Read during Lent, 2024. Published 2000. I read it immediately after reading Gabriel Bunge’s Earthen Vessels. Although having different foci and coming from slightly different places, there was a lot of commonality I felt between the two. They are both addressing the “evaporation” of the faith in the western world, and how we are missing essential things, be it liturgy in common or in our practice of personal prayer.

Preface

• The original German title is Der Geist der Liturgie. Eine Einführung.
  • Chosen to be reminiscent of Romano Guardini’s Vom Geist der Liturgie (1918)
• He gives an interesting analogy
  • Romano Guardini’s Spirit of the Liturgy started the Liturgical Movement in 1918, and at this time the liturgy is a fresco covered in whitewash, very well preserved but unseen by most
  • After Vatican II, the fresco has been uncovered, but since then it has been badly damaged and indeed threatened with destruction
    • “For a moment its colours and figures fascinated us. But since then the fresco has been endangered by climatic conditions as well as by various restorations and reconstructions. In fact, it is threatened by destruction, if the necessary steps are not taken to stop these damaging influences.”

Part One - The Essence of the Liturgy

Chapter 1 - Liturgy and Life: The Place of the Liturgy in Reality

• P. 13, 1920s early Liturgical Movement idea of liturgy as “play”
  • A game has its own rules and sets up a word of its own
  • Does not have a purpose, and is therefore healing, liberating
  • P. 14, children’s play seems in many ways an anticipation or practice for later life, but without any real responsibility or gravity
  • In the analogy, the liturgy is therefore an anticipation or rehearsal for the life of the world to come
  • Ordinary play contains a longing for a real “game”
  • The essence of the liturgy is somewhat different, according to the play-theory
    • A wholly different world in which order and freedom are at one
    • The order-freedom antinomy is resolved
    • Play cannot have no rules, neither can it have too many or too strictly enforced rules
    • Wisdom is said in the Bible to “play” before God
    • Proverbs viii, 30: “I was with him forming all things: and was delighted every day, playing before him at all times.”
    • This is a passage which I believe Margaret Barker frequently quotes
• P. 15, the Exodus from Egypt had two distinct goals
  • The first, familiar to us all, is reaching the Promised Land, the people achieving the freedom and security proper to them
  • The second we hear repeatedly at the meetings of Pharaoh with Moses and Aaron (Exodus vii, 16; viii, 1; ix, 1, 13; x, 3): “Let my people go to sacrifice to me in the desert.”
    • Moses cannot negotiate with Pharaoh on this point, he cannot make any political compromise regarding worship
    • The manner of worshipping God is not a matter of political feasibility, it contains it measure within itself; it is dependant on God and his revelation
    • Worship is the main goal of Exodus and can only be performed according to God’s rules, not the rules of the game of political compromise
    • “The goal of the departure is the still unknown mountain of God, the service of God.”
• P. 17, God makes a covenant with the people through Moses, a covenant realized through minutely regulated worship
  • The explanation of the Exodus given to Pharaoh is fulfilled, Israel learns how to worship God in the way he desires
  • Cult is part of this worship, but so is everyday life itself
  • Life according to God’s will is an indispensable part of true worship
  • St. Irenaeus, Adv. Haer. 4, 20, 7: “The glory of God is the living man, but the life of man is the vision of God.”
    • Here the “life of man” is the righteous life, the very life
  • In the covenant of Mt. Sinai, worship, law, and ethics are inseparably woven
• P. 19, Sinai is not a halfway house, on the road to the Israelites true goal, the land, rather it is the winning of the Israelites interior land
  • Sinai is still present once they get to the Promised Land
  • When Sinai is lost, the Land is lost too, and the people go into exile
  • Whenever the Israelites turn to false gods, the powers of this world, their freedom collapses
  • “It is possible for her to live in her own land and yet still be as she was in Egypt.”
  • Giving God sacrifice, service worship thus appears to be the sole purpose, the very essence, of the Exodus
• P. 20, cult or worship goes beyond the liturgy, and embraces all of human life, St. Irenaeus’ “life of man”
  • Law and ethics do not hold together when they are not anchored in and inspired by the liturgy, by worship
• P. 21, Exodus x, 26, Moses says to Pharaoh: “We know not what must be offered, till we come to the very place.”
  • This is a fundamental law of all liturgy
  • When God does not reveal himself, man can out of some religious sense build altars “to the unknown god” (Acts xvii, 23), groping towards him
  • “But real liturgy implies that God responds and reveals how we can worship him.”
  • Liturgy requires some kind of institution, it does not just come from our own creativity, which would either be a cry in the dark, or mere self-affirmation
  • “Liturgy implies a real relationship with Another, who reveals himself to us and gives our existence a new direction.”
• Aaron and the golden bull calf (Exodus xxxii) is a very subtle apostasy, since the Israelites are not turning towards some pagan god, but rather glorifying the God they have followed by means of a golden calf; it is apostasy in two ways:
  • Firstly, this violets the prohibition of images; the people cannot cope with a mysterious, invisible God, and they try to bring him down so they can see and understand
  • Secondly, the cult of the golden calf is self-generated cult
    • Moses is away and the people have no access to God, so they try to fetch God back
    • The worship of the golden calf is a festival of self-affirmation, a closed circle of eating, drinking, dancing, and merry-making
    • “The dance around the golden calf is an image of this self-seeking worship.”

Chapter 2 - Liturgy—Cosmos—History

• P. 25, “The Sabbath is a vision of freedom. On this day slave and master are equals. The ‘hallowing’ of the Sabbath means precisely this: a rest from all relationships of subordination and a temporary relief from all burden of work.”
• P, 26, “The goal of creation is the covenant, the love story of God and man. The freedom and equality of men, which the Sabbath is meant to bring about, is not a merely anthropological or sociological vision; it can only be understood theo-logically. Only when man is in covenant with God does he become free.”
• P. 27, In Exodus, during the conclusion of God’s giving of the ceremonial law to Moses, it says seven times, “Moses did as the Lord had commanded him.”
  • The text closely parallels the creation story
  • Suggests that the seven-day work on the tabernacle replicates the seven days of creation
  • The construction of the tabernacle ends with a kind of vision of the Sabbath (Exod. xl, 32f.): “The cloud covered the tabernacle of the testimony, and the glory of the Lord filled it. Neither could Moses go into the tabernacle of the covenant, the cloud covering all things and the majesty of the Lord shining, for the cloud had covered all.”
  • The verb בָּרָא has two and only two meaning in the Old Testament
    • Separation of elements by which the cosmos emerges from chaos
    • Election and separation of pure from impure, the process of salvation history, inauguration of God’s dealings with men
  • Creation looks towards the covenant, and the covenant completes creation
  • Worship is the soul of the covenant, therefore its purpose is to save not only mankind, but to draw all of creation back into communion with God
• P. 28, in all religions, sacrifice is at the heart of worship
  • But true sacrifice or surrender to God looks very different from the destruction of some goods
  • According to the Fathers, and keeping with Biblical thought, sacrifice is the union of man and creation with God
  • St. Augustine says that true sacrifice is the civitas Dei
    • I.e. Mankind, transformed by love, the divinization of creation, the surrender of all things to God
    • God all in all (cf. 1 Cor. xv, 28)
    • This true sacrifice and worship is the purpose of the world
• P. 29, Teilhard de Chardin and his spiritualization of the modern evolutionary worldview
  • the cosmos is a process of ascent, a series of unions, leading to the “Noosphere”, Christ is the energy that drives this
  • “The transubstantiated Host is the anticipation of the transformation and divinization of matter in the christological ‘fullness’. In his view, the Eucharist provides the movement of the cosmos with its direction; it anticipates its goal and at the same time urges it on.”
• However, in contrast to Teilhard, the older tradition found in most ancient religions, follows a different pattern
  • Not an upward-flying arrow, but a cross-shaped movement
  • Two essential directions: exitus and reditus
    • The going-out of the non-divine from God, and its return thereto
  • Can also be visualized as a circle, where something departs and eventually returns
    • Individual lives can be seen as micro-circles, within the macro-circle of the exitus and reditus of all history
    • The great circle and the smaller circles are interconnected and interdependent
  • P. 30, The exitus and reditus of Plotinus (and of others) was a little different from the Christian version
    • The exitus is not a going out but a fall from grace
    • The appearance of anything non-divine is a fall
    • To exist and not be God, to be finite, is already a sin
    • The fall is arrested in the outermost depths and the reditus journey begins
    • In the end there is liberation from finitude and God becomes “all in all”
    • Cult is knowing the one’s fallen state, and making the turn around back towards God
    • Gnostic, in that redemption or union with God is γνῶσις
  • P. 32, For the Christian, exitus is not the same as the Fall, rather it is first and foremost something positive
    • God has created us freely, we exist by his will and our existence is something good, in itself
    • We are able to give back to our Creator a response of freedom and love
    • The reditus is not the rescinding of creation, rather the creature comes home freely, answering God’s love
    • The reditus gives the creature its full and final perfection, and this is the Christian understanding of God being “all in all”
    • Cf. St. Augustine, Confessiones III, vi, “tu autem eras interior intimo meo et superior summo meo”
    • The Fall is the refusal of the creature to be dependant, to say no to the reditus
    • Love is seen as dependence and rejected
• P. 33, sacrifice in its essence is returning (reditus) to love, and therefore divinization, then worship takes on a new aspect of healing
  • Healing of wounded freedom, atonement, purification, deliverance from estrangement
• P. 34, Worship is directed at that Other who alone can extricate us from the knot that we cannot untie
  • In our straying, the Shepherd came to us himself and took us on his shoulders
  • The Word became flesh and dwelt among us
  • We had said no to the reditus, but it became possible when the God-Man carried us back home
• The sacrifice of the Cross of Christ is nothing to do with destruction (e.g. of sacrificial goods, cf. p. 27, 28), rather it is an act of new creation
  • Worship is now a participation in the “Pasch”, the Passing Over, of Christ from divine to human, from death to life
  • Christian worship fulfils Christ’s words on Palm Sunday in the Temple (John xii, 32): “And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all things to myself.”
  • This is the verse that is on the cover of my edition, accompanying the Tree of Life Crucifixion painting by Andrea di Bonaiuto

