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Beyond the Text

A Holistic Approach To Liturgy

Indiana University Press

Introduction

The Focus on Holism

This book is about a household activity, if not a household word; an activity that engages us all with that very degree of regularity which breeds indifference: liturgy, or, to be more precise, worship, or, to be more precise still, the variety of rituals in which religious people, particularly, engage. Liturgy ranges from the most elaborate Holy Day ceremonial to the simple sacred markings of otherwise pedestrian time: like grace before and after meals, or weddings, which bestow cosmic significance on the decisions of men and women to live together, or funerals, which cast equal grace on events no one chooses at all. An academic association that worries about such things, The North American Academy of Liturgy, recently honored one of its members, Father Robert Taft, who responded by speaking for all of those millions of others who celebrate religious ritual without giving it a moment of thought: "I had never heard the word liturgy," he said, "until I entered the Jesuits in August 1949. Of course I went to Church, but like Moliere's Monsieur Jourdain, who did not know he was speaking prose, I did not know that what we did in church was liturgy."

But what is it that one does in church that liturgy is? What exactly should a liturgist study? Since the middle of the nineteenth century, when both Christians and Jews generally date the genesis of liturgy as an independent academic discipline, the church (or synagogue) activity deemed worthy of investigation has been the prayers of the faithful, which are based on the sacred texts enshrined by tradition. To study liturgy was taken as the equivalent of exercising expertise in the reconstitution of the recension history of those prayers. By that definition, usually assumed as unquestioned and unquestionable, however, Taft's attitude preceding his personal Enlightenment when he entered the Jesuits turns out to be not so wrong. "I did not know that what we did in church was liturgy," he observes wryly; indeed, by that definition it wasn't. Religious services in synagogue and church may vary widely from place to place and time to time; they may have within them all manner of activities; they may feature singing, reading, bowing, preaching, and a variety of other communicative means. These activities may or may not revolve about a sacred text, but even when they do, what worshipers do with that text at the moment of praying is a far cry from what nineteenth-century liturgists envisioned as they defined the proper object of their study to be the text as independent literary tradition. Taft, who is a better student of the text than most, knows this very well. To know liturgy, says he, "one must study much more than liturgy. ... We need to study not just the Roman Mass through the ages as Jungmann did, but liturgical life in southern Gaul or Northern Italy at some chosen period, and we must do it within the sociocultural context of that time. We must plunge into what Jacques Le Goff has called the 'archeology of the everyday.'"

Taft's call for the expanding of the borders to go beyond the text of prayer itself is more than an interesting critique of the liturgical establishment from within. First, the field is so small, one wonders whether there is an establishment; second, if there is one, the audience to whom Taft spoke is it. What we see is a discontent shared by many, who may not readily go so far as to admit that "what we do in church is not liturgy," but at least feel that "what we have been doing in the academic discipline of liturgy is not what people do in church" and may even come to the thoroughly revisionist conclusion that it should be. For Taft's uneasy stance before the tradition of his own craft is, if anything, mild, compared to what others have been saying: that liturgical theology ought to be conducted in the "borderlands between theology and some of its neighboring human disciplines, such as the sociology of knowledge, the philosophy of language, the anthropology of ritual, the psychology of belief, and the theory of action"; that "the formal object of ... liturgical studies [ought to be] the actual worship life of the living offering praying Church"; or, on the Jewish side of things, that "Jewish liturgy certainly warrants more than a mention in passing in such subjects as Hebrew language and literature, Jewish history, Halakhah, Kabbalah, archeology and art, musicology, Jewish religious thought, and phenomenology and social anthropology." Perhaps a discipline as young and as small as liturgy has no right to suffer from a mid-life crisis in its normal operating procedure; but if that is not so, it seems to me indubitable that we are in the process of a radical reevaluation of its paradigms and cannot easily go home again untouched by the fruitful interaction of interdisciplinary attention, which, in fact, has come to characterize the social sciences in general.

But before us is the promise not merely of revamping a little-known discipline, but of opening a new window on the life of religious people the world over, a window that looks out on the very essence of religious celebration, the way in which a holy calendar takes its shape, a committed life unfolds, a community of faithful takes its stand. It is not the text, then, but the people who pray it, that should concern us.

