Whatever belongs to the liturgical offices, objects, and furnishings of the Church is full of signs of the divine and the sacred mysteries, and each of them overflows with a celestial sweetness when it is encountered by a diligent observer who can extract honey from a rock and oil from the stoniest ground [Deut. 32:13]. Who knows the order of the heavens and can apply its rules to the earth [Job 38:33]? Certainly, he who would attempt to investigate the majesty of heaven would be overwhelmed by its glory. It is, in fact, a deep well from which I cannot drink [cf. Jn 4:11], unless He who gives all things abundantly and does not reproach us [Jas 1:5] provides me with a vessel so that I can drink with joy from the fountains of the Savior [Isa 12:3] which flow between the mountains [Ps 103:10].
Quecumque in ecclesiasticis officiis, rebus ac ornamentis consistunt, diuinis plena sunt signis atque misteriis, ac singula celesti sunt dulcedine redundantia, si diligentem tamen habeant inspectorem qui norit mel de petra sugere oleumque de durisimo saxo. Quis tamen nouit ordinem celi, et rationes ipsius ponet in terra? Scrutator quippe maiestatis opprimetur a gloria. Si quidem puteus altus est et in quo aquam hauriam non habeo, nisi porrigat ille qui dat omnibus affluenter et non improperat, ut inter medium montium transeuntem hauriam aquam in gaudio de fontibus saluatoris.
In the first paragraph of the modern translation of the Rationale divinorum officiorum of William Durand (c. 1230–1296) are markers of the change this book seeks to chart. One is immediately visible. The translator, Timothy M. Thibodeau, chose to distinguish through the use of italics what he then identifies, through the use of brackets, as biblical texts. Those italics and those brackets do not simply mark the modern sense of “source,” of a particular relationship between Durand and Scripture, that postdates Durand himself.Footnote 2 They distinguish Scripture and, in so doing, obscure Durand’s understanding of revelation and its relationship to “ecclesiasticis officiis, rebus ac ornamentis.” There in the opening paragraph of the Prologue and throughout the Rationale, Durand presents a different relationship entirely among ecclesiasticis officiis, rebus and ornamentis, and biblical history, prophecies, psalms, Gospels, and Epistles.
A second measure of that change is Thibodeau’s choice to translate the Latin phrase, diuinis plena sunt signis atque misteriis, into relationships that make sense today: “full of signs of the divine and sacred mysteries.” Durand, however, had written “full of divine signs as well as mysteries.” For Durand, the res and ornamenta were not solely signs but were filled with both signs and mysteries. As we shall see, the stone of altars, the linen of albs, rubrics on the pages of missals – “matter” – participated complexly in the communication of divine mystery that took place in the liturgy.Footnote 3 As the following chapters reveal, redundantia points toward the nature of divine communication, not simply its many different forms and their interreferentiality but also their amplitude, the evidence of divine intent to communicate.
The understanding of the liturgy of which the Rationale is evidence has suffered a fate similar to the memory practices Mary Carruthers illumined.Footnote 4 As she showed, the modern notion of “memory” does not simply differ from how medieval authors and monks conceived of the human mind and its relationship to texts. The modern frame of reference impedes our ability to hear the monks and to understand their rhetorical practices. Analogously, the understanding of the liturgy set forth in the Rationale has largely been read in terms of a sense of liturgy – as preeminently, for many, essentially, verbal, even textual, and as occurring within time governed by clocks – which postdates the fifteenth century. Again, there in the modern translation is a trace of the distance between medieval understandings and modern, in Thibodeau’s utterly reasonable decision to translate “rebus ac ornamentis” as “objects and furnishings” – no one word in English can capture the medieval valences of res or ornamentum.Footnote 5 Even as the Rationale has been brought into circulation in a welcome modern edition and translation, it has been read in terms of how we have been taught to conceive of matter and time, of modern physics, in the wake of Reformation.
