Schmemann’s Critique of the West (Part 3): Secularism and Liturgy

Our Lady’s Church (13th century), Lissewege, Belgium (source)

Having summarized Schmemann’s objections (Part 1) and begun to respond to them (Part 2), today, in this concluding part, I will take up two questions.

First, did Aquinas “cause secularism,” as it were, with his distinction between first cause and second cause?

There are two extremes and a mean on this question.

At one extreme, the world has its own causality independent of God, which amounts to saying that God mostly does not exercise causality in this world. At the other extreme, there is only God’s causality, because the world has no causality. In the mean, God has causality and the world has causality, but the world’s causality is dependent on God’s. Aquinas in in the mean and secularism is in the first of the two extremes. It is probably true that thinkers before Aquinas could wander into the second of the two extremes at times, and so Aquinas’ move from the second extreme back to the mean can look like a movement toward the first extreme.

Later on, nominalist thinkers did set up a kind of divide between God and the world that led towards secularism. Schmemann’s critique is not entirely without merit, but he has picked the wrong enemy, for Aquinas is not a nominalist or a dualist.

(All the same, as a friend of a friend pointed out, Schmemann had liturgics of the 1950s-1970s in view as he composed his critique. He was right to recognize that Western Christianity since the late Middle Ages seems to have been overtaken by a creeping nominalism, one that seems connected, in turn, to a new concept of absolute Church authority, and which alone made possible a kind of nominalist, rationalist, and positivist liturgical reform that would be unthinkable in the East. Like Geoffrey Hull, Schmemann is asking himself: “How did it come about that this concept of liturgy ‘makes sense’ in Roman Catholicism (and Protestantism), when the same approach would be unthinkable in Orthodoxy?” That remains a valid question.)
 

Aquinas among the Fathers of the Church (excerpt from a painting by Zurbaran)

Second, does Aquinas differ from the Fathers on the relationship between liturgy and sacrament?

Schmemann is right to point out that there was no place for “liturgy” in the systematic theological treatises of the Middle Ages. There were commentaries on the liturgies, but within the developing system of theology there was not a slot for “liturgy” the way there was for “sacrament.”

However, this was not due to Aquinas’ metaphysics but because the contents of the theological system were at least partially determined by the history of controversies. There were controversies about sacramental validity, etc., but there weren’t controversies about liturgy such as we have today. The absence of a treatise on liturgy is not because Aquinas had divorced sacrament from liturgy but because it had never occurred to anyone divorce the two. It was inconceivable.

One finds a similar lacuna in the medieval system regarding “church”: there is no treatise on the Church, although one finds a brief treatment of Christ as Head of the Mystical Body. This is not at all because Aquinas or his contemporaries did not believe in the Church or did not have thoughts about it, but because controversy had never made it a definite subject as later happened in the Reformation debates.

As regards thinking of “sign” as a participation in the signified, I would point to the book Cur Deus Verba, where Dr. Jeremy Holmes develops Aquinas’ own thought to make this very point. I would also note again that some kind of contrast between “figure”/“type” and “truth” was made throughout Patristic times, and the division between “thing” and “sign” was made by St Augustine, so it seems petty to run down the medievals for making similar distinctions.

I think Fr. Schmemann’s problem is not so much with sign/thing as with the very notion of transubstantiation. To avoid transubstantiation, he says that when we enter into the liturgy we pass from this world into the kingdom of heaven, and in that kingdom the bread is the body of Christ. The bread is not the body of Christ in this world, but only in the kingdom of heaven. Once we have entered the kingdom by entering the liturgy, then there is no need for a particular moment of change in the bread; Schemann says that the action of the Holy Spirit is not to change the bread but to reveal that the bread is the body. This view would exclude, for example, the Western practice of Eucharistic adoration.

Needless to say, the idea that in the realm of liturgy the bread is shown to be always/already the body of Christ is, curiously, to repeat Berengarius’ error in a more subtle manner: the liturgy shows the bread as a sign of the body, but a sign it remains, with no basis for stating that the consecrated bread is, in truth, in reality, objectively, the body of Christ, such that the worship of latreia is rightly given to it (or rather, to Him who is present to us by means of the Eucharist). One wonders if we are not confronted once again with the fundamental error of Platonism, whereby the sensible is (merely?) an image of the idea or the form, “participating” in it, yes—but not the idea or the form really present in our midst. This Platonism has been a far greater temptation in the East, where it has even threatened, at times, to undermine the core mystery of the Incarnation of the Logos in the flesh.

Some broader points need to be made as part of a judicious response.

There is much truth in what Schmemann says, as (in general) is true of the Eastern Orthodox critics of Western rationalism. Those who wish to pursue this line of argument still further should consult Geoffrey Hull’s The Banished Heart, which will make the reader either a Roman traditionalist, a Byzantine Catholic, or an Eastern Orthodox. We might as well candidly admit that there has been a tendency in the West, in theological discourse, to isolate sacraments from liturgy, and then to isolate within sacraments the “matter and form” that makes them valid. This reduction to validity is at the root of all modern Western liturgical woes.

