1. Byrd practised the same lost art as Palestrina and Victoria. But I find as much musical and spiritual merit in Gretchaninov as in Byrd’s pupil Tomkins, and that’s a lot of merit.

2. The Kyrie, Gloria and Sanctus of Bach’s B minor Mass are completely compatible with the Lutheran liturgy (Latin words and all). The Credo and Agnus Dei seem to me to have been added partly because of Bach’s familiar aspiration to completeness and partly because he had hopes of a job in Dresden. If it’s permissible to argue that Bach “transcended Protestantism” in the direction of Rome, one could also argue from the unsatisfactory setting of Et in Spiritum Sanctum that Bach was well on the way to Orthodoxy!

3. It’s Calvin’s doctrine of the Trinity that seems to me to be derived from Aquinas. They both put the Nature of God before His Persons – the Unity before the Trinity – and that’s backwards.

4. The Latin theologians I most admire and enjoy are St Hilary of Poitiers and St John Cassian. I read Augustine, Anselm and Aquinas (and many others) before disagreeing with them. Did you read St Photius the Great, St Gregory Palamas and St Symeon the New Theologian before disagreeing with them?

So you consider Gretchaninov superior to, say, William Byrd. A matter of taste, I suppose. Bach was a Lutheran, but he transcended Protestantism. B Minor Mass, for example. Luther himself was an artist, which is why he, unlike Calvin, encouraged music and artisitic expression. And Calvin’s central idea, that of predestination, comes straight from Augustine, and I find it hard to discern any Thomist influences. I just wonder if you rate any theologian who wrote in Latin, such as the three giants you mentioned. It’s that thing I mentioned before: Catholics are much more tolerant of the Orthodox than vice versa.

Oops! I intended to enumerate the first three paragraphs as 1., 2. and 3., in order to make it clear that they were unrelated comments, but somehow I only got as far as 1.. The fourth paragraph is of course a mere parergon.

1. As far as I can tell, Calvin’s theology is mostly derived from Aquinas, except where he (disastrously) prefers Augustine or (even more disastrously) Anselm. But I didn’t quite lump Calvin and Aquinas together: I distinguished them as debating a question that ought not to have been asked, along with Zwingli and Keble (respectively the worst and best of the list, in my opinion).

Like you, I try to avoid the word “heresy” in East/West debates.

Your argumentum ab sublimitate (if that’s the right phrase) is one that I find difficult to resist emotionally but easy to refute. While it’s true that the Western Church has all the best music, it’s also true that Ancient Greece has all the best poetry, but we don’t think that people who rightly exalt Homer, Pindar and Aeschylus ought to worship Zeus, Poseidon and Hades, do we?

By the way, nobody would rank Gretchaninov’s liturgical music with Bach’s, but Bach was a Protestant. One has to go back to the lost art of Palestrina and Victoria to find Gretchaninov’s superior in the Roman Church. In more modern times, I think only Bruckner is his equal.

Your lumping together of Aquinas and Calvin is most refreshing. This reminds me yet again that Catholicism is much more tolerant of Eastern Christianity than vice versa. Thus you’ll notice that I’ve never described Orthodoxy as heretical (even if I may consider it that in my innermost thoughts). The obvious problems with it are the secular proofs of the ecclesiastical pudding: it’s Western, not Eastern, Christianity that created history’s greatest civilisation. We have Bach; you have Grechaninov. Thank you very much.

But you are right that we don’t need Aristotle to be present at communion. We believe in the Real Presence because Christ said so. We know he is present, and there’s the end to it. How he is present is an infinite mystery our finite minds can’t grasp. However, there also exists church doctrine, which in this case I find believable enough to accept. I only invoke philosophy when trying (usually in vain) to explain such things to the intelligent uninitiated.

Aquinas’s misapplication of Aristotle to the great Christian mystery has also been the source of much superstition: if Corpus Christi processions and the Rite of Benediction aren’t superstitious, what is? But in the Orthodox Church (which you probably guessed I was going to mention sooner or later), we don’t even elevate the newly consecrated Body of Christ, lest the foolish make the mistake of worshipping it.

So this is yet another difference between East and West. In the West, Aquinas and Zwingli and Calvin and John Keble are furiously debating what precisely is going on in the Divine Liturgy, while in the East we’re calmly and contently receiving our holy nourishment, the undebatable Body and Blood of Christ.

Have a blessed Triduum!