Liturgy & Language

Denis de Rougemont is Switzerland's brilliant Protestant discourser on religious and ethical problems (Love in the West ern World, The Devil's Share}. Back in the U.S. from his first postwar trip to Europe, he reports (in the current issue of Christendom) a new surge of interest in Christian liturgy:

"A well-defined movement is emerging among the Catholics of France to have the Mass said in French and to popularize the translations into the vernacular; while at the same time influential bishops are recommending to the faithful the reading of the Bible. . . . The intended objective, however, is not to draw nearer to other confessions, but to render the Roman liturgy more appealing and efficacious. In Paris, the Holy Orthodox Liturgy is said in French in two churches, and an Orthodox branch of the Benedictines was formed during the war with a liturgy likewise translated into French.

"On their part, several Lutheran churches are in process of a pronounced return to their original liturgy, after having suffered for two centuries an impoverishment comparable to that of the Calvinist churches. ... In Calvinist circles in France and Switzerland, among many young pastors, among students of theology and influential laymen, the legitimacy of liturgy in itself is no longer being argued, as it was before the war. . . ."

A Common Language. "The whole world . . . has lost that common spiritual measure which conferred upon the medieval and classical civilizations their grandeur and their sense of unity. . . . The words liberty, authority, spirit, justice, democracy, truth take on as many different meanings (and often incompatible ones) as there are standards of evaluation in our heads. ... At Babel, men divided because they began to speak different languages. Our situation is worse: we all pronounce the same words but at the same time give them different meanings. . . .

"Liturgy is a language of coordinated sentences and gestures; it thus guarantees and defines the common meaning of the words and their actual authority... . Simplifying for the sake of symmetry, one might say that theology provokes reflection in regard to certain terms, while liturgy makes of them reflexes of the entire being. . . ."

Spiritual Etymology. "In the last analysis, the full meaning of words which have elsewhere become so hard to define authoritatively . . . was given to our Western civilization by the Bible. And liturgy makes these words live in their Biblical context, thus unceasingly restoring them to their spiritual etymology.. . . The true problem of the century is that of the community. It is bound up with the problem of a common language. Liturgy can contribute toward recreating and authenticating this language; but only under two equally determinative conditions: it must remain Biblical at its source, and it must find a contemporaneous form."

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