The pastors assembled in the 2005 Synod of Bishops stated that "the Christian faithful need a fuller understanding of the relationship between the Eucharist and their daily lives. Eucharistic spirituality is not just participation in Mass and devotion to the Blessed Sacrament. It embraces the whole of life." If we extend the scope of this statement, and put liturgy in the place of the Eucharist, we have a working definition of liturgcal spirituality.
In this interview, David Fagerberg explains liturgical spirituality and his pick of the five best books on the subject.
David Fagerberg is Professor Emeritus of the Department of Theology at the University of Notre Dame. His area of study is liturgical theology – its definition and methodology – and how the Church’s lex orandi (law of prayer) is the foundation for her lex credendi (law of belief). He is the author of Liturgical Dogmatics and Liturgical Mysticism.
- Christ the Life of the Soul
by Blessed Columba Marmion O.S.B. - Introduction to the Spiritual Life
by Louis Bouyer - For the Life of the World
by Alexander Schmemann - On Liturgical Theology
by Aidan Kavanaugh OSB - The Wellspring of Worship
by Jean Corbon
Can you start by defining liturgical spirituality?
Good question, and one I continue to ask myself. My background is in liturgical studies – liturgical theology, to be precise – and this field constantly asks “What happens in liturgy?” I think liturgical spirituality reframes and refocuses the question as “What happens to us in liturgy?”
The spiritual tradition has always treated the Church and the soul as two operational theatres of grace. For example, the bride in the Canticle of Canticles is sometimes understood to represent the Church, and sometimes to represent the individual soul. Well, similarly, it seems to me, the liturgy has two operational theatres. We usually talk about the liturgy that happens in the visible, sacramental, hierarchical body of Christ, but there must also be liturgical impact upon the invisible, spiritual, personal soul. Liturgical spirituality is spirituality that swims in the ocean of liturgy. It is liturgy that “gets inside” a person, if I can put it that way. The river of liturgy flows from the heavenly throne (an image in the book of Revelation); it first pools up in the Church (I’m picturing a baptismal font now); then it overflows its lip to flood our personal lives. Christians are living stones being built into God’s spiritual temple (1 Peter 2:5); the temple is for liturgical adoration.
“What happens in liturgy?” I think liturgical spirituality reframes and refocuses the question as “What happens to us in liturgy?”
My objective is to connect liturgy to life. Imagine four altars for liturgy: the wood altar of Calvary, the stone altar of the Church, the spiritual altar of our hearts, and the celestial altar in heaven. Christ is at work on all of them; the cross is connected to all of them; the paschal mystery is present in all of them, even though one is bloody, one is sacramental, one is interior, and one is supernal.
You have written several books on liturgical spirituality. Could you give us an overview of your work in this area?
“Overview” suggests a view from above, and I didn’t have any plan overseeing (super-vising) my writing. But I can answer it with a “retrospection” – a look backward.
Thirty years ago I titled my dissertation “What is Liturgical Theology?” and ever since then, I have been adding clay to the bust I began sculpting. Theologia Prima (2003) was a rework of my dissertation, minus all the stuff a grad student puts in to impress the reading committee. It tried to thicken the idea of liturgy, and say that while it is an activity of man, it is the work of God.
But it seemed people were still missing the point, so the idea of theology had to be thickened, too. Eastern Orthodox asceticism came to my aid (On Liturgical Asceticism, 2013). The goal of the ascetical life is union with God, and asceticism called that theologia. Apparently, theology doesn’t begin in the card catalogue, it begins with prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. Asceticism capacitates a person for liturgy.
Does this make any impact on living life? We would hope so. Consecrating the World (2016) tried to apply liturgy to daily spirituality. And Liturgical Mysticism (2020) looked deeper into the spiritual state of the liturgical person. Since liturgy is everywhere, I thought to look at 36 dogmas through a liturgical keyhole (Liturgical Dogmatics, 2022). For example, liturgical anthropology understands Adam and Eve as cosmic priests, and the Fall was the forfeiture of their liturgical career.
Providence is always seen more easily in the rear view mirror, as I discovered while rummaging through articles to choose for publication in a collection this fall (The Liturgical Cosmos: The World through the Lens of the Liturgy
1.
The first book that you have selected is Blessed Columba Marmion’s Christ Life of the Soul. St. John Paul II said that “he left us an authentic treasure of spiritual teaching for the Church of our time.” Why have you chosen this book in particular?
