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Liturgy in the Broadest Sense
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2024
Abstract
Theologians interested in postmodernism and contemporary culture have recently turned to liturgy as a resource. However, these scholars often overlook the rich tradition of philosophically and theologically sophisticated reflection on liturgy of the past few decades. The result is that essential features of liturgy are overlooked. These features include the authoritative nature of liturgy for theology, and the impossibility of fully expressing the content of liturgy in propositional theology. By turning to the work of liturgical theologians, including Alexander Schmemann, Aidan Kavanagh, and Geoffrey Wainwright, I suggest that the attempt to grapple with contemporary issues by appealing to liturgy will always be compromised unless liturgy is understood in a modest, not broad, sense. I argue that recent work by Catherine Pickstock and William Cavanaugh, among others, ignores the authoritative nature of liturgy. These recent enthusiasts of liturgy promote a ‘liturgical culture’, but in the process their work takes away what makes liturgy most potent.
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- Copyright © 2009 The Author. New Blackfriars © 2009 The Dominican Society.
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1 There is some implicit dialogue: for example, William Cavanaugh acknowledges (and has biographical connections to) Geoffrey Wainwright, and Catherine Pickstock draws on Gregory Dix's historical work. This lack of historical reflectiveness is particularly worrying as Jewish writers join in the recent enthusiasm for liturgy, apparently without appreciating the distinctively Christian heritage of the concept. For example, Steven Kepnes's recent book purports to be a Jewish ‘counterpart’ to Catherine Pickstock's After Writing. Kepnes, Jewish Liturgical Reasoning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007);Google Scholar Cf. Rashkover, Randi and Pecknold, C. C. (eds.), Liturgy, Time, and the Politics of Redemption (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006).Google Scholar
2 Fenwick, John R. K. and Spinks, Bryan D., Worship in Transition: The Liturgical Movement in the Twentieth Century (New York: Continuum, 1995);Google Scholar Reid, Alcuin, The Organic Development of the Liturgy (Farnborough: St. Michael's Abbey Press, 2004);Google Scholar Nichols, Aidan, Looking at Liturgy: A Critical View of Its Contemporary Form (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1996).Google Scholar
3 BeauduinO.S.B., Lambert O.S.B.,, Liturgy the Life of the Church (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1926),Google Scholar cited in Schmemann, Alexander, Liturgy and Tradition: Theological Reflections of Alexander Schmemann, edited by Fisch, Thomas J. (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press), p. 2.Google Scholar
4 Schmemann uses the distinction between the question of ‘how’ worship is done and ‘what’ is done in worship to frame his study, Introduction to Liturgical Theology (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1996).Google Scholar
5 Schmemann, Liturgy and Tradition, p. 12.
6 I am substituting ritual for cult without harm, I think, to the point Schmemann is making (he seems to have Durkheim in mind, who closely links ritual and cult). Ibid, p. 16.
7 Ibid, p. 16
8 On the ‘performativity’ of ritual, see Hollywood, Amy, ‘Performativity, Citationality, Ritualization’, History of Religions 42 (2002), pp. 93–115.Google Scholar On a similar point made about liturgy, see Kavanagh, Aidan, On Liturgical Theology (New York: Pueblo Pub. Co., 1984), pp. 73–4.Google Scholar
9 Schmemann makes the confusing claim: ‘Liturgical tradition is not an ‘authority’ or a locus theologicus; it is the ontological condition of theology…’ (Liturgy and Tradition, p. 18). The point he is making here is just that the relationship between lex orandi and lex credendi is bi‐directional: liturgy and theology both function as authorities for each other.
10 Schmemann, Liturgy and Tradition, p. 19.
11 Wainwright offers a detailed defense of his choice, and a discussion of the historical context of the Latin phrases, in his Doxology: The Praise of God in Worship, Doctrine, and Life: A Systematic Theology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 219–225.Google Scholar
12 Kavanagh, On Liturgical Theology, p. 75.
13 Ibid, p. 47.
14 Ibid, p. 100.
15 Ibid, p. 106.
16 Schmemann, Liturgy and Tradition, p. 121, 117.
17 Hughes, Graham, Worship as Meaning: A Liturgical Theology for Late Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 227.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
18 Ibid, p. 228.
19 Kavanagh, On Liturgical Theology, p. 125. Kavanagh helpfully puts this point another way: ‘The liturgy is neither structured nor does it operate in such a way as to provide doctrinal conclusions. These are distilled from liturgy by theologians according to the general principle that data are not given but must be consciously taken’, p.126.