This book is a study of the sea change reflected in those italicized words and translations of res as objects, ornamenta as furnishings. Beginning with The Eucharist in the Reformation, I have held a model of “fragmentation” as capturing the splintering the medieval Western Christian Church into many Churches, all of which traced their roots to the same origins in the person of Christ, his preaching, his parables, his acts. But “fragmentation,” chosen as a way to conceptualize simultaneously shared histories and division, accords the splintering of the sixteenth century definitive importance. This book returns to the puzzle that the iconoclasts of Zurich and Strasbourg posed to me years ago: Why risk their lives for mere matter?Footnote 6 Smashing as they did eternal lamps and altars as well as altarpieces and panel paintings, carpenters and shoemakers and church assistants committed the capital crime of blasphemy. They knew the penalty, even as they characterized the victims of their violence as “idols.” This book offers an answer to that question. In so doing, it recasts the story from fragmentation to one of the most far-reaching ruptures of early modernity, from a sense of matter as a medium of divine revelation to the sense of “mere matter” that, ultimately, translated the violence from an assault against God to property damage.
The Rationale proved the key to answering the puzzle of the iconoclasts. Prior to Reformation, it was measurably the most widely produced commentary on the liturgy. It was the fifth book printed in Gutenberg’s shop, after the Bible, a missal, a psalter, and a Latin grammar.Footnote 7 Some 200 manuscripts and some 44 separate printed editions prior to 1500 have been identified.Footnote 8 Before the sixteenth century, it was printed in fifteen cities across Europe. It is the preeminent trace of a way of thinking about the relationship of liturgy and matter before the sixteenth century. Divided into eight books, covering the church, altars, images (Book I) through the Calendar (Book VIII), the Rationale is not simply the most comprehensive commentary on the liturgy. It offers the fullest articulation of a sense of liturgy that was gone by the end of the sixteenth century. Book IV, on the Mass, follows Book I on the church, altars, and images, Book II on the clerical orders, and Book III on vestments. The entire Rationale concludes with a chapter on time, on the calculus for the calendar which enacts Christian history in the rhythms of each Christian’s experience of the year. For Durand, the church, altars, images, vestments and the persons of clergy, and the calendar were not, as they came to be, something apart from the communication of divine mysteries in the liturgy but “full of” those mysteries which they brought in their distinctive ways to collective worship.
The way of thinking about connections among Scripture, liturgy, and matter set forth in the Rationale was one of the earliest targets of sixteenth-century Evangelical criticism.Footnote 9 In 1520, in one of his most successful and widely disseminated pamphlets, The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, Martin Luther encompassed the Rationale in his attack on “allegories”:
Similarly, in the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, what does this Dionysius do but describe certain churchly rites, and amuse himself with allegories without proving anything? Just as has been done in our time by the author of the book entitled Rationale divinorum. Such allegorical studies are for idle men. Do you think I should find it difficult to amuse myself with allegories about anything in creation? Did not Bonaventura by allegory draw the liberal arts into theology? And Gerson even converted the smaller Donatus into a mystical theologian. …Who has so weak a mind as not to be able to launch into allegories?Footnote 10
This passage is part of a much larger attack on what Luther called a figurative reading of Scripture, which, he argued, was the foundation for wrong understandings of just what a sacrament is. Evangelicals’ rethinking of the relationship among Scripture, liturgy, and matter is the subject of the second part of this book. Here let me dwell for a moment on how Luther deployed the word “allegories” and its cognates.Footnote 11 In a line that can be traced to most modern studies of allegory, which locate its origins in classical rhetoric, Luther construed it as an exclusively verbal practice.Footnote 12 He also reduced to a single thing, allegory, what Durand and others had held to be rich and dynamic interconnections among scriptural referents to the physical world, that physical world, and divine mysteries.Footnote 13 Luther not only vehemently rejected allegory as a mode of biblical exegesis.Footnote 14 He rejected the entire way of thinking about divine communication which had construed Creation and Scripture as interreferential. The words of the Bible were where the faithful were to look for divine communication.Footnote 15 Meaning was located in a printed text, a codex, clear to its true reader. In this pamphlet and others, Luther laid the foundations for the modern understanding of liturgy as a direct and verbal expression of the “plain” sense of Scripture. In so doing, he recast the relationship between the liturgy and Creation and with it the nature of “revelation.”
