Sacred Signs
by Romano Guardini

TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE

THAT this unpretentious little book, written so long ago as the

first world war, should still be thought worth retranslating and

republishing is a tribute to its value as an introduction to the

liturgical life. But that so elementary an introduction should be

as much needed now as then, at least in America, is a tribute

also to the slow advance of the liturgical movement, if that is

to be the name given to the new life now quickening in the

church. Never movement moved so slowly to remain a movement. Over

forty years ago St. Pius X reopened the world of the liturgy, and

with all his authority as Pope and man of God urged clergy and

people to enter into their inheritance. The Pope has been

canonized, but has he been obeyed?

In some places, magnificently. One may say that he has been

obeyed wherever the liturgy was well understood. It was from the

great Benedictine Monasteries, Solesmes, Beuron, Maria Laach,

that the influence spread which has worked such wonders in

France, Germany and Austria. We in America hardly yet know what

the Pope desired. A priest, pressed by a friend, answered that it

was hard enough on the people to have to worship in an unfamiliar

language without forcing on them in addition an unfamiliar music.

But the people, given a little encouragement, will sing the

church music with all their heart. Last Easter the Baltimore

Cathedral was filled with the massive voice of the congregation

pouring out Creed and Gloria, and responding to the single voice

of the priest; and while the mass went silently forward at the

altar, the music of the seminary choir, freed from the double

load of choir and congregation, reached the worshipping heart in

all its intricate beauty. In this fulfilment of the Pope's so

long deferred hope the joy and satisfaction (and relief) of

clergy and people alike proved how right he was.

But the new life, with its source and centre in the liturgy, goes

out from there in every direction. It springs up in the work of

an artist like Roualt, in the pastoral work of men like Parsch,

and of those French priests who are carrying the word to every

soul in their geographical parishes, or laboring side by side

with the workers in factory and mine, in the strong impact on

Protestantism of Guardini and Karl Adam, in the confident

Biblical scholarship of the French Dominicans. All are parts, as

a reviewer in the "Literary Supplement" of the "London Times" put

it, of "a coherent system that has gone back to the fountain

head." The book under review called it a Catholic Renaissance,

and the reviewer added that it was a second Reformation, which

may have "among its effects the healing of the breaches caused by

the earlier and less radical one of four centuries ago."

If, so far as we in America have failed to catch fire, our

failure is owing rather to inability than to a defect of will.

Behind the liturgy is the Bible; and Catholic education here,

whatever its merits, has not been such as to make the Bible a

congenial book. It is a slander to say that Catholics are not

allowed to read the Bible; it is no slander to say that by and

large they do not read it. Our religious education addresses

itself to the intellect and the will,--our "spiritual faculties."

It has resulted (no mean achievement) in moral firmness and

mental precision. But the formulas of the Catechism do not enable

us to read the two great works provided by God for our

education,--created nature and the Written Word. In these are

addressed not only our intelligences and our wills, but the

entire human creature, body and soul, with his imagination,

passions, appetites, secular experiences, the whole complex in

which intellect and will are inextricably mingled. Cultivated

apart, and as it were out of context, our noblest faculties may

grow dry and superficial. Man being of a piece, if his appetite

for beauty, joy, freedom, love, is left unnourished, his so

called spiritual nature contracts and hardens.

The Bible is literature, not science, and as literature it

engages man's full nature. And external nature, as the Bible

presupposes it, is not a system of forces intended primarily (if

at all) for man's scientific and economic mastery. The Bible

takes the ancient poetic view which rests upon direct insight.

Nature is a "macrocosm," and it is epitomized in man, the

"microcosm." Nature is human nature written large. It is a

miraculous appearance drawn from a primordial chaos back into

which it would sink were it not sustained in fleeting being by

the substantial hand of God. Man and nature are inseparable parts

of one creation, and our being, like our justice, is God's

momentary gift.

Guardini's "Sacred Signs" was designed to begin our reeducation.

It assumes that correspondence between man and nature, matter and

meaning, which is the basis of the Sacramental System and made

possible the Incarnation. Man, body and soul together, is made in

the image and likeness of God. His hand, like God's, is an

instrument of power. In the Bible "hand" means power. Man's feet

stand for something also he shares with God, as does his every

limb, feature and organ. The writers of the Bible had an inward

awareness of what the body means. As the head and the heart

denote wisdom and love, so do the 'bones,' 'reins,' and 'flesh'

signify some aspect of God written into our human body. The

contemplation of the body of Christ should teach us what this

deeper meaning is.

The next step in our reeducation after the symbolism of the body,

which once pointed out we instinctively perceive, is for modern

man something of a leap. He will have to abandon or leave to one

side the notions instilled into him by modern science.

Symbolically, if not physically, nature is composed of only four

elements: earth, air, water and fire. Earth, humble, helpless

earth, stands for man, and water, air, and fire for the gifts

from the sky that make him live and fructify. Combined in sun,

moon, and stars, they represent Christ, the Church and the

Saints, though perhaps rather by allegory than symbolism. The sea

signifies untamed and lawless nature, the primordial chaos; the

mountains signify the faithfulness of God.

Objects, things, are not the only symbols. Their use and

function, again stretching the term, is a sort of immaterial

symbol. The positions and movements of human hands and feet may

symbolize God's action. Direction, dimension, are also symbolic,

and so are those two philosophical puzzles, time and space, which

provide the conditions of human action and progress. The course

of the sun is a sign to us of time; by prayer we eternalize time;

and the church breaks up the sun's daily course into three or

seven canonical hours of prayer. Its yearly course, which governs

the seasons and their agricultural operations, signifies to us,

as it has to religious man from the beginning, life, death and

resurrection, and in revealed history God has accommodated the

great works of our redemption to the appropriate seasons.

The last field of symbolism the sacred signs indicate to us is

one that causes us no surprise. Art from the beginning has been

symbolic. The Temple of Solomon like the "heathen" temples was

built to symbolize the earth, and Christian Churches are (or

were) built upon the model of the Temple in Jerusalem and of its

exemplar the Temple in Heaven from which the earth was modeled.

The axis of a Christian Church, its geometric shape and numerical

proportions, the objects used in its worship, the disposition of

its windows, its ornamentation to the last petal or arc, all

carry our minds to the divine meaning behind the visible form.

For the modern American Catholic, as for the modern American non-

Catholic, these vast symbolic regions of nature, man and art are

lapsed worlds, unknown, unbelieved-in. "Sacred Signs" furnishes

us with a clue. If we pick it up and follow it we shall come, as

it were naturally, to reexercise over them and in them the

kingship and priesthood conferred on us by God, which also,

largely, has lapsed. We shall carry, as the saying is, our

religion into our daily lives, and build our houses, like our

churches, about a central hearth of God's charity, remember in

our entrances the double nature of him who called himself the

door, and in our windows who is signified by light. Every act of

daily living would again take on meaning, temporal and eternal,

and we should again become the doer, which man naturally is,

instead of the passive receptionist he threatens to become.