We know that Christ is present in the Eucharist, so why use incense? We know that a Church is God’s house, so why decorate it? Since the prayers at Mass are now in the vernacular we don’t need the images and poetry found in the “old prayers” since people know what we are saying. We know that a priest or religious is who he or she is, so why wear a collar or habit? I consider all of these a form of rationalism that has shaped our current Church. Certainly Descartes or this thinking has never been officially sanctioned, but I feel they have made their way in over the centuries. As we strip things down to there simplist form the succeding generations lose out who never new their past.

Any thoughts?

The woman who mistakenly feeds her child poison in the sincere, innocent belief that it is pure food is different from the woman who feeds her child food on the understanding that it is poison. I agree: physical acts don’t always line up with intentions. The will and the intellect are the key things, though, not really the affective state per se.

Apparently the angels delight in objective demonstrations of female submission and modesty as it is found in the wearing of chapel veils. Objective goods determine what affective relations are proper, even if — out of ignorance or incapability — the person is incapable of achieving that particular objective end. It seems that the Tridentine Mass provides more stimuli for intellectual and volitional acts of piety, faith, etc., insofar as the words are more explicit and the decorum more solemn. That certainly is tied in with affective states, but the matter is not exhausted thereby.

Forgive me if I’m rehashing things that have already been addressed — I’m writing in a rush and don’t have much time to reread everything.

However, the Bible often talks about things being pleasing to God, where we might sometimes cash that out in terms of the thing having a positive effect on a person’s spiritual state. I don’t know why the same couldn’t be true of angels. If it’s true that most other trappings of the Mass are there for the sake of shaping human affections, it would seem awfully strange for chapel veils to be the one exception.

But there are tendencies. For one who genuinely wishes to honor God, kneeling tends to put us in a superior state for doing this, and yes, this does have something to do with the effect of kneeling on our emotional state (the medievals might have said, on the “affective” part of our nature) though it won’t necessarily yield immediate and tangible rewards of the kind we often have in mind when we describe an experience as “emotionally satisfying.” Similar things could be said for many aspects of the old rite Mass. This was largely the point of my post — trying to plan for what’s most “emotionally satisfying” is not generally wise, for the same reason that it isn’t wise to consciously orient our lives around “being happy.” Being happy is great, but we don’t have a very good grip on what really makes us happy, so it’s better to worry about being virtuous and good. It turns out that this will make us happiest in the long run anyway.

Similarly, our emotions do matter, but we aren’t necessarily in a position to know what emotions are best for us to be feeling at any given time. Given a choice, we’d probably go for nonstop feelings of peace, contentment, excitement or pleasure… but perhaps those aren’t always the ones needed for our spiritual growth. Periods of dryness might feel to us like “emotional sickness” when in fact later reflection will reveal that they were spiritually beneficial. So it is generally better to stop worrying about whether liturgy leaves us “emotionally fulfilled” and to focus our attention on the object of our worship, namely God. But we shouldn’t conclude from that that the worshipper’s own affective state isn’t, on some level, the main thing at issue in developing the rubrics for the Mass. God wants clean hearts and contrite spirits, and he values kneeling and singing and chapel veils and incense and all the rest of it, only insofar as these are instrumental to giving him the former.

“On a second point I believe we must look at Descartes to understand the curent liturgical situation (Novus Ordo).”

On a second point I believe we must look at Descartes to understand the curent liturgical situation (Novus Ordo).

But the letter writer is surely right that it is wrong to try and engineer the Mass to produce a certain emotional experience. That is where the Charismatics sometimes go wrong, unfortunately. Even though I can’t stand praise and worship music, if it brings someone closer to God in a NON-LITURGICAL setting, then I have no problem with it. But why does all of this nonsense have to be incorporated into the liturgy? That’s the megachurch mentality.