Positive and Negative

If there is a positive side to the negative coin, there is an equally negative side to the positive coin. If I have highlighted some virtues of the east by contrasting them with some defects of the west, I assure you I could continue the discourse in the other direction, for there is plenty, even in matters liturgical, that the east could learn from the west.

Like all of us, eastern Christendom and its liturgies exist on that thin line of the dialectic between myth and reality, between what we want or pretend to be, and what we are. If eastern liturgies present us with the picture of a glorious ideal, that ideal is inadequately realized. I already cited Olivier Rousseau, who said “there can be no question of a ‘liturgical movement’ in the Orthodox Church,” because “the Orthodox Church has preserved the liturgical spirit of the Early Church, and continues to live by this spirit, to drink from it as from its purest source. 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.” (54) That is the myth. The reality, however, is quite different, as is perfectly clear from anyone who reads some of the young Orthodox activist priests in

post-communist Russia, or diaspora writers like the late Alexander Schmemann.

Eastern Christianity finds itself in a profound crisis from which it has not yet found the means to extricate itself, and even more preoccupying is the refusal of so many to recognize this situation, or their attempts to distract attention from it by lashing out, with a chauvinistic xenophobia altogether too traditional in Russian and Balkan history, against enemies, real or imagined, who are presumed culpable for whatever is wrong.

Eastern Christianity has not yet learned to face modernity, a lesson learned in the west only with great pain and many failures. The inroads of secularism, the disarray of Protestantism in western Europe, the precipitous decline in religious practice among Catholics, the stupefyingly vapid superficiality of so much of modem western culture with its consequent banalization of much in Catholic religious and liturgical culture and the resulting conservative backlash–all these are but a short list that could be extended almost ad infinitum. How much of it could have been avoided is moot: second-guessing history is always a fatuous exercise.

In addition to the failures, important lessons have been learned, important values acquired, hopefully with some permanence. Despite fearful reactions and attempts to turn back the clock, such efforts surely will not succeed, since Vatican II Catholics have succeeded in facing the modern world. For the most part they have done so, I believe, with courage, honesty, integrity and imagination.

It is impossible to overemphasize how important it was to do that, if Christianity is to have a future in the modern secularized world. For Christians, the only “ideal period of liturgy” is the one they are living in. A nostalgic vision of Christian tradition was a basic error of the Protestant Reformation, the notion that there was some ideal evangelical past to which one could return.

Some lovers of eastern liturgy make the same mistake, playing the same “pick a century” game. The only difference is that they pick the classic patristic age of late antiquity, whereas the Protestant Reformers opted for apostolic times. But Paul tells us in Second Corinthians 6:2, “Behold, now is the acceptable time … now is the day of salvation.”