Joseph Ratzinger recognized the same thing, and so (as he points out) did the Liturgical Movement at its best. In the Preface to The Organic Development of the Liturgy by Alcuin Reid, OSB (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005), Ratzinger writes:

The author [Alcuin Reid] expressly warns us against the wrong path up which we might be led by a Neoscholastic sacramental theology that is disconnected from the living form of the Liturgy. On that basis, people might reduce the “substance” to the material and form of the sacrament and say: Bread and wine are the matter of the sacrament; the words of institution are its form. Only these two things are really necessary; everything else is changeable. . . . As long as the material gifts are there, and the words of institution are spoken, then everything else is freely disposable. Many priests today, unfortunately, act in accordance with this motto; and the theories of many liturgists are unfortunately moving in the same direction. They want to overcome the limits of the rite, as being something fixed and immovable, and construct the products of their fantasy, which are supposedly “pastoral,” around this remnant, this core that has been spared and that is thus either relegated to the realm of magic or loses any meaning whatever. The Liturgical Movement had in fact been attempting to overcome this reductionism, the product of an abstract sacramental theology, and to teach us to understand the Liturgy as a living network of Tradition that had taken concrete form, that cannot be torn apart into little pieces but has to be seen and experienced as a living whole. Anyone who, like me, was moved by this perception at the time of the Liturgical Movement on the eve of the Second Vatican Council can only stand, deeply sorrowing, before the ruins of the very things they were concerned for.

Indeed, the traditionalist movement is premised on not reducing the virtue of religion—the habit of right worship—to mere validity and licitness. This is a point I discuss throughout The Once and Future Roman Rite, a book that responds, to some extent, to the Schmemannian critique (see especially chapters 5, 6, and 10).

That being said, many Eastern Orthodox thinkers suffer from the polemical defect of being able to find little or nothing good to say about the West, which they believe to be in permanent and irreversible decline ever since the “schism” of 1054. Lossky and other Orthodox intellectuals in Paris even made up a lot of stuff about the Eastern tradition to ensure it would stand as far as possible from the Western tradition. Serious scholarship does not support this almost Manichaean picture of “East = good, true, beautiful / West = evil, false, ugly.” St Thomas Aquinas was sensitive to the complex form of the liturgy, as we can see in Question 83 of the Tertia Pars, where he comments in some detail on the shape of the Roman rite as he knew it, and never betrays the slightest inkling that he views all of that as arbitrary scaffolding around a magical transubstantiation. The careful studies of Abbé Franck Quoëx support this reading of Aquinas.

While Orthodox authors captivate with their poetic grandiosity, metaphysically their accounts often fall apart. For example: even if the entire liturgy is “divine” and must be embraced and entered into with reverence, there has to be a moment of consecration, before which the elements are only bread and wine, and after which they are Christ Himself. After all, He is always present “spiritually” or “mystically” in a soul in a state of grace and in the mystical body of the Church, but He is not always and everywhere present in His body, blood, soul, and divinity as He is upon the altar of sacrifice and in Eucharistic communion. This difference is the basis for the exaltation of the Divine Liturgy and of the Eucharist in the Christian life (just have a look at Nicholas Cabasilas). Whatever language we use to point out that difference—as we saw last week, “real” can certainly be defended, especially if it is contrasted not with mystical but with metaphorical or rational, that is, a linguistic or mental entity—the difference must be pointed out.

Some in the East almost seem to make a boast out of their imprecision (“everything is sacramental... everything is Christ... the liturgy is Christ,” etc.), but this can work only if people are content to rest in a hazy cloud of incense and not ask any further questions. “In what sense is everything sacramental? Is Satan sacramental? Is dung? Is an iPhone? In what sense is Christ in all? Is he in the apostates? In the act of sinning or the sinful will?” Any intelligent reply rests on distinctions: “Things are signs of God to the extent that they are good... Christ is present in the nature of the will but not in its voluntary disorder...” The moment any such distinctions are introduced, a person is well on his way to scholasticism of one kind or another: this is just how the human mind works—and it’s a perfection if it is done well.
 

Need we be separated over the All-Holy Theotokos? (source)

Moreover, Church history reveals many unfortunate cases where a difference in vocabulary need not have been a doctrinal obstacle but ended up becoming one either due to a mistaken apprehension of what each side was saying or, worse, due to a stubborn insistence on a single way of speaking even when argument has shown there can be various ways of expressing a truth. Transubstantiation is an excellent example; the Immaculate Conception yet another. In their passion to condemn everything Western, Eastern writers even manage to contradict, irony of ironies, the witness of the Church Fathers. Have a look at the patristic quotations on behalf of the substantial change in the Eucharistic gifts (whatever one wishes to call it), in Ludwig Ott’s Fundamentals (new ed., 405–6).

Another way in which the modern Eastern apologists fictionalize and mythologize their own tradition is by downplaying the quite extensive Byzantine scholasticism and even Byzantine Thomism. Some argue that Gregory Palamas and Thomas Aquinas are not as opposed to each other as customarily assumed. If we take the conventional view of Palamas, how amusing it is that Orthodox thinkers thunder against the West for “driving a wedge” between God and creation by means of a distinction between uncreated and created grace—and then they seem to drive a wedge into the divine nature by means of a distinction between God’s “essence” and His “energies”! The obvious distinction between the infinite, eternal, uncreated cause and the finite, limited, created effect is elided, while a far from obvious distinction that threatens the simplicity of God is produced ad hoc. When challenged, the “mystery card” is played: more clouds of incense.

In any case, for Aquinas, at least, real and mystical are not in opposition to each other, nor does Aquinas have to be pushed in a rationalizing/rationalistic direction. Is there contrary evidence from within the Western tradition—in the rites themselves and in the habits of the faithful—that this rationalism was not normative? Do we have the wherewithal in our own tradition to respond to its besetting temptations and vices?” Every tradition has its own temptations and vices; any honest person will admit it.

