www.byzcath.org Forums Mysteries: The Life of Worship Vespers, Matins & the Divine Liturgy The Revised Divine Liturgy A comparison

John, excellent points as always. As you likely recall, two years ago on this very Forum we tried and tried to get the answer from the revisionists to the simple question "Why?" Is the Ordo and the 1964 Liturgikon defective? If so specifically where and why (other than a few grammatical/typographic errors which we have discussed)? If not, then where is the genuine pastoral need for this revision?

After having seen with my own eyes a parish backslide from the full 1964 Liturgikon down to this RDL (I was the deacon celebrating the full Liturgikon so it is first hand experience), I will no longer buy into the argument that this RDL in ANY WAY raises the "liturgical bar" at all nor is in any way a "restoration".

Amen!

God bless you Mary.

John:

Slava Isusu Christu!

I have not ignored your points, nor have I tried to move the topic in a different direction. I am simply trying to carry on three separate conversations and tackled what I perceived to be the most important challenge first. I am disappointed that you would suggest that I was running away from your challenge.

I simply cannot say this in terms any stronger than these: you are introducing a false opposition between the DL as focused on worshipping God and the DL as focused on educating man. It is, and always has been, about both.

You have cited no patristic or Eastern Christian theologian in support of your claims. The only appeal you have made is to the pronouncements of Cardinal Ratzinger. That is not sufficient.

Perhaps, since I apparently have failed, the late John Meyendorff will convince you that the distinction you are drawing is a false one. He notes the following (from Byzantine Theology, 1979):

"In Eastern Christendom, the Eucharistic liturgy, more than anything else, is identified with the reality of the Church itself, for it manifests both the humiliation of God in assuming mortal flesh, and the mysterious presence among men of the eschatological kingdom. It points at these central realities of the faith not through concepts but through symbols and signs intelligible to the entire worshipping congregation....

"Besides the sacramental ecclesiosology implied by the Eucharist itself, these hymnographical cycles constitute a real source of theology. For centuries the Byzantines not only heard theological lessons and wrote and read theological treatises; they also sang and contemplated daily the Christian mystery in a liturgy, whose wealth of expression cannot be found elsewhere inthe Christian world. Even after the fall of Byzantium, when Christians were deprived of schools, books, and intellectual leadership, the liturgy remained the chief teacher and guide of Orthodoxy." (pp.6-7, my emphases)

"While a Western Christian generally checked his faith against external authority (the magisterium or the Bible), the Byzantine Christian considered the liturgy both a source and an expression of his theology..." (p.115)

I would encourage you to read the rest of Father Meyendorff's chapter on "Lex Orandi" (pp.115-125).

In Christ,
Theophilos

I think that you have missed entirely John's classical distinction between theology and catechesis.

Theology is not "education" as it is portrayed in documents on the liturgy from the Byzantine Metropolia.

Theology, for those who are prepared and open to it, is illumination, which is a far greater action than any human act can ever provide.

Theology is not learning.

Theology is becoming, by grace.

This very real difference, no mere distinction, is something that Orthodoxy insists upon above all else it seems, and rightly so.

Both Father John Meyendorff and Father Alexander Schmemann have skated the edges of that difference on occasion, and their liturgical wisdom is not always well, or fully, received in Orthodoxy and particularly now that the newness of the past 50-60 years of liturgical experimentation is wearing off.

But even Fathers John and Alexander do not carry things as far as the liturgical commission of the Byzantine Metropolia.

So again, it is you who has exaggerated a real relationship, and missed the point.

Mary

Education in its classical sense also consists of the gymnastic and the muse, the mystical. It is not at all entirely dependent on the verbal or the dialectic, and in fact becomes incomplete when these become stressed to the detriment of the others.

Very nicely done!

In fact I incline my head to your superior insight.

Was it not said that it is good to have astute companions on a journey.

This is such an honest, direct, informed, sincere, heartfelt appraisal that I don't understand how it can be ignored. Then again, it is coming from just a deacon.

If you are JUST a deacon then there are many of our own out there who are MERELY parish priests. And the sad truth is that you are "safer" speaking out than many of our "mere" priests.

Which reminds me, I learned this morning that it was one of the "mere" priests of Passaic who said to Father David "My opinion is as good as yours." toward the end of the exchange over Anaphora/Oblation.

This came from the priest who actually challenged the current usage in the RDL so I suppose now the story is coming out straight. So the dialogue got flipped in the re-telling but the upshot was the same.

In the end, since Father David turned and walked away, there is simply a stalemate of "opinion."

Darn fool way to run a liturgy if ya ask me, but nobody's askin' the resident grouse...a "mere" bird.

Mary

EM and Diak:

Glory to Jesus Christ!

I have not missed the distinction. I am insisting that it does not exist, that theology and catechesis exist along a continuum, and that the DL recognizes and responds to this relationship. I have not been presented with any patristic evidence to suggest otherwise.