I have divided this book into chapters that elaborate some suggestive ways in which the text of the past becomes a window onto the worshipers then, a source of insight into the way religious consciousness is formed, nurtured, and lived. And not only in the past, but now too. People ritualize their lives now as much as they ever have, not always in accepted religious fashion, but in some way: in hymns like John Philip Sousa's marches at the annual fireworks display on the Fourth of July; sermons like those given every four years by the candidates of each major party about to rally the faithful for a march to the White House; responsive readings like the antiphonal cheering between cheerleaders and crowd at the annual homecoming game; or even obeisance to iconic symbols, as when a corporation spawns images to which its workers attach ultimate loyalty. Not that I argue for these expressions as the true religion of our time — my point is by no means polemical, one way or the other (though, of course, I have my own opinion on things). I want only to shout as loudly as I may in favor of taking such things seriously as liturgies, that is, as acted-out rituals involving prescribed texts, actions, timing, persons, and things, all coming together in a shared statement of communal identity by those who live with, through, and by them. If we learn to see the liturgy as transcending words, even great words, we inherit a window on the past and present alike, in which the image on the other side of the glass may look remarkably like ourselves.

How that may be the case is the subject of this book. But before going further into it, a closer look at the topic of this chapter is in order. So let me turn to a more detailed account of how the dominant paradigms for liturgical research came into being, and the types of critique that might be leveled at them.

The modern study of Jewish liturgy (which is my case study here) is almost two centuries old now. Its roots have been traced back even earlier, of course — everything can always be traced back "even earlier" — but few current studies find the need to cite pioneering scholars who lived before the time of Leopold Zunz (1794–1886).

Zunz embodied the spirit that was to guide the study of liturgy up to and including our time. Given his stature, it is no surprise to find that the details of his life and thought are well known now. His place in the history of liturgical research is both documented and assured. Little need be said here, then, beyond one all-important fact (for this study) — namely, that Zunz was at home in books, and, whether he knew it or not, what he was really studying in his classification of liturgical forms was not the liturgy as it is "lived" in that human activity we call "worship," but its literary remains. There is nothing innately wrong with such an approach, as long as one keeps it firmly in mind at all times. The problem has been that the people who talk about liturgy have not always kept it in mind.

Behind Zunz's all-embracing passion for Jewish literature as a topic for investigation was the ninteenth-century doctrine of philology, which Zunz learned from his mentor, Friedrich August Wolff. The Age of Reason had given way to the romantic era and the latter's implicit claim against the former to the effect that pre-Napoleonic universalistic pretensions had only masked the real and indelible cultural differences that separate one nation-folk from another. In Germany's case, the new romantic agenda now sent intellectual leaders scurrying back to the cultural evidence of German uniqueness, which was thought to reveal the essence of German genius. It was Wolff's contention that literary remnants bore the all-important clues to the Germanic spiritual heritage. And what was true about German literature for Wolff was true of Jewish literature for Zunz. Though on the face of it, Zunz was studying Jewish literature, on a deeper level he sought to reveal the history of the Jewish spirit as it had unfolded through the centuries.

Not many people still maintain Wolff's romantic zeal. Heilsgeschichte of every sort is distinctly unpopular in the circles of "objective" scholars these days, as are teleological investigations in general; under the influence of controlled, scientifically oriented investigations, all-encompassing statements about the nature of entire cultures, based on a sampling of their literary remains, are generally eschewed. So the theoretical moorings of Zunz's methodology have been not only abandoned, but even forgotten. His method, however, remains. Philology is alive and well in the study of Jewish liturgy, and though there is nothing wrong with that, one should at least recognize that, as with all theories, philology has its distinct limitations in terms of what we can reasonably expect it to achieve.

One such limitation has been the topic of a debate launched just over two decades ago, by the publication of a landmark volume by the late Joseph Heinemann. Until then, even though academicians had abandoned the romantic era's claim that philology might reveal a nation-folk's entire spiritual legacy, they still maintained that it could at least unearth the literary origin of a specific prayer text. Scholars still went about the philological task of comparing alternative manuscript readings of the prayer in question, "deducing" what "must be" its "original wording" (its Urtext), and then positing a likely period or event in antiquity in which to place the prayer's message. They presupposed such things as a centralized rabbinic social structure in which authoritative texts might be legislated, and from which they could be successfully disseminated; and the absence of "authentic" diversity, in that non-normative but parallel early worship traditions must (by definition) be either heretical or unimportant when compared with the centralized authoritative norm. All deviations from the so- called original text (known because they were cited by early authors, or were still extant in other manuscripts) were thus regarded as later accretions to or diminutions of the pure paradigmatic wording of the Urtext, and were plotted on a time line whereby the same historicist perspective sought to unearth the events that lay behind each of them. When all was said and done, a given prayer in use today stood revealed as a multiply stratified, or layered, literary document. The "original" prayer and subsequent additions to it were all explained as arising in response to various events and periods, as if prayer must always be a rational response to political persecution, a reaction to a foreign ideology, a blow against heresy, or an organism's response to the thousand and one other data that constitute a nation-folk's history. This being reconstituted by scholarship, the prayer was said to be explained.