All Western traditionalists are characterized by a fundamental agreement that liturgy has intrinsic, immense, and independent value and should not be reduced to sacramental validity; nay, that the proper context for understanding what sacraments are, who their ministers and recipients are, what a proper intention is, etc., is precisely the traditional rites themselves, which are therefore indispensable. All one has to do is participate in a solemn High Mass to see that the West never entirely lost its liturgical-cosmic-sacramental sensibility. It is right there, “baked into” the rich and resplendent rites, which are anything but reductionist or minimalist.

True, we are suffering greatly from the triumph of the Pistoian rationalism and utilitarianism that hijacked the liturgical reform and now infests nearly every aspect of the Church’s life; but we can also see a zealous countermovement, a creative minority, that is poised to fill the pews when the twentieth-century experiment has finally exhausted itself in institutional bankruptcy.

Here are some pieces one could look at, having Schmemann’s objections in mind:

• On “Pinpointing” Consecration: A Letter for the Feast of St. Thomas Aquinas
• East-West Disagreements about the Epiclesis and Transubstantiation
• Counterpoints to the Hieromonk’s Letter
• The Byzantine Liturgy, the Traditional Latin Mass, and the Novus Ordo—Two Brothers and a Stranger
• The Four Qualities of Liturgy: Validity, Licitness, Fittingness, and Authenticity

Schmemann’s Critique of the West (Part 2): Placing the Lateran Council in Context

The Fourth Lateran Council, from Johannes de Columna o.p., “Mare historiarum” (source)

Last week I summarized Schmemann’s fundamental critique of Western sacramental and liturgical theology. Today I address the question: Did the Fourth Lateran Council give a bad and unpatristic definition of “real” as opposed to “mystical”?

A helpful historical resource for these questions is Fr James O’Connor’s book The Hidden Manna (which will be cited as HM). Although the Fathers did not contrast “reality” with “symbol” using exactly those words, they did contrast the “true” with the “figure.” For example, St Ambrose says:

Now consider which is more excellent, the bread of angels or the Flesh of Christ which is indeed the body of life. That manna was from heaven; this is from above the heavens. … The former was given in umbra; the latter is given in veritate. (HM 37–38)

This is similar to the contrast St. Cyril of Jerusalem draws regarding the “truth” of the oil of Chrismation and the “type” that its Old Testament precursors were. This contrast did not prevent St. Cyril from referring to the Eucharist as a “type” of the body of Christ; it was a helpful contrast, but not a carefully demarcated system of words.

It was Ratramnus of Corbie (d. 868) who first set out a stark opposition between “figure” and “truth,” and on that basis said some rather unclear things about the Eucharist. For example:

Figure is a kind of hiding … of what is meant to be shown. For example, … when Christ in the Gospel says, “I am the living Bread who have come down from heaven”, or when he calls himself the vine and his disciples the branches … all these things say one thing but imply another. Truth is the manifest setting forth of a reality such that it is not hidden by any images or shadows, or, to speak more clearly, it is the setting forth of things in their pure, open, and natural signification, as is the case when one says that Christ was born of the Virgin, suffered, was crucified, died, and was buried. In these cases nothing is hidden by figures that are obscure; the truth of the reality is set forth by the significance of the natural words; nothing other than what is said is to be understood. But in the cases mentioned above [when speaking of “figure”] it is not thus. Substantially the bread is not Christ or the vine Christ or the branches Apostles. Therefore these are a figure. (HM 92)

Berengarius took up the writings of Ratramnus and spoke unclearly in turn. The “Berengarians” were a diverse group according to contemporary report, and one Guitmund, Bishop of Aversa, avers that some of the Berengarians said “there is nothing at all of the Body and Blood of the Lord present in these Sacraments but that they are only umbras et figuras (HM 105). By this point, the original language used to affirm our faith in the Eucharist—the contrast between truth and figure—was being used to deny our faith in the Eucharist.

Lazzaro Baldi, “St Bruno defending the Sacraments against Berengar of Tours at the Council of 1079,” c. 1684 (source)

The East never endured a crisis around the Eucharist parallel to the Western Berengarian crisis (even as the West never endured a crisis around the divinity of the Holy Spirit parallel to the Eastern Macedonian crisis that prompted the insertion of a consecratory epiklesis in the Byzantine rite). Consequently, the East never experienced the weaponization of the venerable patristic “truth”/“figure” contrast. In the West, however, the faith had to be reasserted in terms of a denial that the Eucharist is merely a figure: for if it were, the New Testament Eucharist would not exceed the Old Testament figures of the Eucharist.

To complete the response, however, this simple reassertion of the Patristic contrast was not enough. There is indeed something symbolic about the Eucharist, as St. Cyril seems to indicate. So the West borrowed language from Augustine, language familiar from On Christian Doctrine: the distinction between (mere) “sign” and (full) “reality.” Again, it is worth noting that this distinction hails from one of the great Fathers—even if from a Father held in suspicion by (some in) the East.

In Book IV, Distinction X of his Sentences, Peter Lombard takes up the heresy of those who say that the body of Christ is on the altar in sacramento, id est, in signo, et tantum in signo manducari a nobis (in sacrament, that is, in sign, and only in sign is it eaten by us). Here “figure” has been replaced by “sign,” but it’s the same position we saw in the Berengarians. In response Lombard asserts the Catholic belief that “the true body of Christ is in the sacrament of the altar,” still staying close to the Patristic phrasing, but he also leverages the Augustinian distinction to distinguish between the sacramentum and the res sacramenti (often translated as the “reality of the sacrament”) and says that the res is the body of Christ. Also following Augustine, he says that “the bread is thus called the body of Christ, since it is truly the sacrament of the body of Christ which was placed on the cross.” Here we have “reality” [res] contrasted with “sign,” but (nota bene) in such a way that the Eucharist includes both, in different respects.

