Celebration Beyond (Un-)Belief: The Potential of Negative Hermeneutics for a Liturgical Apophaticism

2.1. Receiving ‘Unbelief’ from Culture

To analyze how liturgical studies “receives” unbelief through cultural expressions and fathom its potential for wider dialogue between theological disciplines, I will look at the concept of ‘unbelief’ from the angle of a negative cultural hermeneutic, starting with the assumption that unbelief is an essential part of any cultural phenomenon. From a hermeneutical perspective, culture is often understood as an expression, communication, and tradition of certain social norms and meaning, ¹¹ that is, a socially agreed-upon set of assumptions and conventions. However, a critical negative hermeneutic of culture stresses that any cultural expression contains the necessary elements of critique, change, and transformation. ‘Unbelief’ in this context is understood as a moment of critique and questioning of culturally transmitted meaning and norms. Thus, it is apprehended as a necessary space for an active affirmation, negation, or rearticulation of culture. This forms a starting point for negative cultural hermeneutics ¹² that begins by analyzing gaps, lack, and discontinuity in understanding a culturally transmitted and received meaning. All these different aspects of engaging with sense and meaning are part of understanding and communication which manifests in cultural expressions.

Angehrn presents ‘subject’, ‘sense,’ and ‘language’ as the three core concepts describing the approach of negative hermeneutics. The human subject driving the process of understanding receives, deconstructs, and recreates meaning through language. However, the subject is never fully in control of this complex process (neither of the language it uses nor of the meaning it expresses) but is rather confronted with the experience of otherness and negativity. In this process, a negative hermeneutic emphasizes the mutual dependence of subject, sense, and language for the process of understanding—the understanding subject always finds themselves in the realm of meaning and language. They are, however, not an abstract and independent power but only exist in relation to the understanding subject. Negative hermeneutics builds on traditional hermeneutic models of preconception, reception, and revision of meaning in the hermeneutical process and develops these further toward a critical and creative engagement with the process of understanding. ¹³ For an application to liturgy, this requires a focus on layers of the celebration that differ from a ‘liturgical ideal.’ This difference can be found on the side of the liturgical act itself (e.g., the celebrant accidentally skips a page in the liturgical book or uses a prayer for a different day) or on the side of the liturgical subject (e.g., the congregation does not reply with correct liturgical responses because they are not following the service or are unfamiliar with it).

Due to the dual nature of liturgy (a) as a ritual and (b) its claimed referentiality to an underlying mystery, that is, a dynamic that surpasses the propositional structure of language and understanding, liturgy is an object par excellence for exploring the reach of negative hermeneutics in a theological context. According to negative cultural hermeneutics, the concept of ‘culture’ needs to be extended beyond a mere transmission of meaning to its deconstruction and creative recreation. Thus, ‘unbelief’ as an approach to critical appropriation is a necessary element within this process. Therefore, the term unbelief can be used either regarding the cultural content, which is negated and criticized (fides quae), or for an individual's attitude toward a culture (fides qua). Both aspects are critical for the understanding of negative aspects of the celebration. A negative liturgical theology will ask where the liturgical celebration provides elements of incongruousness and tension and how the performative act of the celebration transcends its proclamation of faith. In this performance, the specificity of the concrete liturgical celebration and the reappropriation of traditional forms within it build a starting point for a negative and apophatic approach.

In the context of postmodern pluralism, Lieven Boeve talks about a ‘cultural apophaticism,’ which avoids the engagement of the concrete and specific as it is embarrassed by the specificity of God's revelation in the context of cultural pluralism. The following section will show how this concept can open up a dialogue between a liturgical–theological and a cultural negative hermeneutic. It will outline not only how a negative liturgical hermeneutic can build a fruitful basis for an encounter with cultural apophaticism but also how it leads beyond it and rearticulates questions about the relationship between negative theology and its foundation in positive-articulated faith.

