{Lenten Book Club: The Spirit of the Liturgy}
As promised — and in keeping with the mission of this blog, which is to talk about what we want to talk about — we will read The Spirit(s) of the Liturgy as a little book club together this Lent. I will post here exactly as I would talk to you about it if we were together. Please add your questions and comments!
- First, Romano Guardini’s The Spirit of the Liturgy. It’s free, online. You can also purchase it here, although be warned, this edition does not have the footnotes, which stinks.
- Then, Joseph Ratzinger: The Spirit of the Liturgy (yes, same name).
- (When you buy something via our Amazon affiliate link, a little cash rolls our way… just a little. Thanks!)
- I’ll post on Fridays. I’ll give you your homework, I’ll talk about what we read, we’ll discuss in the comments. You can do this study at any point, but if you want to stay current and join in the convo, that’s how it will go.
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All the posts are linked here. Previously:
The Introduction: Escaping Preference
Chapter One: Seeking Universal Prayer
Chapters Three and Four: The Style and Symbolism of the Liturgy
Chapter Five: The Serious Rules of the Sacred Game
Chapter Six: Truth is the Soul of Beauty
Homework: No more homework for this book! A blessed Passiontide and Easter to you all, dear readers; thank you so much for reading along with us. Consider getting your copy of Joseph Ratzinger's The Spirit of the Liturgy, which builds on the ideas we have studied in a much more linear and specific way. I will have another book club during Eastertide so we can read that.
Chapter Seven: The Spirit of the Liturgy, Romano Guardini
The Primacy of the Logos over the Ethos
In my humble opinion, if you can understand this chapter and its fundamental distinction between being and doing, you will be able to grapple with all the problems life throws at you.
Seriously, while the chapter on Playfulness was necessary to read in order to go on to the Ratzinger, and was an important precursor to this one, with its investigation of purpose and meaning, this chapter is the one which most excited me and made me want to inflict this admittedly difficult book on you, my dear readers who perhaps would prefer to click on a post about raising children, homeschooling, making dinner, or knitting.
Yet, I believe that internalizing the primacy of the Logos over the Ethos will enable us to enjoy those fun activities more and do better at them, because when life is ordered correctly through the understanding, it has more meaning. The Church refines each temperament to be like that of Christ's. She infuses Christ's stillness in the active man and gives Christ's energy to the sedate man.
We must not make the Liturgy in our own image.
That is what this chapter is about!
You see, there came to be a divide that fell between man and that which is beyond man. We can often feel that philosophy has nothing to do with our everyday lives, yet that is not true. What we think about things really matters. And in the West, many centuries ago, the very greatest thinkers began to doubt that there is a connection between the material world and the immaterial world, or that the immaterial world is even real; and most importantly, that words have meaning connected to what they are — that they are not simply random things we have agreed on.
Doubt fell on man. Doubt that he could ever see the truth… doubt that truth exists apart from what he sees in front of him. And, of course, doubt about God and His existence. Fast forward and this doubt has spawned the most fatal negation of all on earth: the erasure of meaning about the human person, male and female.
It's hard for us to know what to do about this doubt, or how to approach it. In some ways, we need it — when we are testing theories about things in a scientific way — and indeed it's the impetus behind the incredible burgeoning of scientific knowledge. But even science (and especially science) must have something behind it — some fundamental anti-doubt — some affirmation of things as good and connected to truth and rightly ordered to truth — or else it devolves to mere laboratory work. Real scientists have testified to the characteristic of receptivity and intuition necessary for their work to take place at all.
And receptivity is the antithesis of doubt.
Guardini speaks right away in this chapter about the restlessness of the person of action. This is a recurring theme of his, and here he goes to the root.
People [who are generously endowed with moral energy and earnestness] regret one thing in the liturgy, that its moral system has few direct relations with everyday life.
Today, now that the “moral” as a category has subsided, relativism having truly gained the upper hand, I think we need to substitute the term “good will,” or “people with benign intentions.” And for “moral system,” I think we need to substitute “plan of action.” It's simply the case that the ensuing century has neutered morality (the system of identifying good and evil), so that we don't speak of it any more. Yet the type remains: the person who wants everyone to do something about what they have learned in their religion, and who wants worship itself to be more dynamic.
