Christian Liturgy Research Paper

To comprehend the history of the latter, therefore, one must attend also to the evolution in meaning of other terms: ‘mystery,’ ‘cult,’ ‘rite,’ and ‘sacrament.’ In the antique world there existed, broadly speaking, a contrast between public ‘liturgies,’ connected to the regular order of the city and its upholding, on the one hand, and private ‘mysteries,’ ‘cults,’ or ‘rites,’ sometimes connected with a certain dissension from civic order, on the other. Public liturgy included animal sacrifice, and was concerned primarily with a symbolic apportioning of different parts of the beast to gods and different classes of men. It was at once a mimesis and a reinstitution of civic order. Private cults, by contrast, also involved deviant sacrifice. Sometimes this was a deviation upwards, as with the Pythagoreans, who modified or refused animal sacrifice, and associated less bloody offerings not with a feeding of the gods but with the transit of their own souls to a higher realm. Alternatively, there were deviations downwards, as with the Eleusinian mysteries, which were essentially older, alien, more agrarian rites involving chthonic gods, reinterpreted in an urban context. Here initiates identified themselves with the perpetual dying and rising to life again of a god, who had been originally a god of fertility. By participating in the god’s own self-salvation, the mystes hoped to regenerate their lives.

Christianity fused together public liturgy and private rite, with momentous consequences. From early times, it interpreted worship, latreia, as meaning, after the incarnation, the entire offering of the whole person to God in charity, which included charity toward one’s neighbor. In this way, the whole span of human life was reconceived as ‘liturgical,’ since the new ‘city’ was an eternal city which also embraced true human life in time. On the other hand, the language of ‘mystery’ and ‘initiation’ was also embraced. In the case of St. Paul’s use of the term mysterion, it is true, the background is very unlikely to be that of the pagan mystery cult, as was once thought. Instead, the background is Jewish apocalyptic: thus Paul speaks of a primordial ‘mystery’ now disclosed to us in Christ, a mystery anticipated in the Jewish Passover, which involves a passage through destruction to renewal. Nevertheless, this meant that, at its heart, Christianity involved the mystery of the death and rising again of God, a mystery that was made present again in the rituals of baptism and the Eucharist. Later, Patristic authors expanded this notion in terms that owed something to pagan notions of initiation into secret knowledge: the Syrian fathers spoke of Raza, an originally Persian term (Raz) denoting secrets of state within the imperial court; one can note here that in this more oriental context, the ‘secret’ and the ‘public’ were already identified before Christianity, although neither was yet democratically available to all. This ‘orientalism’ was also present more in Rome than in Greece, for, in the case of Rome, the plebs were admitted or ‘initiated’ only gradually into the rites of connubium (sacred marriage). The Greek fathers spoke of mysterion in ways that fused Jewish apocalyptic expectation and exaltation with a Greek sense of participating in a hidden drama that yields under- standing. Nevertheless, the association with mystery religions was viewed typologically, and distance as well as proximity was emphasized. One can note in particular the extent to which the pagan mysteries’ involvement of the reslaying of a god was exaggerated in the interests equally of resemblance with and contrast to the (voluntary) death of Christ. Unlike the pagan mysteries, the mystery of Christ involved a once and for all death and an unshakeable resurrection which saved not a god but mortals.

It remains the case, however, that now, in a more ‘oriental’ (and also more Roman) mode, the most public emerged from the most secret, a rite into which one first had to be initiated as a catechumen. Unlike the ancient Orient, furthermore, (although pagan Rome had already evolved in this direction), all could potentially be initiated into the Raza, or inner court secret. This was to break with the ancient Greek and Roman association of the aristocratic with the eternal and transcendent reserved for a few, on the one hand, and the democratic, associated with the immanent, open, ‘positive,’ unmysterious, and available to the many, on the other. Plato, in the Laws, had already begun to de-eroticize the transcendent, or, alter- natively, to eroticize the democratic, since one must express this both ways around. Now, however, not just in a theoretical text, but in actual practice, the secret was publicized, and, equally, the most public—the Eucharist which engenders the ecclesia, the corporate identity—was rendered secret (and permanently mysterious, even for the catechized). Once, either some were to ascend, or all were to remain on an immanent plane; now all were to ascend, continuously.

In accordance with this new conjoining of liturgy and cult, the sacrifice of the Eucharist was public, yet involved no unequal apportionings. All now ingested all that was offered, and yet in eating the totality, the elements and those whom they fed were offered in their entirety back to God. In addition, all ‘sacrificial economy’ was broken with; nothing was any longer expected from God in return for one’s giving. The new sacrifice was one of pure gratitude to the God who, in any case, gives. As with the Pythagoreans, sacrifice involves mainly human elevation. This elevation, however, also now includes humans’ own free giving in charity to others. In this fashion, elevation no longer abandons the city. Indeed, for Augustine in the City of God, it is the whole city which is offered, which is elevated—since the city exists through elevation.

