St. John Cassian, Feb. 29

Icon of St. John Cassian the Roman

Today on the Byzantine calendar is the feast of St. John Cassian. There is a nice biography of this link between East and West at the Orthodox Church of America’s website. But for some fun reading, I thought I would offer Vladimir Soloviev’s interpretation of a Russian legend as to why St. John Cassian had a feast day on leap year. One might object to his interpretation, but it seems a worthy reflection for this feast day.

A popular Russian legend tells how St. Nicolas and St. Cassian were upon a visit to the earth. On their journey they met a poor peasant who had got his wagon, with a load of hay upon it, stuck in the mud and was making fruitless efforts to get his horses on.
“Let’s go and give the good fellow a hand,” said St. Nicolas.
“Not I; I’m keeping out of it,” replied St. Cassian, “I don’t want to get my coat dirty.”
“Well, wait for me,” said St. Nicolas, “or go on without me if you like,” and plunging without hesitation into the mud he vigorously assisted the peasant in dragging his wagon out of the rut. When he had finished the job and caught his companion up, he was all covered in filth; his coat was torn and soiled and looked like a beggar’s rags. St. Peter was amazed to see him arrive at the gate of Paradise in this condition.
“I say! Who ever got you into that state?” he asked. St. Nicolas told his story.
“And what about you?” asked St. Peter, turning to St. Cassian. “Weren’t you with him in this encounter?”
“Yes, but I don’t meddle in things that are no concern of mine, and I was especially anxious not to get my beautiful clean coat dirty.”
“Very well,” said St. Peter, “you, St. Nicolas, because you were not afraid of getting dirty in helping your neighbor out of a difficulty, shall for the future have two feasts a year, and you shall be reckoned the greatest of saints after me by all the peasants of holy Russia. And you, St. Cassian, must be content with having a nice clean coat; you shall have your feast day in leap-year only, once every four years.” 

We may well forgive St. Cassian for his dislike of manual labor and the mud of the highroad. But he would be quite wrong to condemn his companion for having a different idea of the duties of Saints towards mankind. We may like St. Cassian’s clean and spotless clothes, but since our wagon is still deep in the mud, St. Nicolas is the one we really need, the stout-hearted Saint who is always ready to get to work and help us.

The Western Church, faithful to the apostolic mission, has not been afraid to plunge into the mire of history. After having been for centuries the only element of moral order and intellectual culture among the barbarous peoples of Europe, it undertook the task not only of the spiritual education of these peoples of independent spirit and uncivilized instincts but also of their material government.

In devoting itself to this arduous task the Papacy, like St. Nicolas in the legend, thought not so much of the cleanliness of its own appearance as of the urgent needs of mankind. The Eastern Church, on the other hand, with its solitary asceticism and its contemplative mysticism, its withdrawal from political life and from all the social problems which concern mankind as a whole, thought chiefly, like St. Cassian, of reaching Paradise without a single stain on its clothing. 

The Western Church aimed at employing all its powers, divine and human, for the attainment of a universal goal; the Eastern Church was only concerned with the preservation of its purity. There is the chief point of difference and the fundamental cause of the schism between the two Churches. 

It is a question of a different ideal of the religious life itself. The religious ideal of the separated Christian East is not false; it is incomplete. In Eastern Christendom for the last thousand years religion has been identified with personal piety, and prayer has been regarded as the one and only religious activity.
The Western Church, without disparaging individual piety as the true germ of all religion, seeks the development of this germ and its blossoming into a social activity organized for the glory of God and the universal good of mankind. The Eastern prays, the Western prays and labors. Which of the two is right?

Jesus Christ founded His visible Church not merely to meditate on heaven, but also to labor upon earth and to withstand the gates of hell. He did not send His apostles into the solitude of the desert, but into the world to conquer it and subject it to the Kingdom which is not of this world, and He enjoined upon them not only the innocence of doves but also the wisdom of serpents. If it is merely a question of preserving the purity of the Christian soul, what is the purpose of all the Church’s social organization and of all those sovereign and absolute powers with which Christ has armed her in giving her final authority to bind and to loose on earth as well as in heaven?

The monks of the holy mountain of Athos, true representatives of the isolated Eastern Church, have for centuries spent all their energies in prayer and the contemplation of the uncreated light of Tabor. They are perfectly right; prayer and the contemplation of uncreated things are essential to the Christian life.

But can we allow that this occupation of the soul constitutes the whole Christian life? — or that is what we must do if we try to put the Orthodox East, with its peculiar character and special religious tendencies, in the place of the Universal Church. We have in the East a Church at prayer, but where among us is the Church in action, asserting itself as a spiritual force absolutely independent of the powers of this world?

Where in the East is the Church of the living God, the Church which in every generation legislates for mankind, which establishes and develops the formulation of eternal truth with which to counteract the continually changing formulas of error? Where is the Church which labors to re-mould the whole social life of the nations in accordance with the Christian ideal, and to guide them towards the supreme goal of Creation — free and perfect union with the Creator?

The advocates of an exclusive asceticism should remember that the perfect Man spent only forty days in the wilderness; those who contemplate the light of Tabor should not forget that that light appeared only once in the earthly life of Christ, Who proved by His own example that true prayer and true contemplation are simply a foundation for the life of action.

If this great Church, which for centuries has done nothing but pray, has not prayed in vain, she must show herself a living Church, acting, struggling, victorious. But we ourselves must will that it be so. We must above all recognize the insufficiency of our traditional religious ideal, and make a sincere attempt to realize a more complete conception of Christianity. There is no need to invent or create anything new for this purpose. We merely have to restore to our religion its Catholic or universal character by recognizing our oneness with the active part of the Christian world, with the West centralized and organized for a universal activity and possessing all that we lack.
We are not asked to change our nature as Easterns or to repudiate the specific character of our religious genius.

We have only to recognize unreservedly the elementary truth that we of the East are but a part of the Universal Church, a part moreover which has not its center within itself, and that therefore it behooves us to restore the link between our individual forces upon the circumference and the great universal center which Providence has placed in the West. There is no question of suppressing our religious and moral individuality but rather of crowning it and inspiring it with a universal and progressive life.

The whole of our duty to ourselves consists simply in recognizing ourselves for what we are in reality, an organic part of the great body of Christendom, and in affirming our spiritual solidarity with our Western brethren. This moral act of justice and charity would be in itself an immense step forward on our part and the essential condition of all further advance.

