LITURGY AND BIBLICAL I N T E R P R E T AT I O N The Sanctus and the Qedushah
S E B A S T I A N S E LV É N
University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana
Copyright © 2020 by the University of Notre Dame University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 www.undpress.nd.edu All Rights Reserved Published in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data <to come>
∞ This book is printed on acid-free paper.
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
vii
Introduction, Part I:Performance Matters
Introduction, Part II:Liturgical Material— Qedushah and Sanctus 13
CHAPTER 1
Holy the Hideous Human Angels: The Identity of the Seraphim 29
CHAPTER 2
Hymning the Eternal Father: The Function of Isaiah 6:3
63
The God Approached:Divine Presence in the Liturgy
87
CHAPTER 3
1
Conclusions
123
Notes
129
Bibliography
189
Index
211
Introduction, Part 1 Performance Matters
Every time Jews or Christians worship is an instantiation of biblical interpretation. And when the Bible comes to life through music, movement, and setting, it changes character. Psalm 23, sung to the somber tone of a Christian funeral, is a rather different text then when sung (usually after some schnapps) by Jews around a Shabbat dinner table. The word “interpretation” itself hints at this, as French-American polymath George Steiner writes in Real Presences: An interpreter is a decipherer and communicator of meanings. He is a translator between languages, between cultures and between performative conventions. He is, in essence, an executant, one who “acts out” the material before him so as to give it intelligible life. . . . An actor interprets Agamemnon or Ophelia. A dancer interprets Balanchine’s choreography. A violinist a Bach partita. In each of these instances, interpretation is understanding in action; it is the immediacy of translation.1 Interpretation is a highly practical issue. And let us keep in mind: the interpretation of a text (in Steiner’s sense) can have quite a dramatic influence on how one later interprets it. Liturgical experiences activate or neglect certain readings of a text, and evoke certain emotive responses that can galvanize an interpretation. Jews can chuckle their way through the book of Esther even when not reading it on Purim, when the topsy-turvy nature of the liturgy reinforces the carnivalesque aspects of the text.2 Mirth, sorrow, solemnity, anger—all these emotions and more 1
2 Liturgy and Biblical Interpretation
can grow out of one’s reading, and especially so if those are the emotions that are encouraged liturgically. Liturgy involves us not just intellectually but also emotionally and somatically. The space in which worship takes place, the choreography according to which one moves one’s body, the sounds and sights, tastes and scents that one registers, all work to shape one’s experience of the text. Liturgy is, among other things, an experienced biblical interpretation. Like a concert, or a play, it is a performed act: liturgy is not a book, just as a concert is not its sheet music, but a moment, an action in time and space. But there is, as with a classical concert or a play, a particular text that is performed again and again. My argument in this book is that the study of the Bible, as refracted through its ritual or liturgical reception, has been neglected by liturgical scholars but all the more so by biblical scholars.3 Liturgy is one of the many cultural activities that influence one’s understanding of the biblical text, and the study of the interrelation between the Bible and its use in liturgy deserves thorough study. I will take Isaiah 6:1–5 as my case study, and already by choosing this text, some of the factors I would like to draw attention to come into play. This is a passage that has garnered a tremendous amount of attention by biblical scholars. Why is that? Why have so many articles, monographs, and so on been written on Isaiah 6 and not, say, Isaiah 4? Why have so many given this passage new contexts in music, fiction, and poetry, from Dante to Anne Carson, Edmund Spenser to William Empson, John Donne to Allen Ginsberg, Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Leonard Cohen? I would venture to say that this interest—including my own—comes from the liturgical use of this text. Just as some other liturgical texts, such as Deuteronomy 6:4, have been prioritized in biblical research because of their liturgical use, so, I would argue, has Isaiah 6 been prioritized because of the familiarity with it that liturgy breeds. A telling example could be how, when discussing my research, most Jews I have spoken to have said, “Oh, you’re writing about the qedushah?” and most Christians have said, “Oh, you’re writing about the Sanctus?” For both, the liturgical reference was what first came to mind—even in speaking about this text, people do so through their liturgies. This perspective ought to be much more represented in research. Surprisingly, this has not been the case, and until quite recently, it was not the case for almost any non-or extratextual genre of reception. Not
Introduction, Part 1 3
