Office, Duty, Liturgy

Giorgio Agamben notes in the preface to his recent Opus Dei: An Archaeology of Duty that “The word liturgy (from the Greek leitourgia , ‘public services’) is . . . relatively modern. Before its use was extended progressively, beginning at the end of the nineteenth century, we find in its place the Latin officium , whose semantic sphere is not easy to define and in which nothing, at least at first glance, would seem to have destined it for its unusual theological success” (xi).

Office became one of the most central words and themes of Western civilization:

“As the diffusion of the term office in the most diverse sectors of social life attests, the paradigm that the Opus Dei has offered to human action has been shown to constitute for the secular culture of the West a pervasive and constant pole of attraction. It is more efficacious than the law because it cannot be transgressed, only counterfeited. It is more real than being because it consists only in the operation by means of which it is realized. It is more effective than any ordinary human action because it acts ex opere operato , independently of the qualities of the subject who officiates it. For all these reasons, office has exercised on modern culture an influence so profound — that is, subterranean — that we do not even realize that not only does the conceptuality of Kantian ethics and of Kelsen’s pure theory of law (to name only two moments, though certainly decisive ones, in its history) depend entirely upon it, but that the political militant and the ministerial functionary are also inspired in the same way by the model of the ‘acts of office,’ that is, duties.”

The dominance of the liturgical notion of office had an impact not only on Western notions of duty and morality but on its basic ontology: “The paradigm of the office signified, in this sense, a decisive transformation of the categories of ontology and of praxis, whose importance still remains to be measured. In office or duty, being and praxis, what a human does and what a human is, enter into a zone of indistinction, in which being dissolves into its practical effects and, with a perfect circularity, it is what it has to be and has to be what it is. Operativity and effectiveness define, in this sense, the ontological paradigm that in the course of centuries-long process has replaced that of classical philosophy: in the last analysis — this is the thesis that our study will wish to put forward for reflection — being and acting today have for us no representation other than effectiveness. Only what is effective, and as such governable and efficacious, is real: this is the extent to which office, under the guise of the humble functionary or the glorious priest, has changed from top to bottom the rules of first philosophy as much as those of ethics.”

In short, Agamben’s archeological investigations aim to show that Western civilization owes some of its more distinctive and fundamental instincts to the afterglow of the Christian liturgy.