Dom Gregory Dix (Shape of the Liturgy page 745) on the importance of using given liturgy:
"[There is] a certain timelessness about the eucharistic action and an independence of its setting, in keeping with the stability in an ever-changing world of the forms of the liturgy themselves. At Constantinople they 'do this' yet with the identical words and gestures that they used while the silver trumpets of the Basileus still called across the Bosphorus, in what seems to us now the strange fairy-tale land of the Byzantine empire. In this twentieth century Charles de Foucauld in his hermitage in the Sahara 'did this' with the same rite as Cuthbert twelve centuries before in his hermitage on Lindisfarne in the Northern seas. This very morning I 'did this' with a set of texts which has not changed by more than a few syllables since Augustine used those very words at Canterbury on the third sunday of Easter in the summer after he landed."
Greetings to all brother priests ... and, not least, to those who can repeat with me the last sentence of this paragraph!
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4 comments:
Can we identify which few syllables he refers to?
Page 744 Was ever another command obeyed...
I printed part of this as a bookmark to give to my pupils making their 1st Communion a few years ago. Don't know what they made of it but I wanted to share it with them as something of where I am at.
Alan
Dear Fr. Hunwicke,
I have read your quotes from Dom Gregory Dix many times on the blog, and have wanted to hread his works in the original. I'm happy to report that I found the very book you reference in this post on the internet:
https://www.scribd.com/doc/102772823/Dom-Gregory-DIX-The-Shape-of-the-Liturgy
This might be of interest to some of your readers.
Yours in Christ,
Savio
Dear Maureen
The apparatus criticus at the foot of the pages in Botte's edition of the Canon gives the minor verbal variants which were circulating in the sixth and seventh centuries.
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