Liturgy of creation: the Catholic imagination opens up new vistas of sight and sound
Gavin Ashenden• May 17, 2025
One of the delights that begins to unfold in the process of becoming Catholic is a growing realisation of how, within the Catholic perceptive imagination, matter and spirit are infused and intermingled, and the mending of the fractured duality between spirit and matter that Enlightenment culture engendered is achieved.
The Liturgy of the Hours contains the wonderful Benedicite, omnia opera Domini – a canticle of Creation containing verses of The Song of the Three Children. St Francis of Assisi, in his Canticle of the Sun, mirrors this exquisite poetry celebrating an animated universe, sentient of God’s love, joining the angelic order in hymns of praise, whether or not the human beings living at the centre of the created order either feel it or join in.
The idea of the cosmos resonating liturgically in response to the creative love of God weaves its way in and out of Catholic thought from the Fathers through to the present day. In The Spirit of the Liturgy, five years before he became pope, Joseph Ratzinger urged us to consider that the primary end of all creation is the participation of rational beings in the cosmic liturgy which is the life-giving communion of the Holy Trinity.
Consequently, the goal of worship and the goal of creation are one and the same; the notion that the “music of the cosmos” and the “song of the angels” ought to be reflected in liturgical music.
JRR Tolkien follows in the footsteps of the Benedicite and St Francis in his mythical creation narrative in The Silmarillion. The creative action of the Ainulindalë is centred on heavenly music. Eru propounds a theme to the angels and commands them “to make harmony together in great music”. They duly sing before him; Eru is pleased and so gives concrete life and being to their song. In Tolkien’s myth, this gift of life to the agency of music is the means of the creation of the whole world. We find something similar at Job 38:7, where God asks Job if he was present at creation, “when the morning stars praised me together, and all the sons of God made a joyful melody”.
In his excellent book The High Hallow: Tolkien’s Liturgical Imagination, Ben Reinhard suggests that John Dryden (1631–1700) may have provided a stimulus for Tolkien in his journey into the sanctified vivification of music. Dryden was the first Poet Laureate of England; he was also a Catholic. Once again we see the Catholic imagination being tuned to the mystery of the significance of music in the creative purposes of God.
In his great Song for St Cecilia’s Day of 1687, Dryden imagines creation permeated with heavenly music: the world begins, proceeds and ends in song. “From harmony, from heav’nly harmony / This universal frame began,” Dryden wrote. Through all the ages the planets move and sing, as they will until the last day, “when music shall untune the sky”.
As for Dryden, so too for Tolkien: the world will end in music. As great as the music of creation was, at the end of the day a greater music still shall be made by the choirs of Ainur and the children of Ilúvatar. Reinhard continues to explain: “The world will begin and end in a song of praise before God. But the liturgical notes sounded are heightened by the particular language Tolkien chooses. When the great music begins, ‘the voices of the Ainur, like unto harps and lutes, and pipes and trumpets and viols and organs, and like unto countless choirs singing with words, began to fashion the theme of Ilúvatar to a great music, and a sound arose of endless interchanging melodies woven in harmony that pass beyond hearing into the depths and into the heights’.”
What is rather wonderful in Tolkien (as in Dryden) is that the world was not merely created in worship in Tolkien’s mythology – it is also sustained by it. And it is at this point that we are suddenly introduced to the wonderful idea that even the falling rain constitutes the music of praise in response to the love of God, ordered, mastered and orchestrated by living angels, now.
The idea that the pattering of rain is a percussive melody of a kind is not totally new. But what is new is the intimation that behind, within and with the rain there is a music directed by angelic love to the praise of God the Creator, who made the angels, the rain, the earth it falls upon, and everything it feeds and sustains. Praise and thanksgiving are interwoven into the whole of creation.
As Reinhard suggests, rainfall – in fact all water – is privileged in Tolkien’s myth. But, as he notes, “the same could be said for every natural phenomenon”. The Catholic imagination opens new, deeper, more resonant, beautiful and wonderful vistas on what it is to be a human living in creation with a heart attuned to the work and mystery of the angelic.
You don’t have to be a Catholic to live on earth, of course, or give thanks in wonder and praise and learn a deeper purpose to music. But if you are, it helps.
The goal of worship and the goal of creation are one and the same; the notion that the “music of the cosmos” and the “song of the angels” ought to be reflected in liturgical music.
Photo: The Temptation of Eve by Edouard Bisson. Engraving published 1897