The Contemplative Wellspring of St. Thomas Aquinas’ Theology

A review by David Torkington of Peter Kwasniewski’s The Anatomy of Transcendence: Mental Excess and Rapture in the Thought and Life of Thomas Aquinas (Emmaus Academic, 2025)

Anatomy of Transcendence is a brilliant work of scholarship that studies the themes of rapture, spiritual transport, and excessus mentis in the theology of St Thomas Aquinas. I found it a totally absorbing read. The author must be congratulated for his meticulous scholarly study of the writings of St Thomas in order to show and detail not only the beauty of the Angelic Doctor’s teaching on ‘ecstasy’ but also that that this teaching was based on Thomas’ own personal experience.

This work is primarily for scholars and fellow academics and must not be seen, as the author himself has made clear, as a spiritual guide for those seeking to pursue contemplative prayer. Yet it is by no means foreign to this aim.

In the mystic way, there is a clear difference between the ‘ecstasy’ that is experienced by a believer who is in what St John of the Cross would call the purification in ‘The Dark Night of the Soul’ and the ‘ecstasy’ experienced in what St Teresa of Avila would call the Mystical or the Spiritual Marriage when the purification in the ‘Dark Night of the Soul’ has ended. In the ‘Dark Night’, ecstasy is predominantly experienced in the ‘apex mentis’; however, in the mystical Marriage, when the purification of the mind and the body has been completed, the experience of ‘ecstasy’ is also experienced in the body, therefore in the emotions and in the feelings too, when what are called ‘the gift of tears’ becomes commonplace.

This is a far more complete, all-embracing and enthralling experience, the experience that finally impelled St Thomas to put down his pen and refer to all he had previously written as if it were straw. Perhaps we can see here the difference between the two ‘ecstasies’ of St Paul, the one that takes him up and into the third Heaven and the one which takes him up into Paradise. Kwasniewski does an excellent job carefully exploring this experience of St Paul with the aid of the Angelic Doctor.

I was delighted to find that in addition to St Thomas’ devotion to the liturgy, and above all else to the Mass, the author showed how St Thomas gave daily time for the personal contemplative prayer without which all his works could not have been written. True ecstasies are not arbitrary capricious events; they only regularly arise from a long-since experienced contemplative prayer life, such as Aquinas certainly enjoyed, contrary to the vain babblings of Adrienne von Speyr who wrote him off as an unrepentant rationalist.

When in addition to studying and expounding the teaching of St Thomas, his modern disciples follow him into the deep personal prayer that leads to contemplation, then they would receive the infused virtues of wisdom and prudence that would enable them to represent his teaching for the benefit of the modern Church, and the world that it is committed to serve.

Then they will be able to claim to be true Thomists, because like St Thomas they practice what they preach, and so become the long-lost apostles needed to help resurrect a decaying and dying Church, so that God’s Kingdom may once again become on earth, as it is in Heaven.

Dr. Kwasniewski is to be thanked for helping all of us to become much more aware of this vital dimension to the life and work of a theologian who has too often been reduced to a mountain of syllogism. For him, that was only the external skin of the living body, with a heart of love beating within, animated by a soul consumed with love and longing for God.

Anatomy of Transcendence is available from its publisher Emmaus Academic, from Amazon sites, or from Os Justi Press’ online shop.

David Torkington specialises in the promotion of mental prayer in the great Carmelite tradition. See his work at https://metanoia.org.uk/.

“The Sacrifice of Praise and the Ecstatic Orientation of Man”: Dr. Kwasniewski’s Davenport Lecture

The following lecture was given in Davenport, Iowa, on March 2, 2022, at the invitation of Una Voce Quad City. I am grateful to the organizers for making a video, which is now on my YouTube page.

I am convinced that one of the greatest errors we are facing in the Church today—and one that, in a hidden way, drives a lot of other problems we are suffering under—is the dominance of an activist, utilitarian, this-worldly notion of what Christianity is all about. It’s taken for granted that religion is for the sake of social justice and improvement of quality of life, that it’s a matter of being busy with charitable projects, of making ourselves “useful,” and so forth—quite as if God is not very good at ruling His universe and needs a lot of help from us (“excuse me, Lord, let me step in and take care of this disaster”). At its extreme, as we see it too often in Vatican documents and activities, Catholicism looks like an interreligious, humanitarian social services operation, the “chaplain to the United Nations” as some wags have put it.

