Neo-Confucian Insights on Liturgical Crisis
A Christmas Meditation & Note to Readers
Tonight marks the second Christmas I’ve spent in Vietnam with my wife and son. Roman Catholicism has a long and robust history in Vietnam. Contrary to popular misconception, it did not arrive with French colonialism. My ancestors were likely evangelized by Spanish Dominicans - my wife’s by French clerics from the Paris Foreign Missions. In both cases, our ancestors’ conversion to Christianity predated colonialism by several generations. Perhaps even centuries. We belong to a demographic that colloquially refers to itself as “Catholic to the roots” (đạo gốc). Frankly, the appellation has outlived most of its utility. It assumes an inherent “Catholicity” exclusive to families with no traceable connection to paganism. Sadly, this sometimes implies the suspect or subpar “Catholicity” of converts to the faith. Perhaps such badges of honor once held more meaning in periods of prolonged persecution. Today, I find they confuse and obtund authentically Catholic sensibility more than anything. After all, Christian conversion is a life-long endeavor. It is also (albeit not exclusively so) a personal one: “And delight not to say within your selues, we haue Abraham to our father. For I tell you that God is able of these stones to raise vp children to Abraham.” “But whom do you say that I am?”
I’ve often been tempted to treat contemporary Vietnamese Catholicism in its totality as a case study in the bewildering paradoxes of liturgical reform and half-baked attempts at “inculturation” pushed in wake of the Second Vatican Council. I am not a liturgical traditionalist (at least not in the way that term is used in common parlance). If forced to articulate a position on the current state of the Roman liturgy, I would identify as a proponent of “the Reform of the Reform” with equally strong commitments to the pre-Tridentine Western liturgical traditions and those of the Eastern churches. Neither vernacular liturgy nor localized variation are precluded by this framework. Both are, in fact, assumed. Unfortunately, this makes the impoverished liturgy of contemporary Vietnamese Catholicism all the more frustrating. The Tridentine triumphalist can simply leave: huffing and puffing all manner of ahistorical axioms as he or she retreats into self-imposed recusancy. But what are we - those who appreciate the nuance of the liturgical reform as envisioned by some (not all) of the Council Fathers - to do?
The solution is simple when living in the Global West. Find a liturgically sound parish and pray that, whatever brainrot may come, the banality will stop at OCP responsorial psalms from Respond & Acclaim. These days it’s rare to find a diocese without at least some options. Of course, one does this with the nagging suspicion that this aesthetically selective parish-hopping is ultimately but a subtle escapism - one more contrived and less satisfying than that of the full-blown traditionalist. In the end, no matter one’s personal commitments, we are all united in the apparent absence of liturgical catholicity in contemporary Roman Catholicism. Structurally and theoretically, it remains (to an extent). On the ground, I struggle to admit any semblance of shared liturgical ethos convincingly common to the celebration of the Ordinary Form of the Roman Rite as I have attended it at St. Vincent Ferrer’s in New York City and as I presently attend it in Hanoi. The differences are even more telling in the public recitation of the Liturgy of the Hours.
I once thought I knew what to make of all this. I no longer do. My friends jokingly refer to my time spent in Vietnam as an exile. In fact, it’s been a tremendously productive season of life and one of many blessings. Spiritually, however, I suffer. And I thirst. I’ve filled the hours with countless projects in miniature: studying Origen, reciting the Little Office alongside the Liturgy of the Hours, composing sacred music (three of my Gregorian settings of the Vietnamese liturgy have been approved for liturgical use). Nothing can fill the vacuum left in absence of a vivifying liturgical community. One can only read Elliott’s Ceremonies of the Modern Roman Rite so many times before despairing of reality.
Quite unexpectedly, I’ve recently found some guidance in Cheng Hao 程顥, the eleventh-century Neo-Confucian philosopher and elder brother to Cheng Yi 程頤 (the more influential but less personable of the siblings). As I guided a weekly study-group through Reflections on Things at Hand 近思錄, I couldn’t help but hear Cheng Hao speaking directly to the disintegration of liturgical unity described above:
Li Yu asked, “Usually when things happen we know how to hold fast and preserve our minds. But when nothing happens how can we preserve our minds and nourish our nature thoroughly?” Ch’eng Hao answered, “Concerning their listening to music, their observing ceremonies, and their daily movements, the ancients had inscriptions carved or written on their bathtubs, food dishes, desks, and staffs so that whether they were in action or at rest there was something to help them nourish their minds. This practice is no longer observed. The only thing that will help us to nourish our minds is moral principles. If we hold on to these principles of cultivation, in time we shall nourish our minds very well. “Seriousness is to straighten the external life.” This is the meaning of cultivation and nourishment.
