Abstract

It should be clear by now that the self-definition of modernity as a fundamental break with the past as a movement from ignorance and superstition to the gradual expansion of the rule of reason, is self-deception. This view masks the pathologies of the present, by seeing them as temporary irrationalities that will be healed sooner or later by the application of more of the same rationalism, and refuses to see how its sustaining beliefs are immanentizing parodies of earlier transcendent visions of the sacred.¹

The decline of liturgy in the early modern period of Western history is normally captured under…