On the Practicing of Old Liturgies

This blog is about practice, not theology. (However, as I read Alexander Schmemann's For the Life of the World, I am becoming convinced that the two are ultimately inseparable.) My inspiration for this post is the following:

A new book is still on its trial and the amateur is not in a position to judge it … Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books … Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us. Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction … [I]f any man is tempted to think – as one might be tempted who read only contemporaries – that ‘Christianity’ is a word of so many meanings that it means nothing at all, he can learn beyond all doubt, by stepping out of his own century, that this is not so.*

This incisive comment by C.S. Lewis on the value of reading outside one’s own historical moment got me thinking about liturgy. Lewis points out that the blind spots which endanger every age are usually (perhaps unavoidably) present in the books of that age. I want to extend that idea into the realm of church practice.

Evangelical liturgies have, almost as a rule, been developed – sometimes very thoughtfully, sometimes very hodgepodgely – during and for this age. These liturgies (it feels a bit strange to call them that) might contain various holdovers from past decades but not many. And even when they do reflect antiquity, they do so vaguely, more in shadow than in substance. Now, this would be fine if our time was one of perfect insight, but it is not. So, I say, just as it is helpful to read what they read of old, why not do what they did of old? (There are myriad other, and better, reasons to embrace ancient liturgy, but I am here just concerned with one.)

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* C.S. Lewis, “On the Reading of Old Books” (1944), reprinted in (ed.) Walter Hooper, God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970), pgs. 201-3.