Under the Mantle of Elijah

English translation by Robert Kelly

As they continued walking and talking, a chariot of fire and horses of fire separated the two of them, and Elijah ascended in a whirlwind into heaven. Elisha kept watching and crying out,

This is the well-known scene from the Second Book of Kings which is depicted here on the interior of the dome of our university church (Saint-Joseph-des-Carmes Church, Institut Catholique de Paris) by the Liège painter Walther Damery. At the end of this presentation, you will be able to come closer and see Elijah on his chariot being carried away in a whirlwind of fire and, on the drum, his large mantle falling on Elisha and his companions and, more broadly, on all of us in this church, gathered together on the threshold of our Congress. I am delighted to welcome you to a Congress dedicated to The Liturgical Assembly in its Spaces, here in a space designed for liturgy, whose iconography offers us plenty of inspiration as we begin our work.

So here we all are in this church under the mantle of Elijah, a mantle which, in this place of Carmelite tradition, is not only the mantle of Elijah, but also the mantle of Carmel, as well as being the baptismal mantle with which we were all clothed on the day of our baptism. We are clothed in Christ and, with the prophet in rapture, caught up and drawn towards a realm beyond the space enclosed by the walls of this modest basilica, whose layout and dimensions are ultimately very traditional. This image, given that it is situated in a liturgical setting, is much more than a simple figurative transposition of the biblical narrative. We can read into its two dimensions—horizontally Elijah's ample cloak and vertically the prophet's ascension—the figure of the tension around which all theology of the liturgy is constituted, which consequently is also true of our liturgical spaces. They are spaces stretched between on the one hand their communal dimension, for which some see a link to an Augustinian-inspired liturgical paradigm; and on the other, an openness to transcendence, which one of our colleagues, François Cassingena-Trevedy, links to a dimension which he describes as Chrysostomian.

This tension has too often been expressed in the Latin world by a quasi-separation between spaces reserved for the laity and spaces assigned to the clergy, forgetting a little too quickly that clergy are first and foremost baptized Christians and—given that there is a tension which structures all Christian liturgy and therefore all of its spaces, the dialectic according to which it should primarily be interpreted is not that between clerical/lay but rather in terms of the articulation between the community dimension, which is constitutive of our liturgies—the Augustinian paradigm; and its link with the liturgy that we designate, for lack of a better term, as “heavenly”—in the paradigm previously described as Chrysostomian. This is the first lesson we can learn from this church on how to frame the issue which brings us together during these few days: namely, that our spaces of celebration must articulate the community dimension, which is fundamental to Christian liturgy, and openness to an au-delà, to a “beyond” of liturgy.

If we now turn to the altarpiece, at the focal point of our church, what do we see? A representation by Quentin Warin, dating from the same years as the dome painting of The Presentation of Jesus in the Temple. We see Mary and Joseph, nothing more fitting in a Carmelite building, heir to the Berullian tradition, and moreover, in a church dedicated to Saint Joseph. We also see the elderly Anne and Simeon, who is about to take the Child in his arms and sing the Nunc Dimittis. However, we must go further. Looking closely, we notice two surprising things. First, that the nave of our church is represented, inverted, as if in a mirror, in the background of the Presentation scene. It is a mirror image which exactly replicates the architectural design of the real nave in which we are gathered. Second, the vault of this virtual nave is surprisingly interrupted by a quadrangular opening, forming a gaping yet luminous opening toward what could be likened to the sky. The highly skillful composition of this ensemble can be read as a visual representation of liturgical anamnesis, and more specifically eucharistic anamnesis. A visual representation is offered to us as a surprising and daring spatialization of liturgical anamnesis. As if painting had the power to spatialize time.