(Wing-Tsit Chan translation, pg. 126)
李籲問：每常遇事，即能知操存之意。無事時如何存養得熟？曰：古之人，耳之於樂，目之於禮，左右起居，盤盂几杖，有銘有戒。動息皆有所養。今皆廢此，獨有義理之養心耳。但存此涵養意，久則自熟矣。「敬以直內」，是涵養意。
The sentiment is expressed elsewhere in more striking terms:
The student of today is only left with moral principle with which to nourish his heart-mind. As for rituals and ceremonies to nourish his body, patterns and decoration to nourish his eyes, notes and sounds to nourish his ears, dances to nourish his blood circulation, none of these remain intact.
今之學者，惟有義理以養其心。若威儀辭讓以養其體，文章物采以養其目，聲音以養其耳，舞蹈以養其血脈，皆所未備。
The Cheng Brothers assumed a rupture of ritual praxis separating the ancients and the latter-day learners. The various institutional apparatuses which once facilitated the holistic formation of the human person had been lost and could not be salvaged. What remained as the sole means of spiritual “nourishment” (yang 養) was the internal contemplation of moral principle (yili 義理). Properly maintained, this contemplatio would manifest itself in the spontaneous rectification of one’s external and active life. (The spontaneity of this transformation was key for the Cheng Brothers. Consciously exerted effort was forced and therefore short-lived. Lasting transformation was achieved through imperceptibly gradual spiritual growth which could only be measured at certain intervals of attainment.)
The analogy is not perfect. Our liturgical framework has not been entirely obliterated. Neither can we reduce our Christianity to a private intellectual enterprise. (This isn’t what Cheng Hao was getting at either, but that’s for another day.) What I have long found fascinating about these passages is the insight they have to offer us as liturgical Christians stuck in our present conundrum. The diversity of historical liturgies, the unprecedented freedom to pick and choose therefrom, the glaring lack of liturgical unity in our daily lives - all these lead to a deeply paradoxical dilemma in which we are asked to choose between a certain catholicity of haphazardly unpredictable liturgy or informed, but equally arbitrary, hodgepodge selections of historical liturgies. The former is mainstream liturgy. The latter is traditionalism (and what it continues to become as its reactionary tendencies gain momentum). Neither is viable in the long run. The binary itself is contrived and should be utterly rejected.
But what exactly is yili in a liturgical context? Is there a shared sensus liturgicus that links something like the twelfth-century Armenian Xratk'kanonakank' [The Penitential of David of Ganjak] to the 1802 Vietnamese Tội-nhân giám 罪人鑑 [The Mirror of Sinners]? Can we even speak of a singular sensus liturgicus governing such culturally remote Christian communities? I’m inclined to say yes, and to affirm that this is precisely the yili we must contemplate and cultivate as we study historical liturgies and renew our own liturgical living within a more nuanced and robust Tradition (not the apish traditionalism intrinsically inimical to it). For now, I have found peace and purpose in adopting a broadly Confucian approach towards liturgical praxis: one which unquestionably prizes antiquity as the standard, while simultaneously admitting the exigency of practical adaptation to one’s contemporary circumstances.
Note to Readers:
2024 was a busy year. I published a collection of Vietnamese modernist poetry, submitted several journal articles and conference papers, and have made substantial progress on my doctoral dissertation. As the year winds down, I’m preparing several manuscripts (literary, not academic, stuff: translations, essays, whatnot - all in Vietnamese) for publication in early 2025. Somewhere along the way, this page and my original vision for it fell between the cracks. This article was likely a surprise: both on account of its abrupt publication and its personal content. I’m now better prepared to maintain Waiting For The Dawn with a modicum of regularity. As before, I have no grand vision for the page. It is merely a collection of musings running parallel (and occasionally intersecting) with my academic and literary work. Perhaps I will occasionally post updates with links to writings published elsewhere (and in different languages). I do not intend for this page to reduplicate what can easily be found on my Academia page. Nor am I particularly interested in translating my Vietnamese essays and literary criticism to force feed an Anglophone readership. Please stay tuned. Merry Christmas.