God. According to Bonaventure and the Franciscans, blessedness is instead de-
fined as an operation of the will, that is, love.
In 1951, a young Oxford theologian, Eric L. Mascall, published, in a French
journal that brought together the writings of theologians such as Jean Daniélou
and intellectuals of various backgrounds (among whom were Maurice de Gan-
dillac and Graham Greene), an article that took up the question of blessedness
from a perspective that cannot but interest us closely here. According to Mascall,
neither knowledge nor love can define in a satisfactory fashion the supreme
purpose of man. Not only is knowledge essentially egotistic because it concerns,
above all, our enjoyment of God, but it is not ultimately useful either to men or
to God—at least not in the postjudicial condition. As far as love is concerned,
it cannot be truly disinterested either, because, as Saint Bernard reminded us, to
love God without thinking of our happiness at the same time, is a psychological
impossibility (Mascall, p. 108).
The only thing that can define the first and essential element of our blessed
state is neither the love nor the knowledge of God but only his praise. The only
reason to love God is that he is worthy of praise. We do not praise him because
it is good for us, although we find our good in it. We do not praise him because
it is good for him, because in fact our praise cannot benefit him. (Ibid., p. 112)
The praise that is in question here is, of course, first and foremost doxology and
glorification:
Praise is superior both to love and to knowledge, although it can include both
and transform them, because praise does not concern itself with interest but only
with glory [ . . . ] In the worship that on earth we bestow on God, the first place
is due to praise as well [ . . . ] And what scripture allows us to glimpse of celestial
worship always shows us praise. The vision of Isaiah in the temple, the song of
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the angels in Bethlehem, the celestial liturgy of the fourth chapter of Revelation
repeat the same thing: Gloria in excelsis deo [ . . . ] “Our Lord and God, you are worthy of receiving glory, honor, and power.” (Ibid., p. 114)
Here we discover all the elements of the theory of glory with which we have
become familiar. The specific value of glory as the ultimate purpose of man lies,
curiously, in the fact that ultimately neither God nor men need it or draw any
utility from it. And yet, in contrast to Lassius, praise is not extrinsic to God. “The
archetype of all praise can be found within the Trinity itself, within the eternal
filial response of the word to God his Father” (ibid., p. 115). God is, in other
words, literally composed of praise, and, by glorifying him, men are admitted to
participate in his most intimate existence. But if things stand thus, if the praise
that men give God is intimate and consubstantial with him, then doxology is,
perhaps, in some way a necessary part of the life of the divinity. Basil used the
term homotimos (“of the same glory”) as a synonym for homousios, the technical term that in the Nicene symbolism denoted consubstantiality, suggesting thereby
a proximity between the glory and the being of God. Perhaps the distinction be-
tween internal glory and external glory serves precisely to cover over this intimate
link between glorification and the substance of the divinity. What appears in God
when the distinction breaks down is something that theology absolutely does not
want to see, a nudity that must be covered by a garment of light at any cost.
8.14. Catholic liturgy contains a doxology that bears the curious name of improperia, that is, reproaches. It appears for the first time in liturgical texts of the ninth century, but is probably older still. The peculiarity of this doxology is that
it is introduced by an antiphon in which God turns to his people and reproaches
them: “Popule meus, quid feci tibi aut in quo contristavi te? Responde mihi”
(My people, what have I done to you, in what way have I displeased you? Answer
me). In other versions, the complaint comes from Christ himself: “Quid ultra
debui facere tibi, et non feci?” (What more should I have done that I have not
done already?). Only at this point do the deacons respond from the altar, singing
the great hymn of praise, trisagion: Agios ho Theos, agios ischyros, agios athanatos,
eleēson hēmas.
It is decisive in this case that it is God himself who is demanding praise. In the
legend contained in the Greek menology, he does not limit himself to uttering
reproaches but provokes an earthquake that does not stop until the people and
the emperor sing together the doxology “Sanctus Deus, sanctus fortis, sanctus et
immortalis, miserere nobis.” Lassius’s theory, which suggested that the purpose of
the divinity’s actions could only be that of glorification, is confirmed here. More-
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573
over, according to the anaphora of Basil’s liturgy “it is deserving and just, and
fitting the greatness of your sanctity, to praise you, sing to you, bless you, adore
you, offer up thanks to you, glorify you”; but God appears to need this praise
and adoration, to the point of requesting from men the acclamation “three times
holy” ( trisagios phonē) that he already receives from the seraphims in heaven. If, as is recited in John Chrysostom’s liturgy, the power of the Lord is incomparable and unrepresentable ( aneikastos) and his glory surpasses all comprehension
( akatalēptos), why utter it and represent it incessantly in the doxologies? Why
call him “sovereign” ( despotēs); why invoke the “ranks and armies” ( tagmata kai stratias) of angels and archangels in “the service of his glory” ( leitourgian tēs doxēs)?
