Liturgical Thinking

Peter J. Leithart, February 15, 2007

"The liturgical movement," Rosenstock-Huessy says, "is intimately connected with an upheaval against modern thought." His essay on liturgical thinking is an effort to explain how this is the case. Modernity is "obsolete," and even uses the term "postmodern" to describe the new kind of man that's aborning.

He begins by examining the transformation of various terms. Person, for the modern world, is "a bundle of nerves." This was not the original meaning of the term: "'person' in canon law meant a dignitary, a bishop perhaps, or an abbot, or a princely person. Persons had status and authority. They had something to say, to administer, to answer for." When the word was applied to human beings in general, the background idea was that man was made in the "image of the triune God," the Three Persons who constitute the one God. Since the Reformation, the notion of "person" has expanded so that we think of ourselves as "persons by nature." In this way, "a temporary trend of extending privileges was exalted to 'naturalness.'"

This involved a "second fallacy" concerning nature, which now had to become "something infinitely bigger and better than it had been in the times of the living Christian faith." The Renaissance reasserted the claims of nature (physis), and even extended them over persons. But as physics became "the science of dead matter," it ended up treating even persons as dead matter: "Dead things were to explain the living." The Counter-Reformation tried to help by introducing a "supernature" above nature, but this assumed the modern conception of nature was fine.

The Renaissance also brought a new conception of time, which for the first time "conceived [time] as rectilinear, as 'natural,' or mechanical or geometrical. The Counter-Reformation again came to help by setting up eternity over against time, just as supernature was over against nature, but "Time once falsely conceived is not cured by eternity." Modernity killed time, and in killing time killed the miraculous, which were conceived as God's interventions into the realm of space. Miracles are not exceptional because God "is the ruler. We are his miracles either always or never."

The destruction of time meant the destruction of shame and modest: "Shame is the soul's garment against arbitrary and untimely knowledge: because timing is the condition in which alone the eternal may be revealed." It takes time for a bride to know her lover, and modesty is the veil over that permits this time to occur; there is a time lag between convictions we come to and the proper time to speak, and shame is the cover for words that are not yet ready to be spoken. The Counter-Reformation again, eh claims, hardened and sterilized shame and modest: "If shame is not the expression of growth, it turns into a loveless, asocial, hard and fast thing." But life requires being gazed upon by loving faces, since "God's countenance cannot fasten on us unless His delegates, loving faces, are recognized as gateways to His face."

On every point, the Counter Reformation failed: "The apologetics of the Counter-Reformation defended eternity, supernaturalness, revelation; but it is astounding how far they conceded to their humanistic opponents the definitions of nature, time and shame" The "abyss opened between physics and apologetics" was destructive of Christian apologetics, splitting man into an ideal Christian and a practical materialist.

In the second part of the essay, ERH describes how the liturgy challenges modernity's sterility and dualisms. It does this, as we might expect, through speech, through vocatives, second-person address, names, imperatives, bodiliness, and so forth. Liturgical thinking assumes the truth that we are moved by names, and shows that we receive a new name from God. Liturgical thinking assumes that mind and body are "two compensatory and strictly time-directed processes of Me," and that the soul directs both mind and body. The first "figure in our liturgical treatment is 'Thou.' The priest then only is allowed to respond 'I' after has been called out, in his ordination, by his full name." The liturgy doesn't just address man as thou, but also the inanimate creation and animals: "Thou creature."

Specifically, "thou creature drink" (Benedico te, o creatura potus). Drink "has passed through many stages; some of them common sense assigns to 'nature,' like planting the vine, pruning, fertilizing, spraying with sulphur, etc. etc. Some others common sense classifies with social action, like the harvesting, barreling, bottling, etc." That is not what the liturgy shows: "our academic distinction between natural and social collapses." Before God, "we His faithful – when we have done right by the wine – lead this creature wine as much to its destination as does the soil, the rain, the air, the sun. We are not God, but one of the creatures in that meadow of God on which all creatures here below praise Him . . . whenever mortal man leads the other creatures to their destination, we do not prevent, rather, we complete their 'proceedings' into that Creature which is in process of being created." To call something "natural" is to confine it to its original state. But the liturgy teaches us that we are kings and priests of creation, to bring the creation to its fulfillment, and to offer it in gladness to God.

In the liturgy, wine is translated from "nature" to "creature," through the royal-priestly intervention of man. And if wine can be so translated, so too can man. The Mass, ERH says, expresses a "transubstantiation from natural hominis to creatura hominis."