In February 2010 I joined a party travelling in Burkina Faso. This was my first time in that country although I have travelled extensively in other parts of East and West Africa. In most other parts of Africa I have noted that the dominant religious discourses are clearly either Christian or Islamic. Most people assert that they follow one or other of these traditions, whatever other beliefs may exist alongside the more formal understanding of the monotheistic religion. In Burkina Faso, however, we were told, both by the guide and by those we met, that a significant proportion of the population were “animists” and we were introduced on more than one occasion to those who defined their own tradition as “animist”.

Having been brought up in the English anthropological tradition I found this very disconcerting. Animism was, for me, a word from the origins of the discipline, a word, and a concept, that had been thoroughly discredited and rejected in favour of “traditional African religions” or some such similar phrase. To describe people as “animist” was tantamount to describing them as “savages” and for people to lay claim to this term for themselves appeared degrading. In Burkina Faso, however, with its French traditions, the term “animist” was used widely, and it appeared with pride. Many of the French tourist guides for the area also use the term “animiste” as a description of the religion of the people without raising any specific concerns (e.g. De Gonneville et al. 2010: 70–71).

INTRODUCTION: DEMOTIC DISCOURSES

At the end of the previous chapter I referred in passing to the concept of ‘devotion’ in relation to lay participation in medieval liturgy. I suggested that ordinary worshippers might be engaged in their own form of devotional habitus while the official, dominant, cosmological discourses were being presented in the liturgy itself. Up to this point, however, I have hardly explored the distinction between liturgy and devotion at all. This is partly because for much of the first thousand years of Christian history official liturgical worship and lay devotion were largely indistinguishable; each fed off and into the other. To some extent this is also true of the medieval period. A hard and fast distinction is impossible to make and each one would not exist without the other. In this chapter, however, I do want to focus more closely on this particular distinction and I want to relate it to the understanding of discourse that I have developed throughout the book. More specifically, I want to explore the distinction between ‘dominant’ and ‘demotic’ discourses within later medieval Christianity and explore how this relates to understandings of worship at this time.

Gerd Baumann introduced the concepts of ‘demotic’ and ‘dominant’ discourse in his discussion of the role of religion and community in a contemporary West London suburb.

INTRODUCTION: DOMINANT DISCOURSES

As we have seen in the Introduction, discourse is a widely used word that does not have a clearly defined and commonly agreed meaning. In this chapter I want to use the concept of a ‘dominant discourse’ as a way of expressing the nature of Christian language and thinking within most of the principal Christian societies at the turn of the first millennium. For the first thousand years of their history Christians, or more specifically Christian authors and their literature, understood themselves primarily in opposition to more or less specified others. At its inception Christianity was, of course, a minority religion with a strong missionary zeal. Through the fourth to the seventh century, and within most of the late Roman Empire, Christianity was still battling with various forms of paganism for the hearts and minds of the people. During the following four hundred years the missionary activity of Christianity in Northern and Eastern Europe, the rise of Islam and the internal conflicts within Christianity itself maintained a sense of being one among many competing religious discourses. By the eleventh century, however, especially in Western Europe and, I would suggest, within parts of the Byzantine Empire, the sense of being on the defensive about Christianity had largely disappeared, and Christian discourse had a confidence and sense of ‘rightness’ that profoundly affected the way in which liturgy was performed and understood.

INTRODUCTION: HEGEMONY

In the previous chapter I suggested that the process of Christianisation was a slow and gradual movement developed through the individual actions of many different people, and that it represented a gradual change in the direction of discourses within the society as a whole. As we will see in Chapter 5, however, there are many conflicting worldviews vying for a place within the discourses of all complex societies. Over against this complete and widespread view of Christianisation there were clearly other forces at work that had an equally important impact on the development of Christian worship. While much of the process discussed in the previous chapter could be described as bottom-up (at least in principle) there were also top-down movements that involved the imposition of Christian ideas and practices as part of state policy. In the period between about 600 and 900 this involved attempts by ruling authorities to manipulate and control liturgy for political ends. It is these attempts, and their consequences for the development of Christian worship, that I wish to explore in this chapter.

It is difficult to define exactly how a particular state establishes and maintains its authority. There are many theories within the political sciences from Machiavelli to Gramsci and beyond. No one theory could ever be used in isolation to explain every single instance.

INTRODUCTION: CONTEXTUALISATION

In my Introduction I explored the way in which we have to understand worship as a form of discourse. I argued that a purely textual or theological approach to worship was not adequate. I said that in this book I would be exploring the practice of worship, trying to understand the way in which ordinary people approached their worship. This still remains my focus. However, when we go back to the very beginnings of Christian worship, it is only texts that we have to work with. What is more, these texts are partial and limited. They emerge from many different places and over considerable periods of time. It is difficult to see any coherent narrative within or between them. While in the Foucaultian sense all these texts act as ‘statements’ within an emerging Christian discourse, it is not easy to see that discourse in anything other than an entirely fragmentary form. We have to recognise this, therefore, as we begin to sift through and explore the evidence that we have.

One of the biggest obstacles facing scholars in understanding the nature of Christianity in the first few centuries after the death of Jesus is the temptation to read back presuppositions drawn from the subsequent two thousand years of Christian history. This has been particularly true in the area of worship.

