Abstract
Ritual is one of the foundations of virtue. This chapter will explore how different categories of ritual nurture virtue and support a culture. Moreover, ritual orients the participants to ultimate meaning. Because different systems of ritual are tied to different and competing cultural frameworks, the culture wars (political, social, and cultural struggles to define the public space) manifest themselves in ritual wars. The culture wars are in great measure about which rituals should define public interactions and the public space. Rituals can reach beyond a particular time and beyond a local community. Rituals expand the present into the past and to the future. Ritual functions as a primary source of education concerning the metaphysical, moral, and social commitments of a culture). In addition, rituals are performative acts. Rituals create social roles, and embed persons in socially established roles. They emphasize the appropriate scope of particular social roles. This chapter contends that rituals when rightly ordered sustain the moral life.
H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr., Ph.D., M.D., is professor, department of philosophy, Rice University, and professor emeritus, departments of internal medicine and community medicine, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, Texas.
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Notes
- 1.
Among the few exceptions is Schilbrack (2004).
- 2.
Natural theology developed at the beginning of the second millennium as an attempt to demonstrate the existence and explore the nature of God through discursive reflection apart from divine revelation. Liturgical theology involves a reflection on the character, function, and power of liturgical actions, religious ritual, primarily the Divine Liturgy (Engelhardt, 2005).
- 3.
Immanuel Kant spoke against all the ceremonies of religious worship. 2 blue Quotes on p. 106, AK VI.116.
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Orthodox Christianity’s ritual of baptism illustrates the socially performative and metaphysically transformative power of ritual. For this reason, water is thicker than blood. That is, the bonds created by water, by the waters of baptism, are recognized to be socially and ontologically thicker than those established by blood, by kinship. This is the case because the bonds of the waters of baptism among other things allow an individual and communal turn to, and participation in, salvation. The power of the baptism ritual is thus recognized to be more significant than the more transient bonds of physical, blood relationships. Beyond that, baptism is recognized as metaphysically transforming the person baptized.
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Core to Christianity from the beginning has been a commitment to right worship. As a result, included among “the credal and dogmatic monuments of the Orthodox Catholic Church [are] the liturgies of St. John Chrysostom and St. Basil the Great, complete with their typikon or liturgical rubrics and the actual manner of their celebration” (Vasileios, 1984, p. 19). Traditional Christianity is framed by and lives in the rituals integral to right worship.
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Engelhardt, H.T. (2012). Ritual, Virtue, and Human Flourishing: Rites as Bearers of Meaning. In: Solomon, D., Fan, R., Lo, Pc. (eds) Ritual and the Moral Life. Philosophical Studies in Contemporary Culture, vol 21. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2756-4_3
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