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Liturgy and Poetry
By Geoffrey Wainwright

THE two thousand pages of these two volumes¹ are sandwiched between two contributions that epitomize the significance of cultural anthropology for Christian theology. As "the feast of language," poetry has its abiding origin, Jörg Splett and Peter-Otto Ullrich argue in their opening chapter (I, 5-46), in religious celebration. Theology for its part, finds its source and goal, it is the concluding contention of Maria-Judith Krahe (II, 923-957), in doxology, in "psalms, hymns and songs, as the Spirit inspires them" (Eph. 5:l9). If the Western world is experiencing a crisis in lyric poetry, liturgy, and theology, the simultaneity of these critical manifestations should not be surprising.

It is over liturgy, as the symbolic and ritual focus of the meeting between God and human beings, that anthropology and theology make their most concrete contact. If, ontologically, God remains ineffable, and yet one may not stay silent, what is left, asks Augustine (in Ps. 32, sermo 1, 8), but "jubilation"? In terms of redemptive history, the singing of the congregation is the overflowing expression, Philipp Harnoncourt maintains (II, l39-172), of its experience of salvation: "If they don't sing it, they don't believe it" (echoing Luther, WA 35, 477). It is not only the reflective theologian who is directed to the liturgy for motive and material, but the anthropologist also turns to "the language of the rite" (a title of R. Grainger's, 1974) for the clearest manifestation of homo religiosus, in the present case the Christian. Conversely, the theological interpreter of culture may properly examine poetry and the arts for the substance and quality of their relation to the religious matrix, in the Western case biblical faith.

Diachronically, the Church knows the problem of maintaining identity with its origins. At the level of faith, it is a question of fidelity in face of ever-threatening sin; at the cultural level, it is a matter of finding appropriate formulations of the faith amid changes in society toward which more general anthropological factors than the specifically religious contribute. As George Steiner richly demonstrated in After Babel, translation presents a test case for cultural continuity and diversity.

Geoffrey Wainwright is Professor of Systematic Theology at the Divinity School and in the Graduate Program in Religion of Duke University. He is the author of Doxology--The Praise of God in Worship, Doctrine and Life. In his contribution to this issue's "Theological Table-Talk," Dr. Wainwright comments on a recently published German work and its significance for Christian thought and life.
¹ Liturgie und Dichtung. Ein interdisziptinares Kompendium. Edited by H. Becker and R. Kaczynski. St. Ottilien, EOS-Verlag, 1983. I, xiv + 902 pp. II, xiv + 1030 pp.

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When Christians engage in translating the Gospel, they are called on to make strictly theological decisions concerning the content and meaning of their proclamation and the condition of their addressees. These decisions can only be taken in faith, but linguistic and literary criticism can help to clarify what is at stake. The present volumes contain several valuable chapters along those lines.

I

The translation of the canonical Scriptures constitutes the most important case. Birgit Stolt studies the theory, practice and reception of Luther's translation of the Bible (II, 1-40). The Reformer, she argues, deliberately oscillated between the more literal, text-oriented method, allowing the "strangeness" of the original to come through, especially at points-of theological weight, and the more freely adaptive method which looked for current German equivalents. Even in the latter case, however, Luther let himself be guided by his preacher's experience of what hearers could actually understand and did in fact respond to in that context, rather than attempting a merely colloquial style. Like the Septuagint, Luke, and the Vulgate before him, Luther knew that a sacral style, drawing on the scriptural Hebrew, was needed to mediate the emotive side of faith and open up new horizons of perception. With their abandonment of "lo!" and the narrative "and" (Stolt compares the changing German versions of the Nativity stories), rational translators may also have lost salvation-history. Yet myth-hungry moderns are willing to read Tolkien and T.H. White.

A biblical text which receives particular attention in this compendium is Psalm 130 ("Out of the depths"). Johannes Brosseder (I, 645-657) shows how Luther's creative reworking makes "Aus tiefer Not schrei ich zu dir" a hymnic statement of the Reformer's doctrine of justification: the petition of the first stanza is a profound expression of the "God alone." The question of how, on this side of Feuerbach and Freud, such petitions can escape charges of infantilism and narcissism is tackled by Lorenz Wachinger (II, 335-357) through a transactional analysis of Psalm 91 in the framework of depth psychology: an integrated personality is attained not through evasion but in internal struggle (Luther's Anfechtungen!), although the question of the operation of grace-a fundamental theme in the psalm on the part of its divine speaker-is left substantially open.

