The Omnibus Homo Sacer
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It is possible to recognize here the theological model of that division, and at the same
time cooperation, between the necessary activity and initiative of the political militant on the one hand and the dialectical laws of history that guarantee their effectiveness on the other, which has made a lasting mark on praxis in the Marxist tradition.
Threshold
IN perfect consistency with the etymological meaning of the term leitourgia,
the Church has always emphasized the “public” character of its own liturgy.
The piety and private prayers of the faithful are certainly important, but as the
encyclical Mediator Dei admonishes, they have their proper value insofar as they
prepare for participation in the public cult, which has its center in the eucha-
ristic celebration (§66; cf. Braga and Bugnini, 578), and, if separated from this,
they are “sterile and deserve to be condemned” (§32; cf. Braga and Bugnini, 576).
The definition of the liturgy contained in the encyclical expresses this public
character through an image familiar to political historians: the “mystical body”
of Christ, constituted by the inseparable union of the society of the faithful and
its “Head”: “The sacred liturgy is . . . the public worship . . . rendered by the
Mystical Body of Christ in the entirety of its Head and members” (§20; cf. Braga
and Bugnini, 571).
It is this political meaning of the Church as liturgical assembly that Erik Pe-
terson puts at the center of his 1935 book on the angels. “The Christian ecclēsia,”
he writes, is “the assembly of the citizens with full rights [ Vollbürger] of the
heavenly city for the accomplishment of specific cultic acts” (Peterson, 198/108).
“The worship of the heavenly Church,” we read a few pages later, “and therefore
implicitly too of the earthly Church’s liturgy, which is joined with that of the
heavenly, has an original relationship to the political world” (Peterson, 202/112).
The distinction and at the same time the conjunction between heavenly
Church and earthly Church corresponds here to the twofold articulation be-
tween opus operatum and opus operans, immanent Trinity and economic Trinity, that we have seen to define the liturgy. The liturgy actualizes the political community between heavenly Church and earthly Church and at the same time the
unity of immanent Trinity and economic Trinity in a sacramental praxis. Yet
precisely for this reason it is constitutively marked by a duplicity. Insofar as it
expresses the operation internal to the very divine life, the economic activity of
Christ the “liturgue” and priest and of his mystical body can only be effective
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ex opere operato. And moreover, insofar as it defines the praxis of the Church
as political community, there cannot be liturgy without the opus operans of its
members. “The work of redemption,” claims the encyclical, “which in itself is
independent of our will, requires a serious interior effort on our part if we are to
achieve eternal salvation” (§31; cf. Braga and Bugnini, 576).
By defining the peculiar operativity of its public praxis in this way, the
Church has invented the paradigm of a human activity whose effectiveness does
not depend on the subject who sets it to work and nonetheless needs that subject
as an “animate instrument” to be actualized and rendered effective. The liturgical
mystery, insofar as in it the mystery of the trinitarian economy reaches its actu-
alization, is the mystery of this praxis and this operativity.
2
From Mystery to Effect
1.The term mystery is at the center of a reflection on liturgy that has pro-
foundly marked the Church’s conception of its activity today. Odo Casel
(1886–1948), a Benedictine monk of the Rhineland monastery of Maria Laach,
was one of the principal inspirations of what was later to be defined as the “Li-
turgical Movement” ( liturgische Bewegung). Already Ildefons Herwegen, named
abbot of Maria Laach in 1914, had immediately founded a rereading of the
sources of the liturgical tradition, which starting from 1918 was advanced in the
publication of two series with the significant titles Liturgiegeschichtliche Quellen
(Sources for the History of Liturgy) and Ecclesia orans (The Praying Church). In
1921 Casel supplemented these two publications with the “Jahrbuch für Litur-
giewissenschaft” (Yearbook for the Study of Liturgy), which proposed a system-
atic and at the same time historical study of the Church’s worship. In the twenty
years that that publication lasted, the “Jahrbuch” became, by its imposing bulk
of philological-lexical and theological studies, the organ of what, in the title of
a monograph dedicated to Maria Laach, has rightly been defined as a “renewal
of the Church from the spirit of liturgy” (Jeggle-Merz). From the perspective of
Casel and his followers the liturgy ceases to be the completion of a rite that
received its meaning from elsewhere—in faith or in dogmatic theology—and be-
comes the locus theologicus par excellence, from which the Church can alone find
its life and its reality. “Christianity,” writes Casel, “is not a ‘religion’ or a confes-
sion in the way the last three centuries would have understood the word: a system
of more or less dogmatically certain truths to be accepted and confessed, and of
moral commands to be observed or at least accorded recognition. Both elements
of course belong to Christianity, intellectual structure and moral law; but neither
exhausts its essence” (Casel 1, 35/9). Christianity—such is the thesis that summa-
rizes Casel’s thought—is essentially “mystery,” a liturgical action that each time
renders present in ritual form the salvific praxis of Christ, and the worshiping
community obtains salvation by entering into contact with this praxis. And it is
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to oppose the desacralization and rationalization that defines the modern world
that Casel undertakes his vindication of mystery.