This depiction of the Presentation is clearly eucharistic, as was so often the case during the heyday of the French School of Spirituality: the cloth covering the Virgin's shoulders and on which the Child rests is at once a corporal, a shroud and perhaps even a chasuble. What does this image tell us about what is being celebrated in the church by the priest and the congregation? That all together are covered by the baptismal mantle, Elijah's mantle from the dome, which “represents,” “makes present” (if we use the language of Trent), or which “actualizes” (if we prefer the conceptuality of the Liturgical Movement) the New Testament event that is both incarnational and sacrificial, as depicted by the painter. However, it is also the fulfillment of what had been prefigured in ancient times, signified by the figure of the High Priest firmly planted in the inverted nave, which gives the fullness of biblical depth to that for which the church was made. That purpose is to actualize in the liturgy the saving events envisaged typologically as the fulfillment of the multiple musteria of the Old Testament. However, we must take a further step: the strange opening at the top of the vault, which is open to the sky, is in direct spatial relation to the figure of the Father in the act of giving blessing which crowns the altarpiece. The painting opens up to the “Beyond” of its frame and points to the sculpted crowning of the entire composition. It is an opening onto the heavenly fulfillment of the Mystery, that place beyond all places, where there is no Temple, no liturgies, no sacraments, no ministers, but only the pure Light of the Lamb, that time beyond all time, when the heavens and their luminaries, now without purpose, will have been folded back. The composition is powerful. It belongs to a Tridentine tradition that is no longer entirely our own, yet it can be interpreted, without exaggeration, in terms of the theology of the actualization of mysteries to which, as heirs of the Liturgical Movement, most of us, beyond the specificities of our different traditions, are indebted. Liturgy as the actualization of mysteries. Mysteries rooted in the depths of Old Testament preparations, fulfilled in Christ and open to a “beyond” of their celebration. Moreover, and above all, Mysteries in which participation is possible through liturgical action.

Why have I chosen to focus on what is clearly much more than just the décor of this church? It is not to act as a tour guide for this church—which has had such a profound impact on my own spiritual and theological journey. It is simply to help us understand how, in a theological, historical and ecclesial context that is no longer ours, our predecessors were able, through the grace of an exceptional iconographic arrangement, to transfigure an otherwise rather ordinary basilica into an integrative space—in the temporal and spatial sense of the term—for an assembly which is thereby, as it were, entirely immersed in the Mystery. This, through the grace of images which recall both the future and the past of the mysteries we celebrate. An iconographic immersion that must be articulated, as we will do tomorrow evening here, with the musical immersion without which this type of space would remain incomprehensible in terms of its liturgical function.

Finally, it was a space from which the Carmelite monks, bound by a form of apophatic theology, were excluded, they who celebrated on the other side of the image—and is this reverse side not a kind of “beyond”?—in a quasi-iconoclastic space opened up by a series of tall windows onto the image of nothing but the Parisian sky. This is a striking dichotomy between two spaces in the same Church, separated by an image, which bears witness to the very heart of Baroque Catholicism and the profound tension in the relationship between Christian worship and images.

The Liturgical Assembly in its Spaces. We are no longer in the Baroque era: much water has flowed under the bridges of the Seine, the Tiber, the Congo, the Mississippi, the Ganges and the Mekong since those times of confessional polarization in European Christianity. But it is the same Redemptive Mystery which we celebrate today, each according to his or her tradition, each in his or her own culture. Much water has flowed, and perhaps above all the most fruitful waters of the Liturgical Movement, which marked us all and made us rediscover the grace of the assembly, of the assembly as a whole as celebrant—“le sujet intégral de l’action liturgique,” to use the famous phrase of one of our masters, Yves Congar, who taught within the walls of our university. However, there is the risk that Congar's formula, which we all had in mind when preparing this Congress, by dint of repetition, becomes no more than a slogan, a more or less disembodied banner.

“The ecclesia as the integral subject of liturgical action.” ¹ This, in fact, viewed from an ecclesiological perspective, was a horizon for the Liturgical Movement, a horizon to which we were supposed to be able to draw closer through active participation. So in the enthusiasm of the great years of the Liturgical Movement, from the founding experience of Rothenfels to the very trendy Kommunioraüme at the end of the last century, a whole range of research was conducted, and numerous experiments were carried out to stretch out towards this horizon. However, a horizon, as we well know, recedes as we move towards it. This is perhaps why the artists who worked on this church prudently designed a dome whose summit and even whose sides cannot be seen from the nave, and pierced the virtual vault of the painting, opening it up to a “beyond” that they themselves even refrained from depicting.

