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  • On the Augustinian Roots of The Spirit of the Liturgy
  • Michael C. McCarthy S.J.

IN JANUARY AND FEBRUARY OF 2008, Pope Benedict XVI used his general audiences to give five addresses on the life and thought of St. Augustine of Hippo. The practice of speaking on important post-apostolic figures had begun in the second year of his pontificate. “And thus,” he said, “we can see where the Church’s journey begins in history.”1 When he came to Augustine, however, the Pope introduced him as the greatest of all Latin-speaking Church Fathers, “who was able to assimilate Christianity’s values and exalt its extrinsic wealth, inventing ideas and forms that were to nourish the future generations.”2 In his works “all the thought-currents of the past meet … and form the source which provides the whole doctrinal tradition of succeeding ages.”3

It is hardly surprising that Benedict would give Augustine so much attention. Not only did the Bishop of Hippo leave behind a literary output that massively influenced the thought of all Western Christianity, but it was on Augustine’s ecclesiology that the future Pope would cut his theological teeth at the beginning of his own academic career. Young Ratzinger’s 1953 dissertation, “The People [End Page 795] and the House of God in Augustine’s Doctrine of the Church,” draws on Augustine’s theology to assert the nature of the Church as the sacramental body of Christ uniting the whole people of God in one communion.4 The later Ratzinger would indicate that the notion of the People of God united in the Body of Christ grounds the ecclesiology of Lumen Gentium, yet this prevailing theology of Church had long been anticipated by a rediscovery of patristic traditions, whose most eminent voice was that of Augustine.5

By the time he introduced The Spirit of the Liturgy on the Feast of St. Augustine in 1999, Cardinal Ratzinger had so absorbed the ideas of this fifth-century thinker that he could exhale them. To consider the correspondence between the thought of Augustine and Benedict on liturgy, therefore, is less a matter of identifying conscious points of dependence than of exposing large theological symmetries. Furthermore, just as Ratzinger assimilated so much of Augustine’s teaching, the bishop of Hippo himself reflects considerable debt to his predecessors. What Gerald Bonner, the eminent patristics scholar, has remarked about Augustine could equally be applied to the pope: “[His] originality is not iconoclastic. Rather, he amplifies and enriches the thought and feeling of earlier generations. No Christian thinker is more aware of and more concerned to follow, the tradition of the Catholic Church.”6 Any study of the relationship between the two on the subject of liturgy will reveal the effects of “traditioning,” a process that includes a long, slow transmission of skills (in this case theological) through personal example and imitation.7

If Benedict’s thought on liturgy has Augustinian underpinnings, it is in his most fundamental conception of the Church as an ecclesial communion and a pilgrim people that we hear the deepest patristic undertones. In worship, the Church becomes what God intended it to be: “the Church lives in Eucharistic communities. Its worship is [End Page 796] its constitution.”8 Although Augustine left no extended treatise on liturgy as such, not only his theological writings but even more his homilies in liturgical contexts reveal a dynamic Christo-ecclesiology that imagines the liturgy, both the Eucharist and the Divine Office, as a place of exchange between God and humanity. Through its incorporation into the “whole Christ,” the Church receives the gift of participating in the divine life. True worship, for Augustine, possesses an eschatological orientation. It looks forward to the fulfillment of creation and the divinization of persons made possible only on account of Christ’s assumption of humanity.9 Such divinization is realized, however, through participation in Christ’s perfect work of compassion, the final and universal sacrifice where Christ, head and body, is fully offered to God the Father.

Like Augustine’s centuries earlier, Ratzinger’s understanding of liturgy depends centrally on a theological reading of Scripture that regards all of salvation history as leading up to...

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