Why liturgy abhors change

The case against liturgical change has usually been made by pointing to its deleterious effects. However, as Joint Editor of Oriens Gary Scarrabelotti argued in a recent address to the 25th Anniversary Conference of the Campion Fellowship, liturgical change must confront obstacles rooted in the nature of language and in the nature of the world which language seeks to describe. The following is an edited version of that address.

WHEN YOU you get angry about the names people call you, it can often mean that they have hit home.

Some time ago I was riled by an epithet hurled at people like me. A well-known Catholic journalist, Father Paul Collins MSC, had described Catholics like me as "document flashers". A "document flasher" was a conservative Catholic who rushed about furiously waving the latest Roman document under the noses of 'Vatican II' Catholics.

When I calmed down, I began to think. Perhaps Father Collins had a point. Was it the Catholic thing to be a "document flasher"? I tried to look at myself through the eyes of Father Collins. And what I saw was a ranting fellow that seemed hardly Catholic at all.

Word mania

A new kind of Catholic personality was emerging here. It was characterised by a hunger for texts. It was foreover fingering lines and stabbing out quotations. It was seized by a kind of word mania. It was especially obsessed with the latest official 'word' from the Vatican and tended to invest it with a kind of sola scriptura authority.

This is a modern pathology. It is protestant in style, though, in the ultimate unraveling of its meaning, in which we ourselves emulate the revolutionary shift from Reformation to Enlightenment, it is rationalist in content. People like me had stopped behaving as Catholics. We had, instead, much in common in our new ways with John Knox or, even more so, with Maximilian Robespierre.

Robespierrian Catholics

A Robespierrian Catholic is someone who tries to reinvent Catholicism. They (we) were exponents of a pure aggiornamentist policy. What we attempted was to make a religious culture de novo.

"Just take," we said, "old Catholic ideas and new secular forms. It's only a matter of baptising present day culture. Gregory advised Augustine to do the same. We simply assign new (old) religious meanings to present day secular forms. We change the labels while keeping our minds fixed on the underlying Christian meanings. It's elementary really. The trick is to keep your 'eye on the meanings', so to speak. You see, the meanings have been moved from the old Christian to the new secular location. So a sharp eye and a focused gaze is important, especially at the beginning. But eventually we'll get the hang of it and what seems now like an unlikely change will soon become perfectly normal."

Some of us, unlike the real Robespierre, were horrified by the results of all this. But we were held to the new course out of loyalty to the folly of official Church policies. To survive, we sought to live our faith at the level of concept. By a 'conceptualised religion' I mean a religion in which intellect knows and in which the heart - often in exquisite agony - assents. But it all happens in a vacuum empty of habit, custom, ritual, art: in a virtual encyclopedia of abstract ideas and commitments detached from - (sometimes, indeed, proudly aloof from) traditional Catholic culture.

Cultural necrophilia

Such refusing to live a Catholic life in the round does not, of course, preclude rummaging through the 'old wares shoppe' of Catholic history. We are all into heritage these days. We love picking over the pieces and taking away with us an odd assortment of bits. Rosaries, devotions, pieties, lives, miracles, tomes are in demand. But put them all together with their transcending and integrating inspiration, with the traditional liturgy of the Church, never! It seems that we prefer, to use James McAuley's phrase, "cultural necrophilia" to a flesh and blood religion.

There are a number of forces here at work, but the most interesting is the invasion of the Catholic mind by rationalism.

By rationalism I mean the attitude that man can know all that he needs to know through his unaided use of reason. Rationalism is, however, more than this. It is not merely a claim to be able to know all needful things. It is a claim to be the source of meaning itself.

This mentality, while its parentage might be traced to the Renaissance, was born at the Reformation. It sprang from the idea that man does not need an interpreter to explain Scripture. The meaning of it resides in the words alone and this can be understood by anyone who studies the text for himself. From the Reformation and the idea that each man is his own church, it was but a short step to the Enlightenment and the notion that man, without need for either Church or Scripture, could read in the 'word' of nature, by his own unassisted powers, all he needed to know.

The gods of meaning

In both cases man became the master of meaning. Rather than receiving a meaning which shed a light upon and unified things, whether it be the text of scripture or the observed phenomena of nature, man set about claiming to 'find' the meanings for himself . Without, however, the fundamental paradigm provided, in the case of the Protestant, by an authoritative tradition of interpretation and, in the case of the enlightened man, by a revelation to confirm the dimly perceived truths of natural reason, man ceased to discover the meaning of things. He began instead to give things their meaning. In other words, things came to mean what man wanted them to mean.

Nominalism

This radically subjectivist kind of 'nominalism' has come into its own only in our time. It is pre-eminently the modern way of thinking. It dominates all thought and discussion and we are all influenced by it - the ultramontane no less than his bete noir the liberal Catholic.

