Part 4: “Eastern Presuppositions” and Western Liturgical Renewal

Western Needs and Eastern Liturgy

With this background, let us return to our status quaestionis: What have eastern liturgies contributed to the contemporary western understanding and renewal of Christian worship? In his recent excellent article in Worship, Frederick R. McManus, one of the “greats” of liturgical renewal in the United States, unwittingly carried out on me a preemptive strike. (12) I was in the process of putting my thoughts together on this subject when his article arrived to steal some of my thunder.

In that article, McManus describes the Vatican II liturgical renewal’s “fresh breadth and flexibility” as flowing “from a genuine return to evangelical and patristic sources.” (13) The Vatican II reform was not just an updating or aggiornamento, but a return to the “venerable traditions of the early post-biblical centuries.” (14) That is what made the reform an organic and traditional development out of the existing tradition, and not a modernist revolution, as some of the contemporary ignorant try to portray it.

The mandate of Sacrosanctum Concilium was that the rites “be restored to the vigor they had in the tradition of the Fathers” (no. 50).

Therein lies not only the solution, but also the problem. As McManus goes on to show, Pius V used the same language in 1570 in the liturgical restoration following the Council of Trent, when he spoke of restoring the Missale Romanum “to the pristine norm of the holy Fathers.” (15) For Pius V as for Vatican II, the issue was not, of course, a sort of conservative archeologism, seeking to return to an irrecoverable past. Rather, as McManus so well formulates it, “There is no commitment to one century or other, but only a search for the best sources and the best Christian thought, especially in the first few centuries. It is a matter of restoration and recovery, scrutinizing the past precedents for what can be pastorally sound liturgy in the present.” (16)

I think this is not much different in spirit from what I said some years ago on the same topic: “In liturgical renewal the work of the historian is to remove obstacles to understanding produced by a misreading of the past. Historical scholarship cannot tell the church what it must do. It can only help the church to see what it could do if those in the pastoral ministry deemed it feasible.” (17)

Does this mean that history provides us models for imitation? Not necessarily; for the church is never guided by a retrospective ideology. The past is always instructive but never normative. What its study, like all study, should provide is an understanding of Tradition, that essential continuity that can legitimately be labeled “Tradition” with a capital “T,” riding above the ebb and flow of the shifting tides of “traditions” with a small “t,” Tradition is not history, nor is it the past.

Tradition is the church’s self-consciousness now of that which has been handed on to it not as an inert treasure, but as a dynamic principle of life. It is the church’s contemporary reality understood genetically, in continuity with what produced it. The very basis of the church’s pastoral activity is to re-present, faithfully but afresh for each new circumstance and age, the will and message of its founder not only at its point of origin, but at every moment of the continuum at which that will and message have been manifested.

So we study the history of Tradition not because we are interested in reviving the past, but in order to promote a contemporary understanding of Christian life in terms of its origins and evolution, an understanding that challenges myths and frees us from the tyranny not just of any one frozen slice of the past, but also from the tyranny of the latest clich6, so that we can move ahead to solutions suitable for today in faithful freedom, faithful to living Tradition that is always