Hungarian liturgical researchers have been in touch with New Liturgical Movement for nearly 20 years now. Recently, the research group behind the Usuarium database won a 5-year grant from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences to move on from the processing of mediaeval missals to rituals – books that deal with the extraordinary ceremonies of the liturgical year, or have the formulas for sacraments and sacramentals, blessings, exorcisms, and various other rites. We are therefore very happy to share these excerpts from a recent interview with Dr. Miklós Földváry, the founder and principal investigator of the research group, in which he speaks about inculturation, mediaeval heritage, the Church’s ambiguous relationship with its European history, and what academic research has to offer to those who wish to implement tradition in practice. (Pictures courtesy of Usuarium Database and Domonkos Orbán-Katona © ODPictures Art Studio.)
I would like to highlight two factors. One is the question of European identity. While we study ancient or distant cultures with great respect, we often fail to love what is ours. Of course, we preserve, restore, make catalogues: but all this only leads to forgetting, to building a cemetery of memories, if we do not find a living, personal connection with our own past.
Europe is not limited to the otherwise respectable level of prosperity, security and civilisational values we represent. It is also a symbolic reality, which means preserving, creatively carrying and being touched by a fascinating tradition.
The other is the discovery of ritual. Just think of familiar concepts like thoughtful branding of companies and products, group dynamics and identity formation in sports, the press, public life or social media, the almost mythical possibility of archetypal representation and grand narratives offered by movies and series. All of these are fragmented, uncoordinated manifestations of a deeply hidden human tendency. Compared to this, we are lagging behind when it comes to our own organic ritual heritage.
What message does a centuries-old rite convey to modern man?
Europeanness and ritual meet in the medieval liturgy of Latin Christianity. This is the ritual mother tongue of Europe, founded in late antiquity, developed in the Middle Ages, and has not completely ceased to function and influence since then.
There was nothing in pre-modern Europe that mobilized such resources, was so persistent and so comprehensive in every corner of the continent, and encompassed such a broad social spectrum. This is true even if one does not necessarily identify with either Christianity or the Latin, or Roman, tradition. We are all the heirs to this tradition.
There is no pure past or pure present. Culture is always like a performance: the creative re-experiencing of things created by others; the attribution of new meanings to objects, texts, gestures that we have received ready-made but which cannot survive without us, and indeed, with every re-enactment, we add something to them.
What are some of your more notable findings so far?
This research is so comprehensive that it is actually difficult to talk about results in the usual sense. Rather, it’s like discovering the periodic table or the taxonomy of living things.
It creates a framework against which a source, a rite or an institution can be effectively and correctly analysed and interpreted. Studies could be written from almost every query in our database, and doctoral dissertations could be written from every item in our drop-down list of categories. This is partly the case already: among my doctoral students there was one who dealt with the Codex Pray (pictured below), an influential early Hungarian Sacramentary; others chose baptism, penance, royal coronation, the liturgy or agricultural rites as their topics.
But we do not want to monopolise the opportunity, and indeed, more and more people are recognizing the usefulness of the approach and tools outside the research group. Wherever we go, the case studies that are prepared in the spirit of this concept and in the context of the knowledge we have accumulated open up new horizons in the research of the given topic.
And not to avoid the question, so far we have managed to form a complete picture of the material of the liturgy of the mass. Its main result is the survey of tendencies characteristic of regions and eras. I explained the basic outlines in the manual related to the Usuarium database, but we are currently working on a Missale synopticum that presents the overall picture in a structured and clear way: a manual-like edition of the missal that shows together the similarities and differences of 250 traditions.
What exactly does the title of the second Momentum project, which is now underway, mean: “The culminating points of the church year and human life”?
The highlights of the church year are the special, memorable rites mainly around the feasts of Easter and Christmas. Holy Week is full of these, above all, but also Candlemas and Ash Wednesday. On the one hand, they have a specific structure: things happen and are said in a way that is characteristic of that day, and not at other times. On the other, these rites leave the closed clerical spaces, they seem to inhabit the entire church space.
They even go out into the world. They often feature blessings of objects and processions, which establish a direct connection between the clergy and the laity. These have made the great narratives of Christian salvation history tangible to the widest possible audience in European cultural memory.
