{Book Club: The Spirit of the Liturgy}
- I hope you will read along in this book club (or just read my posts, that’s okay): Joseph Ratzinger’s The Spirit of the Liturgy.
- (When you buy something via our Amazon affiliate link, a little cash rolls our way… just a little. Thanks!)
- I’ll post on Fridays, although for this longer book, perhaps not every Friday. I’ll give you your homework, I’ll talk about what we read, we’ll discuss in the comments. Even if you read later, the comments will still be open.
Previously:
Introduction to the reading: Joseph Ratzinger’s The Spirit of the Liturgy: A Book Club for Easter and Beyond
Nature or history in worship? Or both?
The Relationship of the Liturgy to Time and Space: preliminary questions
The Reservation of the Blessed Sacrament
Homework: Read Chapter Two of Part IV: The Body and the Liturgy — it's the last chapter!
Chapter One, Part IV: Rite
Here is a word, coined, I think, by Joseph Ratzinger in this chapter, that could not seem more negative to Western ears:
Unspontaneity.
Last week, in the chapter on music, I touched on something mentioned by Joseph P. Swain in his book, Sacred Treasure: the most common musical style employed in today's churches (both Catholic and Protestant), fastened on with unseemly haste in the 60s, has the quality of spontaneity as its fundamental goal.
This music is actually an accurate expression of what liturgists* think about worship — that it ought to give the impression of having burst forth as an unpremeditated event.
*Begging the question of whether “liturgist” ought to be, in the light of the goal of spontaneity, a thing at all, much less administered, paradoxically, by professionals from a stance of technique, like management or aerospace engineering.
Very rarely does Ratzinger display any emotion as he writes, but in his book The Feast of Faith, he focuses on this rather ridiculous approach:
… The opinion is all too widely held today that so-called creativity, the active participation of all present, and the relationship to a group in which everyone is acquainted with and speaks to everyone else are the real categories of the conciliar [modern] understanding of the liturgy. Not only assistant pastors but even some bishops think they are not being faithful to the Council of they pray everything just the way it is found in the Roman Missal; at least one “creative” formulation must be inserted, regardless of how trite it may be. And the conventional greeting of the congregation at the beginning along with friendly wishes at the dismissal have already become obligatory elements of the sacred action, which hardly anyone would dare omit.*
I hope you appreciate the way this last sentence fairly drips with ironic juices.
Yes, all those embellishments meant to convey hearty camaraderie and a sense of being above “all that stuffy rigid formality” — like celebrities' “unscripted,” ubiquitous waves to friends as they mount the podium; the “unstudied” smiling acknowledgement accompanied by the jaunty pointed finger, picking out the special one in the crowd; the “unrehearsed” quick departure from the written text, noted on the teleprompter — have become as entrenched and as sacrosanct as any other ritual.
*Protestants don't have a Council, but they have their modern pieties as well. Simply consider the rigid pattern that “spontaneous prayer” follows… so much so, that it can easily be spoofed with deadly accuracy.
So we must examine our rituals.
In this chapter, Ratzinger clearly has the whole of Guardini's work in mind. But he's trying to give context for Guardini's philosophical guidelines.
As always in both the books, the question “What is liturgy; that is, what is worship — what is its spirit?” is front and center. For Ratzinger, as he stated at the start, the key answers are in Scripture and in history. Having prepared the ground with the previous chapters, in this one he comes squarely to the nub: the importance of rite.
To adapt a saying of Kant, liturgy “covers everything” from the Incarnation to the Resurrection, but only on the way of the Cross. For Christians, then, “rite” means the practical arrangements made by the community, in time and space, for the basic type of worship received from God in faith. (P. 160)
I will leave it to you to follow his outline of ritual in the East, with its sense of the givenness of worship, and West, with its creativity anchored in time and place (p. 163), growing organically. Note especially his emphasis on the many and varied rites to be found in the West. Ironically, it was in the Second Vatican Council, “with its concern to restore the Roman tradition in its purity” that “what began as a process of making everything uniform has swung to the opposite extreme: a widespread dissolution of the rite, which must now be replaced by the “creativity” of the community.” (p. 163)
That process of making things uniform entailed a certain notion of papal power that brought with it unfortunate consequences to freedom, creativity, and unity, really undermining the best aspects of those ideals. Even diversity itself, quite alive in the past, is replaced with a non-organic understanding of “inculturation” in the liturgy.