To return to Psalm l 30: Hermann Kurzke offers some examples from its Wirkungsgeschichte in German literature. The translations by Luther, both prose and verse, Martin Buber, and Romano Guardini are all allowed to possess integrity and even validity in so far as they themselves each spring from a coherent faith experience and take advantage of the "space" left by the original for interpreters to bring in their own conceptions. (Before leaving Luther, we may regret the absence of a contribution from Gerhard Hahn, author of the splendid Evangelium als literarische Anweisung. Zu Luthers Stellung in der

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Geschichte des deutschen kirchlichen Liedes, Munich 1981.) The theological problematic inherent in the productivity of the interpreter becomes more apparent when the psalm is used outside a religious tradition that lays claim to it. Are such "emancipated" uses-the expressionist J.R. Becher wrote his poem "De profundis Domine" in ignorance of the psalm itself!-to be lamented as the arbitrary secularization of the psalm, or are they to be considered as, in Dorothee Soelle's term, possibly genuine "realizations" of it? For all the difficulties involved (Kurzke maximizes the irony of dependence on an allegedly secular "philology"), historical criticism and exegesis are necessary if not sufficient conditions for the canonical functioning of Scripture. The "literal," historical sense of a text-with all due allowance for the diversity of literary genres and the history of the material before it reached definitive form-must exercise some control over any subsequent allegorical, tropological or anagogic interpretations if Christian identity is to be preserved.

II

The same applies, mutatis mutandis, in the treatment of a postbiblical text firmly embedded in the tradition. Alex Stock's subtle analysis (II, 41-63) induces admiration for the faithfulness of Huub Oosterhuis' "innovative reprise" of the twelfth-century "Golden Sequence" of Pentecost, "Veni sancte spiritus": "Hierheen, Adem, steek mij aan." Especially delightful are the "Dutch interior" touches in the seventh stanza: "Lava quod est sordidum" evokes spring cleaning ("Maar jij maakt schoon"), "Riga quod est aridum" the watering of flowers ("Verflenst mijn bloem-geeft water"). The deeply biblical inspiration of Oosterhuis' own paschal litany is brought to the fore by Joop Bergsma (I, 887-900).

The question of criteria for testing faithfulness to Christian identity arises not only in relation to the translation of Scripture or the adaptation of a traditional classic but also in the case of an independent composition. Joachim Gnilka (I, 173-185), in his exegesis of Philippians 2:6-11, pushes the problem back into the Scriptures themselves: the abasement-elevation pattern of the pre-Pauline hymn is sharpened by the apostle to a staurological focus. So potent is the kenotic motif that Peter-Otto Ullrich (I, 41-46) would make it the differentia of the Christian cult and the condition of its effectiveness to achieve human freedom and dignity. Yet it is doubtful whether such a single "canon from within the canon" is sufficient for measuring the fidelity of all later compositions.

More broadly based scriptural tests are in fact applied by other authors in their treatment of Christian poetry of a liturgical or quasiliturgical kind. Most are sensitive to the poets' interaction with their surrounding culture. Three examples may be given. Gerhard May (I, 257-273) shows the biblical texture and Christian originality of Clement of Alexandria's christological "Fisher-hymn," for all its bor

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rowings from (Logos-inspired) philosophy and the use of Greek lyrical forms. Ruth Maringer emphasizes the biblical-theological aspects of the Te Deum, showing for instance how the philosophical-ontological concepts of "Deus" and "Aeternus" receives a heilsgeschichtlich functional enhancement through "Dominus" and "Pater." For a sample of the tendency to "spiritualization" in the period of pietism and rationalism, Waldtraut Ingeborg Sauer-Geppert (I, 775-810) takes C.F. Richter's hymn "Vom verborgenen Leben der Gläubigen": "Es glänzt der Christen inwendiges Leben." Against the background of a platonic revival (whose causes and positive values she unfortunately does not stop to analyze, just as she skips over the exegesis of 2 Cor. 4:16), she shows the changed use to which the poet put such passages as Col. 3:3f., 2 Cor. 4:8-11, 6:3-10, and the Letter to Diognetus, 5. Yet she is obliged to, admit that Richter maintains a proper eschatological tension and to allow that he may be expressing a legitimately Christian mystical experience. When Sauer-Gippert moves on to the products of some lesser lights, she offers some amusing examples. The "von Mutterleib und Kindesbeinen an" of Martin Rinckart's "Now thank we all our God" gets bowdlerized to "von der Kindheit an," while the Royal Prussian Army, of all people, could not give thanks "mit Herzen, Mund und Händen" but only "mit tiefgerührten Seelen."

