It is a while since I wrote anything on this blog’s primary subject, the liturgy and the Norman-English tradition. Lee on the BCP has this to say in regard to those who exclude the possibility of using medieval liturgical forms.
The subject of this article is the 1979 American Prayer Book and a book that has been written to present it to readers. We find emphasis on the wholeness of the liturgy in contrast with the more minimalist Anglican prayer books.
Here are a couple of passages dealing with the issue of medieval liturgical forms and modern liturgical forms inspired by the medieval tradition.
Perhaps my central point of disagreement with Lee is in his synthesis of Christian liturgical history and his notion of a single correct primitive pattern of Christian worship from which the past departed, to which the Reformation pointed, until ultimately recaptured by the Liturgical Renewal Movement. Following this kind of a pattern it’s inevitable that the word “medieval” will become a swear word as it represents the nadir of falling away from the primitive pattern. And such is certainly the case throughout this book. As a student of medieval liturgy, this struck me as a bit short-sighted…
It has been fashionable for some time to seek anything other than medieval liturgical shapes in the almost “dogmatised” belief that anything medieval was decadent and corrupt. This prejudice spread into the twentieth-century Roman Catholic liturgical movement.
On one hand, I fault failures in his synthesis. In particular, he falls into the trope (also found in Black’s book) that in the (Western—the East is never in view) medieval period, liturgy and its spirituality became the sole preserve of the clergy and monastic elite who alone inhabited and understood it. First, this ignores the vibrant tradition of lay liturgical spirituality represented by the Books of Hours and prymers. Second, I believe it assumes a much more educated clergy than the sources do. Latin literacy of average parochial clergy would not have been that much greater than many of their congregants requiring a different perspective on the assumed (and perhaps largely constructed) gulf between the understanding of the laity and the clergy.
The author to read is Eamon Duffy, especially but not only The Stripping of the Altars. There is historical evidence of a vigorous tradition of lay spirituality in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Inversely, we can ask the question of whether churches with other liturgical shapes are any more relevant to people in our world whose religious culture has long since disappeared.
On the other hand, such a synthesis raises again the theological problem of the Holy Spirit. If the entire body of Christendom—East and West—fell into such significant error around our fundamental worship practices, what exactly was the Holy Spirit up to with reference to the Church? Did it take a millennium-long nap and only conveniently wake up for the Western Reformation? Sorry—I have a really hard time buying it… Yes, the Liturgical Renewal Movement did some great work. Yes, there are aspects of our current prayer book that seem to better reflect the spirit of apostolic worship than our caricature of a thirteen century non-communicating High Mass. And yet, I can’t go along with the notion that the medieval liturgical experience, the spirituality that supported it, and the thinking, writing, and praying that came out of it (think Julian of Norwich, for example…) was entirely an aberration.
That is a standard argument – where the Church was before … It is impossible to claim that darkness reigned in the pre-Reformation Church, or, for that matter, in European Catholicism in the 1950’s under Pius XII (though there were already the first changes in the liturgy based on “pastoralism” at the time).
The problem in terms of getting people back to church is not the liturgy, but the fact that most of our contemporaries cannot relate in any way to what has become “church culture”.
No conclusion … but comments are welcome.
The Blue Flower 