What is important is that the great forms of rite [as found in history] embrace many cultures. They not only incorporate the diachronic [time and place, always and once for all] aspect, but also create communication among different cultures and languages. They elude control by any individual, local community, or regional Church. Unspontaneity is of their essence. In these rites I discover that something is approaching me here that I did not produce myself, that I am entering into something greater than myself, which ultimately derives from divine revelation. (P. 165)
Later:
The greatness of the liturgy depends — we shall have to repeat this frequently — on its unspontaneity. (P. 166)
Even the most fundamentalist, non-liturgical sects are today, as Ratzinger notes, searching for rite in Scripture. (He rejects this search as absurd, because Scripture itself has a context, which is history — from which comes tradition — without which it loses its meaning.)
Liturgy “manufactured” in this way… remains totally empty, however much human artistry may adorn it. Only respect for the liturgy's fundamental unspontaneity and pre-existing identity can give us what we hope for: the feast in which the great reality comes to us that we ourselves do not manufacture but receive as a gift.
This means that “creativity” cannot be an authentic category for matters liturgical…. This kind of creativity [art “under the free mastery of man, … subject to no questions of meaning”] has no place within the liturgy. The life of the liturgy does not come from what dawns upon the minds of individuals and planning groups. On the contrary, it is God's descent upon our world, the source of real liberation.
We must confront this reality for our children's sake as well as our own. Every religion and religious impulse expresses itself in rite. And that is why even the “spontaneous” additions become almost immediately rigidly enforced. The human heart longs for rite!
When we deny this fact, we are really missing something essential in our lives. We can find spontaneity — real creativity and true surprises — in many areas. (Of course, by definition, we can't program those things or look for them.) But if our worship refuses to rest on unspontaneous rite, where will we go to find it? If we despise a given order, how can we impose one we invent?
The question is a simple one: What is the true rite?
And that is what the book seeks to answer, with admirable specifics in this short chapter.
I refer you again to the previous chapter's concept of sober inebriation: that gift of true, Scriptural and historical worship, where the spirit has room to breathe and even to be drunk on the wine of union with God, but in the Logos, in the submission of the will to the gift as it's found in the whole of salvation history.
Questions? Comments? I’d love to hear from you!
(Emphases added in quotes are mine.)
Click here to see our previous discussion of Romano Guardini’s The Spirit of the Liturgy, which you can read free, online. You can also purchase it here, although be warned, this edition does not have the footnotes, which stinks.
Fr Withoos says
One might be able to say that spontaneity is the opposite of ritual, and hence ritual, and possibly liturgy (but I need to think about the distinctions here) are suitably defined as unspontaneity. All in all, I guess, I prefer ritual as a more precise term.
Fr. Michael Lang of the Brompton Oratory has a fascinating new book out entitled ‘Signs of the Holy One: Liturgy, Ritual and Expression of the Sacred’. I would heartily recommend–for those interested in reading further on the chapter you are discussing, and the question of ritual–his first chapter entitled ‘Ritual and the Sacred: Anthropological Foundations.’ He considers there a number of fascinating sociologists on the question of ritual, but it is his discussion of the work of another Turner (are they everywhere?) Victor Turner, an anthropologist which is truly illuminating.
There are many fascinating comments of Turner illustrated her by Lang but suffice here to identify only a couple, which may be worth raising in your further discussion of the Spirit of the Liturgy.
In discussing what he will call ‘flow’ and ‘frame’ which makes for an ‘exalted state of reflexivity’ (you just have to love anthropologists!) and finding how participants in ritual find ‘their current lives in vital relation to a supremely noble paradigm’ (phew!) he goes on to describe how ritual in terms of flow is:
‘a state in which action follows action according to an internal logic which seems to need no conscious intervention on our part; we experience it as a unified flowing from one moment to the next, in which we feel in control of our actions, and in which there is little distinction between self and environment, between stimulus and response, or between past, present and future.’
How interesting. He then states that if anyone should try to interfere with this many undesirable consequences result. Turner again:
‘Above all, flow is characterised by a merging of action and consciousness: actors in a successful ritual are not self-conscious of what they are doing; if they become so, the flow is interrupted and ease turns into anxiety. This lack of self-consciousness is made possible by a “limited stimulus field”, the rules of which can be easily mastered. In a game, there are precise formal rules; in the liturgy there are rubrics’ (p.31)
In an age where rubrics are no longer do the red, say the black, to borrow a now somewhat hackneyed phrase of a famous blogger, no wonder there is no flow, no wonder there ritual is misunderstood, and no wonder in much of our liturgy we have returned to spontaneity, the precise opposite of that which Cardinal Ratzinger has described ritual as being: unspontaneity.
