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Comparative Liturgy as a Historical Discipline: An Epistemological Aspect

The study focuses on Christian Liturgics and its methodology. The goal of clarifying the place of comparative liturgy among the historical disciplines has determined the main research tasks, namely: 1) to explicate the methodological approaches of leading liturgists of the so-called “liturgical renaissance” of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as well as of contemporary scholars of liturgical history (Dom Prosper Guéranger, Dom Fernand Cabrol, Alexander Golubtsov, Anton Baumstark, Robert Taft, Fritz West, Carl H. Bieritz, Dom Alcuin Reid etc.), including the Catholic liturgical movement; 2) to test their methodology on concrete historical material in the context of inter-confessional theological debates around the question of the transubstantiation of the Holy Eucharist, which are resolved differently in the Orthodox, Catholic, Lutheran, Reformed and other ecclesiastical bodies, including the Church of England; 3) to identify the distinctive features of historical comparative studies. The authors conclude that the aforementioned liturgists used the historical comparative method in their studies, not theological or any other (legal, sociological, political) method, thereby creating a new historical discipline – comparative liturgy. The modern complex “liturgical method” belongs to the metatheoretical field of liturgiology, as it comprises a whole interdisciplinary arsenal of specific methods and techniques, such as causal analysis, form analysis, structural and functional analysis, methods of classification, extrapolation and modelling, which require constant revision and updating. The importance of such revision is illustrated by the example of Anton Baumstark's appeal to organicism in the mainstream of evolutionism.