Gregory Dix

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Dom Gregory Dix (1902-1952) was a monk of Nashdom Abbey, an Anglican Benedictine Foundation (1901-1952). He was educated at Westminster School and Merton College, Oxford. From 1924 to 1926 he was lecturer in modern history at Keble College, Oxford and was ordained priest in 1925. He entered Nashdom the following year and took his final vows in 1940. He was elected Prior in 1948.

As a scholar, Dix worked primarily in the field of liturgical studies. He produced the first critical edition of the Apostolic Tradition in 1935; but his most influential book is The Shape of the Liturgy, first published in 1945. In this book he argued that it was not so much the words of the liturgy but its 'shape' which mattered. This was, he believed, even more fundamental than the inclusion of the Words of Institution (This is my Body...This is my Blood), which he believed had not always been included. To Dix, the entire liturgy of the Eucharist constitutes anamnesis - a commemoration and re-presentation of the one sacrifice of Christ. His study of the liturgy's historical development, as seen in the writings of Justin Martyr, the Apostolic Tradition of Hippolytus, and the Syriac Liturgy of Addai and Mari, among others, led him to formulate what he called the Four Action Shape of the Liturgy: Offertory, Consecration, Fraction, Communion. This was, he believed, even more fundamental to the rite than are the Words of Institution, which the Liturgy of Addai and Mari does not include, and which may not have been part of the earliest celebrations of the Eucharist.

Dix's work heavily influenced liturgical revision both in the Church of England and in related rites of the Anglican Communion, along with that of the Church of South India. More recent scholars, however, have criticized it as lacking historical accuracy, and newer rites such as those in the Alternative Service Book and Common Worship represent a reduction of his influence.

In particular, his claims for the 'shape' of the liturgy, which laid emphasis on the significance of the Offertory, have been argued to rest on weak evidence historically, and have been criticised on the theological ground that the Offertory was in danger of Pelagianism: that is, it suggests a natural goodness in human kind who could give God anything. (This objection originated in a comment by Archbishop Michael Ramsey about the dangers of a 'shallow and romantic sort of Pelagianism' but which was taken up by Evangelical liturgical scholars not as a warning but as a prohibition of offertory processions of any sort.) On the other hand Dix's thesis was defended by members of the English Parish Communion movement, such as Gabriel Hebert and Donald Gray, who saw the offertory as representing the bringing of the world into the eucharistic action. (This is also the traditional Eastern Orthodox perspective on the offertory. Cf. Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World, 2:7). Dix's thesis was also defended by scholars who noted ancient ideas of sacrifice particularly associated with the work of St. Irenaeus.