Wednesday, December 25, 2019

Tomas Luis Victoria - O Magnum Mysterium


Masters of the Académie Vocale of  Paris,  Iain Simcock, director

O great mystery,
and wondrous sacrament,
that animals should see God born,
lying in a manger!

This is about my favorite Christmas piece of all.  


It was brought to mind by the passage in Isaiah , "Then the glory of the LORD shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together."  I've never found the dogma that animals don't have immortal souls to be either convincing or congenial.   My friend RMJ notes that Luke is a subtle theologian, I wonder if his noting that Jesus was born in a stable and laid in a manger, from which animals eat, isn't him noting that the animals were a witness to God made flesh as well as people.  I would think that implies that they have a higher status than soulless objects.   The text of this chant calls animals seeing God born, lying in a manger a sacrament.  


The old Catholic Encyclopedia, in its long article on the definition of sacraments begins, "Sacraments are outward signs of inward grace, instituted by Christ for our sanctification."  Yet, in this chant, the outward sign is made to animals as well as people.  And, in Luke, it is the humblest of people who live in closest proximity to animals who are the first to whom it is announced, it's in Matthew that the wise and mighty find signs of it in their astrology.

It's been not only one of the best discoveries of my adult conversion that the Scripture is full of texts implying that all people as well as all animals live in relation to God, as I've said, it was in the passage in Genesis in which God tells Noah that he has made his rainbow covenant with "all flesh" which would include animals which is not only revealing but essential to me.  I have read that the radically exclusive traditional Catholic treatment of animals I grew up with was more a product of the modern, mechanistic view of the universe coming from Descartes and Bacon  than it was in the more authentic Scriptural tradition. Maybe I had to read that to see the subtle things that were always in the Scripture that I didn't notice before.  

St. Francis advocated that people put out food for birds and other animals at Christmas time.   I'd trust his view of animals more than I would Descartes. who was so evil as to dissect his wife's dog as it was nailed to a board, conscious and crying out in pain, which he dismissed as the squeaking of a defective machine or the rest of the mechanistic tradition.  St. Francis wasn't the one leading us to destroying ourselves through destroying the environment we live in, that comes from the desacralized mechanistic view of life, not the view that sanctifies it, the view that the animals in the stable where Jesus were born were the recipients of a sacrament for their sanctification. 

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