Alisadaire McIntyre, Gay "Marriage," and Church Music

A couple of essays on widely disparate topics happen to address the same philosophical minefield.

Dreher on gay "marriage" wherein he demonstrates that he is not an optimist.

It is astonishing, though, how quickly gay marriage went from being something as unthinkable by most people as legalized polygamy is today, to being considered a constitutional right by high courts, and accepted by roughly half the populace...

...So it is with the institution of marriage. Gay marriage is and is not a sudden shift in the meaning of marriage. It started with the Reformation. The reason I think gay marriage cannot be stopped, only delayed, is because it is only the latest manifestation of deep social trends in the West going back centuries. These currents run so deep in our civilization they carry us all along without many of us being aware of how far from shore we're receding

He quotes Carle C. Zimmerman and adduces Richard Weaver on the origins of the phenomenon:

In an interesting parallel with Richard Weaver's contention that the West sowed the seeds for its own destruction in the 13th century with the victory of nominalism over Thomism, Zimmerman says the process of the family's decay began at the same time, for the same reason.

It had a firm beginning with the rise of nationalism and the Protestant conception that the family bond was holy but not a sacrament. [A logical follow-on to the rejection of the priesthood.] It led through the philosophical conception of the eighteenth century that the family was a union based upon private contract with only incidental, but necessary, civil implications. The nineteenth and early-twentieth-century schools of family sociology, with their consistently negative attitudes toward the binding and displeasing aspects of the family unit, were but the wholesale development of centuries of previous thought which in a smaller way had the same attitude toward familism.

Thus modern thinking about the family, other than the scholasticism of the Christian [Catholic] church, has been largely a product of the Reformation and has attributed to the family all those elements of nominalism and contractualism so prevalent in institutional thinking since that period. Just as John Locke, J.J. Rousseau, Thomas Paine, and a number of the Founding Fathers of our own nation could hold that the social compact -- government -- if it became unsatisfactory to the body of the people could be abolished for a new form, so the developing school of family negationists could hold that unsatisfactory family types had been, are being, and will continue to be abolished.

Which is related to an essay on "Beauty" in church music from Fr. Rob. Johannsen. Here Fr. J. quotes the prototypical parishioner on the question of 'what music to use for Mass.'

Well, Father, you like all that classical music and chant, and the traditional hymns, and that's fine for you. But I [we] like [insert musical genre here], and, after all, it's all for God's praise. One kind of music is just as good as another.

What's wrong with that? McIntyre had a response.

Alasdair McIntyre, in his seminal book After Virtue, described this mode of thinking as emotivism, that is, the collapsing of all moral or qualitative judgments into mere expressions of personal preference. And this kind of thinking is the besetting sin of the post-modern West.

In fact, "emotivism" is the son of nominalism.

And McIntyre could well have used the term "besOtting" instead of "besEtting."

What is missing in the thinking illustrated above is any sense that the liturgy, and the music of the liturgy, has any objective quality whatsoever

We can emplace that into the debate above, substituting the word "beauty" for "liturgy" and arrive at the following:

"What is missing in the thinking....is any sense that BEAUTY has any objective quality whatsoever."

The important term, of course, is objective, which is not part of McIntyre's "emotivism."

Thus, the liturgy has an objective nature to which we more or less perfectly conform ourselves. [As does marriage.] The Church expresses her appreciation of this objectivity by holding up certain forms or expressions as models which we are urged to adopt and which have been treated as sources or starting points for development which is "organic", that is, which always respects and makes reference to the model. In the area of music, the Church has held up chant and polyphony as those models.

The post-conciliar period has seen, in many if not most sectors of the Church, a loss of a sense of the objective nature of the liturgy. With the liturgy coming to be seen, as Pope Benedict has written, as the outlet for personal "creativity", the liturgy became something expressing not that which is universal and objective, but private and subjective.

Just as "marriage" has become an expression which is private and subjective since the (deficient) understanding that it is a "private contract" between "two individuals" became the operative predicate. That understanding germinated from the Nominalism of the Protestant Revolution in the 1500's, which is the burden of Dreher's thesis.

Thus Fr. J's paragraph about music for worship also (mutatis mutandis) describes the blindlings promoting and espousing gay "marriage."

Aristotle taught that the ability to make correct judgments was about more than simply amassing the necessary data. It involves the training and formation of the person in virtue, so that he has the kind of mind and soul that can apprehend the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. These three Transcendentals have a moral quality, and the inculcation of moral excellence and the ability to make right moral judgments requires, as the ancients taught, and as the Church continues to teach, the proper formation of the mind and soul.

Such 'proper formation' is necessarily based on objective reality, or that which is True. Aristotle and Aquinas taught that knowledge of the Truth is simply conforming one's mind to reality.

Dreher also covered the question of "how can Dan and Bill's 'marriage' hurt YOUR marriage,' which, of course, is a red herring of the first water. Here, Fr. J. answers that question but in the context of liturgy and music:

...what has happened in large part is that extra-liturgical forms and even sometimes texts, many of which come from the dominant mass culture, have been imposed on the liturgy from without. And this has obscured the meaning and nature of the liturgy. It has led to confusion and a weakening of faith. A people that has been led to believe that the liturgy is whatever Father Feelgood or Sister Liturgist make it this week is not a people who will necessarily be able to properly apprehend truth or beauty when they encounter it. The moral equipment that they need to do this has been damaged, and it needs to be repaired.

Dreher's parallel:

I think the most common, and superficially common-sensical, questions that comes up in discussions of this issue is, "How does Jill and Jane's marriage hurt Jack and Diane's?" The idea is that unless you can demonstrate that a gay marriage directly harms traditional marriage, there is no rational objection to gay marriage.

But this is a shallow way to look at it. We all share the same moral ecology. You may as well ask why it should have mattered to the people of Amherst, Mass., if some rich white people in Charleston, SC, owned slaves. Don't believe in slavery? Don't buy one. Similarly, why should it matter to the people of Manhattan if the people of Topeka wish to forbid a woman there to have an abortion? Or, conversely, why do the people of Topeka care if women in New York City choose to abort their unborn children? Don't believe in abortion? Don't have one.

Some issues are so morally consequential as to affect the moral ecology of an entire society.

And that's all one can say. There are no micro-analytics to which one can refer in answering the question--there are only macro-analytics, and they don't show up in 60 minutes-less-commercials which satisfy the typical American mind.

They show up over 50- or 100- year spans, when the results are endemic and horrifying.

HT: Aristotle