First of all, my apologies to our readers for posting my column a bit late this week. I had a bit of a flu last night and didn’t feel quite up to writing anything, so I put it off. But I thought for this week’s column I might follow up on my last week’s theme, namely, the purpose of liturgy. A few hours after putting up my Maundy Thursday post I got an email from one of our readers. I won’t identify him since he never actually gave me permission to post this – but I expect he won’t mind and he’s welcome to identify himself in the comments if he likes. I thought he posed some worthwhile questions, and I wanted to answer them, but I didn’t have time last weekend. However, this topic is presumably of interest to many of our readers, so I thought it might as well become the topic for my column this week.
The person who wrote the letter is responding to my post from last week, The Limitations of Liturgy. You may want to go back and read that in order to see what he’s talking about. My response will follow his letter.

Clara,
I realize that the liturgy is for us - to bring down to us and the world the graces needed.
But don’t you think that all this focus on emotions and feelings tends to play into the Novus Ordo concept of liturgy - as primarily a form of theater involving the whole community?
When actually the liturgy is about giving proper worship to God.

Perhaps this is the point of your post - that liturgy is not the most perfect vehicle for drawing the faithful into the Sacred Mysteries, nor should it be tailored to nor tinkered with for this purpose. Some degree of learning, understanding, meditation, and prayer are required outside of and even inside of Mass, separate from the liturgy, to bring people to the right state of mind and feelings toward the Sacred Mysteries.

Okay, well I can see how I might have alarmed some by talking about emotions and the meaning of liturgy in the same breath. There is something very distasteful about church services that are obviously designed to elicit particular emotional reactions from the worshippers. We see these more and more, in the mega-churches that come complete with rock bands, and in all manner of low Protestant churches in which it seems that nothing can count as worship unless it involves being in a kind of emotional frenzy. This kind of worship is also becoming increasingly popular among Catholics, particularly in places like Steubenville.

Witnessing such displays, one gets the same nauseated feeling that one has while watching movies like StepMom or City of Angels (horrible movies, both of them) in which it’s obvious that the film maker was seeking the most direct, unadorned, shameless means possible for bringing the all the teenaged girls in the audience to tears. You don’t emerge from such movies having gained a deeper understanding of life or a greater sensitivity to some historical or contemporary problem. Instead, you feel that a direct assult has been waged against your natural sympathies. If it works, the result is a kind of emotional masturbation: strong feelings are aroused, but nothing fruitful can come of it. The audience emerges without the smallest degree of moral improvement, and indeed, such experiences are likely to do spiritual harm. Like masturbation, they teach us to direct a good faculty towards unreal or pointless ends. If it becomes a habit, we often lose our will or inclination to turn our attention towards more fruitful ends.

Do I fall into the same trap when I discuss “emotions” in connection with liturgy? Well, I certainly think that much of the damage to liturgy has sprung from an excessive attention to the emotional experience of the worshipper. That isn’t to say, though, that emotions are unimportant. In fact, they’re very important, and no one can be a good Catholic without having their sensibilities properly ordered. So now, a little basic philosophy lesson, for those who aren’t already familiar with this stuff.

If you think that emotions are more or less a distraction from everything that matters in life, you’ll have good company in that great modernist philosopher, Immanuel Kant, who thought that all our actions should be taken for the sake of reason, and that emotions were a kind of unfortunate human baggage that made it more difficult for us to act rationally. In Kantian moral philosophy, we get no credit for having the “right” sorts of emotions. In fact, we get more credit for behaving well when we aren’t inspired by good feelings; the person who gets pleasure out of, say, playing with his children, deserves no special commendation for it, while the person who does it for duty’s sake even though he loathes the activity, is performing an action of great moral worth. In general, a moral life is not one in which the emotions have been trained, but rather one in which the agent has learned not to let his emotions have any effect on how he decides to act.

In the Aristotelian model, acting rationally is still of the utmost importance, but Aristotle takes a very different view of human emotion. For him, emotions are an integral part of the human person, and the rational agent will be the one who has trained himself to feel the appropriate emotions at the appropriate times. So, for example, the virtuous person is not the one who never gets angry, nor the one who ignores feelings of anger entirely in deciding how to act. Rather, the virtuous person will feel the appropriate amount of anger at the appropriate time, and he will act on that feeling of anger in the right sort of way. The man who gets unreasonably angry at small provocations (for example, by going into a blind rage because his wife overcooked the broccoli) is demonstrating a vice, but so too is the man who is unfazed by grave injustices (i.e. who feels or shows no reaction to the news that his wife has been unfaithful to him.)

Christian philosophy clearly follows in the Aristotelian path. Emotions are good – otherwise God would not have made them such an important part of human experience – but we need to learn to have the right sort of emotions at the right times.

This tends to worry people, and one reason is that it can seem a little too slippery. It would be nice for morality to be more straightforward, and it’s supposed to be within everyone’s power to be virtuous. After all, people can justifiably be blamed for their vices, and it seems odd to blame people for things they can’t control. But It’s obvious that we have less-than-complete control over our emotions, so it seems worrisome if morality depends on that. Aristotle would probably have been willing to bite the bullet and agree that some people simply aren’t able to be virtuous. That doesn’t seem to be an option for Catholics; salvation is supposed to be available to everybody.