I can’t remember who introduced me to the writings of Marmion. You do one kind of reading in graduate school, where a professor assigns a text. You do a different kind of reading when a friend introduces you to another friend in his footnotes. That was how I found Marmion.
There is a prejudiced view of the East-West split in Christendom that divvies up the tradition into camps, the way neighbourhood kids divide into teams. According to this convention, deification (theosis) is supposed to be the property of the Eastern Church, the West having given up its lease on the idea sometime in the dark ages. The Latins are thought to celebrate Good Friday, while the Orthodox celebrate the Transfiguration; Westerners are redeemed from culpable guilt, while Easterners are transfigured by the light of Mount Tabor; the Orthodox follow the lead of monastic ascetics while Latin Christians are under the spell of scholasticism.
I found Marmion fascinating because here was a western, Irish, pre-Vatican II, Thomistically trained Benedictine who made comments that sounded characteristic of what the above scheme says was abandoned by the West. Marmion is a teacher for our time because he is a master chef mixing ingredients of deification, sacrament, asceticism, eternal life, trinitarian mystery, and imitation of Christ. “What in fact is a Christian?” he asks, and replies with the patristic answer “Christianus, alter Christus.” The Christian life is more than a list of observances and a compilation of doctrines, he says. The Christian life is “the life of Christ within us, and all that Christ has appointed to maintain this life in us; it is the Divine life overflowing from the bosom of the Father into Christ Jesus and, through Him, into our soul.”
Such a spirituality inevitably leads Marmion to the liturgy (or, perhaps, such a view of liturgy inevitably leads to spirituality). The mysteries which Jesus lived during his earthly sojourn have become our liturgical mysteries, to be reproduced in our hearts. Christ did not come so we could have rubrics, and have them abundantly, but so we could have life! And since he is the way, the truth, and the life, he came so that we could have him, himself, in abundance.
2.
The author of the second book, Fr Louis Bouyer, was a bit like John Henry Newman. He was a Lutheran pastor who was received into the Catholic Church and became an Oratorian. You have written the introduction to a recent edition of his Introduction to the Spiritual Life. What can this book teach us about liturgical spirituality?
Bouyer has a special place for me. I was also a Lutheran pastor, and the way to my reception into the Catholic Church was paved by three authors. Bouyer was one, because he could speak to specific hurdles that I, as a Lutheran faced. Chesterton was another, because he could speak to general prejudices that Protestants hold. The third author, I note with amusement, was myself. I wrote myself into Catholicism in chapter five of my dissertation (an existential effect not often produced by dry, doctoral theses).
Appreciation for the exhaustive wisdom of Bouyer has never waned among some; it is returning for others, and is growing, in my opinion. He was accomplished in liturgical studies, patristics, ecclesiology, the Fathers, Scripture and its interpretation, cosmology, ethics, and mystery theology. I should revisit that first entry. Not only did he know the history of liturgy, and the methods being used to investigate it, I find that he thinksas a liturgical theologian. Therefore his spirituality is a liturgical spirituality.
The opening sentence to the original preface to this book reads, “This book is a manual, a manual for practical use.” Bouyer knows his history; he knows his theology; but he confesses to want this book to help practically. Help what? Prayer, the sacramental life, asceticism of the cross, vocations, purification, and the mystical life. I have simply quoted from his chapter titles. The notion of “mystical” has been warped in some popular use, and Bouyer wants to bring it back to its biblical, liturgical and spiritual homeland. The mysticism of a Christian revolves around a Person. This Person is experienced in his mystical body when comes to us in the hierarchical and mystical liturgy.
Spirituality has a cost. Bouyer wrote elsewhere, “Christ died for us, not in order to dispense us from dying, but rather to make us capable of dying efficaciously.” But spirituality has its reward. “The sacramental world is essentially a link between two other worlds, the world of eternity, in which the risen Christ lives, and the world of today, in which we have to live and achieve in ourselves the life of the risen.”
The mysteries which Jesus lived during his earthly sojourn have become our liturgical mysteries, to be reproduced in our hearts. Christ did not come so we could have rubrics, and have them abundantly, but so we could have life!
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3.
You have called the authors of the third and the fourth books your mentors. What can you tell us about Fr Alexander Schmemann, of the Orthodox Church of America, and Fr Aidan Kavanaugh OSB.
