Part 3—Select Seminar Papers
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means whatever we want it to mean! But this bears out more in abstract thought experiments rather than in our lived practices of thought, speech, and action. It is possible, and indeed we do it all the time in our everyday language, to think conceptually without the necessity of a closed definition. We do this not by thinking our way to a conceptional definition, Wittgenstein argues, but by observing: Consider for example the proceedings that we call “games.” I mean board-games, card-games, ball-games, Olympic Games, and so on. What is common to them all?—Don’t say: “There must be something common or they would not be called ‘games’”—but look and see whether there is anything common to all. For if you look at them you will not see something that is common to all, but similarities, relationships, and a whole series of them at that. To repeat: don’t think but look.20
The same advice is apt for our efforts to conceptualize Christian liturgy. The presumption that liturgies must share something in common in order to rightly be called by a single name assumes an essentialism that seems not to be borne out in historical practice itself. To determine what Christian liturgies have in common, Wittgenstein suggests that we look at those activities which are called liturgy to discover whether there are things common to all. The inability to discover a set of shared universal traits is not a failure of observation. It is a failure of our conceptual imagination to understand a concept as a system of shared relationships rather than a set of universal characteristics. Thus, what we are seeking is not a better set of definitional criteria, but better descriptions of liturgy as it has been and is being practiced in and by Christian communities. We can begin by taking Wittgenstein’s charge as our own: Don’t think, but (first) look! How might we begin to look for and discover practices that have been repressed and rendered invisible by our current definitions? How do we begin to narrow down Christian practices to a subset of possible liturgical ones? One way is to begin with the practices that we have already identified with our essentialized definition—that is, practices which Catholics already agree are liturgical—and look for family resemblances beyond the criteria in our current definitions. In the discussion below, I foreground the baptismal and eucharistic liturgies as heuristic examples. I propose two resemblances that we might consider here: ritualization and symbolization. Ritual Practices Catherine Bell introduces the category of ritual as a strategic practical operation that distinguishes an act from its quotidian counterpart. Ritual practices, Bell explains, are not a clear and closed category of behavior, but rather ways of acting in and on the world. Ritualized acts are designed and performed to privilege what is being done in comparison to other, usually everyday, activities. At its most basic level, Bell argues, ritualization is the production of this differentiation between activities. More specifically, ritual is always “contingent, provisional, and defined by difference.”
