Genuine Catholic liturgical sense

The Heresy of Formlessness: The Roman Liturgy and its Enemy, by Martin Mosebach (translated from the German by Graham Harrison); San Francisco, Ignatius Press, 2006; 210 pp.

Reviewed by Gary Scarrabelotti

This is a remarkable book and its author has a remarkable gift.

This is the power of penetrating our ordinary – and sometimes out-of-the-ordinary – actions to the meanings that lie behind them. Such is the work especially of the novelist, the essayist, and the poet. Martin Mosebach is all of these, and, after having read and then re-read this book, I lamented my ignorance of his native German and the fact that his other work is closed to me.

Outwardly The Heresy of Formlessness appears to be a set of stand-alone essays strung together more or less loosely by the theme of liturgy. At first, I thought, there are some brilliant pieces here, but the whole lacks sufficient unity, the later essays appear to tail-off toward the end. On a second reading I took a different view. This is a work of art. The trailing essays with their apparent repetitions and superfluities restate and reinforce while, with the introduction of a new subject, the Missal as icon, the book closes with a magnificent recapitulation and finale.

Second time around, I was bowled over.

Mosebach’s central proposition is that a liturgy in which we separate form from content is a liturgy that, ultimately, disintegrates. A liturgy that changes form changes meaning; and a liturgy in which we deny significance to form is a liturgy that can sustain no meaning however much we might want it to signify one thing or another. One cannot take a form and declare it to have any meaning. Forms only bear the meanings native to them. To force the issue destroys the form and loosens our connection with the meanings it once contained.

For an artist who deals with concrete things – “I am a Stone Age man” – and who reads their surface for the meanings they contain – “all matter is so full of spirit and life that they simply pour from it” – the abstract dividing of form and content makes it impossible to understand what the senses experience. This is not a problem just for artists. It is a problem for theologians, philosophers, and scientists. To insist upon knowing things strictly at the abstract level – which is what is involved in saying that form is inferior and disposable while only content matters – is an implicit denial of sensory experience as the basis of human knowledge and of the materiality with which truth, both natural and supernatural, has been embodied: “He who sees me sees the Father.” We do not rely on pure abstraction to know God. We have a flesh and blood Christ to deal with – and one who is still among us, and can be seen in the liturgy.

Extending the implications of this, Mosebach argues that the question What constitutes a valid Mass? is not a liturgical question properly speaking. God is not confined to some valid minimum formula beyond which He does not act in, or is not present in, the liturgy – a misconceived notion which has led people to conclude that beyond the “essential core” of the Mass lies a field of non-essential, changeable, and ultimately disposable elements. If God is present in liturgy at all, He is present in the whole liturgy, and He is present wholly in that liturgy. To participate in the liturgy is not to be present in some abstract way with the Word. It is not to intersect immaterially with it, so to say, at some fine geometrical point at the centre of the consecration formula. It is, rather, to encounter the historical Jesus in the flesh, to reach out from the crowd and to touch the hem of His cloak, just as really as if we were stretching out a hand from the jostling crowd as He passed us by down some dusty lane in Galilee. We see Him, we hear Him, we receive Him in a single, completed liturgical action – which brings us to the question of the rubrics.

The purpose of the rubrics is to form the priest as a human personality to become invisible within – or perhaps one should say “transparent to” – the liturgical action in order that the persona who acts in, and through, him becomes visible to the worshippers: hence the vestments, the sacred furnishings, the highly disciplined orchestration of the ritual actions. The person of the celebrant disappears and the Son walks among us again. How wonderful!

And, finally, the great point. If it is God who acts in the liturgy then those actions are His and not ours, and consequently they cannot be changed, at least not changed arbitrarily. Liturgy comes to us not as the “work of human hands” but from God himself. Liturgy is, in fact, a revelation of God no less than that contained in Scripture.

“Jesus and his disciples, and the first Christians, were aware of the fact that if they were fully to grasp Jesus’ message, it was not enough to hand on his teachings faithfully … If these teachings were to have their effect, it was essential for the disciples to have the experience and know the influence of Jesus, bodily present. And if the liturgy is to be this manifestation of the bodily Jesus, essential for the Christian life, it must be possible to experience it as something that is not a human artifact but something given, something revealed. Thus Basil the Great … regarded the Mass as a revelation that is just as great as Holy Scripture, and consequently he strictly forbade anyone to alter or refashion it.”

To the modern, ratiocinating Western Catholic this idea, central to the liturgical thinking of the Eastern Church, would come as a shock. The greater the shock, the more powerful the instinct to reject it, and, I suggest, the more powerful the instinct, the greater the measure of how far we have travelled in the West from a proper understanding of our liturgy. It is not an idea that most Western Catholics – whether liberal, conservative, or traditionalist – can easily accommodate. Embedded, nevertheless, in this book – as also in Joseph Ratzinger’s Spirit of the Liturgy – is the conviction that to recover in the West the genuine Catholic liturgical sense will require a turning to the East that is both ritual and theological.

The Heresy of Formlessness is, to my mind, one of the most powerful, accessible, and effective books written on the liturgical question. If you want to understand it, you cannot ignore this book.

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