HISTORIES OF WORSHIP

For almost as long as we have records of specifically Christian worship there has been a sense of the history of that worship. In his letter to the Corinthians, written twenty to thirty years after the death and resurrection of Jesus, Paul talks about what ‘I received from the Lord’ and ‘passed on to you’. This sense of tradition is also central to many of the earliest commentators. The compilers of what were to become known as the ‘church orders’ in the third and fourth centuries made a feature both of the supposed apostolic origin of these orders and of their collecting together of elements of the tradition. ‘Tradition’ dominated Christian thinking on the history of worship for much of the first fifteen hundred years, with the explicit assumption that all Christians continued the practices instituted by Jesus and his Apostles. Beginning in the seventeenth century, however, new ideas began to develop and the understanding of a ‘history’ of Christian worship began to take root.

With printing and the development of scholarship Benedictine monks such as J. Mabillon (1632–1707) and E. Martène (1654–1739) began to collect together, and print, the various manuscripts relating to their own specific ‘tradition’. It was in studying these manuscripts, noting their differences and developments, and in tracing these through time that the origins of ‘liturgical’ study can be seen. The study of the ‘liturgy’, that is of the texts of Christian worship, continued to develop over the centuries.

The origins of this book go back to my final year at University in Manchester when I sat through a course on the History of Liturgy delivered by Richard Buxton and Kenneth Stevenson. I remember sitting, even then, thinking that one day I would really love to deliver a course of this kind. My own course, however, would look nothing like that offered by Richard and Kenneth. This is not to say anything against the course itself; I learnt a great deal from it, and it inspired many different thoughts that have ultimately led to this book. I am very grateful for all that they taught me. It was simply that at the time I was taking a degree in Social Anthropology and the approach to liturgy taken by Richard and Kenneth was basically textual. I could see so many possible connections between the work that I was doing in anthropology and the material I was being presented with in the course on liturgy. I was just dying to bring the two together.

Twelve years later, having been appointed as a Lecturer in the Sociology and Anthropology of Religion at Birmingham University, I was invited by the then Head of Department, Frances Young, to offer a course on the History of Liturgy for the B.A. in Theology. This was my chance to bring together all the reading and reflection that I had done in the previous twelve years and to create the kind of course that I wanted to teach.

INTRODUCTION: CHRISTIANISATION

The so-called ‘conversion of Constantine’ in 311 did not mark a sudden shift of a whole society from paganism to Christianity. Many ordinary members of society, both Christian and pagan, would not have noticed any immediate difference. As part of a wider process, however, the relaxation of persecution by the state, and the official encouragement that Constantine gave to certain factions within the emerging church, did mark a significant step in a process that some scholars have come to call the ‘Christianisation’ of the late Roman Empire. This process clearly had its impact on worship as well as on many other areas of social life. At the most basic level, worship in the major centres of the Empire became much more formal, more elaborate and, perhaps most significantly, more public as the fourth century progressed. What is not so clear, however, is whether the increasingly public nature of worship was a consequence of, or one of the many causes of, the wider process of Christianisation. This is what I wish to look at in this chapter.

‘Christianisation’ is the term that some scholars have given to the process that is believed to have taken place across Europe, North Africa and much of the Middle East between the fourth and the seventh century. The use of the term ‘Christianisation’ recognises that while during this period the formal structures of the church grew and by the end of the period the vast majority of the population were at least nominally Christian, the ‘conversion’ of the Empire did not happen in one simple movement.

INTRODUCTION: GLOBALISATION

This chapter represents the last two hundred years of Christian history with the spread of Christianity to every corner of the world. This is not to say that Christianity had never been an international, or even global, religion before; it simply recognises a new phase in its global spread. Part of this new phase simply acknowledges the extent of the global spread, but more importantly, and picking up ideas from previous chapters, it recognises a new relationship with other religious traditions and discourses. This puts the last two hundred years into a different context from much of what has gone before.

In talking about the way in which Christianity became global, and the impact that this had on worship, we must explore the idea of globalisation. Peter Beyer identifies four features of recent theories of globalisation that are specifically relevant to the discussions in this chapter. The first is the importance of mass communication. What is new about the world we now live in is that events and ideas can be spread around the world practically instantaneously and that developments in one part of the world, especially of an academic nature, inevitably affect developments in all other places. We are part of a single conversation, if not a single discourse. This can be seen, in terms of Christian worship, with the revisions of the liturgy that affected all the principal churches in the second half of the twentieth century.

INTRODUCTION: ‘DE-CHRISTIANISATION’

It is possible to see this chapter, at one level, as simply a reversal of Chapter 2. In that chapter we looked at the way in which the gradual Christianisation of the late Roman Empire affected the development of worship, and how the increasingly public nature of that worship contributed to the process of Christianisation. In this chapter, we could argue that, beginning with the Reformation in Western Europe, we will be looking at the gradual process of de-Christianisation and the impact this has had on liturgy and worship. We could also argue, fairly convincingly, that this process of de-Christianisation was helped by the increasing privatisation of worship from the fourteenth century onwards. To look at the situation as simply and as starkly as this, however, would be a mistake.

The first question we have to ask is what, if anything, performed the role of the Christian discourses in the process of Christianisation: what was it that was driving Christianity out of its role as the dominant discourse in society? The obvious answer might well be ‘science’, or ‘modernism’ or even ‘rationalism’. These have all, in their different ways, become central parts of the dominant discourse of the Western world today. I would want to suggest, however, that neither science in itself, nor modernism, nor rationalism, are the discourses that have been driving Christianity out of its previous position of dominance.