Reading the Liturgy

An Exploration of Texts in Christian Worship

Juliette J. Day

• Publisher: T&T Clark
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780567220134
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Teología

This is a unique contribution to discussions within churches about the provision of suitable words for liturgical worship and to debates among scholars about liturgical hermeneutics, as well as offering a new methodological paradigm for liturgical studies to inspire students and researchers. By combining insights from literary and linguistic studies with those from historical and contemporary liturgical studies, Juliette Day investigates the nature of a text in relation to unscripted speech; how authors and worshipers make use of genre, narrative and other texts; how the textuality of the liturgy as well as its ritual context affect the sort of language used in worship and what implicit meanings are conveyed in the way liturgical texts are printed in books. Day discusses the history of liturgical texts and their function, as well as liturgical genres and narratives. She examines the function of language in liturgical worship and emphasizes its meaning for readers, worshipers and speakers. Day applies insights from literary and linguistic studies to liturgical texts in a comprehensive fashion, making it accessible to a broad readership

1

Text

Our churches and our worship are text-bound. If we want to know when the service is, we are more likely to look for text on a sign or website than listen out for the ringing of a bell; when we enter a church, its character and activities are displayed on signboards, and then when entering the worship space itself we will, more often than not, be handed a hymn book and if not a prayer book then at least a leaflet containing selected texts to be spoken during worship and some rudimentary directions. Worship is constructed from books – missals, lectionaries, sacramentaries, hymnals, bibles, even text projected onto screens; the internet as well has increased opportunities for worship by providing online versions of the daily office which is identical to the printed text but in a new media. The worship event consists of texts arranged and spoken according to established patterns, sometimes accompanied by rituals which also have textual authority.

In the worship event, at least in churches with authorized liturgical texts, ministers and people read the liturgy – worship consists of a period of particular text-based activities. Despite the ‘nose in the book’ manner in which much worship is conducted, participants will be averse to calling their activity ‘reading aloud to God’ and are more likely to emphasize the entire ritual event as encounter with God which is made possible primarily through speech. With liturgical texts more than others, then, the relationship between speech and written text needs to be explored and further what distinguishes a speaker from a reader and even from a worshipper. In this chapter, I will establish some key features of a liturgical text such that in the subsequent chapters we can turn our attention to the production and interpretation of these texts and how that affects what worshippers do with them in the liturgical event.

A brief history of liturgical texts

Worshippers prioritize speech over written text as the effective component of their activity. This, in part, is related to the historical development of Christian liturgy as well as to concepts around the scriptures (written) being the word (spoken) of God and the priority given to the inspired speech of prophets in both Testaments.¹ For Christians, then, there is the paradox of asserting the primacy of speech communication, but conveying that through text. This is the case in liturgy too. Our first evidence for liturgical forms is in texts which assert that worship is not conducted by text, but by the leader using what words he chooses and to the best of his ability. This very familiar account of a Christian assembly from Justin Martyr makes the point clearly:

And on the day called Sunday, all who live in cities or in the country gather together to one place, and the memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are read, as long as time permits; then, when the reader has ceased, the president verbally instructs, and exhorts to the imitation of these good things. Then we all rise together and pray, and, as we before said, when our prayer is ended, bread and wine and water are brought, and the president in like manner offers prayers and thanksgivings, according to his ability, and the people assent, saying Amen; and there is a distribution to each, and a participation of that over which thanks have been given . . .²

It would be difficult to discern the precise point at which liturgy became textual. Early ‘sacramentaries’, such as that of Serapion, which we will examine in the next chapter, show that at least one bishop in the early decades of the fourth century found it helpful to have a written collection of the prayers he needed to fulfil his liturgical duties. Additionally, church orders such as the Didascalia Apostolorum, the Apostolic Tradition and the Apostolic Constitutions indicate that there was a market for manuals to guide liturgical worship as well as other aspects of community life.³ The move to text, though, was not inevitable. During the fourth and fifth centuries, the episcopate attracted highly educated men who were famed for their rhetorical skills like Basil of Caesarea, Gregory Nazianzus, Ambrose of Milan and Augustine of Hippo, for whom eloquent and fluent public speech without a text was the hallmark of their craft. Sermons of the finest preachers were taken down in shorthand as they were preached and then would be refined by the preacher for collation and circulation, but the evidence for this happening to liturgical texts is non-existent.⁴ If anything, liturgical texts begin as an aide-mémoire prior to the liturgical event and not a record of it afterwards, and this can be seen especially in the Western and Roman church which developed a tradition of variable thematic introductions to the Eucharistic prayer which otherwise contained a fixed sequence of topics. The creativity of the Roman bishops, especially, can be seen in the early sacramentaries where multiple prefaces and collects for each Sunday and feast of the year were collected together from libelli, or pamphlets, preserved in the Lateran library.⁵ Although the contents of these sacramentaries clearly reveal that they were composed by different authors, some of whom can be clearly identified on stylistic grounds, either the libelli did not preserve the name or the compilers did not think it important to attach names to them. These sacramentaries are, though, simply compendiums and not books for use in the liturgy; their arrangement and variety indicate that they were intended to provide models for bishops and priests who would still be expected to improvise. This is evident even in the late fifth century as we can see in Gregory of Tours’ (538–94) praise for Sidonius Apollonaris, Bishop of Clermont Ferrand (d. c. 487):

The holy Sidonius was so eloquent that he generally improvised what he wished to say without any hesitation and in the clearest manner. And it happened one day that he went by invitation to a fête at the church of the monastery which we have mentioned before, and when his book, by which he had been wont to celebrate the holy services, was maliciously taken away, he went through the whole service of the fête improvising with such readiness that he was admired by all, and it was believed by the bystanders that it was not a man who had spoken there but an angel.⁶

Although clearly not an eyewitness account, it does indicate how much the oral was prized even if it was accepted that some text was required.

