ABSTRACT
In this final chapter I want to emphasize further that liturgy has a function analogous to aesthetics primarily in its attempt to express what ultimately is inexpressible, while at the same time, acknowledging the importance of that which is expressed. The liturgist must become the artist. For each, the material is always the means of this expression, the mode recognized as being both absolutely required and at the same time, inherently provisional. Art has the capacity to ‘show’ the mysterious and hidden depths of human existence by employing those material means available to it, and yet, like the apophatic-cataphatic dynamic in theological discourse, it can only ever offer provisional showings of the real within contexts of absence and presence. In some measure, therefore, the aesthetic is able to exhibit an excess of meaning, while paradoxically remaining frustrated to reveal fully what it attempts to communicate. This capacity entails a largely affective means of communication, transporting those involved to a world within and beyond the aesthetic, a boundary location, just as liturgical rites become the boundary spaces between the two worlds of the material and immaterial. Abbot Suger reminds us that in the delight felt through the material we come to sense a borderland world between the visible and the invisible (Thiessen 2004: 116) and by this experience we begin to transfer our attention from the material to that which is immaterial.
