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From 'The Theology of Liturgy'
in Joseph Ratzinger's Complete Works:
'Liturgy teaches man how angels live'
by Silvia Guidi
Translated from the 8/23-8/24 issue of
"A gift also implies responsibility: that of accepting it, of not neglecting it, of seeking to understand its value and to perceive its importance over time," said the director of the Vatican pushing house, Don Giuseppe Costa, in presenting the first volume in Italian of Joseph Ratzinger's Complete Works - Teologia della Liturgia (LEV, 2010, 849 pp, Euro 55) - at the 31st annual Meeting for Friendship among Peoples in Rimini.
"The Pope's books are an immense wealth," Don Costa went on, "a gift which it is our task and responsibility to disseminate. We will be publishing the second volume of JESUS OF NAZARETH, even as we continue to publish the anthologies of his Wednesday catecheses.
"To give you an idea of the interest in the Complete Works around the world, five US publishers will be publishing them simultaneously. It is all about sharing a good that the Lord has given us, in the thinking of Joseph Ratzinger, which is particularly valuable in this time of disorientation".
The enterprise is impressive: 16 volumes containing 20,000 pages of essays, homilies and lectures which Mons. Gerhard Mueller, Bishop of Regensburg, who is also in Rimini, says he has 'the joy and commitment' to publish (through Herder) in the original German.
"One might say that in these writings, the most complicated subjects are extricated from their complexity and made transparent in their internal linearity," Mons. Mueller told L'Osservatore Romano, speaking about the monumental project of which it has been the fortune of his diocese be the custodian.
Prof. Joseph Ratzinger taught at the University of Regensburg from 1969 until he was named Archbishop of Munich-Freising in 1977. It was also in Regensburg that in 2006, the ex-Professor as Pope pronounced the lectio magistralis heard round the world on the intimate links between faith and reason [though it came to be primarily linked to violence Islam].
The volume that inaugurates the publication of Joseph Ratzinger's Complete Works in Italian, edited by Pierluca Azzaro and Edmondo Caruana, is dedicated to liturgy because "the fate of the faith and of the Church is decided by their relationship to liturgy", according to the cover blurb for the book.
In his Preface to the volume on liturgy, written in 2008 when it was the first book in the German collection to come out, Benedict XVI wrote:
Starting with the subject of ‘liturgy’ [as Vatican II did in passing Sacrosanctam concilium, the constitution on liturgy, as the first of its 16 documents] unequivocally brings to light the primacy of God, the priority of the subject ‘God’. God above all, that is what the constitution on the liturgy says at the start.
When attention to God is not determinative, then every other thing loses its orientation. The words of the Benedictine rule "Ergo nihil Operi Dei praeponatur" (43, 3: ‘Therefore place nothing before the Work of God) are valid specifically for monasticism, but are valuable, as an order of priority, even for the life of the Church and of everyone, in their respective ways.
It is perhaps useful to recall here that in the term ‘orthodoxy’, the second half of the word – doxa – does not mean ‘opinion’ but ‘splendor’, ‘glorification’. It is not about a correct ‘opinion’ about God, but about the right way to glorify him, to respond to him.
"If Beauty is the splendor of Truth, the key for communicating the experience of 'the eternal in time' is precisely 'the wound of beauty'," observed Alberto Savorana, spokesman for C&L, citing a message on Holy Week sent by then Cardinal Ratzinger to the Meeting in 2002.
"Beauty wounds," the cardinal wrote. "It is like an arrow that pierces the spirit, reminds it of its ultimate destiny, and opens its eyes to its infinite nature".
He goes on to recall an old Russian legend according to which Vladimir, Prince of Kiev, was not converted to Christianity by particularly convincing missionary efforts, but thanks to his encounter with the beauty of divine worship.
Roberto Fontolan, director of C&L's International Center in Rome, said about the book, The Theology of Liturgy:
"My first and continuing reaction was surprise. Joseph Ratzinger's clarity of expression is well-known, but the Pope's passion for liturgy, which he calls 'the center of my life' is truly contagious.
Above all, a fundamental point: Far beyond liturgical actions considered individually, about which there are numerous illuminating pages, he conveys the fact that Christian worship is "the experience of contemporaneity with the Paschal mystery of Christ" - in which 'there exists something of the primordial sacraments, the sacraments of creation which are born from the crucial points of the human experience and allow us to see the image and essence of man as well as his relationship with God".
Crucial points such as birth, death, eating, sexual union. In his biological conditions, man experiences a power that he can neither summon nor suppress, and which surrounds and supports him even before he makes a decision. (Ratzinger) calls them fissures, citing Schleiermacher, through which "eternity looks upon the monotonous progress of man's daily life"
Thus begins man's sense of spirituality, his connection to the cosmos, projecting himself into the dimension of relationship: with things, with other men. For Christians, namely, for myself, liturgy thus becomes something that is of the utmost seriousness - that has something to do with the concept of faith itself, and invests the very life of the Church and her effective presence in the world.
