The heart has its reasons

Latin functions as a language of love, of adoration, of mystery and of longing, as Gavin Ashenden explains

Dr Dick and I sit at the back of Mass together. We are both tenors. I would not want to say ‘elderly’; I would prefer to say that we share a degree of intellectual and musical experience. But basically, we are both two retired ex-academics past the first bloom of youth. A long way past.

We have many things in common – the same size, the same vocal range, a trifle given to pedantry, but Dick is a scientist and I am not. Both of us are converts to the faith. We fell to discussing the Latin Mass. The conversation grew quite energised. Dick is a Novus Ordo kind of a guy through and through.

He was a senior lecturer in biology. He likes his facts and he likes clarity. When I suggested that the restriction of the Latin Mass was an impoverishment, he expostulated with vigorous denial.

“Of course it isn’t,” he said. “No one needs the Latin Mass. No one understands it. The liturgy has to be in the vernacular. It must be comprehensible, or else the laity are excluded.”

There was a time when I would have agreed with Dick. I remember as a recent convert to Christianity when I was a student, I had become very impatient with the ornate language of Cranmer in the 1662 prayer book. After years of attending liturgy without encountering the living God, I too was inclined to favour the contemporary, the accessible, the familiar. Beauty, cadence and elegance were all very well, but perhaps, went the familiar puritan argument, they could sometimes be a means of idolatry – ends in themselves, more than vehicles of supernatural encounter.

I tried the argument of Pope St John XXIII (in Veterum Sapienta) that perhaps if Latin was not objectively a source of holiness it might passively be so, having been sanctified by constant use in prayer? That didn’t pass the functionality test either, however.

Nor does Dick have much history. Not many biologists do. I told him how deeply I was moved by knowing I was using almost identical words and structures to my great heroes of Catholic history, prayer and thought.

In fact, I wanted to go further and say that through my whole life as a Protestant I carried the pain of not being in communion with disciples I loved – St Martin de Tours, St Anselm and St Augustine. And as for the home-growns, Bede, Alfred, Becket, Julian of Norwich, More, Fisher – the list is endless.

As with many sacramentally nostalgic ex-Anglican ministers, I was taught how to say the Latin Mass, in (sacramentally ineffective) imitation of the Catholic Church, and I immediately got the point. It was all about holiness and miracle.

What one touched, how one touched, where one moved at the altar, how one moved, what one wore, how one wore it and how one prayed when dressing, were all about holiness and the miraculous.

The choreography of priests and servers, given as much attention as any ballet or drama on stage, because something more important than a ballet or a drama is taking place, gives an indication that something of supreme beauty and importance is going on here.

There are many reasons why our generation of Catholics have found difficulty in believing in the miracle of the Mass. The alarming figure in the USA is the now well-known 69 percent surveyed who disbelieve the essential supernatural miracle and only 31 percent who do.

So, I want to ask Dick, how the culture of intelligibility is going for the Church? What has rational, accessible, colloquial, vernacular communication achieved? Is openness to the experience of the supernatural, is vulnerability to the miraculous achieved by the rational calculations of the mind; or is it perceived by the intuitions and longings of the heart?

Perhaps there is an advantage in using words from a second rather than a first language. The first language in which everyone is fluent may be the language of contract, bargains, measurement, argument, acquisition, negotiation; but perhaps Latin can offer itself as a second language; in which it functions as a language of love, of adoration, of mystery and of longing. It offers itself as the language not of the mind but of the heart.

It may not please Dick the scientist at first sight. But Dick may have forgotten that his laboratory of the mind in which empirical science is tested and discovered and in which biological life is tested and defined, is a different venture from the liturgy. The liturgy may instead act as a laboratory for the heart in which the supernatural is perceived and the life of the soul is rescued, mended and restored. The promise of God through the prophets was always, “I will give you a new heart” (Jeremiah 31).

It was a mathematician, Blaise Pascal, who got to the heart of the matter so succinctly when he wrote: “The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of... We know the truth not only by the reason, but by the heart.”

And liturgical Latin is pre-eminently the language of the heart.