I have not defined theology solely or even primarily as "learning," as a purely or primarily intellectual exercise. But that is part of it, and not just at the beginning. Theology is seeing God and knowing God and becoming God. The illumination of the nous is not something that typically just happens -- it is the product of prayer, effort, and, yes, even instruction. Is this to be doubted?

I have not offered a circumscribed definition of education. I have not insisted that it is "entirely dependent" on the dialectic.

In Christ,
Theophilos

P.S. "So the dialogue got flipped in the re-telling but the upshot was the same." No, the upshot is not the same. Your earlier telling of the story had Fr. David ending the discussion with the assertion that his opinion was as good as the priest's. It seems now that he walked away because the priest ended the discussion by asserting the finality of his authority.

Since you keep misrepresenting the point I have made I can only conclude that you have not understood it.

The Divine Liturgy is about the worship of God. It has four main points: praise, adoration, petition, and thanksgiving. Man is educated by all of these at two levels. The higher level is the catechesis that comes through prayer, through participation in the Divine Light. The lower level is hearing the words and understanding them. When you rearrange the structure of worship to provide for the lower form of education then you take away the liturgy�s focus on the higher level. The Liturgy is not a classroom and this is by intent. It is for the worship of God.

I have appealed to Cardinal Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) for several reasons. Many elements of the newly mandated revisions are blatant imitations of what the Roman Catholics did in the 1970s. The Revisers are using the same arguments that the Latins used back then (which is where they got them from in the first place). The Latins have now stepped back and said that these reforms didn�t work, that they need to do something else, and that maybe returning to the older forms might be best. Look at a parallel. Your neighbor made some structural changes to his house 30 years ago. He now finds that these structural changes have weakened his house and is examining the problems they created with the hopes of fixing them. For some reason you liked what he did 30 years ago but were not in a position to make similar changes to your house. Now you are in a position to make these structural changes. Does it make sense to ignore the experience your neighbor went through, so that you can avoid the problems he encountered? Or do you close your eyes to these problems and stick with the original logic and pretend you will not have the same outcome? I quote Ratzinger be he speaks directly to what the Revisers are trying to imitate in their copying of Latin forms.

I have read Father Meyendorff�s Byzantine Theology so many times my copy is dog-eared. It was used as the main text book for a course on Byzantine theology I took in college. Your quote indicates only that man is educated by Liturgy. It does not state that the purpose of Liturgy is to give knowledge to man.

Meyendorff: "In Eastern Christendom, the Eucharistic liturgy, more than anything else, is identified with the reality of the Church itself, for it manifests both the humiliation of God in assuming mortal flesh, and the mysterious presence among men of the eschatological kingdom. It points at these central realities of the faith not through concepts but through symbols and signs intelligible to the entire worshipping congregation...."

�The humiliation of God� the mysterious presence among men�.�

�Let us set aside all earthly cares so that we may welcome (receive) the King.� The purposeful instruction of man in the faith is an earthly care. Even this must be put aside to worship the King. It is �only where His nearness is made present, only where human aims are set aside in favor of the reverential respect due to Him, only there is born that credibility which prepares the way for faith.� (This last is Ratzinger again.) When the liturgical form makes primary an earthly care (the passing of knowledge as in a classroom) it hinders the ability of the worshiping Church to set aside all earthly cares.

Again, no one suggests that man is not educated by the Liturgy, or that there are elements that are there for his education. But even in these elements God is praised, adored, implored and thanked. We do not pray the prayers for their educational value. We pray the prayers to worship God. I believe that the Spirit led the Liturgy to its present form precisely because praying the Liturgy is a higher form of education then is listening to the prayers, and any instructional value that comes from them. Look even at the structure of the Liturgical Year. Is there educational value in this structure, in hearing these texts year after year? Of course! But the Liturgical Year is not organized mainly for the education of man. It is organized mainly so that man can participate in the Divine. These are two different things. The Liturgy is not a time for purposeful study as if in a classroom. It is a time to pray. Yet if one reads Father David's book one can easily see that the reason for many of the revisions is to impart to men the education they are not getting elsewhere (catechism classes, etc.). Of course it misses the whole idea that if we had the fullness of the Divine Services - Vespers, Matins and a full Liturgy - the people would be educated by participation in this worship.

Meyendorff: Even after the fall of Byzantium, when Christians were deprived of schools, books, and intellectual leadership, the liturgy remained the chief teacher and guide of Orthodoxy."

It was not the schools, the books or the intellectual leadership that taught the Faith. It was the Liturgy. The Faith is taught in worship. Worship is not a school classroom, a theological journal, or anything else. Liturgy teaches because God is praised, adored, petitioned, and thanked.

