Introduction
Nicholas Wolterstorff opens his recent book Acting Liturgically: Philosophical Reflections on Religious Practice with the following paragraph:
In recent decades there has been an extraordinary surge of interest in philosophy of religion within the analytic tradition of philosophy. Those who have participated in this movement – myself included – have focused almost all of their attention on just four topics: the nature of God, the epistemology of religious belief, the nature of religious experience, and the problem of evil. If someone who knew nothing about religion drew conclusions about the religious mode of life from this literature, she would come to the view that, apart from the mystical experiences of a few people, the religious life consists of believing things about God. She would have no inkling of the fact that liturgies and rituals are prominent within the lives of most adherents of almost all religions . . . Between the priorities of analytic philosophers of religion and the priorities of most religious adherents there is a striking discrepancy.Footnote 1
There is much to celebrate about the ‘surge of interest’ of philosophy of religion in the analytic tradition. Exactly the kinds of topics Wolterstorff mentions have received much helpful attention. Yet he is likewise right in pointing out that there is a discrepancy between work being done by philosophers of religion and ‘the priorities of most religious adherents’ (I assume Wolterstorff is speaking primarily about Christians). While Christians are by no means unconcerned with questions about the nature of the divine and the justification of their beliefs in God, the vast majority of them are far more concerned with living out their faith, which is largely about certain practices. Consider what Charles Taliaferro writes:
It is regrettable that mainstream, contemporary philosophy of religion has largely ignored the role of ritual in Christian life and practice. Very few standard anthologies today in philosophy of religion contain any material on prayer, the sacraments, meditation, fasting, vigils, religious hymns, icons, pilgrimages, the sacredness of places or times, and so on, and yet these play different roles in much religious life. A neglect of this terrain results in an excessively intellectual or detached portrait of religion.Footnote 2
Turning to liturgy and ritual, then, is a very important step in the right direction and I find Wolterstorff's account of liturgy to be fundamentally correct. My goal here is to follow Wolterstorff's lead by taking his observations further and thinking more broadly about what we mean by the term ‘religion’, specifically, the Christian religion. In what follows, I intend to show how Christian theology grows out of and is grounded in liturgical practice. Put more sharply, I believe that liturgy is more foundational to Christianity than its doctrine, even though doctrine is always necessary as a codification of Christian experience.
Here it is important to be clear about how I am using the term ‘liturgy’. The term usually takes one of two particular senses. First, traditions such as Roman Catholicism and Anglicanism are often described as ‘liturgical’. More often than not, this use is vague at best, since it can refer to using candles or incense, bowing and genuflecting, and ringing bells. Wolterstorff also uses the term in a second sense – that of a ‘script’ prescribing the order of service. Regarding this second sense, it would be hard to think of a religious tradition in Christianity that does not have some sort of script. For some, this is codified by book or text. But simply having an order of service – written or not – ends up being a liturgy, meaning that ‘non-liturgical’ traditions are not lacking in liturgy. Wolterstorff provides an excellent exposition and analysis of both worship and script, and my intention here is neither to criticize nor to undermine that analysis. However, I am using the term in a way that includes the liturgical practice that takes place on Sunday morning but places that in the broader liturgical context of our lives. Historically, the term ‘liturgy’ has been much richer and encompassing than the relatively narrow use of the term today. Restricting the use of the term loses an important connection with its ancient meaning, going back to the ancient Greeks and to the early church.
Let me put my view in analytic terms. I would label Wolterstorff's position, as well as that of Terrence Cuneo, as L1: liturgy as defined primarily in terms of a weekly gathering of Christians. To be sure, much (and perhaps most) writing on liturgy falls into this category, so Wolterstorff and Cuneo are in good company. In category L2, I would place the view of someone like Jean-Yves Lacoste, particularly as expounded in his text Experience and the Absolute. For Lacoste, liturgy is ‘the logic that presides over the encounter between man and God writ large’.Footnote 3 On this view, liturgy is not restricted to a particular day of the week nor a particular action in which human beings engage. Instead, it concerns all of the ways in which human beings engage – or even do not engage – with God. Liturgy for Lacoste aims not merely at seeing and knowing God but at putting ourselves at God's disposal. Thus, the movement of liturgy for Lacoste is threefold: (1) from the everyday life of being-in-the-world, (2) to becoming new beings in the image of Christ, and (3) back to serving our neighbours. To explicate Lacoste's position further is beyond the scope of this article. What is important is the way in which he broadens the conception of liturgy.Footnote 4
Following Lacoste but going beyond his position, I see my position – which I label L3 – to be about the fundamental structure of human existence. We are, quite simply, liturgical beings. One could explicate this in many different and complementary ways. From an Augustinian view, we might say we are what we love. That is, our loves have the most profound effect upon our lives. For instance, Augustine says: ‘When we ask whether somebody is a good person, we are not asking what he believes or hopes for but what he loves’.Footnote 5 Being a Christian is primarily about following Jesus in daily life. I do not mean my view to be exactly that of Augustine, but I think this very broad way of thinking about liturgy is correct. Here I simply provide this very brief account to situate my position.
