Christ the Liturgy William O. Daniel, Jr. Thesis submitted to the University of Nottingham for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy March 2013 For Susan Keefe (1954 – 2012) and Frank Valdez Synopsis This thesis is a constructive work in theology. The aim is to show the centrality of liturgy for theological investigation, exposing how liturgical action at once shapes and gives rise to theological articulation and also manifests an implicit theology. The meaning is in the making, as it were, and this thesis seeks to show the descriptive nature of theology and liturgy as that which makes all theology possible. What is liturgy? Following the earliest usage of leitourgia in the ancient world, and especially as articulated by Saint Paul, Clement of Rome, Ignatius of Antioch, and Irenaeus, I show that the Church’s earliest articulation of liturgical action bears an implied ontology of participation, namely in the singular liturgical action of Christ. Liturgy is not, therefore, to be defined or understood as “the work of the people,” but rather as the “work of the One for the sake of the many,” in which all of creation participates. I argue that the human is to be understood as a liturgical animal who by virtue of her being(-)created is incorporated into the Liturgy God is. I also argue that liturgy names the inter-offering of the Persons of the Trinity, whereby each hypostasis exists as mutually constituting and constituted. The human’s participation in this liturgical action is a participation of the whole person, mediated by the materials and movements involved in the liturgical action—liturgy as the mediation of the divine economy. I also show how late medieval liturgical reforms issue a gradual and unwarranted relegation of the laity’s involvement in the liturgical action. Although inadvertent, this continual extraction of lay participation serves to secularize their role and extract them from the economy to which the liturgy is meant to assimilate. All of this is to expose how the liturgical action, which was vastly influential to the social imaginary of the medieval world, construes and conditions the human more and more along a secular line. Additionally, it is to recover the essential nature of liturgical action for social construction. Indeed, liturgical action as social construction—the embodying of the reciprocal and mutually constituting life of God in whose image the human is created and to whose Being, through Christ the Liturgy, the human has been assimilated, is being- assimilated, and will be assimilated. Christ the Liturgy 6 Acknowledgements I thank Professor John Milbank who facilitated my postdoctoral research in theology and for his encouragement in the unraveling direction of this thesis. I am grateful to Simon Oliver and Catherine Pickstock for their generous and careful criticism of the thesis, which has proved immensely beneficial for its current form and my continued research and writing. I am especially grateful to Susan Keefe, without whom this thesis would not have been possible. Her direction of my studies at Duke Divinity School, her friendship, and her fruitful criticism of my work during my time at both Duke Divinity School and the University of Nottingham will never be forgotten. I am deeply saddened by her unexpected death this past year, which is a tremendous loss to the Church Catholic. She was the most selfless person I have ever known and I am grateful to dedicate this thesis to her memory. I thank Steven Hoskins and Henry Spaulding who first taught me how to do theology and why I should. I am grateful to Stanley Hauerwas who was so influential in my studies at Duke Divinity School. I thank the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship for providing further avenues for dialogue, which enabled much of this thesis to develop. As part of the Institutes’ work, and for their gracious reading and discussion of the ideas contained herein, I thank D. Stephen Long, Michael Budde, James K. A. Smith, and all who participated in their seminars. I thank also my friends and interlocutors who have challenged my reading, writing, and theological rigor. I am especially grateful to: Frank Valdez, Hugh Cruse, Bill Duryea, Elizabeth Bass, Richard Eatman, Steven Peay, Thomas Holtzen, Arnold Klukas, Kyle Bennett, and all others who may have entertained my continuous discussions on liturgy and action. Last, but not least, I thank Amanda and Wyles and Aydah. They have endured the most from my research and writing and all the time away from home it has caused. I am eternally grateful to Amanda for her faithful encouragement and support and to Wyles and Aydah who constantly distracted me to help me realize what I am really writing about. I am also grateful to my parents Bill and Fay, and my in-laws, Jim and Kathy, who have Christ the Liturgy been a constant source of encouragement, more so than perhaps they will ever know. 8 Contents Abbreviations Introduction i 1 A Genealogy of Liturgy 1 2 Divine Liturgy and the Epistemological Crisis 41 3 Being-in-the-Liturgy 85 4 Deranging the Senses 131 5 Invoking the Secular 177 Conclusion 221 Bibliography 227 Abbreviations ANF The Ante-Nicene Fathers. Translations of the Writings of the Fathers down to A.D. 325. Edited by Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson. Edinburgh, 1866-72. 