I often hear that my love for what is unfortunately called “traditional” hymnody is just a prejudice of taste. This accusation comes in various forms. The first one Ill call the Temporal Fallacy. It is most commonly expressed thus: “Every work of art that is now considered traditional was once new, and was once experienced as such. The only difference between those works then, and works now that are out of the stream of tradition, is a mere accumulation of years.” But this just isnt so. To see why, take an example from a different kind of art – from painting. When Giotto painted his frescoes in Florence and Padua, placing his figures in often dramatic poses, and taking great care to express human feelings in a figures eyes and in the cast of the countenance, people raved about it. They said that it seemed that the figures could just walk out of the walls and come right into the church. Within his own lifetime he was reputed to be the greatest painter in Italy, as Dante testifies in the Purgatory, written when Giotto still had many years ahead of him. Giottos work was felt as “new,” and it set future painters in Italy on a course that would lead to the tour-de-force perspectives of Masaccio and Mantegna, and eventually to the muscular figures that Michelangelo painted on the Sistine ceiling. Yet if you look at things more carefully, you see that there is no severe break between Giotto and what went before. Duccio and Cimabue had prepared the way for him. The emphasis on the particulars of the human form was not new. Attention to the natural world was not new – Albert the Great, the naturalist and teacher of Thomas Aquinas, died before Giotto painted a single wall. Giotto was bringing to reality the possibilities that had already lain latent in western painting. He had mastered everything that his predecessors had done, and he unfolded from that tradition the greater things that it still had to offer. If you look at Giottos stupendous series of frescoes for the Arena Chapel in Padua, you see that the genius at work has at his disposal a whole world of Christian symbols, which he uses deliberately and intelligently. He does not have to invent a new language. He does not toss the old language away. Look at the bare hill that “follows” Mary and Jesus on the flight to Egypt, with the lone scraggly tree, bearing green leaves, on its top. Giotto did not invent that motif. Look at the simian face of Judas when he kisses Jesus, and look at his cloak that tries to “hide” Jesus. Giotto didnt invent those motifs either. Look at Mary Magdalene weeping at the feet of Jesus, wiping them with her long luxuriant hair, as she once did in the house of the Pharisee. When you “read” Giottos paintings, you are in a world that the painter has inherited, from hundreds and thousands of preachers, poets, theologians, and artists going back to the time of Jesus Himself. Giotto has not uprooted himself from the springs of tradition. Great periods of artistic flourishing are like the time of Giotto and Dante. They are characterized by remembering great works that may have been forgotten or not well enough appreciated. They bring to fuller reality the virtues of their forebears. Giotto could do everything that Cimabue did, and better, and more. Dante could do everything that Guido Cavalcanti did, and better, and more. Periods of artistic decline, by contrast, are characterized by forgetting. There are whole genres of poetry that flourished as recently as a hundred years ago, which no longer exist, and contemporary poets do not seem to be aware of the vast and disheartening loss. They do not know how much they do not know. Those genres have not been transformed into other more glorious kinds of poetry; we arent talking about a flower coming from a bud, but a parking lot paved over a garden. Much the same thing has happened to popular songs, and to Christian hymnody, if I can judge from the evidence of the hymnals. (It may be that the best composers never get chosen for the hymnals.)
Posted on: Tue, 13 Jan 2015 21:13:17 +0000