Loss of the centrality of God, the detachment from Christ of contemporary consciousness, is seen in many ways, even in the liturgy, demonstrating a surrender to modernity which eliminates mystery from the human horizon.
Contemporary visual arts, for instance, portray the entire problem with the modern consciousness, the author says. If man cannot find an interior openness that can enable him to see more than that which is measurable and perceptible, and to see in Creation the splendor of the divine, then God will remain excluded from our field of vision. Not to see God is not to live at all.
As for churches themselves, in the sense of edifices, he writes: "In order to conserve its Christian legitimacy, the church must be catholic in the original sense of the word - that is, a home for believers in all places".
And he cites Albert Camus "who gave unsettling expression to the experience of human alienation and solitude" and who recounts a trip to Prague: in a city where he could not understand the native language, he felt like an exile - even the splendor of the churches said nothing to him and gave him no comfort. "For a believer, this would be impossible: where there is a church, there is the Eucharistic presence of the Lord, and there he feels at home".
For the author, everything converges to construct the wonderful cathedral of Christian liturgy, which is worth the effort to learn, to love, and above all, to live in full, because liturgy, as Don Luigi Giussani [C&L founder] wrote, "is a never-ending discourse through which one is drawn into the power stream of God's Grace, of the mystery of God".
"Drawn into' - it is precisely the experience I had and which I have sought to propose to you, feeling myself as a reader who has everything to learn," Fontolan concluded.
Savorana, for his part, picked up from the Holy Father's greeting sent to the Meeting by Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone:
Praying is not an event that takes place in the clouds, it is not an escape from the world, but is the maximum of concreteness. To learn to ask, to learn what to desire, and to 'orient one's desires well' is to learn to live.
Prayer is man's advance post in the battle to defend the human heart in its desire for great things. The hope that Pope Benedict XVI often expresses is that the intelligence of faith may become the intelligence of reality.
And a church ought to be the place where beauty is at home, "the beauty," according to Benedict XVI, "without which the world becomes the first circle of Hell".
Savorano then quotes Joseph Ratzinger's conclusion to an essay about sacred music in this volume, from a chapter dedicated to 'the image of the world and of man reflected in liturgy':
Let me end my reflections with a beautiful statement by Mahatma Gandhi that I once found on a calendar: "Fish live in the sea and are quiet, animals live on earth and scream, but birds, whose vital space is the sky - they sing. Man takes part in all three: he carries in him the depth of the sea, the gravity of the earth, and the heights of heaven - and that is why he also possesses all three abilities: to remain silent, to scream, and to sing".
I wish to add that today, we see that for the man who has no sense of the transcendent, all that remains is to scream, because he has chosen to remain solely of the earth and wishes to turn even the sea and the sky into land.
The correct liturgy, the liturgy of communion, restores man's integrity. It teaches him to be quiet and to sing, opening up the depth of the sea and teaching him to fly, which is how angels live. Uplifting his heart, it awakens in him once more the song that had been buried.
I'm re-posting here a translation I did in October 2008 in the BENEDICT thread of the PRF, of the Preface that Benedict XVI wrote specially for the first volume of Joseph Ratzinger's COMPLETE WORKS (GESAMMELTE SCHRIFTEN) at the time it came out in Germany.
Preface to the first volume
of my collected writings
by JOSEPH RATZINGER
The Second Vatican Council began its work with the discussion of the schema on sacred liturgy which was later voted on solemnly on December 4, 1962, as the first fruit of the great Church council with the rank of a Constitution.
That the subject of liturgy was at the beginning of the Council’s work and that the Constitution on liturgy should be its first result may be thought at first glance as nothing but a coincidence.
Pope John had convoked the assembly, in a decision that was shared with joy by everyone, in order to reassert the presence of Christianity in an era of profound changes, but without proposing a definite program. The preparatory committee put together a wide series of projects. But it lacked a compass to find the way through the abundance of proposals.
Among all the projects, the text on sacred liturgy seemed to be the least controversial. That is why it was taken up immediately: as a kind of exercise, so to speak, with which the fathers of the Council could learn the methods of Conciliar work.
So, that which at first glance may have seemed simply coincidence now reveals itself to be – looking at the hierarchy of the issues and tasks of the Church – as intrinsically the most correct thing.
Starting with the subject of ‘liturgy’ unequivocally brings to light the primacy of God, the priority of the subject ‘God’. God above all, that is what the constitution on the liturgy says at the start.
When attention to God is not determinative, then every other thing loses its orientation. The words of the Benedictine rule "Ergo nihil Operi Dei praeponatur" (43, 3: ‘Therefore place nothing before the Work of God) are valid specifically for monasticism, but are valuable, as an order of priority, even for the life of the Church and of everyone, in their respective ways.
It is perhaps useful to recall here that in the term ‘orthodoxy’, the second half of the word – doxa – does not mean ‘opinion’ but ‘splendor’, ‘glorification’. It is not about a correct ‘opinion’ about God, but about the right way to glorify him, to respond to him.