I'd say that in this new century, this personality has gone beyond mere exhortation, establishing of movements, and urging of devotions* — we now have a full-fledged, entrenched, and all-pervading bureaucracy of programmers — that is, purveyors of programs.
*As Guardini states and repeats in a footnote, devotions are good and necessary, and the life of faith needs them. It's primacy we're looking into here.
It's the rare parish that doesn't consider itself first and foremost a provider of programming for the faith. The style now is even to cease calling it a church at all, but rather community or center. That which Guardini touches upon here has become a thorough-going way of life, and like its political counterpart, it has its own means of reproduction. Bureaucracies, once established, are notoriously difficult to reform or remove. There is, after all, always another program to administer and another person whose livelihood depends upon doing so. And the more active and sentimental (emotions-based) a person is, the greater their influence when left unchecked.
It's hard to step back from all the activity and ask some questions, for two reasons. I'll get to the second towards the end of this discussion. The first is that we're all rationalists now. The rationalist uses analysis, taking things apart, as a substitute for seeing things whole (in Latin, ratio, discursive reasoning, vs. intellectus, the part of the intellect that sees and receives knowledge effortlessly) — that is, we are all inheritors of this legacy of falling back on activity and will; of living according to Ethos as the highest principle.
I'd say that most of us do have a secret suspicion that we're better off doing a program about faith than going to Mass; we feel more fulfilled by a lively Bible study than by praying Vespers, should we ever get the chance — or we'd like our liturgy and prayer to be a Bible study. We are convinced that the best remedy for poor preparation for marriage is another, better program for marriage preparation. When we think of religion, we think of catechesis. When we think of passing along the faith to our children, we think of religious education classes.
It's not that studying the faith or preparing for marriage with a class are bad things. Not at all. They are good things. Yet…
One person commented, when I was describing this new model of the church, and deploring the making of Sunday into another day of busy-ness, of learning and teaching and classes and programs, “Well, what would the church be? Would there just be… the sacraments?”
Well. Hmmm…
Josef Pieper, in his book on Happiness and Contemplation, reminds us of a few things.
The political life (which in an election year is on everyone's mind even more than usual), according to Aristotle, exists for something beyond itself: for what is not political.
In fact, and this might shock us a little, as again, we are rationalists to some extent, political life is not even for some ideal life of the common good here on earth. No, we take part in the political life to secure peace, that we might have breathing space in order to devote ourselves to contemplation of the good.
Totalitarians, Pieper tells us, will allow “spare time [recreation]. But not true repose.”
Dr. Johnson said, “To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition.” And what is the home? The home is where all work is ordered to the day of worship, that we might contemplate the Good. The home is the least efficient place, which is why those social engineers/busybodies who are always trying to better things attack the home first. If you are aiming at running things more smoothly, something like dormitories and collective nurseries work much better. No, the home, like the Church of which it is a little exemplar, exists for its own sake — allowing the person freedom to come in contact with God. But I digress.
Guardini:
This predominance of the will [Ethos] and of the idea of its value gives the present day its peculiar character. It is the reason for its restless pressing forward, the stringent limiting of its hours of labor, the precipitancy of its enjoyment; hence, too, the worship of success, of strength, of action; hence the striving after power, and generally the exaggerated opinion of the value of time, and the compulsion to exhaust oneself by activity till the end.
The Church, he says, can speak to us in any age, “but it must be pointed out that an extensive, biased, and lasting predominance of the will over knowledge is profoundly at variance with the Catholic spirit.”
If not,
Religion becomes increasingly turned towards the world, and cheerfully secular. It develops more and more into a consecration of temporal human existence in its various aspects, into a sanctification of earthly activity, of vocational labor, of communal and family life, and so on.
In short, a kind of club.
While life's center of gravity was shifting from the Logos to the Ethos [during this revolution in thought I was telling you about], life itself was growing increasingly unrestrained. Man's will was required to be responsible for him.
