with the transcendent Beauty that eludes him. These longings are in themselves good, and the pagan expressions that arise spontaneously are not completely corrupt, but they are deficient and erroneous to varying degrees.

The knowledge of Truth is classically sought through philosophy. Part of man longs to know the First Cause of all things, to know what is eternal, solid, objective, and independent of man. Pagan philosophy grasps at the Truth and discovers it to certain degrees, but it cannot satisfy. What pagan philosophy discovers are perhaps facts; it is at best merely accurate. Man longs for more than this, for more than rote knowledge of true propositions.

In our own age, aesthetic relativism is rampant. In this attitude, the beautiful is seen to be radically and purely a matter of subjective taste. This leads modern man to seek to gratify his own taste without reference to what is true or good for him. Like a child who eats too much candy, modern man makes himself sick on entertaining trivialities and fleeting experiences. He needs an authentic experience of the transcendent but seeks it unknowingly through a flood of the superficial.

Christ offers the only remedy to the schism in our hearts between the longing for Beauty and the longing for Truth. He offers us the greatest story ever told, the true philosophy. In Christianity, man’s need for mystery and myth is super-satisfied but not with falsehoods that ultimately poison our souls. Rather, our capacity for Beauty is overwhelmed with Beauty himself, who is the Truth, not only in our imaginations but in reality.

This reflection came about because of a discussion on the Catholic Answers Forums.

A definition of art might be “an authentic human expression in a sensible medium.”

This means that art comes from human nature and human experience. Therefore, art is directed in some way to the Truth and the Good. These correspond to man’s spiritual faculties of intellect and will. Now, what makes art to be art rather than a purely intellectual exercise is the sensible expression. This is also why art is human: the visible is in harmony with the invisible. We are material bodies informed by spiritual souls.

To say that some art is ‘better’ than other art is to say that it accomplishes its end more effectively, namely, it expresses more profoundly human nature and human experience. Even art that is not explicitly Christian, to the degree that it expresses Truth or Beauty, references Christ in an implicit way. This is not only because Christ is the Truth and is Beauty in his divine nature but because Christ is fully human and without sin. Therefore, in his Person humanity and divinity are united perfectly, and Christ himself is the authentic expression of what it means to be human.

Now, if a piece or genre of art by its nature is misleading about human nature or about the human end (Truth, Good), then it could also be an occasion of sin because it could frustrate in those who experience it the achievement of man’s end: this is sin by definition.

This is not to say that art can never depict or express sinful things. By no means! Sometimes art presents a conflict. It could present a division in man between the visible and the invisible or between man’s end and where he actually finds himself. This does not make art less an authentic expression of human nature because it is expressing the truth of where man finds himself due to original sin. This very conflict makes us desire the resolution for the conflict–Christ–even more and, therefore, helps man to achieve his end.

We have to avoid, therefore, even aesthetic relativism. There is no Beauty without Truth, and there is no Good apart from these. This is simply because God himself is the Truth, the Good, and Beauty.

Some art, then, is more fully art than other art because it is more fully human.

Christ, then, is art par excellence: he is more fully human than we are because sin makes us less human. Why? Man is “in the image and likeness of God” (Note that this is the language of art). Sin defaces that image, but Christ is “the image of the invisible God.” In other words, Christ is “art of God”–a sensible expression of the invisible.

This is on a divine level in Christ’s divine nature: the Second Person is the perfect image of the First Person such that he is actually consubstantial with the First Person.

This is on a human level in Christ’s human nature: Christ’s human nature was flawless and perfectly subordinated to his divine nature. Thus, Christ in his human nature was a perfect human image of the Father: “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.”

Therefore, if Christ is perfect art in himself, divine and human, what are the sacraments? The sacraments–and especially the Eucharist–become more fully than anything art because in them is Christ. The sacraments are our visible, bodily, human encounter with Christ. This is more powerful than any other art because the sacraments not only point to Christ, but they were instituted (or “authored” or “composed”) by Christ and Christ is contained in them.

Because Christ is man’s end and also a perfect man himself, these sacraments instituted by him are a more authentic expression of true human nature and true human experience than anything we could come up with.

Not only that! The sacraments bring about grace in us. By our very reception of them, they help us achieve our end (if we do not resist). They not only dispose us to grace as other types of art might, but they confer grace to us: they give us the Holy Spirit.

Why is Gregorian chant the music most suited for the liturgy of the Roman Rite? Isn’t which music we find most beautiful or sacred a subjective judgment? No. We are in constant danger in this age of regarding beauty as subjective. In fact, God is Beauty. Beauty, therefore is beauty insofar as it corresponds to God, that is, to the Truth, that is, to the Good.

Gregorian chant has several qualities that make it sacred in an objective sense. One is that its instrument, properly speaking, is the human voice. Thus, in a very direct way, the instrument for chant was devised by God himself and calls to mind Christ’s perfect prayers to the Father and the psalms he chanted with a human voice.

Gregorian chant, also, has for its content primarily Scripture. Chant is not only for the liturgy or for the Scripture; it is of the liturgy and of the Scripture. The nature of the melodies, too, is such that it serves the text most effectively. The text and its musical expression are scarcely considered as separate in Gregorian chant. Thus, God may be said to be the author of the chant since its content is given by him in the Scriptures.

We must also not forget the Church’s role in the liturgy. Indeed, the essential and primary liturgies are given by God to the Church (e.g., the essential elements of the sacraments). However, the other rites and things which embellish these essential forms are given to us by the traditions of the Church. The Church, then, is a true mother because she teaches us how to pray, that is, she responds to God because she is united to Christ who perfectly responds to God.

We, then, are taken into the Church’s response, which is Christ’s response to the Father. The Church, therefore, teaches us an authentic and integral human response to God through her liturgical rites and by her presence in the world. We absolutely must pray, then, in continuity with the Church’s tradition. This is not only by following the rubrics but also by praying in the same words and with same melodies which are very ancient.

The traditional liturgical expressions of the Church can never be foreign to us because they are an authentic human response to God. We must allow ourselves to be formed by them so that we may be more fully human. In this way, the Church’s traditional liturgical responses to God: the rites, Gregorian chant and the Latin language (in the Roman Rite) etc. become an authentic personal response to God. We become conformed to the mind and heart of the Church and in doing so become conformed to the mind and heart of Christ. Thus, we become more authentically and integrally the image of God.

St. Augustine, Confessions:

O eternal truth, true love and beloved eternity.