I do not wish to argue that Luther alone effected the change this book charts. In the sixteenth century, all Evangelicals, from Anabaptists through Anglicans, rejected the interwoven lives of Scripture, matter, and the liturgy. Luther neither called for nor supported the acts of violence that ultimately did transform the landscape of Christianity in Europe, violence not only against images but, more tellingly, also against matter that was not an “image” in the modern sense:Footnote 16 altars, eternal lamps, candlesticks, and bells. Many risked their lives to destroy the matter of the medieval liturgy. But Luther did give voice, in one of the most widely disseminated pamphlets of the sixteenth century, to a way of thinking that recast the relationship among Scripture, matter, and liturgy. And by the end of the sixteenth century, as we shall see, Luther, Huldrych Zwingli, and John Calvin, whom modern scholars now call “Protestants,” articulated a radically new understanding of what the liturgy was, what its relationship to Scripture was, and what the relationship of liturgy to matter was. By the last session of the Council of Trent in 1564, Catholics, too, had come to consider images as objects, things apart from the liturgy. This book seeks to chart, in other words, not a break between Catholic and Protestant but a sea change between the medieval Church and modern Churches, Catholic as well as Protestant.
Liturgy and Time
The change runs very deep. It is there in the ways modern scholars approach the two nouns, liturgy and matter, in their separation from one another since the sixteenth century, and in the ways each has been discussed. For Durand, “liturgy” encompassed both the Mass and the Divine Office. Prior to the sixteenth century, the Divine Office shared the space, the site, the images, and the crosses with the Mass. Bells sounded the Office’s rhythms across the European landscape, creating a soundscape which encompassed not only the religious but even non-Christians who lived within hearing of the bells.Footnote 17 Modern histories tend, at a minimum, to treat the Divine Office and the Mass in discrete chapters; some histories of “liturgy” treat the Mass alone.Footnote 18 This book follows that narrower sense of “liturgy,” as the collective act of worship of the entire congregation or body of the faithful, and excludes the orthopraxis of those who took vows. The separation of the Divine Office from the Mass and the narrowed definition of liturgy as the Mass reflect, inter alia, the erasure of the Divine Office in a number of sixteenth-century Churches. For this book, that narrower definition reflects foremost the need to set boundaries to a topic that has few natural ones.
The very notion that the Mass has a history may well be a product of the sixteenth century, with its rethinking of the relationship among living community of the faithful, “this do,” what was encompassed in “in remembrance of me,” and time. As we shall see when we turn to altars, excising the matter of the liturgy also contributes to a sense of time as linear and encoded in texts, chronological in the way texts exist in relationship to one another. Altars abide as sites at which divine presence occurs rhythmically. More critically, those histories trace a direct line from the words of institution as found in Scripture, here, for example, First Corinthians, to contemporary practice, excising both matter and Creation:
The first holy Mass was said on “the same night in which He was betrayed” (1 Cor. 11:23). Judas’ resolution had been taken, the next few steps would bring our Lord to the Mount of Olives where an agony would overtake Him and His enemies seize Him. In this very hour He gives His disciples the Holy Sacrament which for all time would be the offering of the Church. The setting was significant – the paschal meal. Since the withdrawal of the people out of Egypt the paschal lamb had served year after year to prefigure the great expectation. The fulfillment, too, would serve to recall the exodus not only from Egypt but from the land of sin, and the arrival not into a promised land but into God’s kingdom. From this hour on it was to continue as a fond reminiscence from generation to generation. But the records of the Last Supper contain few details concerning the ceremonial of the meal, probably because this ceremonial was not meant to be the lasting setting of the celebration.