If the claim that liturgical practice takes precedence over doctrine is correct, then future work on ‘philosophy of liturgy’ done by Christians should be developed in such a way that it takes into account the entire range of liturgical practices in which Christians engage – from Sunday to Sunday. A further aspect of placing the emphasis on liturgy in Christianity might mean that future work on the philosophy of the Christian religion should at least broaden and perhaps even reorient its focus from being almost exclusively concerned with doctrine to being considerably more concerned with how belief is embodied in practice. In any case, if I am right that the lives of Christians are more focused on the practices than beliefs, then philosophers of Christian religion need to take considerably greater interest in those practices. That in no way means that philosophers of Christian religion should give up work on proofs for God's existence or examinations of God's attributes. It simply means that philosophy of religion has other rich and relatively untouched areas to cultivate. What I say here may well be applicable to other religions and I suspect that – mutatis mutandis – it probably is to some extent. However, that would be a different sort of project from the one I am attempting to undertake here.
Religious experience and theological belief
If we go back to the quotation from Wolterstorff, he mentions that the question of religious experience has been taken up by philosophers. But he qualifies this by noting that it has largely concentrated on ‘the mystical experiences of a few’. The implication is that there is a small group of select people who connect to God in some important or profound way. Yet studies of ordinary people in ordinary circumstances show exactly the opposite. For instance, The Madonna of 115th Street gives an account of ‘the lived religious experiences’ and ‘the devotional logic of presence’ of Italian Catholics.Footnote 6 One could just as easily examine the lived experience or devotional presence of global south Pentecostals or North American evangelicals. As it turns out, many Christians around the world have religious experiences.Footnote 7
Wolterstorff also notes that anyone who only reads the analytic philosophy of religion literature would think that religion is about ‘believing things about God’. Taliaferro puts the problem of emphasizing religious belief over religious practice in terms of two things: (1) being ‘excessively intellectual’ and (2) being ‘detached’. While I am a philosopher by training and trade, I don't think religion is primarily ‘intellectual’ in nature. To be sure, it involves thinking, but Christian beliefs – the kind formulated by creeds and catechism – are only one kind of thinking, and not the most important way of thinking at least for the vast majority of Christians. There are people for whom religion is primarily cerebral – and many of them are philosophers of religion – but they are very few in number in comparison to the roughly 2 billion Christians around the world. To make that point stronger, consider Ninian Smart's taxonomy of the seven different dimensions of religion: (1) ritualistic, (2) experiential, (3) mythic, (4) doctrinal, (5) ethical, (6) social, and (7) material.Footnote 8 While we need not be concerned here with the exact contours of Smart's taxonomy, it does show us that doctrine is a relatively small aspect of religion. If we take Smart's taxonomy at face value, doctrine is 1/7th of what constitutes religion. However, if one considers the contours of the discipline known as ‘philosophy of religion’ – particularly in the analytic philosophical tradition – then it quickly becomes clear that these six other dimensions have been given remarkably little attention, both in general and proportionally. As Kevin Schilbrack incisively notes:
The doctrinal dimension of religions has received the lion's share of the attention from philosophers of religion. But the task of developing and defending religious doctrines tends to be the work of literate elites, typically from a leisured class and typically male . . . the interest in religious doctrines and arguments is a relatively small fraction of the lives of religious people, even in those communities that do make such issues central.Footnote 9
If we were speaking of religions in general, it seems safe to say that most religions are not concerned with expounding and inculcating doctrines. But, even within Christendom, the number of groups or denominations that define themselves primarily in terms of specific doctrines is limited. Further, even in groups that have strong doctrinal traditions, the average person in the pew is either not very familiar with them or else has only a limited understanding of what they are supposed to mean. Consider the distinction Catherine Bell makes between what she calls ‘orthodoxic’ and ‘orthopraxic’ forms of religion. Of course, she recognizes that the distinction between these two forms of religion is a matter of emphasis, rather than a concern with one against the other.
Whether a community is deemed orthodoxic or orthopraxic can only be a matter of emphasis, of course, since no religious tradition can promote belief or ritual at the total expense of the other, and many would never distinguish between them at all. Moreover, whatever the overall emphasis in a tradition as a whole, it is easy to find subcommunities stressing the opposite pole . . . terms like ‘orthodoxy’ or ‘orthopraxy’ cannot be used effectively if accorded too much rigidity or exclusivity.Footnote 10
Most Christians would not even be able to explain the difference between orthodoxy and orthopraxy.Footnote 11 Still, Bell claims the following about Christianity: ‘As a result of the dominance of Christianity in much of the West, which has tended to stress matters of doctrinal and theological orthodoxy, people may take it for granted that religion is primarily a matter of what one believes.’Footnote 12 To be sure, there are people who think of Christianity as a set of beliefs to which one subscribes. However, most people who identify as Christians would be hard pressed to explain in much detail even the most basic Christian doctrines. Having watched a number of my students become Roman Catholics because they find the idea of a church that has answers to all religious questions in the form of a catechism quite appealing, I have often reminded them that their comfort in having all theological matters decided by the Magisterium is not shared by most people in their pew.
