Body and Soul: The Harmony in Liturgy Marina D. Barnes
I
n Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville observes nineteenth-century Americans’ obsession with reducing the world to bare facts so as to strip away any seemingly superfluous wrappings that hamper the comprehension of truth. He argues that this tendency leads Americans to reject forms in an effort to tear asunder the “veils placed between them and truth.”1 The rejection of traditional liturgy in many modern American churches is symptomatic of the disdain for forms that Tocqueville noted. By shunning liturgy, these American Christians diminish the symbolism of worship and deny the deeply ceremonial nature of human beings as embodied souls. Rather than veiling the truth, liturgy brings the physical and the spiritual—the outward and the inward—back into harmony, using the rich physicality of this world to point us to the next. According to Tocqueville, the rejection of forms is rooted in Americans’ philosophic method. Perhaps unconsciously influenced by Descartes’ extreme rationalism, Americans view human reason as the “most visible and closest source of truth.”2 As Tocqueville writes, Americans “like to see the object that occupies them very clearly; so they take off its wrapping as far as they can; they put to the side all that separates them from it and remove all that hides it from their 1.
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Harvey Mansfield and Delba Win-
2.
Ibid.
throp (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 404.
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