St. Cassian need not become a different person or cease to care about keeping his clothes spotless. He must simply recognize that his comrade has certain important qualities which he himself lacks, and instead of sulking at this energetic worker he must frankly accept him as his companion and guide on the earthly voyage that still lies before them.

St. Joseph in the East

Today at Wyoming Catholic College there is a general euphoria for the celebration of the Solemnity of St. Joseph. Parties are being given, Italian dinners will be consumed, and in general, the students will be frolicking in the joy of the feast of the Guardian. The feast, however, does not existent on the liturgical calendar for the Ukrainian Greek Catholics. Following the 10th century Typikon of the Monastery of St. Sabas, our only liturgical commemoration for St. Joseph is the Sunday after the Nativity, when we commemorate King David, St. Joseph, and St. James, the brother of Our Lord according to the flesh. The Syriac tradition observes a feast of the Revelation to St. Joseph on the Second Sunday before Christmas, so, while offering a slightly different emphasis it agrees with the the Byzantine tradition in making St Joseph’s feasts part of the Nativity season.  I’ll admit to being slightly confused as to why the Latin Church observes her own feast when she does: it is in some proximity to the Annunciation, although one would tend to think a feast that commemorates Joseph taking Mary into his home would fall on the days following the Annunciation, not before it. (I’m told that current liturgical historians think that the date may arise from the previous observance of Joseph of Antioch’s feast on March 20th, and a linking of the two.) For their part, my Latin students are no less puzzled that any Catholic Church does not observe the feast day of the universal patron of the Church. (Even if Joseph’s title of universal patron is not explicitly linked to the current Roman liturgical commemoration of him, I have found that in the hearts of many the title is still linked with the day.)

The mutual bemusement led me to consider the history of devotion to St. Joseph in the Christian East, which seems to have especially flowered in Egypt. This is probably due to the importance the Egyptian Church placed on the the Infant Christ’s entrance into Egypt, and St. Joseph’s integral role in that regard. Many of the local churches of Egypt that claimed to have been a resting spot or even a residence for the Holy Pilgrims came to observe the feast of the Flight into 

Egypt on various days, and by the early 15th century, as recorded in the Synaxarion of the Coptic Church of Alexandria, each local church was allowed to commemorate the feast in conjunction with the feast of the dedication of the particular church.

A  fifth century (or perhaps earlier) apocryphal text, “The History of Joseph the Carpenter”, gives testimony to the liturgical commemoration of the death of St. Joseph, observed on the 26th of the Egyptian month of Abib (the 2nd of August on the Gregorian Calendar). The text in its present form opens with a doxology that seems designed for liturgical worship, and concludes with a doxology as well. Certainly by the 15th century synaxarion mentioned above, the Alexandrian use had uniformly adopted the feast on August 2 as the feast of the Transition of Joseph into Heaven.

I find the apocryphal text itself to be a beautiful read, admittedly with some occasional eyebrow raising, but on the whole a lovely meditation on Joseph’s relationship to Christ.  The narrative of his life and death is placed on the lips of Christ, as He entrusts this story to His Apostles as part of His own Gospel.  The text adopts the fairly uniform position of the East that St. Joseph was a widower, and an old man by the time he married the Theotokos. In the account, Joseph is held to be the father of six children, with James the Just still being a child when Joseph, at the spry age of 90, took the Virgin into his home. It also stresses that Joseph was a Patriarch in the ancient tradition, remaining spry and active well past 100, until finally be overtaken by death at the age of 111. Regardless of how much credence one gives to the particulars, the story remains the earliest testimony to devotion to St. Joseph.

From here, the Coptic Church would eventually develop an entire liturgical office for St. Joseph. The office, and implicitly the ranking of St. Joseph himself, is placed in the following order: first the office for the Theotokos, then that of the Angels, then that of John the Baptist, then St. Joseph, then the Apostles and subsequent saints. This ranking is testimony to a tradition seemingly referenced even by St. Thomas Aquinas in the West (Super Sent., lib. 2 d. 11 q. 2 a. 4 ad 2) which sees John the Baptist above all other men, but just after the Angels, in accordance with Christ’s words in Matthew 11, 11. Nevertheless, devotion to St. Joseph does not seem especially active in the current Coptic Church.

In the early 1800’s, the Melkite Patriarch Maximos III introduced the observance of the Feast of St. Joseph into his church’s liturgical year on March 19. However, the title of the feast was given as “The Feast of the Transition of St. Joseph the Betrothed into Heaven.” As such, it is the second feast of St. Joseph on the Melkite calendar, and I am struck by the Patriarch’s thoughtfulness in its regard. He was attempting at the time to balance certain pressures from Rome, and especially the Latin missionary movement, and thus introduced the increasingly popular observance of St. Joseph on the 19th of March. But he also tried to in some way connect it to the liturgical tradition of the East. Since a feast of St. Joseph as the foster father of Christ already existed on the Byzantine calendar on the Sunday after Christmas, he instead looked to Egypt’s long tradition of observing the dormition of Joseph.

The Ukrainian Church, on the other hand, has not yet seen fit to introduce the feast into its own Lenten calendar. Since the Council of Trullo forbade any Divine Liturgies on the weekdays of Lent besides the feast of the Annunciation, it would bring a lot of questions in any case. Would it be observed at a Presanctified liturgy with a Gospel, as is done for the few other weekday liturgical commemorations of Lent (The First and Second Findings of the Head of John the Baptist, and the Feast of the 40 Martyrs of Sebaste)? Would it be transferred to a given Saturday of Lent, as was done with the feast of St. Theodore the Recruit? Or, (this seems very unlikely), would the UGCC adopt a full observance on the 19th of March, with a Divine Liturgy? The Melkite church had, under the influence of the Latin Church, come to observe daily Divine Liturgies through Lent, so the introduction of the March 19th feast did not immediately raise these questions for them; I don’t have enough experience with the current practice of the Melkites to know what they are doing at present.