only has there been a privileging of content over form when looking at the history of biblical texts, there has also been a privileging of abstract text over other forms of cultural activities: commentaries have been unpacked for their readings, but the study of other engagements with the biblical texts is still underdeveloped. Art, film, theater, music, and pop culture phenomena are all part of this history, and some of them have had a far greater influence on how people approach the biblical texts than even the most influential commentary. There have been attempts at remedying this by broadening the field by, for example, Cheryl Exum looking into the Bible in art history4 and Adele Reinhartz examining the role of the Bible in Hollywood productions.5 This is, to my mind, a very welcome endeavor that needs further strengthening.6 Timothy Beal’s call for a broadening of the field “to include not only academic and theological readings but also biblical appearances in visual art, literature, music, politics, and other works of culture, from ‘high’ to ‘low’ ” appears to be underway.7 It would seem, however, that some areas have been overlooked. Christopher Rowland, writing about his editorial work on the Blackwell Bible Commentary, focuses on “the different ways in which the Bible has been read and heard in history, through music, literature and art.”8 He believes an “openness to the varieties of effects of biblical texts puts exegesis in touch with wider intellectual currents in the humanities, so that literature, art and music become part of the modes of exegesis.”9 Curiously absent from both these listings of media is ritual.10 It is also a remarkable oversight when we take into account the very fact that the only Hebrew Bible we have is a liturgical text.11 The Masoretic text, which is our access point to this corpus in its original language(s), is cantillated in its entirety. Our Hebrew Bible is written to be sung in synagogues and is thus an unavoidably ritual text, and, to be more precise, an unavoidably Jewish ritual text. The liturgical nature of the Hebrew Bible available today is, in a certain sense, hidden in plain sight.12 A biblical scholar cannot get away from the fact that the liturgical instructions of qere and ketiv, for example, are written in the manuscripts themselves. As a corpus, too, the Bible is also deeply marked by liturgy: it includes liturgical portions, such as the book of Psalms, but its very canon, as persuasively argued by Judith Newman, has also been profoundly changed and in some instances even determined by liturgical use.13
4 Liturgy and Biblical Interpretation
This neglect is also remarkable from another perspective, given the prevalence of biblical language in Jewish and Christian liturgy.14 Already the fourteenth-century liturgical commentator David Abudraham points out in his siddur commentary: “Know then that the language of prayer is founded on the language of Scripture. Because of this, you will find written in this explanation on every single word a verse like it or on its theme. And there are a few words for which a foundation in Scripture could not be found, and therefore for them I will bring a foundation from the Gemara.”15 This has been repeated by Ruth Langer, who writes on Jewish prayer: “Hardly a word of the prayer lacks a biblical echo.”16 Reuven Kimelman, championing the study of biblical hypotexts in Jewish liturgy, writes: “The meaning of the liturgy exists not so much in the liturgical text per se as in the interaction between the liturgical text and the biblical intertext. Meaning, in the mind of the reader, takes place between texts rather than within them.”17 The same, of course, holds true for much of Christian worship. This interpretative activity is often glossed over, though it might be one of the most influential sites of biblical interpretation. Diarmaid MacCulloch points out concerning the Book of Common Prayer: Its liturgy was not a denominational artefact; it was the literary text most thoroughly known by most people in this country, and one should include the Bible among its lesser rivals. This was because the English and the Welsh were active participants in the BCP [Book of Common Prayer], as they made their liturgical replies to the person leading worship in the thousands of churches throughout the realm: they were actors week by week in a drama whose cast included and united most of the nation, and which therefore was a much more significant play, and more culturally central, than anything by Shakespeare.18 What could be added to this important observation is that through the Book of Common Prayer, the Bible, too, entered the mouths and minds of all those worshippers.19 A less central cultural activity in the West than it once was, liturgy is still a potent interpretation of biblical texts. In it, the Bible is a script to be performed, and so is remade, day after day, week after week. Many biblical scholars still come from a religious
Introduction, Part 1 5