Because of this new, nonsacrificial economy, Augustine refused most of the pagan terms for ritual or worship, espousing only the Greek term latreia (CD VI 3). Nevertheless, he spoke of a true Cultus as involving a participation in the one true offering made by Christ (CD VII 30). This was an ‘inner’ cultus, not in the sense that outer signs are inefficacious, but in the sense that they must be truly intended. Indeed, participation in the mystery of Christ through the Eucharist and the annual liturgical calendar is now so intense that christians inner life must be understood also in cultic terms: their heart is not mainly ‘ltheins,’ but rather an altar upon which they sacrifice to God (CD X 3; Ep. 140 Ad Honoratum, 18, 45).

Thomas Aquinas reiterated and expounded Augustine’s understanding of latreia and cultus. He stresses that cult does not have God as its object but as its end, since the aim is not to please God, but to be united with Him, and this is not brought about through the work of worship; rather, God brings it about Himself by meeting humans in liturgical acts of worship (S.T. III, Q. 81 a 5; Q. 24 a 5).

Up until the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, this understanding of cult was in the most part preserved. It worked against any notion that the essence of liturgy is a matter of ‘correct procedure,’ or that the liturgical sphere is a special domain standing over the practical and theoretical aspects of life. Even in Gratian’s Decretals, the aim of the canonist is to allow proper scope to the force of local custom, so long as this is not inconsistent with the custom and understanding of the church in general, following Augustine of Canterbury’s precept that ‘place does not approve a custom, custom approves a place’ (Decretals, 12. C 10).

Nonetheless, the later Middle Ages witnessed an increased notion of juridical thinking in the liturgical sphere, resulting in some separation of private piety from public ritual: in this way, the Christian logic of ‘the public secret’ started to come undone. The Reformation then protested against a mechanistic formalism which tended to suggest that the following of certain procedures secured salvation. In response, the Council of Trent sought diligently to reconnect the outer and the inner, and to reassert the notion of a sacramentum as an outward sign of an inner reality whose exteriority could not be dispensed with, since the fullness of this reality was only to be eschatologically disclosed, and then would transcend the inward outward contrast. However, the implementation of the Tridentine decrees involved more and more a dry insistence upon outward observance, as sacramental practice came to be viewed as a series of instituted motions with formally consistent entailments ensuing automatically. Such an outlook at once harmonized with Enlightenment rationalism, and was itself part of what the Enlightenment rejected.

By contrast, the spirit of the most ancient tradition was renewed and rethought by Cardinal Berulle, who insisted that the whole of Christian life, outer and inward, was a participation in, and, in a sense, a reenactment of the incarnation: only the divine man who utterly gave Himself showed, by giving beyond humanity, true humanity. Ultimately, the French School which he founded helped to sustain some unbroken tradition of Christian liturgy as encompassing all of Christian life, since it was a sharing in the mystery of Christ. The centrality of ‘mystery,’ and so of the notion of a public secret (or a secret publicness) was emphatically renewed in the nineteenth century by Dom Odo Casel who (though he overstressed the influence of Greek mystery religion) was a decisive influence on Catholic liturgical renewal in the twentieth century.

In many ways, Vatican II restored the theological centrality of liturgical mystery, although it is questionable whether its practical liturgical recommendations were entirely in keeping with this understanding. It misinterpreted a particular ancient local practice at Rome as indicating that originally the priest stood behind the altar to celebrate the liturgy, whereas the design of even the most ancient basilicas suggests this could not have been the case. Most scholars now reject this conclusion, but the adopted new practice of the priest facing the congregation tends to reduce both the sense of approaching eschatological mystery, and of an equal approach by the entire public, both priest and people. Likewise, Vatican II mistook documents of broad direction for liturgical enactments, such as that of Hippolytus and Justin Martyr, as indications of original ‘simple’ liturgies, organized more formally and without supposedly ‘messy’ repetitions. In this way, another dimension of public mystery was lost in practice: the endlessly ‘stammering’ recommencement of an approach to an altar where one can truly worship—an approach that cannot be completed in time. Thereby both eschatological and apophatic aspects were diminished in practice, even though the reformers had stressed these in theory. Equally, the new Latin liturgy and its vernacular translations tended to lose metaphoric richness, typological resonance, and a sense of language as an epiphanic vehicle.

For these reasons, efforts in the tradition of Berulle and Casel to restore the centrality of Christological mystery and public secrecy to Christian practice remain only partially accomplished.

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