The Mystic Way

A Psychological Study in Christian Origins

pub J.M. Dent, 1913

Chapter 6
THE WITNESS OF THE LITURGY

"Manducat te Angelus ore pleno: manducet te peregrinus homo pro
modulo suo, ne deficere possit in via, tali recreatus viatico" (Præparatio
ad Missam).

"Et inveni me longe esse a te in regione dissimilitudinis, tanquam
audirem vocem tuam de excelso: Cibus sum grandium, cresce, et mandu­
cabis me; nec tu me in te mutabis, sicut cibum. carnis tuæ, sed tu muta­
beris in me" (ST. AUGUSTINE, Confessions, Bk. VII cap. 10).

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I. The Outer Mystery

A LITURGY, says Dom Cabrol, is "the external and official manifestation of a religion":1 and the Mass, the typical liturgic rite of the Catholic world, is "the synthesis of Christianity."2 If, then, our discovery of the mystic life at the heart of the Christian religion be a discovery indeed and not a fantasy, it is here that we may expect to find its corroboration. Here, in that most characteristic of the art-products of Christendom, the ceremonial with which the love and intuition of centuries have gradually adorned the primitive sacrament of the Eucharist, we may find the test which shall confirm or discredit our conclusions as to the character of that life which descends from Jesus of Nazareth.

Much of the material that we have considered, and on which those conclusions were based, belongs in form to the past. It comes to us now as history, not as experience: though it is illuminated and made actual by the ever­renewed repetition of its chief characters in the lives of all those mystics through whom the mounting flood of Spirit has passed upon its way. By their help we may still go back up the stream of becoming, till we reach their source; the parent type. But here, in the ceremony of the Mass, we have a work of art designed and adapted by the racial consciousness of Christendom for the keeping and revealing of "something", claiming descent from that same source, which lives: lives, not in the [] and security of liturgical

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museums, but in the thick of diurnal existence — in the cathedral and the mission hut, in the city and the cloister, in the slums and lonely places of our little twisting earth. This "something" is still the true focus of that Christian consciousness which has not broken away from tradition. The great dramatic poem of the liturgy is still for that consciousness the shrine in which the primal secret of transcendence is reserved. We may yet experience the full force of its immense suggestive magic when we will. Here, from within the circle of the static, the authoritative, the apparently mechanical, the Spirit of Life now makes its most subtle appeal. In this strange reliquary it has successfully endured through centuries of change.

The Christian Church has often been likened, and not without reason, to a ship: a ship, launched nineteen hundred years ago upon that great stream of Becoming which sets towards the "Sea Pacific" of Reality. Though she goes upon inland waters, yet hints of the ocean magic, the romance of wide horizons, mysterious tides and undiscovered countries, hang about her. In the course of her long voyage, carried upon the current of the river, she has sometimes taken fresh and strange cargo on board; sometimes discharged that which she brought with her from the past. She has changed the trim of her sails to meet new conditions, as the river ran now between hard and narrow banks and now spread itself to flow through fields. But through all these changes and developments, she kept safe the one treasure which she was built to preserve: the mystical secret of deification, of the ever-renewed and ever-fruitful interweaving of two orders of reality, the emergence of the Eternal into the temporal, the perpetually repeated "wonder of wonders, the human made divine." She kept this secret and handed it on, as all life's secrets have ever been preserved and imparted, by giving it supreme artistic form. In the Christian liturgy, the deepest intuitions, the rich personal experiences, not only of the primitive but of the patristic and mediæval

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epochs, have found their perfect expression. Herein has been distilled, age by age, drop by drop, the very essence of the mystical consciousness. "The rites and symbols of the external Christian church," says Eckartshausen,"were formed after the pattern of the great, unchangeable, and fundamental truths, announcing things of a strength and of an importance impossible to describe, and revealed only to those who knew the innermost sanctuary."3 Each fresh addition made to this living work of art has but elaborated and enriched the one central idea that runs through the whole. Here it is that Life's instinct for recapitulation is found at work: here she has dramatised her methods, told in little the story of her supreme ascent.

