Introduction

Peirce believed, as has practically every semiotician since, that his ‘doctrine of signs’ encompasses every kind and level of sentient awareness: ‘All thinking is performed in signs’ (CP 6.481) and ‘All the universe is perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs’ (CP 5.448, note 1). It might thus be argued that the meanings of worship are already accommodated within the semiotic web, so that – in principle, at least – there is no need for a supplementary account of the theological dimensions of liturgical semiosis. I myself incline to this point of view. What necessitates a more intentional discussion of the theological competencies of liturgical signs – how may they signify transcendence? – is not so much the incapacity of semiotics (we recall that the mediaeval discussion of signs was grounded in sacramental theology) as the difficulties incurred for inhabitants of modern (and postmodern) cultures in making sense of the notion ‘God’.

Human beings construct their meanings (a meaningful world) from the meanings culturally available to them. That has been my guiding hypothesis. It is precisely this circumstance, I have urged, which generates for the members of late modern societies a crisis in religious meanings; for the most basic axioms of such societies neither depend upon, nor have room for, theological readings of the world. That is not to deny that significant numbers of people in such societies do hold religious convictions of one kind or another.