The Origin and Development of the Christian Liturgy According to Cultural Epochs: Political, Cultural, and Ecclesial Backgrounds: History of the Liturgy (review)

Written by the Hungarian Jesuit teacher and bishop Attila Miklósházy, known especially for his 2001 publication Benedicamus Domino! The Theological Foundation of the Liturgical Renewal (Ottawa: Novalis, 2001), this massive five-volume collection of liturgical materials, called by the author, a "compilation and thesaurus of liturgical data from the origin and of development of Christian worship" (Vol. 1, p. iii), is truly remarkable on several levels. First, Miklósházy always presents texts in context, taking note of how the overall political, cultural, and ecclesial contexts are not only shaped by the liturgy but how the liturgy is itself shaped by those contexts. Second, in addition to the general bibliography offered at the beginning of the first volume (pp. xi-xvii), each historical section and topic covered in each volume contains more specific additional and helpful bibliographies. Third, Miklósházy provides a veritable wealth of short biographical and liturgical source entries, as well as lists and charts of various liturgical rites and important events in the overall historical contexts of each period studied. And, finally, each volume has its own helpful index thus making each volume an independent study: Volume 1 treats the "antecedents" of Christian worship in Judaism and paganism as well as the New Testament; Volume 2 is concerned with the Patristic period up to the year 800; Volume 3 covers the eighth through the fifteenth centuries; Volume 4 offers an overview of the period from the sixteenth-century Reformations through the Romanticism of the nineteenth century; and Volume 5 offers a study of contemporary liturgical renewal, especially in Roman Catholicism.

Written especially "for the use of those, priests and laypeople, who want to know how the present Christian liturgy has arrived at the point where it is today" (Vol. 1, p. vii), this work does provide a helpful outline of that story. Those expecting an historical narrative, however, will find instead a collection of very expensive ($600 plus!) lecture notes, many of which will certainly serve the teacher in the preparation of lectures on various periods of liturgical history as well as charts and lists that may also serve as suitable handouts for students in classes in liturgical history. But as a narrative history, priests and laypeople, teachers and students alike, would be better served by studies such as the recent Oxford History of Christian Worship, edited by Geoffrey Wainwright and Karen Westerfield-Tucker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), and/or Frank Senn, Christian Liturgy: Catholic and Evangelical (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997), which does not appear in Miklósházy's general bibliography, and his more recent The People's Work: A Social History of the Liturgy (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006).

Because I received only Volumes 1-3 of this work I cannot comment on Miklósházy's treatment of liturgical history from the Reformation period to the present, and, as such, my comments are limited necessarily to his presentation of liturgy in the patristic and medieval/Renaissance periods. And here I cannot but be rather critical. While I find his treatment of Greco-Roman religion helpful, Miklósházy has not sufficiently integrated his own bibliography, with entries by Lawrence Hoffman and Paul Bradshaw, into his presentation of Jewish liturgy, and does not cite the important studies of Joseph Heinemann or Ruth Langer. Similarly, with regard both to Jewish and New Testament worship, the author tends to assume anachronistically that Jewish liturgy in the time of Jesus was relatively stable and that there is a kind of mono-linear link between the Birkhat ha-mazon and the early Eucharistic prayer, and even here one looks in vain for the scholarship of the likes of...