background, and even among those who do not, most are embedded—at least in the most general sense—in a certain religious tradition, owing to culture and geography, if nothing else. As Stefan C. Reif amply demonstrates in his recent collection of essays, Jews, Bible and Prayer (2017), liturgy shapes our pre-understanding of a text: which texts are important, which texts are connected, and often how they are to be read. Certain readings are reinforced, and certain potential aspects of a text activated, through their use in liturgy, while others are neglected or even muted. Some of the readings encouraged through liturgy may be helpful, some innocuous, but some may be problematic, even harmful. An instructive example here is that of Isaiah 6:1–5, which will serve as our case study. This pericope is far from a peripheral text; in fact, it is probably one of the most well-known biblical texts, to a large extent for liturgical reasons. This text has been chosen because of its fame rather than its obscurity, and it will serve to exemplify my argument since it has been employed in related but diverse Jewish and Christian settings. In the chapters of this study, I will trace its liturgical use in Jewish, Roman Catholic, Anglican, and Lutheran traditions. It should be stressed at the outset that I am not presenting a comprehensive historical overview. Rather, I have chosen examples of illuminating interpretational choices in the liturgy. I have selected certain trends and “summit moments” where in my view the text has been taken in new directions, and often this has meant providing context. Much of the chapter material is dedicated to a historical investigation, but the purpose of this is to provide background for and examples of influential liturgical traditions that have shaped the interpretation of this text and that continue to exercise an influence today. This has also dictated the choices of traditions. Rather than taking an encyclopedic approach, which would have included, for example, Eastern Christian liturgies, I have chosen those religious traditions that are well represented and influential in modern biblical research.
RECEPTION STUDIES
Because this is an investigation into the reception study of the Bible, it might be worth considering some of the issues that have come up within
6 Liturgy and Biblical Interpretation
this field and how they relate to this study. Reception studies have come a long way, from being a rebel to an established subfield in its own right. However, it is now no longer seen as unorthodox so much as at risk of calcifying, as can be seen in critiques of it.20 One recent such critique concerns some of the core assumptions of why reception studies should even be separated into a distinct field. Reception studies have traditionally been set up in opposition to historical-critical approaches as the tracing of what the text has meant after its production or formalization. Its subject matter has often been understood the way John Sawyer characterizes it: “The history of how a text has influenced communities and cultures down the centuries.”21 Lately, this distinction has turned out to be untenable, and in order to situate this study in the larger field, some issues need to be dealt with.22 A reasonable point of departure would be how the reading process can be imagined, followed by a return to what this might mean for the problematic division between original and reception. My two core assumptions in this study are that reading is (1) a process undergoing constant mutation and (2) that our academic ways of reading—from historical-critical to postcolonial—are themselves part of the reception of the text, rather than a meta-operation taking place above it. The first assumption constitutes, in effect, a view of liturgy not entirely unlike that of certain theoreticians of literature, according to whom lived experiences and snippets of everyday storytelling are arranged and restructured in the encounter with a text. Liturgy, like a novel, presents a participant/reader with suggestions for how to understand everyday life by organizing concepts, terms, and acts in a specific way, to which the participant/reader reacts in one way or another.23 Liturgy not only restructures how a person might interpret and string together one’s own lived experiences, but also how one might interpret and draw connections between biblical passages that are liturgically presented in a certain order and context. By putting biblical verses together in a certain way, certain readings are more likely to occur.24 And if liturgy, as a form of reception, can restructure the ways in which an individual reads biblical texts, how does that work on a macro level, in an academic field? My second assumption is this, and scholars of liturgy will have to excuse me for mainly addressing the biblical side of things in this section: that we as scholars in the field do not stand above the textual traditions we study. Modern biblical research is part
Introduction, Part 1 7