The answer that, in the form of an acclamation of the type, axios, monotonously
accents the anaphora— hoti prepei soi pasa doxa, “because all glory is suited to
you”—suggests that the prepei (“fits, is suited”) hides a more intimate necessity: the acclamation has a sense and value that escape us and that we should pursue.
8.15. In the Western Church, the hymn of praise par excellence, the doxologia
maxima, is the Te Deum, the tradition of which has, without any real evidence, been traced back to Ambrose and Augustine. The historians of liturgy who have
long debated its authorship, time of composition, and place of origin are more
or less in agreement in considering it to contain three parts, which at a certain
point were firmly bound together to form its twenty-nine verses: the first (verses
1–13) and oldest is a hymn to the Trinity, probably composed in the Ante-Nicene
era; the second (verses 14–21), which is entirely Christological, is probably more
recent since it seems to bear witness to the anti-Arian polemics; and the last
(verses 22–29) concludes the hymn with a series of quotations from the Psalms.
Scholars, who are as usual entirely concerned with questions of chronology
and attribution, omit to say what is nevertheless obvious beyond any possible
doubt: whatever its origin might be, the Te Deum is formed from start to finish by a series of acclamations in which the Trinitarian and Christological elements are
inserted into a substantially uniform doxological and epenetic context. Verses 1–10
appear to have no other purpose than to assure the divinity of the praise and glory
that surrounds him on all sides, on earth as in heaven, in the past as in the present:
Te Deum laudamus te Dominum confitemur
Te aeternum patrem omnis terra veneratur
Tibi omnes angeli Tibi caeli et universae potestates
Tibi Cherubim et Seraphim incessabili voce proclamant
Sanctus sanctus sanctus Dominus Deus Sabaoth
Pleni sunt caeli et terra maiestatis gloriae tuae
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Te gloriosus apostolorum chorus
Te prophetarum laudabilis numerus
Te martyrum candidatus laudat exercitus
Te per orbem terrarum sancta confitetur Ecclesia.
The mention given to the persons of the Trinity, which follows this meticulous
enumeration of the names and functions of the glorifiers, seems to be aimed
above all at specifying the one to whom the praise is directed, reiterating it in the
form of doxological attributes:
Patrem immensae maiestatis
Venerandum tuum verum et unicum Filium
Sanctum quoque paraclytum Spiritum.
However, even in the following Christological verses, which certainly contain
doctrinal elements, as in the formula hominem suscipere, Christ is first invoked in eschatological terms as the “king of glory,” and it is as such that the faithful who
glorify him ask in exchange to be allowed to participate in his eternal glory:
Tu rex gloriae Christe
Tu patris sempiternus es filius
Tu ad liberandum suscepisti hominem non horruisti virginis uterum
Tu devicto mortis aculeo aperuisti credentibus regna caelorum
Tu ad dexteram Dei sedes in gloria patris
Iudex crederis esse venturus
Te ergo quaesumus tuis famulis subveni quos pretioso
sanguine redimisti
Aeterna fac cum sanctis tuis in gloria munerari.
In the final antiphon, one is struck by the biblical citations that assure us that the
service of glory will be eternal and ceaseless, day after day, age after age:
Per singulos dies benedicimus te
Et laudamus nomen tuum in saeculum et in saeculi saeculum.
Even more evident is the acclamative structure of the other great doxology, the
Gloria that the most ancient documents—such as the Constitution of the Apostles (ad 380)—attribute to the Matins. In this case the text is nothing more than
an uninterrupted collage of acclamations of every type: of praise, benediction,
thanks, supplication:
Gloria in excelsis Deo
et in terra pax
hominibus bonae voluntatis
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575
Laudamus te
benedicimus te
adoramus te
glorificamus te
gratias agimus tibi
propter magnam gloriam tuam
Domine Deus rex caelestis
Deus pater omnipotens
Domine Fili unigenite Jesu Christe
Cum Sancto Spiritu
Domine Deus agnus Dei
Filius patris, qui tollis peccata mundi
Miserere nobis [ . . . ]
As we have seen, Peterson, Alföldi, and Kantorowicz have shown that liturgical
acclamations often have a profane origin, that the formulae of the liturgy of glory
are derived from the acclamations of the imperial ceremonials. It is, however,
probable that the exchange took place in both directions. We know, for example,
that both the Te Deum and the Gloria have had an extraliturgical use, the former on the battlefields (at Las Novas de Tolosa and in Liège in 1213) and the latter at
the time of the discovery of the body of the martyr Mallosus and of the arrival
of Pope Leo III at the court of Charlemagne. In all these instances, it was a
case of a sudden explosion of triumph and jubilation, as is often the case with
acclamations. But how can one explain, beyond the relation between profane
and religious ceremonials, the massive presence of acclamations in the Christian
liturgy? Why must God be continually praised, even if the theologians (at least
up to a certain point in history) never tire of assuring us that he has no need of
it? Does the distinction between internal and external glory, which reciprocally
respond to one another, really constitute a sufficient explanation? Does it not
rather betray the attempt to explain the unexplainable, to hide something that
it would be too embarrassing to leave unexplained?