My thesis advisor, Aidan Kavanagh, introduced me to the work of Alexander Schmemann when I first arrived at graduate school. He was acting dean, so not teaching any courses, and I begged him for a directed readings course. He agreed on condition that we read everything we could by Schmemann. I say that the rest of my doctoral education was trying to catch the number of the bus that hit me.
Most scholarship, I think, deals with liturgy in one of two ways. In the first, liturgy is an area marked off for exploration. Biblical theology talks about the Bible, moral theology talks about morality, and liturgical theology is thought to be an investigation of matters classified as liturgical – from sacramentaries to processions to vestments. (But usually not sacraments; they get classified in systematics because they are thought too important to be left to liturgical studies.) In the second, the scholar has an idea of worship already formulated in his head, and then turns to liturgy to find examples of what he has in mind. If real theology belongs only in the academy, then liturgy provides straw for an academic Rumpelstiltskin to spin into real theological gold.
A totally different approach was opened by these two thinkers, with whom I am proud to have my name associated. Liturgical theology is something the academy receives, it is not something the academy produces. Liturgical theology comes from the heart of the Church, it does not spring from the head of a university professor.
So Schmemann said liturgical theology is “first of all and above everything else, the attempt to grasp the theology as revealed in and through liturgy.” He calls liturgy “the ontological condition for theology.” And Kavanagh said liturgy produces a deep change in the lives of those who participate in it, which requires an adjustment. “It is the adjustment which is theological in all this. I hold that it is theology being born, theology in the first instance. It is what tradition has called theologia prima.”
Kavanagh died in 2006. He was a monk of St. Meinrad’s Benedictine Archabbey in Indiana, studied in Trier, Germany, became associate professor of liturgy at Notre Dame in 1966, and in 1974 went to Yale Divinity School where he finished his career. I regret that I never met Schmemann in person. We missed each other by sixty miles (the distance from Yale to St. Vladimir’s) and one year (he died in 1983, the year after I began my studies). He was educated at, and then taught at, famed St. Sergius Orthodox Theological Institute in Paris; he came to St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Seminary in New York in 1951, and was named dean in 1962 until his death.
Why have you chosen Schmemann’s For the Life of the World from among his various books?
Schmemann’s work has an amazing shelf life. So many authors go stale, and are removed to a discount bin within a few years after their death, but Schmemann wrote this book 59 years ago and it is still being sold regularly (and has been translated into 11 languages). Schmemann was the face of Orthodoxy to North Americans for decades, and would accept almost any invitation to lecture, teach, and converse. This book began as a series of lectures to be delivered to the 19thQuadrennial Ecumenical Student Conference in Athens, Ohio. Their theme was mission, i.e. the relationship between Church and world, the relationship between liturgy and life. Schmemann delivered on that topic.
This gives the book its two commendatory qualities. (1) It is a description of sacraments to an audience that did not necessarily come from sacramental churches. It therefore speaks with freshness. And (2) it connects sacraments to the spiritual life. Instead of explaining sacraments by going down (into historical practices, and into scholastic jargon), it goes out – into the world. Christ died “for the life of the world.” What could that possibly mean?
It turns out that the Church’s relationship with the world is more complicated than we think. Schmemann identifies two opposing groups that each get it wrong. First, “spiritualists,” whom he describes as living apart from a world they disdain. They endure the surrounding secular world by gritting their teeth, but think it has no spiritual significance. Second, he identifies “activists,” whom he describes as taking the world as an end in itself. They try to help the world by moral activism and social justice projects. Schmemann thinks these are flip sides of the same mistake. So he concludes, “The only purpose of this book has been to show, or rather to signify that the choice between these two reductions of Christianity – to religion and to secularism – is not the only choice, that in fact it is a false dilemma.”
The world is an enemy (it killed Christ, after all!) but the world is being redeemed, so the spiritual Christian who is fed by the sacraments finds he can bless God for the world. Man is homo sapiens and homo faber, that is true. “But first of all homo adorans. The first, the basic definition of man is that he is the priest. He stands in the center of the world and unifies it in his act of blessing God … The world was created as the ‘matter,’ the material of one all-embracing Eucharist, and man was created as the priest of this cosmic sacrament.”
4.
