http://merecomments.typepad.com/merecomments/2007/04/calling_time.html">>>Stuart, this is off topic but I have been wondering what your reaction is to the changes in the DL of the ByzCath churches in the Pittsburgh diocese recently? Adopting "inclusive language" in the Nicene Creed, etc.?<<<
It sucks. My wife (professional translator who speaks Slavonic, Russian, Slovak, Ukrainian, Bulgarian and half a dozen other Slavic languages) and I are preparing an article on the subject for Eastern Churches Journal. In the interim, you can perhaps get a copy of Fr. Serge Kelleher's scathing review "Studies on the Byzantine Liturgy-The Draft Translation: A response to the proposed recasting of the Byzantine-Ruthenian Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom". This can be ordered from:
Stauropegion Press
PO Box 14096
Pittsburgh, PA 15237-9998
The price is $20.00 + $4.00 per book shipping and handling ($24.00 total per book).
You would not believe how truly awful this "translation" is--my wife says it is semi-literate at best. Many of the changes are needless and invariably result in an inferior English rendition. Examples:
"May our lips be filled with your praise, O Lord" becomes "May our mouth be filled with your praise, O Lord" (the Slavonic word can me either, but generally is used metaphorically, while a separate word is used for mouth as an organ of the body, as in Psalm 50: O Lord, you will open my lips, and my mouth will declare your praise").
"As smoke vanishes, so let them vanish, as wax melts before a fire" becomes, "As smoke disappears, so let them disappear, as wax melts before a fire". Obviously, the people who wrote this drivel have a tin ear.
"Holy Gifts for the Holy" now becomes "Holy gifts for holy people"--as if we could not figure that out. A much better translation, going back to the Greek through the Slavonic, would be "Holies for the holy", which has a nice, mystically ambiguous ring to it.
But it is when we get to the "horizontally inclusive" language that the dissonances really become impossible to ignore. For instance, one of the oldest and most revered titles for Christ in Eastern spirituality is "Philanthropos", the "Lover of Mankind" (the Slavonic equivalent is "Cheloviklubjets"). This has been rendered to "Lover of us all", while the ekphonesis (ending of a prayer string) "For He is gracious and loves mankind" has been changed to "He is gracious and loves us all".
Not only is this hard on the ears, it is theologically suspect at best, and downright heretical at worst. "He is gracious and loves us all"? Who are the "all"? The people at the Liturgy? The members of the Ruthenian Church? Everyone on earth, the doggies and kitties and dolphins and chimps, and even the liturgists?
Ostensibly, this is being done to "eliminate vestiges of sexism" in the language of the Church, but in fact this is a solution in search of a problem, since nobody--and I mean nobody--has ever muttered a complaint about this in the past. This is not an issue for us (indeed, the use of the inclusive language is found offensive by a number of women in the parish, including my wife, who wonder if our "God-loving bishops" have such a low opinion of women that they believe the poor things don't know that they are included in the word "mankind").
So why do it?
Because they can. Because there has always been a streak of self-loathing within the clergy of the Ruthenian Church going back to the arrival of the Church in the New World, a desire to be accepted as "real Catholics" by the Roman Catholic clergy, right down to mindless aping of the intellectual and theological fads of their Latin confreres. This, combined with a real lack of respect for the intelligence of the laity (in the Old Country, the priest was usually the only literate man in the village, but this is America, dammit!) has produced a liturgy which is condescending and bowdlerized, a Byzantine attempt to make all the same mistakes as were made by ICEL after Vatican II. Perhaps it is also the last hurrah for a group of long-haired (in the worst way) hippie priests to whom the sixties just weren't good enough.
Those of us with deep conspiratorial minds call this "Elkoism with a human face", after Archbishop Nicholas Elko, who was Metropolitan of Pittsburgh in the early 1960s. He tried to accelerate and complete the latinization of the Ruthenian Church by gutting the liturgy, removing the iconostases and icons from the churches, and purging the ranks of the clergy of anyone who objected (it was said his desire was to squeeze the grease out of the Greeks, and remove the stink from the onion dome). This prompted a revolt of the clergy that saw him kicked upstairs to the Oriental Congregation in Rome, and ultimately to a post of true disgrace--auxiliary Latin bishop of Cinncinati. He ended his days a bitter man, convinced he had been done in by communists.
But Elko left a lot of followers in parishes across the Church, and many of these have now risen to positions of power and influence. They are wiser than their master, for they do not attempt to make a clean break with the Byzantine Tradition, but rather to use "aggiorniamento" to make it comply with the spirituality of the postconciliar Roman Church. Rather than a latinization of ritual, they seek a latinization of the soul and the intellect. For instance, the new people's books lack any Slavonic text for the Liturgy or the hymns. It's as if they want to forget the ethnic heritage of their forefathers. I'm not a Ruthenian at all, and am I convinced vernacularist, but I find great delight in the Slavonic text of Liturgy. As someone who as evangelized by the Ruthenian Church as an adult, who was baptized directly into the Church, I am in fact the kind of person they need to attract if the Church is to survive. Apparently, though, my opinions are not worth a stale piroghi.
