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

Some would maintain that the credence owed to an explanation is
directly proportionate to how much the historical explanation approximates
scientific explanations, the hallmark of which is the subsumption
of a particular statement under a law. 12 This point of view has been subjected
to trenchant criticism from those historiographers who would
deny any relevance to the scientific model. For them, the historian
does not use laws even implicitly. History is unique, they hold, and
explanation-models, while perhaps useful for prediction in science, are
irrelevant for history, which has to do with the actions of free human
beings, the reasons for which are found within the actors themselves
and not in laws extrinsic to them. 13
Baumstark, a creature of his times like all of us, formulated his
methodological principles within the cultural ambience he knew.
What has been discredited are not Baumstark’s basic insights so much
as the intellectual matrix within which he attempted to locate them.
In the last analysis, great liturgical scholars like Anton Baumstark
(1872–1948), Edmund Bishop (1846–1917), 14 Gregory Dix (1901–52),
Josef Andreas Jungmann (1899–1975), and Juan Mateos (1917–2003)
advanced our knowledge because they did not just collect facts; they
explained them. 15 To be content with just editing or describing what is
in the sources is to renounce all attempts at writing history. 16 History
means perceiving relationships, pointing out connections and causes,
hazarding hypotheses, drawing conclusions—in a word, explaining.
Unless the sources are explained, their editing does not advance our
knowledge of history one whit. Knowledge is not the accumulation of
data, not even of new data, but the perception of relationships in the
12 V. A. Harvey, The Historian and the Believer: A Confrontation between the
Modern Historian’s Principles of Judgment and the Christian’s Will to Believe (New
York: MacMillan, 1966), 45ff.
13 Ibid., 45–46.
14 See the superb academic biography by Nigel Abercrombie, The Life and
Work of Edmund Bishop (London: Longmans, 1959). Baumstark himself (Vom
geschichtlichen Werden der Liturgie, 88) considered Bishop the greatest historian
of the liturgy in modern times and fully shared Bishop’s insight on the innate
conservatism of the Roman liturgy (ibid., 97).
15 Apropos of Baumstark, see the remarks of Dom Bernard Botte, OSB, in his
1953 foreword to the third edition of CL, vii–viii.
xx
16 I resume here ideas from my numerous writings on methodology.