The days when the New Atheists were at the height of their influence seem far behind us. The noughties were awash with bestselling books that arrogantly dismissed religious beliefs, such as The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins and God is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens. “Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.” So wrote Terry Eagleton in a legendary review of Dawkins’ God Delusion. And yet, the vulgarity of their writings did not stop the New Atheists from selling thousands of books and from making religion seem low-status, fit only for the simple-minded.
Twenty years later, however, millions have now listened to Jordan Peterson’s YouTube lectures on the Book of Genesis, and the prominence of theological themes and Christian speakers at the Alliance of Responsible Citizenship conference in London was another sign of what some are calling “The Rise of Cultural Christianity.” One book that is particularly responsible for this shift is Tom Holland’s Dominion, the book that launched a thousand think pieces, which gives an engaging and sweeping account of how Christianity challenged the assumptions of the ancient world and shaped the values and beliefs that remain pervasive in the West. Although elusive about his own beliefs, Holland’s evident attraction to Christianity’s benign effect on the West has gained a newfound respect among secular people for the influence of Christianity on our mores and moral beliefs about human dignity and rights. This in turn has led many to an anxiety about what may come next, as secularization leaves those mores and morals increasingly groundless without their connection to Christian faith and practice, and at risk of being swept away.
The cultural moment is therefore opportune for the publication of Cosima Clara Gillhammer’s Light on Darkness: The Untold Story of the Liturgy, a book that can rightly be placed alongside Holland’s Dominion. Whereas Holland focuses on how the belief in a crucified God shaped the assumptions and attitudes of the West, Gillhammer is instead concerned to draw attention to a different aspect of the Gospel’s impact. She writes: “Liturgy is at the roots of Western culture. Our music, art, literature and architecture are shaped by and developed out of the liturgy. Without it, Dante’s Divine Comedy would not exist, and neither would Michelangelo’s Pietà. Not even Star Wars would have its memorable soundtrack had it not been for medieval liturgy.… Perhaps it is one of the best-kept secrets of our time that the liturgy stands at the centre of the cultural history of the West” (8).
Cultural Approach
The purpose of the book is not to give a scholarly account of the Western liturgy as Father Uwe Michael Lang has done incomparably in The Roman Mass: From Early Christian Origins to Tridentine Reform. It is rather an introductory guide for the general reader to “cultural production—literature, art, music—arising from the influence of religious ritual” (12), which means specifically, in the West, the ritual of the Roman rite, the dominant rite in Western Christianity, during the key period of its development in the Middle Ages up to the Tridentine reforms.
In the introduction, Gillhammer faces immediately the scepticism that may greet her plan. In secularized societies, so many rituals seem to have disappeared from everyday life that the importance rituals once had in the past may seem difficult to understand for some, especially as ritual and ceremony have connotations of being “stiff, cumbersome, uninspiring” (13). But she rightly emphasizes that, even today, there are moments we feel called to observe by some form of ritual, whether it be a wedding, a funeral, or the anniversary of events of national significance, such as Veterans Day in the US or Armistice Day in the UK. Thousands of people waited to pay their respects to the late Queen Elizabeth II’s lying-in-state in a line snaking its way along the River Thames, at one point reaching a length of ten miles. This was a particularly extraordinary example of a felt need for ritual, according to Gillhammer, even in a highly secularized society (14-15). The Changing of the Guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington National Cemetery—or at Buckingham Palace—always draws tourists, perhaps for similar reasons. “Ceremonies such as these bring together communities, they set important life events apart from the ordinary and mundane, and they connect us with the past in the knowledge that many generations before us have observed the same rituals, whatever they may be” (15). Gillhammer therefore leads the reader on in the following chapters to demonstrate how indispensable it is to understand the ritual of Christian liturgy “if we want to understand Western art and culture” (17).
Human Response
Each of the following eight chapters is centered around one common human experience or emotion (e.g. “Hope,” “Love,” “Grief,” “Death”) and each follows the same pattern roughly. Gillhammer selects a particular text used in the liturgy and dwells for a time over the different ways that it has been employed and understood in Christian worship, and then explores the reverberations of that liturgical text in works of art inspired by it in the following centuries. Her method is more associative than argumentative, since her purpose is not to stake out a position in a scholarly debate or challenge some received opinion. Her purpose is rather to show the intrigued layman the different perspectives from which to look at the liturgy and to appreciate how it has been a generative source for works of culture, sometimes even in unexpected places. This calls for a more free-flowing style and she often begins a chapter with an imaginative description of some liturgical ritual or text, as it might have been sung or enacted in medieval Europe.
