The Spirit of the Liturgy

An Evangelical overwhelmed by the Eucharistic theology of Dix and Schmemann (D&S) and all it implies.  That’s my own position.  How I would like to discover a distillation – a ‘sound-bite’ presentation of this theology – simple enough to share with non-theological friends – whether sympathetic Evangelicals or non-believers who might be more impressed by such vision that by anything they would hear in an Evangelical sermon!

It was with such a hope in mind that I first approached Ratzinger’s The Spirit of the Liturgy.  I had various reasons for this (probably unreasonable) hope.  The D&S position seems to have much in common with that of certain Catholic theologians (e.g. de Lubac). to whom R. claims to be indebted. As regards an Evangelical audience, he knows how to write for the general reader: Evangelicals of my acquaintance were impressed (greatly to their surprise) by his book about Jesus. Finally, I had read of R.’s ‘theology of the Word’ – something that seemed to promise a degree of rapprochement with non-Catholic believers. (See Matthew Olver, ‘The Bavarian’s Surprise’, Nova et Vetera 15.1 (2017), pp.185-218)

So, was this the book I was looking for? 

Sadly not.  There were features that seemed promising.  For example, R. sets out the theological core of his thinking in the initial four chapters, not half way through, like Dix – and doesn’t, like Bouyer, wrap it up in a welter of scholarly detail.  He begins with religious sacrifice in general; then proceeds to sacrifice in the Old Testament and the New.  Thus far, all very persuasive.  But in the fourth chapter (actually Part 2, chapter 1), we get to the nub of the whole thing: the nature of our Eucharistic participation.  And, as so often, it’s there that the difficulties begin!

What do I mean?  Well, for a start, I am no longer sure R. is saying what I hoped he would be saying!  The kind of thing, I mean, that I believe Evangelicals need to hear.  That’s hardly his fault, of course!  After all, they were probably not his intended audience!  But there is also the problem that R.’s line of thought becomes so complex and confusing that I’m no longer sure what he’s trying to say – let alone whether it agrees with D&S. 

Main issue

I being with the most important thing.  (See below for a detailed analysis of the crucial eight pages (pp. 53-61)

R. offers a revelation fulfilled in steps corresponding to past, present, and future: ‘the three steps of shadow, image and reality’.  Present liturgical action corresponds, therefore, in R.’s analysis to ‘image’. Those of my readers with better knowledge of patristic writers than myself will be able to inform me of the sources for this; Ratzinger mentions only Gregory the Great (about which, see below).  Of course, the word ‘image’ can mean many things; but its placing on an ascending scale of the which the final term is ‘reality’ makes clear that our present liturgical action is qualitatively less ‘real’ than the heavenly reality, and implies that it is so in rather the way that the cult of the temple was a shadow of our liturgical action.

Compare this with what Schmemann says of the ‘symbol’:

In the early tradition, and this is of paramount importance, the relationship between the sign in the symbol (A) and that which it signifies (B) is neither a merely semantic one (A means B), nor causal (A is the cause of B) nor representative (A represents B).  We called this relationship an epiphany. ‘A is B’ means that the whole of A expresses, communicates, reveals, manifests the ‘reality’ of B (although not necessarily the whole of it) without, however, losing its own ontological reality …

Or Dix:

Caution is necessary in handling the use of such terms as ‘symbol’, ‘antitype’, ‘figure’, applied to the relation of the sacrament to the Body and Blood of Christ.  As Harnack long ago observed, ‘What we nowadays understand by ‘symbol’ is a thing which is not that which it represents; at that time ‘symbol’ denoted a thing which in some kind of way really is what it signifies’.  The ‘symbol’ manifests the secret reality.

Does R. agree with S&D on this?  Because, if he does, then it is surely the most important thing to be clear about from the outset, as it will be the semiological foundation that underpins the whole of your Eucharistic theology.  Also, it is the thing that we modern Christians (and those of us from Protestant and Evangelical backgrounds particularly) most need to hear because it is precisely what we are most at risk of being wrong about.  

Let me put things more concretely. Imagine a room light with a dimmer switch that has three settings: low, medium and full.  That, on the face of it, appears to be Ratzinger’s ‘three steps’ – or, if it isn’t, he gives us precious little reason not to make such an assumption.  Now, for D&S – if I understand their positions aright – the corresponding three settings, on the same analogy, would be, not ‘low; medium; full’, but ‘off; low/medium; full’.  The difference is paramount, because the relationship, envisaged in the latter case, between the first two terms (off; medium) is qualitatively different from the relationship between the second and third (medium; high); whereas, in the former case, it is implied to be qualitatively the same.

Curiously enough, the analogy given by St Gregory himself, to which R. refers as his authority, speaks of darkness (before dawn); early sunlight (with sun newly risen); full sunlight of mid-day.  This is so much closer to ‘off; low/medium; full’ than it is to ‘low; medium; full’ that it is tempting to believe that this is actually what R. means.  But the way his whole argument unfolds (see below) really does suggest that our liturgical ‘actio’ stands in the same relationship to the ultimate revelation as the ‘shadow’ of OT cult does to the sacrifice of Christ.   