But as much as literature may be the obvious way to think about most texts, Heinemann challenged that assumption in the case of prayers. He charged that Jewish prayer in classical times must be seen as originally oral, its wording unencumbered by the norms of single authoritative texts. His critique was not universally accepted, to be sure, but at least one had an alternative method, what Heinemann and, even before him, Arthur Spanier (1884–1944) preferred to call form-criticism, which could be used as a substitute for the Zunzian model. Much like form-critics in biblical studies, liturgists of the Heinemann school were encouraged to give up the fruitless attempt to reconstruct a nonexistent original text, to exercise caution in matching up so-called later accretions with historical circumstances that sounded vaguely as if they might have produced political conditions appropriate to the prayer in question, and, instead, to separate prayers according to style. Then they could locate each such genre within a social milieu, preferably known, but sometimes only postulated, within Jewish society of ancient times. Like the philological position that it criticized, the form-critical analysis of liturgy proved itself able to accomplish a great deal; and, again, like the methodology it claimed to supersede, it has its shortcomings.

Here we require a complete critique of form-criticism no more than we do a thoroughgoing analysis of philology. More to the point is our recognition of a consistent similarity that underlies even these presumably rival systems of research. That is, Heinemann's form-criticism is just as much a text-centered phenomenon as is Zunz's philology, since his goal too is the attainment of a critical stance regarding texts, even if it means postulating a pretextual oral period of recension. This text-centeredness might seem obvious and even necessary in studies of antiquity, which must gather their evidence in literary remains, the only thing we have left, at times, of cultures long destroyed by the ravages of history. But there is no necessity involved. Of course research must begin with the literature in which the evidence is embedded; that indeed is necessary. But both philology and form-criticism end with that literature as well; and that is not necessary at all.

Both vantage points are essentially analyses of literary works, as if a complete comprehension of the words of prayers (and of the books that carry them) were equivalent to an understanding of the liturgical life of the people who pray. To this claim, the following remark by Saussure is in order. He used to begin his course on general linguistics by noting the curious fact that "philological criticism is still deficient [in that] it follows the written language too slavishly and neglects the living language." To be sure, Saussure's context was not Zunz's; by philology, they meant different things; the contrast to which Saussure points, that of the grammatically formalized system of written speech as opposed to oral utterance, is not identical with the distinction between written prayer records and the ritualized act of rehearsing those records. Still, Saussure's insight is not beside the point for us. We may well paraphrase him with regard to both philology and form-criticism, inasmuch as they claim to be studying liturgy. Slavishly addicted to the study of liturgical texts, these methods neglect the living liturgy itself. In other words, the methods entailed in unraveling textual conundrums are excellently suited to the task of literary analysis, but liturgy — like linguistics — is not a literary matter in the first place. Like it or not, liturgists must eventually confront the disturbing recognition that though their evidence from the past is essentially literary, the human activity of worship is not. People who pray already know this. Though hardly gifted with complete comprehension of what they are about when they worship, those who do so certainly know better than to confuse the text of a prayer with the act of praying. Every liturgist has thus been in the uncomfortable position of lecturing on the origin of this or that prayer, only to be asked by a layperson why we pray it in the first place. Referring the question to the local theologian will not do. If we are to take our métier seriously, we liturgists must develop some context for handling prayer qua prayer, not just prayer qua literature. We will have to acknowledge the common-sense recognition that prayers are not readings, and prayer books are not literary specimens.

The question of what exactly liturgy is has been debated from many perspectives; the claim has even been made recently that Jewish worship is not liturgy at all. But we need not establish a universally accepted definition of liturgy to agree that, whatever it is, it goes beyond literature, or at least that we do no intellectual damage to the concept of liturgy by extending our purview to include not only the books of prayer but the people who pray as well, the worshiping community for whom the prayers exist as something to be prayed, not read.

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Excerpted from Beyond the Text by Lawrence A. Hoffman. Copyright © 1987 Lawrence A. Hoffman. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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