In my talk this evening I would like to present to you a totally different way of thinking of the meaning of Christianity and of the purpose of human life. I will offer you the traditional vision, which, needless to say, is not well understood. And I will do so starting from a book of the Bible that used to be at the heart of all of theology but has suffered enormous neglect in the modern Church, namely, the Epistle to the Hebrews, which is all about priesthood, sacrifice, and heaven, and the very title of which underlines the profound continuity between the worship of Israel instituted by God through Moses and its fulfillment in the worship of the New Israel instituted by the God-man Jesus Christ.

In this Epistle, whose author I will take to be St. Paul or certainly of St. Paul’s circle, a climactic verse of chapter 13 exhorts us: “By Him [our Lord Jesus Christ], therefore, let us continually offer the sacrifice of praise to God, that is to say, the fruit of lips confessing to His Name” (Heb 13:15). Given the relative paucity of explicit references in Hebrews to the Christian liturgy and how it is to be conducted here on earth,[1] this exhortation rings out all the more loudly, summoning us to a certain way of life: one in which we offer unto God, continually, the “sacrifice of praise,” which is the fruit of interior faith and its verbal confession. One might ask: Why does St. Paul sum up the Christian religion as a sacrificium laudis? What might we learn from the emphasis on praise?

Before digging into that question, it is worthwhile to point out how frequently Sacred Scripture uses this language. Apart from Hebrews 13:15, here are some other instances:

Offer to God the sacrifice of praise: and pay thy vows to the most High. (Psalm 49:14)

The sacrifice of praise shall glorify me: and there is the way by which I will shew him the salvation of God. (Psalm 49:23)

And let them sacrifice the sacrifice of praise: and declare his works with joy. (Psalm 106:22 )

I will sacrifice to thee the sacrifice of praise, and I will call upon the name of the Lord. (Psalm 115:8)

And offer a sacrifice of praise with leaven: and call free offerings, and proclaim it: for so you would do, O children of Israel, saith the Lord God. (Amos 4:5)

But I with the voice of praise will sacrifice to thee: I will pay whatsoever I have vowed for my salvation to the Lord. (Jonah 2:10)

And thou hast taken pity upon two only children. Make them, O Lord, bless thee more fully: and to offer up to thee a sacrifice of thy praise, and of their health, that all nations may know, that thou alone art God in all the earth. (Tobit 8:19)[2]

And there are countless verses that suggest the same in different language. We have, for instance, Psalm 70:8: “Let my mouth be filled with praise, that I may sing thy glory, thy greatness, all the day long”—a verse, incidentally, that is sung in the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom immediately after the reception of Holy Communion, in a way identifying Our Lord with the very act of praise: “Let my mouth be filled with praise.”[3] The Prophet Jeremiah says: quoniam laus mea tu es, “for Thou art my praise” (Jer 17:14).

Of all forms of prayer, praise is the one most “for its own sake.” In a sense, it is useless, in that it has no further ulterior motive or result we are seeking out of it.[4] Praise looks to the greatness, glory, beauty, and worthiness of the one praised and seeks to render to him a selfless homage; in the words of the Gloria, propter magnam gloriam tuam, or in the words of the final Psalm: laudate eum secundum multitudinem magnitudinis eius, “praise him according to his exceeding greatness!” (Ps 150:2). All forms of prayer, of course, are directed towards God, this being part of the very definition of prayer. That explains why the publican in the parable went home justified rather than the Pharisee, since the publican actually turned to God in self-abnegating repentance, whereas the Pharisee turned to himself in admiration of his own excellence.

All the same, other forms of prayer besides praise are unavoidably wrapped up with oneself. When we give thanks to God, we are recalling the good things He has done for us. When we supplicate Him, it’s about our own needs or the needs of others, and that’s perfectly fine; we are needy creatures, and the worst thing we can do is to pretend otherwise. When we accuse ourselves of wrongdoing and repent of it, we are recognizing that we have failed to live up to God’s just expectations of us, that we are at fault and deserving of punishment, and we beg for pardon. But when we praise, we are lifting up our hands, our voices, our minds, towards God who is almighty, all-glorious, awe-inspiring, worthy in Himself of the homage of the entire cosmos for all eternity, worthy of the total surrender of myself to Him. In a short story called “The Castle: A Parable,” George MacDonald gives us this magnificent prayer:

We thank Thee for Thyself.
Be what Thou art—our root and life,
our beginning and end, our all in all.
Thou livest; therefore we live.
Thou art—that is all our song.[5]

