Part 7: “Eastern Presuppositions” and Western Liturgical Renewal

Witness of the East

Time will permit me to select only a few of those qualities we perceive eastern liturgy as possessing in ways that the west lacks. Since they have been expressed before, they will appear commonplace, but that does not make them any less true. I can only offer, en toute simple, a personal witness, the witness of one who after a lifetime of study has lost all romanticism and illusions about the Christian east, but whose personal piety has been profoundly stamped by a lifetime of praying and studying according to its liturgical rhythms.

1. Easternliturgy balances a high Christology with a tender devotion for the eminently knowable, human, kenotic Christ.

East and west have different images of Christ. The liturgies of the Christian east remain indelibly marked by the trinitarian and Christological controversies of the period of the first seven councils, and certain liturgical attitudes current in the contemporary west remain totally alien to the eastern liturgical spirit. For the Christian east, Christ remains the awesome Pantokrator, before whose sacred mysteries the worshiper bows down in reverential awe.

But Christ is also the philanthroposlchelovekoljubec, the one who loves humankind, loved us, indeed, unto death on the cross. He is the kenotic Jesus of Russian piety, the Jesus of Philippians 2: 6-11, “who, though his state was divine, did not cling to his equality with God but emptied himself (ekenosen)

to assume the condition of a slave” This text is emblematic of Slavic Orthodox piety, a piety both distinct from and–in my view–more balanced than that of the Greeks, who reserve their emotional devotionalism for the Mother of God and the saints. (44)

The exquisite dialectic of this Philippians text, moving back and forth between Jesus’ divine glory

ab aeterno,

his self-abasement, and his glorification by the Father, mirrors perfectly the tension in the Byzantine liturgy between Christ as both Pantokrator and Philanthropos-Theos.

Among the Slavs this awesome Byzantine vision of Christ-Pantokrator is strikingly balanced by the Slavonic Canon to the Most Sweet Jesus (Sladchaishchemu Gospodu nashemu Iisusu Khristu) in the Slavonic Book of Hours or Ierejskij Molitvoslov, a devotional text that cedes nothing to the intimate love for Jesus expressed in western devotion to the Sacred Heart, as Joseph Ledit showed clearly enough in his little book on the Byzantine liturgical theme of the wound in Christ’s side. (45)

The sources of this liturgical Christology, at least in the Byzantine cast, is the focus of the liturgy on the paschal mystery, which is not just resurrectional, but comprises the entire passover of Jesus from death to new life. I say the Byzantine east, because Syrian (especially East-Syrian) and Armenian Christology is more radically incarnational, and as such its liturgical piety shares with the Christian west the centrality of Christmas. But I do not need to repeat here what I have

already written elsewhere on the paschal orientation of Byzantine worship.

Though there is nothing here to which the Latin Christian would not subscribe, I do not think contemporary western Christological piety is as successful in holding these realities together in dynamic tension. The west tends toward Christological schizophrenia, a sort of post-mortem Nestorianism. Its piety ricochets from an excessive familiarity to an excessive

neo-Chalcedonianism, from Christology-from-above to Christology-from-below. This is just a roundabout way of saying that western piety tends to be historicizing, and its familiarity with the human Jesus leaves the God-man receding back into the divinity, as Joseph Jungmann described in his famous essay on Teutonic Arianism. (47)

2. Eastern liturgy is radically

Western Christology runs the danger of disturbing the trinitarian structure of Christian piety. All Christians, of course, believe in the Holy Trinity. But here I am talking about a community’s actual faith consciousness and its liturgical expression, which in the liturgies of the Christian east is, in my view, incomparably superior to what was traditional in the Latin west. Recent attempts to enrich the pneumatological and epicletic structure of western eucharistic prayers have not fully remedied this problem, which is one not of texts but of mentality.

Here, too, of course, one must avoid cliches and know what one is talking about, The decidedly Christological stamp of the old Roman Canon is a sign of great antiquity. This eucharistic prayer, obviously formulated before the impact of the late fourth-century pneumatological resolution at Constantinople 1 (381 A.D.), reflects a primitive euchologic theology much older than almost any extant eastern anaphora except Addai and Mari and the no-longer used UrChrysostom and UrBasil, pace the common myth that everything eastern is automatically older.

Nevertheless, eastern prayer is explicitly and consciously trinitarian in ways that western liturgical prayer is not. I am not talking about phrases, the repetition of trinitarian formulae like doxologies, but about the liturgie profonde,

which in the east simply cannot be regularly prayed without the attentive worshiper becoming imbued with a piety that remains trinitarian through and through. That, in my view, is simply not true of the west, where the Holy Spirit, though professed, is just not a conscious operative factor in a radically Christological liturgical piety.

Eastern liturgy retains a sense of the absolute and awesome holiness, transcendence and unknowability of God, who is to be worshiped for that reason alone.

Nothing is so foreign to the western mentality as the ancient prayers of the Assyro-Chaldean tradition which simply pray to God without asking him for anything, as in the beautiful Collect of the Lakumara Hymn: “For all your benefits and graces to us past recompense, Lord, we confess and glorify you without ceasing in your triumphant Church full of all helps and all blessings: for you are the Lord and creator of all, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, forever.” (48)

Such “liturgical indifference” is refreshing in the face of the incessant western mania to thematize and instrumentalize liturgy for its own ends, so that one can “get something out of it.” Like the reply of George Leigh Mallory when asked why he climbed Mount Everest–“Because it is there,” he answered”–the Christian east prays to God simply because he is. One constantly hears in the west that people do not go to church because “they don’t get anything out of it anymore.” What one “gets out of it,” let me repeat what I have said on other occasions, is the inestimable privilege of glorifying almighty God.