of the stream of textual interpretation—and production—that is the Hebrew Bible, and the field itself is another instantiation of biblical reception. The field, as part of the modern Enlightenment project of academic knowledge creation, tries to be non-biased, but like any other field of study, it is influenced by many other factors, among them liturgy.25 One might here wish to remember the cautionary remarks of Hans-Georg Gadamer: “Real historical thinking must take account of its own historicity,”26 and “[history] prevails even where faith in method leads one to deny one’s own historicity.”27 There has, fortunately, been a shift away from the view of scholars of biblical reception as coming in after the historical-critical “job has been done,” to do the same—that is, neutrally explicating—to later inter preters such as Origen or Rashi.28 Instead of framing reading as a creative endeavor, biblical studies have too often presented reading as a matter of applying the right set of methods to a text. The model has been to be a commentator on the commentators. This is reflected in content, style, and even chapter layout, since studies often start with “what the Bible says” and then go on to reception.29 The comments of Stephen D. Moore and Yvonne Sherwood come to mind: “In biblical studies, epistemological decorum is construed rather differently than in literary studies. In biblical studies, the model of the good reader is the commentator. This self-effacing reader does not write but, as his name implies, merely comments. He is a civil servant of the biblical text.”30 Style matters, as does layout and a host of other decisions of presentation, since they in turn shed light on our underlying assumptions. One of those assumptions that frequently makes itself felt is the assumption that we have a by now stable biblical text and that the work of a scholar of its reception is to follow it down the rabbit hole of history. The Hebrew Bible, however, was not made in the past but in the present, by scholars who themselves form its latest “growth ring.”31 We are on a horizontal plane with the flow of biblical texts throughout history, rather than above it, in our reading of them.
STUDYING LITURGY: WAYS OF SEEING
One of the main challenges of studying the nexus between the Bible and liturgy is the fact that liturgy, as a “genre,” is rather different from, say,
8 Liturgy and Biblical Interpretation
literature, and has to be approached in other ways. It is important that, when studying liturgy, one pays serious attention to its extratextual dimensions. Liturgy is not, after all, just another text, but an activity. This is something that liturgy has in common with, for example, theater. For a long time in theater studies, the dramatic text was what was being studied, as if it were a book and not a blueprint for production, a realization that has since shifted the whole field, not just into extratextual considerations but also into nontextual ones.32 Research on liturgy has, on the whole, been somewhat slower to realize that there is something outside the text.33 With one’s eyes fixed on text, one runs the risk of ending up studying an idealized liturgy rather than actual worship. Take, for example, Catherine Pickstock’s laudable attempt to break out of the privileging of text over orality, which devotes a substantial section to an interpretation of the Mass of the Roman Rite.34 Bryan Spinks, after trying to figure out when and where this Mass that Pickstock interprets may have taken place, points out that “it is certainly not a reading of a medieval mass, but a reading of an academic critical text by a modern academic.”35 It is impossible to go through all iterations and variants of a liturgical rite, especially when taking many different areas and periods into account, but one must also take in more than just the written text and look beyond it to get at something resembling an actual worship experience without getting bogged down in the minutiae of liturgical history. One aspect of both Jewish and Christian liturgical practices that is rather helpful here is that they are both textually based. This is not a given for all religious rituals, but it does hold true for the regulated worship of these two religious traditions. This means that they are not entirely dissimilar to theatrical plays, or sheet music, in that they are, to some extent, “readable.”36 Just as a play is not exhausted by its dramatic script, so liturgy too has, beyond its script, performers, setting, and a mise-en-scène that must be taken into account: its aesthetic dimensions, its melodies and “moods.”37 Just as with a play, no two “performances” will be identical, and liturgy shares with dramatic theater that tension between textual stability and performed unrepeatability.38 Apart from extratextual dimensions of choreography, architecture, and modes of participation, attention to the role of text and words, when used, is also called for. Waving the lulav fronds, blowing the shofar (ram’s horn), or receiving the ash cross on Ash Wednesday may all be highly charged moments in the liturgy, without words having a central role at all. But even when words are
Introduction, Part 1 9
