On the Liturgy

The aesthetic of Christian liturgy is remarkably uniform across the rites which originated in the earliest centuries. By aesthetic I mean the sights, sounds, and smells, and what they convey about the meaning of the rite. I want to draw your attention particularly to the fact that the earliest Christians saw themselves as the inheritors of the Levites. Clement (40-41), Ignatius (Philadelphians 4, 9), and Justin (Trypho 41) had a keen sense of identity that came from a narrative: The temple cult was divine, but the Jews corrupted it. God rejected their sacrifices and proved it by destroying the temple. However, he sent his Son to institute new sacrifices, which Christians offer in his name. Everything about the liturgy then is supposed to be indicative of temple worship, from the solemnity of the ceremonies and incense to the chant to the facing of the east to the uniquely formulaic way that priests behave and so on.

Because of this idea of direct continuity from temple to church, churches have always been understood as temples in the fullest sense of the word, as earthly houses where God lives and is served and where sacrifices and gifts are presented to him. The sanctuary is his courtroom. The notion of liturgy — and this is explicit in the Greek λειτουργία — is incomprehensible apart from the idea that God is a king with a court and servants who serve in this court. These servants are angels. The highest of the orders, the Cherubim and Seraphim, are those who render God unceasing service through their praise and on whom God is enthroned.

The uniquely Christian notion, however, and the one that is the secret heart of Christian liturgy, is that in sending his Son to become man, handing him over to death, raising him from the dead, and catching him up into heaven to serve at his right hand, God has given mankind a promotion. No longer do the Cherubim and Seraphim occupy the highest place. No longer are the orders of angels the primary court servants. We are. You, me, and every Christian are ordained to the general priesthood of the baptized by baptism itself. So great is our baptismal dignity that by virtue of it we have the right and duty to move past the orders of angels to the very face of God, before whom Christ stands in our nature and offers unceasing liturgical service for us. This is why we invoke the song of the Seraphim in the Sanctus. It signals to us that everything that happens afterward is done in the highest heavens above their rank.

That is the awesome mystery of the liturgy. This is what it means to be a Christian. Our identity comes directly from the mass and the aesthetic of the mass proclaims that identity. Orthodox liturgical aesthetic declares our identity and makes concrete our liturgical theology. It is not of secondary importance whether the priest faces this or that direction or how he dresses and behaves or how the church appears or how the people act or what the prayers actually say and so on. In a real sense nothing is of secondary importance because the whole act is sacred. The aesthetic of the mass tells us we're entering a different world where God is king and we are about his business, a business that demands we lay aside all earthly cares.

Specifically on the point of ad orientem worship, which is particularly essential to the mass, when a Christian priest serves at the altar facing away from us he stands in the shoes of the Jewish priest who once a year offered typical blood in the same fashion, foreshadowing the antitypical chalice. Ad orientem has two dimensions: Firstly and primarily it means worshiping toward the east because of what it represents, namely God and heaven and the life of the world to come. Secondly, it means the clergy and people facing in that direction together. When ad orientem is employed there can be no mistake about what is going on in mass, and it nourishes piety because it renders orthodox liturgical theology concrete. Ad populum on the other hand encourages heterodoxy by giving place to many erroneous and novel notions, such as the primacy of meal over sacrifice, the primacy of human community over service of God, the primacy of the temporal and earthly over the eternal and heavenly, and the primacy of the priesthood of the baptized over the ordained priesthood. Ad orientem worship is essential because without it the temple aesthetic of the mass is almost totally obscured.

In summation, if we as Catholics have lost the sense of our own identity, it is because we have forgotten that we are Jews and that everything we do has its roots in the temple and the synagogue. We are firstly a worshiping people. Before we can serve as the hands and feet of Christ, before we can preach or teach in his name or do anything of value for this fallen world, we first have to leave it. We have to have an encounter with God on his holy mountain. We have to take our place in heavenly places with Christ to realize our identity in him, so that having lifted up our hearts to the Lord, we can go back into the world empowered by the Holy Ghost, certain of our mission and alive in our faith. This is why the aesthetic of the mass matters, because without it the mass becomes an abstraction and abstractions do not nourish piety.