Posted on: July 18th, 2008 Pickstock on Developing a Liturgical Worldview (III)
Liturgy, as Catheine Pickstock explains it, signifies an underlying attitude and not just a specific order of celebration. It is, as she says, “a way of being on the way.” A way of receiving, and releasing, what is only ever present in passing.
Liturgy isn’t just going to church on a Sunday. When I was analyzing what a liturgical worldview might be like, I tried to conceive it as a way of life, rather than as a text or as something we did every now and then. And this is something I found in Plato again, when he is looking at the life of the philosopher and the philosopher’s desire to recollect the highest principles of the good and to communicate them to his pupils. He was trying to show that philosophy isn’t a decadent pursuit which occurs on the ancient Greek version of a high table at a college, but rather is a way of life, where everything must be orientated toward a vision of the good, and if one can Christianize that vision…. Well, in a way that is what I’ve been doing in my analysis of liturgy: trying to show how a way of life might help us to unsettle all the dichotomies and pernicious categories that I analyzed in secular modernity.” — Catherine Pickstock, in an interview one can listen to here.
