Art & Creativity Quote by Richard Morris

There’s a deliberately provocative swagger in Morris’s reversal of the “Catholicism versus culture” cliché. He’s not merely defending Catholic practice; he’s staging a rhetorical coup: the Church didn’t just preserve music, it authored the very rules by which the West hears significance. The key move is the hierarchy embedded in “sound like” versus “mean.” Technique matters, Morris concedes, but interpretation is the real battleground. He wants music understood not as ornament or entertainment but as a moral technology: ordered sound designed to train the soul.

As a 19th-century clergyman, Morris is writing in the long shadow of the Reformation’s polemics, when Catholics were accused of theatrical excess and empty ritual, and in the thick of Victorian anxieties about modernity’s new soundscape - public concerts, popular song, secular virtuosity. “Thus the slogan should be reversed” signals he’s arguing with a fashionable summary of history, the kind of punchy Protestant narrative that credits reformers with rescuing meaning from Catholic “form.” He flips it to claim that Catholic liturgy fused form and meaning first, making music a vessel for doctrine, communal identity, and disciplined emotion.

The subtext is also institutional: if the Church taught the world what music is “supposed” to be, then the Church retains interpretive authority over it. Morris isn’t just praising Gregorian chant; he’s warning that when music severs itself from sacred purpose, it doesn’t become neutral. It becomes unmoored - and, in his view, spiritually forgetful.