What has been adopted, by the UGCC, in good Slavic tradition, is the praying of an Akathist to St. Joseph. The Akathist (literally “not sitting”) is a 6th century Marian hymn that has a pride of place in Bzyantine Marian devotion. In the Slavic Churches, a variety of Akathists, patterned on the 6th century exemplar, were composed and dedicated to various saints, themes, or titles of Our Lady. The Church of Kyiv that is in union with Rome, produced a very lovely Akathist to Joseph the Betrothed. The Marian Akathist is actually prayed liturgically as part of the Matins for the fifth Sunday of Lent, and in some monasteries is part of Friday night Compline throughout Lent. The Akathist of St Joseph, however, has no corresponding liturgical commemoration, and thus remains a private devotion. But the more I pray it, the more I am struck by how the prayer weaves in themes from the liturgy of the Byzantine Church, be they themes from the Royal Hours of Christmas Eve, or appropriations of other liturgical texts not connected to Joseph, which offer an interpretation of them in light of St. Joseph’s role. The whole prayer can be found here; for the moment, I will just highlight one of my favorite aspects of the prayer, Joseph’s role as the secret-keeper of the Incarnation. Since the time of St. Ignatius of Antioch, the Church has spoken about the great secret of Mary’s Virginity, and how the secret was kept from men and demons. The Akathist to Joseph highlights his role as the one who was instrumental in guarding this mystery:

Preserving the mystery of the birth of God the Word by the all-Pure Virgin, which is inaccessible even to the angels, from the slander of people and the craft of the devil, God chose you, O righteous Joseph, a lowly carpenter, to be the protector and witness of the virginity of the all-Holy Mary. 

Even though  my own liturgical tradition has not adopted the feast of March 19, I am sufficiently swayed by the festivities around me, and so in love with this akathist, that I will gladly sing it this evening.  For those of you with actual liturgical commemorations happening today, I hope you will take the time to at least pray part of this lovely collection of verses in honor to Joseph the Betrothed.

Rejoice, o righteous Joseph, ready helper and intercessor for our souls!

The Season of Revelation: The Feast of Theophany/Epiphany

Icon of Theophany

Yesterday, for those of the Byzantine tradition on the Gregorian calendar, was the second day of the octave of Theophany, the Synaxis of St. John the Forerunner. That feast is worthy of a post in its own right, the fourth major feast of St. John on the Calendar, making him a strong analogue to the Theotokos: both have a feast commemorating their conception (Sept. 23; Dec. 9), their birth (June 24; Sept. 8), and their death (Aug. 29; Aug. 15), and both have a synaxis the day after a major Christological feast commemorating their mediating role in salvation (Synaxis of the Theotokos on Dec. 26, and Synaxis of the Baptizer on Jan. 7). But more on that another time.

For those on the Julian calendar, however, yesterday was not January 7th, but Dec. 25th. Hence, for Eastern Christians in Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Israel (where the Latin Catholics already celebrated on Dec. 25th and the Armenians will celebrate on January 18) Bulgaria, Greece, Macedonia, Kazahkstan, Georgia, Moldova, Romania, Serbia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia, as well as various diaspora communities worldwide, yesterday was Christmas. While this ambiguity may stand out, the question about the proper date of the feast of Christmas is an old question that long predates the 16th-century creation of the Gregorian calendar, albeit the reasons for the question were different.

The Armenian observance of Christmas on Jan. 6, (January 18 due to the Julian calendar discrepancy) highlights the original question of the early Church: when to observe the feast of Theopany, that is, the feast of God’s revelation, and what is commemorated by that feast? The Armenian calendar observes a Theophany fast from Dec. 30-January 4th (a strict fast where traditionally no food at all is consumed), and then celebrates the Feast of Theophany, a feast which includes three dates: Jan. 6 for the Nativity of Christ, January 13 for the naming of Jesus, and Feb. 14 for the Presentation of our Lord in the Temple. This one feast of Theophany, therefore, extends to several distinct moments when God shines forth into our world: his birth, circumcision/naming, and meeting with Simeon. Each event is striking: angels singing to shepherds and the stars speaking to pagans, the revelation of the name of God that succeeds the revelation of the burning bush, and Simeon’s recognition of Jesus as the “light of revelation to the Gentiles, and the glory of the God’s people, Israel.” The one feast is the feast of revelation, and the Armenians have come to observe the above three events as those which most exceptionally characterize revelation.

St. Clement of Alexandria (c. 190 A.D.) is the first to reference the observance of the feast in his Stromata:

And there are those, out of over-curiosity, who have determined not only the year of our Lord's birth, but also the day; and they say that it took place in the twenty-eighth year of Augustus, and in the twenty-fifth day of Pachon (20 May). And the followers of Basilides hold the day of his baptism as a festival, spending the night before in readings. And they say that it was the fifteenth year of Tiberius Cæsar, the fifteenth day of the month Tubi (Jan. 6); and some that it was the eleventh of the same month (Jan. 10). And treating of His passion, with very great accuracy, some say that it took place in the sixteenth year of Tiberius, on the twenty-fifth of Phamenoth; and others the twenty-fifth of Pharmuthi and others say that on the nineteenth of Pharmuthi the Saviour suffered. Further, others say that He was born on the twenty-fourth or twenty-fifth of Pharmuthi (Apr. 19 or 20).

It is entirely possible that Basilidians’ observance of the Baptism was connected with their observance of Christ’s birth (which may or may not be deliberately implied here by Clement), although what led to this association is unknown. Some have speculated it had to do with Basilides’ theory that Christ received his Divinity at the Baptism, an idea that came to be linked to a variant reading of Luke 3:22. Whereas the best Greek manuscripts of the Gospel attribute the same message to God the Father as in Matthew and Mark: “You are my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased,” the Codex Bessae (Manuscript D), the Old Latin, and several early fathers cite Luke 3:22 as “You are my beloved Son, today I have begotten you.” While this version certainly lent itself to Adoptionist heretics who held that Christ became the Son of God at that moment, there is a strong tradition of Orthodox interpretation of the verse, beginning with Justin Martyr and continuing through Clement of Alexandria, Origen (who in this case was orthodox), Methodius of Olympus, Ephraim the Syrian, and even upheld by St. Augustine in his Harmony of the Gospels. The Ethiopian Didascalia picks up the link between baptism and begetting, and prescribes that the bishop lay his hands on the newly baptized and declare, “You are my sons; today I have begotten you.”  This same language is adopted in the Apostolic Constitutions; baptism was connected with the day of one’s birth.  This link between the Baptism of Christ and His begetting may be central to the Basilidians’ identification of the two events, and it certainly underlies the subsequent develops in the orthodox east.