In a study encompassing hundreds of textual sources, Joseph A. Jungmann accorded one brief section to “Accommodations of Space,” which he held to be “an outer frame surrounding the celebration of Mass.”Footnote 20 He echoed Luther in designating a group of medieval liturgical commentators as applying “the allegorical method”; for him, as for Luther, medieval commentators on the liturgy from Pseudo-Dionysius through Durand did not seek to link matter, Scripture, and the liturgy but “to put an allegorical interpretation on sacred texts whenever they appeared mystifying.”Footnote 21 “Allegory,” as for Luther, was a fiction imposed; Durand was an allegorist, not a liturgist connecting Creation and liturgy.Footnote 22
It is not simply that these histories of the liturgy privileged clerical sources: Church Fathers, the books produced for monasteries, the books authorized by bishops, the commentaries of canon lawyers such as Durand or theologians such as Thomas Aquinas. For these historians, liturgy itself is textual. The movements of the priest, as well as his vestments, were, for Jungmann as for Gregory Dix and others, “ceremonial,” something added on to liturgy.Footnote 23 The altar, as Jungmann wrote, “[t]he heart of the church, the focal point at which all lines converge, … the place of the sacrifice,” nonetheless for him, as for others, brought nothing to the Mass, neither scriptural allusion nor temporal complexity.Footnote 24
Liturgy and Matter
Reformation led to the study of liturgy in terms of texts – missals, hymnals, psalters, the Book of Common Prayer, and service books. That we speak of altars, altarpieces, eternal lamps, crucifixes, candlesticks, or liturgical books as objects is the clearest evidence of how deeply Evangelical violence and sixteenth-century liturgies severed all of them from worship. They have become discrete from one another – a sense of object we shall see more fully in Part II. The deepest severance is the least visible to modernity: For Durand, all were forms of materia, that is, they belonged to Creation. Sixteenth-century Evangelicals smashed altars into pieces of stone, stripped pigments from wooden panels, and melted precious metals, revealing the stuff of Genesis as things apart from human hands, as indeed vulnerable to human hands, and not a place to discern revelation.
A broad range of modern fields of scholarship trace their origins to that severance, from a notion of “art” that is to be found in museums through work in “material religion” and “sensational religion” to theorizing about the “agency” of matter.Footnote 25 The scope of the transformation of one form of matter, images, can be traced in their transposition to museums, their reconceptualization as art, as well as in the studies, in the hundreds, of individual altarpieces and panels as both detachable from their original location and defined by the human being who designed them.Footnote 26 David Morgan, one of the most influential scholars of “material religion,” in a recent article mapped “a process that consists of at least nine aspects or moments, each of which captures a key aspect of an object’s materiality and its relevance for those who put the object to religious use.”Footnote 27 There, in the formulation of one of the most sympathetic scholars, is that Reformation separation: An “object” is put to human “use.”Footnote 28 So, too, does the study of religion and the senses or sensational religion take as its point of departure the physics of the Evangelicals: “Matter” is not an autonomous medium of divine communication but what human beings take up, in the materiality of their own bodies, to express something about a transcendent being.Footnote 29 That sense of a dynamic limited to matter and human being also informs the extraordinarily rich variety of conceptualizations of the “agency” of matter.Footnote 30
Late medieval European Christians held a sense of divine Creation that was dismantled over the centuries following the sixteenth, in the wake of Reformation reconceptualizations of the relationship of matter to liturgy.Footnote 31 They shared, as we do not, some version of Aristotle’s notion of “prime matter” or prima materia.Footnote 32 Aristotelian physics was primarily concerned not with the composition of the physical world – what Robert Pasnau has called “integral parts” – but with change in it, “generation” and “corruption,” and with what did not change.Footnote 33 Materiality could take different “forms” – and just what “form” encompassed and its relationship to “matter” were themselves disputed.Footnote 34 In one of the most popular late medieval textbooks, the Philosophical Pearl, for example, first published in 1503, Gregor Reisch wrote: “The prime matter truly remains the same which was first under the form of air, now under the form of fire; but this [prime matter] is not a sensible.”Footnote 35 Everything that could be tasted, touched, seen, heard, or smelled had its origin in “prime matter,” which, for Christians, conformed with Creation, as set forth in Genesis 1: “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void [In principio creavit Deus caelum et terram terram autem erat inanis et vacua].”Footnote 36 That is, altars and vestments may have had different textures, weights, colors, and rigidities, but both had their origin in prima materia – and not in stone or marble or silk or linen, which were formed of that original nonsensible materia.