Here it's helpful to return to Taliaferro's points out about belief being ‘detached’. The question here is: what's detached from what? The simplest answer is that theological belief is detached from religious practice. I suspect this is what Taliaferro intends. But it's a question of how it is detached. Taliaferro seems to imply that, if we only focus on belief and neglect ritual, then we have a conception of religion that is somewhat impersonal: religion as signing on to a collection of doctrines. I think this is certainly a danger. But Alvin Plantinga points out that, if belief in propositions were the only thing at issue, then the demons would be believers (Ja. 2:19). The difference, says Plantinga, is one of affections: the believer believes but also loves God.Footnote 13 Plantinga is exactly right on this point, and he sounds quite Augustinian. These affections and these beliefs are formed, nurtured, and put in action by Christian liturgy. But I think the affections are more fundamental than the beliefs. Consider this statement: ‘Christianity is not an intellectual system, a collection of dogmas, or a moralism. Christianity is instead an encounter, a love story; it is an event.’Footnote 14 That quotation comes from someone one might not expect: Cardinal Ratzinger, who became Pope Benedict. Given Benedict's nickname while Cardinal – God's Rottweiler – it is safe to conclude that this statement could hardly mean that doctrine or dogma is unimportant. His time as Cardinal Prefect at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (1981–2005) was marked by a vigorous defence of the faith and denunciation of many for their heretical views. So, at least in his case, there is nothing like a ‘choice’ between ‘lived’ theology and what we might call ‘academic’ or ‘speculative’ theology. Instead, it becomes a question of emphasis or primacy: namely, what really is the driving force behind Christianity?
Benedict is right that Christianity is an encounter and love story, which can only be understood by doing and being. It is not incidental that Benedict's first encyclical is Deus caritas est, which begins as follows:
‘God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him’ (1 Jn. 4:16). These words from the First Letter of John express with remarkable clarity the heart of the Christian faith . . . Saint John also offers a kind of summary of the Christian life: ‘We have come to know and to believe in the love God has for us’.Footnote 15
Understanding the doctrine of Christianity is highly dependent upon love being lived out. Rightly understood, doctrine grows out of practice, for it is a kind of formalization of liturgical experience. Liturgy simultaneously relates us to God and to our neighbour, and community is more fundamental to Christian faith than dogma, both historically and logically. I will follow that order – history and logic – by first sketching out the earliest days of Christian history and then turn to the logic of liturgy and doctrine. Working out all the implications of the thesis that liturgy is primary to Christianity is a task that that I can only begin here.
However, before going any further, I need to make clear that my thesis does not boil down to something as simple as ‘practice is more fundamental than theory’. The reason for this is simple: I do not believe that the practice/theory distinction can hold in any strong sense. There is no practice without theory or theory without practice. So any attempt to separate them into independent parts is impossible. Aristotle was the first to make a distinction between theōria and praxis, and it is a useful distinction – at least to some extent. The problem with the distinction, though, is that it could imply that there either is or could be something like a theōria divorced from praxis or a praxis divorced from theōria. Aristotle never makes such a claim. Neither do I. For instance, theōria is something we do, making it ultimately a form of praxis. Put otherwise, thinking about God and making arguments for God's existence are practices. The Nicene Creed can be viewed as a set of propositions but saying the Nicene Creed each week is performative in nature. Even believing in God is something that we do. Thus, there can be no simple distinction between theory and practice or belief and practice.
In saying that ‘liturgy’ is primary for Christians, I am saying that lived out beliefs have a primacy over beliefs found in catechisms and creeds. Anthropologists have made it clear that religious practices across the world are not merely rote, irrational, and meaningless (an assumption that seems to have arisen from Protestant Christians). Practices always embody theory. They are ways of knowing. My point is that theory is dependent upon practice for its meaning. By saying that liturgy is the primary element of Christian life, I am saying that it is more basic to Christianity than official statements of belief found in creeds and catechisms. Or, put differently, how we interpret creeds and catechisms is always in light of liturgical experience. Put more strongly, when liturgical practice is at odds with creeds and doctrines, those either implicitly change (we interpret them in a different way) or they are explicitly amended to reflect the liturgical life of believers.