The fact that the framework of the Mass is essentially a mystical drama, the Christian equivalent of those Mysteries which enacted before the Pagan neophyte the necessary adventures of his soul, was implicitly if not directly recognised in very early times. It was the "theatre of the pious," said Tertullian in the second century;4 and the steady set of its development from the Pauline sacrament of feeding on the Spiritual Order, the Fractio Panis of the catacombs, to the solemn drama of the Greek or Roman liturgy, was always in the direction of more and more symbolic action, of perpetual elaborations of the ritual and theatrical element. To the sacramental meal of apostolic times, understood as a foretaste and assurance of the Messianic banquet" in the coming Parousia, there was soon prefixed a religious exercise — modelled perhaps on the common worship of the Synagogue — which implied just those preparatory acts of penance, purification and desirous stretching out towards the Infinite, which precede in the experience of the growing soul the establishment of communion with the Spiritual World. Further, the classic exhibition of such communion — the earthly life of Jesus — naturally suggested the form

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taken by this "initiation of initiations"5 when its ritual development once began; the allegory under which the facts of the Christian mystery should be exhibited before men. The Mass therefore became for devout imagination during the succeeding centuries, not only the supreme medium through which the Christian consciousness could stretch out to, and lay hold on, the Eternal Order, not only the story of the soul's regeneration and growth, but also the story of the actual career of Jesus, told, as it were, in holy pantomime: indirect evidence that the intuitive mind of the Church saw these as two aspects of one truth.6 Hence every development of the original rite was made by minds attuned to these ideas; with the result that psychological and historical meanings run in parallel strands through the developed ceremony, of which many a manual act and ritual gesture, meaningless for us, had for earlier minds a poignant appeal as being the direct commemoration of some detail in the Passion of Christ.

As Europe now has it, then, in the Divine Liturgy of the Orthodox and the Mass of the Catholic Church, this ceremony is the great living witness to — the great artistic expression of — those organic facts which we call mystical Christianity: the "transplanting of man into a new world over against the nearest-at-hand world," the "fundamental

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inner renewal," the "union of the human and the divine."7 All the thoughts that gather about this select series of acts — apparently so simple, sometimes almost fortuitous, yet charged with immense meanings for the brooding soul — all the elaborate, even fantastic symbolic interpretations placed upon these acts in mediæval times, have arisen at one time or another within the collective consciousness of Christendom. Sometimes true organic developments, sometimes the result of abrupt intuitions, the reward of that receptivity which great rituals help to produce, they owe their place in or about the ceremony to the fact that they help it in the performance of its function, the stimulation of man's spiritual sense; emphasising or enriching some aspect of its central and fundamentally mystical idea.

That central idea, as we have seen, is simple and yet complex. Here, as nowhere else, we find it in its many­sided unity. "The divine initiation of the Eucharist," says Dionysius the Areopagite, "although it has a single, simple and indivisible Source, is multiplied out of love to man into the holy variety of the symbols, veiling itself in all those external forms whereby Divinity is manifested to us. Yet this multiplicity of symbols always returns to the fundamental Unity: to which Unity all worthy participators in this mystery are drawn."8 Transmutation and communion: the pushing out as it were of a bit of the time world into the eternal world, or — the same thing seen at another angle — the discovery of Reality's substance under simplest accidents within the framework of the Here-and-Now: the paradoxical encounter of Divine Personality under profoundly impersonal forms: Divine Union actually achieved by the separated human creature: the feeding of crescent spirit upon Eternal Life: the slow growth and pilgrimage of the soul up from its new birth to an actual attainment of God, under the cyclic

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law that governs the Mystic Way — all these aspects of Life's movement have their place in it.

I propose, then, to examine in some detail the witness which is borne by the liturgy to the character of the mystic life: and to take as the basis of inquiry the Roman ceremony of the Mass as we now possess it. To the practical mind such a proceeding must seem at best fantastic and at worst insane. To the liturgic student it will seem in addition profoundly unhistorical; since the Roman Missal contains many late mediæval additions, and has lost several primitive elements — has in fact been subjected to the vital law of mobility and change. To the first type of student I reply, that the study of those artistic and religious forms in which his emotions and intuitions are expressed, is an important part of the study of man. To the second, that the additions and developments which differentiate the primitive from the modern Mass have all taken place in harmony with, and as adornments of, the central idea which the Eucharist is designed to exhibit; they are but the rubrications of the text. Also they have been for the most part the work of great and ardent spirits, true members of the "Interior Church"; and "all that the external Church possesses in symbol, ceremony, or rite, is the letter which expresses externally the spirit and the truth residing in the interior Sanctuary."9 Hence, if our view of that central idea be correct, they should demonstrate rather than obscure it: should represent life's secret, gradual, and ever deepening apprehension of its richness and variety. I choose the Roman rite rather than the Divine Liturgy of the Orthodox Church — with which, however, we may often illustrate and compare it — not because it is more mystical, but because it is so easily accessible to all Christians of the West; and represents the supreme effort of their Church towards that which Eucken has called "the bringing of

