Catholic Romance with the Christian East
It is in this context that we must understand the modern western Catholic romance with the Christian east and its liturgies. I believe the west has tended to define eastern liturgy in terms of what it perceives itself as lacking. It would be easy to make a list of things in the pre- and
post-Vatican II Roman Catholic liturgical renewal that were directly inspired by the east: the restoration of Holy Week and the Easter Vigil under Pius XII; liturgy in the vernacular; the Spirit-epiclesis
in the new anaphoras; eucharistic concelebration; communion under both species; the permanent (and married) diaconate; the recomposition of the ancient unity of Christian initiation in the rite of Christian initiation of adults; revisions in the ordination and confirmation rites; and, the (in my view largely unsuccessful) (18) attempts to restore the liturgy of the hours.
It would be equally easy to show that what was being done was not so much an imitation of existing eastern usage, as deciding what should be done on the basis of several factors, above all perceived pastoral need, and then finding justification and support in patristic and eastern precedents as interpreted–even reinterpreted–in the light of those perceived present needs.
There is of course nothing whatever remarkable about such a process. What the west did with the east is what historians do with the past: they interpret it in the light of present aims and needs. In other words, the western view of eastern liturgy, the commonplaces of its virtues, are simply a mirror of our own deepest longings. The qualities we identify in eastern liturgy are those we think the west has lost.
Olivier Rousseau of Amay-Chevetogne, one of the first historians of the liturgical movement, wrote: “Among Catholics it is a truism that the Orthodox Church has preserved the liturgical spirit of the Early Church, and that it continues to live this spirit, to drink from it as from its purest source. So there can be no question of a ‘liturgical movement’ in the Orthodox Church.
This Church has never departed in its piety and its offices from the liturgical spirit of the Early Church, to which it has always remained faithful.” (19) Rousseau was writing in 1944, towards the end of World War II, when the liturgical movement among francophone Catholics drew much of its inspiration from contacts with the Orthodoxy of the Russian emigration that had found refuge in France in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1918.
This wave of Catholic romanticism for the east so impressed the more naif Greeks that Zoe in Athens published a book entitled Nostalgia for Orthodoxy, (20) anthologizing citations from western authors in praise of Orthodox liturgy and spirituality. But of course this book missed the whole point. Catholics then and now who have become entranced by eastern liturgy were and are not seeking a “return” to an Orthodoxy to which they had never belonged.
That is the same mistake Catholics used to make before the birth of Catholic ecumenism, when they thought the Orthodox had to “return” to Rome, as if they had ever “belonged” to Rome in the first place. Present day Orthodoxy in no way represents “the past” of western Christianity, whose roots are as equally apostolic and autonomous as those of any eastern church.
Rather, these western Christians were engaged in “imagining” an Orthodoxy, just as modern Greece likes to “imagine” that it is the sole repository of the classical hellenic heritage, (21) and just as Edward W. Said showed, apropos of the Middle East, that nineteenth-century western orientalists “imagined” an Orient that is not a place but an idea, an idea that is basically an invention of the European orientalists. (22)
All this is nothing more than the movement known as romanticism, part of humanity’s ongoing
attempt to recreate for itself a better present out of an imagined ideal past, perhaps out of the fear that, having lost yesterday, we have no today.
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