Robert Hugh Benson

At a Requiem

Robert Hugh Benson

(1871–1914)

At a Requiem

1903

At a Requiem

November, 1903.

This morning I assisted at one of the most impressive dramas in the world—I mean the Solemn Requiem mass celebrated by the Catholic Church on All Souls’ Day.

It was sung in a beautiful church, of which the altar, the steps, and the reredos were draped in black. In the centre of the choir stood a great catafalque, shaped like a gigantic coffin, yellow and black on a black carpet: six candlesticks as high as a man held each a burning yellow candle. There were three priests at the altar, two of them attached to the church, and the third, who acted as deacon, appeared to be a monk, for his amice-veiled hood hung over his shoulders. There was a small choir of boys who sang very sweetly, and one man who sang alone, for no organ was used, endless and sombre melodies from a great book on a lectern. It was a very dark morning without and within, and the immense slender columns of the church soared up into a gloom that might well be thronged with watching souls. Beneath, perhaps a hundred persons (mostly in black clothes), half of whom were children, stood and knelt and sat without a sound for nearly an hour.

I am quite aware that many regard such a ceremony as idle and useless, if not worse; but they do so from a dogmatic standpoint, and I am not concerned with that now. It is as a representation of death and all that that means that I think it worth describing: for it is to be seriously doubted whether any other religion under the sun gives so adequate and moving a picture of the one eternal tragedy which so far as is possible darkens the light of that sun for us all.

The Church makes no exceptions or concessions in the case of her children who have died in the odour of sanctity: all have fallen short, she declares, and need the mercy of their God. As for the departed souls considered as a body on this day, so for each separate soul that dies in her communion, she prescribes penitence, mourning, and petition. There is no attempt to canonize before the time; no desperate effort after brightness or triumph. White flowers and wreaths of laurel remain still unrecognized in her ritual. It is the same for all, black and smoky yellow, and black again, and, through all, melancholy melodies that wail and soar as if souls indeed were crying from a pit wherein is no water. There is hope, certainly; but not a touch of exultation, for the time for that is not yet come.

Yet her faith and charity are unbounded. In her calendar is set down the words, In die omnium defunctorum, without exception or qualifying clause; and in her sanctuary is reared up a catafalque, empty of material coffin, but crowded, to her mystical eyes, with a multitude which no man can number of souls forgotten and remembered that hasten here to take refuge under a pall as ample as her love and as heavy as death. Round this emblem of dead humanity there is raised a wall of fire, signified by the six flames rising from yellow wax, as if to keep off the darkness of the grave; and about it go her priests, sprinkling hallowed water to cleanse corruption, and drowning with sad-smelling, fragrant incense the odour that not even she can wholly obliterate.

It is she again who, while eternally young and undying, identifies herself with the myriads of the dead, gathering them all up in her own person. As she looks forward with terrified eyes to the great day which she proclaims is at hand, she cries out in fear, uniting with herself all who will need mercy then.

Quid sum miser tunc dicturus?

Quem patronum rogaturus?

Cum vix justus sit securus?

And again as she looks back to that from which springs her hope:

Recordare, Jesu pie,

Quod sum causa tuae viae;

Ne me perdas illa die.…

Qui Mariam absolvisti,

Et latronem exaudisti,

Mihi quoque spem dedisti.

Then once more she turns on herself, comes back to the present, and while still on earth, prays for those who are not, as a mother might pray for absent children.

Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord: And let light perpetual shine upon them.…

Then, as if in a piteous struggle against her own stern creed which declares that eternal destinies are decided at death, she entreats God to deliver the souls of her departed children from the gates of hell: and once more, remembering the Day that is always before her eyes, “Deliver me, Lord,” she cries through the mouth of her priest, “from eternal death in that tremendous day: when heaven and earth are moved, while Thou comest to judge the earth through fire. I am all trembling and afraid, while judgment comes and wrath approaches.…” “May they rest in peace. Amen.”

“Never in any religion,” writes a French author, “has a more charitable part, a more august mission, been assigned to man. Lifted by his consecrations wholly above humanity, almost deified by the sacerdotal office, the priest, while earth laments or is silent, can advance to the brink of the abyss and intercede.… Timid and distant, plaintive and sweet, this Amen said, ‘We have done what we could, but… but…’”

Now all this may appear dangerous nonsense to many people; but, as I said before, I am not concerned with dogma. It was as a mirror of my own human instincts and ideas that this Mass for the Dead moved me so profoundly. Whether or not that sacrifice and those prayers prevail, the whole affair was none the less an amazing drama as true to life as to death.

Death is an exceedingly unpleasant fact, but it is a fact; and, I suppose, that there never has lived a man who has not formed some ideas on the subject. There is first of all its horror and darkness; and it is not the smallest use to pretend that we are not aware of these features. The Gospel of Cheerfulness, preached so gaily and courageously by Stevenson, and welcomed so thankfully by many thousands of readers, is a poor thing if it does not take into account the end of us all. Of course the perfection of philosophy is to unite all known data into a single theory; but for most of us it is necessary to go into committee on life, and consider its component elements one by one; we have not attained to the serene heights of eternal contemplation. While we regard the phenomenon of Birth it is not possible to do justice to that of Death—the cradle and the grave are too far apart to be included in one glance—no more than at a marriage a man should set about engaging his counsel for the Divorce Court.

