Ritual worship is a complex human activity associated with an encounter with the power of the sacred. It involves, on the one hand, regularly ordered components. On the other hand, it involves two distinct functions, a mediatorial or priestly function, and a receiving or "lay" function. But whoever discharges a mediatorial function must also discharge a receiving function. Clearly, not every encounter with the power of the sacred involves ritual worship. Here, however, I shall be concerned only with the activity of ritual worship and the encounter with the power of the sacred associated with it.
In this paper I will first focus on two generally recognized peculiarities of the activity of ritual worship and the language, including gesture, involved therein. Then, on the basis of an elementary intentional analysis of ritual worship I will argue that these two peculiarities are intrinsically correlated. More specifically, I will argue that the internal time structure of ritual worship imposes requirements on the language involved in ritual worship. I will not investigate here whether the converse holds. By not making such an investigation I am prevented from claiming any sort of priority for the time-structure over language. But on the basis of my findings I can raise, without of course answering, two general questions of substantial philosophical import: I) Does every distinct kind of internal time structure impose specifiable requirements on the language involved in whatever activity exhibits that time structure? And 2) if so, then is there anything that binds these several languages and time structures into a unity? * My colleague, Professor George Bond, has made several valuable suggestions for this paper.