The Reign of Novelty and the Sins of the Times: Why the Novus Ordo Is Solely Modern in Content (Part 1)

As promised, I am sharing with readers of Tradition & Sanity the full text of the lecture I gave last month at the Roman Forum in Gardone, Italy. I consider this to be one of the most important papers I have ever written; the drafting of it brought several new realizations that will be decisive for my future work (and for my life). For ease of reading, it has been divided into four parts, which I will publish today, Thursday, next Monday, and next Thursday. I sincerely hope you will read (or listen to) them all!

Passing Time, by Anton Parsons (source)

In 1945, the Perennialist author René Guénon¹ published a rather insightful book entitled The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times.² The book’s argument covers vast territory but the fundamental thesis is that all cultures and civilizations have placed quality and form above matter and quantity—until Western modernity, which for the first time exalts the material world and its quantitative aspect over the spiritual domain and its qualitative aspect.

A disciple of Guénon named Marco Pallis applied this theory to the Catholic Church in the wake of the Second Vatican Council. He maintained that prior to the Council, the Catholic Church had (with greater or lesser consistency) held up the ideals of Christendom and cast itself in a counterrevolutionary role, whereas at and after the Council it somehow saw itself as lagging behind the modern world, inferior to and dependent on it, to such an extent that it had to strip away centuries of supposed detritus in order to “catch up,” to welcome the mentality of the age and its attitudes. If the Church could only throw open its creaky old doors (the theory went), it would position itself to welcome a huge influx of confused but good-willed modern seekers who were only waiting for the proclamation of the good news in their own language and ideas. In a telling passage, Pope Paul VI gushes:

One must realize that this council, which exposed itself to human judgment, insisted very much more upon this pleasant side of man, rather than on his unpleasant one. Its attitude was very much and deliberately optimistic. A wave of affection and admiration flowed from the council over the modern world of humanity. The modern world’s values were not only respected but honored, its efforts approved, its aspirations purified and blessed. It might be said that all this and everything else we might say about the human values of the council have diverted the attention of the Church in council to the trend of modern culture, centered on humanity. We would say not diverted but rather directed.³

In particular, the liturgical reform rejected form and quality—the intricately developed offering of worship as handed down across the ages, with its exaltation of rhetoric, poetry, the sacred dance of rubrically dense solemn ceremonial, architecture and the panoply of fine arts—and chose, instead, to privilege quantitative ways of thinking.

For example, the sanctoral calendar had “too many saints,” so more than 300 were removed, in a sort of hagiographical weight-loss program; the Order of Mass had too many prayers, symbols, and gestures for busy modern people, and some of them seemed (to some people, at least) superstitious or ridiculous, so all were radically simplified. Yet, at the same time, the verbosity of man in the media age clamored for a grossly distended lectionary spreading over two and three years in a way that clearly exalts sheer quantity of text over the quality of appropriateness for its moral, doctrinal, and Eucharistic purpose.

In short, the reign of quantity (both additive and subtractive) inaugurated by such philosophers as Francis Bacon and René Descartes finally invaded and assimilated the central act of the Church’s life, which, from that point on, reflected more and more the desiderata of its human agents and particular local interest groups. This resulted in a balkanization and banalization eloquently diagnosed by Joseph Ratzinger:

In our form of the liturgy [i.e., the Novus Ordo] there is a tendency that, in my opinion, is false, namely, the complete “inculturation” of the liturgy into the contemporary world. The liturgy is thus supposed to be shortened; and everything that is supposedly unintelligible should be removed from it; it should, basically, be transposed down to an even “flatter” language. But this is a thoroughgoing misunderstanding of the essence of the liturgy and of liturgical celebration. For in the liturgy one doesn’t grasp what’s going on in a simply rational way, as I understand a lecture, for example, but in a manifold way, with all the senses, and by being drawn into a celebration that isn’t invented by some commission but that, as it were, comes to me from the depths of the millennia and, ultimately, of eternity.⁴

It is quite striking that Ratzinger describes what occurred at the hands of the Consilium as resulting from “a thoroughgoing misunderstanding of the essence of the liturgy”!