Because this is the fundamental question of man when he begins to understand himself in the right way: how should I encounter God? We learn the right way of adoration – of orthodoxy – above all, through what is given to us in the the faith.
When I decided, after some hesitation, to accept the project of publishing all my works, it was immediately clear to me that it should avail of the Council’s order of priority, and that therefore, the first volume to come out should be that of my writings on liturgy.
The liturgy of the Church has been, for me, from childhood, the central activity of my life, and it became, in the theological school of teachers like Schmaus, Söhngen, Pascher and Guardini, also the center of my theological work.
As my specialty subject, I chose fundamental theology because I wanted above all to go to the very depths of the question 'Why do we believe?' But this question also includes from the beginning the other question about the right reply to give God, and therefore, also the question of divine service.
It is from this perspective that my works on liturgy should be understood. The specific problems of liturgical science did not interest me, but rather, it was always the anchorage of liturgy as the fundamental act of our faith, and therefore, its place in our entire human existence.
This volume puts together all my works of small and medium dimension through which, in the course of years, on different occasions and from different perspectives, I took a stand on liturgical questions.
After all the contributions that had started this way, I was finally impelled to present a total view which appeared in the Jubilee Year of 2000 under the title The spirit of liturgy: An introduction, which constitutes the central text of this book.
Unfortunately, almost all the reviews were focused on one chapter: “The altar and its orientation of prayer in liturgy”. Readers of the reviews may have deduced from them that the entire work had dealt only with the orientation of liturgical celebration, and that its contents come down simply to wanting to re-introduce the celebration of the Mass ‘with the (priest’s) back to the people”.
In consideration of this distortion, I thought for a moment of suppressing this chapter (nine pages out of 200) in order to be able to re-conduct the discussion to the true subject which interested me and continues to interest me in the book.
This would have been more easily possible, because in the meantime, two excellent books had appeared in which the question of the orientation of prayer in the Church of the first millennium was clarified persuasively.
I think first of all of the important little book by Uwe Michael Lang, Turning towards the Lord: The orientation of liturgical prayer (Italian translation published by Cantagalli, Siena, 2006); and very particularly, of the great contribution from Stefan Heid, 'Attiude and orientation of prayer in the first Christian era (in Rivista d’Archeologia Cristiana, 72, 2006), in which sources and bibliography on this question are amply illustrated and brought up to date.
The result is quite clear: the idea that priest and people should face each other during prayer was born only with modern Christianity and is completely alien to earlier practices.
Priest and people certainly do not pray to each other, but to the one Lord. That is why they look in the same direction during prayer: either towards the East, as the cosmic symbol for the Lord who will come, or where this is not possible, towards an image of Christ in the apse, towards a Cross, or simply upwards to heaven, as the Lord did in the priestly prayer the evening that preceded his Passion (Jn 17,1).
Meanwhile, fortunately, a proposal I made at the end of the chapter in question has been making headway increasingly: not to proceed to new transformations [i.e., structural changes in Church architecture] but to simply place the Cross at the center of the altar, towards which priest and faithful may look together, to be led in this way towards the Lord, to whom we all pray together.
But perhaps I have said too much for now on this point, which represents a mere detail in my book, and which I could even leave out.
The fundamental intention of the work was to place liturgy above and beyond usually petty questions about this or that form, in its important relationships that I sought to describe, in three areas that are present in each single topic.
First of all, the intimate relationship between the Old and New Testaments. Without the relationship to the Old Testament legacy, Christian liturgy is absolutely incomprehensible.
The second area is the relationship with the religions of the world, while the third is the cosmic character of liturgy, which represents something more than the simple gathering, great or small, of human beings.
Liturgy must be celebrated within the breadth of the cosmos, embracing creation and history at the same time. This is the meaning of orientation in prayer: that the Redeemer to whom we pray is also the Creator, thus, liturgy also always expresses love for creation and the human responsibility for it.
I will be happy if this new edition of my liturgical writings could contribute to show the grand perspectives of our liturgy and to relegate to their right place some petty controversies over external forms.
Finally, and above all, I must give thanks - above all to Bishop Gerhard Ludwig Mueller, who has taken the Opera omnia project into his hands and has created the personal and institutional conditions for its realization.
Benedict XVI met with Mons. Mueller, Volderholzer and Schaler of the Institut Papst Benedikt XVI at the Vatican in May 2008 on preparations for publication of the Complete Works.
In a very special way, I wish to thank Prof. Dr. Rudolf Volderholzer, who has invested time and energy to an extraordinary degree in gathering and identifying my writings. I also thank Dr. Christian Schaler, who assists him in a dynamic way.
Finally, my sincere thanks to the publishing house Herder, who with great love and thorough attention, has taken on the burden of this difficult and effortful labor.
May all this contribute so that liturgy may be understood ever more profoundly and celebrated worthily.
‘The joy of the Lord is our strength’ (Neh 8,10).
Rome
Feast of Saints Peter and Paul
June 29, 2008
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 25/08/2010 00:42] |