Boeve uses the concept of a ‘cultural apophaticism’ to describe a philosophical approach using ‘pure religion’ as a form of committed agnosticism that avoids any specificity. ¹⁴ He analyzes negative-theological thinking patterns within postmodern philosophy and concludes that in these approaches, “[e]very form of prayer and praise is reduced to a radically pragmatic and performative speaking of the God who is beyond being and discourse.” ¹⁵ According to Boeve, this ‘hyperbolic’ understanding of religious language aims to overcome the distinction between apophasis and cataphasis by introducing the radical hermeneutics of différance (Derrida) or even religion (Caputo). This results in the ideal of a religious dynamic beyond the particularity of the discourse within a specific religious language game. Boeve argues that a ‘purely religious’ approach of cultural apophaticism leads to a purified understanding of prayer as a pragmatic linguistic function that speaks ‘as if there was a God.’ He contrasts this approach with an awareness of the specific narratives of a God which is active in history and an incarnation that requires an ongoing hermeneutic of faith. He argues that “[i]nterpreting Christianity, therefore, cannot lead ‘beyond’, or let alone ‘behind’, language, but needs to pass through language itself.” ¹⁶

In dialogue with Lyotard's critique of “master narratives,” Boeve suggests that the religious is capable of bearing witness to the “differand” by offering new ways to conceive otherness and transcendence in the particularity of its tradition. He writes, “if grace is the event of the breaking-through of God's love, then theology must critique every immediate closing of the event within closed narratives.” ¹⁷ Against philosophical ‘negative theologies’ trying to avoid contamination of language, Boeve proposes an “incarnational approach to Christianity that teaches us that narratives are always already told, and that language happens anyway, even in speaking about impossible phrases.” ¹⁸ He suggests that “God is revealed anew in every event of heterogeneity.” ¹⁹ With Richard Kearney, he emphasizes that there cannot be “messianicity”, as imagined by Derrida and Caputo, without particular messianism, and that God is desired because he desires first. He focuses, however, even more strongly than Kearney on the specific experience and the radical particularity of narratives. Boeve sees the moment of truth of deconstruction in the narrative's venture of a truth claim, which ‘is bound to the very lived particularity.’ ²⁰ He argues that a contemporary culturally motivated apophatic theology is tempted to leave any specificity of religious narratives behind out of embarrassment at God's otherness as well as God's specific historical revelation. ²¹ Against these tendencies, Boeve emphasizes the irreducible particularity of religious discourse based on the doctrine of the incarnation, leading to an ongoing radical hermeneutic (against universalism or fundamentalism). ²² He concludes that Christian theology, in its incarnational character, presupposes an ongoing radical hermeneutic and cannot be set against narratives. However, maintaining an awareness of narratives ²³ leads to the conclusion that “apophatic theology does not abandon cataphatic theology, but qualifies it.” ²⁴ The strength of this approach is its ability to rediscover dynamics of apophatic theology in the context of postmodern culture and at the same time to qualify them within the theological tradition.

However, a negative hermeneutic of liturgy shifts the perspective and argues that a ‘lived particularity’ can best build the basis for a theological inquiry when approached in its incongruence and provisional possibility. Although Boeve concludes that language does “not need to be a contamination or a fall,” ²⁵ a negative hermeneutical approach will emphasize that language is fundamentally structured by its brokenness and incongruence. We only encounter language in the tension between idealized meaning and limited expression. From a negative hermeneutical perspective, the focal points of language, subject, and sense are constantly challenged by their inconsistencies and experienced their limitations. A liturgical application of negative hermeneutics would not abandon this ‘contaminated’ language but rather argue that this is where its theological potential lies. This does not revokes its perspectivity—as Boeve emphasizes the narrative situatedness even in talking about the limits of narrative ²⁶ —but helps reflect on the meta-hermeneutical dynamic of mediation and immediacy within the liturgical act.

A negative liturgical hermeneutic analyzes the particularity of the God (pro-)claimed in the individual liturgical celebration in its negative features. It asks what we learn from the ritual performance in a concrete and deficient context about the faith of a community and the God it proclaims. This is not simply a variation of ritual or religious studies, but it takes the claim of faith seriously as a theological inquiry. This perspective is “negative” insofar as it focuses on the gaps and irreducible “claims” of the celebration. It focusses on the dynamic of worship ‘as if’ takes a glimpse into the abyss of a ‘God who might not be.’ Herein, the potential of a negative hermeneutical approach to liturgy that opens up a perspective of transformation and critique, one that asks questions about the shortcomings and failings of liturgy as a communal expression of faith, and analyses liturgy that is celebrated “despite” its messiness. It argues that religious truth is found outside and beyond the particular religious tradition but always revealed within it, that is, gaps, tensions, questions, and disappointments. ²⁷ Flanagan speaks in this context of ‘liturgical ambiguities.’ These ambiguities arise when an action creates an effect other than that which is intended or is believed to have been signified. ²⁸ This is where aspects of apophatic theology and cultural unbelief meet. Taking a slightly different angle from Boeve, a liturgical apophatic hermeneutic argues that a Christian apophaticism is not opposed to the structure of a messianic prayer that in its performance proclaims a God ‘as if’, but rather focuses on the parallels in its negative expressions.

