“The truth is that the English puritan’s crusade against all forms of sensuous beauty in worship has had more effect than we realise upon our notion of the worship of the primitive church. It disconcerts us to find that that church did not share the puritan theory of worship so far as corporate worship was concerned. No small part of our liturgical difficulties … come from confusing two things: protestantism – a purely doctrinal movement of the sixteenth century, confined to Western christianity and closely related to certain aspects of fifteenth century Western catholicism, from which it derived directly by way both of development and reaction, and puritanism – which is a general theory about worship, not specifically protestant nor indeed confined to christians of any kind. It is the working theory upon which all mohammedan worship is based. It was put as well as by anybody by the Roman poet Persius or by the pagan philosopher Seneca in the first century, and they are only elaborating a thesis from Greek philosophical authors going back to the seventh century B.C. Briefly, the puritan theory is that worship is a strictly mental activity, to be exercised by a strictly psychological ‘attention’ to a subjective emotional or spiritual experience/ For the puritan this is the essence of worship, and all external things which might impair this strictly mental attention have no rightful place in it. At the most they are to be admitted grudgingly and with suspicion, and only insofar as practise shows that they stimulate the ‘felt’ religious experience or emotion. Its principal defect is its tendency to ‘verbalism’, to suppose that words alone can express or stimulate the act of worship. Over against this puritan theory of worship stands another – the ‘ceremonious’ conception of worship, whose foundation principle is that worship as such is not a purely intellectual and affective exercise, but one in which the whole man – body as well as soul, his aesthetic and volitional as well as his intellectual powers – must take full part. It regards worship as an ‘act’ just as much as an ‘experience’. The accidental alliance of protestant doctrine with the puritan theory of worship in the sixteenth century may have been natural, and was as close in England as anywhere. But it was not inevitable. The early Cistercians were profoundly puritan, but they were never protestant. The thorough protestantism of the Swedish Lutherans, with their vestments and lights and crucifixes, has never been puritan.

The puritan conception of worship may be right or wrong in itself – catholics must excuse a monk for finding it understandable and, in some respects at least, sympathetic,. But from the point of view of history we have to grasp the fact that there was little in antiquity to suggest to the church that it was even desirable for Christians. The elaborate ceremonial worship of the Jerusalem Temple had never been condemned on those grounds by our Lord. And although they came to regard it is in some sense superseded, it had never seemed wrong to the christians of the apostolic age, whose most revered leaders had continued to frequent it until they were driven from Jerusalem. Images and metaphors drawn from it saturated the language of the new christian scriptures, and entered at once into the very fabric of eucharistic doctrine. Clement in the first century takes its practice as the most natural analogy of the christian eucharistic assembly….What is striking about the pre-Nicene liturgy is to no much its simplicity as what I have called its ‘directness’, its intense concentration and insistence upon the external sacramental action in itself as what really mattered, and its exclusion of all devotional accretions of a kind which stimulate or satisfy a subjective piety. This is a type of worship the very reverse of the puritan, for which the subjective experience, not the external action, is always the important thing.”

Dom Gregory Dix The Shape of the Liturgy Dacre Press 1943

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