You have a personal connection with the fourth book on the list. You were studying under Fr Aidan Kavanaugh while he was preparing it.
Yes, I worked out that chronology once for self-interest. Kavanagh wrote the first half of the book for some 1980 lectures. I did my directed readings with him in 1982. During that year he delivered the lectures that make up part two of the book, and they were published together in 1984. I offered to type the handwritten manuscript for the publisher because I wanted to get my hands on the text. I wish I had photocopied a few pages for my souvenir: he gave to me several pads of yellow legal size paper with his distinctive handwriting on it. No corrections, no cross outs, no insertions. He would sit and think. Then he would write.
I could probably identify his contribution to me in two of his shorthand statements. First, something he repeated in class often: “Liturgy is doing the world the way the world was meant to be done.” That started me on my sense that the macrocosmic liturgy is as interesting as the microcosmic liturgy. Second, his identification of Mrs. Murphy as a primary theologian. He refers to the liturgical assembly as a “theological corporation” because it is a place of Christ’s presence. Faith is perception of this presence; theology is adjustment to this presence. Mrs. Murphy perceives, and she adjusts; in that sense, she is a theologian in the primary sense. She does theologia prima. “The theological lingo she and her colleagues speak is not the same as that spoken by secondary theologians in academe.” Professional theologians speak words about words; her language “more often consists in symbolic, metaphorical, sacramental words and actions which throw flashes of light upon chasms of rich ambiguity.”
That is why Kavanagh says his admiration for Mrs. Murphy deepens daily. In a way, I could describe my three decades (of secondary, academic work) as a defence of Mrs. Murphy. She has accompanied me through my books. Mrs. Murphy is a theologian, though not of the academic variety; she is an ascetic, though not of the monastic variety; she is a mystic, though not of the extraordinary variety. A philosopher once said, “We know more than we can say.” That describes a primary theologian.
5.
Many have read the author of the final book without knowing it. Fr Jean Corbon OP was the main redactor of the fourth part of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which is on prayer. What can you tell us about his Wellspring of Worship?
In academia it’s not called cheating if you name your sources, so I will answer your question with two quotes. One is from Cassian Folsom. “The liturgical section of the new Catechism (CCC 1066-1209) has a much different feel to it than the sacramental section (CCC 1210-1690).” Why? Because the source for the former is Corbon, and the source of the latter is the Roman Catechism of St. Pius V. “This section breathes a different air than many of us are accustomed to because much of its vocabulary comes from ‘the other lung’ of the Catholic Church, that is, the eastern lung.”
The other quote is from Benedict XVI, telling how Fr. Corbon came to be associated with the Catechism. “After having resolved to add a distinct fourth part on prayer to the first three, we looked for a representative of Eastern theology. Since it was not possible to secure a bishop as author, we settled upon Jean Corbon, who wrote the beautiful concluding text on prayer while in beleaguered Beirut, frequently in the midst of dramatic situations, taking shelter in his basement in order to continue working during the bombardments.”
Corbon was a priest of the Greek-Catholic eparchy of Beirut (an eastern rite Catholic). He was born in Paris, and taught liturgy and ecumenism at the University of St. Joseph in Beirut.
To add my own answer to your question, I will say Corbon brings three special themes. The first is an emphasis on the Trinity. The Trinity is never far away from liturgical theology, but sometimes it is not quite near enough. Corbon brings the Trinity front and center by saying “liturgy is the energy of the Blessed Trinity in the world.” To that he adds, secondly, a connection between liturgy and heaven. He calls liturgy the river mentioned in the Apocalypse flowing down to us. “The indescribable energy of the Blessed Trinity at the heart of the messianic Jerusalem, and if we let the river of life permeate us, we become trees of life.” I think it was from Corbon that I received my mental image of the heavenly river pooling up in ecclesial sacraments, to overflow the lip of the font and flood our spiritual liturgy. And third, Corbon writes with language that invites reflection from the reader. When I would teach him in class I would point out examples. “The liturgy cannot be lived at each moment unless it is celebrated at certain moments.” “In the Eucharist, the Holy Spirit is the principal liturgist.” “For Christians there are no longer ritual actions and interior worship, but a wholly new unity of the two.” “The more our will is submissive to that of the Father, the more the Father does our will!”
Corbon can feel like he is pouring fifty pounds of meaning into a one pound sack – and what’s left on the floor can be the most important parts. It is a book to meditate on, not just read through rapidly.