א By forcefully affirming the centrality of the mystery-action in the reality of the
Church, Casel (and with him the Liturgical Movement) seems to refer implicitly to the an-
cient axiom that confirms the primacy of liturgy over faith in the tradition of the Church: legem credendi statuat lex supplicandi (or, in abbreviated form, lex orandi-lex credendi, the law of prayer is the law of faith). As has been written, for Casel, “the authentic liturgical traditions are not simply one among many sources of knowledge of faith, but the source and central witness of the life of faith and so of all theology” (Kilmartin, 96–97). And it is certainly not an accident if in the imposing philological labor of his school, the analysis of liturgical texts and sacramentaries comes before that of Scripture or of theological
texts in the strict sense. Liturgy predominates over doctrine exactly as the accent falls on praxis rather than theory in contemporary political movements. Given the success of the
Liturgical Movement’s theses within the Church, it is not surprising that in his encyclical, Pius XII dedicates an important passage to the refutation of their extreme versions. While forcefully underlining the vital importance of liturgical praxis, the principle according
to which the norm of liturgy decides that of faith is exactly reversed: “The
sacred liturgy, consequently, does not decide or determine independently and of itself what is of Catholic faith. . . . If one desires to differentiate and describe the relationship between faith and the sacred liturgy in absolute and general terms, it is perfectly correct to say, lex credendi legem statuat supplicandi—let the rule of belief determine the rule of prayer” (§48; cf.
Braga and Bugnini, 581). And moreover, what the pope has in mind is, as the rubric of
the chapter in question suggests, the “strictest connection between liturgy and dogma”
( arcta connexio liturgiae et dogmatis; Braga and Bugnini, 580), in which the liturgy “can supply proofs and testimony, quite clearly, of no little value, towards the determination
of a particular point of Christian doctrine” (§48; cf. Braga and Bugnini, 581).
2. The first twenty years of the twentieth century were rightly defined as “the
age of movements.” Not only do the parties, on the right as much as on the left
of the political spectrum, give way to movements (both the workers’ movements
and Fascism and Nazism define themselves as “movements”), but also in the arts,
in the sciences, and in every sphere of social life movements are substituted for
schools and institutions to such a degree that it is practically impossible to provide
a comprehensive list of them (it is significant that when, in 1914, Freud sought a
name for his school, he decided in the end on “the psychoanalytic movement”).
A common characteristic of movements is a decided distancing with regard
to the historical context in which they are produced and the vision of the world
of the epoch and culture to which they are opposed. In this sense the liturgical
movement also participates in the same reaction against humanist individualism
and the rationalization of the world that defines many movements that followed
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the First World War. A reading of the first chapter of Casel’s book-manifesto, Das
christliche Kultmysterium ( The Mystery of Christian Worship, 1932), entitled “The Mystery and Modern Man,” is particularly instructive from this point of view.
Our time, writes Casel, is witnessing the decline of individualism and humanism,
which by stripping nature and the world of the divine had believed themselves
to have forever dispelled the obfuscation of mystery. In this way, by means of the
collapse of rationalist humanism, our time has opened up “a new turning to the
mystery” (Casel 1, 30/5). The world “becomes for him once more a stage on which
God’s drama is being carried out. . . . God’s mystery once again inspires dread,
attracts and calls us” (ibid.). With a barely veiled allusion to so much that was
happening in those years in the secular sphere and, in particular, to the rediscovery
of ceremonials and liturgies in the political sphere, Casel can thus write: “Today
the world outside Christianity and the church is looking for mystery; it is building
a new kind of rite in which man worships himself. But through all this the world
will never reach God” (ibid., 33/7).
3. Casel’s strategy was already clearly articulated in the dissertation he defended
in 1918 at the University of Bonn under August Brinkmann: De philoso phorum
Graecorum silentio mystico ( On the Mystical Silence of the Greek Philosophers).
Under the appearances of a purely historical-philological study, we find already
enunciated here the two theses that will guide his subsequent labors.
The first, which constitutes the theme of the dissertation, is that the pagan
mysteries (Eleusian, Orphic, and Hermetic) must not be seen as a secret doc-
trine, which one could pronounce in words but that one is prohibited to reveal.
