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

allowing for inference and may, in that sense, be regarded as corollaries
of the first. 42
The organic model was also helpful to Baumstark for organizing
data. Of course, all scholars of the early liturgy must take into account
Jewish, Christian, and Hellenistic contributions to the development
of the liturgy. For the Roman Catholic scholar of the early twentieth
century, however, these three could not be simply analogous historical
forms of human invention, comparable to all other such forms in
an unbroken series of equal entities. From a doctrinal point of view,
Catholic Christian liturgical forms were by (super)nature incomparable,
rooted as they are in the historical particularity of the incarnation;
the Eucharist was understood to be essentially different from a
Jewish Sabbath meal or a Hellenistic symposium. For this reason, the
Catholic scholar had to be able to (1) assert the integrity of the liturgy
of the Church and (2) weight the factors that shaped it so as to maintain
the unique character of the incarnation. The ontological organic
model served Baumstark well in this regard. With its bias in favor of
the internal life of the liturgical “organism,” its genetic understanding
of the relationship to Judaism, and its categorization of the Hellenistic
cultural milieu as mere “environment,” the ontological organic model
examined the Church’s liturgy in its historical context while maintaining
its distinctive character. 43 Within this methodological framework
Baumstark found the freedom to exercise his craft, without compromising
the historical particularity of Christian revelation. 44
The ontological organic model organized data within the cultural
organism as well. Already as a student of philology, Baumstark recognized
that his teachers regarded cultural products of Christianity in
the Near East, notably Christian literature, as derivatives of European
forms. Baumstark wished to value Christian matters of the Near East
in their own right. 45 Once again Baumstark and Strzygowski found
themselves in the same camp. When Strzygowski argued that influences
in the world of Anatolian art flowed from the East to the West,
42 For a discussion of Baumstark’s liturgical laws, see West, Anton Baumstark’s
Comparative Liturgy, 281–95.
43 In addition to chaps. 2–4 in Baumstark, On the Historical Development, see
also, for example, Baumstark, Comparative Liturgy, 2–14 and 63–70.
44 West, Anton Baumstark’s Comparative Liturgy, 268–71.
45 Baumstark, “Besprechung: Hilgenfeld, ed. Ausgewählte Gesänge des Giwar-
gis Warda von Arbel,” OC 4 (1904): 209.
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