Chapter 3 - From Old Testament to New: The Fundamental Form of the Christian Liturgy—Its Determination by Biblical Faith

• P. 35, the essential intention of worship (in all religions) is peace with God throughout all the cosmos, the union of above and below
  • A struggle for atonement, reconciliation
  • To overcome guilt and reconcile himself and the world with God, what gift to God is even possible?
  • The only true gift one can give to God is oneself
  • Different religions have responded to this conundrum in different ways, human sacrifice being the most extreme example, but it always becomes clear that material sacrifices of this kind are not true gift, merely replacements, substitutes, Ersätze
  • All sacrificial systems, including that of ancient Israel, rest on the idea of representation, but sacrificial animals or harvest fruits are not true representation (Vertretung, somehow one thing is present in another), but replacement (Ersatz, something is missing and something else inferior is in its place)
  • The pagans sacrificed to subordinate powers, perhaps precisely because they knew that the one, true, and living God would not accept such worship
    • Their sacrifices were aimed at the principalities and powers that mankind must deal with on a day to day basis, which are to be feared, placated, propitiated
    • Israel not only denied the existence of these “gods”, but came to regard them more and more as demons
• P. 37, The New Testament is the mediation of two elements in the Old that at first appear to be in conflict, the sacrifices of the Law vs. true worship
  • The inner drama of the Old Testament is resolved, the conflicting elements find their unity in Jesus Christ, in his Cross and Resurrection
  • P. 39, the sacrificial system is accompanied throughout the Old Testament by “prophetic disquiet and questioning”
• Leviticus at first glance seems to set up an eternally valid form of sacrificial worship
  • Ch. 26 however shatters this illusion, by threatening destruction and exile if Israel disobeys the commandments
  • Leviticus should be read in the context of the whole Torah, particularly two events in Genesis and Exodus which address the problem of representation
    • Genesis xxii, Abraham obeys God’s direction to sacrifice his only son Isaac, which seems to go against the promise of a great posterity given him by the same God
      • At the last minute he is stopped and a male lamb is sacrificed instead, and so representative sacrifice is established by divine command
      • God gives the lamb, which Abraham offers back to him
      • Cf. the Roman Canon where sacrifice is offered de tuis donis ac datis
    • Exodus xii, the institution of the Passover liturgy, the lamb is the ransom through which Israel is delivered from the death of the firstborn
      • The firstborn are thereafter to be consecrated to God (Exodus xiii)
      • The Passover sacrifice places an obligation on the firstborn, on the whole people, on the whole of creation
      • This is why St. Luke is so emphatic that Jesus is the firstborn (Luke ii, 7)
      • Also why the Captivity Epistles (Colossians, Ephesians, Philemon, Philippians) present Christ as the firstborn of creation, in whom there is a sanctification of the firstborn that embraces all of creation
• P. 40, Acts vii, St. Stephen’s radical critique of the Temple
  • Though fiery, has Amos v as a precedent and quotes from this
  • Amos v, 21–27: “I hate, and have rejected your festivities: and I will not receive the odour of your assemblies. And if you offer me holocausts, and your gifts, I will not receive them: neither will I regard the vows of your fat beasts. Take away from me the tumult of thy songs: and I will not hear the canticles of thy harp. But judgment shall be revealed as water, and justice as a mighty torrent. Did you offer victims and sacrifices to me in the desert for forty years, O house of Israel? But you carried a tabernacle for your Moloch, and the image of your idols, the star of your god, which you made to yourselves. And I will cause you to go into captivity beyond Damascus, saith the Lord, the God of hosts is his name.”
  • P. 41, St. Stephen also quotes from the Messianic prophecy in Deuteronomy
    • Deuteronomy xviii, 15: “The Lord thy God will raise up to thee a PROPHET of thy nation and of thy brethren like unto me: him thou shalt hear.”
    • Acts vii, 37: “This is that Moses who said to the children of Israel: A prophet shall God raise up to you of your own brethren, as myself: him shall you hear.”
    • The essential work of Moses was the construction of the tabernacle and the ordering of worship, which is the heart of the law and the moral life
    • “The new Prophet, the definitive Prophet, will lead the people out of the age of the tabernacle and its impermanence, out of all the inadequacy of sacrificial animals. He will ‘destroy’ the Temple and indeed ‘change the customs’ that Moses had delivered.”
• P. 43, tearing of the veil of the Temple in all three of the Synoptic Gospels
  • Meaning is that worship through types and shadows, worship using replacements, has ended, at that moment when real worship takes place, the self-offering of the Son, the man, the Lamb, the Firstborn
  • Christ gathers up into himself all worship, and takes it out of types and shadows and into man’s union with the Living God
• P. 45, Nebuchadnezzar’s destruction of the Temple and the Babylonian Exile was an opportunity for Israel to reevaluate and understand sacrifices better
  • The “emptiness of Israel’s hands, the heaviness of her heart” was now her worship, a spiritual form of the old Temple worship
  • The Essenes or Qumran community in the later Second Temple period took up this mantle, criticizing the Temple priests and dedicating themselves to spiritual worship
  • Alexandrian Jews also came into contact with the Greek idea of λογικὴ λατρεία and λογικὴ θυσία, worship and sacrifice with spirit and mind, cf. Romans xii, 1: “ut exhibeatis corpora vestra hostiam viventem, sanctam, Deo placentem, rationabile obsequium vestrum”
  • A man’s sacrifice, his prayer or λόγος, goes up to God, he is conformed to the divine λόγος, and becomes λόγος himself
  • P. 46, The Church Fathers saw the Eucharist as this prayer, this oratio, a sacrifice in the Word
  • The Word alone is not enough however, cf. the contradiction in Psalm 50, where there is an expectation of a restoration of a purified Temple
  • The Hellenistic λόγος mysticism has its limits, since the body becomes irrelevant, it becomes merely a Gnostic hope for spiritual ascent (p. 30, 31)
  • Cf. Augustine saying that he couldn’t have got that “the Word became flesh” from Plato (Confessiones VII, ix: “sed quia verbum caro factum est et habitavit in nobis, non ibi legi”)
  • P. 47, sacrifice of the λόγος only becomes a reality in the λόγος incarnate
  • The Word becoming flesh reconciles the two themes that Psalm 50 could not, the Word is no longer a representation of something else, no longer is the cult a replacement cult
  • “In virtue of Jesus’ Cross and Resurrection, the Eucharist is the meeting point of all the lines that lead from the Old Covenant, indeed from the whole of man’s religious history. Here at last is right worship.”
• P. 48, to sum up:

1. Our worship is not a Christianized synagogue service, which service, though profound, knows itself to be incomplete
   • Contrast this with Islam where its liturgy of the word, plus pilgrimage, plus fasting, constitutes the whole of divine worship as decreed by the Koran
   • For Christians the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem was both final and necessary, and it has been replaced by a new Temple, the risen Christ
   • In modern theology, the model for Christian worship has been thought to be only the synagogue in opposition to the Temple, which represented the obsolete Law
   • This has been a disaster, rendering priesthood and sacrifice unintelligible
2. P. 49, Christian worship is therefore universal, there is one Church, one divine assembly, uniting all men
   • The horizontal and the vertical come together in Christian worship
3. P. 50, St. Paul’s λογικὴ λατρεία is the confluence of
   • The spiritual movement of the Old Testament (e.g. the rebukes of the Prophets, Essenes, etc.)
   • The process of inner purification within the history of religion
   • Human quest and divine response
4. In the Christian liturgy, the quest of human religion finds itself fulfilled, however it remains a liturgy of hope, as “it, too, bears within it the mark of impermanence. The new Temple, not made by human hands, does exist, but it is also still under construction.”
   • Christian liturgy is “a liturgy of pilgrimage toward transfiguration of the world, which will only take place when God is ‘all in all’.”