At the time of Lombard, no one has yet used the phrase “real presence” in reference to the Eucharist. In fact, the phrase “real presence” does not occur even in the works of St Thomas Aquinas! We’re getting close to that phrase with the res et sacramentum distinction, but we’re not there yet.

So what language does St. Thomas use? In the Summa, he raises the question: “It seems that the body of Christ is not in this sacrament secundum veritatem (according to truth, i.e., in truth), but only secundum figuram or as in signo (according to figure or as [meaning is] in a sign).” As we have seen, this is exactly the language the heretics have used to deny the faith.
 

The Angelic and Eucharistic Doctor (detail from an embroidered banner of St Dominic’s, Newcastle) Photo by Fr Lawrence Lew (source)

In his reply, St. Thomas first goes back to the old Patristic contrast between the Old Law and the New: since the Old Law already contained Christ’s passion in figura, it was necessary that the New Law should have something more, “namely, that it should contain Christ himself, the one who suffered, not only in signification or in figure, but also in the truth of the thing [in rei veritate].” Here we have the Patristic “truth” but with the addition of the word rei [“thing” or “reality”], seemingly to distinguish this “truth” from other ways in which the sacrament could be “true.” St. Thomas goes on to add a more medieval meditation:

Second, this belongs to Christ’s love, out of which for our salvation he assumed a true body of our nature. And because it is the special feature of friendship to live together with friends, as the Philosopher says (Ethic. ix), he promises us His bodily presence as a reward, saying (Matt. 24, 28): Where the body is, there shall the eagles be gathered together. Yet meanwhile in our pilgrimage he does not deprive us of his bodily presence; but unites us with himself in this sacrament through the truth of His body and blood. Hence (John 6, 57) he says: He that eats my flesh, and drinks my blood, abides in me, and I in him. Hence this sacrament is the sign of supreme charity, and the uplifter of our hope, from such familiar union of Christ with us.

Notice that St. Thomas uses the word “presence,” which is not a major word in the Church Fathers, and we find this word in the phrase “bodily presence.” Taken by itself, “bodily presence” could lead to misunderstanding, but Aquinas rephrases it as a union of Christ with us “through the truth of His body,” thus going back to traditional wording as the final explanation.

Aquinas’ use of “bodily presence” brings us close to what O’Connor claims is the first use of “real presence” in history, namely, Pope Urban IV’s bull Transiturus of 1264, extending the feast of Corpus Christi to the entire Western church. Urban IV says:

This is the memorial most sweet and salvific in which we gratefully recall the memory of our redemption, in which we are drawn from evil, strengthened in good, and secure an increase in virtues and graces, the memorial in which we attain the corporeal presence [corporali praesentia] of the Savior himself. Other things whose memory we keep we embrace spiritually and mentally [spiritu menteque complectimus]: we do not thereby obtain their real presence [realem praesentiam]. However, in this sacramental commemoration of Christ, Jesus Christ is present with us in his proper substance [propria substantia], although under another form. (HM 194)

What does “real presence” mean here? In this text, the term “real presence” is used in parallel with “bodily presence” and with the phrase “present in his proper substance,” in contrast with things present to us in such a way that we can (only) embrace them with our mind or spirit. His point lines up with the second argument quoted above from Aquinas, because Aquinas is speaking in the context of friendship and Urban is speaking in terms of what we “embrace” in a memorial. When we commemorate other things, we embrace them in mind or in spirit, but when we commemorate Christ’s death we embrace Him with the body. (As we know, Urban entrusted Aquinas with composing the office for the feast of Corpus Christi, so he may even have relied on him for some of the text of Transiturus—this possibility cannot be ruled out.)

It seems that the Augustinian res / sacramentum distinction may have prepared the way for Urban’s use of realis praesentia. The obvious meaning of realis praesentia would be a presence “through the res,” and Urban puts this in parallel with corporali praesentia, which seems to be presence through the body itself. Perhaps we are supposed to see this against the background of the common view, expressed by Lombard in the text I quoted above, that the body is the res of the Eucharist. But since the contrast with realis here is not sacramentalis but memories embraced by the mind, the Augustinian language does not completely cover Urban’s usage.

To pull this all together, it seems that the contrast between Old Testament “figure” and New Testament “truth” was a normal way to speak about Christ in the Eucharist from Patristic times through the High Middle Ages. Heretics took up the contrast to say that the Eucharist is but a figure and not the true body, and in response, orthodox thinkers reasserted that the New Testament has the truth and not just a figure; they also worked out new distinctions, including the distinction between “res” and “sacramentum” (“reality” and “sacrament”). The word “presence” does not come up much prior to Urban, although St. Thomas’s reference to “bodily presence” does bring the word in, and his wording is reflected in Urban’s bull. Urban first uses the phrase “real presence” to indicate that Christ’s presence in the sacrament of the altar goes beyond the presence of other things or persons we commemorate in other commemorations, which he characterizes as embraced in mind and spirit. In short: “real” is not contrasted with “fake” but with “mental” or “spiritual.” (He does not use the term “real presence” in the context of the old contrast of figure/sign and truth, so it is hard to know whether he saw the term as helpful for that context.)

Nevertheless, the phrase “real presence” later became the dominant name for this mystery in the West. So dominant is the phrase “real presence” in later theology that translations tend to import it. For example, the Catechism of the Council of Trent quotes St. Hilary, who says, “There is no room for doubt regarding the truth of Christ’s body and blood,” but the TAN translation of the Catechism renders that “regarding the real presence of Christ’s body and blood.” Countless times I have found translations of older texts replacing “truly” with “really.”
 