Throughout this book, when referring to buildings, altars, vestments, and images in the aggregate, I use the phrase the made world. Among the many legacies of Reformation, as we shall see in Part II, is the distinction so commonly made between the natural world and the things human beings have made.Footnote 37 The line between that which God had created and what human beings fashioned was not as hard for Durand as it was for Luther, Zwingli, or Calvin.Footnote 38 For Durand, the matter of the liturgy was formed from matter God had created.Footnote 39 Human hands had not changed that matter; they had fashioned it into forms that, in the case of churches, altars, and vestments, were scripturally authorized. The phrase, the made world, intentionally aims first to blur the distinction between Creation and human fashioning, to erase some, but not all, of the importance that came to be accorded human hands in the making of places of worship. It also aims to blur the distinction among the things human beings made that has so shaped their study in the past two centuries: churches as separate from the images that were in them, vestments as separate from the persons who wore them, altars as separate from the places in which they were used.
Liturgy, Matter, Scripture
non solum voces, sed et res significativae sunt [not only words, but things too are significative]. Hugh of St.-VictorFootnote 40 Quaelibet enim res, quot habet proprietates, tot habet linguas aliquid spirituale nobis et invisibile insinuantes, pro quarum diversitate et ipsius nominis acceptio variatur
[Indeed every created thing has as many meanings suggesting to us something spiritual and invisible as it has properties, in proportion to the diversity of which even acceptance of the name itself varies].
In 1958, in his inaugural lecture at Kiel, Friedrich Ohly called attention to the Latin word res and how medieval theologians construed its relationship to vox, which he translated as the sound of a word. In the article from that lecture, first published in 1977 in German, he argued: “Whereas antiquity … had been concerned only with the meanings of words, the Christian philology of the Middle Ages goes beyond that and is concerned with the ‘thing significations’ of everything present in creation.”Footnote 42 Drawing on a range of medieval authors, Ohly identified a way of conceptualizing the relationship between Creation and Scripture, which, he argued, defined medieval Christianity.Footnote 43 In the following chapters, my use of the term scriptural res is rooted in Ohly’s work.
Marie-Dominique Chenu, Mary Carruthers, and Caroline Walker Bynum have argued compellingly that the boundaries we draw are not those of medieval monks, theologians, nuns, or laity.Footnote 44 For the twelfth-century theologians Chenu studied, there were two books of Revelation: the Bible and nature.Footnote 45 A similar sense of revelation, as not exclusively verbal and to be read in the surrounding world, pervades the Rationale. For sixteenth-century Evangelicals, the Bible was the preeminent, even exclusive, locus of revelation. Even as they continued to acknowledge divine design and intentionality in Creation, they severed what human hands had fashioned from Creation and divine design, and they accorded Scripture sole authority in determining worship.
The boundary sixteenth-century Evangelicals placed between the made world and revelation has also shaped the conceptual models we bring to bear on the material traces of past worship. Modern scholars tend to posit one of two relationships between God and matter: either absence – and matter is inert, mute, and “presence” is a subjective perception on the part of the human viewer – or a “presence” which is in the matter.Footnote 46 Or, to put it in another modern bipolarity, “transcendence” and “immanence.”Footnote 47 Durand, however, posited neither. From that opening paragraph he construed matter as created: not simply by God but with divine intentionality; not embodying God, which was doctrinally distinct and unique in the person of Christ, but originating in divine design and, for Durand, consisting in an ongoing divine communication with humankind. Durand did not argue that God was “present” in the matter of, say, stone or linen – though God was indeed present for Durand in the matter of the elements, the Host and the wine, after the words of consecration. For Durand, matter was a medium between God and humankind, in ways explicitly analogous to Scripture.Footnote 48 Divine mysteries were communicated through and in altars and vestments, for those devout who could discern them. Revelation was not the same as presence but communication with humankind, communication which was multiform and oblique – mysteries and signs.
