Our Barren Garden of Symbols

It is becoming increasingly clear to me how vehemently our modern culture loaths symbolism. Our society is so ridiculously analytical, so bull-headedly rationalistic, that we can have no patience for the subtle communication of the economy of symbolism. That's not to say we don't like visual representations; we love those, but only if they are rationalized, corporatized, and utilitarian. We are a society obsessed with logos and mascots but cannot abide signs and symbols. 

This is, I suspect, a consequent of the highly data-driven, diagnostic, managerial nature of modern society. Our society is incredibly unbalanced, skewing heavily towards reductivist "left-brained" view of the world. To put it plainly, modernity finds symbols too cumbersome; they are too obtuse, too opaque, too imprecise. We find symbolism to be an ineffecient way of communicating because the symbol has to be decoded and interpreted. This is because a symbol, by its nature, appeals to us on a different level, what we might call the extra-rational plane: it's the type of communication that is spatial, non-verbal, holistic, and implicit. It cannot be reduced to mere words, and doing so risks distorting its content. The very act of trying to make the implicit explicit diminishes the symbol—a bit of it is "lost in translation." In other words, an effective symbol is always characterized by a certain opacity; effective use of symbolism means you must be comfortable with that opacity. It cannot be cast aside without diminishing the efficacy of the symbol as a means of transmitting meaning.

We see this trend in how the new liturgy deals with symbolism. The new liturgy retains symbols insofar as they have an expressly didactic value—everything has to be instructive. We are not allowed to simply take the symbol in and experience on the extra-rational plane; it has to be explained to us. Last night I attended a traditional All Souls Day liturgy with music from Gabriel Fauré's Requiem Mass in Dm. The mood of the entire Mass is defined by the conspicuous presence of the catalfaque at the front of the nave, draped in black and flanked by candles, calling to mind  a whole host of concepts relating to death, the afterlife, the souls who have passed on, and our own judgment. At the end of the Mass was the blessing and absolution at the catalfaque. The candles were lit as the choir sang Dies Irae, and the priest prayed sotto voce, surrunded by servers bearing crucifix and censers. A few responses at the conclusion and the ritual was ended; congregation filtered out in silence, each one passing by the catalfaque, a stark reminder of our morality. It was such a powerful ceremony, such a potent message about the Church's view of death—yes, death is real, all of us will one day face of judgment before our creator. But we do not go without aid, for in the Church Militant offers its prayers for the Church Suffering, that the holy souls may be aided in their last trial. All the symbolism points to this: the black catalfaque, the censers, the prayers, the music, the entire ambience created by the ritual action. It's all communicated on a level that is intuitive; I was thinking to myself that even if I was from an entirely different culture and understood nothing about Christianity, I would probably comprehend what this ritual was about.

I honestly don't know if the Novus Ordo has an option for an absolution at the catalfaque, but if it does, the prayer is likely a didactic text that tiresomely spells everything out. Everything in the Novus Ordo is explained away; nothing is left implicit. We have to be told what everything represents, told what the priest is doing at every moment. We can't appreciate the symbol as symbol; it has to be instructional, turned into a teaching lesson. The current ecclesial zeitgeist is obsessed with the liturgy as pedagogy. It is so prevalent I am not sure some clergy can even think of it otherwise (I am reminded of Pope Francis's story about the Cardinal who forbade his priest from learning Latin because Latin didn't have a plain pedagocial value). 

Now, to be fair, I don't think this tendency in the Church originates with the Novus Ordo; it was stewing for a long time, centuries even, and merely reached its apotheosis with the Novus Ordo. It parallels the movement towards rationalism in society as a whole, reflecting the modern preference for the quantitative over the qualitative. My friend dom Noah Moerbeek made an interesting observation once that the Council of Trent and the Counter-Reformation coincided with the disappearance of the Thaumaturgists, the "wonder-working" saints like Anthony of Padua, Vincent Ferrer, and the like. Obviously this is somewhat of a generalization; one could point to Padre Pio or St. Charbel as modern thaumaturgists, but I think overall the observation is sound. Trent brought a much greater disciplinary and doctrinal systematization to the Church, but not without some loss of the intuitive factors that made the medieval Church so vibrant. I think what we have in the Novus Ordo is this tendency taken to its extreme and run off the rails: the idea that we can just "skip right to the end," that we could "cut out the middle man" by rationalizing away our symbology and expecting it to produce the same results. It was a total triumph of function over form, quantity over quality, left-brain over right, the explicit over the implicit, the didactic over the mystical, the pedagogical over the pietistical, the "logo" or "mascot" over the symbol.

Now, if we want this kind of Church, this kind of society, then so be it. We can have whatever we create, and we will have to lie in whatever bed we make for ourselves. But we can't have it both ways. We can't overthrow the entire economy of liturgical and pietistical symbols that have characterized Catholicism for centuries and still expect reap the fruits of that economy. We can't systematically uproot every flower in our liturgical garden and ask why it looks so bare.