Echoes of Former Glory

The other day I was watching my son play a new video game he got for Christmas, Halo Wars. For anyone who doesn’t know, Halo was the platform video game for the original X-Box, which came out when I was as old as my son, and has since produced a whole line of games associated with the first in plot, design, and music.

What is very interesting about the game is its nomenclature. There is the Covenant, Heretics, Prophets, the Flood, and other details and plot points which suggest an allegorical parallel with the Christian true-myth, as JRR Tolkien called it. But what most strikes one is the music.

The first theme that one hears as a galactic scene opens up on the menu is the Gregorian chant melody and orchestra theme. Here it is.

It is no exaggeration to say that video games are the new main medium of entertainment and high art, more so than paintings in museums, theaters, opera or drama works, novels, concert halls, etc. The reason is video games, like Halo, are all those things plus the immersive experience of being a part of the plot. Video games are the cultural repository of art and beauty.

While I watched my son play Halo Wars, I was struck by the music. The tune was so haunting and beautiful and seemed to suggest something directly to my soul I could not consciously articulate. Here it is.

I loved the key it was written in, which put me into a reflective and moody mood, contemplating the end of the world, end of everything good and bad and, had I really articulated my emotional response by intelligible words, I would have said I was pondering Judgment Day.

As it turns out, this song was written in e-flat minor, Dorian mode, which was also the same musical setting for the original plainchant melody of the Dies Irae sequence for requiem masses, which is here.

After doing a little digging, I discovered that this ancient melody was literally everywhere. It was to be found in classical music, of course, but also in popular works. Here is a list.

From Disney’s Frozen hit song “Into the Unknown” to “Making Christmas” in Nightmare Before Christmas, the medieval melody of Dies Irae is to be heard just about everywhere—well, almost everywhere. There is one place (apparently) where it doesn’t belong, and that is at funeral masses in Vatican 2 churches.

That’s because, following the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, the Dies Irae was removed from the funeral sequence of the requiem mass, supplanted, no doubt, by some banal Beetles-like pop music which bespoke of happier days ahead for the dearly departed.

Anyway, Archbishop Annibale Bugnini said why the sequence of happy and immemorial status in the liturgy was stricken from the hearts and minds of the faithful.

“They got rid of texts that smacked of a negative spirituality inherited from the Middle Ages,” Bugnini said, because Dies Irae “…overemphasized judgment, fear, and despair. These they replaced with texts urging Christian hope and arguably giving more effective expression to faith in the resurrection, (source).

Whether what replaced the text of Dies Irae is more effective in inculcating the virtue of faith in the resurrection is perhaps proved by the general collapse of faith in the resurrection since the Council. But what concerns me here is the utter inanity of the reformers to replace what has been called one of the most quoted pieces of music in history. Why would they do such a thing? If the text offended, rewrite the text. They rewrote other texts merrily and freely.

No, the reformers hated the influence that the majestic and powerful and beautiful Dies Irae had on the people, which infused into their hearts in an unconscious way what that Halo music infused into my soul—the sense of the world’s end and judgment.

The reforms of Vatican Two have taken away the mass, the music, and the Catholic culture, but they haven’t taken away our faith. We can still discover the beauty and richness of our birthright as Catholics by studying history and looking out for embers like the Dies Irae that still burn with Divine love in the darkness of this world, enflaming our hearts to faith in the resurrection of the dead to judgment.