20 Gillian Rose makes a closely related point in her Mourning Becomes the Law: Philosophy and Representation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).Google Scholar Cf.Lloyd, Vincent, ‘The Secular Faith of Gillian Rose’, Journal of Religious Ethics 36 (2008), 683–705.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
21 Kavanagh, On Liturgical Theology, pp. 123–4.
22 Wainwright, Doxology, p. ix. Wainwright is clearly aware of the humility necessary for the theological enterprise, but he does not associate this humility especially with liturgical theology: ‘It is hard therefore to see how absolute certainty could attach to any doctrinal conclusion drawn from the worship of the Church. Such conclusions will possess varying degrees of probability and must remain open to revision. But that is the case, I suspect, with all doctrinal statements’, p. 250.
23 Ibid, p. 57.
24 Ibid, p. 218.
25 Ibid, p. 160.
26 Ibid, pp. 251–2.
27 Ibid, p. 8.
28 See, for example, Ibid, p. 135.
29 Ibid, pp. 406, 399.
30 I am clearly using the language of translation metaphorically: it is not from one language to another but from a practice to a language. Another way to put it would be in Robert Brandom's idiom of making explicit the norms implicit in practice. The claim I am discussing is that all attempts to make norms explicit will be inadequate.
31 Jeffrey Stout, Democracy and Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). I hope that the New Liturgists I discuss are of a less phantasmal nature than the New Traditionalists whom Stout imagines.
32 I would suggest that Charles Mathewes, with respect to political theory, could be added to this list, though his project differs in significant ways from the work of Pickstock and Cavanaugh. See Mathewes, Charles, A Theology of Public Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
33 Pickstock, Catherine, After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997).Google Scholar
34 Pickstock, Catherine, ‘Liturgy, Art and Politics’, Modern Theology 15 (1999), p. 159.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
35 Ibid, p. 159.
36 Ibid, p. 160; After Writing p. 170.
37 Pickstock, ‘Liturgy, Art and Politics’, p. 160.
38 Pickstock brings out this point in her essay ‘Music’ Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology, edited by Milbank, John, Pickstock, Catherine, and Ward, Graham (London: Routledge, 1999);CrossRefGoogle Scholar cf. Milbank, John, ‘“Postmodern Critical Augustinianism”,’ Modern Theology 7 (1991), 225–237.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
39 Pickstock, “Liturgy, Art and Politics,” p. 161.
40 Ibid, p. 167. See generally the section of After Writing titled ‘The Decline of Liturgical Order’, pp. 135–157.
41 Pickstock, ‘Liturgy, Art and Politics’, p. 167.
42 Ibid, p. 168. Pickstock is careful to emphasize that she does not mean to suggest that genuine liturgy reverts back to ‘pre‐modern subjectivity.’
43 Pickstock, After Writing, p. 256.
44 See, among other places, Pickstock, After Writing, p. 37. She finds this point in Plato, who did not have Socrates condemn ‘poetry as such, but rather … the separation of language from doxology’, p. 42.
45 Ibid, p. 177.
46 Ibid, p. 178.
47 See Pickstock's captivating reading of the Roman Rite in After Writing, pp. 169–219, especially pp. 197–198.
48 Ibid, pp. 171; 176.
49 This is critique could equally be leveled against some of Milbank's work, for instance his ‘“Postmodern Critical Augustinianism”.’
50 Cavanaugh, William, Theopolitical Imagination (London: T & T Clark, 2002), p. 9.Google Scholar
51 Ibid, p. 44, 47.
52 Ibid, p. 83.
53 Ibid, pp. 92–93.
54 Ibid, p. 93.
55 Cavanaugh, William, Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics, and the Body of Christ (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), p. 12.Google Scholar
56 Durkheim, Emile, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, translated by Fields, Karen E. (New York: Free Press, 1995).Google Scholar
57 Mathewes, A Theology of Public Life, pp. 103, 146.