In preparing for this Congress, we asked ourselves whether, in this obviously endless race towards the horizon of a fully celebratory assembly, we liturgists might not have run out of steam along the way. The causes and manifestations of this fatigue are as numerous as they are diverse. There is the enormous weight of the imaginative representations which inhabit us, for better or for worse. There is the weight of a theatrical or of an academic paradigm, dependent respectively on our Catholic or Protestant traditions: paradigms which, after five centuries of modernity, continue to shape our representations of what a liturgical space should be. This is a heavy burden to bear, one that is difficult to shake off and which may partly explain our exhaustion. There are also the many dead ends to which this race, upon which we all joyfully embarked with the ardor of new converts, has led us: in Catholicism, for example, with the reinforcement of the face-to-face relationship between minister and congregation following the introduction of post-conciliar liturgical podiums. Also the transition from a theatrical paradigm, that of post-Tridentine Catholicism, that of this church of Saint Joseph, to a televised paradigm where the sanctuary becomes a stage and the ministers become performers. There is also—as is often the case in our liturgical landscape torn between, on the one hand, the traditionalist temptations of withdrawal which we know only too well on both sides of the Atlantic and, on the other, what resembles a Pentecostal tsunami—the influence of charismatic movements, which are reshuffling the very foundations of our theologies of the liturgy, all of which are more or less inherited from the Liturgical Movement.

In both cases, it is the very meaning of the assembly, of the liturgical “we”—and therefore the foundation of our theology of liturgy and our spaces of celebration—which is being subverted. Segregationist fossilization … absorption into the destructured whole of an atmosphere … far, so far from the precise and luminous intuition of Father Congar.

This Congress, particularly through its numerous papers and panels, will be a rather unique opportunity to take stock of these issues after more than a century of the Liturgical Movement. I hope that this assessment will not be limited to the Euro-Atlantic and Western dimensions inherited from the origins of our Societas. In fact, in the globalized and multipolar world that is now ours we can simply no longer conceive of the theology of liturgy, and consequently confront questions concerning assembly and liturgical space, within the Euro-Atlantic framework that has long been that of the Societas. Our research, our knowledge building, can no longer ignore the plurality of cultures within which our churches are developing. Probably we should no longer be thinking in the Western framing which—for good or for ill—has been that of a Societas structured by a two-voiced ecumenical dialogue. It is my hope that as we celebrate this year the centenary of a great center of Orthodox theology in Paris, l’Institut Saint-Serge, we will not forget the voice—the voices—of the Christian East. This is an important voice to which we must listen, including in our discussion of the very Western issue of liturgical space. Finally, this milestone should push us beyond limiting our discussion to only that of liturgical space alone. Rather we would like it to take the form of working on liturgical ecclesiology, aware that if we want to catch our breath on this journey, it is probably by giving our work on liturgical space a new theological impetus, and in particular an ecclesiological one, without which it will run out of steam … or get bogged down in the meanderings of reducing it to its purely aesthetic or functional dimensions. The liturgical assembly in its spaces. It is my hope that during these days our discussion will be as much about “assemblies” as it is about “spaces,” that we will never talk about “spaces” without talking about “ecclesia.” As we know from experience, whether as liturgists or as architects in dialogue, this is far from being a foregone conclusion!

