The Language of Ritual

Extract

In this article I shall be making some attempt to look at Christian ritual from the particular angle of its nature as a medium for the communication of theological ideas. Ritual, and particularly sacramental ritual, is itself a specific kind of human discourse, one particularly suited to the description of religious experiences and the codification of religious thought. Ritual is a language. The structural principle according to which all language operates is the identical principle underlying any kind of human understanding: the neurological function of ideas depends on the ability to discriminate between percepts. Just as the formation of ideas depends on the ability to discriminate ‘this’ from ‘that’ - whatever ‘this’ and ‘that’ may actually be — so the communication of ideas both to oneself and to other people has discrimination and differentiation as its main purpose, for the action of distinguishing is also the action of relating, and once we are able to hold the objects of perception in tension we can organise our experience into articulated statements about the world: we can relate our own experience to that of other people.

A language, then, is a way of distinguishing between experiences in order to relate them to one another. By relating one thing to another, we are able to alter the meaning we ascribe to similarity and division, so that we now see connections when we were once only aware of oppositions, and logic where there used to be nonsense.