Man becomes God, because only God's will can ultimately take responsibility.
This presumption is guilty of having put modern man into the position of a blind person groping his way in the dark, because the fundamental force upon which it has based life — the will — is blind. The will can function and produce, but cannot see. From this is derived the restlessness which nowhere finds tranquillity. Nothing is left, nothing stands firm, everything alters, life is in continual flux; it is a constant struggle, search, and wandering.
Catholicism opposes this attitude with all its strength.
This is strong, is it not? All these good things: doing, acting, working for the good, seeking to take responsibility — if they are made primary, then the faith must resist them.
The Church forgives everything more readily than an attack on truth. She knows that if a man falls, but leaves truth unimpaired, he will find his way back again. But if he attacks the vital principle, then the sacred order of life is demolished. Moreover, the Church has constantly viewed with the deepest distrust every ethical conception of truth and of dogma.
This discussion is about the order of good things. Truth and dogma are for themselves. They don't exist for a purpose, they don't exist to make us better or to make a good place to live on earth, although devotion to them may have those effects. This “ethical conception” — turning everything into a force for the will, including the truth itself! — is not how the Church ultimately does things.
“Truth is not obliged to give an account of itself.”
And what is Logos, then? In the quote above, Guardini mentions that the will can function but cannot see. Logos, the Greek word for word, relates to man's faculty of the intellect which sees things whole, all at once: which is contemplation, seeing the Good. Seeing has to do with man's highest faculty, the intellect; whereas doing relates to the will. The perennial argument, much more intensified in our age, is which of these principles has primacy? Guardini, following Aristotle and Aquinas, is trying to show us that the answer is not the will.
The Logos, of course, is Jesus Christ, the Word of God. Pieper (a student of Guardini) uses the wonderful image of thirst to explain how contemplation is our fulfillment here on earth. He explains that when we thirst, we long for something. And when we drink, we receive that thing — we receive it as a gift, in fact. From Happiness and Contemplation:
A man drinks… and feeling refreshment permeating his body… says, “What a glorious thing is fresh water!” Such a man… has already taken a step toward that “seeing of the beloved object” which is contemplation…
Immediately we Christians think of Jesus by the well, telling the woman that He is the living water. We thirst, and our seeking (so important!) is the will, moving us to the good. But when we are quenched, that is no longer an act of the will. It's its opposite: the receiving of the gift.
What is our contact with this Logos, now that Jesus is not walking on the earth?
It's Sunday. It's worship. It's the Mass. It's the Liturgy.
The soul needs that spiritual relaxation in which the convulsions of the will are stilled, the restlessness of struggle quietened, and the shrieking of desire silenced; and that is fundamentally and primarily the act of intention by which thought perceives truth, and the spirit is silent before its splendid majesty.
In the liturgy the Logos has been assigned its fitting precedence over the will.
I said, above, that there are two reasons it's hard to step back from all the activity, the striving, to take a look at what we are doing to worship.
The first reason was that we are rationalists willy-nilly, just by living in this age. The second is that for the majority of people, worship does not have this character of the stilling of restlessness, of repose, of receptivity to the beauty of truth.
Worship itself has been invaded by the spirit of Ethos. My intention here is simply to observe this, not to rehash all the reasons this is so, as I strongly believe that the rehash is amply achieved elsewhere. No, I want us to get at the root of what the effect of this invasion is, to think about it, to feel it in our bones the way we stop and take stock of the health of our own body.
What I'm trying to say (and it's really hard!) is that at some point we have to step back from “I thirst!” and wonder why we have such a hard time finding a drink of fresh, clear water. Where is this water?
I'd venture to say that for most of us, worship is not what it ought to be, and it's not usually in our control to change that; simply because when we try, we are met with the charge of preference, which is what Ethos dwindles into, inexorably. We live in the age of preference. How to return to the Logos? And what then?
The liturgy has something in itself reminiscent of the stars, of their eternally fixed and even course, of their inflexible order, of their profound silence, and of the infinite space in which they are poised. It is only in appearance, however, that the liturgy is so detached and untroubled by the actions and strivings and moral position of men. For in reality it knows that those who live by it will be true and spiritually sound, and at peace to the depths of their being; and that when they leave its sacred confines to enter life they will be men of courage.
