دانلود کتاب The Roots of Ritual

This collection of essays is designed to illustrate how
persons working in a variety of disciplines view ritual.
Despite differences in approach and concern, the authors'
corporate opinion is that ritual, so far from being a matter
of mere ecclesiastical ceremonial, is a basic human
language rooted in man's social nature and pervading
his social environment.
Until recently this matter has been the almost exclusive
concern of historians of religion and certain kinds
of anthropologists. In religious circles, where one would
have expected to find particular concern with the demands
and possibilities of ritual as a genre of behavior
and communication, little formal attention has been
given the matter. This is astonishing, considering the extensive
work Christian churches have done during the
last decade in reforming and redeveloping their worship
traditions. Such reforms have been instituted for the
most part on the basis of theological and historical methods—
methods that were primarily those of liturgical and
pastoral studies in the past. The result has been generally
good reform, but it may be argued that adaptation and
development of Christian worship traditions of the past
into new cultural dimensions cannot be well served by
theological and historical methods alone.
This is so because liturgical worship is ritual by nature, and ritual behavior has its own grammar and syntax. If
these go unlearned, the liturgical act itself not only suflc
is but those who engage in it may well find themselves
spin rather than united by it. If these go unlearned, the
power of ritual for evil as well as for good goes unfactored,
and those who engage in it may find themselves
unknowingly gripped by the viciousness they would not
rather than the good they would.
Not only is ritual habit forming, it is power laden. We
aw also immersed in it — to such an extent, indeed, that
it takes an extraordinary degree of perception even to
note its presence, much less to analyze its influences on
us. This presence and its effects are nonetheless real, and
they are not confined to stadiums on Saturday afternoons,
to military parades, to inaugurations, or to Sunday services
in church. Even less is ritual an arcane phenomenon
that survives only in societies we call "primitive."
Architecture, for example, is both a response to the
ritual patterns by which people live together and a cause
that effects such patterns, for better or worse. On both
counts, architecture is ultimately embedded in the ritual
patterns through which people socialize. It rises out of
those patterns as a practical art by which space is defined
by, lor, and among those who enact the patterns over and
oxer again. The same might be said of other social institutions—
such as the theater, schools, systems of jurisprudence
and politics, and religion — except that these
processes (none of them are merely "things") deal with
other significant aspects of socio-cultural definition that
affect us all.
What these other significant aspects are is the scope
of the chapters that follow. None of the chapters pretend
to be exhaustive, nor does the collection itself pretend
to be definitive. Perhaps the only point on which the
several authors agree totally is that ritual is not a need
oi man that may or may not be retained but an inevitability
coextensive with man's social nature. On this
INTRODUCTION 9
basis the authors tackle the grammar of ritual behavior
from various points of view and attempt to suggest something
of ritual's scope and effects in the ways we live.
As the one who originally organized the conference at
the University of Notre Dame, at which most of the contributions
to this volume were first presented, I am
obliged to acknowledge the debt I owe to the work of
Professor Erik Erikson of Harvard lor the concept of the
conference. Thanks are also due to Mrs. Ann Lauer and
Mr. Richard Humbiecht, both of the Murphy Center for
Liturgical Research at Notre Dame, and to the Center's
director, the Reverend James Shaughnessy, for their generous
and untiring work in seeing the volume into print.
Aidan Kavanagh, O.S.B.
Notre Dame, 1973