In the final section of this article, I will show how Aristotle sees the connection between practical wisdom (phronēsis) and theoretical wisdom (sophia). For the moment, though, we can simply say that one cannot have sophia without phronēsis. One of the ways in which analytic philosophy and phenomenology can be seen as complementing one another is by the recognition of something that is often called ‘embodied cognition’, which is the idea that cognition is not something that only takes place in the brain but is actually undertaken by our entire body.Footnote 16 The basis for such a conception of knowing is provided by recent discoveries in cognitive science. One way of putting this connection is that of Mark Johnson, who argues that cognitive ‘patterns emerge as meaningful structures for us chiefly at the level of our bodily movements through space, our manipulation of objects, and our perceptual interactions’.Footnote 17 A fuller definition can be given as follows. Cognition can be said to be embodied in that it
arises from bodily interactions with the world. From this point of view, cognition depends on the kinds of experiences that come from having a body with particular perceptual and motor capacities that are inseparably linked and that together form the matrix with which reasoning, memory, emotion, language, and all other aspects of life meshed.Footnote 18
Assuming cognitive scientists and phenomenologists are at least right about the intimate connection between cognition and bodily movement, it should come as no surprise that our bodily comportment towards God and our neighbour is crucial to our knowing both God and neighbour. Practices such as kneeling for prayer, bowing before the altar, and extending a hand for the peace are not simply practices. They are embodied ways of knowing. It is with this qualification in mind that I argue that liturgy has primacy over doctrine, not that liturgy can or should exist without doctrine.
Liturgical practice in Christianity
If one goes back to the beginnings of Christianity – before it even becomes ‘Christianity’ and Jesus is just another rabbi – one might be tempted to say, as Gertrude Stein famously said of Oakland, CA, ‘there's no there there’.Footnote 19 By this, she meant, nostalgically, that what she had experienced in Oakland as a child had disappeared, so there was nothing to return to. But I think we – as Kierkegaard's disciples at second hand – tend to have the opposite problem to that of Stein: presuming there was a ‘there’ there when there really wasn't much there.
What ‘doctrine’ – what theological belief – was there to believe?Footnote 20 Certainly, one doctrine found in both Judaism and early Christianity was simply that God exists. Every first-century Jew reciting the Shema would surely have affirmed God's existence. A belief in God is fundamental to many, though certainly not all, religions. However, the religion that grows out of the teachings of Jesus is one that reshapes Jewish beliefs in rather substantial ways. The first gospel – Mark, going back to ad 66–70 – presents the disciples as continually confused about who Jesus is. ‘Who do people say that I am?’ asks Jesus (Mk. 8:27). He gets answers such as John the Baptist, Elijah, and one of the prophets. Then he asks ‘who do you say that I am?’ (my italics) and Peter answers: ‘You are the Messiah’ (Mk. 29). Since the category ‘messiah’ was highly contested in terms of its content, that Peter recognizes him to be such doesn't – on its own – tell us much more than that Jesus was recognized as someone very special. But what exactly does Jesus teach? While the basic message boils down to something like ‘follow me’, what that means gets defined – by Jesus himself – in continually different terms. Whereas conservative Protestants tend to favour the born-again metaphor, Jesus also heals and forgives the sins of the paralytic because of the faith of his friends. It's not his faith but their faith that counts in this story. To give another example, Jesus says to the tax collector Zacchaeus that ‘today salvation has come to this house’. What prompts this response? Zacchaeus says he would give half his possessions to the poor and repay anyone he'd defrauded fourfold. In this account, there's nothing even mentioned about his ‘faith’. Instead, it's a concrete action, a similar action to the one that Jesus had required of the rich young ruler (sell all you have and give the money to the poor). Jesus often praises people for their faith, but the content of that faith – at least in the gospel texts – is significantly underdetermined. In fact, the one place in which Jesus speaks about judgement and the separation of believers from unbelievers – Matthew 25 – only makes reference to how they have lived. Those who have taken care of the stranger, the hungry and thirsty, the sick, and those in prison are told they will ‘inherit the kingdom’ (Mt. 25:34). There is no mention of any doctrines or propositional beliefs, let alone the need to affirm them.
Yet there is another way of thinking about faith that makes sense of what Jesus means when he says that his followers must have faith in him. In Hebrews 11:6, we read that ‘without faith it is impossible to please God, for whoever would approach him must believe that he exists and rewards those who seek him’. The term translated as ‘believe’ here is pisteusai, which is not about believing a proposition about God but believing in God. In both the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, such a term never means intellectual assent to a proposition for which there is insufficient empirical proof. Instead, as Wilfred Cantwell Smith points out, to have faith in Jesus means ‘to hold dear’ or ‘to be loyal to’ or ‘to value highly’ – or, simply, ‘to love’ Jesus.Footnote 21 For Jesus’ disciples to believe in him, they would certainly have had to believe that he existed; that would have been a necessary but not a sufficient condition. However, their belief in Jesus was not a commitment to a proposition but a commitment to him. To follow Jesus meant choosing a way of being and the choice here was whether to pledge one's allegiance to Jesus or else to refuse to do so.
The pericopes I've mentioned above give us encounters with Jesus. For the disciples, as well as those who become his close followers, this is a love story. As is well known, to follow Jesus was originally designated as being part of ‘the way’. Jesus identifies himself as ‘he hodos’ – the way – in Jn.14:6. In Acts 9:2, Luke tells us that Saul was looking for anyone ‘who belonged to the Way [tēs hodou]’ (NRSV, capitals in the translation). What, though, is the meaning of this term ‘hodos’? In short, it has a very concrete meaning – in which it can mean such things as road, path, journey, expedition, and way. Yet it likewise has a much richer, metaphorical meaning as the sense of life's direction or motivation.