In order to have a concrete model in front of us, we might think of the sequence of psalms in the office of Lauds in the monastic tradition. On Sundays of Paschaltide, on Sundays in special seasons, and on Solemnities, Lauds is a time of prayer given over entirely to the pure praise of God: Psalms 66, 62, 92, 99, the Benedicite, and Psalms 148 to 150 (from which Laudate psalms the office derives its very name).[6] In contrast, when we look at Prime or the Little Hours, we can see how concerned they are with the labors and trials of the day, the ongoing struggle with our enemies who seek to surprise us and capture us, the need for help, mercy, and consolation in a time of exile or pilgrimage. While not excluding these themes, Lauds is principally a “sacrifice of praise,” a burning up of the incense of our time and of the fruit of our lips. It is an office we perform not in order to “get” something, but propter magnam gloriam tuam. May all the earth praise the Lord: every creature, every order of being, every man, woman, and child. We will stand in for them, voicing the praises of creation; we will announce and obey the divine imperative, laudate Dominum; we will give utterance to a sleeping world on its behalf.

As with the religious life in general, Lauds is not concerned with going out into the streets, knocking on doors, engaging in conversations, making the Gospel relevant or intelligible. Those things are important and have their place, but first comes praise, the precondition and promise of the fruitfulness of anything else we may do.[7] A priest once wrote to me these words:

I know of no great thinker, no great advocate of justice or mercy or great keeper of an institution, who was not first an ardent laudator (giver of praise). I also do not know true intercessors who did not do this ministry in the context of praise. Self-forgetting praise is our foretaste of Heaven.[8]

This is the message we modern Christians need to hear in the expression “sacrifice of praise.” We are steeped in a world of pragmatism, utilitarianism, and activism, where we place such a high premium on doing and making, where we ask “what good is it” and “what’s in it for me,” where we look for results, the bottom line, the cash value, the pay-off. It is so interesting to see how Our Lord in the Gospels repeatedly refuses to lower Himself to the level of quick victories over the roiling crowds, how He insists on the disciples taking time off to recollect themselves and to pray, and, most mysteriously of all, how He Himself spends whole nights in “the prayer of God,” as St. Luke says.[9] He who, as God, could not pray to Himself; He who, as man, was hypostatically united to the Word and therefore perpetually and perfectly communing with the Most Blessed Trinity in His human mind and heart, nevertheless really and truly exercised all the acts of prayer, including praise.

In this way He revealed to us that prayer is not something superficial and optional to man but, rather, is constitutive of his inmost identity as a rational creature fashioned by God, dependent on God, and destined for God. The one who does not pray is not living as a man; in any case, he cannot inherit the kingdom that a saint—that is, a man of prayer—is competent to receive. Jesus showed His disciples that prayer is an activity as necessary and as refreshing as eating and drinking when the body needs nourishment, as vital and fundamental as breathing in oxygen and breathing out carbon dioxide.[10] The poignant little prayer before the Divine Office brings out this point: “O Lord, in union with that divine intention with which You Yourself praised God while on earth, I offer You this hour.” This short prayer addresses Our Lord as the one who first lived and always lives the sacrificium laudis with utter completeness, with inexhaustible superabundance; we wish to unite our will to His pure, lofty, all-sufficient intention.

Continue Reading this Article. . .

The Queen of Sheba in the Court of Solomon: Liturgical Boredom and Ecstasy

Ritual action is inherently non-spontaneous, non-original, and non-extemporaneous. The more perfectly one is enacting ritual, the less of one’s creative self is present in it, and the more one is absorbed into a vastly larger mystery.

Even the pagans understood this in their mystery rites, through which the individual was meant to be drawn into the realm of the gods and to participate in their actions. The worshiper took on the identity of another, and for a moment lost sight of himself. This is the “ecstasy” about which we read so much in ancient authors: a standing “outside oneself” (ek-stasis), a going out of one’s everyday world and mind, to be drawn into something primordial, archetypal, divine.

I have noticed this about the Novus Ordo, when studying the ponderous tomes of its architects and admirers: it may look good on paper, it may have a rationale about which one can wax eloquent, but somehow it never works in practice. There, it tends to look clumsy, casual, limited in expressive range and impressive power; due to its linear modular construction, it suggests a series of tasks on an agenda, and most attendees may be forgiven their desire to see the agenda completed as expeditiously as possible.

