Tidegärd och gregoriansk sång i skönlitteraturen

Abstract

Christian themes and descriptions of ecclesiastical life are nothing uncommon in the belles lettres. Even in a secularized time like ours one can presume that an author of the Western civilization has been influenced by Christian tradition —positively or negatively — both in a cultural and moral respect.  

Some authors devote a great deal of their efforts to grappling with questions of life or to coming to terms with the religion that has once been forced upon them. Others use the Christian traditions to create environment and background, often historical, in their books. To some authors the Christian life is a living reality, which they in and through their authorship want to mediate to others; be it in a simple, evangelicalistic edifying literature, (where good will often exceeds the artistic ability) or in a complicated and fascinating study of the struggle of the belief and the maturity of the soul.  

The human being’s personal relationship with God, her belief and doubt, is an essential subject to many authors. The Church service on the other hand, which in reality has such a central position in the Christian life, is seldom dealt with in literature. Per­ haps because of the fact that liturgy is a form of art in itself and, because of that, more or less inaccessible to treatment by another artistic means of expression. (One who tries to describe music and musical experiences in a literary form often seems to be confronted by similar difficulties.)  

Occasionally a divine service is described both in older and more recent belles lettres. Also more particular material such as the Divine office and Gregorian chant serve as objects for a close and competent study. An author, dealing with such subjects, indubitably has personal experience of such liturgy; the attempts to describe liturgical song and the experience it mediates often has autobiographical features. (The writer, who has not discovered the value of the liturgy and Gregorian chant but — nonetheless — its existence, is normally satisfied by the expression: “monotonous recitation” in order to be able to dismiss the phenomenon in an easy way!)  

The examples of literary descriptions of the Divine office and Gregorian chant, which will be presented here, are among themselves quite different: they are gathered from novels, detective stories or autobiographies; the scene dates from ancient or contemporary time, from monastery life or from life in a parish church or from Roman- Catholic or Protestant Traditions. The de­ scriptions have both the stamp of a burning enthusiasm and of colder distance.  

In “Father Smith och den breda vägen” (Eng. orig: All Glorious Within), by Bruce Marshall the service is all but an aesthetic experience. Through the entire novel one is astonished by the fact that the Christian belief is credible and that the Church still exists after all. Father Smith and his parish hold the mass in a greengrocer’s shop, and the song of the choir is just about as bad as the pronunciation of the Latin words.

In the classical novel “Veronicas svetteduk” (The Veil of St.Veronica), by Gertrud von Le Fort, we find ourselves in a completely different world, in Rome. A few experiences during worship, where the liturgical song is also of vital importance, are important milestones on Veronica’s way towards the Catholic belief. In the Saint Peter’s Church she sits moved through, listening to a single voice, which in a plaintive way sings “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, convertere ad Dominum Deum tuum”. During the service on Easter Sunday she is moved to surrender herselfbecause of the jubilant “Hallelujah”.  

An enchanting description of Gregorian liturgy, as in the tradition of the French Benedictine monks, is given in the novel “Lätt snabb och öm” (Am. transi: Sound of a distant horn), by Sven Stolpe: “But no-one who has not experienced Gregorian liturgy should describe the High Mass... .Someone has spoken this language before in my heart. And there is more to it — it is the mother tongue of the soul, it is the ever valid language of all humanity, the only one, which fully expresses the real situation of the human being in the world, in the history and before God...”  

Even though the description in “Lätt snabb och öm” is unique in its exultation, and its language is close to poetical, the Divine office and the liturgy are important element also in some other books by Sven Stolpe. However, in the most famous of his Catholic novels “Sacrament”, the description of the Divine office and the mass do not have the liturgy itself as a main point. Rat­ her it is a frame for the thoughts of the lea­ ding character and his resolution with God and with himself in a critical situation.  

The American Trappist monk Thomas Merton presents in his comprehensive auto­ biography “Kallad till tystnad” (Am. orig. Elected Silence), some gleams of the liturgical richness and Gregorian joy: ‘How mighty they are, those hymns and those antiphons of the Easter office! Gregorian chant that should, by rights, be monotonous, because it has absolutely none of the tricks of modern music, is full of a variety infinitely rich because it is subtle and spiritual and deep and has its roots far beneath the virtuosity and the technical low level, namely in the deepness of the Holy Ghost and the soul of the human being.”  

In the “Helgonprocess”(A Process of canonisation), by Karin Thelander, Katarina, the daughter of Saint Birgitta, finds rest and security in the Divine office:  

“Surely she must be grateful for this, to once again be able to hear the song, in the way it was tought by the Schoolmaster Peter and as Birgitta wanted it, clear and simple not broken or embellished. Also the following days Karin went to the Divine office for refuge.”  In a Middle Age monastery milieu the famous novel “Rosens namn” (The Name of the Rose), by Umberto Eco takes place. The Divine office serves here among other things as the principal shape, and the names of the different times of the prayers are used as headlines of each chapter.  

The life of the service is described with certain ironic distance, and the beauty of the liturgy is contrasted with the wickedness of reality, when for example the singing monks, during the Lauds are interrupted by the message of a macabre discovery of a corpse. A detailed description of a choir practice shows that polyphonous song existed in the monastery already in the year of 1327.

“En ljugande malm” (A Lying Brass), by Anders Hellén is also a detective story in a Middle Ages environment. The story takes place in a Swedish monastery and the Divine office permeates the entire story. Just be­ fore the murder happens, Helge, the leading character, listens to the song of the monks in the Completorium:  

“While the Gregorian melodies answered each other in the choir benches at the front, the agony in his soul, however, was pacified. His innate musicality was opened to the flow of pure beauty, which was offered him for the first time in his 20 years: ‘They shall be fed by your house’s rich gifts, and of your delightfulness’ stream Thou give them to drink.’ He did not understand the wording, but the meaning and the contents he experienced intensively.”  

About the meaning of the Divine office in the private devotion and as a way of prayer in an ordinary Swedish parish, Olov Hartman witnesses in the second part of his autobiography, “Klartecken” (Clear Sign), “I know that the Divine office brought to me personally the kind of joy of prayer I had not had before. I was carried, I felt, by a tidal water wave across the world where the Church prayed Lauds in the East —‘Exalted be Thou Lord, above Heaven’ — at the same time as she was falling silent in the West during the Compline —‘In peace I wish to lay down, and in peace I wish to fall asleep’. –  –  – Let the words of the Bible be engraved in me until they were at one with my breathing.”  

“The Choice”, a contemporary description of monastic life under the pseudonym Sister Kirsty, is something between belles lettres, a documentary novel and an autobiography, which has an obvious pedagogical purpose. Among all that was new and unusual to Sister Kirsty in life in an Anglican community, plainsong was a special obstacle —but eventually an important source of joy:  

“Obviously, I was not going to find much sympathy. Why, I wondered, were sisters so enthusiastic? What did they find in this form of music that was clearly such an enrichment to their worship? –  –  –

That morning in Westminster Cathedral brought to an end an eighteen month struggle. At last plainsong began to make sense and I was transported into a new dimension of worship. Here was a vehicle of praise that looked back to the Temple (presumably Jesus had heard and sung this kind of mu­ sic?), forward to freedom in the Spirit and the singing of that great throng around the throne in heaven, yet all the time using the natural flow and rhythms of the voice.”  Transl. Annika Laurén Ottosson