Have You Ever Experienced Radical Changes in Your Musical Taste?

[Florestan]

I myself find

Exactly, and no objection from me to that. Just don't imagine that your personal opinions and feelings ammount to universal and objective truths.

[Opus131]

I saw the coronation of King Charles i will put forward the "average" Londoner didn't understand a single thing from it, either it's ritualistic aspects nor the music employed (which was actually pretty good all things considered. I didn't like the "new" music that much but the selection of the old classics was better than i expected).

I also liked the solemnity of it. While the general impression i got is that this is an institution on its very last leg i was also stirred by it and it reminded me why i tend to prefer "archaic" things in general.

I think the things that get nearer to God are the things that go "up". I do not have the fascination for the "low" most modern people seem to have.

[Opus131]

Exactly, and no objection from me to that. Just don't imagine that your personal opinions and feelings ammount to universal and objective truths.

Yeah but some opinions must amount to truth unless you are willing to claim there is no such thing as truth.

[Florestan]

i tend to prefer "archaic" things in general.

From this and from other posts of yours I infer that you would have vastly preferred to be born in the middle ages rather than in our times and that, if it were possible, you would go back there in a second without any second thoughts (pun). Is this correct?

[ritter]

It just bemuses me how people ever come to think that God's own language is King James English...

Which, of course, is wrong.

Charles I of Spain and V of Germany (that's how we refer to him here) put it very clearly:

"I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to my horse."

Since we've gone off topic, let's remain off-topic... 

[Florestan]

Yeah but some opinions must amount to truth unless you are willing to claim there is no such thing as truth.

And they just happen to be your opinions. How convenient.

[Florestan]

Which, of course, is wrong.

Charles I of Spain and V of Germany (that's how we refer to him here) put it very clearly:

"I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to my horse."

Excellent use of that famous quote in the context, Rafael.

Since we've gone off topic, let's remain off-topic... 

I wanted to edit the title of the thread but found no option for that.

[Mandryka]

I think ancient peasants were more noble than todays proles, yes.

These ancient peasants were the ones who cheered on when people -- women especially -  were whipped, tortured and burned at the stake in the name of their God outside their churches.

[Florestan]

I saw the coronation of King Charles i will put forward the "average" Londoner didn't understand a single thing from it, either it's ritualistic aspects nor the music employed

As opposed to the average Londoners who assisting to the coronation of, say, Edward III in 1327, perfectly understood all the rituals down to the minutest detail.

[Opus131]

This is the good in translating the Bible into vernaculars. The bad is that, once it was thus accessible, all kind of people endowed with much zeal but little knowledge began to fancy themselves Biblic scholars and interpret the text according to their own lights and agenda, thus resulting in an extreme sectarian fragmentation and not infrequently bloodshed.

I think the charge is in itself absurd.

No, it is not true that the Church didn't want the Bible translated from Latin to keep people from reading it "for themselves". This in an age where everybody who could read in the first place likely knew Latin to begin with.

I just find this kind of mentality to be both childish and silly, and it's all based on a strawman argument anyway, for i have to see anybody actually "prove" said motivations on the part of the Church, a Church which mind you never made it a secret that it had an "absolute" monopoly on doctrine so what difference did it made who read what. The Magisterium and the ex-Cathedra problamations of the Popes were absolutely binding on anyone, even the most learned of scholars. 

No, the Latin was preferred because a religion needs a "fixed" language for its liturgy, and the language itself must have the qualities i described earlier. Even from a purely practical point of view the idea of translating the scriptures every other generation just seems like a way to assure all meaning is eventually lost in the process, for languages chance, words may not mean the same thing tomorrow as they do today, how can you even mantain a universal standard for your liturgy if you can't even agree to a universal language? The Latin liturgy has been unequivocal for centuries. You don't have that wonder what such or such a word means. We know and will always know.

[AnotherSpin]

There's actually some merit to this line of thinking in that extremism on one side tends to breed an extremist counter reaction.

It's the "God and Magog" of modernism, the devil playing both sides against each other. You could make a similar argument in reguards to Islamic fundamentalism as a reaction to the secularism of the west.

Yes. It can bee seen everywhere. Trump was a result of Obama's eight years. And so on.

[Florestan]

a Church which mind you never made it a secret that it had an "absolute" monopoly on doctrine so what difference did it made who read what. The Magisterium and the ex-Cathedra problamations of the Popes were absolutely binding on anyone, even the most learned of scholars.