The traditional Roman liturgy, in contrast, often looks obscure, complex, or strangely ordered on paper, but it always works in practice. It flows, sweeping all along before it. The motions of the individuals in the sanctuary are scripted and coordinated; there is an organic wholeness to it, and a smoothness like that of rocks caressed by water for a thousand years. Those involved are so intent on “the Father’s business” that it is easy for our attention to be absorbed in whatever they are doing, even when we don’t understand it. So strongly does the rite convey a sense of something extremely important and weighty happening that it has the power to make us want to understand it better.

I am reminded here of the difference between stage drama and “closet drama.” The one is a story meant to be acted out before an audience, the other is a musing to be read in the solitary comfort of one’s study. A play by Shakespeare, while far more complex than Goethe’s Faust in number of characters and subplots, works brilliantly on stage, while Goethe’s, with a relatively straightforward plot, is not nearly as dramatically effective. The one is artistically perfect, the other an intellectual construct. It is like comparing a folk dance with a mathematical theorem.

Even though it is “easier” or “more accessible” — indeed, precisely because it is so — one grows weary of the new Mass over time; it has few secrets and yields them readily. It is the opposite with the old: the longer one attends, the more one discovers in it to appreciate, and one never reaches the bottom of its secrets. The many commentaries on the cherished rites of the Roman Church (Guéranger, Schuster, Parsch, Gihr, Zundel, Vandeur…) contain an inexhaustible wealth of insights, illuminating details one hadn’t noticed before, pointing out reasons for some text or ritual or chant that one had not grasped.

Tintoretto, The Queen of Sheba and Solomon (detail)

I like to think of the Queen of Sheba as a metaphor.

When the queen of Sheba saw all the wisdom of Solomon, and the house which he had built, and the meat of his table, and the apartments of his servants, and the order of his ministers, and their apparel, and the cupbearers, and the holocausts, which he offered in the house of the Lord: she had no longer any spirit in her, and she said to the king: The report is true, which I heard in my own country, concerning thy words, and concerning thy wisdom. And I did not believe them that told me, till I came myself, and saw with my own eyes, and have found that the half hath not been told me: thy wisdom and thy works, exceed the fame which I heard. Blessed are thy men, and blessed are thy servants, who stand before thee always, and hear thy wisdom. (1 Kg 10:1–8)

What happened to the queen in the king’s court, when she cries out “The half of it wasn’t told to me!,” is the opposite of the experience of a person who hears or reads what Catholics believe the Mass and the Holy Eucharist to be — that it is the supreme sacrifice that redeems mankind, our earthly participation in the heavenly liturgy, and so forth — and then goes to check out what it’s like: “Behold, this isn’t even half as good as what I read about or imagined.” But if that same person happened upon a solemn High Mass in the classical Roman Rite, how exactly like the Queen of Sheba’s reaction would his be: “Just based on what I had heard or read about, I couldn’t have imagined such solemn splendor as this!”

The reason for these opposite reactions is simply this: the old rite is so much more than the words of which it is composed — it is thick with ceremonies, gestures, postures, vestments, incense, music — while the new liturgy is centered on and preoccupied with words and communal action, even when it has some of these “traditional elements” added on to it. Hence it cannot fill us with wonder or amazement because we are already saturated in modern times with words (“talk is cheap”), and the mode of their delivery at the new Mass — almost always spoken, and almost always towards us — is the most ordinary, humdrum, secular mode of communication.[1] In such circumstances, there will be no ecstasy like that of the Queen of Sheba.

When everything is visible, nothing is seen. When everything is audible, nothing is heard.

The old rite always exceeds its paper description, whereas the new rite always falls short of its paper description. For Paul VI’s rites, the trailer is better than the film, the advertisement better than the product. For the traditional rites to which no individual pope’s name can be accurately pinned (not even that of St. Pius V), the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, the impact exceeds the force of its components, the experience transcends reason and imagination. There is always something that “escapes” our notice, our understanding, our human capacity. We do not measure the rite, because our age did not produce it; we are measured by it, and we always fall short.

Built by a Dutch artist in 1984

Like all modernist projects, the reformed liturgy always sounds better when described by its proponents than it ever comes out when executed by its laborers. One sees this with modern architecture: the plans can look spiffy, but the results always disappoint. It’s the opposite with Gothic architecture: the plans of medieval architects look like quaint doodles compared with their magnificent structures crafted in stone and glass. Or modernist poetry, which itself is never as satisfying as the thick philosophical commentaries written on it — which shows the failure of art, if not the failure of thought.