Part Two - Time and Space in the Liturgy

Chapter 1 - The Relationship of the Liturgy to Time and Space: Some Preliminary Questions

• P. 53, 54,the in-between, already-and-not-yet of the New Testament
  • if we doubt that there can be sacred times and places for a Christian, if we ask, “Is not all time holy? Are not all places sacred?” then we overlook the “not yet” of our world
  • As if we thought that the New Heaven and the New Earth had already come
  • The New Jerusalem is not yet here
  • The Church Fathers spoke of three steps from shadow → image → reality
    • Not just Old Testament → New Testament
    • In the New Testament “the shadow has been scattered by the image: ‘[T]he night is far gone, the day is at hand’ (Rom. xii, 12).”
    • We are in the Dawn Time, both dark and light
• The three levels of Christian worship:
  • Lower level: institution, the historical level
  • P. 54, 55, Middle level: liturgy, most familiar level, revealed in Christ’s words and actions at the Last Supper
    • Not alone, only has meaning in relation to some reality, something that really happens, something substantially present, otherwise “like bank notes without funds to cover them”
    • The Crucifixion is the external aspect of Christ’s self-giving; St. Maximus the Confessor: Jesus’ human will is inserted into the everlasting Yes of the Son to the Father
    • “Time is drawn into what reaches beyond time.”
    • St. Bernard of Clairvaux: Christ’s semel (once, ἐφάπαξ), bears within it the semper (eternal, αἰώνιος), see also the St. Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews
    • P. 60, this level that is immediate to us only makes sense because it contains the two other levels
  • P. 58, Higher level: eschaton, Christ’s self-giving becomes my self-giving, I become contemporary with the Pasch of Christ
    • Martyrdom as a eucharistic celebration
    • Romans xii, 1, our bodily existence on earth becomes a living sacrifice, united to Christ’s sacrifice
    • Hence the urgent petitions to God that characterize every Christian liturgy
    • The Sacrifice is complete when the world is united to God, has become the City of God
    • Hence the Roman Canon’s uniting ourselves to Abel, Melchizedek, Abraham, types of Christ, predecessors of Christ who became contemporary with Christ, which is what we beg of God for ourselves
    • P. 59, “The Lord has gone before us. He has already done what we have to do.”
  • P. 60, the Liturgy, by being this middle level, expresses the between-ness of our time of images
    • The theology of the liturgy is a theology of symbols, connecting us to what is present to us but also hidden to us
    • We need symbols, even in the time of the New Testament, because they help our blindness, we see heaven through them, we are enabled to know “the mystery of God in the pierced heart of the Crucified”.

Chapter 2 - Sacred Places—The Significance of the Church Building

• p . 63, St. Cyril of Jerusalem (18th Catechesis, 23–25) points out that the word convocatio, συναγωγή, ἐκκλησία, when it first makes its appearance in the Pentateuch, it is people called together to worship
• The Christian church building, or house church, first takes its form in continuity with the synagogue
  • This does not negate what was said above (p. 48), namely that the Christian liturgy incorporates both synagogue and Temple, since the synagogue was understood by the Jews in relation to the Temple
• P. 64, two focal points of the synagogue
  • The “seat of Moses” (cf. Matthew xxiii, 2), whence the Rabbi speaks not his own teaching but God’s Word in continuity with Moses
    • The unrolling and reading of Scripture developed out of the ritual prayers for Temple sacrifices
  • The “Ark of the Covenant” or shrine of the Torah, which represents the lost Ark, which was God’s throne
    • The Rabbi on his Seat of Moses looks towards the Ark along with all the people
    • It is protected by a curtain and before it stands the menorah, the seven-branched candlestick
    • When the Pompey the Great captured Jerusalem and entered the Temple in 63 AD he found the Holy of Holies empty; the empty Holy of Holies had become a place of hope and expectation that God would one day restore his throne

• P. 66, the two great prayers of the synagogue rite
  • The first has its climax in the the kiddush (“sanctification”, קִדּוּשׁ), of which the hymn of the seraphim in Isaias vi and the hymn of the cherubim in Ezechiel iii are a part
  • The other culminates in the avodah (“worship”, עֲבוֹדָה), the consecration prayer of the daily burnt offering in the Temple
• P. 68 Christian innovations upon the synagogue worship
  • Facing the East, rather than the Temple/Jerusalem, which is no longer the place of God’s earthly presence
    • Psalm xviii, “the song of the sun”, where the sun is Christ: “He hath set his tabernacle in the sun: and he, as a bridegroom coming out of his bride chamber, Hath rejoiced as a giant to run the way: His going out is from the end of heaven, And his circuit even to the end thereof: and there is no one that can hide himself from his heat.”
    • The rising sun is an eschatological symbol, praying towards the east is going to meet the coming Christ
    • The rising sun is the natural symbol of hope and of the future, the New Heaven and the New Earth
    • The cosmos prays with us too, awaiting it own redemption, cf. Romans viii
  • P. 70, an altar at the east wall where the Eucharistic Sacrifice takes place
    • The altar is the entry of the Orient into the community of believers, and the community’s going out from the world to God
    • On the altar, what was foreshadowed by the Temple, is now made present
    • The altar opens up the church, does not close it off, and leads it into the eternal liturgy
  • P. 71, the Torah is replaced by the Gospels, the shrine of the Word, becomes the throne of the Gospel
    • The seat of Moses became the βῆμα, the elevated secondary (compared to the Eucharistic altar in the apse at the east wall) place of the liturgy in the centre of church, where were located the throne of the Gospel, the bishop’s throne, and the lectern

Chapter 3 - The Altar and the Direction of Liturgical Prayer

• P. 74, the architectural canon for the liturgy is not a rigid one, but with every change the question must be asked, “What is in harmony with the essence of the liturgy, and what detracts from it?”
• P. 75, despite all variations, praying towards the east is a tradition that goes back to the beginning
  • Modern man has little understanding of the importance of this
  • Judaism and Islam take it for granted that there is a proper direction of worship, towards the central place of revelation
  • But God assumed a body and entered space and time, so it is fitting that our prayer and our liturgy should be incarnational, christological, facing through the incarnate Word towards the triune God
• P. 77, versus populum at St. Peter’s Basilica
  • Because of topography the basilica faces west
  • Thus the celebrating priest stands behind the people and faces east, versus populum
  • “For whatever reason it was done, one can also see this arrangement in a whole series of church buildings within St. Peter’s direct sphere of influence.”
• According to the 20th century thinking on the Mass, versus populum alone was compatible with the meaning of the liturgy, with active participation, and with the model of the Last Supper
  • P. 78, sed contra, “In no meal of the early Christian era, did the president of the banqueting assembly ever face the other participants. They were all sitting or reclining, on the convex side of a sigma-shaped table, or of a table having approximately the shape of a horse shoe. The other side was always left empty for the service.”
  • Our Lord established the new reality of Christian worship in the context of a Passover meal, but it was the new reality and not the meal that we were to repeat
  • The new worship was not simply derived from the meal, but had to be connected to the Temple, the synagogue, the Word and Sacrament, the cosmos, and history.
  • Louis Bouyer: “Never, and nowhere, before that [that is, before the sixteenth century] have we any indication that any importance, or even attention, was given to whether the priest celebrated with the people before him or behind him… Even when the orientation of the church enabled the celebrant to pray turned toward the people, when at the altar, we must not forget that it was not the priest alone who, then, turned East: it was the whole congregation, together with him.”
  • P. 80, with Vatican II came unprecedented clericalization, the priest became the focus of the whole liturgy, everyone has to be able to see and respond to him and be involved in what he is doing
  • People try to reduce this by assigning all kinds of different liturgical roles to various people, entrusting “creative” planning of the liturgy to different people so that they can contribute
  • The emphasis is less and less on God, and more and more on what human beings are doing, and how creatively they do it
  • Priest and people has become a closed circle, no longer open to what lies ahead and above
• P. 81, “Looking at the priest has no importance. What matters is looking together at the Lord. It is not now a question of dialogue but of common worship, of setting off toward the One who is to come.”
• P. 82, “As I see it, the problem with a large part of modern liturgiology is that it tends to recognize only antiquity as a source, and therefore normative, and to regard everything developed later, in the Middle Ages and through the Council of Trent, as decadent. And so one ends up with dubious reconstructions of the most ancient practice, fluctuating criteria, and never-ending suggestions for reform, which lead ultimately to the disintegration of the liturgy that has evolved in a living way.”
  • The aim is not to romantically recover antiquity, but to rediscover what is essential, “in which Christian liturgy expresses its permanent orientation”
• P. 83, Benedict XVI’s “solution”:
  • The cross is “sign of the Son of Man”, which announces his Second Coming
  • We face east to await his Second Coming
  • Where a direct common turning to the east is not possible, the cross can serve as an “interior ‘east’ of faith”
  • Placed in the middle of the altar it can be a focus for both priest and praying community

Chapter 4 - The Reservation of the Blessed Sacrament

• P. 85, the first millennium didn’t have tabernacles
  • The shrine of the Word and the altar were sacred “tents” though
  • Approached by steps, sheltered by a ciborium or baldacchino, burning lamps, curtains, etc.
• P. 86, the idea that the Eucharist is meant to transform us, make us “one body and one spirit” with Christ (1 Cor. vi, 17) was expressed up to the Middle Ages by the concepts of corpus mysticum and corpus verum
  • Corpus mysticum, not mystical, but pertaining to the mystery, the sacrament, therefore this meant the sacramental Body of Christ in the Sacrament
  • That Body is given to us so that we become the corpus verum, the real body of Christ
  • Henri de Lubac: over time these meanings were actually reversed, the Sacrament was addressed as “true Body” and the Church was called the “mystical Body” of Christ, mystical now meaning mysterious
  • P. 88, in fact both versions are good in some sense, we become his “true Body” only because that gift is given to us in his true sacramental Body
  • P. 89, the change in the Middle Ages was due to deepening theological reflection on the Eucharist, especially on the part of the Franciscans and Dominicans
  • “What happens in the Middle Ages is not a misunderstanding due to losing sight of what is central, but a new dimension of the reality of Christianity opening up through the experience of the saints, supported and illuminated by the reflection of the theologians.”
  • And so gradually the tabernacle began to take shape, taking the former place of the Ark of the Covenant
  • The tabernacle is the fulfillment of the Ark of the Covenant, the tent of God, his throne, where the shekinah (שְׁכִינָה) truly dwells
  • P. 90, true there were losses during the Middle Ages, but also a spiritual deepening at the same time
• P. 90, eating the Eucharist is worship, it means letting it come into you, so that you are transformed
  • Thus adoration is not opposed to or merely in addition to Communion; Communion reaches its true depths when supported and surrounded by adoration
• “What man of faith has not experienced this? A church without the Eucharistic Presence is somehow dead, even when it invites people to pray. But a church in which the eternal light is burning before the tabernacle is always alive, is always something more than a building made of stones.”