For all the orthodox interpreters of the variant in Luke 3:22, the message is the same: the begetting of Christ refers to his public manifestation as the Messiah. Beginning with Justin Martyr, to be known is to be born. Thus, Christ’s birth is fundamentally a reference to the revelation of Him. What makes the Nativity a great event is not so much the Incarnation (that Mystery takes place at the Annunciation), but the revelation of the Incarnation. Angels make known the event to the shepherds, the stars make known the King to the Magi. The Nativity is an event of revelation, and thus the more full revelation of Jesus’ ministry is the second birth of Christ.

The reason for the date of January 6th seems linked to the date of the original Easter. In the quote from Clement, we already see a desire to link the date of Christ’s passover with date of his birth; he notes that those who held Easter to be on April 20th also wanted to suggest that the Nativity was on the same date. From early on the popular Christian imagination desired an exact number for our Lord’s age, although the group mentioned by Clement was not as precise as others, who made their calculations correspond not to the birth but to the conception of Christ. Eventually, when Tertullian’s suggestion that our Lord died on March 25 (cf. Adv. Jud. 8) became normative, so did the belief that the conception took place on March 25. Another tradition, attributed by Sozomen to the Montanists, held that Easter took place on April 6th; hence too, the argument would run, His conception, and thus his birth would be on January 6th.

From early on in Church history, therefore, we can see three things: 1) a desire to correlate the date of Easter with the date of Christ’s conception; 2) a preference for liturgically commemorating the birth of Christ over his conception, because 3) the link of birth with revelation. The early Church, therefore, while calculating the date for the conception of Christ, wanted to liturgically observe the revelation of the Incarnation before they turned their attention to commemorating the event of the Incarnation proper.

St. Athanasius in his masterpiece, On the Incarnation, lays out a theology that captures the fundamental principles behind the Early Church's concern for commemorating revelation.  In the work, Athanasius lays out the two-fold dilemma that led to the Word’s Incarnation: 1) the dilemma of death and 2) the dilemma of ignorance. The dilemma of death, namely the scandal of God’s own image being condemned to perpetual corruption, was resolved, according to Athanasius, by the event of Easter. Hence, the feast of Easter was principally a feast commemorating God's destruction of death. But the dilemma of ignorance was another major problem: man had been created logical, that is, given a share in the Logos, the Word of God. But now he only knew earthly realities, not the Word. Thus, along with fixing the problem of death, the Word needed to fix the problem of mankind’s ignorance of God. When the early Church went to expand her observance of the liturgical calendar, therefore, it was only fitting that the next feast correspond to Christ’s victory over ignorance, just as Easter corresponded to his victory over death.

Subsequent to Clement’s note, the first reference to the formal observance of the feast of Epiphany is in 361, but while the East seemed confident in the good of observing a feast of revelation, the content of that feast was more ambiguous. St. Epiphanius claims that the feast of Epiphany is the feast of the shining forth of Christ’s birth, but places Christ’s baptism in November. At the same time, he argues that Epiphany also commemorates the miracle of the wedding of Cana, and Ambrose suggests that the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves is captured by the Feast. But the focus on Baptism became dominant in Constantinople, Syria, and Alexandria. The ultimate Theophany was held to take place at the Baptism: both the public “birth” of Christ’s ministry, and the first public revelation of the Trinity. This is still the central theme of the Troparion for the feast:

When you were baptized in the Jordan, o Christ, worship of the Trinity was revealed. The voice of the Father bore witness to you, calling you His Beloved Son. And the Spirit in the form of a dove confirmed the certainty of these words. Glory to you, o Christ, who enlightened and sanctified the world.

In Jerusalem, however, the birth of Christ took a central role in the Theophany feast, probably due to the proximity of Bethlehem. The Syrians kept the dual focus of the birth and the baptism, and eventually the Armenian focus on the 6th as the day of the Nativity would win out. It is debated when January 6th was adopted by the Romans, but the most likely hypothesis is that Rome became acquainted with the feast of Theophany in the East, but chose to observe the feast on December 25th for a variety of hypothesized reasons.

Following Rome’s adoption of December 25, a new tendency arises in the East, namely, to split the observances of Theophany over two days: December 25th to correspond to the Nativity after the pattern of Rome, and January 6th to emphasize the fulfillment of the revelation promised at Christmas. Jerusalem was slow to adopt the change since it observed the feasts of St. David the King and St. James, brother of our Lord and first bishop of Jerusalem on December 25. (The Byzantine calendar subsequently to the adoption of December 25 as Christmas, moved that feast to the Sunday after Christmas, and added St. Joseph to the commemoration.) St. John Chrysostom seems to have been hugely influential in getting Antioch to make this change, and St. Gregory the Theologian promoted it in Constantinople. In fact, Gregory’s festal homilies for Christmas and Theophany propose a theological vision for the three great feasts of the Church that correspond to the three births of Christ: His birth at Christmas, His birth at his Baptism, and His birth as first-born of the dead, at Easter.  In Gregory’s homily on Christmas, he also gives the Byzantine Church its liturgical language for the feast, focusing his reflections on Christmas as revelation. His description of the revelation to the Magi, in fact, becomes the language of the troparion for the feast:

Your Nativity, O Christ our God, shed upon the world the light of knowledge. For by it, those who worshiped a star, were taught by a star to worship you the Sun of Righteousness and to know You the Orient from on high. O Lord, glory to you.

The liturgical observances for Christmas were patterned off of those for Theophany, which in turn were patterned off of those from Easter. Christmas and Theophany came to be seen as one pole that corresponded to the other pole of the liturgical year, Easter. In Rome, the feast of the Epiphany was eventually adopted on January 6th, but there was a decidedly focus on the Nativity in it. Hence, Christmas was focused on the revelation to the shepherds, Epiphany on the revelation to the Magi, and following that, a feast of the Baptism. The Milanese explicitly kept a focus on the three miracles of the day for January 6th: the manifestation to the Magi, the Baptism, and the Wedding at Cana (a focus for Epiphanius, and still observed two days after Epiphany on the Coptic Calendar but not the Byzantine), but Rome originally focused only on the Magi. Others suggest the possibility of including the Transfiguration on this day, a suggestion that doesn’t catch on in a meaningful way.

