-
Father Pavlos Koumarianos, "Symbol
and Reality in the Divine Liturgy" (Sourozh, May
2000). Until roughly the iconoclast period, people understood the
Liturgy as an act of Communion of all the Faithful with each other
and with God, and a foretaste of the God's ultimate Kingdom: it did
not ‘symbolize’ something; it was
something. However, an allegorical or symbolic approach later developed,
in which the Liturgy became a kind of drama where the faithful watch
a "symbolic
representation" of the life of Christ performed by the clergy. Although
such interpretations seem to have fallen out of favor in recent years,
at least in America, attitudes and practices based on them still very
much persist, especially in more 'conservative' circles. Koumarianos
comments on the distortions that have crept in to the way the Liturgy
is served and understood in many churches, due to this allegorical
understanding, and his remarks are also very helpful for getting an
idea of what the Liturgy itself envisions about what it is doing.
-
Khaled Anatolios, "Heaven
and Earth in Byzantine Liturgy": Antiphon, Volume
5, Number 3. Prince Vladimir's envoys to Constantinople are often quoted
as saying of their first experience of the Divine Litury, "We felt
we were no longer on earth, but in heaven." But what they actually
said was, "We knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth." The
actual remark is a classic expression of the notion of the mutual
transparency between earth and heaven which is the authentic and
pervasive understanding of Byzantine liturgy. The misinterpretation
(and often misquotation), on the other hand, belies a view of Byzantine
liturgy as belonging to "another realm"— as simply staged (as
it were) in heaven, away from earth— and this masks the liturgy's
insight into the christological synergy of
heaven and earth with the idea of a magical replacement of
earth by heaven. This is not the view of the Byzantine liturgical
tradition itself.
-
Robert Taft SJ, "How
Liturgies Grow: The Evolution of the Byzantine “Divine
Liturgy”. Orientalia Christiana Periodica XLIII,
Roma 1977, p. 8-30. A very convenient summary of the development of
the Byzantine Liturgy used by the Orthodox Church.
- Juan Mateos, SJ, "The
Evolution of the Byzantine Liturgy".
Originally published in John XXIII Lectures, Vol. I, 1965: Byzantine
Christian Heritage. John XXIII Center For Eastern Christian Studies, Fordham
University, New York: 1966.
I have added some clarificatory notes to Fr Mateos' text, for the convenience
of a class I taught. This is a valuable outline of the history and development
of the Orthodox Liturgy, even if he spends two full pages on defusing
the Catholic-Orthodox controversy over when the consecration of the gifts
occurs. The discussion has (thankfully) moved beyond such controversies,
largely due to the work of scholars like him.
- Protopresbyter Alexander Schmemann on the origins of Christian worship:
“The Problem of the Origin of the Ordo” [i.e., of the Church’s
liturgical structures]: Chapter Two of Introduction to Liturgical Theology (St.
Vladimir’s Seminary Press, Crestwood, NY; 2d ed. 1975) pp. 40-71.
- Protopresbyter Alexander Schmemann, "The Byzantine Synthesis". Chapter 4 of Introduction to Liturgical Theology (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, Crestwood, New York, 1975 and 1986), pp 149-220.
The concluding chapter of Father Alexander’s game-changing Introduction to Liturgical Theology is a tour-de-force on the development of the Byzantine liturgical tradition as a whole. As such, it provides the integral perspective necessary for any talk of ‘liturgical renewal’ or even if any adjustments are to be made to the typicon at a purely practical, pastoral level. Without such perspective, we will inevitably end up emphasizing what is secondary, while eliminating elements that belong to the essential structure of our services.
The fact is, we don't understand the typicon very well today, whether we seek to follow it maximally, or to simplify the services in order to make them more accessible. Fr Alexander shows why the development of dogmatic thought went hand in hand with a weakening of ecclesial consciousness, and how this was reflected in our liturgical offices. The empire and the ‘desert’ both obscured the reality of the Church as the people of God and the new Israel, a chosen people, a royal priesthood. This remains true even if the dogmatic decisions of the Councils were not just transposed in Byzantine worship from philosophy into sacred poetry, but actually revealed in all their significance.
Whatever we do liturgically, we need to recover and strengthen that ecclesial consciousness that lies at the very heart and root of the Church's liturgical life.
- Jean Danielou, S.J. "The
Sacraments and
the History of Salvation" from The Liturgy and the Word of God
(Liturgical Press, 1959). The relationship of the actions that make up sacred
history in the Old and New Testaments to the actions that are the sacraments
of the Church.
- Bp. Hilarion (Alfeyev), “Orthodox Worship as a School of Theology”. Lecture delivered at the Kiev Theological Academy on September 20, 2002. Bishop Hilarion is Bishop of Vienna and Representative of the Russian Orthodox Church to Western Europe.