Aristotle (source)

As an aside, Schmemann is mistaken to attribute a definition of “real” to the Lateran Council. Perhaps there is a concept of reality behind the language of the council, but neither the word “real” nor the word “mystical” come up in the council. I think what Schmemann is objecting to is the very notion of transubstantiation. And how ironic that would be, considering that the Eastern Orthodox Church’s 1672 Synod of Jerusalem clearly taught the doctrine of Eucharistic metaousiosis (that is, change of substance or change of being), which was already taught more commonly under the equally telling expression metastoicheiosis or “change of elements.”

Nor is it legitimate to say one is “merely rejecting” the Aristotelian physics behind the term, for, as Paul VI pointed out, Aristotle’s distinction between substance and accident (whatever you wish to name them—the underlying thing and its logically posterior incidental or changeable features) is an inescapable concept in any realist philosophy whatsoever. The only alternatives are the philosophical systems of materialism and idealism. The former is patently absurd, since it can make no room for and give no account of the very concept of itself; and the latter, while defensible on its own terms, is impossible to reconcile either with an orthodox theology of creation or with an orthodox Christology, since it would obliterate the distinction between spirit and flesh, and thus give the lie to (among other things) the constant insistence of St John that the Word was made flesh.

Schmemann’s Critique of the West (Part 1): The Accusations

Alexander Schmemann (1921–83) was a highly influential Russian Orthodox priest and author who left a major mark on the renewal of Byzantine liturgical and sacramental theology, and on the thinking of some Roman Catholic liturgists as well. He was famous (infamous?) for his intense attacks on Western theology, which he believed to be thoroughly contaminated with a rationalism and a reductionism inimical to mystery. (It should not be forgotten that he also rather sharply criticized many aspects of modern Eastern Orthodoxy.) It would be tempting for traditionalists to give ear to these arguments because, if they are correct, they would seem to demonstrate a broader liturgical crisis in the West that is rooted in a false Thomistic distinction, which, over the centuries, changed how Christians understood and received the sacraments and liturgy.

My goal in this new series of articles is to summarize his major objections (part 1) and then respond to them in a way that is both sympathetic to whatever is legitimate in his concerns, and sharply critical of his misunderstanding (at times extreme) of Western theology (parts 2 and subsequent).

One of Schmemann’s most important books, For the Life of the World, expounds how the Church is a sacrament/epiphany of Christ, and how the Church is her liturgy. After meditating on the Church’s liturgy as the work of Christ extended in time, Fr. Schmemann addresses secularism, which he defines as “above all a negation of worship” (p. 146), because its core doctrine is a negation of “the sacramentality of man and world. A secularist views the world as containing within itself its meaning and the principles of knowledge and action” (p. 147). He then cites the Lateran council of 1215 and St. Thomas Aquinas as watershed moments in the origin of secularism as a post-Patristic and anti-Patristic way of conceiving the world and its relation to God.

Here is a key passage:

At the end of the twelfth century a Latin theologian, Berengarius of Tours, was condemned for his teaching on the Eucharist. He maintained that because the presence of Christ in the eucharistic elements is “mystical” or “symbolic,” it is not real. The Lateran Council which condemned him … simply reversed the formula. It proclaimed that since Christ’s presence in the Eucharist is real, it is not “mystical.” What is truly decisive here is precisely the disconnection and the opposition of the two terms verum and mystice, the acceptance, on both sides, that they are mutually exclusive. (p. 152)

Aquinas, starting from this point, introduced the dichotomy characteristic of secularism:

And since then, Christian thought, in scholasticism and beyond it, never ceased to oppose these terms … it is indeed implied already in Thomism, with its basic epistemological distinction between causa prima and causae secundae. Here is the real cause of secularism, which is ultimately nothing else but the affirmation of the world’s autonomy, of its self-sufficiency in terms of reason, knowledge, and action. The downfall of Christian symbolism led to the dichotomy of the “natural” and “supernatural” as the only framework of Christian thought and experience. (p. 153)

(Note that Schmemann, in effect, is summarizing DeLubac’s argument in Surnaturel.) It follows that, Aquinas—the theologian par excellence of the Latin West—has, according to Schmemann, a different metaphysics or ontology than the Church Fathers do.

Later on, Fr. Schmemann explains further by explicating the relationship between sacrament and liturgy. He explains that the Church Fathers related these two in an ontologically different manner than Aquinas and Scholasticism:

In the early Church, in the writings of the Fathers, sacraments, inasmuch as they are given any systematic interpretation, are always explained in the context of their actual liturgical celebration, the explanation being, in fact, an exegesis of the liturgy itself in all its ritual complexity and concreteness. The medieval De Sacramentis, however, tends from its very inception to isolate the “sacrament” from liturgical context, to find and to define in terms as precise as possible its essence i.e., that which distinguishes it from the “non-sacrament.” Sacrament in a way begins to be opposed to liturgy. It has, of course, ritual expression, its “signum” which belongs to its essence, but this sign is viewed now as ontologically different from all other signs, symbols, and rites of the Church. And because of this difference, the precise sacramental sign alone is considered, to the exclusion of all other “liturgy,” the proper object of theological attention. One can for example read and reread the elaborate treatment given in St. Thomas’ Summa to sacraments without yet knowing much about their liturgical celebration. (p. 163)

Again:

St. Maximus the Confessor, the sacramental theologian par excellence of the patristic age, calls the body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist symbols (“symbola”), images (“apeikonismata”), and mysteries (“mysteria”). “Symbolical” here is not only not opposed to “real,” but embodies it as its very expression and mode of manifestation. Historians of theology, in their ardent desire to maintain the myth of theological continuity and orderly “evolution,” here again find their explanation in the “imprecision” of patristic terminology. They do not seem to realize that the Fathers’ use of “symbolon” (and related terms) is not “vague” or “imprecise” but simply different from that of the later theologians, and that the subsequent transformation of these terms constitutes indeed the source of one of the greatest theological tragedies. (p. 165)

And driving home his argument:

In the early tradition . . . the relationship between the sign in the symbol (A) and that which it “signifies” (B) is neither a merely semantic one (A means B), nor causal (A is the cause of B), nor representative (A represents B). We called this relationship an epiphany. “A is B” means that the whole of A expresses, communicates, reveals, manifests, the “reality” of B (although not necessarily the whole of it) without, however, losing its own ontological reality, without being dissolved in another “res.” But it was precisely this relationship between the A and the B, between the sign and the signified, that was changed. Because of the reduction of knowledge to rational or discursive knowledge, there appears between A and B a hiatus. The symbol may still be a means of knowledge but, as all knowledge, it is knowledge about and not knowledge of. It can be a revelation about the “res,” but not the epiphany of the “res” itself. A can mean B, or represent it, or even, in certain instances, be the “cause” of its presence; but A is no longer viewed as the very means of “participation” in B. Knowledge and participation are now two different realities, two different orders. (p. 168)

It is this kind of reasoning that leads Fr. Schmemann to conclude: “The doctrine of transubstantiation, in its Tridentine form, is truly the collapse, or rather the suicide, of sacramental theology” (p. 170). One may certainly sympathize with this line of argument, inasmuch as we see conventional Thomists teaching about sacraments in isolation or abstraction from liturgy and exaggerating the principle of magisterial authority to the denigration and effective cancelation of tradition.

Next week, I will begin my response by answering this question: Did the Lateran Council give a bad and unpatristic definition of “real” as opposed to “mystical”?
 

with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Visit Dr. Kwasniewski’s Substack “Tradition & Sanity”; personal site; composer site; publishing house Os Justi Press and YouTube, SoundCloud, and Spotify pages.

Wisdom! Let Us Be Attentive!

Protopresbyter Alexander Schmemann (1921-83), one of the most respected figures in Orthodoxy in the 20th century, on beauty in the liturgy: “The liturgy is, before everything else, the joyous gathering of those who are to meet the risen Lord and to enter with him into the bridal chamber. And it is this joy of expectation and this expectation of joy that are expressed in singing and ritual, in vestments and in censing, in that whole ‘beauty’ of the liturgy which has so often been denounced as unnecessary and even sinful. Unnecessary it is indeed, for we are beyond the categories of the ‘necessary.’ Beauty is never ‘necessary,’ ‘functional’ or ‘useful.’ And when, expecting someone whom we love, we put a beautiful tablecloth on the table and decorate it with candles and flowers, we do all this not out of necessity, but out of love. And the Church is love, expectation and joy.” (From his book For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy)

Byzantine Ressourcement? Liturgical Reform in the Orthodox Churches as a Model for the Roman Rite

You would have to be a liturgical ostrich not to be aware that the Roman Rite has been a battleground for the last 70 years or so. At times I have been tempted to look wistfully over the garden fence at the Eastern Rite churches, and wish we had it like them. They have been sailing along steadily and peacefully, as far as I was aware, in an unchanging bubble of serene mysticism, apparently untouched by any of the controversy that is ripping the institutional Roman Church apart. Ever since St John Chrysostom and St Basil put stylus to diptych and composed their liturgies, all has been sweetness and uncreated light. I thought.

Now I am not so sure.

I have recently been working my way through some books on the liturgy by the Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World; Of Water and Spirit - A Liturgical Study of Baptism, An Introduction to Liturgical Theology, and Great Lent - Journey to Pascha.

These books paint a beautiful picture of how our worship ought to relate to the Christian life, which is also applicable in general terms, I would say, to participation in Roman Rite. What is surprising to me, however, is how critical he is of the Eastern Rite that he saw in his day, and the reforms he suggests to counter problems within it. It became apparent to me that the Eastern liturgies I had been attending, and assumed had been unchanged since their inception, were in fact recently reformed. And, what was even more surprising to me, that reform was in accordance with the principles by which the Roman Liturgical Reform movement of the 19th and 20th centuries had proposed to change the Latin Mass, and for the most part, failed.

A Melkite liturgy in the USA

Alexander Schmemann was born of Russian parents in Estonia in 1921, and grew up primarily in France as part of the thriving Russian expatriate community of Paris. In 1951, he moved to the United States, where he was a member of the Orthodox Church of America. The books named above were written in the period between the mid-1960s and his death in 1983.

In his writing, he makes the occasional passing reference to the Roman Rite (which for him is just beyond the pale) and then addresses his concerns with the Orthodox liturgy of his day. As mentioned, these criticisms of the Divine Liturgy are strikingly similar to those that the liturgical reformers of the 19th and 20th centuries made of the Tridentine Mass. Indeed, Schmemann cites the familiar names of this movement as authorities, and like them, looks to the early Church for a model of how the liturgy ought to be. He quotes, for example, Dom Gregory Dix, Oscar Cullmann, Joachim Jeremias, Jean Danielou, Romano Guardini, Louis Bouyer, and even Yves Congar.