Chapter 5 - Sacred Time

• P. 92, all time is God’s time, however the time of the Church is a between time, between shadow and reality
  • And so it needs a sign, a time specially chosen to draw time into the hands of God
• p. 93, all the different cycles of the cosmos that mark time: the sun, the moon, the stars, plants (tree rings), animals, man, a lifetime, a heartbeat
• P. 94, facing east toward the rising sun points to our Lord’s Paschal Mystery, his death and new rising, it points to the future consummation of the world
• In the OT there was a double division of time:
  • The week, moving towards the Sabbath (tying creation and covenant together)
  • The other festivals, which celebrate creation (seed-time, harvest, festivals of nomadic tradition) or God’s actions in history
  • Christianity orders time in continuity with this OT heritage
• P. 95, Christ’s Supper, Cross, and Resurrection belong together as we have seen and they raise the Old Covenant up to a new level, forming a New Covenant
  • The Resurrection brings about this New Covenant, and so henceforth the Day of Resurrection is the new “Sabbath”
  • The morning of the “third day” becomes the hour of Christian Worship
  • Through the unity of Supper, Cross, and Resurrection, the Supper has become the morning sacrifice, which fulfills the task given to the Apostles at the Last Supper
  • P. 96, Sunday is the “third day” from the perspective of the Cross, a day of theophany
  • It is the “first day” in terms of the week
  • The Fathers also called it the “eighth day”
    • It took on the same symbolism as the direction of prayer, the sun’s rising proclaiming Christ and the new creation which took up the old creation
    • Sunday was the day of God’s command to Adam, “fill the earth and subdue it” (Gen. i, 28), Adam must look after the earth as a garden for God so that its meaning is fulfilled and God is all in all
    • Sunday the Eighth Day looks not only backward but forward to the Resurrection and consummation of the world
    • Baptism is birth into the eighth day, entering into a new time opened by Christ’s Resurrection, and this is responsible for the 8-sided font and baptistery tradition
  • P. 98, Christ’s “hour”, a concept emphasized in St. John’s Gospel
    • It is the Passover, the great festival
    • Originally a feast for nomads
    • The sacrificial lamb, throughout the Bible, is a type of the Redeemer, of his self-giving
    • Monotheism did not develop in great cities, but in the wilderness, “where heaven and earth face each other in stark solitude”, “in the homelessness of the wanderer, who does not deify places but has to put his trust in the God who wanders with him.”
    • p. 101, Jesus consciously connected his “hour” with the Passover
    • The oppression of Israel in Egypt was a kind of death, thus the Passover prefigures Baptism (crossing the Red Sea) and the Resurrection (entering the Promised Land)
    • In Baptism a man emerges from his own existence into communion with Christ
    • Passover’s meaning is fulfilled in Easter; Easter does not simply remember the Passover, but the “once and for all” of the Passover becomes the “forever” of Easter
  • p. 99, 5th century controversy about the latest possible date for Easter
    • Alexandria: 25 April
    • Rome and St. Leo the Great (440–461): earlier, since Easter should fall in the first month, i.e. the sign of Aries
      • the constellations seem to prefigure the precedence of the Lamb of God, as well as the ram caught in the thicket who took Isaac’s place in the sacrifice
      • The fork in the tree in which the ram hung replicated the sign of Aries, ♈︎, which in turn foreshadowed the crucified Christ
      • Jewish tradition gave the date of 25 March to Abraham’s sacrifice, and this date was also reckoned to be the date of creation, “Let there be light”
      • Very early on it was considered the date of Christ’s Crucifixion and later also his conception
    • P. 101, eventually the dating of Easter was fixed at Nicaea, incorporated into the solar calendar but with still a link to the lunar calendar, and the symbolism of both of these heavenly bodies colours the feast
      • “When the Sunday after the first full moon of spring comes to be the date of Easter, the symbolism of sun and moon are linked together. Transitoriness is taken up into what never passes away. Death becomes resurrection and passes into eternal life.”

• P. 104, St. John’s Gospel and the Epistle to the Hebrews interpret our Lord’s Passion in terms of the Passover on which date it occurred, but they also connect it to the Day of Atonement (in the autumn)

  • The “hour” of our Lord connects spring and autumn together, the autumn of decline becomes a new spring
  • Interesting to think that in the Southern Hemisphere, Easter occurs in autumn
  • In the Old Rite calendar there were a set of Sundays after Epiphany and their readings that could be transferred to the autumn, to the end of the liturgical year, when Easter falls earlier
  • These texts tend to involve the sowing of seed (which activity always points towards the future), i.e. the seed of the Gospel
  • and both autumn and spring can be seed-time, either sowing seed for autumn or for the coming year; both seasons are involved in the mystery of hope
  • This could be a great work of inculturation for the Southern Hemisphere, which could also re-enrich the Northern’s understanding of the festival

• P. 106, the feasts of Christmas (25 Dec.) in the west and Epiphany (6 Jan.) in the east emerged around the same time

  • They both celebrate the birth of Christ as the new dawn of the true sun
  • The feast of 25 March (creation of the world, Crucifixion, conception of Christ) seems to be earliest and it is from this that the 25 Dec. feast took its date
  • P. 108, Old theories about 25 Dec. being something about Mithras or the sol invictus can no longer be sustained

• P. 109, (see also p. 68, and p. 103) for the Fathers of the early Church, Psalm 18 was the real Christmas psalm, where the sun, i.e. Christ, comes forth from his chamber

• Between 25 March (a.d. VIII Kalendas Apriles) and 25 Dec. (a.d. VIII Kalendas Januarias) comes the feast of St. John the Baptist, 24 June (a.d. VIII Kalendas Julias), at the time of the summer solstice when the days begin to decrease, hence John must decrease with the seasons that Christ may increase

• P. 110, the Feast of the Epiphany

  • Links together the adoration of the Magi (the beginning of the Church of the Gentiles), the Baptism of Christ in the Jordan (Jesus is proclaimed as the Son of God), the Wedding at Cana (Jesus reveals his glory)
  • The Magi were important since they showed how the cosmos itself leads man to God: “The mysterious star could become the symbol for these connections and once again emphasize that the language of the cosmos and the language of the human heart trace their descent from the Word of the Father, who in Bethlehem came forth from the silence of God and assembled the fragments of our human knowledge into a complete whole.”

• Saints’ days:

  • The moon has no light of its own, but has a brightness that comes from the sun
  • The meaning is that we men need a little light, that will point us to the greater light of the Creator; this is why the feasts of the saints have from the earliest times formed part of the Christian year
  • The saints are the new Christian constellations