(From a purely practical standpoint, the new book is also impossible to use, being some 400 pages long with a table of contents that has only fifteen entries. It's exceedingly hard to find something like the common tones for Sundays, let alone for festal days. For instance, to find the Troparion and Kontakion for Palm Sunday, you have to know that Palm Sunday is the last Sunday of the Lenten Triodion, though some might think it's the first Sunday in the Paschalion or Pentecostarion. Confused? Join the club. There are, however, four brightly colored ribbons which can be used to mark your place (if you can find it), though on major feasts you may have to pray that the bulletin has the requisite number of loose pages to supplement the ribbons. We altar boys joke that we will soon have a new duty--at the appropriate place in the liturgy, we will raise a placard of the appropriate color above the iconostasis so that the people will know which ribbon to pull. Speaking of pulling ribbons, how long do you think those bright red, green, blue and yellow ribboons will survive contact with curious four-year-olds?
What really makes this stick in the craw is the injunction that this translation supersedes all others, and that after 29 June NO OTHER TRANSLATION CAN BE USED IN THE METROPOLIA.
I have several problems with this. The first is that there is no such thing as a "typical edition" in the Byzantine Tradition. Within the rite, there are literally dozens of individual usages, within Churches, withiin eparchies and dioceses, and even within parishes. As the Liturgy is the property of the people, who hold it in trust for God, it is a living, dynamic organism that reflects the true genius of the people who celebrate it. Moreover, it has to be understood that the Byzantine Liturgy follows a monastic ordo (it would require twenty five separate books and about three hours to celebrate a Sunday Divine Liturgy in its fullness). This normative monastic form is redacted for cathedral and parochial usage according to local custom. Put bluntly, Tradition sets the MINIMUM that MUST be done on a given day, but the new translation, by OMITTING most of the optional material and then MANDATING the use of ONLY THAT TRANSLATION, have effectively defined the MAXIMUM that may be done in any parish. Want to sing all the antiphon verses? Sorry. Include all the little litanies? Out of luck! Include the "Grant it" petitions after Communion? No way! Thus, the new translation dumbs down the Liturgy and causes a spiritual atrophy among the faithful, who will never be able to learn about these wonderful parts of our worship.
And, to add insult to injury, this liturgical commission, which was originally tasked only to make a full and accurate translation of the Ruthenian Recension published in Rome in the 1940s (widely regarded as one of the best examples of liturgical scholarship of its time, and widely used even by Orthodox scholars and Churches) have turned away from the Slavonic text and are using the Greek text for their source material. When one understands that the Ruthenian recension is a pre-Nikonian usage much older than the current Greek texts, one wonders what they were thinking. Some people who reviewed the earlier drafts of the translation, as well as the current version, believe that the translators just didn't have the facility in Slavonic to do the job, so turned to Greek, where there are far more published glossaries and other study aids.
Thus, in one stroke, our God-loving bishops have managed to repeat both the errors of Vatican II and the errors of the Nikonian Reform. I take it as proof positive that Darwin had to be wrong.
If our God-loving bishops and their cohorts succeed, the new liturgy will make it impossible for the Ruthanian Church to cooperate with any Orthodox Church, not even (perhaps I should say, especially) the Carpatho-Rusyn Orthodox Church, and even with other Greek Catholic Churches--the Ukrainians, Romanians and Melkites. The Ruthenians thus would be neither fish nor fowl, but would remain something apart, the "tertium quid", and the small (and ever shrinking) circle of Ruthenian priests will be free to be big fish in a very small pond, third rate academics playing around with something that is rightly the patrimony of the entire People of God.
I was going to write to Tony Esolen privately about this, since he is well atuned to the problems endemic in the Latin Church, but since this is out in the open, I wonder if he might not consider a separate thread for it. Perhaps we could call it, "When Bad Liturgy Happens to Good Churches"?
Posted by: Stuart Koehl | Apr 15, 2007 3:40:37 PM
>>>For meself, it doesn't seem to be the ugly, gratuitous kind of "inclusiveness" I usually despise. From what I understand of the Greek, it seems to be more in the spirit of the original.
How 'bout you?<<<
1. We're not Greeks, we're Slavs. We have a beautiful, pre-Nikonian Slavonic recension that calls out for a beautiful English translation.
2. We don't speak Greek, we speak English, and English does not have inclusive pronouns, nor does it have a neuter word for the collective of humanity.
3. If you can say "He is gracious and loves us all" without gagging, you have a stronger stomach than I do."
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