Abstract
Christian religious rituals have attracted oddly little sociological attention. They lack an image or a literature, seeming to occupy an analytical limbo beyond the sociological pale. Liturgies, or public orders of Christian worship, such as the mass, or offices like choral evensong, appear as less than exotic to a sociological imagination best employed seeking striking questions elsewhere. As a child of the Enlightenment, sociology chases more devious prey, those who operate on the darker side of life. Somehow, the study of liturgy does not fit easily on a sociological landscape. Christian rites belong to the childhood of society, the province of the unsophisticated, the socially immature and unenlightened, who occupy territory the streetwise sociologists will not enter. Yet these rites persist.
Everything in this world is symbolic, everything must serve in some way as a spiritual looking-glass; everything has its function and its meaning; and everything is a lesson or a warning for us all …
(J.-K. Huysmans to Léon Leclaire 27 April 1896 quoted in Robert Baldick, The Life of J.-K. Huysmans)
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Notes and References
Marcel Proust, Marcel Proust. A selection from his miscellaneous writings, trans. Gerard Hopkins, London: Allan Wingate, 1948, pp. 97–98.
Margaret Mead, Twentieth Century Faith, Hope and Survival, London: Harper & Row, 1972, p. 126.
Frank Parkin, Max Weber, London: Tavistock, 1982, p. 23.
Oscar Wilde, The Works of Oscar Wilde, London: Galley Press, 1987, p. 17.
R. G. Collingwood, An Autobiography Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970, ‘Question and Answer’, pp. 29–43.
Barbara Beaumont, ed. and trans., The Road from Decadence. From Brothel to Cloister. Selected Letters of J. K. Huysmans, London: The Athlone Press, 1989, p. 131.
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© 1991 Kieran Flanagan
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Flanagan, K. (1991). Introduction. In: Sociology and Liturgy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230375383_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230375383_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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