Therefore it is surely wholesome for us now and then, though not too often, to look steadily upon coffins and churchyards. To dwell always in a nuptial chamber or a dining-room is as narrow and enervating, as it is morbid and depressing to pitch our tents permanently in a cemetery. Nor is it even the highest philosophy to level the graves to a lawn and plant flowers there, and turn a stream through it, and pretend that it is something else. It is not something else; it is a cemetery.

Now this element of death is perfectly recognized at a Requiem. I despair of making clear, to those who cannot see it for themselves, the indescribably terrible combination of the colours of yellow and black, the deathliness of the contrast between flames and the unbleached wax from which they rise. No man could come away from a Requiem Mass, where he had behaved with a decent mental composure, without being aware, both from the sights he has looked upon, and the sounds that he has heard—those wailing airs unsupported by the genial organ, those clusters of neumes that rise and falter as they rise—without being aware that Death is a terrible and a revolting thing: I defy him to be eloquent in the bleak Gospel of Cheerfulness for at least ten minutes after the last Amen has ceased.

This then is faced; but it is not left there. Other emotions have been represented, and chief among them that emotion of hope that so resolutely refuses to die. A man may laugh at Purgatory, and proclaim in debating societies that he for one regards himself as a candle that will presently be blown out; but when he is quite alone and has drunk his glass of whisky-and-water, and thrown the butt of his cigarette into the fire, and the last doors have banged, and he gets up and whistles himself into his bedroom—well, I venture to assert that he would not have drunk his glass so genially or whistled so shrilly, if he was not perfectly aware that somewhere below that beautiful waistcoat there was a dim and faint hope that he had over-stated the case just now in Jones’ rooms.

That emotion, then—quite apart from explicit statements of dogma—has been represented in the Requiem Mass. Else why the smell of incense, the beads of water, and the candle-flames? It is very well to speak of the “Confraternity of the Faithless… where, on an altar, on which no taper burned, a priest, in whose heart peace had no dwelling, might celebrate with unblessed bread and a chalice empty of wine,” but after all, when such a sanctuary is raised, I predict that some one of the Confraternity, no doubt with many apologies and disclaimers, will be found to insist upon striking a match. Men can no more live without fire and light than hearts can continue to beat without hope.

And these two emotions, terror and hope, are welded into a trinity by a third that partakes of the nature of both,—I mean penitence.

We are all perfectly at liberty to dislike that word; it is possible that we associate it with hypocrisy, or weak-mindedness, or crocodile-crying; but we know what is meant by it; and surely it may stand as a label upon that piece of luggage that we all bear with us, and which contains in its paradoxical constitution regret for an irrevocable past, and a certainty that it is neither past nor irrevocable. Charity, Mr. Chesterton says somewhere, is the pardoning of the unpardonable; and may we not add to that, that penitence is a denying of the undeniable?

This emotion too, then, is well represented in a Requiem; in fact we may say that nothing else is represented except so far as it is an element of this. From the Confiteor Deo omnipotenti of the three black and white figures bowed at the foot of the altar to the last doubtful Amen, the whole performance is nothing else than one heart-broken sob of sorrow. It is possible that we may repudiate the theological idea of sin; but we cannot help allowing (what comes to pretty well the same thing) that there are certain events in our own lives and in the lives of other people, that we regret extremely, certain failures to achieve the right thing, certain achievements which we should prefer to have failed.

And I suppose, too, that when that unpleasant fact to which a Requiem witnesses becomes quite imminent, we shall experience that regret even more acutely; at any rate, it would not be unreasonable to do so.

Very well, then; it is exactly that in which Mass for the Dead rises head and shoulders above any other form of funeral devotion. The Catholic Church does not emulate the eminent man who, when requested by his weeping friend at the hour of death to declare what it was that gave such a supernatural radiance to his face, answered with a patient smile that it was “the memory of a long and well-spent life.” On the contrary, she makes not one reference to the virtues of the deceased—though it is only just to say that she has done that the day before—she does not recount victories, or even apologize for failures; she does what he considers even better, she deplores them.

The conclusion of the whole matter then is that I am pleased to have gone through those exercises on All Souls’ Day, because I feel that they have been extremely good for me. I do not need any reminders that I am alive, nor that immortality may be only a brilliant guess, nor that I am an exceedingly fine, manly, successful, and capable person. But it is not bad for me to be told silently, in a very vivid and impressive manner, that I am certainly going to die some day, that hope is a fact that must be accounted for, and that, in spite of my singular probity and extraordinary gifts, there are just a few incidents here and there in my long roll of triumphs for which I should like to be sorry.

The End