The Roman Mass: From Early Christian Origins to Tridentine Reform by Uwe Michael Lang

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Roman Mass: From Early Christian Origins to Tridentine Reform by Uwe Michael Lang Stephen Morgan Uwe Michael Lang The Roman Mass: From Early Christian Origins to Tridentine Reform Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. xi + 445 pages. Hardback. $120. In 1948, when the Austrian scholar-priest Josef Jungmann published his two-volume Missarum Sollemnia it is not inaccurate to say that it marked the full flowering of a century of scholarship which had sought to understand the history of the Roman Rite as part of those various theologico-pastoral efforts the better to engage with the liturgy, and which came to be known as the Liturgical Movement. Jungmann's work, known in its English translation as The Mass of the Roman Rite, appeared within months of Pius XII's encyclical on the liturgy Mediator Dei and shortly before the same pope began to make changes to the Roman Rite that were clearly influenced by the insights of the Liturgical Movement. The subtitle Jungmann had given his book was "A genetic explanation of the Roman Mass." So complete, so thorough, so authoritative was its treatment of the historic development of the Mass in the West that it is possible to talk [End Page 120] of that explanation as being thought to be the culmen et fons of liturgical scholarship in the Roman Rite: the summit of the Liturgical Movement and, as it came to be, the source of so much of the intellectual underpinning of the liturgical teaching of the Second Vatican Council and the post-conciliar reform of the liturgy that came in its wake. It is no overstatement to say that liturgical scholarship of the Roman Rite falls into two periods: before Jungmann and after Jungmann. No respectable liturgical scholar before Jungmann managed so comprehensive a synthesis; no liturgical scholar after him can afford to ignore his work. And yet, The Mass of the Roman Rite was a work of its time. It is seventy-five years old—even its fifth edition, the last published during Jungmann's life, appeared over half a century ago—and it bears all the marks of its age. The number and range of sources that have come to light, the more developed techniques for establishing the age and provenance of texts, the critical examination of those texts, the insights brought to liturgics by anthropology, sociology, psychology, and ritual studies all mean that what could be confidently asserted in 1948 has subsequently been shown to be very much less secure. Where Jungmann's work could be distinguished from the more antiquarian efforts of, for example, Prosper Guéranger or Adrian Fortescue (and that is not to disparage the work of either one iota), by a rather more rigorous attention to detail and to the sources, and rather less reliance upon conjecture, it still bore the marks of early modern and Enlightenment belief in progress. Two presuppositions go largely unexamined in Jungmann: that things develop from the simple to the complex, and that there was once a liturgical epocha aurea, a golden age to which it is possible in part to return if only later corruptions can be stripped away. Neither presupposition is self-evidently true. Indeed, scholarship in many fields has decisively undermined the first as a rule of general development and exposed the anachronistic nature of the second. Consider the insights of linguistics in, for example, the grammar of Old English in comparison to modern English or, in the field of political science the complexity of the constitutional structure of Republican Rome compared with that of the present-day United [End Page 121] States. Contemporary study of ancient literature reveals the prevalence of variant sources appearing to coalesce over time into received texts and anthropologists—insofar as they agree upon anything—seem to agree that what once would have been called "primitive societies" are at the very least as complex and multi-dimensional as modern and post-modern ones. Indeed, it appears at least as true that things progress from the complex to the simple as the other way around. The second rule that Jungmann takes as axiomatic—what we might call the Verfallstheorie—fares no better in the light of...