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

hypotheses for reconstructing the evolution of liturgy on the supposition
that other liturgies might have behaved in the same way in cases
where the evidence to prove it is lacking. All of the humanistic and social
sciences like history, sociology, political science, and criminology
depend on comparative studies and the generalizations that emerge
from them. Generalizations based on observation, analysis, and comparison
are so fundamental to all humanistic studies that to challenge
them is simply absurd. Just imagine what would happen to art history
if comparison were to be banished! I hold the same to be true for
Liturgiewissenschaft.
ARE BAUMSTARK’S “LAWS” LAWS?
A river of ink has been spilt over Baumstark’s use of the term “the
laws of liturgical evolution,” the product of an era when one still believed
in the complete objectivity of the scientific method as applied
to the natural sciences. “Laws” says much more than one would say
today, long after Gadamer and company laid to rest the myth of absolute
scientific objectivity, and Baumstark could have saved us considerable
grief had he limited his metaphor to comparative philology or
linguistics. But it is a complete distortion of his thought to seize out of
context his metaphors of the natural sciences and biology as indicating
that he confused the laws of nature with the flow of history. This is
clear enough from his assertion that “historical facts ought never to be
absent from the mind of the historian of Liturgy. Further, Comparative
Liturgy should always be on its guard against preconceived ideas and
above all against theories constructed (in the way dear to theologians)
in the interests of a system” (CL 7).
Baumstark’s abhorrence of preconceived ideas of the sort common
to the manual theology of his day, which began with the conclusion
and then marshalled the arguments that agreed with it, may be the
reason for Baumstark’s insistence that Comparative Liturgy is a
science. For he continues, “This maxim follows from the place we assign
to Comparative Liturgy in the totality of the sciences,” then goes
on to explain what he means by the example of the Anaphora of Addai
and Mari and another Mesopotamian anaphoral fragment, which lack
the words of institution (CL 8). For Baumstark, such phenomena are
facts to be taken at face value and not to be explained (or explained
away) in function of some doctrine about the place of the Verba Domini
in the eucharistic consecration (CL 7–8). So Baumstark’s heuristic
principles are “laws” only in the metaphorical sense, no more than
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