The Shape of the Liturgy
Digital Verbum Edition
Overview
Considered the most influential liturgical work of the twentieth century, this volume describes Dix’s Four Action Shape of the Liturgy: Offertory, Consecration, Fraction, and Communion. Dix explores the ancient Christian forms of liturgy from the Egyptian and Syrian traditions to the Roman, Jerusalem, and Antioch rites prior to the fourth century, and each of their expressions and developments in each liturgical action. The Shape of the Liturgy is the standard text for ancient liturgical studies and the meaning of each symbol and sacrament present today.
Top Highlights
“Let us look for a moment at its beginnings. It was instituted not in a public place of worship but in an upper room of a private house, in circumstances arranged with a seemingly deliberate secrecy,2 among a restricted company long selected and prepared.” (Page 16)
“At the heart of it all is the eucharistic action, a thing of an absolute simplicity—the taking, blessing, breaking and giving of bread and the taking, blessing and giving of a cup of wine and water, as these were first done with their new meaning by a young Jew before and after supper with His friends on the night before He died. Soon it was simplified still further, by leaving out the supper and combining the double grouping before and after it into a single rite. So the four-action Shape of the Liturgy was found by the end of the first century. He had told His friends to do this henceforward with the new meaning ‘for the anamnesis’ of Him, and they have done it always since.” (Pages 743–744)
“It is the proof that the christian liturgy is not a museum specimen of religiosity, but the expression of an immense living process made up of the real lives of hosts of men and women in all sorts of ages and circumstances. Yet the underlying structure is always the same because the essential action is always the same, and this standard structure or Shape alone embodies and expresses the full and complete eucharistic action for all churches and all races and all times.” (Page xii)
“concentrated attention entirely on the sacramental act, as the expression of a will already intent on amendment of life” (Page 13)
The most influential work of Anglican liturgical scholarship in the twentieth century has been The Shape of the Liturgy. . . . Dix’s work had a pivotal influence on all subsequent liturgical revision in the Anglican Communion.
—The Study of Anglicanism
George Eglinton Alston Dix (named Gregory in religion) (1901–1952) was an English monk and priest of Nashdom Abbey, an Anglican Benedictine community. He was a noted liturgical scholar whose work had particular influence on the reform of Anglican liturgy in the mid-twentieth century.