The chapter, "The Sanctification of Time," picks up where the last post left off: The establishment of the Eucharist as the central service of the mostly underground pre-Nicene house churches. As all three of us know, the rite's context changes with the conversion (or at least political shifting) of Constantine. The Christian assembly moves from the home to the basilica. The church goes public. It is "established." It settles in for the long haul.
The consequences for worship are many. The Eucharist loses its secrecy as the practice of dismissing before it the (adult) catechumens wanes (because everybody has already been baptized as infants). This initiates the fusion of the synaxis (the Jewish practice of scripture reading and chanting psalms) with the Eucharist. The leaders of the liturgy adopt the customary Roman dress for public events (although initially nothing more fancy than that). Other aspects of public ceremony creep in as much for necessity as anything else -- the clergy process in and out, candles provide light for reading and vestments signify the various liturgical roles. These developments, Dix is eager to say, rarely begin by papal decree. Rome, he emphasizes, is conservative and often a late adopter of such innovations made elsewhere in Christendom. But once a practice is widely adopted it becomes set, e.g. the Roman [tunic] worn by clergy long outlasts the Roman empire, and then layered with theological meanings.
More fundamentally, Dix says, as the church's posture towards the world changes so does it's relationship with time.
As the church came to feel at home in the world, so she become reconciled to time. The eschatological emphasis in the eucharist inevitably faded. It ceased to be regarded primarily as a rite which manifested and secured the eternal consequences of redemption, a rite which by manifesting their true being as eternally 'redeemed' momentarily transported those who took part in it beyond the alien and hostile world of time into the Kingdom of God and the World to come. Instead, the eucharist came to be thought of primarily as the representation, the enactment before God, of the historical process of redemption, of the historical events of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus by which redemption had been achieved.
As might be expected from a monk -- and rightly so, I'll add with my own limited understanding -- monasticism is described as swooping in as a kind of hero for the post-Nicene church whose leadership is tempted with power and luxury. Asceticism is the response of a few Christians to their brothers' worldliness. As Dix tells it, the monks give the church prophetic judgment, a reminder of the world to come and the development of the Divine Office. In turn, the established church gives the monastics the Eucharist, the corporate nature of prayer and the church year.
The development of the church year is the central tale in "The Sanctification of Time." Before Nicaea, the church celebrated only Pascha (Easter) and Pentecost, and some local martyrs. However, the subsequent development of other feast days did not follow their current hierarchy of (more-or-less) Christmas, Lent, Epiphany, Advent and days for All Saints, Mary and the apostles. The church calendar is first populated with various martyrs, often local, some of whom develop a catholic following. Next come confessors, Christians who, it is believed, given their holiness would have become martyrs if circumstances had dictated it. Only later does the church come to celebrate the apostles (beyond Peter and Paul), Mary and major events in the life of Jesus. Having a full 365 days of lections, collects and propers is a still later development.
Alas the preceding paragraph is a dry summary compared to Dix's learned and detailed account of which Christian communities came to celebrate what feasts when -- and how such celebrations spread. For example, does the transposition of the sabbath from Saturday to Sunday come about from the efforts of a grand bishop or determined monk? No, Dix says, it is Constantine who declares Sunday a day off, and then theologians who follow with sabbatarian explanations. In another case, Dix credits St. Cyril with singlehandedly creating Holy Week. As bishop of Jerusalem beginning in c. AD 350, Cyril has both a flare for liturgical embellishment and claim to the entire territory of Jesus' last week before death. By 385, Dix can cite a source, Etheria, reporting a Holy Week in Jerusalem with Palm Sunday, Maunday Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday and the Paschal Vigil. Cyril, Dix argues -- not any Pope -- is the key actor in post-Nicene liturgical development.
Cyril's Holy Week and Easter cycle is at the basis of the whole of the future Eastern and Western observances of this culminating point of the christian year. He gave to christendom the first outline of the public organisation of the divine office; and the first development of the proper of the seasons as well as of the saints. He was certainly the great propagator, if not originator, of the later theory of eucharistic consecration by the invocation of the Holy Ghost, with its important effects in the subsequent liturgical divergence of East and West. In the Jerusalem church in his time we first find mention of liturgical vestments, of the carrying of lights and the use of incense at the gospel, and a number of other minor elements in liturgy and ceremonial, like the lavabo and the Lord's prayer after the eucharistic prayer, which have all passed into the tradition of catholic christendom.
A further influence on the liturgy after Nicaea is folklore. In a way it is obvious -- once the common man becomes a Christian, his customs are incorporated into the life of the church, superstitions and all. Thus, practices involving candles, incense, shrines and -- shoot -- fur trees show up in the liturgy. Beyond noting this trend, Dix wishes to make two points about it. First, such practices are rarely encouraged by church leaders; some documents show their official condemnation. Second, these popular forms of devotion are decoration on top of core forms of worship already in place. This second point is important for Dix because he wants to refute scholars who claim that the development of the liturgy is heavily influenced by pagan mystery cults. To that view he says: "Those aspects of Christian worship with parallels to paganism are NOT part of the early church or even the post-Nicene church, which might have been able to borrow them from active cults. Instead those supposed marks of paganism are really a continuation of folklore that began long before the church and entered it mainly in the Middle Ages, long after paganism was serious alternative form of worship."
With his argument about the effect of folklore on the liturgy, Dix has completed his fascinating description of a kind of archeology of the liturgy. The most superficial layer contains the folk customs: incense burned to ancestors, Christmas trees, Easter bunnies and candles burned as prayers. Next comes the influence of Roman public ceremony with its dress, stage directions, basilicas and amenities for public performance. Beneath that is the Jewish community meeting tradition known to the apostles -- chanting psalms, corporate prayer and reading and interpreting scripture. Finally, at its deepest level is, of course, the Eucharist, which itself traces its origins to the Last Supper held in the tradition of the ritual Chabûrah meal (see my previous post).
And with that Dix has done it again. In the early chapters of The Shape, he sifted through three centuries of manuscripts to come up with his fourfold outline of the Eucharist: Offer, pray, break and distribute. In this middle chapter, he extends his study another, say, seven centuries and gives us a four-layered history of the liturgy: Domestic Eucharistic event, Jewish community meeting, Roman public ceremony and folk customs variously present throughout Christendom. It's another exceedingly helpful lens for seeing our worship today.