So here we are tonight, at Saint-Joseph-des-Carmes church, gathered under the mantle of Elijah, all gathered under the same mantle. We have been plunged visually and aurally into a mystery-evoking experience which belongs to the sacramental economy of this space and of what is celebrated in it, including the “openings” into the “beyond” of this economy, some examples of which we highlighted. Simultaneously, however, we are in a profoundly theatrical space, which corresponds to the Baroque concept of theater. In such an understanding the stage-space and the audience-space are clearly distinct, but where the scenic devices—both visual and musical—give more than the illusion that everyone is an actor. All are under the mantle of Elijah. That being said, given the invasion of chairs that fill the nave, while everyone may be an actor, some are more so than others. This is precisely where the Liturgical Movement invites us to go further, much further. Tomorrow we will be hearing from Jean-Marie Duthilleul, an architect. We wanted, we tried with his help, to imagine how we might unify this space. He proposed a profound modification to the shape of the assembly which would be stretched between the place of the Word which would have been celebrated close to the entrance and the place of the eucharist under the altarpiece. It proved impossible to implement. It is just one example among many of resistance, not so much of the spaces themselves which ultimately lend themselves quite well to this kind of theologically-founded reshaping, but rather resistance on the part of institutions and of hearts and minds constrained by representations of what “a church” should be.

We may all be under the mantle of Elijah, but it is a mantle which remains quite fragile, or virtual. Or rather, we hesitate to let ourselves be clothed in the mantle of the Prophet. The purpose of our proposed reconfiguration project was precisely to give bodily expression to the mantle of the prophet. To let ourselves be clothed in it so as both to experience and demonstrate that we are truly a people of prophets.

We are under the mantle of Elijah, but even the great voice of the prophet—whose “voice burned like a torch” (cf. Sirach 48:1ff., nrsv)—has fallen silent. For in this Church, as in so many others, it is as if the prophetic word has been absorbed, has been thrown into orbit, by the sacramental space. Yet, just a century ago, that word resounded, thundered from the pulpit on the lips of another prophet, Henri Dominique Lacordaire, here in the middle of the nave, in the midst of the assembled people.

We are under the mantle of Elijah, but in our spaces of celebration what have we done with the mantle of the prophet, with the garment of our common baptism? This, perhaps, is the question with which this church challenges us as we stand on the threshold of our work together.

In the account in the Book of Kings, the mantle falls to the ground, where someone picks it up: the prophet Elisha.

Elisha picked up the mantle of Elijah that had fallen from him, and went back and stood on the bank of the Jordan. (2 Kgs 2:13, nrsv)

After a century of the Liturgical Movement, we are perhaps once again on the banks of the Jordan, a Red Sea—a Jordan that prophets from Moses to Joshua, from Joshua to Elisha, never ceased to cross. Perhaps it is time to pick up the mantle of the prophet and, once again, cross over to the other side. There we can pitch our tents with confidence, far from the symmetrical pitfalls which I identified earlier: nostalgia-induced paralysis; and refusal to inhabit the Promised Land.

Four centuries ago, here in Paris, on the banks of the Seine, at the end of one of those religious conflicts that bloodied Europe, by building a church that integrated the best of their northern medieval tradition and the breath of the new times of modernity, our predecessors picked up the mantle of Elijah to invent a space of celebration for the times that were theirs. They did so by mobilizing what, in the Catholic context of the time, seemed to them to be the most appropriate medium for epiphanizing the Mystery: the resources of the theater. A few kilometers to the east, our brethren in the Reformation tradition did something similar by building a huge theater, centered this time on the pulpit. In both cases, they were letting themselves be clothed in the mantle of the Prophet and embarked on a seemingly perilous journey, but which proved to be astonishingly fruitful, crossing the Jordan of a nascent modernity that was anything but a long, quiet river. Four centuries later, and after 125 years of liturgical, biblical, patristic and ecumenical movements, we now stand together on the threshold of a post-modernity tempted by nostalgic retreats or flight from the world. Like Elisha, we must allow ourselves to be enveloped in the mantle of the Prophet and set out on our pilgrim way once more, to take our turn in drawing something new from the old. To offer our communities the spaces that will enable them, in turn, to enter the same Mystery. May this Congress be a stone, firmly laid at the threshold of this crossing which it is now our turn to accomplish.