Subsequent to the establishment of the twin dates of Christmas and Epiphany, other great feasts began to be commemorated in the Byzantine tradition, but in many ways, all 12 of our great feasts can be seen as developments of either the triumph over ignorance or the triumph over death. Thus as a kind of unfolding of Easter we have Palm Sunday, the Ascension, Pentecost, the Dormition, and the Exaltation of the Cross. And from the revelation of Christ at Theophany we take first Christmas, then the Annunciation, the Transfiguration, the birth of Mary and her entrance to the temple, and Christ’s meeting of Simeon.

If we accept a view of the liturgical year that revolves around the twin axes of Revelation and Redemption, it certainly seems like the Armenians are onto something when they call this entire season the Feast of Theophany. And regardless of how the days are split up in East and West, regardless of the interesting transfer of the date of Epiphany for the West, and even regardless of the further ambiguity created by the Gregorian calendar, in this general season with a  variety of different ways of expressing those days, lets us all celebrate the splendor of God’s revelation in Christ.

Blessed Theophany!

The Feast of the Entrance of the Theotokos into the Temple

Today is one of the Twelve Great Feasts of the Byzantine liturgical year.  The feasts are divided between those that commemorate the work of Christ (Exaltation of the Cross, the Nativity, Theophany, the Meeting of Simeon in the Temple, Palm Sunday, the Annunciation, Pentecost and the Transfiguration) and those which commemorate the Theotokos’ role in salvation history (Nativity of the Theotokos, Entrance into the Temple, the Annunciation, and the Dormition). That the Theotokos is prominently featured in seven of the festal icons (in addition to the previous four also the Nativity, the Meeting of Simeon, and the Ascension), makes it a bit harder to distinguish which feasts are principally Christological and which are Marian, but the division  is something like the one offered.

A few years ago, NLM offered a nice account of the Vespers for the feast. Here, I only want to offer some very brief historical notes on the broad developments of its liturgical observance. According to Vladimir Lossky, it would not be until the fourteenth century when the feast was adopted in the West and celebrated by Pope Gregory XI in Avignon. In the East, however, its history goes back much earlier.

The feast is derived from the second-century Protoevangelium of James (specifically sections 6-8).  [Hamatoura Monastery offers a delightful animated greeting card with icon figures of the basic story of the feast.] Exactly when this story began to be liturgically commemorated remains a matter of some dispute. The Palestinian Christians maintained a tradition that when the Empress Helen built churches in Jerusalem, she built a church dedicated to this feast. While I have yet to find anything to confirm the truth of that tradition, it is the case that St. Gregory of Nyssa referenced today’s events as an established fact in his fourth century homily on Christ’s Nativity. In that same homily, he identified the priest to whom Mary was presented as none other than Zacharias, the father of John the Forerunner. The basis for this is his exegesis of Lk. 11:51, as he tries to explain who was this last prophet who Christ says completes the line of prophetic martyrs:

Gregory of Nyssa

Now, provided we do not digress too far from our subject, it is perhaps not inopportune to adduce Zacharias, who was slain between the temple and the altar, as a witness to the incorruption of the Mother of God. This Zacharias was a priest; and not only was he a priest, but he was also endowed with the gift of prophecy, his power of prophecy being declared expressly in the Book of the Gospel. When the Grace of God was preparing the way for men not to think that birth from a Virgin is incredible, it set the stage for the assent of unbelievers by means of lesser miracles: a child was born of a barren woman advanced in years. This was a prelude to the miracle of the Virgin Birth. For, just as Elizabeth became a mother not by the power of nature—for she had grown old in barrenness—but the birth of her child is ascribed to the Will of God; so also, the incredibility of a virginal parturition gains credibility with reference to the Divine. Since, therefore, he who was born of the barren woman preceded Him Who was born of the Virgin, and, in response to the salutation of her who was carrying the Lord, leaped in his mother’s womb before he saw the light of day, as soon as the Forerunner of the Word was born, the silence of Zacharias was thereupon loosed by prophetic inspiration. All that Zacharias recounted was a prophecy of the future. Therefore, guided to the knowledge of hidden things by the spirit of prophecy, and perceiving the mystery of virginity in the incorrupt birth, he did not exclude the unwedded Mother from that place in the Temple allotted by the Law to virgins, thereby teaching the Jews that the Creator of existing things and King of all creation has human nature subject to Himself, along with everything else, guiding it by His own Will as He sees fit, not being Himself mastered by it, so that it is in His power to create a new birth, which will not prevent her who has become a mother from remaining a virgin. For this reason, he did not exclude her, in the Temple, from the place of the virgins; this place was the space between the Temple and the altar. When the Jews heard that the King of creation, by Divine Economy, was about to undergo human birth, fearing lest they become subject to a king, they murdered the priest who bore witness to this birth as he was serving at the altar itself.

That St. Gregory tells the story is a testament to the growing piety in regard to the Theotokos; that he tells it as part of his Christmas homily suggests that the devotion arises from a focus on Her role in the mysteries of Christ’s life, and that at this point there is not yet a distinct feast in Cappadocia for either the birth of the Theotokos or her Entrance into the Temple. A bit over a century later, the emerging devotion evidenced by Gregory had blossomed into a liturgical observance of the Nativity of the Theotokos. In a homily for Mary’s Nativity, the monk and hymnographer Andrew of Crete also recounts the story of her entrance into the temple:

Andrew of Crete

Thus the immaculate Fruition issuing forth from the womb occurred from an infertile mother, and then the parents, in the first blossoming of Her growth brought Her to the temple and dedicated Her to God. The priest, then making the order of services, beheld the face of the girl and of those in front of and behind, and he became gladdened and joyful, seeing as it were the actual fulfillment of the Divine promise. He consecrated Her to God, as a reverential gift and propitious sacrifice -- and, as a great treasury unto salvation, he led Her within the very innermost parts of the temple. Here the Maiden walked in the upright ways of the Lord, as in bridal chambers, partaking of heavenly food until the time of betrothal, which was preordained before all the ages by Him Who, by His inscrutable mercy, was born from Her, and by Him Who before all creation and time and expanse Divinely begat Him, and together with His consubstantial and co-reigning and co-worshipped Spirit -- this being One Godhead, having One Essence and Kingdom, inseparable and immutable and in which is nothing diverse, except the personal qualities. Wherefore, in solemnity and in song I do offer the Mother of the Word the festal gift; since that He born of Her hath taught me to believe in the Trinity: the Son and Word Without-Beginning hath made in Her His Incarnation; the Father begetting Him hath blessed this; the Holy Spirit hath signed and sanctified the womb which incomprehensibly hath conceived.

