Liturgical Revival and the Orthodox Church  

The Orthodox Church has always attracted the attention of all those who are active in matters liturgical. They have a natural sympathy for the East, and this for several reasons. Dom Olivier Rousseau, the Roman Catholic historian of the Liturgical Movement, wrote recently that the Eastern Church is the liturgical Church par excellence. He even goes so far as to say that the Orthodox Church needs no liturgical revival because it has preserved intact the great liturgical prayer of the early Church. This, I think, is an overstatement. We all need a liturgical revival, and the "liturgical" Churches may be in need of it even more than the non-liturgical ones.

But it is true that the great names of St Basil and St John Chrysostom are not to be discovered in our tradition. They are there. Our liturgy is still deeply "patristic," and from this point of view the western Liturgical Movement has been in many respects a rediscovery of some ideas and principles which in the eastern tradition are "natural." Take, for example, Dom Odo Casel and some other leaders of the Liturgical Movement in Europe. They all attempt to rediscover the patristic idea of the liturgy and therefore are so deeply interested in the unbroken liturgical tradition of the Eastern Church.

There exist, of course, less valid reasons for this interest in the eastern liturgy. Some people love it for its liturgical "exoticism" and "Orientalism," for its being different from the western patterns. This is, of course, a superficial approach. The real Liturgical Movement did not grow out of a "rubricistic" curiosity or an interest in liturgical colors. It began with a strange shock experienced by some Christians when, after centuries and centuries, they realized of a sudden that Christ really said, "Take, eat, this is my Body" — and it is not taken, not eaten. Or, as a Roman Catholic priest wrote, "I was a priest for forty years before I knew what Easter meant in the life of the Church." And this is why we all need a liturgical revival.

It so happened that in the West the liturgical revival was first of all a return to the corporate idea of worship. The underlying ecclesiological principle was that of the Church as the Body of Christ; and the whole movement took mainly that direction. And probably it is one of the most needed, most essential aspects and merits of the Liturgical Movement. But from the Orthodox point of view (and this is what justifies my appearance here), there are also other dimensions of the liturgy that must be rediscovered, brought back into our corporate experience of worship. To focus your attention on them is my purpose in this short paper.

At the beginning of my liturgical studies, I of necessity read the various theological and liturgical explanations of the Eucharist. I found that virtually all of them were symbolic explanations. Author after author, theologian after theologian, was making the same affirmation: that the Divine Liturgy is a symbolic representation of the earthly life of Christ. The Entrance with the Gospel, which we have at the beginning of the rite, "represents" Christ going to preach, and the altar boy who precedes him with the candle is the "symbol" of John the Baptist — and so on, through the whole service. If you take a Byzantine classic, Nicholas Cabasilas' Explanation of the Divine Liturgy, you will see that every detail of the service has a symbolic explanation, and sometimes not one but as many as four or five. Thus the exclamation: "The doors, the doors!" can mean at the same time that the doors of our hearts must be closed to earthly temptations and open to the spiritual reality, or then that the doors of the Church are open to those who believe and closed to the heretics. But the partisans of "symbolism" are never embarrassed by contradictions.

And yet, all theologians agree that within this "symbolic" liturgy, at one precise moment, the "symbolism" disappears and is replaced by "realism." When dealing with the transformation of the bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ, the term "symbolic" is out of order and sounds heretical. We have thus a long "symbolic" representation, one point of which and one point only ceases to be symbolic and becomes "real presence." And because of this, the theologians, leaving the symbolic framework to liturgiologists, concentrate all their attention upon this precise moment, trying to define and to express its precision. When does it happen, how does it happen, and what exactly is it that happens?

The long controversies about the Eucharist were always attempts to reach precise answers to these and similar questions. I am not quite certain that the type of precision achieved in these elaborations is adequate to its object. But it is clear that we have, as a result of it, two different ways of looking at the Eucharist, ways which are by no means connected with each other. The liturgical approach (in the old acceptance of the term "liturgical") is concerned with symbolism in all its possible variations. The theological approach isolates the quid of the liturgy from its liturgical framework (thought of as precisely a framework, useful and beautiful but not essentially necessary), and deals exclusively with the question of the validity, i.e., the minimum of conditions required for the Eucharist. In my opinion, the time has come for liturgical theology, or, in other terms, for a theology that would respect the liturgy as we receive it from tradition, and a liturgiology whose aim would once more be the formulation and explication of the lex orandi as the lex credendi of the Church.

In this approach, the question, which for a long time has been not only central but almost the only question in all Eucharistic theology — namely, what happens to the elements (and the how and the when) — must not precede, but must follow another basic question. What happens to the Church in the Eucharist? For it is only when this question is asked that certain of the affirmations made by the Eastern Church can be understood: the affirmation — for example, that the very ideas of a moment of consecration and also of the essential and the non-essential acts in the liturgy, etc., are not adequate — should not be applied in Eucharistic theology; nor should the affirmation that it is the Epiclesis, the invocation of the Holy Spirit, that constitutes the real "form" of the Eucharistic sacrament. At the time they were made, they expressed the opposition of the Orthodox Church to some western theories rather than a consistent sacramental doctrine. But, as we move toward a liturgical theology, they acquire their full meaning and become the starting points of a fuller theological understanding of the Eucharist.

From: Liturgy and Tradition by Fr. Alexander Schmemann, St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, Crestwood, NY 2003