Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
Hughes. New York, N.Y.: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. vii + 330. Price
$23.00 paper.
“spirituality.” And much of this spirituality—ranging from New Age gurus like
terms of a quest for meaning: What is the meaning of life? What does it all
mean? How can I “make sense” of my life? How can I make my life meaningful?
Charles Sanders Peirce. Given that liturgy traffics in signs, and thus is
liturgical theology and semiotic theory, since “semioticians have avoided the
liturgy even more comprehensively than liturgists have missed semiotics” (129).
The heart of the book tries to reach two audiences: to semioticians it offers an
the way in which worship “makes sense”—that is, gives meaning—of a lifeworld
by orienting participants in a particular way (39). We will focus on the latter side
of his project.
differences between Peirce’s account (which Hughes takes to be superior) and the
Eco (115-134). (Unfortunately, the book has a very short-term memory in this
This exposition of semiotic theory then sets the stage for the “application”
of semiotics to worship in chapter 5. Given that the world is “signs all the way
which to live” (68) or a map which orients us to our lifeworld, “making sense” of
what we encounter. Worship, we might say, both informs and is informed by our
worldview, and both function semiotically. Hughes devotes most of this chapter
and symbolic signs—a bit too complex to summarize here. What I found of
inculcates habits of orienting to the world (what Peirce called “the practical
bearing” of signs).
If this is what liturgy does (semiotically speaking), then the next question
is how this happens: just how do signs function? How is meaning produced?
Hughes sees the unique challenge (and opportunity) for worship in late
modernity. This stems from a semiotic axiom which owes as much to Ricoeur as
Peirce: “Human beings construct their meanings (a meaningful world) from the
meanings culturally available to them” (219; cp. 7 and passim). In other words,
“meaning entails both ‘making’ and ‘finding’” (63); it is both construction and
discovery (64). Liturgy must operate on the basis of the same axiom: worship can
only construct meaning from the meanings that it finds available. The challenge,
then, in late modernity is this: how can the signs of Christian worship create a
to suggest that the Christian community is resigned to the meanings which are
capitulation to modernity: “A thesis which runs through this book is that the
meanings to which people are exposed daily, hourly, in the world all around them
cannot possibly be insulated from those same people’s religious readings of the
world. That is, the corrosive effects of secularism are not left in the church foyer.
They are insistently part of the available means with which people have to
construct their world” (53). In fact, he takes this to such an extreme that he
seems to deny the very possibility of tradition (in terms of traditio, “handing on”
any given cultural system” (43). On this account, there could be no fundamental
antithesis between the semiotic framework of late modern culture and the
semiotic orientation of the Church. But Hughes misses the way in which the
Church is its own culture, with a pool of meanings available to it across time; the
meanings, even if these must also be appropriated anew within different horizons
situations).
Hughes suggests that the task of the Church—or better, “designers and leaders of
meaning systems” (42). But it’s hard not to conclude that the result is an
strangely distant and too familiar: God as a good democrat, or something like
that. (Hughes rightly suggests that both liberal, mainline Protestantism and
meaning production which rules out the transcendent). For Hughes, the
about ‘God?,’” and not “What does God mean in his Word?” While he constantly
nowhere suggest that what we might find are signs produced by God. In short,
(generating liturgical signs). Nowhere in the book does Hughes suggest God is
meaning-exhange are “those who design orders of service in the first place, and
then the priests, ministers, lay leaders and preachers who must bring these to
expression” (221). The result is that, for Hughes, the “sense of the divine” is
“generated,” not given (40). But is not the first confession of Christian worship
expression, speaking “in Son” (Heb. 1:3)? Creation and and the Incarnation are
“position” Christian liturgy, with the result that a purportedly “neutral” semiotic
general” is the condition for liturgical meaning. But this would make Hughes’
project a kind of semiotic natural theology. We could then contrast this with the
more radical thesis of, say, Catherine Pickstock (whose work Hughes ignores),
who argues the inverse: that liturgy is the condition for meaning. That, I have