Part 8: “Eastern Presuppositions” and Western Liturgical Renewal

Between Myth and Reality

Before concluding, I hope you will allow some personal reflections from one who has played no small part in western scholarship on eastern liturgy over the past generation, but who long ago abandoned the contemporary clich6s with which the liturgical life of the Oriental churches are usually described.
Though I am an academic Orientalist who loves the Christian east and has dedicated his entire scholarly life to the study of its traditions with the express aim of understanding them sympathetically and fostering and preserving them, I am not one of those romantics who considers the east–for heaven only knows what imagined reasons–to possess some sort of traditional superiority, a deeper spirituality, a more ancient and traditional monasticism, a more faithfully apostolic liturgy.

Those are nothing but cliches, most of them long discredited among those who have some real historical knowledge and practical experience of the Christian east. I am also one who resolutely rejects the Religionsgeschichtliche approach to Christian liturgy, resisting all attempts to reduce its study to anthropology or ritual studies.

That being said, however, I hold with equal firmness that Christian liturgy, eastern or western, must be studied with the same seriousness, objectivity, and historico-critical distance with which men and women of science study anything. Objectivity and distance do not mean without faith and love. They do mean without hypocrisy, self deception or dissimulation, and without spinning the webs of myth (here I use the term in its pejorative modern sense) and neo-gnosticism behind which the contemporary Orthodox east sometimes tries to hide.

Only in modern times have Christians tried to study eastern liturgy objectively, for itself, and on its own terms, and across the entire spectrum of its history and in all its manifestations, rather than as a source for something else. From my own study, I have gleaned some firm conclusions that I think the Catholic west needs to hear.

Every coin has two sides. I have mocked the notion of “the Golden Age of patristic liturgy.” Everything I said was true, but it was partial; for I neglected to mention the truly great preaching which gave rise to thunderous applause; the psalmody which resounded through basilicas like the roar of the sea; the wonderful hagiopolite Holy Week and Cathedral Offices so lovingly described by Egeria; the continuous prayer of the desert monks that so captivated the visiting Cassian; and the stunning stational processions of Constantinople that stupefied the Arab prisoner Harun