  Part Three - Art and Liturgy

Chapter 1 - The Question of Images

• Many quotes from P. Evdokimov, L’art de l’icône: Théologie de la Beauté, 1970
• P. 115, the Mercy Seat, an exception to the First Commandment
• p. 116, St. Paul saw Christ as the true and living Mercy Seat (כַּפֹּרֶת, ἱλαστήριον, propitiatorium, Romans iii, 25, Hebrews ix, 5), the old Mercy Seat lost during the Exile being but a foreshadowing
  • In the Resurrection Icon, the cross-shaped slabs both symbolize the grave and the Mercy Seat of the Old Covenant
  • God is no longer concealed or veiled but shows himself in his glory in the form of the Son
  • The Ark of the Covenant is the image of the Resurrection, this is the heart of the transition from the Old to New Testaments
• Judaism in the time of Jesus was more generous in its interpretation of the prohibition of graven images
  • P. 117, ancient synagogues were often richly decorated with scenes from the Bible
  • These were not just a pictorial history, but a narrative, a haggadah (הַגָּדָה, the Seder text telling of the Exodus from Egypt), which makes what is being told of present
• The Christian images of the catacombs develop typologically the canon of images inherited from the synagogue
  • The images not only tell a story, but incorporate that history into the Sacrament
• P. 118, “All sacred images are, without exception, in a certain sense images of the Resurrection, history read in the light of the Resurrection.”
• The early catacomb images do not give portraits of Christ, rather Christ is shown allegorically, e.g.
  • the true philosopher instructing us in the art of living and dying
  • above all, the Good Shepherd, the guardian of creation, taking us lost sheep home on his shoulders
• P. 119, the first emergence of an ἀχειροποίητος, an image of Christ’s face not made by human hands, was an important development for images
  • “The first of these was the so-called camulianium, the imprint of the image of Christ on a woman’s gown. The second was the mandylion, as it was called later, which was brought from Edessa in Syria to Constantinople and is thought by many scholars today to be identical with the Shroud of Turin.”
  • “Now at last could the true face of the Lord, hitherto hidden, be seen.”
  • Since seeing Christ is seeing the Father (John xiv, 9) this icon began to be seen as a Sacrament, a communion no less than the Holy Eucharist, a real presence of Christ
  • Thus the ἀχειροποίητος was an image in the full sense, “a participation in the reality concerned, the refulgence and thus the presence of the One who gives himself in the image.”
• P. 120, there was a danger in overly sacramentalizing the image though, i.e. adoration of the image itself, and a false claim that they lead one beyond the Sacraments to see God directly
  • This as well as other political factors lead to the violent reaction of iconoclasm
  • In the course of this crisis theology matured and still speaks to us today in the midst of our own crisis
  • “The icon of Christ is the icon of the risen Lord. That truth, with all its implications, now dawned on the Christian mind. There is no portrait of the risen Lord. At first the disciples do not recognize him.”
  • P. 121, The disciples on the road to Emmaus, when they recognize the risen Christ in the breaking of the bread, they are experiencing in reverse fashion what happened to Adam and Eve whose eyes were also opened when they ate the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil
  • The icon comes from the opening up of the inner senses, a sight that is deeper than empirical observation, perception of Christ “in the light of Tabor”
• P. Evdokimov, L’art de l’icône, p. 188: The icon requires a “fast from the eyes”
  • Icon painters must prepare themselves by prayer and asceticism, this is what makes art into sacred art
  • The icon comes from and leads to prayer
• P. 122, “Thus in the icon we find the same spiritual orientations that we discovered previously when emphasizing the eastward direction of the liturgy. The icon is intended to draw us onto an inner path, the eastward path, toward the Christ who is to return.”
  • We are taught to see Christ not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit, cf. 2 Cor. v, 16
  • “Only when we have understood this interior orientation of the icon can we rightly understand why the Second Council of Nicaea and all the following councils concerned with icons regard it as a confession of faith in the Incarnation and iconoclasm as a denial of the Incarnation, as the summation of all heresies.”
• P. 123, this new seeing does not abolish the senses, but fulfills their original purpose
  • Iconoclasm relies on a purely apophatic theology, i.e. God is wholly other, beyond all images and words
  • Even revelation is inadequate for the iconoclast
  • P. 124, “What seems like the highest humility toward God turns into pride, allowing God no word and permitting him no real entry into history.”
• From the early Christian period up to the Romanesque, up to the threshold of the 13th century, there is no essential difference between East and West regarding images
  • The West did emphasize the pedagogical function of the image, cf. St. Augustine and St. Gregory the Great, but otherwise no essential difference
  • P. 125, In the Romanesque period, plastic art emerges, which was never used in the East, but still “it is always the risen Christ, even on the Cross, to whom the community looks as the true Oriens.”
  • P. 126, In the Gothic period there is a slow change: “The depiction is no longer of the Pantocrator, the Lord of all, leading us into the eighth day. It has been superseded by the image of the crucified Lord in the agony of his passion and death.”
  • Evdokimov thinks that the turn from Plato to Aristotle in the 13th century played a part in this change
    • Aristotle rejects the Ideas/Forms, and says that the material thing exists in its own right; through abstraction we can discern species that things fall into
    • Abstraction replaces seeing the divine Idea in the creature
    • For Plato the beautiful and the good are God: “Through the appearance of the beautiful we are wounded in our innermost being, and that wound grips us and takes us beyond ourselves; it stirs longing into flight and moves us toward the truly Beautiful, to the Good in itself. Something of this Platonic foundation lives on in the theology of icons.”
    • This line of thought disappears from the West after the 13th century, and painting now only strives to depict the events of history
    • Salvation history is less of a sacrament, and more of a narrative
    • The Liturgy is seen as more of a reproduction of the sacrifice of Calvary
  • P. 127, however we should not exaggerate the differences that developed between East and West
    • The emphasis on the Crucifixion is new, but still depicts our Saviour, “by whose stripes we are healed”
    • The highly naturalistic Issenheim Altarpiece (c. 1512–1516, by Matthias Grünewald, c. 1470–1528) was an image of consolation to those cared for by the Antonians; God descended to share in their fate of suffering
    • These images too come from prayer and interior meditation on the mysteries of our Lord
    • “Let us not forget the glorious art of Gothic stained glass! The windows of the Gothic cathedrals keep out the garishness of the light outside while concentrating that light and using it so that the whole history of God in relation to man, from creation to the Second Coming, shines through. The walls of the church, in interplay with the sun, become an image in their own right, the iconostasis of the West, lending the place a sense of the sacred that can touch the hearts even of agnostics.”
  • P. 129, the Renaissance as a low point in Christian art:
    • Development of the “aesthetic” in the modern sense, where art no longer reaches beyond itself, but is content with its own beauty
    • They reached back into Antiquity, but forgot its tragedy, only nostalgically sought its beauty and its gods, its world without fear of sin and the pain of the Cross
    • Religious art of this period “does not enter into the humility of the sacraments and their time-transcending dynamism.”
    • The iconoclasm of the Reformation is best seen against this background, though its roots were deeper
  • P. 130, the Baroque era, Council of Trent and counter-Reformation
    • “The altarpiece is like a window through which the world of God comes out to us. The curtain of temporality is raised, and we are allowed a glimpse into the inner life of the world of God. This art is intended to insert us into the liturgy of heaven. Again and again, we experience a Baroque church as a unique kind of fortissimo of joy, an Alleluia in visual form.”
  • The current iconoclasm probably starts in the 1920s, but has been seen as virtually mandated by Vatican II
    • Eliminated a lot of kitsch, but through the baby out with the bath water
    • “It left behind a void, the wretchedness of which we are now experiencing in a truly acute way.”
• P. 131, talking about scientific positivism, limiting knowledge to what can be verified
  • It contains mathematics, but the logos that presupposes those mathematics is gone
  • Our “world of images” no longer goes anywhere beyond sense and appearance
  • “The flood of images that surrounds us really means the end of the image. If something cannot be photographed, it cannot be seen.”
  • Not sure I totally followed this discussion, but when he talks about a “flood of images” I think of AI-generated images today, and wonder what that means
  • Art becomes mere experimentation with self-created worlds, no longer looks to the Creator Spiritus, it attempts to take the place of the Spirit, but manages to produce only vain things, the absurdity of man as creator is shown
    • See Tolkien’s Milton Waldman letter on the difference between the magic and sub-creation of the elves versus the machines and sorcery of Mordor
• The fundamental principles of art ordered to divine worship:
  1. The complete absence of images is incompatible with faith in the Incarnation; “Images of beauty, in which the mystery of the invisible God becomes visible are an essential part of Christian worship.”
  2. The subjects of sacred are are in salvation history, from Creation to the Eighth Day (the Resurrection and the Second Coming)
  3. Images do not merely illustrate past events, but show the inner unity of God’s action towards man, and they point to the Sacraments esp. Baptism and the Eucharist; “The centre of the icon of Christ is the Paschal Mystery: Christ is presented as the Crucified, the risen Lord, the One who will come again and who here and now hiddenly reigns over all.”
  4. Sacred images are not photographs, they must be the fruit of contemplation, of an encounter with the reality of the the risen Christ, an encounter in prayer with the Lord; the image must serve the liturgy
  5. The Church of the West does not need to disown the path she has followed since 13th century, however she must receive the Seventh Ecumenical Council (Nicaea II, which affirmed the theology of the image); there must be a place in the Church for fresh intuitions and pieties, but there is a difference between sacred art (related to the liturgy) and religious art in general; “There cannot be completely free expression in sacred art.”
• P. 135, Art “is always a gift. Inspiration is not something one can choose for oneself. It has to be received, otherwise it is not there.”
  • We must regain a “faith that sees”