His specific worries about the Orthodox liturgy will sound familiar to us even if some of the specifics are different: the laity have become detached from the clergy in their worship, and so are not participating actively, and they are more likely to be engaged in devotional prayer than in the worship of God; the detachment has occurred in part because the profusion of secret prayers said by the clergy and the physical barrier of the iconostasis which all but hides the activity of the priest. This detachment has led also to clericalism, in which the importance of the role of the laity in worship is diminished, while that of the priest is exaggerated relative to it.

A iconostasis in Moscow, dating from 1693

He tells us that the chanting of the propers has become too ornate and melismatic so that it cannot be understood by those who hear and is too difficult for the laity to sing. And he complains of the profusion of an artificial symbolism that hides the true meaning of the liturgy, “not the symbolism as the sacramentality of all God’s creation,” he says, “but that allegorical symbolism that confers on each part of the sacred rite a special meaning, making it a representation of something that is not.”

Furthermore, somehow Eastern Rite Churches, both Orthodox and Catholic, have managed to varying degrees, to implement his recommended changes. I say this based upon personal experience of attending Divine Liturgy in the UK and the US and so, admittedly, it is anecdotal.

Contrast this to what has happened in the Roman Rite. If I was to characterize the broad pattern of the response to the impetus for reform in the Roman Rite, it is characterized by two poles - complete resistance to any change on the part of those who attend the Traditional Latin Mass on the one hand, and radical and misdirected change in the Novus Ordo on the other.

When we look at Eastern Churches we see something different. The liturgies have been translated into the vernacular; in the ones I have attended, into understandable but elegant English. The laity sing the chants along with the ordained ministers. The iconostases are open and lower than the ‘traditional’ ‘image-wall’ iconostasis seen above - sometimes more like an English medieval rood screen, and the Royal Doors at least are made in such a way as to to allow the altar to be seen during the whole Liturgy. The prayers of the clergy can be heard and understood. The “spirit” of these changes, if I can use that phrase, is therefore closer to those which the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council hoped for in the Roman Mass. Furthermore, these have been implemented by Orthodox Churches that do not consider themselves bound by the Council (and very likely in most cases by people who have never read it or even thought about doing so).

A modern Greek Orthodox church in Shrewsbury, England.

A modern iconostasis at the Russian Orthodox church of St Nicholas in Amsterdam.

The effect of Schmemann on the Eastern Catholic Churches is just as notable. I am told that if you had gone into a Byzantine Catholic church in the 1950s, you would have seen something different from the Orthodox liturgies that Schmemann was criticizing. It would most likely have been a highly Romanized version of the Divine Liturgy, very close in style and content to a Roman Mass. Now, you are more likely to see a reformed Divine Liturgy which is purged of its Roman influence and reflects the ‘Eastern Ressourcement’ influence of Schmemann. These Churches do recognize Vatican II, but in this case the Council had very little to say about them (although what was said was very positive). The changes in the liturgy conform to an instruction that was part of a single sentence in Orientalium Ecclesiarum, the decree of the Council, promulgated in 1964 to the Eastern Church. It declared:

...it is the mind of the Catholic Church that each individual Church or Rite should retain its traditions whole and entire and likewise that it should adapt its way of life to the different needs of time and place. (2).

The fact that a single sentence of instruction can bear such fruit undermines the argument of some critics of the Council, that it was deliberately written in a tone of aggressive ambiguity in order to sow confusion. It suggests, on the contrary, that there was more than sufficient detail addressed to the Roman Church, if one accepts and genuinely takes the trouble to try to understand what was said. No matter how clearly articulated, and detailed the language of the Constitutions, if on the other hand, people are disposed willfully to misinterpret or ignore the text, they will do so. And this, I suggest, is what has happened.

A number of thoughts arise from this. First, Schmemann was part of the expatriate community in Paris in the mid-20th century that included the great figures that re-established the traditional forms of the iconographic tradition, such as Ouspensky, Kroug, Lossky, and Evdokimov. It strikes me as no accident that a reform of the liturgy and a reform of the culture of faith go hand in hand. The approach to tradition and its relation to modernity is driven by the same principle, which is exactly what I learned in my icon painting classes with Aidan Hart. There has been a similar flourishing of Orthodox architecture and music. All of this is still largely absent in the Western Church, where we swing between the poles of historicism and liberalism. If we are to evangelize the culture of the West, we still need, I believe, that liturgical reform. Neither the Tridentine Mass circa 1955 nor the standard suburban rite, circa 1970 can drive it, in my opinion.

Second, it does beg the question: why have Eastern Churches reformed their liturgies successfully with little or no input from the Council, while the Roman Church, to which most of what the Council had to say was directed, has failed so spectacularly?

I have some thoughts on this, which I will address in a future blog post. (However, I would say that one factor is the difference in governance as highlighted in Everything Hidden Shall Be Revealed, Ridding the Church of Abuses of Sex and Power by Adam DeVille, published by Angelico Press.)

Announcing Liturgy Outside Liturgy: The Liturgical Theology of Fr. Alexander Schmemann by David Fagerberg

Chorabooks has just released what looks like a fascinating book, pertinent to readers of NLM.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

David W. Fagerberg, Liturgy outside Liturgy. The Liturgical Theology of Fr. Alexander Schmemann.
Hong Kong: Chorabooks, 2018.
Paperback $ 24.60            ISBN 9789887851547
EBook (Kindle) $ 9.83     ISBN 9789887851509
EBook (Epub) Euro 6.99  ISBN 9789887851585

Available immediately in all the Amazon stores in Kindle and paperback format, and in more than 100 online stores in Epub format (Feltrinelli, Rizzoli, Mondadori, hoepli, Book Republic, Libreria universitaria, San Paolo store, Il fatto quotidiano, Il giardino dei libri, Google play, Ibooks store, Kobobooks, Tolino, Casa del libro, Bajalibros, Nookstore, Weltbild, El corte inglés, Barnes and Nobles, etc.)

