“Fritz West, himself a methodological master of ... - Liturgical Press

accuse another liturgical giant, Josef Andreas Jungmann, SJ (1899–
1975), of disastrous assumptions without in any way detracting from
the fact that Jungmann was one of the great liturgical scholars of all
time. 8 The issue is not whether Baumstark or Dix or Jungmann were
always right, but what we can derive from how they worked and from
their liturgical insights.
What we derive from them is a way of working and thinking that
remains valid to the present day. Among liturgiologists, Anton Baumstark
was one of the first to reflect methodologically and critically on
how he worked. In so doing, he provided a model for all practitioners
of a science that, like any other scholarly discipline, needs not only
objective research but also methodological reflection. Only via the
endless process of sifting and resifting hermeneutical presuppositions
through the sieve of shared critical reflection can scholars sharpen the
tools of their craft and refine its methods via fruitful dialogue within
the profession. 9
Liturgy is a living activity that can never, in Baumstark’s words, “be
paralyzed into the rigour of an immobile dead formalism” (CL 1). By
its very nature, liturgy is subject to a process of continuous evolution.
The vocation of the historian of liturgy is “to investigate and describe
the origins and variations of the changing forms of this enduring substance
of eternal value” that is “the living heart of the Church” (CL 2).
This means studying the evidence. And since the evidence presents
similarities and differences, its study is perforce comparative. Were
there no differences, there would be identity and nothing to compare
or explain. Were there no similarities, there would be no basis for a
comparative method to begin with. Those who would complain that
this is to reduce to text what is per se a living action seem to forget that
texts, along with archeological remains, are all of the distant liturgical
past that remain to us.
8 E. Duffy, “The Stripping of the Altars and the Liturgy: Some Reflections on
a Modern Dilemma,” Antiphon: Publication of the Society for Catholic Liturgy, vol.
1, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 2–3. Duffy, “The Stripping of the Altars and the Modern
Liturgy,” Antiphon, vol. 2, no. 3 (Winter 1997): 3–12.
9 For a superb recent example of such disciplinary reflection, see Harald
Buchinger, “On the Origin and Development of the Liturgical Year: Tendencies,
Results, and Desiderata of Heortological Research,” Studia Liturgica 40,
nos. 1–2 (2010): 14–45.
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