Chapter 2 - Music and Liturgy

• P. 137, Liturgical singing is established in historical tension, e.g. Israel’s crossing of the Red Sea is their main reason for praising God, for Christians the Resurrection of Christ is the true Exodus, cf. Exodus xv, Apo. xv
  • P. 138, The Israelites realized that their song was provisional, they looked forward to a definitive new song
  • In our in-between time, this definitive new song has been intoned, but still the sufferings of history must be endured
• P. 139, the Psalms display the whole range of human experience turned into prayer and song before God
  • “Lamentation, complaint, indeed accusation, fear, hope, trust, gratitude, joy—the whole of human life is reflected here, as it is unfolded in dialogue with God.”
  • Desperate complaints tend to end in words of trust, anticipating God’s salvation
  • The Psalms could be said to be variations on the song of Moses
  • P. 140, for Christians, Christ is the true David; King David prayed in the Holy Spirit, through the One who would be both his Son and the Son of God
  • The Holy Spirit moved David to sing and become the mouth of Christ; the Psalms speak through Christ, in the Holy Spirit, to the Father
  • Singing surpasses ordinary speech, it is a “pneumatic” event; Church music is a “charism” a gift of the Spirit, true glossolalia, the new tongue of the Holy Spirit
  • “But this intoxication remains sober, because Christ and the Holy Spirit belong together, because this drunken speech stays totally within the discipline of the Logos, in a new rationality that, beyond all words, serves the primordial Word, the ground of all reason.”
• P. 141, love and song came together in the Old Testament rather curiously, through the acceptance of the Song of Songs, a collection of human love songs, but interpreted in a far deeper way
  • In the prophets, worship of foreign gods was always “harlotry”, and this was not an idle metaphor, since this was a world of fertility cults and temple prostitutes
  • Conversely, God’s choice of Israel appears as a love story, the covenant is a betrothal and marriage, our Lord is the Bridegroom
  • Mark ii, 19–20, “Can the children of the marriage fast, as long as the bridegroom is with them? As long as they have the bridegroom with them, they cannot fast. But the days will come when the bridegroom shall be taken away from them; and then they shall fast in those days.”
    • P. 142, Both a prophecy of the Passion and an announcement of the marriage that will be the central theme of the Apocalypse
    • “Everything moves through the Passion toward the wedding of the Lamb.”
  • The communion of the Eucharist corresponds to the union of man and woman in marriage
  • St. Augustine’s cantare amantis est
    • “In so saying we come again to the trinitarian interpretation of Church music. The Holy Spirit is love, and it is he who produces the singing. He is the Spirit of Christ, the Spirit who draws us into love for Christ and so leads to the Father.”
• P. 143, the singing of the Psalms were presumably involved a kind of chanting, with a tenor note, and changes of melody at the beginning and end
  • The LXX translated the Hebrew zamir (זָמִיר) by ψάλλειν, to pluck (esp. a stringed instrument), but now taking on the meaning of a special kind of instrumental playing used in Jewish worship, later describing also the singing of Christians
  • “Several times there is an additional expression, the meaning of which is obscure, but in any case it refers in some way to ordered artistic singing.”
    • What expression? He doesn’t say.
• P. 144, music and inculturation
  • One of the ways that the Christian faith developed was through the writing of new “canticles”
  • The Church moved more and more into the Hellenic world, there was a spontaneous fusion with Greek logos mysticism, and with Greek poetry and music
  • There was hope but also danger here in that it threatened “to dissolve Christianity into a generalized mysticism”; hymns and music were often the point of entry for Gnosticism
  • The Council of Laodicea forbade the use of privately composed psalms and non-canonical writings in the liturgy, and restricted the singing of psalms to designated choirs of psalm-singers
  • The post-Biblical hymn tradition was almost entirely lost
  • Seems very radical, but returning to the Bible and rejecting false inculturation did preserved Christianity through those times
• P. 146, The Council of Trent also intervened in a time when secular music was invading the liturgy
  • Declared that liturgical music should always be at the service of the Word, reduced the use of instruments, affirmed the difference between sacred and secular music
• “The age of the Baroque, albeit in different forms in the Catholic and Protestant worlds, achieved an astounding unity of secular music-making with the music of the liturgy. It succeeded in dedicating the whole luminous power of music, which reached such a high point in this period of cultural history, to the glorifying of God. Whether it is Bach or Mozart that we hear in church, we have a sense in either case of what gloria Dei, the glory of God, means. The mystery of infinite beauty is there and enables us to experience the presence of God more truly and vividly than in many sermons.”
  • Dangers too though with it and the musical styles that followed, of the virtuoso mentality, vanity of technique, individualism
  • 19th century was a time of subjectivity, the sacred was obscured by the operatic
  • Same dangers that forced the Council of Trent to intervene
  • St. Pius X reacted by restricted operatic elements from the liturgy and declared Gregorian chant and the polyphony of the Catholic Counter-Reformation (as represented by Palestrina) to be the standard
• P. 147, thus the three great historical crises that shaped sacred music were the Gnostic crisis, the crisis at the end of the Middle Ages, and the crisis at the beginning of the 20th century that was a prelude to our present crisis
• 3 modern problems:
  1. What should inculturation look like for sacred music? Christianity must be preserved intact, but its universality must be expressed in local forms.
  2. So-called “classical” music has become an elitist ghetto.
  3. “Pop music, which is certainly no longer supported by the people in the ancient sense (populus).”
  • Rock music expresses basic passions, and has a cultic character, opposed to Christian worship
  • “In the ecstasy of having all their defences torn down, the participants sink, as it were, beneath the elemental force of the universe.”
  • Contrast the Holy Spirit’s sober inebriation
• P. 149, The music of Christian worship is related to logos in three senses:
  1. The music is related to the words, singing has priority over the instrumental, without excluding it of course, and Biblical and liturgical texts are the normative words used
  2. According to St. Paul (Romans viii, 26) we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us, thus prayer is a gift of the Holy Spirit, and so is singing and playing before God.
  • The Holy Spirit’s sober inebriation: “There is always an ultimate sobriety, a deeper rationality, resisting any decline into irrationality and immoderation.”
  • In Greek mythology and in Plato, the lyre music of Apollo (god of light and reason) is contrasted with the aulos of Marsyas (Dionysian, intoxicating, frenzied, subordinates the spirit to the senses)
  • Thus not every kind of music has its place in Christian worship and the standard of worship is the Logos
  • Does music draw us to what is above, or does it cause disintegration, intoxication, and mere sensuality?
  3. We sing “Holy, Holy, Holy” together with the cherubim and seraphim; we sing and pray in union with “the great liturgy that spans the whole of creation”
• P. 152, Music’s beauty depends on conformity to rhythmic and harmonic laws of the universe, and the more it is in conformity with those laws, the more beautiful
  • P. 153, This idea was first taken up and later deepened by St. Augustine
  • The mathematical movements of the heavenly bodies implied intelligence
  • For the Pythagoreans these were deities, for the Christians, angelic choirs that surround God and illuminate the universe
  • The music of the cosmos is the music of the angels, cf. Isaias vi (vision of the Lord enthroned in the temple, the seraphim sing the Holy, Holy, Holy, the live coal is placed on Isaias’ lips, etc.)
  • The Logos himself is the great artist and origin of all art and beauty
  • All true human art is assimilation to the artist, Christ
• P. 154, Schopenhauer’s change of direction
  • The world is no longer grounded in reason but in “will and idea” (Wille und Vorstellung), the will precedes reason
  • Music is the pure expression of the will that creates the world
  • Music should not be subject to the word, and rarely have any connection with the word
  • “In our own times this continues in the attempt to replace ‘orthodoxy’ by ‘orthopraxy’—there is no common faith any more (because truth is unattainable), only common praxis.”

Part Four - Liturgical Form

Chapter 1 - Rite

• P. 159, the 2nd century Pomponius Festus, a non-Christian, defined ritus as “approved practice in the administration of sacrifice” (mos comprobatus in administrandis sacrificiis)
• Etymology of orthodoxy:
  • Originally did not mean “right doctrine”
  • Δόξα means either opinion, or (true, divine) splendour
  • Therefore “orthodoxy” is the “right way to glorify God”, the right form of adoration, orthodoxy = orthopraxy
• P. 160, a “rite” is the practical arrangements received from God for his worship
  • And worship always includes one’s conduct in life
  • The rite is expressed not only in liturgy but in theology, the spiritual life, and the ecclesiastical life
• P. 163, three great ritual groups of the West:
  • Roman, and the related Latin liturgy of Africa
    • Characterized by conservatism, brevity, and sobriety
  • Old Gaulish or Gallican liturgy, and the related Celtic liturgy
    • More open to Eastern influence, characterized by poetic exuberance
    • From the end of the first millennium the Roman liturgy appropriated aspects of the Gallican, and the Gallican itself began to disappear
    • Gallican survivals in the Roman Rite were finally done away with in the Vatican II reforms! Wonder what these were specifically.
  • And the Spanish or Mozarabic liturgy
• P. 163, the Vatican II reforms were an unprecedented standardization, though the local rites of various places had already been disappearing prior to that
  • And of course, what began as a drive to make everything uniform somehow resulted in the opposite, where rite was replaced by the “creativity” of the community
• P. 164, rites have a relationship to the places in which they originated
  • “The Christian faith can never be separated from the soil of sacred events, from the choice made by God, who wanted to speak to us, to become man, to die and rise again, in a particular place at a particular time.”
• P. 165, The great rites of the Church each have embraced many different cultures (e.g. for the Roman rite, the Latins, the Germans, and to some extent the Slavs)
  • There is communion over time through the rite, but also across different cultures and languages, and no one community or regional Church controls the rite
  • The rite is greater than any person or group, there is something that comes to me in the rite that I did not create myself
  • After Vatican II people had the impression that the pope could do anything he wanted in liturgical matters, esp. backed by an ecumenical council
  • P. 166, The givenness of the liturgy disappeared
  • Vatican I in no way made the pope into an absolute monarch, rather he was defined as the guarantor of obedience to the revealed Word
  • The authority of the pope is not unlimited, but is at the service of Sacred Tradition
  • “The greatness of the liturgy depends—we shall have to repeat this frequently—on its unspontaneity (Unbeliebigkeit).”
• P. 167, the tragedy of Luther
  • The essential form of the liturgy was not understood in his day
  • The Reformation would have been different if Luther had seen how the liturgical tradition was an analogous binding force to scripture
• P. 168, the “creativity” promoted after Vatican II had its origin in Marxist thinking, where the universe is meaningless, and man must creatively come up with a better world
  • The life of the liturgy does not come from individual minds and planning committees, rather it is from God’s descent into our world
  • P. 169, the liturgy becomes personal, true, new, not through novelties, but “through a courageous entry into the great reality that through the rite is always ahead of us and can never quite be overtaken”.
  • Not a matter of rigidity
    • Muslims see the Qur’an as God’s very speech
    • “Christians know that God has spoken through man and that the human and historical factor is, therefore, part of the way God acts.”
• There can be no creation of new rites
  • But well into modern times the West had many variations within its ritual families
  • “An example of this kind of development seems to me to be the Missal that may be used in Zaire (the Congo). It is the Roman rite ‘in the Zairean mode’.”