the focus, the role of these words may be unusual. Liturgical language is, after all, performative, in the old-fashioned, analytical sense of the word. It is not a dry statement of doctrine; it is the dynamic interpretation and bringing about of a world. In this world, divine forgiveness is dispensed on Yom Kippur, blessing is relayed through the priestly blessing, and bread and wine are turned into the body and blood of Christ. Liturgical language does not describe these moments, it instantiates them.39 This is important to the theological dimensions that we need to keep in mind when dealing with liturgy. The individual worshipper may not believe in angels, or the miracle of Mass, or even God, but she might still go through the liturgical actions, sing hymns, move her body in the prescribed ways, and so will perform the theological worlds and perspectives of which the liturgy is part. She will not do so in an uncomplicated manner, especially because the liturgy may be communicating many different worldviews, sometimes in tension or in direct contradiction with one another, but she will still “follow the script.” It is in this way that theology can also be taken seriously, not as an abstract “content” or “belief” behind the “practice,” but as a component and as a function of the liturgical actions themselves.40 The realization that words are efficacious—something very true of liturgical language—may help offset some of the assumptions coming together with the theater paradigm that would suggest that liturgy is therefore “just a play.”41 Liturgy does, after all, make certain claims on its relationship to the world, and in which way its words are “like a spider’s web, attached ever so slightly, perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.”42 To say that you sing with the angels is to uphold a world in which angels sing. Even if individually that is not one’s perspective on the world, it is still a form of acted-out belief. Because it would be all but impossible to capture the relationship between practice and theology in Jewish life without this perspective, and would hamper the analysis of Christian traditions, too, I think this is an important lens through which to view these liturgical practices.43
FOCUS AND CHOICE OF MATERIAL
This study is concerned with the ritual reception of the Hebrew Bible, in this case of Isaiah 6:1–5, taking into account not just text but performed
10 Liturgy and Biblical Interpretation
ritual. Even within the realm of rituals, however, one must draw some lines. One such delimitation is that what is of interest here is liturgy, not the whole field of ritual life, which is more or less impossible to demarcate or define. Another is that a comprehensive view of all the contexts in which Isaiah 6 has been used is impossible—some biblical texts can be isolated and treated comprehensively, but this is not one of those. I would like to stress this because this is not a historical survey. Rather, I have identified certain moments in the life of this text that I have deemed to be of importance, and I will analyze these. The liturgies in question are the ones in Jewish and Christian worship in which Isaiah 6:1–5 features most prominently, that is, the qedushah deYotzer and the qedushah deAmidah of Jewish liturgy (leaving the third, qedushah deSidra’, to the side for now), and the Sanctus of Christian liturgy. The rabbinic qedushah traditions are omnipresent in modern Jewish liturgy and are emblematic of much of Second Temple and also later rabbinic theology. The Sanctus of the medieval Roman Rite is the starting point for my discussion of Christian liturgy. Here there are extraordinary overlaps with Jewish liturgy and also specifically Christian expressions. This medieval Sanctus was changed in more than one direction during the Reformation.44 Two Protestant traditions will therefore be used as cases of comparison. The first of these is the Lutheran liturgical tradition. This is first exemplified by the two liturgies Martin Luther himself wrote, but the main example will be the Lutheran Church of Sweden. The reasons for this choice are a few. First of all, the Church of Sweden is the largest Lutheran church in the West.45 It has furthermore, as part of the state structure of the Swedish empire, had a significant influence on the other Nordic churches, most obviously in Finland, which up until 1809 was Swedish, as well as in the Baltic countries.46 Lastly, due to migration, it has also been one of the important sources traditions in the formation of North American Lutheran liturgies.47 The Church of England will be the main example of Reformed Protestant Christianity, because it is one of few Reformed traditions to keep the Sanctus. Through the different early editions of the Book of Common Prayer, which because of its pivotal role in Anglican worship will be taken as my example, we will also see these Reformed influences come into play.
Introduction, Part 1  11
Since I will be looking at influential examples of ritual reception, this also means that other fascinating examples will fall outside of the scope of this study: the use of Isaiah 6 in Eastern Orthodox traditions, for example, or in Freemasonry, or esotericism. Very few biblical scholars have their religious backgrounds in these traditions, at least not to the extent that it has had an influence on the field, and so they have had to be left to the side.