In like manner, the Novus Ordo was built by the best team of highly credentialed specialists, loquacious about their ideals, but the finished product is what one would expect from a period known for neither theological sublimity nor aesthetic brilliance. As Dietrich von Hildebrand said: “We live in the world without poetry, and this means that one should approach the treasures handed on from more fortunate times with twice as much reverence, and not with the illusion that we can do it better ourselves.”[2]

As Martin Mosebach says, we do not know the names of the saints who “wrote” the old liturgy, with the exception of a few hymnographers. But we know exactly who put together the new one—list after list of experts, carefully recorded by Bugnini in his big fat book The Reform of the Liturgy 1948–1975. This contrast makes all the difference. The old rites are something anonymous that we receive from as many centuries as the Church has offered up her corporate worship to God; the new rites are the work of a committee, imposed on us from above by the stroke of a pen. The one is a collective work of art, the other a period piece trapped in the assumptions of a frenzied and dated movement.

Man was created for ecstasy — not sexual, athletic, aesthetic, or drug-induced, but the ecstasy of faith, of love, of beatitude in union with God for ever. Truly the traditional liturgy of the Church, celebrated with all the resources Divine Providence has bestowed on us, feeds that faith, inflames that charity, and grants us again and again a foretaste of that heavenly consummation.

NOTES

[1] For further explanation, see my articles: “Why We Sing Liturgical Texts” and the quotations from Zuckerkandl contained therein; “Death by Dullness: Prioritizing Speech over Silence and Song”; “How the Liturgy May Open or Close the Door to Christ”; “Twelve Reasons Not to Prefer the Novus Ordo: A Reply to Fr. Longenecker,” point 1.

[2] The Devastated Vineyard (n.p.: Roman Catholic Books, 1985), 70.

Visit www.peterkwasniewski.com for information, articles, sacred music, and Os Justi Press.

"Liturgy that requires ecstasy": McLuhan Meets Ratzinger

I don't know how I managed to miss this superb article, "The Mode in Which We Go to Mass," by Marc Barnes. Credit goes to Musings of a Pertinacious Papist for alerting me to it. The article is just wonderful: it strikes me as a blending of key ideas from Marshall McLuhan and Joseph Ratzinger, among others. Here are some excerpts:

The mode in which a message is delivered has the power to negate the content of the message. ... Catholics have, for the past 60 years or so, tended towards presenting the Divine Liturgy in a mode of similarity. We want to “get people to come,” and so we strive to make our liturgies similar to other experiences, to provide that condition by which some one may enter comfortably into its presence, as I am comfortable to be in the presence of someone I already know, comfortable to engage a conversation with people who have similar interests, similar views.
          The music of the Mass is made similar to the music of our culture. The demeanor of the Mass is made similar to the “Christian services” of our culture. The clothing we wear to Mass is made similar to our everyday clothing. The posture, structure, language, architecture, the position of priest to people — all this, and nearly anything that can be presented in a mode of similarity is thus presented. And, in a sense, it works. People come. But what does the mode of similarity do to the way in which people encounter the Mass? What does the mode do to the message?
          To understand this, we need a deeper understanding of similarity and dissimilarity. Similarity may be a condition for comfort, but dissimilarity is the necessary condition for love. Because a boy and a girl have “something in common” they can meet, comfortably enter into each other’s presence, and strike up a conversation, but only because of the fact that they are not ”in common” can they fall in love, can she — utterly dissimilar to him — and he — dissimilar to her — strive for personal communion — that difficult, wonderful embrace of two entirely unique and dissimilar lives.
          Because I am used to something, I am not afraid to participate in it, and in this sense, a liturgy of similarity succeeds. But because I am not used to something, because it is utterly other, I am pulled into the heart of a mystery. Similarity may provide the occasion for a meeting and a grouping, but dissimilarity provides the occasion for a binding. Because I do not know her, I strive to understand. Because I cannot fathom her, I gaze all the longer. ...
          What good is it if the mode of similarity brings every man in the world to the Divine Liturgy, if by the very mode that it brings them there, it undoes the entire point, which is not simply being there, but being in love? Similarity engenders comfort because it requires nothing of us. If a person is just like me in every respect, then there is no effort required of me to get to know them, to strive after them. There is no ecstasy, that is, no getting beyond myself. The fact that something is similar may just as well be an occasion for boredom as for unity — and hasn’t millennial boredom with the liturgy been an equally observable outcome of the mode of similarity as millennial presence at the liturgy?
          To say something is similar is to say it is already known, but the point of the Divine Liturgy is that it is the Pascal Mystery, the Pascal Unknown, and precisely because it remains unknown, it remains something worth applying the passion of our entire lives towards, to strive towards knowing.If the point of the Church is to make her children comfortable with God, a liturgy of similarity that “meets people where they are” make sense. If the point of the Church is to call her children to love God, to strive after him and to seek intimate communion with him, then a liturgy that opposes us makes sense, a liturgy drenched in a dissimilarity that accentuates the mysteries that we cannot understand — and thus must strive for, bow before, and commit our lives to surge towards. In short, what is needed is a liturgy that requires ecstasy of us. This reconciles itself in a series of paradoxes, that the unrelatable is the most relatable, the irrelevant is the most relevant, and the unfamiliar the greatest source of our desire for familiarity, for intimacy, and for union.
          ... The good news is that we are not caught between the choice of attracting people to Mass and letting the Mass be precisely what it is, in all its incens-y, ringing, silent, dark, unbearably bright and grotesque mystery, its complex simplicity and its simple complexity. For precisely by letting the Mass be what it is, and indeed, working hard to reveal the Mass as the Paschal Mystery in accordance with the rubrics and teachings of the Church, we attract, for dissimilarity is always a more attractive and binding force than similarity. An intentionally dissimilar liturgy may be more uncomfortable, but we were not made for comfort. We were made for love, that wonderful, uncomfortable ecstasy towards that which we are not.

