In Defense of Liturgical Stammering

Catherine Pickstock, describing view of modern Catholic liturgical reformers, writes, “The mediaeval Latin liturgy seemed to consist in disorienting ambiguous overlappings between the stages of advance toward the altar of God, and a lack of clarity in the identification of the worshipers and the priest. Its repeated rites of purification and pitiful requests for mercy and assistance apparently laid a morbid and all too Augustinian emphasis on the worshipers’ guilt, whereas the reformers favoured a recovery of the Greek Fathers’ stress on deification and the glorification of the cosmos. The Roman humiliation of the worshipper before God, together with the inclusion of various ceremonial accretions, confirmed their suspicion that the Rite contained interpolation from secular court ceremonial and emperor worship, betokening a dubious politicization of the Eucharist.”

Pickstock sees things differently:

“the many repetitions and recommencemets in the mediaeval Roman Rite can be situated not within the context of secular interpolation, but rather of oral provenance conjoined with an apophatic reserve which betokens our constitutive, positive, and analogical distance from God, rather than our sinfulness and humiliation. According to such a perspective, the haphazard structure of the Rite can be seen as predicated upon a need for a constant re-beginning of liturgy because the true eschatological liturgy is in time endlessly postponed.” Liturgy is the expression of hope for liturgy, an expression of this deferred eschatological desire to join the heavenly liturgy.

Further, the structural ambiguity of the rite also mirrors “the decentred ordering of mediaeval society, for in that period there was no absolute centre of sovereignty on an immanent level.” Pickstock claims that this decentering escapes the problematics of modernity, which demand either that everything be under control or that there be some invisible power that manipulates. The Roman rite is essentially unstable, since it is both “a gift from God and a sacrifice to God,” and thus “a reciprocal exchange which shatters all ordinary positions of agency and reception, especially as these have been conceived in the west since Scotus.” Liturgy is impossible, and especially so because of the Fall, since we have become incapable of right worship. This impossibility is overcome in Christ, “whose resurrection ensures that our difficult liturgy is not hopeless, and enables us to rejoin the angelic liturgy taking place in an ambiguous and shifting space beyond our own.”

What she calls the “liturgical stammer” of the medieval liturgy “bespeaks its admission of distance between itself and the transcendent ‘real.’ It is this very admission of distance which permits a genuine proximity with God.” The stammering character of the liturgy thus both highlights the transcendence of God, and also the sub-eschatological stage in which we find ourselves. The liturgy resists totalizing, resists the smoothing-out of modern rationalisms, which round upon finitude, which close off the immanent.