Thank you for reading along with me!
Feel free to leave comments at any time — I will always see them.
Jenny says
I want to thank you for this series of reflections. My religion is not the same one as yours, but I have really appreciated your wisdom these past weeks, and I am particularly cheered today by your insight into preference and the danger of religion becoming a club. I haven’t been reading along, and may well not get the chance to read either of these books, but I really very much appreciate the introduction.
Sincere thanks for what you have shared.
Leila says
Thank you, Jenny! So happy you read along with the posts!
Marlon Davis says
Thank you for this! It was wonderful to read something that may not have found otherwise. And such an important work? As a convert I thought I really was in touch with what the mass is all about but I realize that although I sensed much of what Guardini writes about, I could not find language to express it- especially to my protestant family. Not that I will run to share this with them immediately but I am happy to hold these truths in my heart right now, especially at Easter. I know I will have to read this book again and I look forward to (hopefully) an opportunity to do this again with Like Mother, Like Daughter with Pope Benedict’s same-named book. There is so much I missed I am sure – but your blog helped to keep me on track!
I am not sure if the final paragraph answers that question about what we do when we try to support or suggest small changes in the worship in our parishes so that it might become closer to what is depicted here…and then as you say are told that we are working toward our own misled preferences – “that are seeking to undo all that has been achieved in the past 50 years.” ( on suggesting using music – maybe just once at Easter -not found in Journeysong).
Leila says
Thanks, Marlon — so glad you read along with us.
The next book will get much more into specifics in so many ways, which is why I’ve held off getting into those discussions.
And there will be a lot of undoing that must occur if worship is to be according to the principle of Logos and not of Ethos.
It just will. And that’s not preference, it’s not feelings — it’s demonstrated by these books to be objective reality.
Mrs. B. says
It is dreadful to contemplate where that little worm of a doubt that insinuated itself inside modern man’s mind has led us. Maybe Guardini wouldn’t be surprised to see people, in 2016, proclaim that reality is simply what we want to make of it, but still it’s shocking. But if we have the liturgy, there is hope: Guardini urges us to live by it and to trust it. After all, this is also what Jesus gave us at the Last Supper: Himself, yes, but also the command to celebrate the liturgy, with the promise that He would be there. This is no small thing!
One if the insights I have treasured while reading this book is the wonderful, peaceful harmony behind God’s design for us. Very often there will be two elements, like Being and Doing, Logos and Ethos, Purpose and Meaning, Reason and Intellect, (even Man and Woman!), and where God had their well-ordered balance in mind for our own good, the devil has introduced disorder, division, and a power struggle of one element against the other. The devil will not leave even the liturgy alone: it’s like wanting to pollute Heaven!
And yet, as we enter Holy Week (the most liturgical week of the year!), we are reminded that the Victory has been won already for us: we just have to follow Christ.
What a magnificent feast this has been! Thank you so much for sharing this gem of a book with us, Leila, and for making it more understandable, thus more fruitful.
Leila says
Thank you, Mrs B! I really appreciate all your thoughtful comments. It is no small thing — it is the greatest thing, as I know you agree — to have Jesus himself in the Mass. And that we will cling to.
Carol Kennedy says
“And in the West, many centuries ago, the very greatest thinkers began to doubt that there is a connection between the material world and the immaterial world, or that the immaterial world is even real; and most importantly, that words have meaning connected to what they are — that they are not simply random things we have agreed on.”
This makes me think of a Tom Howard quote about the medival mind vs the modern mind: everything means something VS nothing means anything.
“It is the reason for its restless pressing forward, the stringent limiting of its hours of labor, the precipitancy of its enjoyment; hence, too, the worship of success, of strength, of action; hence the striving after power, and generally the exaggerated opinion of the value of time, and the compulsion to exhaust oneself by activity till the end.”