Well, they were obviously not absolutely binding on Martin Luther, for one, and he having read the Bible actually made a huge difference.

[Opus131]

As opposed to the average Londoners who assisting to the coronation of, say, Edward III in 1327, perfectly understood all the rituals down to the minutest detail.

At least they had that and not André Rieu.

[Opus131]

Well, they were obviously not absolutely binding on Martin Luther, for one, and he having read the Bible actually made a huge difference.

I don't see what difference it made. Everybody else read they Bible too. Every Catholic that opposed him read the Bible.

Are you guys seriously suggesting nobody actually knew what was in the Bible until it was translated from Latin except for an handful of Church prelates?

Did Aquinas not read the Bible? Why didn't he come to the same conclusions as Luther? What about St. Jerome himself, who created the Latin version. Why didn't he became a Protestant a thousand years earlier?

There's also something anachronistic about this charge since the basic assumption is that Catholicism also believed in sola scriptura, where as it never did. For Catholics and the Orthodox alike, the "tradition" comes  first. The scriptures or writings are not in themselves the origin of the Christian religion.

[Florestan]

These ancient peasants were the ones who cheered on when people -- women especially -  were whipped, tortured and burned at the stake in the name of their God outside their churches.

Yeah, but their cheers were uttered in a nobler language than the cheers uttered by the modern proles who watch a football match.

[Florestan]

a religion needs a "fixed" language for its liturgy

Should the faithful be able to understand the Mass or not?

[Opus131]

Should the faithful be able to understand the Mass or not?

Is there something that prevents them from learning the scant words that are said during the liturgy?

Earlier i mentioned that for religions like Islam, Arabic is not negionable either for prayer or their own liturgy (or whatever equivalent they have). Now there are millions of Muslims who do not know Arabic, and yet they have no problem hearing the Quran being chanted in their mosques in its original language. How come doesn't that make them give up on the religion? Shouldn't they be able to understand what's in the Quran? Doesn't seem to me they are particularly borthered by it.

So here we have a religion that has lasted for over 1500 years with only one language allowed for its text. Wonder how they were able to accomplish such a miracle.

Likewise for the Latin mass, which has been used for centuries and centuries. Doesn't seem like it ever drove anyone away from the religion. The same CANNOT be said for the Vatican II mass. Almost as if devaluing and downgrading your own tradition makes others not want to respect it anymore.

[Florestan]

Is there something that prevents them from learning the scant words that are said during the liturgy?

There were lots of things that prevented the peasants of the Middle Ages from learning Latin.

Earlier i mentioned that for religions like Islam, Arabic is not negionable either for prayer or their own liturgy (or whatever equivalent they have). Now there are millions of Muslims who do not know Arabic, and yet they have no problem hearing the Quran being chanted in their mosques in its original language. How come doesn't that disqulify them from the relgion? Shouldn't they be able to understand what's in the Quran? Doesn't seem to me they are particularly borthered by it.

So here we have a religion that has lasted for over 1500 years with only one language allowed for its text. Wonder how they were able to accomplish such a miracle.

Let's keep this can of worms closed. This is both a friendly and a formal request.

[Opus131]

And they just happen to be your opinions. How convenient.

Ok but now you are arguing that they must be wrong because they are my opinions how is that any different. 

I never said that my opinions should be accepted as truth because they are my opinions, but you seem to be bothered by the very fact i hold some opinions which i happen think are unequivocally true. It's not so much that you disagree with them, you just would prefer if we all acted as if our opinions were subjective without taking into account the fact that would be a denial of the existence of objective truth which would render all opinions meaningless.

You don't have to accept my opinions as true, but you cannot tell me they CANNOT be true either, least of all just because i cannot "prove" them to you with means that are incapable of proving anything but the most relative of facts a priori. Like i said, it's up to see for yourself if what i'm saying is true or not, but that cannot happen if you refuse to even consider the possibility some opinions could be true.

[Florestan]

Likewise for the Latin mass, which has been used for centuries and centuries. Doesn't seem like it ever drove anyone away from the religion. The same CANNOT be said for the Vatican II mass. Almost as if devaluing and downgrading your own tradition makes others not want to respect it anymore.

The Romanian Orthodox Church has been celebrating the liturgy in Romanian since the 18th century, when Slavonic was gradually abandoned. According to your theory, church attendance should have plummeted and atheism should have been on the rise. Surprise, surprise: according to the 2021 census, 73.86 % of Romanians identify as Orthodox Christian and 0.43 % as Atheist/Agnostic.