Lost in Wonder: Essays on Liturgy and the Arts

195 Pages·2011·1.14 MB·English

by  Aidan Nichols O. P.

Lost in Wonder
Essays on Liturgy and the Arts
Aidan Nichols O. P.
Lost in Wonder
this book explores the Liturgy as the manifestation by cultic signs of Christian
revelation, the 'setting' of the Liturgy in terms of architectural space, iconography
and music, and the poetic response which the revelation the Liturgy carries can
produce. the conclusion offers a synthetic statement of the unity of religion,
cosmology and art. Aidan nichols makes the case for Christianity's capacity to
inspire high culture - both in principle and through well-chosen historical examples
which draw on the best in Catholicism, eastern orthodoxy and Anglicanism.
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Lost in Wonder
essays on Liturgy and the Arts
AidAn niChoLs o. P.
University of Cambridge, UK
© Aidan nichols o. P. 2011
All rights reserved. no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.
Aidan nichols o. P. has asserted his right under the Copyright, designs and Patents Act,
1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
Published by
Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
nichols, Aidan.
Lost in wonder : essays on liturgy and the arts.
1. Liturgy and the arts.
i. title
246-dc22
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
nichols, Aidan.
Lost in wonder : essays on liturgy and the arts / Aidan nichols.
p. cm.
includes bibliographical references and index.
isBn 978-1-4094-3161-9 (hardcover) -- isBn 978-1-4094-3162-6 (ebook)
1. Christianity and the arts. 2. Liturgics. i. title.
Br115.A8n52 2011
261.5'7--dc22
2011008612
isBn 9781409431619 (hbk)
isBn 9781409431626 (ebk)
III
Printed and bound in Great Britain by the
MPG Books Group, UK.
Contents
Preface vii
Acknowledgements ix
PART 1: ExPloRATions of ThE liTuRgy
1 St Thomas and the Sacramental Liturgy 3
2 Romano Guardini and Joseph Ratzinger on the Theology
of Liturgy 21
3 Eucharistic Theology and the Rite of Mass 37
PART 2: ThE sETTing of ThE RiTEs
4 Architecture in the Church 49
5 The Icon Revisited 71
6 Paul Claudel on Sacred Art 105
7 A Theological Perspective on Church Music 117
PART 3: REsPonsE To ThE WoRd
8 Dante’s Commedia and the Role of Friars 135
9 Poetics in the Russian Diaspora 149
Conclusion – By Way of an Ending: Religion, Science, Art 177
Index 181
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Preface
The words ‘lost in wonder’, which give this collection its title, should really be
extended by three so as to complete the citation from one of Charles Wesley’s
best known hymns. ‘Lost in wonder, love, and praise’ is insufficiently concise for
a title, but it perfectly describes what should be expected in Christianity from the
aesthetic experience. Christian aesthetics concern, above all, the beauty of God,
the difference of which, in its tremendousness, from all merely natural beauties
is signalled in Scripture by a more distinctive term – God’s ‘glory’. Lostness,
understood in its positive sense, means the condition of the self when carried
beyond its everyday limits by being rendered ‘ec-static’ (literally, ‘standing
outside itself’) through the solicitation of some transcendent good. Such self-
transcendence towards the attracting good is, in a huge variety of modes – some
bewilderingly unlike others, but then ‘the good’ is, in its diffusion, multifarious – a
feature of all aesthetic experience. I am treating the term ‘aesthetic’ as synonymous
with the experience of the beautiful, when most deeply felt and grasped.
In the Christian context, this ‘lostness’ has, as Wesley indicates, its own
distinctive ethos, which defines its character. It is typified by the threesome of
wonder, love, and praise. Wonder testifies to the sheer facticity of the divine beauty;
love to its capacity to draw to itself our desire; praise to our recognition of its
supreme excellence. In all three respects – sheer facticity, love-arousing capacity,
discernable if also superlative excellence – the beauty of God has made itself
known not only in creation but, above all, in the work of salvation, centred as this
is on the Cross and Resurrection of the incarnate Word, and in the consummation
of creation to which the work of salvation points the way.
In the last analysis, the lostness of ecstasy belongs, indeed, with eschatology.
Its cynosure is the vision of God at the definitive End. That does not, however,
exclude it altogether from present resources. Such ecstasy plays a crucial part not
only in the ascetical and mystical life but, I would argue, in the moral life too. It is
productive not only ascetically and mystically but also morally because it breaks
down the limits of the false finitude which denies that finitum capax infiniti and
corrals the self within boundaries that restrict its openness to others – including the
divine Other which lets all others be. For Catholic theology, the finite is ‘capable
of the Infinite’: capable, that is, of responding to the Infinite should it call. In the
single concrete order of the divine plan, nature is made for grace.
The beauty of God communicates itself generally in the cosmos – but, par
excellence, in the Incarnation and the Paschal Mystery. For Catholic Christians,
the Liturgy of the Church is the principal act of celebrating the divine beauty
(hence the disaster which overcomes the liturgical life when Philistia is made to
viii Lost in Wonder
coincide with Zion, for the divine glory needs its analogues in congruent signs).
The Liturgy is the principal context in which we learn what wondering, loving, and
praise-filled lostness may be. In the first three of these essays, by attention to such
masters as Aquinas, Guardini, and Pope Benedict, I seek to explore further the
significance of the Liturgy, and its normative practice, not least in this perspective.
In the succeeding four chapters I consider the contribution which can be made by
the visual and aural setting of the rites, in architecture, iconography, and music,
as well as, where sacred images are concerned, their overflow into the further
spaces of the home and the public highway. Lastly, I treat of the literary response
to the revelation of God’s glory in a sin-darkened world. Dante is the classic case,
here presented with special reference to the inspiration he found in the mendicant
orders (to one of which I belong). But we also need a wider poetics that makes
possible Christian discernment in scanning the literature of the modern. I have
found no better guide than the Russian exile whose reflections I expound. While
I may have taken a title from Methodism, I owe far more, substantively speaking,
to Eastern Orthodoxy which has been my accompaniment, often explicitly, since
my earliest work.
The Conclusion, originally a sermon preached at St Andrew’s, Deal, for the
opening of the Deal Festival of Arts, draws some threads together in a way that
may be helpful.
Aidan Nichols, O. P.
Blackfriars
Cambridge
Feast of our father Augustine, doctor gratiae
Acknowledgements
An earlier version of Chapter 1, ‘St Thomas on the Sacramental Liturgy’, appeared
in The Thomist 72 (2008), pp. 1–23; of Chapter 3, ‘Eucharistic Theology and the
Rite of Mass’, in Mass of Ages 162 (2009), pp. 4–8; of Chapter 4, ‘Architecture in
the Church’, in New Blackfriars 89. 1023 (2008), pp. 522–542; and of Chapter 7,
‘A Theological Perspective on Church Music’, in Usus Antiquior I. 1 (2010), pp.
26–38. The author and publisher are grateful for permission to reprint the relevant
material.