I missed two class meetings while at a conference in San Diego. One of these was on prayer, which is unfortunate because I am well aware of what a difficulty the Catholic practices of praying to saints and of contemplative prayer can be for Protestants. So I don’t really have a Catholic perspective on either of those, although I think I can understand the reasons why.

I’ve already speculated a little as to what exactly happened during the Reformation. It’s almost impossible to underestimate the effect of St. Thomas Aquinas on the Church. Where St. Augustine was responsible for explaining much of Christian theology in Platonic and neo-Platonic terms, Aquinas revived the study of Aristotle, and more or less created the tradition of Scholasticism in the Church. The most important differences between the Eastern Orthodox church and the Roman Catholic church can probably be blamed on Aquinas: in particular the elevation of Reason in the Roman tradition where the Eastern tradition is more comfortable with paradox and mystery.

Along with this reliance on reason came Aristotle’s rather complicated notions of causality (I’ve written a more extensive discussion for The Colossus). What I think happened is that as rationality began to take root in the way people looked at the world, the more confusing (and, to be perfectly honest, mystical) components of Aristotelian causality were dropped. By the time Martin Luther came around, the old explanations of the interplay between faith and works, or of the role of the sacraments, no longer made sense. At the same time the hierarchy of the Church was guilty of some of the grossest abuses of religion in history. Luther was, perhaps more than anything, a superb textual critic. He had access to original texts in Greek and Hebrew, along with Jewish commentaries on the Hebrew texts. His reaction to the powermongering and decadance of the clericy – as well as his own feelings of guilt – was to look back at the sources to understand what Christianity was really about. As we all know, the Vatican felt rather threatened by this, and rather than give up its power tossed all the Lutherans out of the church. Without the dead weight of an existing power structure, Reason got its wings, so to speak, and gave rise to Western science, democracy, and about 35,000 Protestant denominations. Each successive split in the Protestants tended to make God more rational and abstract, churches more plain and unassuming, and faith more a function of the mind than the whole man.

The point of this historical speculation is to explain why Catholicism retains prayers to the dead and a tradition of contemplation. Catholics, at least as far as I can tell, make a subtle but real distinction between praying to God and praying to the saints. Praying to saints is more like talking to them, and because Catholics profess the communion of saints, they don’t see anything wrong with having a chat with someone who’s gone on to the next life. Likewise, because contemplative prayer involves, to some extent, the supression of the rational faculty, Protestants tend to be a little uncomfortable about it.

Which brings me nicely to music. I’ve been playing music for close to twenty years now. There’s something about instrumental music that attracts mathematical, orderly minds like the one I’ve got. It’s only been in the last few years that I’ve begun to break out of my box (mostly a world of technique and theory) and really listen to the stuff – to start to understand the language. As with any language, once you reach a certain point in your knowledge of it, it become a joy to speak and hear it. There is something truly mystical about speaking a language, about being able to communicate with another being. In music this experience is even closer to the surface. Some of the most awesome moments of my life have been in the wind section of an orchestra: moments in which hearing the music, playing the music, and understanding the music merged into a single sensation, and I felt my whole body, heart, and mind submit to something – the orchestra, the music, the audience, I don’t know what, really. What I’ve realized from those glimpses is something that I also see in religion. It is not the suppression of the rational mind, but the glorification of it: the supreme joy of being a single being in service of something good.