Between 715 and 730 A.D., the  patriarch of Constantinople, St. Germanus, preached two sermons for the feast, which also seem to have either included hymns used for the feast, or led to into such hymns:

St. Germanus I

Today the gate of the divine temple, opened wide, receives the eastward-facing and sealed gate of the Emmanuel, which is entering into it (cf. Ez. 44:1-3, read in Vespers for the feast). Today the holy table of the temple begins to be made splendid, having assumed the transfer to bloodless sacrifices by participation and the sweetest embrace of the heavenly and life-sustaining bread from a table of divine veneration. Today she alone is dedicated to the place of propitiation for the floods of errors that have overthrown mortals, being called a new, most godlike cleansing place of propitiation not made by hands. Today she is about to be welcomed by the sanctity of the Spirit into the holy of holies; she who was raised in a most marvelous way beyond even the glory of the cherubim, is stored up in a most holy way and gloriously in the holy of holies, for a greater sanctity, at an innocent impressionable age.

Hail, the shining cloud that lets fall drops of spiritual divine dew on us, having today, at your inconspicuous entrance into the holy of holies, caused a radiant sun to shine on those held in the shadow of death! Divinely flowing spring from which the rivers of divine knowledge disperse the most discerning and brilliant water of right belief, as they destroy the band of heresies!

A century later, St. Tarasios, patriarch of Constantinople, formally introduced the feast into the Byzantine calendar. The liturgical observance continued to develop. In an eleventh-century manuscript about the liturgical observances of the Monastery of Mar Saba near Bethlehem, we find the prescription to read excerpts from the Life of the Virgin, attributed to St. Maximus the Confessor, (although whether he is the real author is disputed). According to the manuscript, the monks were to read the section of the life that begins with Mary passing the age of nursing and stopping with the story of the prophetic revelation she received prior to the Annunciation at 12 years old while living in the Temple, which revealed to her that she would be the mother of the Lord. The text is devoted to offering a spiritual reflection on the Theotokos’ entrance to the Temple, more than merely recounting a history, and this is done specifically through an exegesis of Psalm 44. (The psalm also serves as the Alleluia verses for the Divine Liturgy of the day, as well as the Aposticha antiphons: “She is led to the king with her virgin companions.” “They are escorted with joy and gladness; they pass into the palace of the king.” “Hear oh daughter and incline your ear.” etc.)

According to author of the Life, the psalm is fundamentally a prediction of Christ, but included in the mystery of Christ are necessarily references to either the Church or the Theotokos, and this psalm can be interpreted as applying to both. And even more specifically, he writes:

Behold, then, how beautifully he foretells not only about the Entrance in the Temple, but also about her other spiritual goodness and beauty. The queen stood at your right. This statement foretells her Entrance in the Temple and her location to the right of the altar in the Holy of Holies, which is truly regarded as being to the right of God....And as she grew in age, the adornment of virtues increased greatly. And that is why the king desired her beauty, and he dwelt within her.

While there are undoubtedly more steps in the development of the liturgical observance of today’s feast, what is striking is that while the origin of the story seems to be the second century apocryphal Gospel, the theology, details, and liturgical hymns are profoundly formed by a Patristic exegesis of the accepted canon of Scripture: from St. Gregory of Nyssa’s exegesis of Luke 11, to St. Andrew’s veiled references to the Epistle to the Hebrews, to St. Germanus’ use of the prophet Ezekiel, and lastly “St. Maximus’ ” exegesis of Psalm 44. This exegesis also culminates in the icon which is shown in the post below, and interpreted in the work of Lossky, cited above. For the Byzantine tradition, therefore, this feast is far from merely an apocryphal import, but rather, much more a mystery contained in the deep spiritual sense of God’s self-revelation.

Burial Rites of the Theotokos

St. John Paul II offered a reflection on the death of the Theotokos in a General Audience in 1997:

My Venerable Predecessor Pius XII, made no pronouncement on the question of Mary’s death. Nevertheless, Pius XII did not intend to deny the fact of her death, but merely did not judge it opportune to affirm solemnly the death of the Mother of God as a truth to be accepted by all believers. Some theologians have in fact maintained that the Blessed Virgin did not die and and was immediately raised from earthly life to heavenly glory. However, this opinion was unknown until the 17th century, whereas a common tradition actually exists which sees Mary's death as her entry into heavenly glory. Could Mary of Nazareth have experienced the drama of death in her own flesh? Reflecting on Mary’s destiny and her relationship with her divine Son, it seems legitimate to answer in the affirmative: since Christ died, it would be difficult to maintain the contrary for his Mother. The Fathers of the Church, who had no doubts in this regard, reasoned along these lines.

Icon of the Dormition of the Theotokos.  Mary lies on
 the bier, while carried in procession to the tomb.
Christ holds her soul in his arms.

For an Eastern Christian, it is not possible to celebrate the feast of the Dormition of the Mother of God, and not ponder her death.  For two weeks we have been preparing for this, the last of the 12 Great Feasts of the Liturgical Year.  (The first of those feasts is the birth of the Theotokos on Sept. 8).  Serving as a bookend to the Church year, the Dormition also serves as an occasion for us to reflect on the end that must come to us all.  Yet at the same time we are consoled, knowing that for a Christian to die is less about the biological process and more about falling asleep in the Lord.  In the words of John Donne, "One short sleep past, we wake eternally.  And death shall be no more; Death thou shalt die."

Our preparation for this feast that celebrates the end of death, began August 1st, with a solemn procession with the Cross of Christ.  Traditionally, this was due to the increase of disease and death in the blistering hot Augusts of Constantinople.  As a way to pray for healing and/or to prepare for the coming death, the priests of the Great City would process

Procession of the Holy and Life Giving Cross,
August 1.

through the streets with the relic of the Cross, everyday until the middle of August.  For those of us not dwelling in plague stricken urban climes, the procession invites us to follow the Cross through the two weeks of fasting, penance, and prayer that we undergo to prepare for the coming of Christian death.

At the same time, Christians of the Kievan-Rus' tradition also remember their baptism on August first, and thereby recall that is through being baptized into the death of Christ that we are able to gloriously enter into his resurrection.

Lesser Blessing of the Water,
August 1st.

To highlight the link between the Cross and Baptism, the waters are blessed on August first through a short ceremony that is a "lesser" version of the great blessings of the waters done on Theophany.  In the lesser service, a cross is three times submerged into a large vessel of water.