DESCRIPTION

"Does liturgy only matter to members of the Jesus Club when they get together to kill a Sunday morning? Is liturgy basically nothing more than temple etiquette, inessential to the mundane world? Should liturgy matter outside the Church?"

This is an important question that David W. Fagerberg, Theology Professor at Notre Dame University asks himself and us. And to answer this question, he is presenting the thought of Fr. Alexander Schmemann (1921-1983), who was a leading theologian in the Orthodox Church in America and one of the foremost thinkers in liturgical theology. The material is based on careful scholarship, but presented in such a way that the common reader will also benefit from the many powerful insights that can be found in it.

Schmemann made powerful statements to make readers think seriously. For example, about the world he says, “We seem to forget that in the New Testament and in the whole Christian tradition the ‘world’ is the object of two apparently contradicting attitudes: an emphatic acceptance, a yes, but also an equally emphatic rejection, a no.” And about the relationship of theology and the Church he writes, “[Theology] today constitutes within the Church a self-centered world, virtually isolated from the Church’s life. It lives in itself and by itself in tranquil academic quarters, well defended against profane intrusions and curiosities by a highly technical language. Theologians avoid discussing the trivial reality of the Church’s life, and do not even dream about influencing it in any way. In turn the Church, i.e., the bishops, priests and laity, are supremely indifferent to the writings of the theologians, even when they do not regard them with open suspicion. … Theology simply fails to reach anybody but professionals, to provoke anything but esoteric controversies in academic periodicals.”

Against the dangers of a liturgy that is auto referential, Fagerberg observes that “Liturgical reform should not, therefore, be self-serving; liturgical reform is a matter of empowering the Church’s leitourgia, which is the work of a few on behalf of the many.” He summarizes the conclusion his book in this way: “Let me conclude with a glance back over all three investigations: should liturgy matter, where is theology done, and does liturgy enter our life? In these three questions we were only following Schmemann’s own definition of the goal of liturgical theology, which is to overcome the fateful divorce between theology, liturgy, and piety. This breakup deprived liturgy of its proper understanding, theology of its living source, and piety of its living content. … The liturgical cult does not exist for itself, but for the sake of the world, for the sake of understanding and transforming the world.”

This book is not only for academic theologians, but also for all those who love the liturgy and are willing to be challenged with a fresh perspective on this fundamental topic for our Christian life.

AUTHOR

David W. Fagerberg is a theology professor at the University of Notre Dame (Indiana, USA). Fagerberg’s area of study is liturgical theology: its definition and methodology, and how the Church’s lex orandi (law of prayer) is the foundation for her lex credendi  (law of belief). Lately he has been working on how liturgy, theology, and asceticism interrelate. He also has interests in sacramental theology, Eastern Orthodoxy, linguistic philosophy, scholasticism, G. K. Chesterton and C. S. Lewis. He is the author of several books, including Consecrating the World: On Mundane Liturgical Theology (Angelico Press, 2016).

*          *          *

A COMMENT FROM DR. KWASNIEWSKI

Reading the sentence quoted above, "The liturgical cult does not exist for itself, but for the sake of the world, for the sake of understanding and transforming the world,” one might feel a slight misgiving. Apart from the obvious sense in which this is true, namely, that liturgy is not a club activity, like a game, could it not be dangerous to say that the cultus of God is for understanding and transforming the world? This may sound like a Marxist redirection of worship away from the divine towards the mundane and immanent? Do not the Orthodox rightly say that liturgy is doxology, the acknowledgment and praise of God in His greatness and for Himself -- which then spills over (or can and should spill over) into the rest of our lives?

But we have to understand the sense in which Fagerberg -- and Schmemann and Kavanaugh, if I construe them rightly -- understand this world-liturgy dialectic. This trio of authors has to be understood as offering a creative, redemptive response to religion's headlong rush into the arms of Marxism. When the whole world was deserting "organized religion" and "dogmas" as "irrelevant" to the world-changing processes going on, they argued that the liturgy was "the world done right." When the denominations were being suburbanized, taken away from the center of life in the city, they proposed bringing liturgy "back to the city." Against the psychologists who said religion was "abnormal," they said liturgy was the only way to be "normal." So, the world-transforming aspect should be understood as a corrective of Marxism, which thinks that the world can be understood and transformed by human action alone. Liturgy is the real revolution, if you will, and the real psycho-therapy, precisely because it is not reducible to horizontal political and economic relationships or psychological categories, but is inherently from above and ordered beyond itself.

Christ came as an epiphany in order to transform the world for the Father's glory, which is revealed in and through creation, embodied in man rescued from sin and death. As the extension of the Incarnation, the sacred liturgy participates in this mission, for the life of the world, to hasten it on its reditus to the Creator. The liturgy is therefore meant to be the axis of human culture, the pole star around which the constellation of all human endeavors circles, the vital center of civilization. It is a fleshly, sensible regime of worship proportioned, like the Incarnation, to man's bodily nature, given to us to draw our attention and devotion to God, granting us a dramatic vision of the universe gathered in worship of its Final End. This vision allows us to coordinate all our activity toward our End, thus fulfilling our role as high priests in bringing all things to God.

From what I have read over the years, it seems that Fr. Schmemann, whatever his limitations from a traditional Catholic perspective, is well positioned to help us work through these points, with a combination of mystical penetration and no-nonsense critique. I am therefore happy to see this new book by Fagerberg and look forward to digging into it.