Such a meaning of the term mystery, according to Casel, is late and derives from
the influence of the Neopythagorean and Neoplatonic schools. Originally, mys-
tery designates a praxis, that of the drōmena, the gestures and acts by means of which a divine action is accomplished in time and in the world for human
salvation: silentium mysticum non qualecumque theologiam, sed actiones ritusque
sacros texisse (mystical silence does not conceal any kind of theology, but sacred actions and rites; Casel 2, 19).
The second thesis, which concludes the dissertation in the form of a ques-
tion, is in reality a programmatic declaration: “Greek philosophy has ceased, but
it is not dead. Thus it is possible to ask oneself if Christians took up the Greek
mystery-doctrine again and put it back into use and what influence it exercised
not only on their philosophy and theology, but also in sacred worship and in
their moral precepts (in particular among monks). I propose to treat this argu-
ment elsewhere [ qua de re alio loco erit agendum]” (ibid., 158).
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One can say that all of Casel’s subsequent work is the patient, methodical,
and obstinate carrying out of this program. Through an imposing series of lex-
ical and historical-philological studies, he seeks to demonstrate the connection
of the Christian sacramental liturgy with the pagan mysteries and to show that
Christian worship is by nature essentially a “mystery.”
א The attempt to put the pagan mysteries and Christian liturgy in relation in this
way is in truth already implicitly present in the gesture with which Clement of Alexan-
dria opposes the “mysteries of the logos ( tou logou ta mystēria)” to the pagan mysteries ( Exhortation to the Greeks, chap. 12). At any rate, between the end of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century, historians of religion—from
Usener to Dieterich, from Reitzenstein to Wilhelm Bousset—had observed and doc-
umented beyond any doubt the obvious connection between the salvific experience
that is in question in the pagan mysteries and the Christian message. The fact that the
claim of this connection would now come from a Benedictine monastery and become
widespread within the Church accounts for both the new meaning that it assumes
in twentieth-century theology and the polemics that accompany its diffusion. Still in
1944, three years before the Curia would take a position on the theses of the Liturgical
Movement with the encyclical Mediator Dei, a Jesuit theologian, Hugo Rahner, could write in a lecture on Pagan Mysteries and Christian Mysteries that “the matter still is very much under discussion” (Rahner, 152).
Casel’s doctrine can be seen as the attempt to construct a non-Judaic genealogy of
Christian liturgy (which in fact, as Werner’s studies show, we know instead to derive in
many aspects directly from the synagogue). “Judaism,” he never tires of repeating, “did
not know mysteries. . . . The Hebraic religion of the law was not mystical; where mystic
ideas appear, as in the prophets, these do not refer to worship. An authentic concept of
mystery is found only in Hellenism” (Casel 3, 140). In this sense it is possible that this distancing from the Judaic genealogy may have contained, given its historical context,
unconscious anti-Semitic implications (which their author, to be fair, does not seem to
have ever expressed).
4. The thesis of the derivation of Christian liturgy from the pagan and
late-classical mysteries has given rise to interminable discussions among theo-
logians and historians of liturgy. The lexical studies of Casel and his students
on the semantic history
(which they call “theological philology”) of the terms
mysterium, sacramentum, and leitourgia show that in the Fathers already between the fourth and fifth centuries there is certainly a clear awareness of the meaning
that these terms had in the pagan context. As to the derivation of the Latin term
sacramentum from the classical oath—which in the figure of the vow implied a
consecration and was in this sense present in the mystery-initiations—the po-
lemics, already kindled in Casel’s lifetime, have continued after his death.
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The debate over “theological philology” nevertheless risks obscuring a more
essential problem, which concerns not the problem of the continuity between
pagan mysteries and Christian mysteries so much as that of the very nature of the
liturgical mystery. If we want to fully understand what Casel means by mystery,
we must interrogate the function that it takes on in his argumentative strategy.
What is at stake for Casel, then, in the definition of Christianity as a “mystery”?
Why is the genealogical connection with pagan mysteries so decisive for him?
For Casel, mystery means essentially “cultic action.” Defining Christianity as
a mystery is therefore equivalent for him first of all to affirming that the Church
is not simply a community of believers, defined by sharing a doctrine crystal-
lized in a set of dogmas. The Church is defined rather through participation
in the mystery of the cultic action: “Yet just as the economy of salvation is not
merely teaching, but first and foremost Christ’s saving deed, so, too, the church
leads humanity to salvation not merely by word only, but by sacred actions”
(Casel 1, 32/7).
Christ’s salvation must be made real in us. This does not come about through
a mere application, with our behavior purely passive, through a “justification”
purely from “faith,” or by an application of the grace of Christ, where we have
only to clear things out of the way in a negative fashion to receive it. Rather, what
is necessary is a living, active sharing in the redeeming deed of Christ; passive