The special highlights of the year are those that are not so much about the grand narrative as about medieval society’s relationship with nature and farming. In an agrarian world, every harvested crop was blessed, and every crisis or risk was neutralised with rituals. Even if many people today find such things strange, they say a lot about the perception and feeling with which the ancient European man related to the weather, the land, animals, and plants.
Of course, the relationship between Christian sacraments and sacramentals and life cycle rites is complex, but it is a fact that in the Middle Ages, when we can already count on an essentially completely Christian society, sacraments almost automatically accompanied significant changes in biological life and social situations. Even today, these are the situations in which the widest circles of society have a need for church rites.
What do the occasional rites, the objects of your current research, have to say to us? What does the way baptisms, marriages, or funerals are celebrated reveal about medieval man?
Medieval man did not create his own rites. He inherited their most basic elements from late antiquity. The framework of occasional rites is already present in the sacramentaries of the 7th century, and even in some patristic texts. So, what I said about the reliving of patterns inherited from the past was also valid for medieval man. He was not the subject, but the object of his own rites. When he was baptised, married, buried someone or was buried, he rather actively appropriated the meaning of the situation he was going through at that time.
These were moments of cultural acquisition. The words spoken, the gestures performed, integrated him and those around him into the interpretive tradition they inherited and carried forward. All changes, whether in theoretical emphases or in dramaturgy, occurred almost involuntarily, slowly, with respect for the antecedents.
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| Two pages of a rituale of the Use of Esztergom, the primatial see of Hungary. |
How can these research results be made public – for example in education, church practice or for the wider public?
As I mentioned, the research group itself is an educational institution. It is like a kind of dual training: the students start working with me and find themselves learning Latin, getting to know palaeography, coming into contact with music and ritual. Since they do not come from the same place, the Latinist gets to know the art historian, the ethnographer the theologian. The new project has not yet officially started, but a doctoral student colleague of mine is already forming a group of enthusiastic volunteers who are learning the digital processing of rituals.
Church practice is a more delicate issue: from the Church’s perspective, mainly because the uncertainty that characterises the relationship of Old Europe and its old rites is also present in the Church. Catholicism today is trying to appear globally, and therefore, as it were, consciously separate itself from the European heritage. In church discourse, to be called a Cultural Christian is practically an insult, but I believe that the cultural, that is, the formal, aesthetic side of Christianity is not something inferior.
Without this, the “essence” is just a lifeless X-ray image that is difficult to connect with. It is not very credible for the Church to encourage the Eastern communities, i.e. Byzantine, Slavic, Coptic, Syrian, Armenian, to cherish their own heritage, and even to encourage inculturation, i.e. for newly converted non-European peoples to preserve the valuable elements of their past, if the majority of Catholicism is almost ashamed of everything that ties it to Rome and Europeanness. This division and uncertainty were completely understandable in the generation after World War II, then with the dissolution of the colonial empires, and especially since peoples outside Europe have begun to make up the majority of Christianity. But every tradition is made up of layers, and just as the European tradition incorporated first the biblical and then the classical Greco-Roman layer, we can consider the medieval layer as a similar, if not necessarily final, layer.
From a secular perspective, the issue is delicate because, as educators and scholars, we must maintain a certain distance from religious institutions. Christianity still exists, the rituals we research have modern equivalents, and it is clear that most people who are interested in the Christian past are no strangers to the Christian present. Without it, we would be like the armchair anthropologists of the 19th century, who are now looked down upon. I also make no secret that as a publisher of practical books, an organiser and a singer, I have been supporting and performing the traditional Roman liturgy and – as far as the framework allows – its Hungarian, Esztergom version for about twenty years. We also have bilingual and musically notated publications for practical use, and anyone who visits St. Michael’s Church on Váci Street in Budapest can encounter the old liturgy and its medieval Hungarian singing tradition live. But I do not advertise this in a university or scientific environment. Anyone who does not do his research on me will not even know about it. I do not expect or require my colleagues or students to be committed and to what extent. Of course, there are those who start from a religious background and those who do not. This is also the case in study groups of the profession outside of Hungary. Church practice can be a catalyst, an experimental field and a beneficiary of scientific work, but it is in their mutual interest not to mix them up.
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| Solemn Mass at the church of St Michael in Budapest, Hungary |