I'm a bit perplexed by your suggestions. First of all, these are not "distinctions" but parts of an organic whole. To make them separate distinctions is a scholastic exercise that gets us precisely to this point, i.e. the "need" for liturgy to "educate". The East has been able to live out the faith within a mystical context since the inception of the Church.

Even Latins who love the Tridentine Mass and who are steeped in the Scholastic tradition would agree that everything does not, in fact, need to be heard to be "understood" or that the Mass is intended as an educational venture.

Experience is by its own nature "educational", even if words are not exchanged or given. When you wake up in the morning, you don't have to be told it is morning. The Jews knew that when the High Priest went behind the curtain something profound was happening and didn't have to be told at every step.

Some interesting words from the Latin Auxiliary of Melbourne recently posted on another thread:

...the sense of a holy mystery that the East maintained through the universal liturgical paradox of concealing so as to reveal...

Silence is not in any way an absence. Sometimes a Mystery is so profound that we should let "all mortal flesh keep silent". Sometimes it is in the silence, in the hiding, that the profundity of what is apparent is revealed in a veiled way.

And regarding Patristic references - where to start - here is one to start from St. John Cassian from the Conferences :

This is patently false. There is not only a distinction, there is a difference.

Classical theology is illumination of the nous or the eye of the soul. It is a divine grace.

Catechesis is what man does with his fellow man in an effort to instruct the baser intellect in the ways of the faith.

One is a real gift from God.

The other is a putative gift, man to man.

M.

We all know that Father David thinks his opinion on the matter of Oblation/Anaphora is better, not merely as good. In fact Father has said on this Forum that prior to this version of the liturgy, the rest of the entire Orthodox and eastern Catholic world, for over 1500 years, did not really know what they were referring to when they spoke of a "generic offering, or some such."

Only now with this liturgy, this catechesis, is the matter finally clear to all.

Well!!

The priest simply indicated that Father David's "opinion" is not better. Father David walked away. End of brotherly dialogue.

Mary

Mary

Why do you keep referring to this story over and over again? What is the point?

The priest in question explicitly did not challenge the translation but the catechetical interpretation of it.
In full assembly I dialogued with him on the point for 5-10 minutes. It became obvious that neither of us was convinced by the other's argumentation.
I did not end the dialogue, it was ended by the moderator of the convention.
I did not walk away, but stayed to answer other questions.
It is perhaps futile to try to correct the record, but for the sake of the Forum I declare this to be way this incident happened.

Fr. David

John:

Glory to Jesus Christ!

I sense that we are talking past one another, and that we are actually not that far apart. I apologize for any confusion that my words seemingly have caused.

Let me try to state as succinctly as I can what I take to be your opinion, and you may tell me if (and where) I'm wrong:

The purpose of the DL is to worship God. In the process of performing this work, man is educated, in the sense of both "naturally" coming to know God (i.e., with, by means of, and through our human intellect) and "supernaturally" coming to know Him (by being in His Presence). In both senses, the education of man is, however, an incidental by-product of the DL. It is an unintended consequence (?), and cannot justifiably be considered a purpose or focus of the DL.

The RDL, particularly through its mandate that the silent prayers of the anaphora be said aloud, reflects an unwarranted shift in emphasis from the worship of God (the true purpose) to the education of man, especially education in the lower, humanly sense (an incidental by-product). The Latin Church did this and it hurt them greatly, and thus the BCC should not imitate the errors of the Latins.

John, if this accurately reflects your position, then I'm sorry, but I still see you making Scholastic-type distinctions where I think our Fathers would say that none exists. The worship of God and the education of man by and through the Liturgy are, as Diak puts it (in an odd rejoinder that accuses me of making the very distinctions I am arguing against), �parts of an organic whole.�

Saying the prayers aloud, I have suggested, is not about making the Liturgy primarily didactic. Nor is it about doubting the efficacy or the reality of our heretofore more silent participation in the divine life. It may just be an attempt to help us appreciate more consciously, or to be more rationally aware of, of the communion in which we are participating.

And, perhaps, that is the root of our disagreement. I do not see man as having some natural existence apart from God. Human reason is not �mere� human reason, something that exists independently of God � it is itself, like man�s very biological life, a product and a sign of our original and continuing relationship to the divine. It is one of the marks of man�s life as the eikon Theou. It is a divine gift, a divine power, a grace. And, thus, I do not see catechesis or instruction as somehow distinct or different from the illumination of the nous. They are dynamically, and organically, and fundamentally, one.

A further note: Elijahmaria claims that there is not just a distinction but a difference between theology proper and catechesis. Though I am willing to be corrected, I reject that difference as un-patristic and un-Orthodox: theology proper is, certainly, a gift to man from God but so is catchesis � it is a gift of God that is mediated by man, himself a creature infused by divine grace. Why should we limit, by the categories we make, the means by which God seeks to bring those who are willing closer to Him?

In Christ,
Theophilos