16 - Liturgically Infused Practical Understanding

Summary

This chapter grapples with a long-standing concern about liturgical activity. The worry stems from a trio of observations. The first is that the major monotheistic traditions enjoin having attitudes such as faith, hope, and love, as well as the performance of actions that express these attitudes. The second is that these traditions call for their practitioners regularly to engage in liturgical activity, participating in rites of corporate worship. There is, however, a condition on whether such activity has religious worth, fittingly relating the community and its members to God: it must align in the right ways with the core religious attitudes and actions. The third observation is that liturgical activity systematically fails to align in the correct ways, often being rote, mechanical, insincere, or focused on whether it is being performed correctly. Hence the long-standing worry that liturgical activity systematically fails to have religious worth. Focusing on the Eastern Orthodox liturgies, the chapter develops a view according to which enactments of the liturgies have religious worth by enabling their participants to gain practical understanding of the “Maximian vision.”