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the supersensuous world to some kind of concrete expression."10

When we take up the Roman Missal,11 we find that it consists of an unvarying nucleus — the "Order of the Mass" — and a number of special parts; the readings,
chants and prayers proper to each Sunday and feast-day of the year, each circumstance of human life. In these special parts we notice at once a certain order, which, if not intentionally devised, is now at least most clearly present: an order which links up that ascent to communion with God which this ceremony exhibits in terms of time and space, first with the historic career of Jesus, next with the cyclic movement of those spiritual seasons which condition the growth of the soul, finally with the fortunes of the whole Christian family — the continuity and solidarity of the New Race. The life of the Founder is here recapitulated, step by step, from Advent to Pentecost: the great external facts of it, the alternate joys and pains. Side by side with this historical drama runs the parallel strand of the psychological drama: the story of the Mystic Way trodden by those who "imitate Christ." This, too, goes from the "advent" of the first faint stirrings of new life, and the birth and slow, steady unfolding and growth of spirit, through the purifications of Lent, the destitutions and self-surrender of Passion-tide, to the resurrection-life, and great completing experience of a Triumphing Spiritual Power. All the way from the first turn in the new direction — "Ad te levavi animam meam:"12 — to the final, sublime consciousness of world-renewal — "Spiritus Domini replevit orbem terrarum, alleluia:"13 — the changing, moving liturgy tracks out the adventures of the soul.

Within this great memorial act is again enshrined the

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lesser memorial acts which do honour to those who have celebrated in their lives the difficult liturgy of love: the"illustrious athletes" in whom "grace was victorious" as they are called in the Nestorian rite.14 There is hardly a day on which such partial repetitions of the pattern career — the attainment of sanctity, the ascent to the Eternal Order and heroic descent in charity to men — achieved by some man or woman is not commemorated with declarations of gratitude and joy.

"O quam pulchra est casta generatio cum claritate!" . . .

"Implevit eum Dominus spiritu sapientiæ et intellectus: stolam gloriæ induit eum. . . ."

"Justus germinabit sicut lilium: et florebit in æternum ante Dominum."15

The special characters of these, the "Knights and Ladies of the Holy Spirit" are here recited: sometimes — and especially in the older collects — with the epic dignity proper to the commemoration of heroic personalities: sometimes in little, sudden loving phrases, the naïve and intimate expressions of a domestic joy and pride. St. Francesca Romana, unwearied helper of the poor, who was "honoured by the close friendship of an angel": St. Jerome Emilianus, "a father of orphans": St. Catherine of Genoa, "wholly burned up by the Fire of Divine Love": St. Jane Frances de Chantal, who "sought with a wonderful fortitude in every by-way of life the one way of perfection": St. Rose of Lima on whom "heavenly grace fell like dew, so that she brought forth the flowers of patience and virginity": St. Francis of Assisi, through whom "the Church conceived and bore new children": St. Peter of Alcantara, teacher of St. Teresa, blessed by the twin gifts of "wondrous penitence and loftiest contemplation": St. Gertrude, "in whose heart God made Himself a home":16 day by day these, and hundreds of other

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amateurs of Eternity, initiates of humility and love, are brought to mind by the living members of that race which produced them, ensamples of the rich variety in unity which marks the mystic type.

This, then, is the triple recapitulation effected by the wide rhythms of the ecclesiastical year: a threefold witness to new life, first achieved in a classic example, then taught and continued in the race. But day by day within this wider rhythm, the developed sacramental act presents, in more intimate and detailed drama, the "Mystic Way" trodden by each spirit in its movement from partial to completed life; the law of man's growth into Reality, the economy of the Kingdom of Heaven. The Order of the Mass — the unchanging nucleus of it — is the book of this more intimate drama: the ceremonial and deeply mystical representation, not of an historical past nor of an apocalyptic future, but of an Everlasting Now, the rules which govern the correspondence between two orders of Reality, the communion of those two mysterious forces which we call life human, and life divine.

