‘Are we still drama- and symbol-capable?’  An exploration of the Catholic liturgy’s formative project
Katja Frimberger, University of Strathclyde

Enquiries to dpm50@cam.ac.uk

In this presentation Katja Frimberger explores the Catholic liturgy as ‘pedagogical reality’ – drawing on the writing of Romano Guardini, a key figure in the early 20th century (German) liturgical reform movement. In the first part of the paper, she sketches the formative project of the ritual-liturgic act. Here, she explores how Guardini conceives the liturgical form as a call into a symbolic encounter with the existential human drama (of violence, suffering, helplessness), which is shown – through its cultic act – to be interwoven in God’s ‘dramatic’ response to this human drama (in the incarnation). Importantly, both ritual and ‘player’ are here pictured as dependent – for their (self-)formation – on their mutual self-giving in this symbolic play. As such, it is due to the relational structure of the ritual-symbolic act that the liturgy also pictures our human formation firstly as a relational enterprise; one in which the individual (churchgoer) – although part of a community or body (here: the mystical Church) – is however not merely swallowed up in a dominating, collective will. Accordingly, Guardini suggests, the liturgy – via its dense symbolic structure – also creates a certain hermeneutic distance; one which – although it seek to indeed form/educate (or prepare) the human mind, body and spirit, it does not overwhelm human creative intellection. Through symbolic allusion, rhythmic repetition and questions that do not have final answers, the churchgoer’s intellect, body and spirit are ‘played’ and moved into engagement with the ritual act; but the individual’s inner life is not coerced into a psychic-emotional state. After sketching the liturgy’s formative project, Frimberger then, in the second part of the paper, goes to ask a broader methodological question about pedagogical research. Drawing on Klaus Mollenhauer, she claims that the liturgic form reminds us that pedagogical inquiry is always a practical philosophising about how cultural forms enact (in practice) certain educational goods.