The points made here are fundamental to the divide—a growing divide, it seems—between the modernizers of liturgy (whose main concerns are inculturation, relevance, immediacy, vernacularity, accessibility, familiarity, fellowship, etc.) and the lovers of traditional liturgy (whose main concerns are loyalty, fidelity, identity, mystery, silence, sacrifice, sacredness, beauty, transcendence, etc.). Properly understood, of course, many of these opposing qualities can and should be reconciled, but only if one begins from the right first principles that are capable of ordering into a unity the liturgy's complex elements. The horizontal dimensions of the liturgy emerge spontaneously and indeed more powerfully when we unambiguously prioritize the vertical dimensions—if, in short, we seek first God's kingdom and His righteousness, so that all these other things can be added unto us (cf. Mt 6:33). In contrast, if we look first to the horizontal, the doors to the transcendent are shut upon us by a kind of divine jealousy that brooks no divided mind.

Part of what appealed to me in Barnes' article was the use of the concept of ecstasy, which, properly understood, is an extremely powerful tool for understanding how the liturgy "works" on the human soul, by drawing it outwards and upwards into mystery. Some years ago I published an article in the journal Nova & Vetera entitled "Aquinas on Eucharistic Ecstasy: From Self-Alienation to Gift of Self," which mounted an argument comparable to Barnes':

The solemnity [of the liturgy] draws attention to, and keeps attention on, the symbolic representation of our being loved as no one else loves us, our being taken hold of and carried into something totally beyond our ken, yet offered to us through ordinary things which in turn provoke us to reconsider how we relate to the world itself. … [T]he avoidance of merely “common” modes of speaking and acting in the liturgy is by design, to help us break free from a profane mindset, to awaken us to the Presence that surrounds and penetrates the entire world. Hence, making the liturgy more common, more everyday, casual, horizontal, is self-defeating; it obliterates the liturgical as such, exactly where it cultivates the holy, the divine, the Other who is more myself than I. Ironically, too, a liturgy stripped of its mysterious alteritas would be reduced to the place of last among worldly equals, for it cannot compete against the secular on the latter’s terms. And so, it would be effectively sterilized in its power to fecundate outlying culture, prevented from casting an otherworldly light on the potential sacredness of the ordinary elements of this-worldly life.
          … Liturgical worship offers us an opening or clearing in which to practice, and thus to make our own, a sacred mode of thinking, feeling, acting, receiving—a mode that challenges our profane assumptions, the worldliness in which we tend to lose ourselves if we are not careful to cling to Christ. … If the liturgy ever became fully domesticated, if it ever struck us as perfectly clear and distinct, it would ipso facto cease to be a provocation to the shattered, alienated mentality of fallen “enlightened” man that pretends to be sweet reasonableness.
          … The true “unsettling” of which Preston speaks is accomplished primarily by a confrontation with the purest ritual manifestation of both the divine otherness and the divine condescension, a paradox that is vividly communicated in traditional liturgical rites—in their prayers, gestures, trappings, and overall complexion. …
          Without a mystagogical focus, liturgy will do little more than validate a community’s collective conceit, when it does not drive away the congregation from sheer boredom.

This link will take the reader to the full article at Academia.edu.

Meanwhile, I also encourage you to go over and read the whole article by Barnes.