Archaeologism or Liturgical Modernism

Comments on liturgy made by some priests today reflect their origin and the generation to which they belong and in which they were liturgically and theologically trained. Such clergymen may be called 'survivors' of that most tumultuous period of the 1960's and 1970's in which centuries of organic liturgical development were overturned in an instant and new liturgical forms and practices were introduced (it would appear) for the sake of novelty, 'doing a new thing.' But the phenomenon is not that simple - the irony is that in the effort to reclaim what is supposed to be an ‘ancient and authentic Christianity,’ wholly novel forms of worship were promulgated in place of Tradition. The new is instead called the old, really old. Many celebrants today are a product of their time, a time in which Cardinal Annibale Bugnini of the Roman Communion, a modernist to the hilt, sought to eradicate in the Latin Rite the theological and liturgical heritage received through centuries of natural organic development. The trial liturgies of the Roman Communion, which gave birth to the Novus Ordo Missae of 1970, bled into the Episcopal Church beginning in the 1950's and eventually led to the first American experimental laboratory test in 1967 called The Liturgy of the Lord's Supper . If I were a betting man, I would wager that many of the most influential 'liturgically-hip' priests today were in seminary or graduate school at the very moment or just after the new-fangled liturgies were introduced, and they most likely embraced them with a youthful enthusiasm. At a minimum, it is safe to assert that a majority of priests have since been trained by priests who themselves imbibed the 'Spirit of Vatican II' at the time. Times they are a-changin': Generation X priests, Anglican and Roman alike, and their protégés, the millennials, have a very different more traditional perspective, but that is a topic for another reflection.

What Bugnini and his ilk did in the Roman Church led, through modern liturgical revision, to the wholesale abandonment of Common Prayer in the Anglican Communion and the jettisoning of traditional worship forms in the protestant bodies. The vision was one contemporary liturgy for one pan-protestant and pan-ecumenical church which could potentially unite Romanist and Anglican with Methodist and Presbyterian. The Consultation on Church Union (COCU) was the ecumenical body which embodied and inculcated in organisation what was expressed in liturgy with the Novus Ordo and the new Anglican liturgies.

This revolution, a deliberate rebellion against Tradition, has always been promoted under the guise of ad fontes, 'returning to ancient and patristic sources,' 'going back to the original liturgies of the pre-Nicene period.' All these folks seem to hold that Constantine corrupted and perverted the original supposedly-pristine Eucharistic liturgies ostensibly used before AD 325. It's funny how they hold views in common with militant protestantism. A significant number of priests today appear to maintain an ideology known as 'archaeologism' or archaism or antiquarianism, which, in the name of early Christianity, can be said selectively to by-pass 2,000 years of collective Christian life and experience and worship guided by the Holy Ghost in the corporate communion of the Body of Christ, Holy Tradition, and seeks to restore a perceived purism that certainly exists on paper in academic journals and in the books of archaeologist scholars but is far harder to verify objectively in the historical record. Although Rome officially condemns this view of history, in practice it succumbed to it at the Second Vatican Council and in its Dogmatic Constitution on the Liturgy, which does precisely what the 1979 ECUSA rite does: both displace time-tested ancient liturgical forms for test-tube liturgies which are in turn based on speculative reconstructions of liturgies which are asserted to have existed and have been used 1700 years ago. The problem with this rather attractive notion that we can efficiently circumvent the intervening millennium and a half of development and evolution and resurrect an extinguished yet purer way of worship is that the earliest Christian matrix is not quite so easy to ascertain or dissect as some might think (or have been led to think).

Grave difficulties and questions arise when begin to peel back the layers of Christian antiquity. We have no irrefutable knowledge of the actual living use of many liturgies at the time conjectured for their use, and we cannot prove conclusively that many of them were ever used by unquestioningly orthodox Christian communities in their Eucharistic assemblies. Some of these 'original' liturgies were in fact heretical and employed by groups now condemned as heretical, such as Arians. I feel confident that conscientious scholars will admit the problems involved here. In the name of 'recovering' the original Christian liturgies, liturgical modernism, to oversimplify the term, has purposely sought to uproot any continuity or organic connexion with the liturgies of the past ages, which intrinsically bind us to the Communion of Saints through their hallowed use lost in the mist of centuries. Genuine worship unites us moderns to the Holy Catholic Church of history, of every kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation, of every age, generation and clime. Only Tradition does this. A radical rupture with the sanctified past has been imposed on the Churches in the name of authenticity.

These new liturgies are a novum, a novelty created de novo, as a new thing, many with no real clear historically-discernible precedents. We can lay at the feet of Dom Gregory Dix and his Shape of the Liturgy the blame for a surprising amount of this - he was the first popular exponent and architect of what would become liturgical modernism. His works are fascinating and at times extremely helpful, but they are certainly fallible and contain many historical errors and guesses.

I say all of this merely to express my opinion that many priests today were formed as Christians and as priests in the most chaotic and complex time in Christianity since the Reformation, and their attitudes to the traditional Mass reflect their training and their background. I suspect their antipathy to the classical BCP in Anglicanism or the extraordinary Latin Rite in Romanism is a result of culture - they have reaped the whirlwind. Critique of Archbishop Cranmer's Anglican Rite is certainly fair (for example, the Gloria in Excelsis does historically belong up front at the beginning of the Mass as in the 1549 English BCP but was moved by Cranmer in the 1552 BCP to serve as a climactic thanksgiving after Holy Communion – an untraditional but brilliant liturgical shift meant to emphasise the centrality of receiving Holy Communion in the Mass rather than focussing on the Consecration) but one surely protests too much when one states, for instance, that the 1979 rite is somehow more historically accurate or more well-ordered theologically than the Anglican Mass we inherited from the ancient Roman and Sarum Rites through the redaction and editorship of Thomas Cranmer, a liturgical and literary genius. The 1979 rite is an alternative service book with a totally twentieth century provenance - and it is not 'common prayer' in any meaningful sense. Modern liturgical revision has, for world Anglicanism at least, shattered the reality of Common Prayer.

We should be mindful of the fact that the whole Anglican world is in a state of irreversible meltdown and many of the Provinces of the Anglican Communion still use the Cranmerian liturgy: the 1662 English Book is the official liturgy of organisations to which a lot of liturgical modernists now belong. It is possible that we may see more and more 1662 liturgy in the USA as foreign prelates bring it with them in their missionary efforts. Maybe Common Prayer will re-emerge someday. In the interim, it will be necessary in future for all Anglicans charitably to tolerate differences of style, liturgy, rite and worship, including, yes, Tradition.