When Jesus asks the twelve, ‘Do you also wish to go away?’, Simon Peter answers, ‘Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life’ (Jn. 6:67–68). In effect, Jesus is saying: are you going to follow me? Have you thrown in your lot with me? With some rather significant lapses along the way, they did follow him to his death, resurrection, and ascension. So then what? In his classic study on early Christianity, Wayne A. Meeks points out that the church's ‘beginnings and earliest growth remain in many respects mysterious’.Footnote 22 We don't know all that much about what exactly Christians believed in these early years, though we do know that beliefs varied widely and that many early beliefs came to be seen as heretical, even though it often took decades or centuries for a specific belief to be identified as a heresy. Further, it was not as if those early followers of Jesus had no doctrines at all, since they were Jews and would have faithfully gone to the synagogue just as Jesus himself did. All that Jesus taught them was set within the Jewish liturgical context of belief. For them to recognize him as Messiah required a thoroughly Jewish context. Yet, even in the years depicted in the book of Acts, that Jewish context is already changing. Certainly, the vast system of doctrines that came to be part of Christianity over centuries simply did not exist for the early church, which means that there was no way in which they could have believed them. What propositional content could the thief on the cross have had about Jesus? He simply says: ‘Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom’ (Lk. 23:41).
Even with little explicitly ‘Christian’ doctrine, the early Christians had liturgy – a way of being. The best account of the very early church comes from Acts 2. That chapter begins with the story of Pentecost, in which 3,000 converts were reportedly baptized. Then Peter preaches a sermon in which he says that Jesus is Lord and Messiah and that in order to follow him they need to change their direction in life, be baptized, and be filled with the Spirit. He tells his astounded listeners that Jesus forgives sins, that he is God's son, and that he had risen from the dead. These teachings would have been the propositional backbone of early Christian liturgy – and one can say that they are still an encapsulation of basic Christian belief. Which is to say that liturgy needs some kind of beliefs in order to function. But what is liturgy? The term comes from the Greek leitourgia (a compound of leito = public – from laos = people and ergon = working or service). The usual translation of this term is ‘the work of the people’, though the translations ‘public service’ or ‘public works’ are much more accurate. What was this work? Originally, it was the wealthy people of Athens providing funding for sporting events, banquets, and religious ceremonies. Such persons were called ‘liturgists’ (leitourgoi).
Given that ancient Greece was thoroughly religious, one's service was by definition a religious service. This broad sense of liturgy is likewise to be found in the Christian scriptures. Variants of ‘liturgy’ are used to describe such actions as ‘ministering’ or ‘ministry’, along with ‘service’ and ‘serving’. For instance, Paul praises the Philippians for their ministry (leitourgias) to him (Ph. 2:30) and the Corinthians for their financial leitourgias (2 Cor. 9:12). Luke at one point uses the term in a way that's closer to the way it is used today, for he describes the church in Antioch as ‘worshipping [leitourgountōn] God’ (Acts 13:2). But what exactly was this ‘worshipping God’? If we go back to that account in Acts 2, we find that these early followers of Jesus ‘devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers’ (Acts 2:44). This formula is about as close to ‘word and sacrament’ as one can get. But their ‘liturgy’ doesn't end there. We are also told that ‘all who believed were together and had all things in common’, that they ‘spent much time together in the temple’, and that ‘they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the good will of all the people’ (Acts 2:44, 46–47). What is striking about Luke's account is that he doesn't make any distinction between what we today would consider the ‘worship service’ bits and the ‘serving the community’ bits. Or, better put, all of this together constitutes their worship. Spending time in the temple, breaking bread together, and sharing things in common are all part of their liturgy.
One of the reasons for examining the birth of Christianity is that we can see how Christian theology grows out of liturgical experience. Of course, theology is itself a liturgical practice: it is a way of worshipping God by using the mind. In this respect, the term ‘orthodox’ (orthos + doxa) is instructive. In ancient Greek, doxa had to do with belief or opinion. But, in the Septuagint, doxa is used to translate the Hebrew word for glory. So ‘orthodoxy’ takes on a dual meaning, both proper belief and proper praise. In the Christian scriptures, these meanings are totally intertwined: doxa always means a good opinion of someone that results in honour, praise, and worship. Put another way, the problem with heretics is that they are not worshipping God but idols, and thus breaking the first commandment.