Throughout the remaining time, the Christian faithful are traditionally called to a period of fasting stricter than any but Great Lent, although such ascetical observances are rare in today's setting.  All of this preparation culminates in the liturgical celebration of the feast of our Lady's Dormition, and the still developing liturgical observance is amazing to behold.  In fact, the Liturgical celebration of the feast is a wonderful example of the ongoing organic life of the Byzantine Liturgical tradition.

The feast of the Dormition has been observed since at least the sixth century, although the Patriarch Juvenal testified in the fifth century that the Christians of Jerusalem had preserved the tradition of Mary's immaculate assumption into heaven, and he even sent the grave wrappings of the Theotokos to the Empress Pulcheria.  We are told that by the end of the 7th century, a Church had been built atop Mary's tomb in Gethsemane, but there are no traces of that Church today.  The current Church has been both attacked and developed since the 9th century, and now claims to house not only the tomb of the Virgin, but the tombs of St. Joachim, St. Anne, and St. Joseph.  While we assume that there was a tradition of liturgical devotion in this Church, the subsequent invasions of pagans and Crusaders has left us little trace of first millenium Jerusalem's observances for the feast.

Tomb of the Blessed Virgin in Jerusalem

In the second millenium, the Russian Chuch's 1438 rubrics evidence a tendency to observe the vigil of August 15th in ways that were analogous to the Holy Saturday observance.  Thus, it is suggested that if the rector wishes, he can have a "tomb" placed before the iconostasis, and the chanting for Matins can take place before this tomb.  Further, churches dedicated to the Feast of the Dormition are allowed to place the icon of the feast in the tomb, again, as an analogue to the Church's placement of the icon of Christ in the tomb on Holy Saturday.

In 15th century Jerusalem, the "Lamentations of Christ for Great and Holy Saturday" were introduced into the Matins service.  These lamentations alternate with each verse of psalm 118/119, and are set to a solemn melody, serving as an extended mediation on Christ's mournful burial and triumphant descent into Hades.

Following the lamentations, the Jerusalem Church kept her older tradition of placing the Shroud of Christ on the back of the priest, and then processing outside as a symbol of Christ's soul's descent into the abode of the dead.  This procession also allowed the faithful to take part in a traditional funeral procession as they would at the death of any loved one.  Following the procession, the shroud was laid in a tomb that had been constructed in front of the iconostasis.  Vigil was then kept at the tomb until the Vesperal Liturgy on Holy Saturday evening.

Epitaphios of Christ Used
In Holy Saturday Procession

The Epitaphios carried in procession in front of the "tomb"

Around a hundred years after the composition of the Lamentations of Christ, Metropolitan Dionysios of Old Patras composed the Lamentations of the Theoktokos in 1541.  The Lamentations correspond thematically, liturgically, and musically to the lamentations of Christ.  They were intended to be chanted at the Matins of the All-Night Vigil for the Dormition.  Like the Lamentations of Christ, they were to be chanted alternately with the verses of Ps. 118/119.  And like the Holy Saturday Matins, the lamentations were to conclude with a procession.  In this case, Met. Dionysios expected the procession to be made with the icon of the Dormition depicted at the top of this post, and he expected this observance to take place only in parishes and shrines dedicated to the Dormition.

The Lamentations of the Theotokos were adopted by the Jerusalem Church as part of her liturgical observance. In susbequent years it spread to Patmos.  At some point the lamentations were translated from Greek into Slavonic in Kiev.  Antiochene parishes also began to adopt the observance.  While the lamentations are not chanted on either Mt. Athos nor in the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, they are becoming increasingly common throughout various parishes of the Byzantine tradition.

In addition, churches are increasingly adopting a burial shroud of the Theotokos to be used in the vigil procession instead of the traditional icon.  The churches that adopt this form of the funeral procession then lay the shroud in a tomb constructed before the iconostasis or even in front of the Church.

Funeral procession with the shroud of the Theotokos

The Entombment of the Theotokos

This ongoing development within the Byzantine tradition is by no means universal, but it fits well with  the shorthand reference to the Dormition Fast and Feast as Summer Lent, and Summer Pascha. Like Great Lent, the Dormition Fast has a feast for the Holy Cross, and it is in part devoting to a renewal of one's baptismal promises. The fasting observances are more similar to Great Lent than either of the other fasting seasons, the culmination of both seasons is an all night vigil focused on bodily resurrection.  The feast of the Dormition points to the ultimate fruition of the Feast of Pascha.  Christ conquers death definitively in both His Physical Body, and in those united to him in His Mystical Body.  The feast of Dormition, therefore, expresses not only the exceptional holiness of the Theotokos, but also the Church's hope that Mary is the exemplar of us all.  She is the pledge of the resurrection of the body; the proof that Christ's redemption will break forth onto all those united to him.

The texts for the lamentations beautifully capture the mood of the feast.  The first verse parallels the verse the lamentations of Christ.  On Holy Saturday we chant:

O Life, how can You die? How can You dwell in a tomb? Yet by Your death You have destroyed the reign of death and raised all the dead from Hell.

Last night we sang:

In a grave they laid Thee / O my Life and my Christ / and now also the Mother of Life / a strange sight  both to angels and men.

Each of the three sets of verses continues to ponder the meaning of this strange death.  On the one hand, the humanity that gave birth to the Theotokos is invited to come and rejoice at the sight:

Come with me, O Anna / Come and stand with us now / lead us in the festive praises of Mary / thine own  daughter, the Mother of God.
Now Joachim rejoiceth / seeing the great glory of his only child / who indeed didst bear a divine Child / truly inexplicable and inspired!
Adam and Eve came out / to behold the glory / of their own Virgin offspring.

On the other, the sadness highlighted in the first verse mingles with terror at the awe-inspiring nature of what is taking place:

Shudder, O ye heavens! / and, O earth, give ear unto these words: / God descended once before for our sake / He descends again today for His Mother. 