Chapter 2 - The Body and the Liturgy

1. “Active Participation”

• P. 171, active participation, participatio actuosa
  • This idea of Vatican II was quickly taken to mean something external, the visible activity of as many people as possible as often as possible
• To understand the real meaning we should examine what is this central actio which everyone is meant to have a part of
  • The sources of our liturgy use actio to mean the Eucharistic Prayer, the Canon, the oratio, the great prayer that is the core of the Mass
  • P. 172, Calling the Eucharist oratio (solemn public speech, not prayer, prex) was a standard response in the early Church to the questions of pagans and intellectuals: e.g. animal sacrifice being abolished, Christianity is a spiritual religion, our worship is Word-based
  • But it is more than just speech, but rather actio in the highest sense
  • The old human actiones where priests operated makes way for the actio divina
  • The priest now speaks with the “I” of the Lord, “This is my Body. This is my Blood”.
  • “The action of God, which takes place through human speech, is the real “action” for which all of creation is in expectation.” Cf. Romans viii
  • In the divine action, God through the Incarnation, Cross, Resurrection, and Second Coming of his Son, draws man into cooperation with him, and this is expressed by the petition for acceptance in the oratio
  • True, the Sacrifice is already accepted once and for all, but still we must pray for it to become our sacrifice, so that we “may be transformed into the Logos (logisiert)”
  • P. 174, In this real action, there is no difference between priest and laity
  • There is only one action, Christ’s, which we make ours as well, since we have become “one body and one spirit” with him
  • In the central oratio of the Mass, regardless of how external actions are distributed through the rest of the Liturgy, any doing on our part becomes secondary
  • “It must be plainly evident that the oratio is the heart of the matter, but that it is important precisely because it provides a space for the actio of God. Anyone who grasps this will easily see that it is not now a matter of looking at or toward the priest, but of looking together toward the Lord and going out to meet him. The almost theatrical entrance of different players into the liturgy, which is so common today, especially during the Preparation of the Gifts, quite simply misses the point.”
  • If our idea of the liturgy is general activity then we have missed the real “theo-drama” that takes place and are engaging in mere parody
• P. 175, If the oratio, the Word-based Sacrifice is the central part of the Mass, have we not spiritualized it and neglected the body?
  • It is the new, true, resurrected corporeality of the Lord that we receive in the material signs of bread and wine
  • The liturgy reaches beyond itself into our everyday life, which must itself become liturgical, and transform the world
  • P. 176, Carrying things around and general activity are of secondary importance to our bodies compared to what is demanded of us by the Mass, namely to become capable of resurrection, to orient our body towards this goal
  • “Incarnation must always lead through Cross (the transforming of our wills in a communion of will with God) to Resurrection.”

2. The Sign of the Cross

• P. 177, the sign of the Cross says, “I believe in him who suffered for me and rose again; in him who transformed this sign into of shame into a sign of hope.”
• P. 178, the sign of the Cross is connected with faith in the Blessed Trinity, and so also with our Baptism which we emphasize when we make the sign with Holy Water; it is a “summing up and re-acceptance of Baptism”
• P. 179, in 1945 it was discovered that many 1st century AD graves bearing the sign of the Cross on the Mount of Olives were actually Jewish graves
  • Ezechiel ix, 4ff. is the key
  • “God says to his linen-clad messenger, who carries the writing case at his side: ‘Go through the city, through Jerusalem, and put a mark [Tav] upon the foreheads of the men who sigh and groan over all the abominations that are committed init.’”
  • The men who do not take part in the sin of the world, yet suffer by it, are to be marked with the last letter of the Hebrew alphabet, Thau, ת, ‎𐤕, originally having the form of a + or X or T
  • Apocalypse vii, 1–8 takes up again the basic idea of Ezechiel
  • P. 180, “But was Ezekiel’s vision of the salvific Tav, with the whole tradition built upon it, not bound to appear to Christians later as a glimpse of the One who was to come? Was the meaning of this mysterious sign not now ‘unveiled’ (cf. 2 Cor. iii, 18)?”
• The Greek cultural world was more affected by another discovered cross, that which Plato writes of in the Timaeus (34ab and 36bc), a cross inscribed upon the cosmos
  • The two arms are “the ecliptic” and “the orbit of the earth”
  • I don’t understand what he meant by the latter, since the earth orbits the sun on the plane of the ecliptic, will have to read the Timaeus to see if it is clearer there
  • Is “the orbit of the earth” the equatorial plane of the earth, or the rotational axis of the earth, both of which could be said to cross the ecliptic?
  • P. 181, Plato connects this great chi with the Demiurge, who made the world and stretched out the world soul across the cosmos
  • St. Justin Martyr (1 Apol. 55), the first philosopher of the Fathers, linked the Platonic text to the triune God and his action in the salvation history through Jesus Christ
    • The Demiurge and world soul prefigure the mystery of the Father and Son
    • The world soul is the divine Logos, the Son of God
    • The sign of the Cross is the greatest symbol of the Logos’ lordship, and his holding together all creation
  • “It must have been an overwhelming discovery for the Fathers to find that the philosopher who summed up and interpreted the most ancient traditions had spoken of the cross as a seal imprinted on the universe.”
  • Ephesians iii, 18ff., “that … you may be able to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth, and length, and height, and depth: To know also the charity of Christ, which surpasseth all knowledge.”
  • St. Paul is without a doubt alluding to the cosmic cross here
  • St. Augustine (De doctrina christiana 2, 41, 62; Corpus Christianorum 32, 75ff.) says that St. Paul refers to “the form of the crucified Christ, whose arms embrace the world and whose path reaches down into the abyss of the underworld and up to the very height of God himself.”
• P. 183, Jesus’ announced that at the end of time “the sign of the Son of man” would appear in heaven (Matthew xxiv, 30)
  • The eye of faith recognizes here that same sign that was inscribed on the cosmos from the beginning
• P. 184, “I shall never forget the devotion and heartfelt care with which my father and mother made the sign of the Cross on the forehead, mouth, and breast of us children when we went away from home, especially when the parting was a long one. This blessing was like an escort that we knew would guide us on our way. It made visible the prayer of our parents, which went with us, and it gave us the assurance that this prayer was supported by the blessing of the Saviour. The blessing was also a challenge to us not to go outside the sphere of this blessing. Blessing is a priestly gesture, and so in the sign of the Cross we felt the priesthood of parents, its special dignity and power.”

3. Posture

Kneeling (prostratio)

• P. 185, Nowadays there are some who frown upon kneeling, that it’s unworthy of free men, that it was unworthy of the Greeks, but something the barbarians went in for
  • But St. Augustine said that though the pagans were made servile by the demons they worshiped, the humility of Christ has freed us from these powers
  • What we now kneel before is that humility
  • Christian kneeling is not inculturation, but an expression of Christianity itself, an expression that transforms our existing culture
• The verb προσκυνεῖν occurs 59 times in the New Testament, 24 of these are in the Apocalypse which describes the heavenly liturgy; there are three related forms of posture here, not always linguistically distinguished:
  • Prostratio: lying face down before the overwhelming power of God
    • P. 188, prostration expresses our shock at the realization that we share in the guilt for Christ’s death
    • At ordinations it expresses absolute incapacity by our own powers to take on the priestly mission of Christ, to take on his “I”
  • Γονυπετειν: falling to one’s knees before another (Mark i, 40; x, 17; Matthew xvii, 14; xxvii, 29)
    • Not a proper act of adoration, but fervent supplication expressed bodily, expressing trust in in a power beyond the merely human
    • Matthew xiv, 33: “And the ship’s crew came and said, falling at his feet, ‘Thou art indeed the Son of God.’” (Knox version); “[The disciples] in the boat worshipped [Jesus], saying…” (RSV); both translations are correct, with different emphases
  • Kneeling proper
    • P. 191, Hebrew בָּרַךְ (to kneel), cognate with בֶּרֶךְ (knee)
    • For the Hebrews the knee was a symbol of strength, therefore we bend our strength before the living God
    • St. Stephen on his knees takes up Christ’s own petition: “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.” (Acts vii, 60)
    • Luke, unlike Matthew and Mark, says that our Lord kneeled in the garden of Gethsemane
    • Luke wants the protomartyr’s kneeling to show his entry into Christ’s prayer
• P. 190, In both “worship” and “fall at one’s feet” the spiritual and bodily meanings of προσκυνεῖν are inseparable
  • They both express the psychosomatic unity of man, that worship affects the whole man
  • This is why kneeling cannot be abandoned by the Church
• P. 192, the most important passage for kneeling is Philippians ii, 6–11, the great hymn of Christ
  • “Christ Jesus, who being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: But emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men, and in habit found as a man. He humbled himself, becoming obedient unto death, even to the death of the cross. For which cause God also hath exalted him, and hath given him a name which is above all names: That in the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of those that are in heaven, on earth, and under the earth: And that every tongue should confess that the Lord Jesus Christ is in the glory of God the Father.”
  • Christ is the anti-type of the first Adam, who in his hubris grasped at likeness to God; for Christ this is not a thing to be “grasped” or “robbed”, but he humbled himself, even to death on the Cross
  • This humility is precisely what gets for him the “name above all names”
  • This takes up the words of promise in Isaias xlv, 23: “I have sworn by myself, the word of justice shall go out of my mouth, and shall not return: For every knee shall be bowed to me, and every tongue shall swear.”
• P. 193, There is a story from the sayings of the Desert Fathers, wherein the devil appeared to a certain Abba Apollo
  • “He looked black and ugly, with frighteningly thin limbs, but, most strikingly, he had no knees. The inability to kneel is seen as the very essence of the diabolical.”
• P. 194, St. Luke’s expression for describing the kneeling of Christians, θείς τὰ γόνατα (describing our Lord kneeling to pray in Gethsemane), was unknown in classical Greek
  • Our reflections come full circle, kneeling is alien to modern culture as it was to antiquity