Yes! I so struggle with restlessness. I remember a friend once asking the question “Shouldn’t stay-a-home moms actually stay at home a little more?” It is so hard to BE when “busyness” is the basic minimum of mommy-life! And when we are home, we can be busy on the internet! 🙂
“I’d venture to say that for most of us, worship is not what it ought to be, and it’s not usually in our control to change that; simply because when we try, we are met with the charge of preference, which is what Ethos dwindles into, inexorably. We live in the age of preference. How to return to the Logos? And what then?”
Okay, so here it is. For the past six months we have been attending an Anglican-use parish and for the first time in our adult lives we look forward to Mass each week (despite the hour+ drive each way)…there is no apprehension about what will happen. My only obstacle to full participation is my own mind (which is a big enough obstacle as it is). But we have worried all this time that we are cheating somehow, are we just going to the liturgy we prefer and abandoning our local parish. And what are we saying to our kids about the typical liturgy (the one they will very likely experience for most of their lives since Anglican-use parishes are not very common…yet).
Mrs. B. says
Carol, I know how you feel because we are in a very similar situation: we forgo what should be our parish and drive quite a bit to go to a different one, where, like you, we can look forward to Mass each week. My husband was uncomfortable at the beginning, and perhaps because he was raised as a Lutheran, he felt like it was a very Protestant thing to do to go parish-shopping, as some call it. But I think this is looking at things backwards: it’s the parish that’s bringing the liturgy down to earth and making it “relevant” and “engaging”, and something where each “talent” can shine, that is doing violence to the liturgy in order to please. I don’t feel guilty for saying No, thanks – and then look for true liturgy. We would be cheating our children if we implied that the two things are just the same: but now they know that there is a good way and a bad way to approach the liturgy, and the liturgy being the Work of God, it’s important to get it right: there is an old phrase that states that the way we pray shapes our belief and the way we live.
Some people will be called to work within their parish and try to make things gradually better – I have the utmost regard for them as it’s a tough job, as we can see from the comments of some readers here, and I am very grateful that they persist! I remember Leila saying that she has even prepared something to help people in this situation, and I hope she’ll talk more about it at some point.
Leila says
Parents’ first duty is to raise their children in the faith. You do what you can to make that happen. Worship is not optional!
Husband and wife have to pray and rely on grace to make the decision about what’s best to do. Sometimes you drive… sometimes you stay and work with what you have… sometimes you do both, alternating. There is no easy answer.
Lisa G. says
“The home is the least efficient place…” – now, that is something I have to ponder and absorb.
sibyl says
Having galloped to get to the end, I’m so grateful. That last paragraph moved me almost to tears: the liturgy like the stars — ordered, mysterious beauty, far away, and yet part of our world and part of a world beyond us (for now).
The triumph of Ethos gets more and more shocking to me the older I get (and I’m not 50 yet!). Everything has to have an action plan. Every problem has to get reported and dissected for motivations and possible fixes. Parents start worrying about their children’s development as though every breath depended on their conscious willing it.
We all not only rationalists, but a little bit crazy. Moms especially, because we are teaching our children how to BE, have to work hard to remember that that means we ourselves have to just — BE. True worship helps me remember how to do this.
I can’t wait for the Ratzinger book! Thanks for leading this.
Leila says
Sibyl, good points — “conscious willing” to make things happen that actually just happen on their own if we live in an ordered way. It is a little bit crazy.
Thanks for reading!
Rose says
Hello Leila, just popping my head up to say hello and thank you for all the reading and guidance, I am having an amazing time.
Nancy says
Thank you Leila for introducing me to this book. Without your discussion and commenting back, I would have been somewhat lost in reading this book. Besides the last paragraph in Chapter 7, my favorite sentence is “Truth is truth, because it is truth.’ And I think your writing/ website has all along been suggesting the importance of BEING-LIVING the liturgical year through Liturgy of Hours and worshipping with family the entire Triduum, for example. Again, thank you!
Leila says
That’s a favorite of mine too, Nancy! In fact, the whole last chapter in my book is almost completely underlined 🙂
Thank you!
Amy says
Leila, I am late to this party, and not even reading the book(s), but am still getting so much from your posts! This resonates in so many ways. Thank you!