Gaudeamus Igitur (‘therefore, let us rejoice’). Readers of a certain age – fewer and fewer to be sure – will recognize these words as the opening lyric of a drinking song popular among university students years ago. Today is Gaudete Sunday, the third of the four Sundays of Advent, that pre-Christmas season that begins the liturgical calendar. Other than the Vatican II document ‘Gaudium et Spes’ the title of this song and Gaudete Sunday are the only occasions where I’ve come across this Latin word for ‘rejoice’. I wonder what, if anything, a bar song and the liturgical calendar have in common.
Could it be that each connotes a concept of human progress?
The gist of the song is that we should make the most of life because it is brief: ‘post iucundam iuventutem, post molestam senectutem, nos habebit humus’ (‘after jolly youth and troublesome old age the earth will hold us’). Death comes quickly and spares no one. Any joy to be had is to be seized in this life and any endeavor to increase it is limited to our efforts alone, here and now. This is the progress implied by ‘progressivism’, that secular term so popular today. Progressivism is steeped in the conviction that utopia is possible now and can be created by our jettisoning tradition, making our own rules, and embracing the dogmas of relativism and utilitarianism. Though we pride ourselves on being autonomous of any objective reality we allow ourselves to be seduced by the false promise of this secular gospel and then abandon any sense of or search for the transcendent. Progressivism is a journey, certainly, but its unthinking adherents fail to recognize that its destination is necessarily totalitarianism.
The liturgical calendar, on the other hand, suggests a different kind of progress. Each year the soothingly immutable cadence of its sequence of religious observances links time with timelessness. In doing so it underscores our own progression, both individually and corporately, and reminds us that we – ‘in’ but not ‘of’ the world – are wayfarers on a journey. Our progress emerges from the ignorance of pre-Christmas darkness through the salvific enlightenment of the Easter promise to the Eschaton, the end of time, the apotheosis of Christ the King, when – free from the sting of death – those worthy of it will be immersed in eternal beatitude. Redeemed and with the help of divine grace and the intercession of saints, we hold on to what is true as we progress toward this end. In a world we recognize as imperfect and whose perfectibility is beyond our unaided ability, we are empowered by charity to use our talents to promote each other’s human dignity.
Though they share a Latin root this boisterous drinking song and today’s special liturgy reflect contrasting views on human progress. Even so, both invite us to be joyful. So, today let us express gladness in advance of our celebration of that turning point in history, the nativity of the Word Incarnate.
And, let our enthusiasm surpass that of those carousing songsters of yesteryear as we ourselves with full throated joy exclaim ‘Gaudeamus Igitur’.