Liturgical Mysticism at the Eighth Day Institute Symposium

The Tenth Annual Eighth Day Institute Symposium is scheduled for this week, starting on Thursday evening with Vespers at St. George Orthodox Cathedral and a reception at Eighth Day Books afterwards. The full schedule is available here, along with other details of the event..

This year's topic is "For I Am Holy: The Command to Be Like God":

It's hard to believe we've been organizing the Symposium for a decade now. But here we are, ready for another great dialogue of love and truth where where prayer, learning, friendship, and feasting take a front seat over the course of the event.

One of the questions we are always pondering at Eighth Day Institute is, "How can we renew our culture?" And one of the answers we keep coming back to is quite simple, but very difficult to achieve: "Be holy." We hope you can join us as we ponder this command from God as a way to think about renewing our souls and cities.

As usual, there are three Plenary Speakers: one Catholic, one Orthodox (Fr. Steven Freeman), and one Protestant (Jessica Hooten Wilson, who spoke at the Inklings Festival in October last year!). The Catholic speaker is David Fagerberg, who will speak in a breakout session on Saturday on "Liturgical Mysticism". I'm going to introduce him and am reading his recent book by the same title, which I bought of course at Eighth Day Books:

Some think that liturgy is formal, public, and for ordinary people, while mysticism is uncontrollable, private, and for extraordinary saints. Is there a connection between the two? In this volume, David Fagerberg proposes that mysticism is the normal crowning of the Christian life, and the Christian life is liturgical.

We intuitively sense that liturgy and theology and mysticism have an affinity. Liturgical theology should reveal liturgy’s mystical heart. Liturgical theology asks “What happens in liturgy?” and liturgical mysticism asks “What happens to us in liturgy?”, and perfects our interior liturgy.

In Liturgical Mysticism, Fagerberg directs the reader to look fixedly at Christ, who is the Mystery present in liturgy, and who bestows his resurrection power upon his adopted children.

One of the first things I noticed about the book was that cover illustration. It's a slightly cropped image of Mass Said by the Canon de la Porte on the High Altar of Notre Dame de Paris (1708-1710) by Jean Jouvenet, from the Musee du Louvre, Paris. But that's not the High Altar of Notre Dame de Paris any visitor or worshipper has seen since Viollet-le-Duc renovated the Cathedral. This blog describes what Jouvenet has depicted and why:

The Cathedral's most ambitious embellishment project of the era was the extensive remodelling of the sanctuary and choir in fulfilment of the "vow of Louis XIII" of 1638 (to rebuild the main altar and erect a statue of the Virgin). Work was begun in 1699 on the designs of Hardouin-Mansart, but substantially completed under direction of Robert de Cotte in the years 1708 to 1715. The elaborate production included many statues, reliefs and decorative elements, among them the celebrated pietà by Nicolas Coustou (1712-28) set in a niche behind the high altar and flanked by the kneeling figures of Louis XIII by Guillaume Coustou and Louis XIV by Coysevoix. Although many of the individual elements have survived the years (and hopefully still do), the altar on which the design centred, and the over all architectural setting, are now lost, victims of the depredations of Revolution and the medieval "restorations" of Viollet-le-Duc.

The enterprise was made possible only by private donation: one of the Canons of the Cathedral, Antoine de La Porte (1627-1710), personally provided Louis XIV with 10,000 livres (?10,000 livres annually) and financed many of the individual embellishments. A painting by Jean Jouvenet, which imagines the Canon celebrating mass at Robert Cotte's high altar - at the time not yet built - shows clearly the harmonious sweep of the space as originally conceived . . . (emphasis mine)

Please read the rest there.

The artist had suffered a stroke and learned to paint with his left hand. It looks like the Mass has just ended as an acolyte leaves the Altar with the chalice and paten covered by the humeral veil.

I am enjoying the book greatly and thinking of another book as I read it: Liturgy and Personality by Dietrich von Hildebrand!