A negative hermeneutic of liturgy will agree with Boeve that an apophatic theology needs to rediscover the specificity of religious, in this case, Christian, tradition, and develop apophasis within cataphasis. ²⁹ On this basis, the following section will present how liturgical apophaticism can rearticulate and challenge assumptions about belief in the context of apophatic theology.

2.2. Deconstructing Cultural Unbelief Through Liturgy

To analyze liturgical celebrations as a starting point for theological engagement with cultural ‘unbelief,’ I will reevaluate Boeve's idea of cultural apophaticism from the perspective of a negative hermeneutic of liturgy. Although Boeve's understanding of a cultural apophaticism allows him to reclaim the concept of apophatic theology without losing the specific Christian content, a negative hermeneutical approach focuses on the radicalization of negative elements within the process of a symbolic expression of faith: it allows for an engagement with dynamics of apophatic theology in culture, as well as negative aspects of belief and unbelief in liturgy. The strength of this approach is its ability to analyze different layers of negativity within the liturgical celebration. It asks questions about the shortcomings and incongruences in the liturgical celebration as an expression not only of faith but also of a communal and theological critique and questioning of traditional belief. Thus, it analyzes the potential of necessary apophatic and negative elements within any cultural process for a ‘liturgical apophaticism.’ This section will present how liturgy as a ritualized expression of faith is situated within a cultural process of reception, critique, and reappropriation and how it can become a starting point to reevaluate the deconstruction of the category of cultural unbelief.

As a communal expression of Church and faith, ³⁰ liturgy appears to be opposed to apophatic and negative theology. However, from the perspective of a negative hermeneutic of liturgy, they do not contradict but rather complement and mutually reference one another. As social and cultural studies offer a necessary object for resistance and engagement for philosophical hermeneutics, so liturgical studies force theology to engage not only with a positive expression but also with the fundamental representative character of faith. ³¹ This engagement with embodied and irreducible specificity is a key challenge for postmodern thinking. In not only its fundamental materiality and resistance but also its ambivalent engagement with the belief of the individual and the community, a negative approach to liturgical studies forces theology to reassess its underlying assumptions about the nature of belief. ³² A negative liturgical theology takes this dynamic of an immediacy of faith proclaimed in the celebration, and its concrete liturgical mediation, as a point of origin for analyzing liturgical expressions. This perspective on liturgy emphasizes aspects of radical particularity and fundamental apophaticism within any (ritualized) prayer, providing a fruitful basis for the engagement with what can be perceived as a ‘culture of unbelief.’

As a religious ritual, liturgy operates on two levels. First, it fulfills the social and ecclesiological function of communicating and symbolizing shared religious experiences. At the same time, liturgy as a religious ritual is meant as an act of representation, that is, it contains an element of reflexivity, which does not exhaust itself in its institutional and pragmatic dimensions. Its essential purpose consists of pointing toward and manifesting the possibility of the transcendent. ³³ Liturgy, as a ritual expression of the faith of the Church, ³⁴ refers to a structured and explicit content (fides quae) as well as the existential dimension of a trusting relationship with God (fides qua), a division that forms the basis for a negative hermeneutical inquiry into both of these layers. The potential of a liturgical apophaticism will need to be explored on both levels to deconstruct the underlying understanding of liturgy as well as of a critique of ‘unbelief.’

Already in its first social and cultural dimension, liturgy contains elements of critique, transformation, and change. As a symbolic and nonpropositional act, it never coincides with the reality it represents but necessarily needs to be adapted, revised, and represented in each individual celebration. ³⁵ Liturgy is celebrated in the hope and trust that meaning is communicated, shared, and believed by its participants. It creates patterns of communicable meaning through iteration. At the same time, it contains a minimum of renewal and change, as iteration is never identical to its origin and never perfectly coincides with or accomplishes that which it pretends to be. As Flanagan puts it: liturgies make ‘the apparent unapparent. They operate in conditions of paradox and delight in the sign of contradiction they display for play.’ ³⁶ As a performative ritual, liturgy always puts its participants, as well as a pre-given meaning, at risk of a necessary and unpredictable transformation and potentially radical questioning. The critical potential of liturgy consists in its limited but real potential not to engage with the traditional forms, by ironizing them or contextualizing them differently: ³⁷ The congregation might not reply to the celebrant's invitation to share the peace, nobody might turn up, someone might interrupt the celebration midway, technology might fail.