10 vols. Peabody: Hendrickson Publishers, 1999. NPNF The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church. Edited by Philip Schaff and Henry Wace. Buffalo and New York, 1886-90. First Series: 14 vols. Second Series 14 vols. Peabody: Hendrickson Publishers, 1999. PG Patrolgiae cursus completus. Series graeca. Edited by J. P. Migne. Paris, 1857-66. 161 vols. PL Patrolgiae cursus completus Series latina. Edited by J. P. Migne. Paris, 1844-64. 221 vols. Introduction “For it is an instinct of human beings, from childhood, to engage in mimesis….” ––Aristotle “Annihilate the Selfhood in me, be thou all my life!” ––William Blake This essay is about liturgy, especially as it regards the formation of the human imaginary. It is common today to speak of liturgy as “the work of the people,” as the work of gathered persons in the worship of the church. Following the liturgical renewals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the awareness and importance of the laity’s (non-)involvement in the liturgical action was heightened in new and important ways, and a more faithful account of the whole church’s involvement came to the fore. This concern was nothing new. This was in large part the concern of the fifteenth and sixteenth century reformers as well. Of seminal importance in each season of the church is the contrasting of clergy and lay functions within the liturgical action. How to account for the church as a whole body of actors involved in the liturgical drama, not simply an elite group of clerical engineers for a conglomerate of untrained or ill-prepared consumers, stands at the fore. The questions that were posed focused their attention on the apparent chasm that had been created between the layperson and cleric, of which the twentieth century saw a plethora of pamphlets, essays and conferences, culminating with Vatican II with a watershed of theological examination that ensued and continues to this day. Leitourgia, ever since its use in the translation of the Septuagint, has been broadly understood as and related to the worship of the Temple, naturally Christ the Liturgy resulting in its employment as that which refers to the worship of the church catholic. This understanding of liturgy continues to present day; however, the need for a more narrow definition was deemed necessary by the various liturgical movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which has more recently gained even greater attention to account for the formation of human desire on the whole––the human as homo-liturgicus, and to raise questions of hierarchy within the church and how Christ's body––historical, sacramental, and ecclesial––is constituted.1 This essay is not an attempt to retrace well trodden ground but is an effort to recapture non-nostalgically what the church throughout the ages has understood itself to be doing in liturgy and how liturgy is understood to inscribe itself upon the bodies of the faithful as the condition for a certain acoluthetic reasoning.2 The purpose of this essay, then, is to deal philosophically and phenomenological with the liturgical action in its historic understanding as the constituting of human nature by a mimetic relation to the singular act of God in Christ. Accordingly, Christ is the event of the human's knowing God and herself as an extension of this singular liturgical event, being incorporated into the making-present of the eternal event Christ himself is. All liturgical action is hereby rendered participatory in relation to the singular Christ-event, who is in himself the embodied, Eternal Liturgy. The first part of this work takes issue with the post-Enlightenment definition of liturgy as "the work of the people." This understanding of liturgy, the first use of which seems to have been during The Fourth General Council of the Alliance of The Reformed Churches holding The Presbyterian System (London, 1888), is rooted in a nominalist understanding of a divisibility of God and creation. This meaning may not at first be evident; however, to speak 1 Most notably with Henri de Lubac and Gregory Dix. 2 Robert P. Scharlemann, The Reason of Following: Christology and the Ecstatic I (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 117-130. “Acoluthetic, or Christological, reason is that form of reason in which the I of selfhood is exstantial; the inwardness of self is confronted with itself outwardly.