Now this order, this rite, consists structurally of two distinct parts: the so-called "Mass of the Catechumens" which ends with the reading of the Gospel, and with the instruction or sermon that may follow it, and the "Mass of the Faithful" extending from the Offertory to the end. The sharp cleavage between these two parts is now veiled in the Missal by the Creed which comes between them; an eleventh-century innovation so far as the Roman rite is concerned.17 It has ceased to have any "practical" importance, and therefore no longer receives ceremonial emphasis. But in primitive times this cleavage did possess a most real and practical significance. The Mass of the Catechumens was a service of prayer, reading and song, accessible to all: to the unbaptised converts, the unreconciled penitents, the "possessed." The Mass of the Faithful — that is to say, the whole sacramental act — was

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a mystery exhibited only to initiates. To this, none but those "regenerate in baptism" and living "in grace" were admitted. Thus in the liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, the normal rite of the Orthodox Church — which retains many antique elements lost to the West — the deacon still cries before the beginning of the "Prayers of the Faithful," "All catechumens go out! Catechumens go out. All catechumens go out. No one of the catechumens!"18 At the same point in the old Roman rite, at least as late as the sixth century, the deacon made an equivalent proclamation: according to St. Gregory, "Si quis non communicat, det locum."19

The idea, then, of an inner and an outer church, a higher and lower communion with Reality, of a separation of "believers" into two classes, is a fundamental character of the Christian liturgy both in the East and in the West.20 Though it arose to some extent under the pressure of practical necessities, and though the line of demarcation between the two classes was inevitably conditioned by formula rather than by fact — by the outward reception of baptism or sacramental absolution, not by true change of mind or purgation of heart —yet it represented a deep-seated conviction that the central mysteries of this new life were not everybody's business. They were "food for the full-grown" not "milk for babes." Immaturity, degeneracy, disharmony, aberration, were conditions of consciousness in which no communion with Reality could take place.21

 

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1. Les Origines Liturgiques p. 17

2. Ibid., p.140

3. The Cloud upon the Sanctuary, Letter II.

4.De Spectaculis, 29 and 30. See Hirn, The Sacred Shrine, p. 493.

5. Dionysius the Areopagite. De Eccles. Hier., cap. 3, i. I.

6. The great exponent of the Mass as a dramatic presentation of the life of Christ is the ninth-century theologian Amalarius of Metz, De Ecclesiasticis Officis; but this kind of interpretation had already begun
in the third century, in the writings of St. Cyprian, and was developed in the sixth and seventh by St. Germanus of Paris and St. Isidore of Seville. See W. H. Frere, The Principles of Religious Ceremonial, cap. II.
The most celebrated and elaborate of all these allegorical explanations is of course that contained in the Rationale of Durandus of Mende ( thirteenth century). Convenient modern accounts are in Hirn, The
Sacred Shrine, cap. 5 (with full bibliography), and A. Durand, Trésor Liturgique des fidèles, pp. 29-60. The same method of interpretation was followed in the Eastern Church. See Neale and Littledale, Liturgies
of SS. Mark, James, Clement, etc., pp. xxi-xl.

7. Eucken, The Truth of Religion, pp. 544-545.

8. De Eccles. Hier., cap. 3, iii. § 3.

9. Eckartshausen, The Cloud upon the Sanctuary, Letter II.

10. The Truth of Religion, p. 463.

11. Readers who distrust the word "Roman" in such a connection will
find nearly all of the described characteristics in the Sarum Missal.

12. Introit for the First Sunday in Advent

13. Introit for Whitsunday.

14. Brightman, Liturgies Eastern and Western, Vol. I. p. 279.

15. Common of Virgins, Easter Gradual; and Common of Doctors,
Introit and Easter Gradual.

16. Collects for March 9, July 20, 4th Sunday after Easter, Aug. 21,
Aug. 30, Oct. 4, Oct. 19, Nov. 15.

17. A. Fortescue, The Mass, pp. 215 and 265.

18. A. Fortescue, The Divine Liturgy of our Father among the Saints,
John Chrysostom, done into English, with an Introduction and Notes,
p. 82.

19. Dial., II. 23. Cf. Duchesne, Origines du culte chrétien, 3e ed., p. 171.

20. Examples of the Eastern Use in Brightman, Liturgies Eastern and
Western, Vol. I.; for the Western see A. Fortescue, The Mass, p. 215,
and Duchesne, op. cit., loc. cit.

21. The three excluded classes, according to Dionysius, were the "un­
initiated," the "imperfect," and those "entangled by contrary qualities,"
i. e. the unharmonised ( De Eccles. Hier., cap. 3, iii. § 7).