This article is taken from the May 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
I hadn’t been expecting the tears. It was more than one member of the congregation. It had all started with an idle daydream of mine that had got out of hand. What would it have been like, I had wondered to myself one day, to worship in our parish church in the Middle Ages? Before I knew it, I was helping to organise a pre-Reformation-style service of Vespers. My normal churchwardenly duties of paperwork and fixing the boiler went neglected as I hunted for incense, copes and clergy who could sing Latin plainsong.
The real challenge was working out the liturgy. Before the Reformation, our church would likely have followed the Sarum Rite, a pattern of worship developed at Salisbury Cathedral from the 11th century onwards. But to someone brought up on the wonderful clarity and user-friendliness of the Book of Common Prayer, finding one’s way through the Sarum Rite was like trying to discern the rules of Mornington Crescent.
Was the feast day we were celebrating a simple or double, a principal or non-principal double or a greater double? In which of the various volumes that contain the rite did one even go to for the opening of the service — the Temporale, the Sanctorale, the Commune Sanctorum?
It was only through the patient and kind help of a Canadian professor that we were able to get the liturgy together, but one couldn’t help wondering before the service whether the winding complexities of this ancient rite would have any meaning for the congregation or bring their hearts to prayer. The tears afterwards told me that such thoughts were misplaced.
Cosima Clara Gillhammer’s new book, Light on Darkness, is a wonderful articulation of why there “lives the dearest freshness” deep down in these old liturgies. The premise of her book is simple. Despite the slovenly and self-indulgent preference of our own age for dressed-down informality, we are still in desperate need of ritual and form. Rites, customs and ceremonies bind people and communities whether at the lowest level — a handshake at a business meeting — or the highest: a wedding, a funeral, a graduation, the King’s coronation. It is not just that they lay down a set of shared manners and a right order for the expression of changes in life, joy or grief. It is also that they offer a way of picking out the important moments from the mundane and, in their repetition over generations, a connection between the present and the profoundest depths of the past.
Medieval Europe was more at ease with the human need for elaborate ritual, and it was with such ritual that Western Christianity was then accustomed to worship. Not only did the desire for order within communities and for connection with earlier generations of the faithful prompt the use of such ritual but also the very idea that Christ was physically embodied in history.
The liturgies assisted not just with the commemoration of the historical life of Christ but also offered first a means of meditation on the many facets of the very idea that God in Christ was fully human and then a template for the faithful to act out their response to this idea. The symbolic actions of the liturgy modelled behaviour for each Christian which they could take from the church into everyday life.
In Britain, starting with the Reformation, and especially since churchgoing went into decline in the 1960s, our awareness of earlier Christian liturgy and rituals has almost evaporated. Yet in the medieval world such awareness was a near universal thing. The liturgy was manifest not just in the words of church services but also in music, gestures, processions, calendar festivals, the display of sacred items.
Being omnipresent as it was and embracing within itself every intellectual and emotional aspect of the Christian story and thus, in a way, of all human experience, it was also a towering influence on the development of Western culture.
However, given the contemporary lack of awareness of Christian liturgy, it is all too easy for us not to realise this impact. The value of Gillhammer’s book is that it reminds us of liturgy’s foundational importance.
Although a book of scholarly rigour, this is not a dry academic history. Instead of dissecting the subject into chronological periods, Gillhammer offers a number of chapters based on a round of universal human experiences, for example “Love”, “Hope”, “Suffering”, “Grief”, “Death”, “Time”, showing how they find their place in the liturgy, and then how treatments of these experiences in art, music, literature and culture more widely have been influenced by the liturgy from the Middle Ages even to the present day.
Tolkien also found inspiration in the old liturgies, when naming his character Eärendil for instance
Gillhammer’s book is especially useful for those who are coming to the subject for the first time, containing as it does a number of the original liturgical texts (with parallel English translations where they are in Latin), as well as extensive examples of their literary and cultural impact. Some texts are more likely to be familiar, such as the Dies Irae and the Stabat Mater, famous in our current age through Mozart’s Requiem and Vivaldi’s eponymous work respectively.
Others will be less well known, and Gillhammer amply demonstrates the extraordinary range of responses which the liturgy provokes. This may be anything from Middle English poetry building on the liturgical uses of the Song of Solomon to meld ideas of courtly love with devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary — “I may nat leve mankynde allone / Quia amore langueo” (I cannot leave mankind alone, because I languish for love) says the Virgin in sorrow for man’s sinfulness — to Dante’s contemporary Guido Cavalcanti, Walt Whitman and even Kate Bush, who drew from the Song of Solomon in a 1993 album.
On this note, Gillhammer brings forth many unexpected cultural genealogies. Speaking of the Dies Irae, she traces the use of its original plainsong melody, finding it employed in contexts to evoke death and fear not just by Mozart, but also in recent film music for The Exorcist, Star Wars and Lord of the Rings. As for the latter, Tolkien also found inspiration in the old liturgies.
For example, his character Eärendil in the mythology of Middle Earth takes his name from an Old English rendering of the Latin “O Oriens”, an address to Christ as the Morning Star in an Advent Antiphon. “There was something very remote and strange and beautiful behind those words,” said Tolkien.
Whilst these lines of cultural descent are often eye-opening, the impression that lingers most insistently from this book is the sheer richness of life and experience possible in a culture where form, ritual and a body of stories are shared across a community and across generations. Ritual is no deadening thing, but more often a path to discern and express those “Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears”.