Let me provide a concrete example of how liturgy leads to theology. With the conversions of Barnabas and Paul, the faith spread considerably wider and this expansion required a new conception of liturgy and a new ethnic conception of who could be included in the ekklēsia. The problem was entirely practical and entirely theological. As long as Christianity remained simply a Jewish sect, being part of it required taking up Jewish practice. However, when Paul proclaims that ‘there is no longer Jew or Greek’ (Gal. 3:28), he makes possible a new liturgical identity and practice. Greek converts would not be required to engage in classic Jewish rites (such as circumcision) nor abstain from eating foods forbidden to Jews. Of course, this transition from Jewish sect to world religion does not come without a fight. Even after Peter's vision in which he comes to see that the euangelion was for Gentiles as well as Jews (Acts 10), some Jews in Jerusalem still insisted that Gentile converts needed to observe Hebrew customs.Footnote 23 Yet Paul responds that there is a fundamental difference between following Torah and following the euangelion. To follow the latter is to be freed from the former. Is this reversal on Paul's part ‘theology’? Of course. But it grows out of a liturgical context – the very real existential problem of Jews and Gentiles worshipping together and asking which Jewish customs Gentiles would need to follow to be part of the community. It would not be difficult to analyse various Christian doctrines to show how they grow out of liturgical practice – how worshipping Jesus as Lord must inevitably lead to questions about his divinity and humanity or how the Holy Spirit's appearance on Pentecost would naturally lead to questions of how the Spirit relates to the Father and the Son. But, for our purposes, these examples are sufficient.
The primacy of practice
One important thing that Terrence Cuneo does in his book on liturgy is point out that Bell's characterization of Christianity as primarily orthodoxic in nature is, at best, only partly true. He writes: ‘Christianity comes in many varieties, and not all are all belief-centred in the way that Bell describes. This is certainly true of various forms of the Roman Catholic, Anglican, and Mennonite traditions, for example – and might also be true of so-called non-liturgical traditions such as Quakerism.’ He goes on to say that his tradition, Eastern Christianity, is particularly orthopraxic in nature and that it ‘has much in common with Bell's description of Judaism and Islam’ (both of which Bell identifies as largely concerned with practice). More importantly, Cuneo recognizes the following:
For Eastern Christians, the liturgy functions as the centerpiece of the Christian way of life. It is the paradigmatic expression of the tradition's mind – the sense of the term ‘mind’ referring not simply or even primarily to various doctrines or claims but also to ways of conducting oneself and viewing the world, whose rich character and significance might be difficult and perhaps impossible to capture in wholly propositional terms.Footnote 24
While I think what Cuneo says applies to far more of Christianity than simply Eastern Christians, I see three important points in this quotation. First, Cuneo rightly understands that Christianity is first and foremost a way of life. It's about one's very being. Second, liturgy is not primarily about affirming a set of doctrines but about ways of seeing and being in the world, which would clearly include doctrines but is not be limited to them or even have them as a primary focal point. Third, and closely connected to the second point, liturgical practices are central to the ‘mind’ of the Christian – they are ways of knowing that perhaps cannot be reducible to propositions, even though the church has always worked to explain its liturgical practices by way of theological beliefs.
While Cuneo speaks of liturgy as ‘ways of conducting oneself and viewing the world’, his book still ends up talking mainly about what we do on Sunday morning, albeit something that in Eastern Christianity lasts quite considerably longer than an hour. However, our conception of liturgy needs to be expanded from a few hours to each and every day. In trying to think about how such a broader conception of liturgy might go, it is helpful to follow the distinction made by two Episcopal priests regarding what they call two kinds of liturgy. They speak of ‘intensive liturgy’ as ‘what happens when Christians assemble to worship God’. In contrast, ‘extensive liturgy’ is ‘what happens when Christians leave the assembly to conduct their daily affairs’. Of course, they immediately qualify this distinction by saying that ‘the two types are mutually dependent’.Footnote 25 In fact, they are so dependent that one cannot be thought without the other. Intensive liturgy alone results in what my Southern Baptist friends in Texas called ‘Sunday Christians’ (not meant as a compliment). Conversely, extensive liturgy alone would result in lone individuals divorced from the kind of community needed to sustain them. Thus, ‘as our intensive liturgies drive us into the world to do our extensive liturgies, so our extensive liturgies bring us back week by week to the Christian assembly’.Footnote 26
Let me begin with extensive liturgy, although it will quickly be seen that it connects to intensive liturgy. Central to the gospel is the idea of metanoia. If we simply extrapolate from ‘meta’ and ‘nous’, the roots of this term, we come up with the literal meaning of ‘afterthought’. But the real meaning is ‘changing one's mind’. The Gospel of Mark opens with John ‘preaching a baptism of metanoios’ (Mk. 1:4). Similarly, Jesus speaks of ‘metanoian’ in Lk. 24:47. The usual translation is ‘repent’ or ‘repentance’. Tertullian insisted that ‘paenitentiam agite’ (confession of sins or repentance) was an incorrect translation of metanoia and many have agreed that ‘repent’ is a bad English translation, despite the fact that it is common. The first problem is that metanoia doesn't really carry the idea of sorrow or looking back upon one's life with regret. There's a good Greek term for that and it's metamelomai. The second problem is repentance doesn't begin to go far enough. You could simply be sorry about how you've lived your life but not sorry enough to do anything about it. Instead, metanoia is really about a change of mind or heart. It is conversion. To be converted is not merely to think differently but to act differently. Conversion requires a 180° turn in one's way of being.
