Modulating the Silence: The Magic of Gregorian Chant

THE FAMOUS SOCIOLOGIST of religion Peter Berger in one of his writings describes his attendance at an experimental service in the cathedral of Stockholm in the beginning of the seventies. ¹ He had gone there with some reluctance, and for want of anything better to do. He knew in advance what he would find: priests cloaked in blue jeans, strumming guitars and singing "folksy sounding songs." All this in a last-ditch effort to involve the church in the times and the times in the church. Berger strikes a weary note. Such experiments had already been fashionable in America in the fifties, and liturgically they did not have not much to offer him. In spite of this, the service made a deep impression, because the language spoken was Swedish, of which Berger hardly understood anything. His conclusion was that precisely the use of an unknown or incompletely known language heightens and deepens the power of the ritual. The Protestants, and recently also the Roman Catholics, in Berger's opinion pay a high price for the ritual use of the vernacular. The price for the unbridled urge in the sixties to make everything intelligible and understandable is the trivialization of the message. Michel de Montaigne [Begin Page 57] had already warned about the dangers of translating liturgical texts into the vernacular. ² He noticed that in many religions (e.g., the Jewish and the Islamic), doctrines of faith are closely linked with the language in which they have been formulated. That which is understood completely, and that can be translated literally, is not an appropriate vehicle for the otherness and the inexpressibility of the divine. For then there remains nothing more to consider-- what is written is written. In the "Spannungslosigkeit zur Wirklichkeit" (absence of tension towards reality)--the expression is Karl Mannheim's--all imagination disappears and with it the possibility of religious imagination. ³

In the quest for the deepest meaning of existence, words fail and people resort to meaningless sounds, if need be. However, this quest is not a meaningless undertaking. In fact, it presupposes the presence of meaning and signification. Religion--thus Paul Valéry has recorded in one of his lifelong morning meditations--offers words, acts, and gestures for occasions in which we do not know what to say, what to think, what to do. ⁴ It is this paradoxical activity that I want to investigate more closely.

From Berger's observation I deduce the general proposition that ritual language cannot be reduced to its direct meaning. In between the words, a melody is sounding that leads us to suppose more and that evokes more than that which is justified by the text. The anthropologist Tambia sharpens this: the logic of religious language does not reside in its intelligibility, nor in its communicative power. ⁵ In several religions the liturgical language is understood only by a minority of adepts, and sometimes no one understands what is being said, not even the one who is speaking. It is an old profundity with biblical roots that he who speaks about God will stammer and stutter.

Divina Commedia

Language seems increasingly to lose its communicative function as it reaches the religious core of the message it contains. A beautiful illustration of this process of fading is provided by the Divina Commedia, Dante Alighieri's famous poem about the journey that led him through Hell, via the Mount of Purification, into Heaven. This journey has all the characteristics of a ritual. The tripartite structure of ritual, as indicated by Durkheim, Mauss, Hubert, and Van Gennep, can easily be recognized. Van Gennep's typology is the best-known one. ⁶ He labels the three parts successively as "séparation" (separation: Hell), "marge" (in-between stage, the purge: the Mount of Purification), and "aggrégation" (joining, completion: Heaven). William James already had indicated...