Ritual and Ceremony

The terms "ceremony" and "ritual" became sneer-words nearly as soon as they were introduced into English and other European languages, according to Edward Muir's Ritual in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2005):

"Around the turn of the sixteenth century, as Thomas Greene has persuasively shown, 'a kind of crisis confronted the commercial, performative sign.' This crisis in confidence in the efficacy of ritual can be seen in what Green calls the 'curious destiny' of the word 'ceremony.' Erasmus employed a Latin neologism ceremoniolae, which has been translated by one scholar as 'trivial little ritual nonsense.' In English one of the definitions of 'ceremony' had become 'a rite or observant regarded as merely formal or external; an empty form.' . . .

"The Oxford English Dictionary's first recorded use of 'ceremony' with a disparaging meaning is 1533, when it was contrasted to the true body of Christ: 'Shal we become Jewes and go backe to the shadow and ceremonie, sith [even though] we have the body and signification whiche is Christ?' A social critic of the English aristocracy later complained that gentility is 'a meer flash, a ceremony, a toy, a thing of nought.' In fact, the word 'ritual' as opposed to 'rite' began as pejorative word in English, first appearing according to the OED in 1570: 'contayning no maner of doctrine . . . but only certayn ritual decrees to no purpose.' The same pattern appears in other vernacular languages of Europe during the sixteenth century. Giovanni Della Casa cited ceremonies, lies, and dreams as examples of illusions that should be ignored; these were things that consist in 'appearances without substance and in words without meaning.' In Italian ceremonie became a synonym for vanita. Struck by the degenerates who congregated around the pope, a French visitor reported in the middle of the century that 'I only found ceremony there,' and his compatriot, Michel de Montaigne, wrote 'we are only ceremonies' to convey his disgust with the hypocrisy of social formalities. Rather than offering access to divine mysteries and hidden powers, 'ceremonies' and by extension 'rituals' came to be considered in the minds of some, at least, as synonymous with fraud."

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Friday, December 01, 2006 at 09:49 AM

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