How is all that to be related, on the one hand, to the medieval habit of weaving phrases from the Latin liturgy into the German drinking songs (see Hermann Uehlein and Elisabeth Gensler: I, 641-644)? And, on the other, to the Nazi rewriting of the Lord's Prayer as an invocation to Adolf Hitler (Gerhard Hay: I, 855-863)?

III

I have been able to allude to only fifteen contributions in this compendium. Some fifty others remain untouched. For the sake of readers with a different specialization, I want at least to mention some of the chapters oriented more technically to historical liturgiology. Both Balthasar Fischer (I, 303-313) and Leo Scheffczyk (II, 579-614) write on the theological presuppositions and consequences of reading the Psalms as speech "about" Christ, "with" Christ, and "to" Christ. Hansjakob Becker offers a thoroughgoing christological interpretation of Benedictine compline from its central lection of Jeremiah l4:9 outwards (II, 857-901). Reiner Kaczynski (II, 795-835) analyzes the choice of psalms in liturgies of burial, Georg-Hubertus Karnowaka (II, 765-793) in the Mass calendar of both East and West. I. H. Dalmais (I, 42l-434), J. G. de Matons (I, 435-463), and Fairy von Lilienfeld (I, 465-507) all write on the liturgical poetry of Byzantium. Edmund Beck (I, 345-379) presents the hymnody of Ephrem the Syrian, Gabriele Winkler (I, 38l-419) the baptismal hymns of the Armenian church, E.W. Platzeck (I, 573-608) the "Cantico del sole" of Francis of Assisi, and J. Evenou (I, 82l-854) the neo-Gallican hymnody of the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries.

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IV

The intention of this compendium is interdisciplinary. Interdisciplinarity properly requires reciprocity. In the modern English-speaking world, academic theologians have been much readier to learn, often uncritically, from the human disciplines, than they have been to address questions to those disciplines, or than scholars in the humanities have been to take up a challenge from theology. The editors of our compendium themselves bewail the fact that hymnody has been the stepchild of literary criticism (I, 3). There are pleasant surprises, as when the poet and critic Donald Davie devotes space to Charles Wesley in his Purity of Diction in English Verse and justifies his inclusion of hymns, sometimes in their familiar rather than necessarily in their original form, in his New Oxford Book of Christian Verse; or when David Daiches delivers the Gifford Lectures on God and the Poets (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984).

To tackle the questions of whether humans can live without myth, whether myth can survive without cult, and what the conditions of credibility are for both myth and cult, what a coup it would have been had the editors been able to secure a contribution from Franz Fühmann, the East German Marxist writer-critic and author of a celebrated essay on "the mythical element in literature." In her interpretation of Gottfried Benn's "Verlorenes Ich," Ursula Baltz (II, 903-922) seems to align herself with the poet in a modern lostness which can only look back with nostalgia to a now powerless eucharist (English readers may be reminded of Philip Larkin's "Church Going"); on the other hand, Paul Celan's provocative reversal of roles in his poem "Tenebrae"-"Pray, Lord, pray to us"--is interpreted in good part as a challenge of Christians to greater intra-human solidarity. Has the inherited Gospel really nothing left to say?

If I have at all understood his book, The Nature of Doctrine (Philadelphia, Westminster Press, 1984), a principal thrust of George Lindbeck appears to be that Christianity is a cultural-linguistic tradition which invites disciplined participation. On my own responsibility, I will opine that it is time for academic theologians to stop bending over backwards to accommodate anything and everything the world has to propose in an unlimited pluralism. It is time we contributed to the Church-itself seeking the common expression of the apostolic faith-in its mission of offering the Gospel as a hope of unity to a grievously, and perhaps fatally, fragmented world.