These are not accidental to the ritual character of liturgy but instead, build the very center of its being. According to Flanagan, “the social contributes best to liturgical transactions when it ‹fails›, and when its limits are marked and transcended.” ³⁸ The liturgical act is always situated between either receiving appropriation or potential critique, failure, and rejecting transformation. This emphasizes the transformative, open, and critical potential of liturgy. Its radical orientation toward the future, for example, is expressed by Gordon Lathrop. He states that liturgy is essentially directed toward doing the next liturgy and asks what the ability of a celebrating community to laugh at its mistakes contributes to liturgy. ³⁹ The notion of ritual failure gains an additional dimension in a time where many liturgies happen as ‘pre-recorded’ performances. What does this mean for liturgical perfectionism and the ability to film several retakes of individual scenes? At the same time, in ‘live’ services, a whole additional layer of potential technical failures is added. How will this development shape our ideas of what ‘good’ liturgy looks like? ⁴⁰

The discrepancy between the subject engaging in liturgy and their ‘role’ illustrates the reach of negative hermeneutics to understand necessary gaps, distortions, and doubts within the liturgical act. The comparison between liturgy and theatrical performance has led to an increased interest in the effects of the “role-difference” for the ritual act. Liturgical meaning and sense emerge in the awareness of the necessary difference between the liturgical role and the “decision” to play it. ⁴³ Liturgy cannot simply be justified in a rational and logocentric way but needs to be understood and retraced in its performative process. A negative hermeneutical approach radicalizes this view and asks how this incoherence exists at the very core of the liturgical act. The idea of a paradoxical, detached, ‘negative’ liturgical subject opens not only interesting perspectives on theological anthropology and ecclesiology but also provides a fruitful basis for the engagement with what can be perceived as a “culture of unbelief.” It opens lines of questioning such as: what is the potential of liturgical performance compared to a logocentric, individualized focus on ‘belief?’; how can the doubts and questions (or even the disinterest) of ‘outsiders’ deepen and shake up a traditional understanding of liturgy?; how can a focus on negative dynamics in the liturgical act give new impulses for an understanding of what ‘good’ liturgy looks like?

This illustration exemplifies that the complexity of the liturgical subject points toward the fundamental dynamic of presupposed immediacy and necessary mediation as a core area for negative liturgical studies. The key argument of a negative and apophatic approach to liturgy is that, by taking on set liturgical traditions, the individual and the celebrating community engage with liturgy on a level situated beyond the dichotomy of belief and unbelief. By taking on a role and engaging with the liturgical play, they become part of a symbolic process that, through and beyond the communication and reappropriation of a specific meaning, points toward a transcendent. The oscillating role of the celebrating subject in the liturgical celebration emphasizes the role of ‘desire’ for the understanding of liturgical dynamics. Hope and desire for the ‘other’ that manifests within the liturgy link back to a hermeneutic of the negative, which starts with emphasizing what is lacking and missing in our understanding, and the desire expressed in it. Thus, the liturgical tradition becomes the basis for a celebration ‘as if there was a God’, as well as for its critique.

The individual act of faith and believing affirmation of the celebrated content is suspended through this mediation of the “hyperbolic” liturgical celebration. This dynamic of deconstruction forms the basis for the next step of a hermeneutical process: a rearticulation of traditional concepts of liturgy as well as its presupposed (un-)belief. A negative hermeneutical approach understands liturgy as an invitation to play and enter into a celebrating relationship with a possible divine by reappropriating liturgical tradition in a specific context. ⁴⁴ Thus, liturgy becomes a reference point for the ‘hermeneutic circle’ that takes the desire of the celebrating subject as a starting point yet always points beyond it. Flanagan expresses this idea of a negative liturgical hermeneutic as he writes, “But the being that is reflected in the act of understanding stands before a text, facing an infinity of the unsaid and finds in new interpretations a growing “circle of the unexpressed.” ⁴⁵ This emphasis on the “unexpressed” leads a negative liturgical hermeneutic beyond the specificity of the historical narrative to an openness toward an ‘unsecured,’ apophatic understanding of liturgy.

