Liturgical Stooges

As the translator of Dante's The Divine Comedy and Lucretius's On the Nature of Things, Dr Esolen knows a thing or two about poetry and what not to do.

From Crisis

By Anthony Esolen, PhD

The project of "modernizing" ancient hymns turned into a search for rhyming words, at the cost of original meaning.

A long time ago, we hired a team of carpenters and plumbers to renovate a bathroom. Moe, Larry, and Curly were not masters of their craft. I should have fired them as soon as I saw what they had done to one of the doorways, removing the support for one of the uprights and turning what had been a rectangle into a quadrilateral in three dimensions, with no two angles alike. But I thought, “Maybe they’re better at plumbing.” Then one of them forgot that the toilet hadn’t been sealed when he turned on the valve and flushed, ruining the ceiling in the room below. And I still thought, “At least they can set up the shower, and I can repair the rest.” But no, they didn’t do that right, either. Then they disappeared before the job was done, taking my money with them.

The lesson is simple. Anyone content to turn a doorway into a buckling, three-dimensional quadrilateral cannot be trusted with anything else in the line of construction—and perhaps cannot be trusted at all.

Apply the lesson to Worship, the fourth edition. I choose it because it is handy, but what I say about it is true of all the other common and overpriced Catholic hymnals whose editors take it upon themselves to mangle hymns written before 1960.

I’m not Michelangelo. I don’t presume to improve the Sistine ceiling by whitewashing what I don’t like, or inserting smiley faces into the Last Judgment, or replacing the lion of St. Mark with a purple dinosaur. But I don’t have to be Michelangelo to leave excellent things alone. I just have to be modest and not stupid. Anyone who does the stupid vandalizing cannot be trusted in anything else.

The editors will vandalize when they think they can get away with it, with these aims:

• To eliminate all archaic language;
• To blunt or obliterate masculine references to God or Christ, when possible;
• To obliterate the generic use of man, for which there is no adequate substitute in English;
• To excise verses and hymns about the Church Militant.

The first aim is foolish and pointless. The others are malignant.

As to the first: In the Our Father, we say, “Hallowed be thy name,” and we know what we’re saying. In the Hail Mary, we say, “The Lord is with thee.” What’s wrong with that? The saintly Fr. Walter Ciszek, writing about his years in the gulags of the Soviet Union, took as the title of his work the first words of a beloved hymn, He Leadeth Me. Anyone confused?

When editors modernize the language, they invariably screw it up. You can’t turn thee at the end of a rhyming line into you without having to rewrite the whole line it is supposed to rhyme with. You can’t turn leadeth into leads without messing up the meter, so you have to choose another verb entirely or rewrite the line. Here is a modest example of such incompetence. It’s the third stanza of the ancient and venerable “Cherubic Hymn,” rendered into English as “Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence” by Gerard Moultrie (1829-1885):

Rank on rank the host of heaven
Spreads its vanguard on the way,
As the Light of Light descendeth
From the realms of endless day,
That the powers of Hell may vanish
As the darkness clears away.

There is nothing difficult about that. The governing motif is light, before which the darkness must vanish.

But the editors of Worship could not leave the word descendeth alone. Here’s what they did, poor punctuation and all:

Rank on rank the host of heaven
Spreads its vanguard on the way;
As the Light of Light, descending
From the realms of endless day,
Comes, the powers of hell to vanquish
As the darkness clears away.

That’s awful. It separates the subject Light from its verb by a line and a half. It replaces the easily understood descendeth with a participle, interrupting the clause.  It inserts the verb comes in the fifth line, requiring that line to be rewritten, not as a clause but as an infinitive phrase to complete the sense of the new verb. But they had to invert the phrase, and thus they replaced the mildly archaic and easily understood descendeth with something much more archaic, as if a handyman might ring your doorbell and say, “I’ve come your washer to repair.” 

Worst of all, the image of light is muddled up. The Light has descended, that the powers of Hell may vanish. That was swift, straightforward, right: as easy as throwing the windows open and flooding a room with light. But the editors painted themselves into a corner, and since “vanquish” sounds sort of like “vanish,” they went for it. Ugh.

