Cosmos-Liturgy-Sex

Part I: The Cosmic and the Personal

With the pending publication of the Motu Proprio, now seems like an appropriate time to talk about the exile of the French Oratorian Louis Bouyer – at one time considered among France’s preeminent authorities on liturgy – from the liturgical establishment in France. It will be recalled, by anyone who has had their antennae up in recent months, that the French episcopacy fought tooth and nail against the Holy Father when rumors began to circulate about the Motu Proprio. For all that we Catholics in the English-speaking world have had to endure the past few decades in matters liturgical, it seems that the French have had it even worse. At any rate, one of the central figures in the liturgical movement before, during and immediately after the Council in France was Louis Bouyer. He was perhaps the key figure in the establishment of the Centre de pastorale liturgique (CPL) before the Council – in fact, he is considered to have penned, in the form of a personal letter to the Dominican Father Duployé, its “founding document.” The CPL later became the Centre national de pastorale liturgique (CNPL), which was responsible for implementing the reforms of the Council in France. Bouyer had to disassociate himself from this latter organization when, in translating the Roman Missal into the vernacular, they evacuated from it all mention of “oblation, sacrifice, and immolation.” It was precisely the crowd opposing the Motu Proprio, in line with those who see things through the perspective of the CNPL, who would have opposed Bouyer.

In fact, recognizing what had become of the liturgical movement after the Council – especially among those who had co-opted it in France – Bouyer became entirely detached from the “liturgical establishment.” The bad blood between Bouyer and the “mainstream” French liturgists ran in both directions: Bouyer truly became persona non grata among the French liturgists. Bouyer recounts his role in the liturgical movement and the missteps in the post-Conciliar liturgical reform in a chapter of the published form of his 1979 interview with George Daix, Le métier de théologien (MT), recently republished (Ad Solem: 2005) to commemorate Bouyer’s passing. I would like to share some of his insights in a series of posts over the next few days – or perhaps it will occur in weekly intervals, depending on how much time I have to spend on this. I shall try to make some quick translations for you from the aforementioned book. At some point in this series of posts, I shall demonstrate the sympathy of viewpoints on the liturgy between the Holy Father and Bouyer. In fact, the Holy Father was influenced by Bouyer’s work on the liturgy and cites him in The Spirit of the Liturgy. Both Bouyer and the Holy Father are at one in recommending strongly the positive insights of Vatican II and in maintaining a highly critical opinion of the way that the Council’s prerogatives – particularly in the area of liturgy – were implemented.

I shall begin at the beginning, that is, at the start of the relevant chapter in MT. Before converting to Catholicism and becoming an Oratorian priest, Bouyer had been a Lutheran minister. He had been brought up in an ecumenically-minded, Protestant home and had always had a strong attraction to the liturgy. At first, he was quite intrigued with the prayer services of the Quakers. Bouyer himself explains:

“When I was still rather far from Catholicism, I had much sympathy – which, moreover, I have not lost – for the Quakers, who seemed to push as far as possible the Protestant instinct for interiority, for the personality of the cult which must be given to God. I think that this is all in fact true but that it is only an aspect of reality. Because if true religion is only personal – that is, interior and spiritual, it is also true that man is a spirit immersed or incarnated in the cosmos and that he does not exist in isolation” (MT, 64).

According to Bouyer, man belongs, even from the very beginning of creation, to a race, to a society of saints who belong to God and whose mutual love must be an embodiment and expansion of His own love. God must be found and encountered not only in the interiority of the soul but in communion with others and in the world itself. “The discovery of God,” according to Bouyer, “must awaken in man a response as interior, as direct as possible. But equally it must thrust him into praise and graced action that embraces the entire universe, in a witness that brings him to communicate to others the most intimate things he has received from God.”

“There is no opposition therefore,” Bouyer tells us, “between this interiority – of which the most Catholic mystics such as Saint John of the Cross have emphasized not only the importance but the necessity for all authentic religious life and cult of God – and the expression of the realization of the cult in a liturgical tradition where the cosmos itself is utilized in order to proclaim the praise of God and to serve at the same time as the organ of communication between all men in order that they be a single heart and a single soul in gratitude and praise of God” (MT, 64).

“It is therefore,” he continues, “from the most personalist, Protestant vision of religion that I have arrived at my interest in liturgy and have seen its absolutely capital importance.” Nevertheless, according to Bouyer, the interior, social and cosmic dimensions can and must be harmonized if man is to recognize himself fully as the liturgical creature that he is by nature.

Interestingly, Bouyer does not deny his Protestant influence. Nor does he deny the true insight of Protestantism – its emphasis on interiority and individual personality. Yet, as we shall see in future posts, Bouyer strongly opposed the liturgical reforms that took place after the Council. This is perhaps at first sight contradictory because it is a standard refrain among those who reject post-Conciliar liturgical reforms that they are essentially “Protestant.” That Bouyer did not reject outright his Protestant heritage would no doubt lead some to see him as part of the problem rather than the solution. Bouyer, as we have seen, argues that the a-cosmic and a-social dimension of Protestantism is harmful to an integral understanding of man, the liturgical subject. But the positive emphasis on the individual spiritual dimension that Protestantism inculcates is an undisputed good, in his opinion. After all, the faith must become the individual’s own possession, even though it must be at the same time shared and lived communally. We shall see later on how Bouyer balances the personal, social and cosmic aspects of Christian liturgy in his harsh criticisms of post-Conciliar reforms of the liturgy, which exhibit a most unbalanced character…