This may or may not be R.’s intention.  But that hardly matters.  Given that my Evangelical friends are all too happy with the idea that the Eucharist (and baptism, for that matter) is – as they would say – ‘just a symbol’, that is certainly how they will read what R. is saying, without very explicit prompting on the writer’s part not to do so.  In short this is hardly the book that will convince them to adopt a more realist understanding of our Eucharistic participation in the Christian sacrifice.

Detailed Analysis of pages 53-61

Now for the analysis of the crucial chapter.

1.(pp.53-54) We begin with the three levels: shadow/past, image/present, reality/future (p.54).  These correspond to OT cult, Christ-event, final fulfilment of the eschaton.  

2.(pp.54-56) R. then announces his intention to focus on the middle ‘step’: present/image.(p.54)  This middle level then turns out to include both the events of the passion and our liturgical action (pp. 55-56).  R.’s argument here is that, whereas on an ‘outer’ level Christ’s action and our own may differ, there is an ‘inner’ level at which past and present merge: the level, that is to say, of Jesus’s conscious giving: ‘a spiritual act that takes of the bodily into itself’.(p.56)  (The introduction of ‘inner:outer’ seems to me to show some sleight of hand. It equates, as it were by default and without explicit justification, the eternal and sacred with the personal and individual, as opposed to the bodily and collective, and the ensuing argument presupposes this implicit bias.) 

3.(pp.57-59) R. continues: ‘let us go back to where we started’.(p.57) But it doesn’t. (More sleight of hand.)  R. intends to speak of the relationship between Christ’s historical action and our own liturgical one. These are now characterized in terms of the first two ‘steps’, even though the relationship between them is not at all analogous to the relationship between OT cult and Christ event earlier characterized in terms of shadow and image.  Nevertheless, the ‘three steps’ paradigm is maintained (below) in order to retain in the reader’s mind the idea of liturgical action (though not, of course, Christ-event) as the ‘image’ of something.

4.(pp.59-61) Next, the distinction is introduced between the sacrifice of an animal and the sacrifice of Christ.  The latter is the sacrifice of something ‘that is alien to us’ (i.e. to the sacrificer) and the logike latreia of Christ, which is the sacrifice of what is actually part of us/Christ (i.e. the sacrificers)(p.58).  The latter ‘bears its future within it’, and, to the extent we belong to Christ, our existence is ‘logicized’ in Christ’s latreia.   Because Christ ‘represents’ us, we are, in some sense, the ‘future’ of his ‘sacrifice’.  This is explicated in terms of a ‘moral demand’ (p.58).  R. clearly senses the danger of seeming to promote a purely ‘exemplary’ (i.e. Abelardian) understanding of sacrifice.  This he contrives to distance by emphasizing the priority of the ‘Word/logos’ to our ethical conformity to it (p.59).  The idea of the ‘three steps’ and the focus on ‘image’ is reintroduced at this point through the words ‘representation’ and ‘reality’(p.58) – to suggest that what in ritual worship is present only as image, eventually becomes reality through our future ethical conformity to the present ‘representation’ of our ritual action.

General Drift of this theology

The overall preoccupation of R.s ‘three steps’ paradigm is to ensure inclusion within the understanding of sacrifice (logike latreia) of the element of personal ethical conformity.  In other words, Christian sacrifice only becomes properly what it is (sacrifice) where embodied in the ethical lives of individuals.  This is quite like Robert Daly.  

By contrast, in D&S, sacrifice exists in some idealized space, a kind of heavenly template or blueprint (like the never-to-be-fully-realized vision of the Mosaic cult received on Sinai).  It’s as though, whether or not there were any Christians whose lives embodied it, sacrifice would, as it were, already just be there! 

Regarding R’s perspective, I am reminded of the quarrel that contemporary post-structuralist social anthropology has with the old social anthropology of Structuralism and Alliance Theory, where the latter has increasingly been reviled as ‘essentializing’ for presupposing the existence of kinship ‘systems’ prior to their institution in real-life social relationships of the individuals of the tribe in question.  

On the other hand, the danger of R.’s more embodied understanding is that it can seem to verge on a ‘moral influence’ theory of Atonement – and R. himself seems to be aware of this danger. 

It is tempting to say that this third dimension of liturgy … expresses its moral demands.

The personal ethical dimension is emphasized to the possible detriment of the bodily and collective.  After all the Church does manifest itself in a bounded community practising specific kind of relationships. Our lives have an institutional as well as a personal dimension. Does the Kingdom of God not engage the former as well as the latter?

I am rather mystified that the Holy Spirit is mentioned not once in the crucial first four chapters – though I’m not sure what significance that has, if any.

In short, I can see the benefits of R.’s perspective, though I think his presentation of it in this book lacks consistency, and resorts to occasional ‘sleight of hand’.  I do not seriously believe that by ‘image’ R. does mean the same thing as my Evangelical vicar when he speaks of Eucharist as ‘just a symbol’.  Far from it.  But I don’t think this book is likely to be helpful in demonstrating to Protestants the deficiencies of a non-sacramental worldview.  And, in any case, I don’t think my friends would come anywhere near understanding it.