Pierre Hadot reminds us that philosophy for the ancients and the mediaevals was first and foremost about living well – a way of life. There were many theories involved in this, to be sure. But the theories were formulated precisely so that one can live a better, more fulfilled life. Central to achieving such a life was askēsis, a Greek term which he translates as ‘spiritual exercises’. For Hadot, ancient philosophy was concerned precisely with practising such exercises so that we ‘let ourselves be changed, in our point of view, attitudes, and convictions. This means that we must dialogue with ourselves, and hence do battle with ourselves.’ The result of such a dialogue is ‘a conversion which turns our entire life upside down, changing the life of the person who goes through it’.Footnote 27 What's odd about all this, of course, is that we tend to think that philosophy is really about theory and that practice is, at best, secondary. If Hadot is correct (and I think he is), it is rather the other way around.
In Romans, Paul talks about presenting one's body ‘as a living sacrifice’ and he defines this act as ‘spiritual worship’ (12:1). Romano Guardini writes: ‘The practice of the liturgy means that by the help of grace, under the guidance of the Church, we grow into living works of art before God.’Footnote 28 Lest this be thought a strange way of thinking, consider that Paul also speaks of human beings as God's ‘poiēma’. While this is usually translated as ‘workmanship’, one could instead say that human beings are God's poem or else work of art. Indeed, this way of thinking about the human persons as works of art is as old as the ancient Greeks and as recent as Nietzsche and Foucault. Here is how the Greek church father John Chrysostom puts it:
As therefore happens in the case of painters from life, so let it happen in your case. For they, arranging their boards, and tracing white lines upon them, and sketching the royal likeness in outline, before they apply the actual colors, rub out some lines, and change some for others, rectifying mistakes, and altering what is amiss with all freedom . . . Consider that your soul is the portrait; before therefore the true coloring of the spirit comes, wipe out habits which have wrongly been implanted.Footnote 29
J. J. von Allmen says the following: ‘A superficial reading of the New Testament is sufficient to teach us that the very life of Jesus of Nazareth is a life which is, in some sense, “liturgical” ’ and he goes on to say that Jesus led ‘the life of worship’.Footnote 30 This is as clear a statement of how Jesus himself lived the liturgical life as one could imagine.
On phronēsis and theōria
Here I want to make good on my promise to ground my claim that practice is more fundamental than theory by way of Aristotle and Heidegger.
Consider the distinction that Aristotle makes between phronēsis and praxis, on the one hand, and sophia and theōria, on the other hand. There are three components of phronēsis. One must (1) know what is important, (2) know how to bring this important thing about, and (3) actually do so. Aristotle insists that anything short of action does not demonstrate phronēsis. With its emphasis on action, phronēsis is about specific and concrete truths. To exercise phronēsis one must know ‘what is fitting . . . in relation to the agent, and to the circumstances and the object’.Footnote 31 Yet Aristotle also believes that someone with phronēsis can discern truth about one's life as a whole. ‘It is thought to be the mark of a man of practical wisdom to be able to deliberate well . . . about what sorts of things conduce to the good life in general.’Footnote 32 When I ask ‘how should I live my life?’ there is a universal component to the answer (for such virtues as temperance and courage are unchanging). While phronēsis guides us in terms of practical action (or praxis), sophia is about theoretical reasoning and so would not seem to be connected to practical action. It results in knowledge of that which does not change, what we would call universal and necessary truths. These truths are what we usually call ‘science’. Yet such a quick distinction between phronēsis and sophia cannot actually be made, for at least two reasons. One is that, while the intellectual virtues (those which have to do with nous or mind) are higher than practical virtues, the latter are needed in order to have the former. A stronger way of putting this, though, is that happiness and wisdom require both kinds of wisdom in the sense that sophia is dependent upon phronēsis. Thus, phronēsis turns out to be more fundamental than sophia, since sophia is grounded upon phronēsis.
This order of precedence gets repeated in Heidegger, who lectured on Aristotle over a number of years while at the University of Marburg before the appearance of Being and Time in 1927. While teaching a course on Plato's Sophist, Heidegger began by lecturing on Aristotle, devoting a good deal of space to the term phronēsis. Aristotle sees phronēsis as something that simply increases over time – one becomes more and more of a phronimos, a moral expert or seasoned moral pro. Quite famously, he has great trouble with the notion of ‘incontinence’, not an aisle at a pharmacy but the idea of the phronimos committing a gross misdeed. All Aristotle can conclude is that such a person was never truly virtuous in the first place. In contrast, Heidegger (having been influenced by Kierkegaard and having been brought up in the Christian tradition) thinks that things are much more precarious than this. ‘A person can be concerned with things of minor significance; . . . so wrapped up in himself that he does not genuinely see himself. Therefore, he is ever in need of the salvation of phronēsis . . . [which] cannot at all be taken for granted; on the contrary, it is a task’ and Heidegger speaks of this task as ‘circumspection’ (Umsicht).Footnote 33
I see phronēsis – practical wisdom – as something one cultivates in the same way that one cultivates one's life as liturgy. As we have seen, liturgy is highly practical in nature. So I think there is an analogous pattern to that of the relationship of liturgy and doctrine. The pattern becomes clearer when we see how phronēsis gets developed in Heidegger. While still speaking of Aristotle, Heidegger claims that phronēsis is ‘the highest mode of human knowledge, namely insofar as one can say that it is the gravest of all knowledge, since it is concerned with human existence itself’.Footnote 34 Here it is helpful to see the contrast Heidegger has in mind. In paragraph thirteen of Being and Time, he makes the claim that ‘knowing the world’, by which he means a ‘theoretical’ sense (Wissen), is a ‘founded mode’. Despite that, Heidegger claims that ‘no sooner was the “phenomenon of knowing the world” grasped than it got interpreted in a “superficial,” formal manner’.Footnote 35 The connection here to the argument that I have been making in this article should now be clear. In same way that sophia and theōria get privileged over phronēsis and praxis, so doctrine and dogma are often privileged over liturgy. The theoretical is seen to be more fundamental than the practical. Of course, scientific knowing – theory – has often put itself forward as the way of knowing, even though it is actually grounded in phronēsis.
