Liturgy and Secularism: Beyond the Divide by Joris Geldhof

Abstract

Reviewed by: Liturgy and Secularism: Beyond the Divide by Joris Geldhof Barnaby Hughes Joris Geldhof Liturgy and Secularism: Beyond the Divide Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2018 xviii + 158 pages. Paperback. $29.95. Belgian theologian Joris Geldhof is professor of liturgical studies and sacramental theology at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and editor-in-chief of the journal Questions Liturgiques/Studies in Liturgy. Although Geldhof has published numerous articles and edited a few books, Liturgy and Secularism appears to be his first monograph in English. This volume is mostly cobbled together from previously published lectures and articles. This leaves the book with an uneven feel, especially since some parts are translated from French and German. Liturgy and Secularism, nevertheless, is an insightful, thought-provoking and challenging read, one that avoids trite interpretations and facile conclusions. Geldhof brings to bear on his subject a strong sense that it is inadequate and unhelpful to blame secularism and modernity for the challenges of the Church and its liturgy today. Moreover, he argues, there is nothing to be gained by trying to turn back the clock or by prolonging the culture wars. Geldhof has thought deeply about liturgy, secularism and modernity, examining them from diverse angles, including anthropology, philosophy, history of ideas, and liturgical theology. He has structured the work like a diptych, each half divided into three chapters of approximately equal length. While the first half is largely devoid of theology, the second is not. Thus, for liturgical theologians, the second half is apt to be easier reading, while the first more challenging because less familiar. Geldhof's dialogue partners range from Giorgio Agamben and Martin Heidegger to Columba Marmion, Lambert Beauduin, and Alexander Schmemann. [End Page 207] Liturgy and Secularism rightly begins by defining and introducing secularism and modernity through the writings of Charles Taylor and Louis Dupré, respectively. Geldhof purposely chooses not to define liturgy, which he thinks has been ill-served by past definitions. Instead, he appeals to liturgy as mystery, something better understood by means of the imagination. And this leads to one of the author's major themes in this short, dense volume: that we need to shift from an epistemological emphasis to a soteriological one. Hopefully this will become clearer in what follows. Geldhof takes seriously this work's subtitle, Beyond the Divide. In the first chapter, he briefly breaks down four antagonisms: Church and world, heaven and earth, cult and culture, and religion and politics. In the third chapter, Geldhof examines the dichotomy sacred and profane, and distinguishes between the sacred and the holy. These are subtle arguments that require close attention. Modernity, he argues, is not a radical desacralization (the sacred disappears), but a profound resacralization (the sacred appears differently). In other words, "modern human beings might recognize the sacred … but they presuppose that it is the human mind which is at the origin of the sacred. For they have practically excluded all the other players in the domain of being" (65–66). The major problem with modernity, Geldhof contends, is not epistemological (proving God's existence), but soteriological ("recognition of the need for grace and salvation," 69). What does any of this have to do with the liturgy? Still in the book's first half, the author contends that modern human beings need to experience a profound conversion. In the words of Dupré, this conversion must be to "an attitude in which there is enough leisure for wonder and enough detachment for transcendence" (68). In the second half of Liturgy and Secularism, Geldhof argues "that the liturgy has an unmistakable desacralizing dimension. Not only does it fail to coincide with natural sacredness, it puts it under critique. It does not do so, however, in a defying, repudiating, or derogatory mode, but with a clear invitation to join in the soteriological dynamic of the Christ event. In other words, it sanctifies" (85). Thus, the liturgy breaks down the distinction between the [End Page 208] sacred and the profane, because it sanctifies all, making everyone and everything holy. In the only chapter comprised of entirely unpublished material, Geldhof highlights the complexity of the liturgy with reference to the Mystical Body of Christ and to mystery theology generally. He does...