Take the chapter entitled “Death” as an example. It begins: “Somewhere in medieval Europe, in some remote monastery on a cold winter’s evening, a monk sitting in his lonely cell decided what death sounds like. He was trying to set a poem to music, a poem to describe the horror, grief and destruction of the Day of Doom in the most evocative language. The poem was gripping, but the music the monk invented was what made it truly haunting.… We will never know who the monk was, but his music has survived. It was passed down the ages, first from monastery to monastery, and then picked up by composers writing for general entertainment rather than religious purposes. Whenever they wanted to create a haunting atmosphere of danger, death and despair, this was their favourite tune to use, and it never failed to cast its spell” (171).
Readers of Adoremus will easily be able to guess that the Dies Irae is intended. She goes on to discuss the Biblical references in the poem, the doctrines of the particular and general judgement of the dead conveyed by it, the rhetorical and literary devices used in the text, its official incorporation into the Requiem Mass from 1570 onwards, although it had already been in use as a sequence in the medieval liturgy (186), and how it was chanted in monasteries and convents. Gillhammer explores how new settings of the poem were composed, such as the setting by the Renaissance composer Jacobus de Kerle, which alternates between stanzas in plainchant and others in polyphony, or Mozart’s Requiem in D minor, who makes “a surprising inversion of the descending motif of the original chant melody…. Mozart’s setting presenting an ascending motif, in which the soprano line becomes gradually higher, increasing the intensity of the anguish expressed in the music” (189). Later, she says, the Dies Irae motif “increasingly started to appear in classical music in context divorced from the Requiem Mass and its religious setting” (191). She mentions how the musical motif from the original Dies Irae chant reappears or is echoed in the soundtrack of numerous films: The Exorcist, The Shining, The Lord of the Rings, The Lion King, and in Star Wars: Episode IV in the scene where Luke discovers the murdered bodies of his adoptive parents. “It is astonishing that the music exerts a profound effect on listeners regardless of whether they are musically trained or even consciously recognize the motif. The dark and foreboding character of the music, perhaps along with subconscious memories of having heard the tune many times before in contexts of death and doom, is enough to evoke in audiences feelings of anxiety, fear and desperation” (195).
In similar fashion, other chapters consider the Stabat Mater and the Pietà (in the chapter on “Grief”), the Exsultet and Handel’s Messiah (“Joy”), and how the Song of Songs was used or alluded to in antiphons for Marian feasts, in paintings of the Annunciation by Fra Angelico and Tintoretto, in Walt Whitman’s poem Song of Myself, and even in pop music, such as “Songs of Solomon” by Kate Bush (“Love”).
There are things to quibble and cavil, of course. Gillhammer describes purgatory as the soul’s destination if its “good actions…outweigh the bad ones” (174), an unfortunately imprecise choice of words. Her wider-ranging final two chapters on the uses of time and space in liturgy could have had more to say on the role of the different parts of the Temporale in the Eucharist’s cycle of collects and readings, about which Columba Marmion and Robert Crouse have written so well.
Traditional Renewal
When reading her exquisite description of how Mass in the medieval English cathedral of Mells might have looked like, I was left moved—and yet saddened at the thought that this tradition of ceremony and ritual failed to be perpetuated in the past century in so many dioceses and parishes (though there are, of course, efforts to revive in many places what fell into disuse). What a scandal it would be for an inexperienced person to read Gillhammer’s book and then to find, on entering the nearest Catholic church for Mass, few signs of that splendour in a carelessly or tastelessly celebrated liturgy!
Seasoned readers of liturgical scholarship may sniff at the description of this book and wonder what they may learn from Gillhammer. But they are not the intended audience. I compared her book to Holland’s Dominion because Gillhammer’s Light on Darkness is the sort of book to recommend to that co-worker or neighbor who seems curious about the Christian faith. Or perhaps a non-Catholic friend came with you to High Mass, without any prior experience of “smells and bells,” and was entranced by the beauty of the ceremony and the music? This is the book to put in his or her hands because it shows that the liturgy has been the underappreciated wellspring responsible for so many of the works of beauty we cherish in the West.