8.16. Marcel Mauss’s unfinished doctoral thesis on prayer, which was only
published in 1968, has rightly been called “one of the most important works”
(Mauss 1968, p. 356) that the great French anthropologist has left us. He begins
by noting—and his observations of 1909 interestingly remind one of Kantoro-
wicz’s analogous considerations on the situation of liturgical studies almost forty
years later—the singular poverty of scientific literature on such an important
question. Philologists, who are more used to analyzing the meaning of words
than their efficacy, were put off by the unquestionably ritualistic character of
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prayer; the anthropologists, solely occupied with the study of primitive cultures,
put to one side what appeared to them to be a late product in the evolution of
religions. Therefore, once again the subject was abandoned and left in the hands
of theologians and philosophers of religion whose theories are, for obvious rea-
sons, “the account they give of their experiences [which] is in no way scientific”
(Mauss 2003, p. 29).
Mauss’s thesis comes to a sudden end after 175 pages, when presumably he
was about to draw the final consequences from his analysis of the oral rites of an
Australian people, the Arunta, which he had chosen as his terrain de recherche;
but both in the previous pages and in an almost contemporaneous series of ar-
ticles, he leaves no doubt as to the hypothesis that guided his research. Prayer—
even when it takes the form of praise or a hosanna—is, above all, an oral rite
and, therefore, like all rites, an “effective act” that concerns sacred things and
acts upon them. As such, it is
also efficacious and with a sui generis efficacy, for the words of prayer can give rise to the most extraordinary phenomena. Certain early rabbis, by saying the
appropriate berakâ (blessing), could change water into fire and the great kings,
by using certain formulae, could change impious Brahmins into insects which
were then devoured by towns that had been changed into ant hills. Even when
all efficacy seems to have disappeared from prayer which has become pure ado-
ration, or when all power seems to be confined to a god, as in Catholic, Jewish
or Islamic prayer, it is still efficacious because it causes the God to act in a certain
way. (Ibid., p. 54)
It is not always easy, from this perspective, to distinguish between magic and reli-
gion: “There are all sorts of degrees between incantations and prayers, as there are
generally between the rites of magic and those of religion” (ibid., p. 55). Never-
theless, Mauss distinguishes magical rites from religious ones because, while the
former appear to be endowed with an immanent power, the latter produce their
effects only through the intervention of divine powers, which exist
outside the
rite itself. “Thus the Indian performs a magic rite when, in hunting, he believes
that he is able to stop the sun by placing a stone at a certain height in a tree,
whereas Joshua performed a religious rite when, in order to stop the same sun, he
invoked the omnipotence of Jahweh” (ibid., p. 53). And while the aim of spells
and magical rituals is not to influence sacred beings, but to produce an immedi-
ate effect upon reality, prayer “on the contrary, is above all a means of acting upon
sacred beings; it is they who are influenced by prayer, they who are changed”
(ibid., p. 56). Before turning to his fieldwork, he defines prayer as follows: “Prayer
is a religious rite which is oral and bears directly on the sacred” (ibid., p. 57).
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A work that had considerable influence on Mauss’s thought, and of which
he wrote a review only a year after it was published, was La doctrine du sacrifice
dans le Brâhmanas (1899). The author, Sylvain Levi, who had been his indology
teacher in Paris, wanted to show that the oldest Brahmin religion “had no moral
qualities” and that sacrifice is essentially defined by its material effects: “It resides
completely in the acts and ends with them, and it consists entirely in the scrupu-
lous observance of rites” (Mauss 1968, p. 353). The most surprising result of Levi’s
research was, however, that Indian sacrifice is not simply an effective action, as
are all rites; it does not limit itself to merely influencing the gods; it creates them:
According to the theologians of the Vedic era, the gods, like the demons, are
born from sacrifice. It is thanks to it that they have ascended to the heavens, in
the same way as the one who carries out a sacrifice still does. They gather around
the sacrifice; they are a product of the sacrifice that they share among themselves,
and it is this distribution that determines the way in which they share the world.
Moreover, sacrifice is not only the author of the gods. It is a god itself or, rather,
the god par excellence. It is the master, the indeterminate, infinite god, the spirit
from which everything proceeds, that ceaselessly dies and is reborn. (Ibid.)
Thus, both sacrifice and prayer present us with a theurgical aspect in which men,
by performing a series of rituals—more gestural in the case of sacrifice, more oral
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