As I said, that’s a modest example of vandalism wrought by the least objectionable of the four motives. It’s a cockeyed doorway. It’s a flooded ceiling.

Let me now look at a hymn where a couple of the motives coincide. I’m not picking out rotten cherries. This one happens to have been the recessional that my son played at Mass yesterday, and we had no choice but to use the text in Worship. I winced through the verses, figuring that something was wrong. It was.

The hymn is “Lift High the Cross,” substantially written by Michael Newbolt for Hymns Ancient and Modern (1916). The first verse serves also as a refrain after each succeeding verse:

1 Lift high the Cross, the love of Christ proclaim,
Till all the world adore his sacred name.

Now let me give Newbolt’s complete work. Imagine singing it as a processional march—to the high-spirited melody “Crucifer,” composed for this hymn—on the Feast of the Elevation of the Holy Cross:

2 Come, brethren, follow where our Captain trod,
Our King victorious, Christ the Son of God.

3 Led on their way by this triumphant sign,
The hosts of God in conquering ranks combine.

4 Each new-born soldier of the Crucified
Bears on his brow the seal of Him who died.

5 This is the sign which Satan’s legions fear,
The mystery which angel hosts revere.

6 Saved by this Cross whereon their Lord was slain,
The sons of Adam their lost home regain.

7 From north and south, from east and west they raise
In growing unison their song of praise.

8 O Lord, once lifted on the glorious Tree,
As Thou hast promised, draw men unto Thee.

9 Let every race and every language tell
Of Him who saves our souls from death and hell.

10 From farthest regions let them homage bring,
And on his Cross adore their Savior King.

11 Set up thy throne, that earth’s despair may cease
Beneath the shadow of its healing peace.

12 So shall our song of triumph ever be,
Praise to the Crucified for victory.

Do you know, Reader, what’s wrong with this hymn? Nothing! And I say confidently that no hymn like it has been written in my lifetime.

The editors of Worship did not, of course, want all those stanzas. Any guesses as to which they omitted? How about 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, and 11? We mustn’t refer to the battle against powers and principalities that St. Paul says we must fight. We mustn’t have any apocalyptic imagery of war that the meek St. John says shall mark the last days. We mustn’t draw too bold a contrast between an earth without Christ, a place of despair and darkness, and the peace that only He can bring to all nations.
So, they emasculated the hymn; and not content with that, they jiggered three of the middle verses they did include. Here is what they give in place of Newbolt’s 2, 3, 4, and 8. I will bracket their mischief:

Come, [Christians], follow where our [Savior] trod,
Our King victorious, Christ the Son of God.

Led on their way by this triumphant sign,
The hosts of God in conquering ranks combine.

Each newborn [servant] of the Crucified
Bears on [the] brow the seal of him who died.

O Lord, once lifted on the glorious Tree,
[Your death has bought us life eternally.]

See? What was an intelligently ordered poem about the soldier in a fighting Church—excellent, by the way, for Confirmation—is now a jumble. Worst is what they did to that last couplet. Rather than end it on the pronoun thee, they rewrote the whole line, getting rid of the generic men and obliterating the powerful scriptural reference: “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself” (John 12:32). The cost is also grammatical. In English, we do not buy eternally. The only reason why that adverb is there is that the editors were scrambling for a rhyme.

And what’s wrong with language and imagery that appeal to the masculine? Too many priests? A Church too bold and fearless in the face of postmodernity? Too many new parishes springing up? Too many baritones in the choir?

Motives aside, the editors have done what Moe, Larry, and Curly did to our bathroom. With few exceptions, what they did to “Lift High the Cross” they did to all the other old hymns, taking right angles and making them obtuse, knocking out supports, and hoping that globs of homemade spackle would keep people from noticing—especially since nobody really expects poetry to make any sense anyway.

Therefore, they should not be trusted in anything else. And sure enough, the more recent hymns they choose range from adequate to embarrassingly bad—grammatically, rhetorically, and poetically. I haven’t even gotten to the unsingable melodies fit for soloists in an off-off-Broadway show. I’ve singled out GIA and Worship. But Moe, Larry, and Curly have cousins in all the big Catholic presses. Enough already.