Scripture and Creation were not discrete from one another, nor was their relationship verbal description and materialization, as Luther would posit.Footnote 49 Scripture and the made world were complexly interreferential – in ways that the chapters on churches, altars, and vestments detail. The same fourfold approach to Scripture could be applied to the made world:
Similarly, Jerusalem is understood historically as that earthly city that pilgrims seek; allegorically, it represents the church militant; tropologically, any faithful soul; anagogically, the heavenly Jerusalem, or our homeland.
Jerusalem was a biblical site, both word and place, simultaneously. That same sense of layers of meaning of the scriptural text as Henri de Lubac set forth in his study – the four senses: historical, allegorical, tropological, and anagogical – the Rationale applies to the made world.Footnote 51
In a 1993 article, Thibodeau argued for the expansion of Lubac’s definition of allegory, from a strictly textual practice to one encompassing “every element of the liturgy, from the vestments of the priest to the thurible and candles used at lauds and vespers.”Footnote 52 He offered one example in his analysis of Durand’s choice of title:
Even the unusual and hitherto unused title of his work, the Rationale, reveals Durand’s preoccupation with making manifest the hidden or deeper meaning of the divine offices. The ornate pectoral to which Durand compared his commentary is described in Exod 28:15–30, and in Jerome’s Vulgate translation it is called the rationale iudicii (Exod 28:15). Aaron wore this pectoral over his priestly vestments; attached to it was a pouch or burse containing two circular stones, the Urim and Thummim – literally, “lights” and “integrity,” translated as doctrina and veritas by Jerome (Exod 28:30) – which the ancient Israelites used as an oracle for determining God’s will.Footnote 53
Thibodeau shared both Luther’s and Lubac’s sense that allegory is a system of hermeneutics, while for Durand it was one of four modes of discerning divine communication. Thibodeau also shared the preeminence Luther and Lubac gave the text of Scripture, but he offered the kind of densely layered analysis, an ongoing interweaving of Scripture and matter, that one finds throughout the Rationale. His one example points toward something of Durand’s dialectical hermeneutic, Scripture leading to discernment in Creation, Creation leading to other places in Scripture, which in turn accrued more layers of meaning to both text and matter.
Reading Revelation
Reading the made world was, as Durand made clear in his opening paragraph, a question of what any one person brought to acts of looking, touching, smelling, listening, and tasting. If we set aside the editorial interventions, the italics and the brackets, Durand modeled a kind of living familiarity with Scripture such as Carruthers delineated for monastic orthopraxis: not a sense of chapter and verse, which postdates Durand, but of embodying and being able to recollect at will those ways of speaking that in turn acquire new referents in each person’s experience.Footnote 54
Durand’s intended readership was clergy, both the religious who would live the rhythms of the Divine Office and the celebrants of the Mass, monks, canons, friars, deacons, and priests. But the sense of the interreferentiality of Scripture and the made world articulated in the Rationale was not restricted to those who had taken vows, those who were ordained, those who preached, or even those who could read. The “diligent observer” suggests another relationship, of attentiveness to divine communication. The liturgy, for Durand, did not parse between text and thing, word and materia, but was itself an orthopraxis teaching a way of discerning divine communication and its multilayered meanings, its complex composition of the world. Perhaps the most unintended consequence of Reformation was the abstracting of the liturgy from Europeans’ experience of time and space: “liturgy” became something one attended on Sundays, not an orthopraxis for discerning God’s design in the world.
