Liturgy, Creation, Critique

Abstract

This article investigates the simultaneously critical and creative understanding of liturgy in a small handful of literary, theoretical, and philosophical writings of the twentieth century. Anyone who works on liturgical culture for a certain length of time risks adopting the conviction that liturgy is the key to all mythologies, invested with a unique explanatory power with respect to cultural forms and social formations. Here, however, I want to isolate an enduring tension between two contrasting notions of liturgy that may help explain its peculiar role in the shaping of modern critical thought, from John Henry Newman to Jean-Yves Lacoste (1984, 2004, 2005), whose writings place liturgy at the center of a new phenomenology of religion. On the one hand, liturgy is stable, cyclical, unchanging, constraining, conservative: embedded ritual inherently resistant to change and innovation. On the other hand, liturgy is a copious source of creative invention, evident in the proliferative aesthetic effects it exerts on cultural practice—albeit effects denied, suppressed, explained away even by the liturgical cultures that most actively and energetically promote them. I view this antagonism between constraint and copiousness as integral to the liturgical as such. And yet liturgy seems to emerge as a provocation to critical thinking and creative practice just at those moments, perhaps, when its traditionalism is most ardently defended.