One manifestation of this 'nominalism' is in the philosophy of language. The theory goes like this. Language is an arbitrary construct. Words change continuously. What they refer to also changes. A word only means what we give it to mean. So at different times the one word can mean different things; and at any given time the one word can mean different things to different people simultaneously.

For example. The word dog only refers to a particular kind of animal because we happen to agree upon that for the moment. Dog is just a temporarily convenient label. The same logic applies not just to words, of course, but to the whole rich world of human symbolism in literature, in art, in architecture, and naturally in religion. Consequently, we can rearrange the language and symbols of, for example, religious worship at any time and introduce a whole new set of words and symbols to mean the same things as we meant before.

The problem is that the 'philosophy' being offered here is only half true. Words are, in a sense, artificial human constructions. We certainly could use entirely different words from those we use now for the things we wish to mean. No problem about that. However, once we 'make' a word, if that's what we do, words take on a life of their own so that the meanings behind them cannot easily be obliterated by giving them a new reference.

Let's take a look, for instance, at the word dog. It certainly is possible to say that we could have called a 'dog' by another name. However the word which has been delivered to contemporary language by long customary use, and a process of gradual changes or developments, has now assumed a life of its own. When we use the word dog we think immediately of that hairy creature with wagging tail: its peculiar smells, its slavering gob, its panting breath, its random couplings, its alternate personae of dumb devotion and blood lust. In a word: a dog.

Experiment in language

All very well, you'll say. But these layers of meaning and image conjured up by the term dog could just as easily have been conjured up by another and we can, if we want, change the words we use for this animal, and for the complex of ideas attached to the very notion of it. Well, let's try it right now. Let's conduct an experiment. Let's play the nominalist game and give the letters a spin. From now on this stinking, slobbering, randy, sometime child-minder and killer will be called god. And just for the heck of it, why not call the All Holy One Dog.

Let's just digest that for a moment...

  The holiness of words

If your reaction to all this is irritation or anger, then you can count your reactions as perfectly normal. But why do we feel like this? It is because of the meanings attached to the words which no nominalism can change except by a revolution in the universe of meaning.

I've just said that meanings are attached to words. But attached is not enough. The meanings have actually grown into the words and taken them over. Impregnated with meaning, words undergo metamorphosis. What appeared to us an arbitrary human artifice turns out to have developed a reality all of its own. Words take meaning and come alive; they assume something of the original Creative Idea which generated the creatures named:

 "And now from the clay of the ground, all the beasts that roam the earth and all that flies through the air were ready fashioned, and the Lord God brought them to Adam to see what he would call them; the name Adam gave to each living creature is its name still. Thus Adam gave names to all the cattle, and all that flies in the air, and all the wild beasts." (Gen. II, 19-21)

With words, therefore, man reaches out to touch the works which the creating Word has made. With that touch the words take their meaning. With that touch the relativity of the human word becomes transformed into objectivity and significance: man provides the word, but its significance and objectivity come from beyond time and space from the source of all being and meaning. Meaning does not come from man, but from God; and so it is with language. Man does not supply its meanings. Rather man provides materials which take their meaning, through the created order, from God. This is why traditional poets have often thought of words as holy things. Man does not give meaning; he receives it.

Recognising this order is one of the sources of man's freedom. He does not have to burden himself with giving meanings to things. They have been supplied. Freedom involves rejoicing in this immense gift. Man, however, becomes a slave when he must supply the meanings for himself. And what a terrible slavery it is for the meanings which modern man seems obliged to give are always dissolving away. Man condemns himself to a desperate clinging to words (like the Protestant), or to his proudly constructed intellectual life (like the Enlightened man), struggling always to capture in inexpressibly fragile vessels the evanescent liquor of human knowledge. Yes, for modern man the choice seems to be between words and despair. But very often it is both together.

Drawing together these different threads, it seems to me that liturgy abhores change precisely because of the inherent contradications involved in trying to manipulate the meanings of words and symbols which are already deeply ingrained with meanings.

For word-bound nominalist Catholics - and that means us! - there really is no such thing as liturgy, traditionally understood. Given that words, and all other symbols together with them, can mean whatever we want them to, community meal, for example, can now mean sacrifice - click! - just like that. We turn the priest around, call him president and - poof! - with a wave of the nominalist wand we make the whole thing mean redeeming immolation.

It's a great theory. But the nominalist wand is only a child's toy. When words and symbols change, old meanings go out the window and new ones take their place, willy nilly. Different words and different symbols do not mean what discarded words and symbols mean. They mean different things.

In religion different words and symbols make a different religion and a different kind of people.

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