The solution is twofold, really: although we can’t entirely control our emotions at any given time, they can be shaped through habituation and through grace. The grace comes through receptiveness to help from God. We have particularly potent conduits to it through the sacraments. The habituation comes from a whole variety of factors of environment and education. Liturgy is obviously one of the Church’s important tools for habituating her faithful.

Although the primary purpose of a Mass is the sacrifice, a valid Mass can be very quick and very simple. Nice churches, rich vestments, music, incense, the bodily posture of the faithful, wearing our best clothes, chapel veils, genuflecting… all these things are inessential to the sacrifice itself, but they’re important because they help to habituate the faithful. Liturgy may not be the best teacher intellectually, but it’s an excellent “teacher” in another way because it trains the sensibilities. By surrounding that central event with these various solemnities, the Church helps her faithful to understand what a solemn event the Mass really is. Nice clothes help us to show respect, chapel veils to express humility, and genuflecting to show reverence. Music and bodily postures can have a great effect on how we experience the Mass. The Church uses all of these to help us habituate our emotions, so that we can approach Mass (and, in the Mass, our Almighty Creator) with the proper attitudes. That involves having the right emotions.

Now, some might want to protest: surely we add these things to the Mass for God’s sake, not our own! In a sense this is quite true, and in a sense not. Of course, as the letter above acknowledges, God doesn’t need worship from creatures like us. It’s funny to talk about us doing anything “for the sake of” a being who will never be any better or worse off regardless of what we do. Why do we worship God, then? The Mass tells us: Dignum et iustum est. It is fitting and right that we should do so, not because God needs worship, but because he is worthy of it. And of course, we ourselves are made better and happier when we learn to give praise to that which is genuinely praiseworthy, and to give our most reverential love to that which surpasses all else, in every kind of perfection.

In a certain sense, then, it is true that the Mass is designed to stimulate certain emotional responses. Of course there’s a sacramental element to it as well, which is why the highest Anglican service can’t substitute for the lowest Catholic Mass. But the reason why a gorgeous Tridentine High Mass is better than a guitar-strumming Novus Ordo Mass is, on some level, because the former is better ordered to train our emotions in the right sorts of ways, so that we will feel anger for sacrilege, gratitude for generosity, and reverential awe in the presence of the Almighty God.

If what I’m saying is right, though, then we might notice something odd: churches that talk a lot about emotions, and pay very active attention to them, seem to be the ones inclined towards “emotional frenzy” worship with all its distasteful associations. Actually, though, this isn’t necessarily so odd. We might understand it by comparison to a related problem in philosophy, which UC Berkeley ethicist Sam Scheffler coined, “the paradox of happiness.”

The paradox of happiness goes something like this: all people want to be happy. But when people take Happiness as their primary goal in life, they tend not to be happy, because human happiness is actually achieved through commitments to other sorts of ends, i.e. love of family, aesthetic/intellectual/political achievements, or dedication to one’s faith. People who wallow in a purely selfish desire for happiness can never attain it. For individual X, personal happiness may be the most relevant byproduct of a life of love and service to others, but happiness isn’t what his life is about.

Something similar may be true of liturgy. Appropriate emotional responses may be what the liturgy is for, but the liturgy needs to be about God. Emotions generated purely for their own sake will be selfish, perverted, and incapable of bearing fruit, much like the ones stimulated by the Hollywood films mentioned earlier. The point of liturgy is to train the soul to respond appropriately to the most important of all beings, namely God. We learn to do that by thinking about God, not by thinking about our own emotions, and when we try to dictate exactly how we ought to be feeling as we worship, we end up with a hackneyed, distorted, manufactured idea of religious experience such as we might find at the mega-church. We have to keep our eyes on the end in order to have the right sort of experience.

So, there’s a real danger to thinking of church as an emotion-fest. Still, it may not be wrong occasionally to step back and have a meta-conversation about liturgy and emotion. The Doctors of the Church were certainly aware that habituation was an important part of liturgy, so there’s no reason why we shouldn’t also be aware of this. We might especially take note of this aspect of liturgy when there’s some actual problem or deficiency in it. If we’re having very obviously wrong emotional responses, we might start evaluating our emotional responses more overtly. (For example, I might begin to wonder what the problem was if I always felt angry or depressed all the way though Mass, since these aren’t generally optimal feelings to have while praising God) We might also reasonably discuss proper emotions if there seems to be some emotion that would help us better to appreciate the Sacred Mysteries, but that Mass isn’t naturally equipped to inspire in us. This was what I wanted to consider in my previous post. Certainly I agree that we should not try to “fix” the Mass in order to incorporate this feeling. There would be no way to do that without paying a heavy price by making the Mass a less fitting place for honoring God. But the limitations of liturgy are still worth noting, and I was merely suggesting that we could make up for such natural deficiencies by reflecting privately on other experiences that might help us to better appreciate the full significance of the Triduum.