The 400th anniversary of the death of William Byrd, the great English composer of polyphonic sacred music, fell on July 4. On that day Cardinal Nichols himself presided at the evening Mass in his own cathedral and the choir used Byrd’s settings for the whole service. The homily touched on the details of Byrd’s long life (he was born around 1540 and lived until 1623), including the remarkable fact of his having become a Catholic during the Elizabethan persecution of the Church.
There can be a strong sense of beauty and grandeur hearing a sung Mass at Westminster Cathedral. By some divine alchemy, the glorious voices of the choir blend with the rich interior decoration and the mysterious gloominess of the high dark domes to provide an intimation of heaven. I have always taken a strange sort of consolation from the fact that the ceilings will almost certainly not be decorated as originally planned until long after I am dead.
On this occasion I also found myself musing on a role which the Church might once again find herself taking up in the years to come: the guardian of high culture and scholarship. Throughout history the Church has often held this responsibility to some degree, beginning in the chaotic and dangerous years following the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, when the first monks preserved religious and secular texts from the classical world.
For many centuries after that, anyone who wanted to pursue the arts or sciences in any form had to do so under the aegis of Catholic institutions. After the Reformation, this monopoly weakened, even in countries that remained Catholic, and the steady progress of secularisation over the last three centuries might be assumed to have finally rendered the Church ir- relevant as a promoter and defender of the arts.
But the course of history is a funny old thing. It seems hard to deny that in the Western countries – Europe and the English-speaking world – the fading of Christian belief and observance is coinciding with a loss of cultural vitality. This has been well outlined in books such as Ross Douthat’s The Decadent Society. The visual arts are stuck in a rut of sterile conceptualism, with artists mechanically repeating the same tired gestures of antagonism towards a bourgeois establishment that ceased to exist decades ago.
Cinema is increasingly divided between brainless spectacle for the masses, and mannered ultra-niche films catering to the increasingly odd ideological preferences of the elite. Pop music is becoming observably cruder and less musically sophisticated. Official architecture remains dominated by a glib, uncouth, inhuman blankness. In academia more and more disciplines are being politicised, with the inevitable result that scholars who simply seek to tell the truth without fear or favour, are marginalised and disadvantaged.
In this context, with universities and artistic establishments dissipating their energies in political wrangling and juvenile self-indulgence, it is by no means inconceivable that the Catholic Church might assume its old role as the main redoubt for serious artistic and scholarly endeavour. We draw on the same great springs of beauty, insight and inspiration that have served us for two millennia.
Some time ago I saw on Twitter a discussion about the decline of the polymath, a person who has a deep knowledge of more than one intellectual discipline – usually several. A classic example is Peter Brown, the renowned historian of Late Antiquity whose work ranges widely across many different times and places, and who is said to have at least some proficiency in more than 20 languages ancient and modern.
I suggested that, even if polymaths were disappearing from the secular academy, one place where you still regularly encountered them was the Catholic priesthood. The Vatican does after all operate its own space observatory, high up in the hills above Lake Albano to the southeast of Rome. I know of several cler- ics who have doctorates in the hard sciences, and even “ordinary” priests will generally have spent six years in full-time residential formation, acquiring degrees in philosophy and theology. Simply saying Mass every day is likely to form a poetic sensibility, and any conscientious priest will necessarily develop a fine and sympathetic understanding of human nature.
Laymen too have a role to play, just as King Alfred and the Emperor Charlemagne took the initiative in making their courts centres of creativity and learning. Sir James Macmillan is one of the most distinguished and versatile composers of our time. Stepping outside Catholicism, there is Professor John Lennox, an Evangelical and an Oxford mathematician who also writes accessible books of apologetics drawing on philosophy, theology, literature and cosmology.
In his 1959 novel A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M Miller imagined how a single monastery might help keep the flame of knowledge alive after a nuclear war. It hopefully won’t come to that for us, but all the same the West’s loss of faith is leading us to something like a new Dark Age, and we must be ready.
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