“Drawing on his experience as both a practicing church musician and a scholar, Cheung Salisbury deftly explores the relationship between worship today and its historical antecedents. He asks the important question of how worship, in each age, has appealed to the senses, what its function has been, and what it might still be. This fascinating and interdisciplinary work, which will appeal to people of faith or of none, impressively imparts insights from history, music, and liturgical practice in order to help us understand why we worship, what happens when we do, and what it is for. Cheung Salisbury shows us that, although the form of worship may have undergone change in different ages, its performative function is as relevant as ever, the constant thread being the objective of prayer and praise to God and the innate necessity for human beings to engage in God-directed activity.” Rev. Dr. Jonathan Arnold Chaplain and Senior Research Fellow Worcester College, Oxford Matthew Cheung Salisbury Hear My Voice, O God Functional Dimensions of Christian Worship A PUEBLO BOOK Liturgical Press Collegeville, Minnesota www.litpress.org A Pueblo Book published by Liturgical Press Cover design by Jodi Hendrickson. Photo: Dreamstime. Excerpts from documents of the Second Vatican Council are from The Docu- ments of Vatican II, with Notes and Comments by Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox Authorities. Walter M. Abbott, S.J., General Editor. © 1966 by the America Press. Used with permission. Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture texts in this work are taken from the New Revised Standard Version Bible © 1989, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved. © 2014 by Order of Saint Benedict, Collegeville, Minnesota. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, microfilm, microfiche, mechanical recording, photocopying, translation, or by any other means, known or yet unknown, for any purpose except brief quotations in reviews, without the previous written permission of Liturgical Press, Saint John’s Abbey, PO Box 7500, Collegeville, Minnesota 56321-7500. Printed in the United States of America. 123456789 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Salisbury, Matthew Cheung. Hear my voice, O God : functional dimensions of Christian worship / Matthew Cheung Salisbury. pages cm “A Pueblo book.” ISBN 978-0-8146-6307-3 — ISBN 978-0-8146-6332-5 (ebook) 1. Liturgics. I. Title. BV176.3.S25 2014 264.009—dc23 2014000347 To students, past and present, who have helped to ask the questions. Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction xi 1. “Full and Active Participation” 1 2. The Liturgical Movement 25 3. Reformations and the Council of Trent 55 4. The Later Middle Ages 88 5. “A School for the Lord’s Service” 118 6. The Time of Jesus and the Early Church 139 Epilogue 158 Index 161 Acknowledgments I am grateful for many discussions with students and colleagues, past and present, who encountered many of the questions posed in this book in their own studies, and who have helped me along in the task of writing. My own first explorations of liturgy and wor- ship, guided by the late Professor Andrew Hughes and Fr. Daniel Donovan, are a point to which I often find myself returning, and I owe much to their teaching. I have been grateful for the support and encouragement of Professor John Harper and Dr. Sally Harper, whose AHRC-funded project The Experience of Worship in Late Medieval Cathedral and Parish Church, at Bangor University, was the source of much valuable reflection. A conversation with Mike Riley was the starting-point for the present exploration. For astute guidance and swift passage through the Press I thank Hans Christoffersen, Lauren Murphy, Colleen Stiller, and Patrick McGowan. Dr. Daniel Grimley and the Rev. Dr. Jonathan Arnold have been patient and supportive colleagues in many ways. My wife, Dr. Jennifer Rushworth, in addition to serving as Italian translator, has helped untiringly in many more ways—editorial, critical, and domestic—to bring this work to completion, and deserves a proper holiday. Oxford St. Jerome, 2013 ix Introduction Lex orandi, lex credendi The law of prayer is the law of belief. The title of this book draws upon the first verse of Psalm 64: “Hear my voice, O God, in my prayer.” It establishes clearly the axiom that worship and prayer are addressed to God. The impera- tive mood identifies the action desired on God’s part, and it sug- gests that the human mind has ways of expressing itself which are appropriate and comprehensible to its Divine Author. This is a complicated undertaking. There have been countless efforts to express how and why human attempts to address the transcendent succeed or fail. St. Augustine (d. 430), trying to establish some of the parameters, writes thus about the nature of hymns, from which we may derive an approach to the organized worship of the church more generally. Do you know what a