Harald Buchinger sketches the origins and complex evolutions of liturgies in Christian Antiquity. He focuses on patterns of worship and celebration developed in those times, underscoring how difficult it is to draw straightforward conclusions, mainly because of a paucity of sources.

This chapter explores christological underpinnings to eucharistic theology. It delineates transubstantiation, consubstantiation, and three versions of impanation in the effort to offer an incarnational model of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist.

This chapter focuses on the companion volumes Mystic Trees and Poems of Adoration to explore the ways Michael Field’s poetry changed following Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper’s 1907 conversion to Roman Catholicism. This chapter reviews prior scholarship on Field’s devotional poetry, which has often emphasised the continuity between Field’s pre- and post- conversion work. The chapter builds on this scholarship by arguing that Field’s devotional poetry, informed by their newfound faith, explores new ways of thinking about time, suffering, and the purpose of art. Furthermore, this chapter explores the significance of studying Victorian devotional and religious verse, and the ways women and queer people were able to use the genre to engage with and build upon theological concepts, outside the bounds of ecclesiastical authority.

The argument of this chapter is that the instrument doctrine, if held, sharpens our understanding of other mysteries of the Christian faith, including the hypostatic union, the Church, and the sacrament of the Eucharist. One reason that Aquinas held to the doctrine was the clarity it brought to these other mysteries. With Christology, the benefits are grammatical and speculative. Calling Christ’s humanity an instrument leads us to think of the one who possesses it, namely, the Logos, and so it can render single-subject Christology clearer to the intellect. If Christ’s humanity is held to be an instrument, it also implicates in our understanding the divine power through which the Logos works. With the theology of the Church, the instrument doctrine supports the biblical idea that Christ sends the Holy Spirit on the Church as a human being, and not only as God. And with the theology of the Eucharist, the instrument doctrine assists Catholic faith in perceiving how Jesus gives us a share of the divine life through sacramental communion.

Leviticus has shaped both Jewish and Christian theology and practice over the centuries. The final chapter examines its influence in the rest of the Old Testament and into the Second Temple period and the New Testament. Levitical theology also influenced a Christian understanding of sacred space in church architecture as well as helping shape the Christian liturgical year.

Augustine’s liturgical preaching is integral to his conception of the liturgical celebration as rendering present the unrepeatable saving acts of Christ. During the liturgical season from Lent to Easter, the north African bishop is consistently preoccupied with the present effectiveness of the mysteries of Christ’s death and Resurrection. During Lent, he invites his congregation to fashion a cross for themselves – through prayer, fasting, and alms – for the sake of communion in Christ’s crucifixion. On Good Friday, he invites his listeners to contemplate the suffering of the impassible God and to safeguard the integrity of the Church that is the fruit of his suffering. In the Easter celebrations, he instructs his flock to be strengthened in their Easter faith through participation in the Eucharist and through performance of works of mercy, and to hold fast to the objective content of their faith in the genuine corporeality of the Risen Lord. He guides them into an experience of Easter joy as a proleptic participation in the eternal joy of the Church’s communion in the body of the Risen Lord, which can only be attained through a sharing in his Crucifixion.

Augustine’s preaching touches numerous aspects of his theology which are predominantly present in his most important treatises. The sacraments of the Church are treated in his controversies with heretics but they are also very much present in his sermons, where he teaches the sound doctrine of the Church and performs the Christian rites for the edification of the faithful. This chapter examines Augustine’s teaching on baptism and the Eucharist in his preaching. Having considered his definition of the sacraments in general in his preached works, it presents his teaching on the sacraments in his catechesis to the baptism candidates and to the newly baptised Christians of his congregation. The study further takes into consideration what Augustine says on baptism and the Eucharist in his sermons while addressing the problems of the Donatists and Pelagians. Augustine makes difficult theological concepts understandable to his flock by adapting his language to them.

Bishop Augustine probably preached countless sermons on the New Testament, but less than three hundred remain extant. Most of his New Testament preaching is found in his 124 Homilies on the Gospel of John, his ten Homilies on the First Epistle of John, and his Sermons 51–183. The richness of these sermons is astounding. This chapter samples them, offering a starting point for further analysis. The first section focuses on the pastoral goals that stand behind Augustine’s preaching on the Gospel of Matthew. Second, the chapter turns to his anti-Donatist Homilies on the First Epistle of John, where he intersperses his commentary on 1 John with extensive citations of the Psalms and the Gospels. Third, with respect to his Homilies on the Gospel of John, the chapter shows that Augustine preaches on John with a strong eye to his central theological interests, including his well-known arguments regarding grace and predestination.

Numerous unpublished Greek manuscripts contain the rituals of marriage as performed in diverse regions of the Byzantine world. This chapter both discusses the universal practices of weddings known across Christian communities of the Eastern Mediterranean and discerns unique traditions local to specific regions, like Byzantine Southern Italy or Palestine. The prayers of the marriage rite are analyzed, and attention is given to such gestures as crowning and veiling couples and to traditions previously unknown to Byzantinists, like the practice of breaking a glass at weddings, popularly understood today as a Jewish custom, as well as specific aspects of ritualized bridal costume and the roles of witnesses, or paranymphs.