Now there’s a lot more in that chapter, and on Turner to be said, but this is all I can manage at the moment. I wonder what you will think. Happy discussing…
Leila says
Fr. Withoos: The very first lines of the chapter:
“For many people, the word “rite” does not have a very good ring to it. “Rite” suggests rigidity, a restriction to prescribed forms. It is set in opposition to that creativity and dynamism of inculturation by which, so people say, we get a really living liturgy…”
And then he doubles down with “unspontaneity”!
So yes, he is getting at “ritual.” His way is to look at scripture and history… and as you bring up, there is another, complementary way, which is to look at how man is made (anthropology) and what his needs are.
We could even look at children, and see what helps them to learn big concepts and feel at home in a world they know nothing about (hint: ritual). We could look at adults as they hope that the barista knows without being told what their order will be (hint: ritual). We could even look at churchgoers who cling to “On Eagles’ Wings” because it is literally one of a handful of songs they can recall from their youth to remind them of being in church (again, ritual).
The books you mention sound dangerously interesting (can’t. read. more. books), but after all, common sense and experience bear out the conclusions. Why, we are all seeking that place where we are seamlessly incorporated, where we can leave behind the tediousness of self-conscious self-observation, where we can escape that anxiety.
Interesting that Turner speaks of “the rules of the game” — just the same way that Guardini speaks of “the rules of the sacred game” in “the playfulness of the liturgy” (any interested readers can read about it here: http://www.likemotherlikedaughter.org/2016/03/the-serious-rules-of-the-sacred-game-the-spirit-of-the-liturgy-a-lenten-book-club/)
Some posit that man needs to be the subject of creativity and endless innovation. At this point — this late date of the collapse of Christian cult — I think it’s valid to ask what their intentions and motivations might be.
Perhaps they are motivated by the best of intentions. However, if things went in a different direction, towards “unspontaneity,” how many of them would lose their jobs in chanceries, universities, magazines, parishes??
Just asking…
sibyl says
Yes, the times that I’ve been to a manufactured ritual have always made me feel terribly embarrassed. There is something so juvenile about ritual that someone thought up, even though it might connect on some level. Once went to a baptism (yes, at a Catholic parish) in which, after Communion, some liturgical dancer took the baby and danced around the whole church waving the baby around. Aside from the worry that she was trip and brain the baby, it just seemed so silly. As if baptism and Mass weren’t enough, and as if the whole thing were truly spontaneous, instead of a clearly planned and somewhat manipulated dance of joy.
It also reminds me of testimonies from former Protestant ministers, who have said that deep down, they wondered if what they were preaching were actually true. When you know that you (or your little group) is the originator of the ritual, the intellectually honest person will have, at bottom, a sense of the absurd or artificial.
Final thought: In Lewis’s Til We Have Faces, the narrator describes a temple in which there is an ancient shapeless rock, which had been worshiped as being divinity incarnate. The temple keepers have erected, next to it, a beautiful statue of a goddess in the finest classical style. The narrator watches as a woman, clearly with some great suffering in her life, comes to offer a sacrifice and pray. She walks straight past the beautiful statue and goes to the shapeless rock. At root, this is what we all feel about ritual. The sweetness or comfortable shallowness of human manufactured worship cannot satisfy like THE REAL THING.
Leila says
Sibyl, your baptism anecdote is horrifying!!
I think your allusion to Lewis shows that even beauty can lead astray if it’s not grounded in truth (Guardini: “truth is the soul of beauty” http://www.likemotherlikedaughter.org/2016/03/truth-is-the-soul-of-beauty-spirit-of-the-liturgy-lenten-book-club/)
It honestly worries me that the experts will figure out that ritual is important and begin forming committees for the Increase of Meaningful Rituals.
That is why these books are so important. They keep us centered on the main point: Worship of GOD, rooted in scripture and history (tradition).
sibyl says
I don’t have the book in front of me, but doesn’t he talk about finding out how God himself wants to be worshiped? That, to me, is where we have to begin. Once again, it comes down to the question of whether we actually believe in the Church (an article of faith that we say we DO believe in every Sunday in the Creed). The Church is guided by the Lord, and thus these questions of right worship are her purview.
But of course this leads to the present confusion; it seems that the magisterium was at work in what seem to be liturgical deformations and abuses — at least, it seemed to condone. This is where my confusion sets in.
Lisa G. says
I never knew there were so many different rites – so many! Too bad about the Gallican rite, which seems very intriguing according to what he says. But it’s gone, I guess. The new one in the Congo sounds exciting; by “exciting” I mean it’s exciting that there is a new one which has grown up in a natural way, a good way.
This got me: “the liturgy becomes personal, true, and new, not through tomfoolery and banal experiments with the words, but through a courageous entry into the great reality that through the rite is always ahead of us and can never quite be overtaken”.