hymn is? It is a song in praise of God. If you praise God without singing, you are not offering a hymn. If you sing but do not praise God, that is not a hymn either. If you praise some- thing else, something unconnected with the praise of God, then, even though you are singing praise, you are not singing a hymn. A hymn implies three things: it must be sung, it must consist of praise, and the praise must be offered to God. The praise of God, when sung, is called a hymn.1 Augustine’s unequivocal definition may seem overly legalistic, but it is lucid, and it assumes that praise sung to a transcendent God is effective. By contrast, Ludwig Wittgenstein (d. 1951) held that the transcendent and the mystical were in fact inaccessible through 1 The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the Twenty-First Century, vol. III/20, Expositions on the Psalms 121–150, ed. Boniface Ramsey, trans. Maria Boulding (New York: New City Press, 2004), 490. xi language and human expression: the limits of language, he argued in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, were the limits of the world.2 Anything addressed beyond the world was inexpressible. Wittgenstein’s proposition is evidently not understood to be the case by those who employ human language to praise and pray to a deity: language in this case is an opportunity for intersection between human experience and divine totality. Worship challenges the boundaries between the world and the transcendent. It also gives rise to the aphorism given above, lex orandi, lex credendi: the law of prayer [is] the law of belief. Christians understand that the teaching of the church is clearly presented in a special way in their forms of worship, and that worship is the unique, privileged means through which the church and its many members enter into a dialogue with God. Aside from the second part of this introduction, which considers the concept and practice of worship in the present day, this book is about a time when the vast majority of people in the West were Christians, and when the vast majority of Christians went to church. Why the church itself should exist is a related question to the establishment of the function of worship, because the point of the church, at least as it was understood until quite recently in the popular imagination, has not been to be one of a host of charitable organizations doing good in the world, or to help individuals explore their own relationship with the divine: in fact, the point of the church was to offer collective praise and thanksgiving to God. If this book’s title seems surprisingly individualistic, recall that many of the texts of the psalms are expressed in the first person (for instance: “I will give thanks to the Lord with my whole heart” [Ps 9:1]), and that interiorized faith, throughout history, was often articulated through such forms. Worship accepts (following our title) that God can hear the voices of the faithful, including one’s own individual voice, and that God necessarily exists. This is not a book about the sociological func- tions of religion; rather, it is about (and tries to depict through several historical episodes) the life of the church and how liturgy 2 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, proposition 5.6 ( London: Routledge Classics, 2001), 68. xii has functioned within the beliefs, doctrines, and practices of a people of faith. It is not about the mechanics of the precise forms of worship which have been observed; rather, it is about interrelation- ships between form and function, which will prove especially in- teresting when either form or function may change. THE PURPOSE OF THIS BOOK Faced with a world in which the worship of the past and present continues to resonate deeply, it is the aim of this book to enable students of a wide range of disciplines, together with those who have an interest in the history of the Christian church, to consider in particular the functional dimensions of worship, meaning the hermeneutic or significative functions or, more simply, what Chris- tian worship has meant to its contemporaries across the centuries. This task seems at first rather unnecessary, for it may be obvious in any given scenario what worship may have meant: its role should be clear from its cultural context and, more fundamentally, from what we can extract from our personal experience and knowledge of the church, liturgy, music, and culture. Yet even (and perhaps especially) within an intentionally Christian context, there is a ten- dency to assume that we know and understand the rationale, the motivations, and the understandings that buttress the liturgical practices of Christians of all epochs, because it is all too easy to equate present-day practice with that of any other historical period, and thereby equate a known and comprehensible scenario with one that is less well understood, which has perhaps emerged from another culture, churchmanship, or theology.