St. Paul speaks about the church as the body of Christ, and he also speaks about the Eucharist as the body of Christ. How are these two affirmations related? Christian medieval authors gave consideration to the notion of the church as the “mystical body” of Christ and understood the church as the fruit or result of eucharistic communion in the “true body” of Christ. This chapter examines the thought of Thomas Aquinas on the church and its relation to the sacraments. It also shows how this conception has deeply informed the modern idea of the church as a sign and instrument of grace for all human beings, called to communion in the one Christ.

George Eliot and Mary Ward explicitly reject orthodox Christianity and hold a prominent place in standard accounts of Victorian doubt. However, their professed unbelief and yet simultaneous interest in liturgy reveals once again the problem with excarnated accounts of religion. To reduce religion merely to interior belief is to miss how Eliot and Ward use ritual forms to embody their post-Christian ethics. In Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876), Jewish ritual galvanizes Daniel’s own ethical aspirations, and Christian liturgy frames key scenes in Gwendolen Harleth’s moral progress. Similarly, the protagonist of Ward’s Robert Elsmere (1888) is more than just a moral exemplar who imitates a purely human Jesus by working for social justice. Rather, he founds a new religion with its own liturgical forms, some of them borrowed directly from traditional liturgies. Thus, even the unorthodox Eliot and Ward feel the threat of excarnation and the attraction of ritual.

The fin-de-siècle aesthetes, of course, react against the moral project expressed in realist novels like Eliot’s and Ward’s. Indeed, Oscar Wilde uses liturgy to attack what he sees as realism’s stunted imagination. But, as this chapter and the next show, aestheticism too is deeply suspicious of how excarnation separates the material and the spiritual. Again, if modernity typically sunders these realms, liturgy joins them. It therefore offers the perfect channel for aestheticism’s veneration of material reality – of beautiful bodies, lovely objects, and stimulating experiences. Such devotion pervades Walter Pater’s novel Marius the Epicurean (1885) – itself a kind of liturgical and aesthetic bildungsroman. Set in second-century Italy, the novel follows the pious Marius, who cherishes the pagan rituals of his boyhood and finds their fulfillment in the early Christian Mass. For Marius, the Eucharist not only sacralizes material objects but also defends matter – specifically the body – against the ritual violence of imperial Rome. Just as Wordsworth depicts industrialism as a liturgy of desecration, Pater sees Roman imperial power in similar terms.

The work of modernist poet and visual artist David Jones provides a retrospective vantage of the central claims of Liturgy, Ritual, and Secularization in Nineteenth-Century British Literature. Jones saw the nineteenth century as a moment of breakage with the past. This rupture, according to Jones, threatens the work of the artist by depleting the sacramental meaning of reality – that is, the ability of concrete things to signify unseen spiritual depths. In both a dramatic biographical encounter with the Mass during his time on the front lines of World War I and in his subsequent art and poetry, Jones turns to liturgical forms to confront the breakage that began in the nineteenth century. Viewed from Jones’s perspective, the Romantic and Victorian interest in liturgy takes on new significance for the overarching genealogy of modernity and secularization. These liturgical fascinations intervene in – and resist – the long story of modernity’s separation of the material and spiritual, the natural and supernatural.

The eucharistic mystery opens the concept of mythic sensibility: narrative that reveals the world to be meaningful in a particular way. Mythopoeic fantasy, as ‘shamelessly fictive’, is a vital locus of contemporary myth-making, demonstrating the dynamics of mythic sensibility outside the traditional venues of religious narrative.

Walter Pater also anticipates Oscar Wilde’s liturgical moves. Pater depicts Marius the Epicurean as a liturgical subject – that is, Marius relishes the forms of liturgy and yet those forms do not become rigid structures but rather gateways into mystery. Wilde pushes this liturgical subjectivity still further. For him, the porosity of the liturgical subject leads to a full-blown liturgical constructivism: If the self remains open before the mystery of ever further aesthetic experience, then perhaps all things – not just the human self – are malleable. In his critical writings, Wilde denounces the mechanistically closed world of the realist novel, which he sees as slavishly imitating nature. By contrast, Wilde argues that art can reshape nature. Liturgical language and ritual action especially reveal how words remake reality: The priest’s Words of Institution and the drama of the Mass transform – even transubstantiate – the bread and wine. As it did for Wordsworth, liturgy helps Wilde imagine nature not as self-enclosed but rather as participating in a higher, transcendent reality.

This chapter discusses the relationship of the imagination to Christian eschatology. It gives an account of the function of eschatological imagery in the Bible, discusses the changing ways in which art and literature have engaged Christian eschatology, and concludes with an account of a distinctly eschatological imagination.