For the Christian east, the church’s liturgy is not something we appropriate to our needs by

reducing it to the level of our own banality. Rather, it is the church’s ideal of prayer to which we must rise. We are not the measure of the liturgy; the church’s liturgy is the yardstick that measures us.

4. Eastern liturgy is

Eastern liturgy has created and retained a synthesis of ritual, art, church, design, and symbolic structure that may at times seem inflexible, but which permits it to do what liturgy is supposed to do without the self-consciousness of present-day liturgy in the west. For liturgy serves no purpose outside itself.

Like a living language, it cannot be reduced to sociology or anthropology; it cannot be invented or created; it simply is. Although it has a history, as I am well aware, having spent my life retracing it, that history cannot be accelerated and overriden. In the west, the Protestant Reformation tried to do so, with results that are available for all to see.

Here too, if the west would learn something pastoral from the east, it must stop getting tripped up in its own cliches. Liturgy should avoid repetitions? Repetition is of the essence of ritual behavior. Liturgy should offer variety? Too much variety is the enemy of popular participation. Liturgy should be creative? Indeed–but whose creativity? Most contemporary western liturgical creativity is just one more cover for a neo-clericalism. The liturgical “creators” do not mean the creativity of the People of God, but of the celebrant and of the liturgical-establishment professionals.

There is a sameness and a familiarity and a repetitiveness that is at the very basis of day-to-day human culture. Men and women who wish to gather to praise God must learn a similar regularity and consistency, or their prayer will not survive. Our people are sick to death of professional coteries constantly reinventing the wheel.

So liturgy must change, will change, has always changed, just as living languages like English change. But they do not change just because some self-proclaimed liturgist gets up one bright morning and decides to change them. The process is much more subtle and unique, and follows its own laws and rhythms, not yours or mine.

5. Eastern liturgy offers an escape from the “medieval “

The more I study liturgy and liturgical theology across the east-west divide, the more I am convinced that the spectre of late medieval western scholasticism still haunts us. Let me say from the start that the western middle ages and its scholasticism deserve to be treated with the same scientific objectivity and respect as any other historico-cultural period. I have no patience with those who raise the shibboleth of scholasticism without ever having read a line of Peter Lombard, Albert, Thomas, Bonaventure or Scotus–indeed, would not know enough Latin to do so even if their life depended on it. I was educated in scholastic philosophy in the days when every student had his own copy of the Summa

in Latin, and read it. So I am not the enemy of any period in cultural history. Such an approach to history is fatuous in the extreme.

But the more I study the history of east-west relations from the late scholastic period on, the more I am convinced that it furnished an ever more aggressive Catholic west with a narrowing of vision that rendered it incapable of understanding the east.

It is enough to read the extraordinary incomprehension and arrogance with which the Latins treated the Armenians of Cilicia during the Crusades. The Armenians, always more open and lacking the chauvinism and bigotry of the Byzantines after Trullo (692 A.D.) and of the medieval Latins, were quite prepared to accept communion with the Latins provided their integrity was not violated.

Anyone who reads that history with openness and objectivity can only conclude that the Armenian Apostolic Church, when confronted with the obtuseness of the Latins, was fully justified in rejecting a communion which threatened not only their integrity, but the very survival of their

age-old tradition. (50) The contentions in large part concerned the liturgy and its theology. One problem for the Latins were the liturgical intercessions for the Mother of God and the saints in the Armenian anaphora, where, as in the Byzantine Chrysostom anaphora, one continued to pray “for” Mary and the saints indifferently, along with the rest of the departed. Here as elsewhere, modern studies have shown that the Armenians had preserved the ancient tradition, (51) and that the Latins were simply wrong.

The same can be said for the hylomorphic theory of the sacraments, one more Latin novelty foreign to the undivided church of the first millennium. The issue is not that the Latins do not have the same right as everyone else to theologize about their own tradition, and to explain it as they wish within the parameters of the common apostolic faith. The issue is the tendency of the Latins in the late scholastic period to elevate their own medieval departures from the common tradition into a norm, then use it to challenge those who had simply continued to believe as they always had. (52)

6. TheEast is our best reminder that Tradition is integral and

Any view of “Tradition” has to take account of the whole Tradition, not just its currently accepted “official” expression. I think the way liturgical theology is presently done too often violates this principle, marshaling what agrees with preconceived conclusions and ignoring everything else.

That just will not do; and that is a message both western and eastern students of liturgy need to hear.

Problems in the history of the theological tradition are resolved not by western references to the Council of Trent or eastern flights of fancy concerning “sobornost” and “eucharistic ecclesiology,” salted with a couple of commonplaces from some patristic anthology of long overworked proof-texts, but by the careful, close reading of all the sources, and attempting to fit all the tesserae into the mosaic.

If nothing visible on earth is so divine and heavenly as liturgy, nothing is so down to earth as the hard daily grind of digging out and painstakingly analyzing line by line all its textual sources.

In the modem theological enterprise, there is no longer “confessional scholarship,” but just plain scholarship. Ideology is the enemy of all understanding. That does not mean that we abandon our faith; that Catholics cease to be Catholics and Orthodox or Protestants cease to be what they are. It does mean that the modern theological enterprise is scientific and common, seeking the truth wherever it is found and regardless of whom it pleases or displeases, or whose theses it confirms or weakens. Lex orandi legem statuat credendi is an adage so profound and so true that we have barely begun to plumb its depths. We cannot turn it on its head and make it the hostage of an ideology.