Carruthers opened her study of monastic meditative practices and rhetoric, The Craft of Thought, with a definition of orthopraxis she adopted from Paul Gehl, who had developed it as an analytic concept for considering the monastic practice of silence.Footnote 55 For Carruthers and Gehl, “orthopraxis” offered a particularly fertile way to conceptualize monastic rhetorical practices. In Gehl’s words,
certain individuals and groups within the church have tended to create for themselves an orthopraxis, that is, one or another Christian experience which, though never independent of orthodox teaching, is essentially a reaching out for immanent experience of God without necessary or direct reference to the teaching of Christ embodied in Scripture, liturgy, and orthodox theology.Footnote 56
Gehl and Carruthers did not take up liturgy in their conceptualizations of orthopraxis. The sense each developed, however, of an ongoing embodied praxis, a discipline, “a reaching out for immanent experience of God,” which deepens understanding over time, brings us very close to Durand’s conception of the liturgy in dynamic with the made world, both as ongoing and dialectical and also as a process of ever greater discernment and illumination. Gehl’s and Carruthers’ conceptualizations of orthopraxis help us to see the made world as present over time, in ongoing dynamic with the liturgy. The concept of orthopraxis helps us to conceive of the liturgy, not as recurring or repeating, but as a process of potentially infinite discernment of revelation. For Durand, in other words, revelation was never instantaneous but ongoing and protean. Meaning was not fixed but constantly acquiring newly discerned layers, dimensions, allusions, associations, and connotations. Perhaps most critically, a concept of orthopraxis moves us from any notion that the liturgy was, as in modern conceptions of ritual, repetitious, to a sense that it was progressive and cumulative, an accrual over time of an ever-increasing discernment of the sheer magnitude and complexity of revelation. As we shall see, this particular way of conceptualizing the temporality of liturgy also helps us to discern more fully the different kinds of time that the missal, the altar, vestments, and the person of the priest brought to the liturgy.
From the opening of the Rationale, Durand emphasized attentiveness, that is, the orientation of the participant in the liturgy to it and to its matter. As we now know, he wrote at a time when other theories of optics were at play, and also when other conceptions of “vision” and “sense” informed thinking about what we now call “perception.”Footnote 57 “Species” has come to be a category of organization, one tier in the modern construction of the relationships among animals or plants. In medieval Europe, however, the term was at the center of debates on the relationship among the made world, the human eye, and the human mind.Footnote 58 As with “prime matter,” “species” had no one universally accepted definition, no consensus as to what it referred. As with prima materia, the word marks a way of thinking at once alien to us and endemic in late medieval Europe. Critically for our purposes, species was at the center of debates which took as their predicates: (1) that light is the medium of sight; (2) that light is material; and therefore (3) that the made world is materially connected to the human eye and, with it, the human mind. Those debates did not agree on the nature of mind or of senses, but they all held a radically different relationship between the made world and the mind.Footnote 59 The eye and the seen object were linked either, on the one hand, through a mathematical line or a continuous ray or, on the other, through a series of multiplications or “species” that traversed the distance between eye and object.Footnote 60 Not until Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) would light be construed as nonmaterial and therefore the eye as physically autonomous from the made world.
Throughout the period this book covers, Europeans broadly held that the made world was itself a participant in visual cognition – connected through the materiality of light, which traversed what we now hold to be a cognitive as well as spatial distance between “object” and eye and mind.Footnote 61 Even more critically important for our purposes, as A. Mark Smith summarized it, “concepts are immanent in objective reality.”Footnote 62 Not until René Descartes (1596–1650) would the made world be construed as both fully external to us and receiving its meaning from us, “objects” in the more common modern sense.Footnote 63
Durand’s focus was not the eye itself, perception, or cognition. As the opening paragraph suggests, his focus was an orientation, a preparedness to see God’s communication in stone and linen, gold and sapphires. In the Rationale, and especially in the first three books of it, he traced interplays of matter and Scripture which were woven into the liturgy, at times, as in the case of vestments, in the regularity of the liturgy, at times, as in the stone of altars, in the ongoing presence of specific kinds of matter within the space of the liturgy. But, in keeping with medieval theories, in the plural, of perception, Durand never treated the matter of the liturgy as objects.Footnote 64 They did not receive meaning from their human observers; they revealed it to them.Footnote 65 The permeability that is at the center of medieval theories of perception also operates implicitly in Durand’s discussion of the matter of the liturgy: The revelation of meaning occurred in dialogue with each person’s specific familiarity with Scripture, within the orthopraxis of liturgy, and with the sense of complex layers he sets forth in the example of Jerusalem.