Standing and Sitting—Liturgy and Culture

• P. 194, many texts in the New Testament show that standing was the normal posture for prayer among Jews of that time (cf. Matthew vi, 5; Mark xi, 25; Luke xviii, 11ff.)
  • Among Christians, standing because the Eastertide form of prayer, e.g. the 20th canon of Nicaea decreed that Christians should stand rather than kneel during Eastertide
• We might be familiar with the orans figure from the Catacombs of Priscilla of a woman standing with outstretched arms
  • P. 196, According to recent research this orans posture may normally represent not prayer but a soul that has entered into heavenly glory and worships the face of God
  • The soul is a woman, that is a bride, ready for the marriage of the Lamb, receptive to grace
  • Not the earthly liturgy of pilgrimage, but definitely the heavenly liturgy, the state of glory, is depicted here
  • Standing prayer is thus an anticipation of the future
• P. 197, When we pray we look beyond ourselves, outwards and upwards
  • The oriental postures of meditation, e.g. the lotus position, are inward looking
  • We do have some good reasons to look towards Asia, e.g. in that it could be a relief from western empiricism and pragmatism, but at the same time the oriental apersonal understanding of God remains as a barrier
• P. 198, liturgical dancing
  • “Dancing is not a form of expression for the Christian liturgy.”
  • “The cultic dances of the different religions have different purposes—incantation, imitative magic, mystical ecstasy—none of which is compatible with the essential purpose of the liturgy of the ‘reasonable sacrifice’.”
  • P. 199, “What people call dancing in the Ethiopian rite or the Zairean form of the Roman liturgy is in fact a rhythmically ordered procession, very much in keeping with the dignity of the occasion.”
• P. 199, popular piety, which may include dancing, is not the same as liturgy
  • Popular piety is important however, e.g. as a bridge between each culture and the Catholic faith
  • The liturgy connects vast regions and different cultures; popular piety is less universal, different pieties are further remove from each other
  • One of the best known in Europe is the Echternach (Luxembourg) Dancing Procession (Springprozession, procession dansante) in honour of St. Willibrord, Apostle of the Netherlands (d. 739), takes place on Pentecost Tuesday; as the pilgrims process to an ancient melody they hop twice on the right foot, twice on the left
  • “In a little sanctuary in the middle of the desert of northern Chile, I was once able to attend some Marian devotions that were followed in the open air by a dance, in honour of the Madonna, employing masks that looked rather frightening to me.”
  • Though they are not the same, the liturgy and the “cheerful earthiness” of popular piety (“Church and inn”) are friends, and their juxtaposition is typical of the Catholic church
• P. 201, true inculturation
  • Includes all the different dimensions of Christian culture, respect for the poor, social concern, care for the dying, reverence for life, education of mind and heart, a political culture and a culture of the law, etc., etc.
  • This leads to an artistry that sees the world in the light of God
  • Culture is education, opening up man to his possibilities, making full use of man’s talents

4. Gestures

• P. 204, praying with hands joined comes from feudalism
  • The recipient of an estate placed his joined hands in those of his lord, the giver of the estate
  • An expression of both trust and fidelity
• P. 205, the Roman Canon begins with the word supplices
  • “Bowing low, we implore thee…”
  • “This is the gesture of the tax collector, who knows that he cannot endure the gaze of God and so bows low before it. And yet this prayer asks that our sacrifice may come before the face of God, into his sight, and be for us a blessing.”
  • St. Augustine’s entire apologetics is based around the concept of humilitas, and he followed in the ancient tradition by saying that ὕβρις is the sin of all sins, as we see in the fall of Adam

5. The Human Voice

• P. 209, these days we are coming to understand that silence is part of the liturgy
  • Silence with content though, not just lack of sound and action
  • “We should expect the liturgy to give us a positive stillness that will restore us.”
  • Two attempts in recent years to insert silence into the modern liturgy
    • A pause for reflection after the homily
      • Artificial? Everyone is just waiting for the celebrant to get up again.
      • Homilies often leave the congregation with questions or contradictions
      • It would be better if homilies always ended with an exhortation to prayer, giving this silence some meaning, but even then it is still a pause in the liturgy, not a liturgical silence
    • Silent prayer after the communion (more appropriate of the two)
• The silent Canon of the old Mass did serve an important purpose
  • P. 212, this was a real liturgical silence, not an interruption
  • The priest is not presiding over a meeting, but over an encounter with the living God
  • The silent prayers he makes invite the priest make his task personal, invite him to give his whole self to the Lord
  • P. 213, The priest’s Communion is preceded by two beautiful and profound prayers, but in the new Rite, in order to avoid the silence being to long, he chooses between them
    • “Perhaps we shall again one day take the time to use both.”
    • This silence seems particularly necessary, since the Sign of Peace causes a lot of commotion, which the “Ecce Agnus Dei” interrupts abruptly
  • P. 215, “In 1978, to the annoyance of many liturgists, I said that in no sense does the whole Canon always have to be said out loud.”
  • In Jerusalem from a very early time parts of the Canon were silent, and the silent Canon overlaid partly with chant became the norm in the West
  • It is not true that having the whole Canon said out loud is a prerequisite for everyone’s active participation
  • Ratzinger’s 1978 suggestion was:
    • Educate the faithful on the essential meaning of the Canon
    • The first words of different prayers could be said out loud as a cue for the congregation, so that each person in their own silent prayer can “bring the personal into the communal and the communal into the personal.”
    • “Anyone who has experienced a church united in the silent praying of the Canon will know what a really filled silence is. It is at once a loud and penetrating cry to God and a Spirit-filled act of prayer.”

6. Vestments

• P. 216, Putting on Christ
  • Galatians iii, 27: “For as many of you as have been baptized in Christ, have put on Christ.”
  • Romans xiii, 14: “But put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh in its concupiscences.”
  • Ephesians iv, 24: “And put on the new man, who according to God is created in justice and holiness of truth.”
  • Colossians iii, 10, 11.: “And putting on the new, him who is renewed unto knowledge, according to the image of him that created him. Where there is neither Gentile nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian nor Scythian, bond nor free. But Christ is all, and in all.”
  • P. 217, This image of putting on Christ was perhaps meant to make us thinking of the donning of a cultic mask of a deity during the initiation into a mystery religion
  • However for St. Paul, this is not just a mask, but a real spiritual transformation, the unity of man with God
  • Vestments remind us of this transformation in Christ and the new community that we become through it
  • Vestments challenge the priest to surrender himself and become Christ
• P. 218, 2 Cor. v:
  • The earthly body is an “earthly tent” which will be taken down and replaced with a house not made with human hands, “eternal in the heavens”
  • St. Paul is anxious about the nakedness he will find himself in once the tent is taken down
  • He hopes to be not “unclothed”, but “further clothed” and to receive the “heavenly house”, the definitive body, the new garment
  • N.B. chasuble = “little house”
  • St. Paul does not want to be left bodiless, does not want his soul to just fly away as perhaps the Pythagoreans or Platonists imagined, rather he hopes for resurrection
  • The earthly body, our tent, is subject to decay, but is an anticipation of the definitive body
  • P. 219, The “Corpus Domini Nostri Jesu Christi custodiat animam tuam in vitam aeternam” is something of a distillation into prayer of 2 Cor. v, 1–10
    • Even before the general resurrection, the soul enters into the Body of Christ, which becomes our body, just as we become his Body
• P. 219, in the story of the Prodigal Son the father says, “Bring forth quickly the first robe” (Luke xv, 22, some translate this as “best robe”, but cf. “stolam primam”, “στολὴν τὴν πρώτην”)
  • This “first robe” is Adam’s original robe which he lost after grasping at likeness to God, and so the Fathers understood this parable
  • The baptismal white garment is also meant to suggest this, while also looking forward to the white garment of eternity (Apocalypse xix, 8)

7. Matter

• P. 221, four sacraments use material things in God’s action upon us, namely Baptism, Confirmation, the Eucharist, and the Anointing of the Sick
  • The matter being water, olive oil, wheaten bread, and grape wine
• P. 222, Of the four elements, water, air, fire, and earth, the first three are all symbols of the Holy Spirit, while earth represents man
• Water, the element itself, is sacramental matter
  • Water has a twofold symbolism
    • Salt water symbolizes death, danger, the Red Sea (death and resurrection, cf. Romans vi, 6–11)
    • Spring water symbolizes life, the source of life
  • At the Feast of Tabernacles (John vii, 37–39) Jesus prophesied that streams of living water would flow from whoever came to him to drink: “Now this he said about the Spirit, which those who believed in him were to receive.”
  • The baptized man becomes a spring
• P. 223, olive oil, wheaten bread and grape wine stand out as somewhat different from water, in that they are the typical fruits of Mediterranean culture
  • Psalm 103: “And that wine may cheer the heart of man. That he may make the face cheerful with oil: and that bread may strengthen man’s heart.”
  • Psalm 4: “By the fruit of their corn, their wine, and oil, they are multiplied.”
  • P. 224, regarding objections to matter that only has symbolic force in Mediterranean regions: “In the interplay of culture and history, history has priority. God has acted in history and, through history, given the gifts of the earth their significance. The elements become sacraments through connection with the unique history of God in relation to man in Jesus Christ.”