Today, on his feast day, I have posted on my YouTube channel a brief homily on two aspects of Saint Gregory the Great: his primary role in sacred music, so eloquent in the face of the musical disaster we suffer in not a few churches, and his pastoral dimension, admirably expressed in the Regula Pastoralis, which teaches bishops that governing souls does not consist in administering a diocese. Some subscribers have responded kindly, and one of them wrote: “Gregorian chant requires two things that contemporary man lacks: stillness and humility.” There’s the crux of the matter, Nacho!
Tradition links the name of Gregory the Great to the ordering and transmission of Roman chant, although the later history of what we call “Gregorian” is more complex than the naïve image of the Pope personally composing his melodies under the dictation of the Dove. But the symbol is formidable: the Church sings because it has first listened. Gregorian chant does not arise from the desire to entertain an assembly, provoke emotions, or display the qualities of the singer or the composer, but from the Word received, venerated, and made music. Because it is sung theology, its protagonist is never the performer: it is God.
Yet Gregorian chant is also a splendid anthropological school: it educates the ear against clamor, sensitivity against vulgarity, taste against banality, breathing against haste, the soul against dispersion. It demands the two virtues pointed out by my kind commentator: “stillness,” because only a heart that knows how to stop can allow itself to be penetrated by its beauty; and “humility,” because one must accept a received wisdom, without pretending that each generation has to reinvent Christianity, liturgy, beauty, and even good taste. Not everything ancient is dead, nor is everything new alive.
“Latin, Gregorian chant, sound doctrine… much has been left behind with the intention of ‘moving forward,’” the comment continues, comparing such “progress” to a vessel from which “the rudder, the sails, and the oars” have been removed. The image could not be more precise. For too many years renewal was confused with amputation and simplicity with aesthetic poverty; a music that had prayed for more than a millennium was expelled from many churches and replaced by products that aged before those who composed them. And it was not only a musical loss: when the beauty of worship is degraded, the idea of God is also impoverished, and, in the short run, that of man.
Gregory reminds us today that the Church does not need to compete with the noise of the world but to offer it what the world cannot produce: silence, height, continuity, mystery, beauty, and adoration. Gregorian chant does not take us back to the past: it gives us back our bearings.