Anthony Esolen, Professor of English at Providence College in Rhode Island, has written a great piece for the March 2006 issue of Touchstone Magazine: a Journal of Mere Christianity. It's bascially about the neutering of liturgical language, particularly in the singing hymns to the Lord. The article is appropriately titled, "No More Hims of Praise."
Reading the article I was several times reminded of a time when I opened up a worship hymnal at my church, and turning to the appropriate song, found that someone had crossed out the word "his" and replaced it with "God's." This frazzled me. It's a worship hymnal, not a seventh grade research paper. But this is the attitude that many today have taken to language which has been around for hundreds and even thousands of years, that if something bothers our modern egalitarian sensibilities, we may simply cross it out and substitute our own linguistic whims.
These recent controversies in the Catholic Church and in others have led me to recognize a fundamental hallmark of the type of Christian orthodoxy that CS Lewis and others like GK Chesterton endorsed. Basically, they take seriously the sexual symbolism used by the Church and by Christ before her. For example, the notion that God is Father and the Church is Mother, therefore in referring to God in the third person singular pronoun the proper terminology is "he," and in referring to the Church as such the proper terminology is not "it," but "she."
That sexual symbolism is fundamental to Catholic and to orthodox Christian teaching not just in systematics and creeds but in areas of morality and indeed liturgy. It is in ceasing to take that symbolism seriously that the decline begins from orthodoxy into apostasy and ultimately into the kind of anarchy that we're beginning to see in some non-Catholic corners of Christendom. And when I open a hymnal where that symbolism is downplayed or dismissed outright, it worries me.
Leave a comment