Penetration—Permeation—Fermentation: Ponderings on the Being of Liturgy and Its Memorial Modes

Abstract

The present contribution seeks to address the following fundamental questions at the crossroads of liturgical theology and metaphysics: How is liturgy in the world? What is the fundamental mode of being of the phenomena, events, actions, and experiences commonly referred to as Christian liturgy? How can people be in the liturgy and the liturgy in them? Or is liturgy only something that is performed and not something human beings can become (part of)? How must the liturgy’s apparent ontological capacity for inclusion be understood? How is it that liturgies can include us and, reversely, that we can embody, disseminate and radiate liturgy? The proposal is to use the three interrelated concepts of penetration, permeation, and fermentation to disentangle the complexities involved in these questions and to do that by primarily relying on both a liturgical and a non-liturgical source. Hence the discussion is concretely centered around the intriguing work Qu’est-ce que la liturgie (1914) of Dom Maurice Festugière, an outstanding thinker and representative of the early Liturgical Movement, and a selection of material taken from the Ordo Missae (2008) which is currently in use in the Roman Catholic Church. On the basis of a careful conceptual analysis of these works, a case is made for embracing metaphysics in liturgical studies and theology instead of considering its import as something of the past.