What, then, does this mean for Heidegger? Hans-Georg Gadamer talks about attending Heidegger's lectures on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics in 1923 and says the following:
We studied the analysis of phronesis . . . Today it is clear what Heidegger found in it, and what so fascinated him in Aristotle's critique of Plato's idea of the Good and the Aristotelian concept of practical knowledge. They described a mode of knowledge (an eidos gnōseōs) that could no longer be based in any way on a final objectifiability in the sense of science. They described, in other words, a knowledge within the concrete situation of existence.Footnote 36
Heidegger thinks of human existence in terms of Dasein, or being-in-the world. That is, one always already relates to the world. So, then, it is merely a question of the how. Heidegger sees the primary ‘how’ as this practical relation to the world, what we might call ‘getting around in the world’ that is based on ‘know how’ (Verstehen, a term used by Heidegger for phronēsis). It is our most basic relationship to the world and every other mode of relating to the world is founded upon it. To put this another way, thinking about the world is not fundamental but doing and acting. The world is where Dasein exists or dwells; it is Dasein's Umwelt (environment). Given that we dwell in the world, we see (understand) the world in terms not of mere objects or things but as equipment or tools. The structure here is that things are understood as ‘for-the-sake-of which’, along the lines of Dasein's concerns. It is this part of Being and Time that contains the well-known hammer example. Before we start hammering, we do not sit down and do some sort of metaphysical research into the thing or describe its chemical make-up or attempt to determine the hammer's place in the great hierarchy of being of Plotinus. Instead, a hammer has for us the character of Zuhandenheit (readiness-to-hand); it is a tool that we use. One could do any of these other things, of course, but they would come under the rubric of theōria. Although in theōria the Zuhanden becomes ‘thematized’ (i.e. one focuses upon it), theōria is abstract rather than concrete for it lacks the character of Umsicht – it is ‘non-circumspect’, for it does not take into account the context and the uses of the hammer (and thus understands the hammer in a one-sided way).
Conclusion
I agree with Aristotle and Heidegger that phronēsis is more properly basic than theory, not the other way around. Theorizing is only possible if we have phronēsis. Apart from being immersed in liturgy, doctrine can only be seen as detached and theoretical. But here is the most important point. If Aristotle and Heidegger are right about phronēsis being more basic than theōria, then the division of practice and theory is about two kinds of knowledge. In terms of liturgy, the very distinction between something like ‘liturgical practice’ and ‘theological belief’ does not boil down simply to practice versus theory, action versus thought. Action is also a way of knowing. When I say that liturgy is more fundamental to theology, I am merely saying that one way of knowing is more properly basic than another way of knowing. If one looks at the classic forms of the liturgy, it is immediately apparent that they are a total integration of forms of knowing that involve both body and mind. Or, better yet, liturgy shows us that the bodily knowledge is fundamental to ‘knowing’. Again, it is instructive to note that Schilbrack speaks of ‘ritual knowledge’ and his idea is designed as a corrective to those who hold ‘that speculative thinking is limited to what goes on in texts or in minds’.Footnote 37 Instead, ritual is a way of knowing that is cognitive. By way of ritual, one is able to experience even the most abstract of beliefs. To experience here, of course, does not necessarily mean ‘completely understand’. It's probably safe to say that it never does. To be sure, ritual also has important social functions that establish or question boundaries, hierarchies, and distinctions. But Schilbrack contends that ‘rituals give rise to metaphysical thinking when they induce participants to experience features of the ritual as features of the human condition generally’.Footnote 38 If this point is correct, and I think it is, then ritual is simultaneously about action and knowledge.
Cuneo points out that ‘knowing God consists in (although is not exhausted by) knowing how to engage God’.Footnote 39 This engaging with God is what Cuneo believes liturgy does. I think he's right about that. But, if Schilbrack is correct, then it does even more than this. It allows thinking about the divine in a cognitive way that is fully embodied. What I have tried to argue is that this embodied way is actually the more basic form of human knowing.
