5 - The liturgical sign (ii)

Summary

How may the meanings of worship be constructed, transmitted and apprehended within the threefold ordering of signs as iconic, indexical and symbolic? This is the question to which I turn in this chapter. The iconicity of worship, I shall say, derives from its being seen as an event which takes place on some sort of boundary or frontier – at once imagined and yet altogether real – to what human beings can fathom as comprehensible; iconicity, that is, has to do with the degree that we can manage to generate a likeness or similarity between what we do on the known side of this frontier and how we imagine things might be on its far side. Indexicality, I shall suggest, has to do with ‘truthfulness’ or ‘authenticity’ in the words and actions of worship, an integrity between ‘form’ and ‘performance’, or what the Second Vatican Council's ‘Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy’ calls ‘thoughts matching words’ or ‘participation which is knowing, devout, and active’. The symbolic dimension of liturgical signification, I will say, comes from the fact that every liturgy draws on, presupposes, depends upon an incalculable depth of tradition in its construction of contemporary significations. All of these, need I say, are important strategies in, or for, the production of liturgical meaning.

Iconicity

Every act of worship, I postulate, assumes or represents some sort of ‘virtual frontier’ across which the divine–human transaction which is worship is undertaken.