Fr Corbon was a priest of the Greek Catholic Eparchy and Fr Schmemann was Orthodox. Do the Orthodox and Eastern Catholic Churches tend to have a keener sense of liturgical spirituality than Catholics of the Latin Rite?
I am tempted to dodge the question by reformulating it. “Do they have a sense of liturgical spirituality?” Yes. But you are asking “do they have a keener sense?” That’s more complex because it asks for a comparison. I have been very influenced by Orthodox authors, both ancient and modern, and your question asks me why.
Schmemann postulates that liturgical theology is the reunification of three things that have, unfortunately, been allowed to separate. “The goal of liturgical theology, as its very name indicates, is to overcome the fateful divorce between theology, liturgy and piety – a divorce which, as we have already tried to show elsewhere, has had disastrous consequences.” Separate liturgy from theology and piety, and believers expect nothing but beautiful and mysterious ceremonies in which they take no real part. Separate theology from liturgy and piety, and it becomes an intellectual exercise for a privileged group of academics. Separate piety from liturgy and theology and it loses its living content and term of reference.
I do find Eastern writers (eastern Orthodox or eastern Catholic) to connect these three in a way that feels natural, necessary, comfortable, organic. It is done without affectation. It is not forced. It is simply grasping the tradition. But it should be noted that Schmemann is complaining that the divorce has happened in his own Byzantine tradition, as well. So the problem must not be geographical (east v. west); the problem might not even be cultural (Constantinople v. Rome). The problem may be letting the three get ripped apart under the centrifugal force of secularism.
I can often catch the scent of something in the East that is also present in my own Western tradition, but I would never have noticed it. I am too familiar with it, or the scent is mingled with too many other aromas. But once I discover it there, I can often find it here.
I used to joke that I could re-write On Liturgical Asceticism using all western sources this time, instead of eastern sources. In the last few years I decided to take my joke seriously, and a forthcoming book (Liturgy on the Cross) looks at liturgical spirituality from the viewpoint of a group of authors I am calling “theologians of liturgical abnegation.” I select them as a third group, after the Fathers of the patristic era, and the scholastics and mystics of the medieval era. They are authors who wrote between 1500 and 1900 (from John Avila to Francis Libermann). On the one hand, they are well known, but on the other hand, they are ignored. They present me with a keen sense of liturgical spirituality, because none of their talk about abnegation, mortification, nothingness makes sense except against the more transcendent horizon of liturgy.
Separate theology from liturgy and piety, and it becomes an intellectual exercise for a privileged group of academics. Separate piety from liturgy and theology and it loses its living content and term of reference.
So perhaps liturgical theology, and liturgical spirituality, could serve an ecumenical end?
Chesterton once quipped that a certain topic would make “one of the best articles he’s never written.” I have a stack of such articles, too, and one would be the ecumenical potential found in an interesting coincidence.
In his journals, Schmemann writes that during his school years in Paris he would often stop briefly in the Church of St. Charles of Monceau. Here was a huge, dark church, and a silent Mass was being said at one of the altars. Right outside was the noisy, proletarian rue Legendre. The life of the world on the street was illumined by the other world (the profane by the sacred). There was a “correlation of all of this with what the silent Mass was a witness to and reminder of, the presence and the joy. What is that correlation? It seems to me that I am quite unable to explain and determine it, although it is actually the only thing that I talk and write about (‘liturgical theology’).”
In a 1983 article, Kavanagh reports of attending a Divine Liturgy celebrated by Metropolitan Anthony Bloom in London. The Metropolitan had described prayer as becoming vulnerable, not enthusiastic. “You must not be enthusiastic, nor rejecting – but only open. This is the whole aim of asceticism: to become open.” And Kavanagh saw it happen in that liturgy: the Creator being praised for no other reason than for himself. He writes, “It hit me like a locomotive … It was at this time that I first began to experience the fact that the act of Christian liturgy is the premier theological act of a believing community as it stands before the living God … It is not a program, not an ethic, not a political theory, not an ideology. It is as near to a description of, and a summons into, the world renovated according to God’s pleasure as exists.”
Schmemann credits his understanding of liturgical theology to a flash that came from a Catholic mass, and Kavanagh credits his to a flash that came from a Byzantine Divine Liturgy. Interesting.