2.3. Recreating and Transforming Unbelief in Liturgy— The Potential for the Wider Theological Discourse

What can a broader theological discourse learn from a negative liturgical approach to ‘unbelief’? A negative approach focuses on the broken, incongruent, and transformative aspects of liturgy and takes the unbelief expressed in the celebration as a starting point. It does not turn into a simply agnostic or negativistic exercise but instead emphasizes the potential of transformation and reimagination within the theological expression and the radical possibility of a transcendence manifesting within it. This perspective of liturgical apophaticism emphasizes elements of celebration and ritualization in their negative referentiality. It draws from insights into the fundamental doxological dynamic of liturgy as a function and target point of theology, as developed in radical orthodoxy, but emphasizes its links to critical cultural anthropology. ⁴⁶

This approach forms the basis for a dialogue with a ‘culture of unbelief’, taking it seriously as a critique of the content and the form of belief. A negative liturgical theology asks questions on a metalevel about the underlying practices and assumptions of theological discourse and how these can be rearticulated and represented in dialogue with critical impulses from social and academic discourse. It can thus be an impetus for a wider inquiry about what theology as an academic and cultural enterprise does and does not represent and, in a more general sense, raises the question of ‘what is not talked about’ in the theological discourse and “what its gaps say” about the underlying ideas and assumptions and its reference to a ritual framework. Thus, a negative liturgical approach is a foundation for a theological reflection on the necessary limitations and tensions of the discourse and opens new perspectives on the symbolic and transformative metaphorical aspects of theological inquiry, emphasizing its reference to a possible transcendent. This possible transcendent is not discovered in the abstract but in the individual and concrete expression with which faith wrestles. As an apophatic approach, it finds its specificity in the negative underlying structure, that is, its narrative gaps. Thus, a liturgical apophaticism not only reclaims the doxological and performative character of liturgy but also emphasizes the irony and “weakness” of this position (credo quia absurdum est). This third ‘movement’ is even less technical and methodical than the previous two, and only the curious engagement with the particular liturgical expression in a text or celebration will be able to show where its transformative potential may lie.

By focusing on a playful engagement of the individual and the community in the liturgical celebration, we can begin to analyze its desired meaning and, at the same time, to understand that the transcendent object of this desire cannot be ‘justified’ or ‘proven’. Or, as Flanagan puts it, “Liturgies demand an interest and they secure meaning through the hidden, by making the apparent unapparent. They operate in conditions of paradox and delight in the sign of contradiction they display for play. They generate curiosity. ⁴⁷ This approach of negative liturgical theology will need to engage in a venture of an unsecured sense, which can neither be proven nor denied as a foundation for speaking about God who may (not) be. ⁴⁸ This perspective will allow for the study of liturgy as an ambivalent and open-ended process engaging with a possible transcendent, which is assumed to be the underlying principle of the celebration. Richard Kearney's argument that the loss of playfulness and the literal understanding of the celebration are great dangers for the liturgical act ⁴⁹ refers us back to the critique of unbelief that reminds liturgical studies that liturgical performances always work based on a ‘metaphorical’ and ‘unjustified’ play. Even the performed belief of the community cannot become a fundamentum inconcussum for the understanding of the liturgical celebration, but its mediated expression and the claim of its immediacy becomes a tension with which to wrestle.

Thus, by exploring the transformative and critical potential of the performative aspects of liturgy, liturgical apophaticism can contribute to broader academic discourse and help articulate a negative theology that suspends the question of belief for the benefit of a playful and performative engagement with the mystery ‘as if.’ A negative hermeneutic of liturgy will take its starting point at the core of theological inquiries and their grounding in the praxis and communal expression of faith. Discovering the negative elements in this dynamic provides a fruitful and critical basis for a further theological investigation of the necessary negative elements of faith and its consequences for liturgy. Key questions for the wider theological discourse will include the necessary falling short of liturgical language, the subject, and the specific liturgical tradition as well as its ecumenical and spiritual potential. As a hermeneutical approach, it refers, therefore, necessarily to the given of tradition (reception) but opens the theological inquiry toward moments of critique and deconstructivism and finally toward a creative rearticulation of theological as well as cultural hermeneutical core concepts.