Authoritative liturgical texts emerge alongside the consolidation of episcopal, and especially papal, power. The ‘Book of Pontiffs’ (Liber Pontificalis) makes several anachronistic references to papal authority for the introduction of liturgical units into what the compilers presumed was a pre-existing text; however, it is in relation to the liturgical reforms of Gregory I (c. 540–604) that personal, liturgical and textual authority come together. Gregory himself notes that the Canon of the Mass was compiled by a scholasticus (scribe) sometime before his election:⁷ this presumes liturgical performance based on authoritative texts. Liturgical reforms from then on are text-based: Charlemagne sends to Pope Hadrian for an authoritative sacramentary to provide the basis for his reforms in 785–6; among the Protestant reformers Cranmer’s express aim was to provide one book for the whole country; the Council of Trent abolished all but the most ancient liturgical texts in preference to the one approved there. A counter-move among some reform movements is also evident in the return to oral composition in worship, although even here the abolition of liturgical texts only served to assert the primacy of the biblical text.

Once text-based liturgy becomes normative, the exponential growth of different liturgical books seems to have followed soon after. There are books of antiphons for the choir, of gospels for the deacons, office books for monks, pontificals for bishops.⁸ The multiplication of liturgical books is related to the multiplication of ministries in the church and, just as they undoubtedly assisted the efficient conduct of worship, they were also indicators of status when only those authorized to use a particular book owned or had access to it. Even today, Roman Catholic and Anglican deacons receive a book of gospels at ordination as a sign of their authority to read the gospel in the liturgy. The laity, too, were not immune from a text-based prayer life: Books of Hours contained shortened offices taken from the monastic context and were the foundation of domestic piety for a certain class, primarily of women, for whom the possession of a richly illuminated book was a status symbol. Images in such books of a woman, often the recipient, seated at prayer using the very same book that she has in her hands vividly assert the primacy of text and reading in private as well as public worship.⁹ It is in light of this multiplicity of books, ministries and ‘liturgical power’ that Cranmer’s radical and democratizing one-volume Book of Common Prayer should be considered.

After the decisive shift from oral to written liturgical texts, the next great upheaval was the invention of printing which permitted a greater number of people to have access to the books and to a large extent removed the imprecision caused by inaccurate copying which was a feature of manuscripts. Between then and the last twenty years, the only comparable change is in electronic publishing and internet resources, but the impact of that on liturgical texts and on worship has still to be worked out. It could be said though that this new media has highlighted the ephemeral nature of much liturgical text. Liturgical texts are collected together Sunday by Sunday, printed on a leaflet handed out before worship and recycled immediately after. The return of the libellus perhaps! The scraps of early prayer formulae have only been uncovered by chance discoveries in monastic libraries, the Canon put together by a Roman scholasticus, and even the impractical books listed by Cranmer have disappeared.¹⁰ Once a liturgical text has no use in a worship event it is soon discarded and replaced by a current one. Paul Bradshaw emphasized what liturgical texts share with some other types of texts, especially those intended for performance (i.e. Shakespeare’s plays), that the content does not remain fixed for all time. To this genre he gave the name ‘living literature’, which is identified by ‘the fact that it circulated within a community, forming a part of its heritage and tradition, but underwent periodic revision and rewriting in response to changing historical and cultural circumstances’.¹¹ This is a process which may affect contemporary texts just as much as it seems to be displayed by historic liturgical texts but, also, we shall argue in the remainder of this book, liturgical texts share textual features evident in all texts. To prepare for those investigations, though, we first need to establish what we mean by ‘text’.

What is a text?

Etymologically, ‘text’ (Latin: textus) is something which is woven together, and this observation has proved useful in recent discussions of what a text is as it draws our attention not just to an object, but to the product of an activity. It also forces us to think of the composite nature of the product, a weaving together of different verbal elements to produce a new ‘thing’.

A text exists at the surface, that is the page, or book, or scrap of paper. It is constituted by words placed in connection to each other so as to produce potentially meaningful units. The means of production characteristic of a text is writing, inscriptions of symbols (letters) on a page; this act of writing endues a thought or speech with the potential for permanence, or may even replace speech entirely. A written word need not be remembered because it can be returned to for as long as the text which contains it exists. Writing, and therefore text production, is a purposed activity, it requires an intention to commit to a permanent form. The words of speech disappear as soon as they are spoken as Walter Ong so memorably put it, ‘When I pronounce the word “permanence”, by the time I get to the “-nence”, the “perma-” is gone and has to be gone.’¹² The recall of speech is left to chance, whereas a text is theoretically always open to the possibility of immediate retrieval.

Although I have suggested that a text is the product of an activity, at the point of reception that activity is masked, indeed it is normal to read a text oblivious of the producer, her drafts and the staring into space hunting for the next word or phrase. Once produced, a text has a life of its own which just as often as not relates to other texts as to the world. It cannot, like speech, clarify in different words what the author meant to say and its interpretation is dependent upon the reader. The fixity of the form, that is the visual and physical inscription of words, does not imply fixity of meaning, so the text is always the location of a series of transactions. The transaction between author and reader can only take place at the surface level, but its meaning is only g...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• 1   Text
• 2   Authorship
• 3   Genre
• 4   Narrative
• 5   Intertextuality
• 6   Language
• 7   Paratext
• 8   Worship
• Bibliography
• Index