Gregory Dix: An English, Monastic Liturgist With Attitude

I realize I may overwhelm the readers of this blog, both of them, by posting twice in a day, but yet I press forward.

As threatened in my write up of the Oxford Guide to the Book of Common Prayer, I am now reading Gregory Dix's The Shape of the Liturgy. I've heard it referenced a few times as one of the most helpful explanations of the history of purpose of catholic Christian worship. After reading only the editor's introduction and the first chapter, I'm reassured.

Dix, I just learned, was a monk at a Anglican Benedictine abbey in Nashdom, England. His community remained within the Church of England but worshiped in Latin according to the Roman missal and breviary.

In explaining his approach in The Shape, Dix says:

It must be admitted that the liturgists have largely had themselves to thank for the reverent disregard with which their labors are so generally treated. They persist in presenting their subject as a highly specialised branch of archaeology with chiefly aesthetic preoccupations, as though the liturgy had evolved of itself in a sort of eccelesiastical vacuum remote from the real life and concerns of men and women, who have always had to lead their spiritual lives while helping to carry on the whole muddled history of a redeemed yet fallen world. Archaeology is no doubt fascinating to specialists but it is a recondite business. And though beauty is an attribute of God and as such can be fittingly employed in His worship, it is only a means to that end and in most respects not a directly necessary means. The ordinary man knows very well that prayer and communion with God have their difficulties, but these arise less from their own technique than from the nature of human life. Worship is a mysterious but also a very direct and common place human activity. It is meant for the plain man to do, to whom it is an intimate and sacred but none the less quite workaday affair. He therefore rightly refuses to try to pray on strictly archaeological principles. And so he feels quite perplexed to leave what he hears called 'The Liturgy' to the mystery of experts, and is content instead humbly to make the best he can of the substitute (as he supposes) good enough for him and his like, viz. taking part in 'worship' as he finds it in the customary common prayer at his parish church, grumbling a good deal if the clergy alter the service with which he is familiar so that he cannot follow it for himself. This, of course, happens to be 'The Liturgy' in some form. And this attitude of the layman seems to me, not only justifiable but also very 'liturgical' in the strict sens of the word.

I'm going to like this guy.