Durand directed his reader to look at the matter of the liturgy – at the stone of churches and altars, at the linen and silk of vestments. He did not direct them to look beyond the matter. He directed his reader to look at it, as itself a site of divine communication, to which the same approach as to Scripture can be applied. For him, there was no boundary between the made world and revelation, and that changed not only the nature of the made world but also Scripture.
Incarnation
Thus liturgical objects and images are not to be considered solely as participant in the ritual from the point of view of their concrete function in the liturgy and their possible general theological and historical significance, but as essential elements of the liturgy destined to be activated by the five senses in order to render really present in the ritual the Incarnation of the Word according to different modalities.
Martin Luther not only lumped the Rationale among the “allegorical studies” he excoriated. He reconceived the matter of the liturgy as adiaphora, things indifferent, to which human beings gave such meaning as was accorded them.Footnote 67 In rejecting the matter of the liturgy as itself a mode of divine communication, he offered a radically different conception of Incarnation, centered on the printed word of Scripture and materially discrete from human experience. “Liturgy” became speaking and singing and listening; the Incarnation was no longer to be a mystery engaging all the senses. Liturgy and Incarnation were realigned.
The Rationale invites us to ask not only what liturgy is or what the relationship between Scripture and matter is. It invites us to ask what the relationship of Incarnation to the world is. The insistence of so many modern scholars that Incarnation is a thing apart from matter is perhaps the most compelling evidence of just how completely Evangelicals separated God from the materialities of late medieval Christianity.
At the center of this book is a shift from a sense that God communicates through the made world and in the cadences of the liturgy to one which locates that communication almost exclusively in a codex, a physically bounded and bound thing, a text. At its center, in other words, is a fundamental reconceptualization of revelation. Both Luther and Durand shared the “foundational tenet” of pre-modern Christian thinkers: God had brought everything, time as well as matter, into being.Footnote 68 For Durand, however, God communicated not only through words but also through matter and in time. Revelation was not restricted to Scripture, nor was Scripture a thing apart from Creation – as the following chapters show, the interplay of the matter of the liturgy and Scripture was richly complex, multivalent, and dynamic. Those signs and mysteries were not “clear”: Their interreferentiality was ongoing, a dialectic rather than a closed loop, generative of new insights through the orthopraxis of liturgy.
For Durand, meaning originated in God, that is, entirely outside of human imagination or intellection: It was external to and exceeded the capacity of any one viewer. The human viewer, for Durand, was not an active participant in meaning-making, in contradistinction, say, to reader response theory or hermeneutics.Footnote 69 Durand wrote of an “observer”; mysteries “overflow.” That sense of the made world was lost in the sixteenth century.
This book seeks to excavate the sense of the matter of the liturgy for which Durand is the fullest source. Chapters on churches, altars, and vestments explore different ways that stone, marble, relics, linen, colors, and the human body materialized sacred mysteries. The chapter on missals takes up time and Creation; while Durand did not write about missals, they are the most concise access to the thinking about time that informed the medieval liturgy and that one can find throughout the Rationale. Each chapter explores specific ways particular kinds of matter served as media of divine mysteries. This book seeks to bring to the liturgy not “objects” or “things” in the modern sense of them – however complex and rich that sense might be – but the active participation of diverse media. In so doing, this book also seeks to delineate a fundamentally different sense of “liturgy”: not as essentially words and sound but as enacted within Creation and in dynamic with all that human hands fashioned using matter God had created. Once we have these in place, we turn in Part II to Reformation and the many ways Evangelicals rejected those ways of thinking, reconceived worship, and with it the relationship among the Bible, Creation, human hands, and human minds. This second part charts how Evangelical repudiations of medieval understandings of the Mass altered the relationship between the made world and revelation for all Churches, Catholic as well as Evangelical. Only with an archaeology of late medieval understandings of the liturgy can we then see just how radical a rethinking of the liturgy the sixteenth century witnessed, such that one of the most sympathetic readers of Durand would typographically distinguish the text of Scripture from rebus ac ornamentis.