But, it is in the third stanza that brings the full weight of the cosmic significance of the event to the fore, while also ending with the personal dialogue between the Mother and her Son:

Ev’ry generation / to thy grave comes bringing / its dirge of praises, O Virgin. All of creation / to the grave comes bringing / a farewell hymn to our Lady. Christ’s holy Disciples / tend to the body / of Mary, Mother of my God. Orders of Angels / and Archangels / invisibly hymn her presence. Pious Women / with the Apostles / now cry out their lamentations. She who was at Cana / at the marriage / hath been called with the Apostles. The Master descendeth / to Gethsemane / with countless hosts of heaven. The choir of the Disicples / seeing the Lord descend / in glory greatly rejoiceth.. Let the earth leap for joy / as it beholdeth / our God from heaven descending.  Let us go out quickly / meeting the Lord Jesus / Who cometh once more among us. Let us be attentive / God now speaketh / with His most pure Mother: "Most sweet Mother / come and rejoice with / thine own most sweet Child, Jesus." Behold now thy Son / cometh to bring thee / into His home in the heavens. "Come, My most lovely one / and enjoy the beauty / of thine own Son thy Maker. Come indeed, My Mother / come into divine joy / and enter into the kingdom." "What will I bring Thee / O my Son, the God-Man" / the Maiden cried to the Master. "What will I bring Thee / O my God in heaven / except my soul and body. The Father I glorify / to the Son I sing a hymn / the Holy Spirit I worship."

Transfiguration of the Lord: Blessing of the Grapes

Four years ago, there was a post on NLM about the Byzantine tradition of blessing grapes on the feast of the Transfiguration, and it included the text for the blessing.

 Yesterday, Fr. Z had a post noting the existence of this tradition in the Roman Rite as well.  I had been intending to write a post about the history of the tradition, only to find that John Sanidopoulos had a great post on his blog Mystagogy.  The post is a translation of an article by Professor Panagiostis Skaltsis, and it traces the history of the blessing from the early Church's initial attempts to protect the exclusive place of bread and wine in the liturgical offering, up until the Church's decision to bless the grapes on the Feast of the Transfiguration.  Read the whole post here. Toward the end of his article, Professor Skaltsis notes:

With the Transfiguration of the Lord the whole world is illumined and glorified.  Creation is exhilarated and acquires the brilliance that creation at one time had....The blessing of the grapes, representing the harvest of the world, is a liturgical act that emphasizes the doxological and eucharistic offering of the material and the fruits of the earth to the Creator and God of all things.  More so, when this fruit of the vine gives us wine, which Christ blessed in Cana, to show the transfiguration of the world in Christ.  He also gave it to us in the Mystical Supper as the element that at the time of the Divine Liturgy, is made incorrupt by grace, transformed into the Lord's Blood.

The image of Christ restoring creation to its original splendor is captured elsewhere in the Church's liturgy.  As we sang in an Aposticha verse for last night's vespers:

Through your Transfiguration you returned Adam's nature its original splendor, restoring its very elements to the glory and brightness of your divinity.  Therefore we cry out to you: O Creator of all, glory to you!

With the Church, let us pray that even more than the grapes, we may bask in the glory of Christ's transfiguration of creation.  May his light shine upon us.

NLM's 9th Anniversary - Meet Some of Our New Writers

Today marks the ninth anniversary of the beginning of this website; I would like to take this occasion to thank our editor Jeffrey Tucker, our founder Shawn Tribe, and all of our writers and guest contributors for all they have done for NLM, and especially to thank all of our readers. We hope and pray that our work will continue to inspire thoughtful reflection on how best to celebrate the Sacred Liturgy. I would also like to ask all our readers to offer a special prayer on this day for those of our fellow Christians who are subject to persecution in any part of the world, and also to pray for the eternal repose of Dr. Stratford Caldecott, who passed away recently. Over the years, NLM has reported on his work on numerous occasions, beginning with our very first post.

Four years ago, Shawn asked all of the writers to list some of their interests outside the field of liturgy and liturgical studies, and I thought it would be fun to update that post by asking the same questions of some of our new writers who have come on board over the last year. Here are the replies from Dr. Peter Kwasniewski, (whose specialty is listed as “the Roman Rite” on the sidebar, but should probably be updated to “everything”), our Byzantine guy, Prof. Kyle Washut, and our intern, Ben Yanke.

What are some of your favorite films?

Peter: I don’t watch many films (listening to music is my cup of tea), but I do very much enjoy the old BBC Sherlock Holmes episodes with Jeremy Brett, any nature film with David Attenborough, Alec Guinness films, Jean-Pierre Ponnelle opera productions, and Into Great Silence.

Kyle: I love Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and also Ford’s Stagecoach. Honorable mentions would go to The Scarlet and the Black, His Girl Friday, and Becket. On the more recent side, I think Christopher Nolan’s Batman Trilogy is fantastic.

Ben: I don’t end up watching a lot of films, but I am a big fan of two of BBC’s shows, Sherlock and Doctor Who. I assume this is the result of Charles Cole’s top secret British-patriotism-mind-control-machine, which is clearly responsible for getting me hooked on all these British shows.

What are some of your favorite books or literary genre (outside the liturgical sphere)?

Peter: Every book by P. G. Wodehouse, many of which we have read aloud as a family. Mystery novels.  Works by George MacDonald, E. Nesbit, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien. The dialogues of Plato, the treatises of Aristotle, and the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas, which are my bread and butter as a teacher.

Kyle: Anything by Graham Greene, and the poetry of Hopkins and Frost. I try to read at least one or two plays by Shakespeare each year. As far as novels in translation go: The Betrothed by Alesandro Manzoni, and Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter are marvelous. In the more philosophical/theological side of things my greats list includes: Alexis De Tocqueville, Plato, St. Maximus the Confessor and the works of John Paul II. I go back to all four authors again and again.

(Ben sat this one out.)

Favorite musical genres or musicians outside liturgical music?

Peter: Johann Sebastian Bach and Arvo Pärt vie for first place. I have a fascination with the works of the “lesser” English composers Gerald Finzi, E. J. Moeran, and Edmund Rubbra. Handel’s operas and oratorios. The symphony -- one of the greatest inventions of the Western mind -- some favorites here include Brahms, Glazunov, Rimsky-Korsakov, Bruckner, Mahler, Elgar, Sibelius, Vaughan Williams. Minimalism, when it’s not too minimalist, e.g., Steve Reich’s Variations for Winds, Strings, and Keyboards. Every recording by Jordi Savall and Hesperion XX / XXI.  I could go on but that’s enough!

Kyle: I’m an ecclectic Philistine when it comes to music. I love Mozart’s Don Giovanni, and depending on my mood I really enjoy Rachmaninoff. I like some of the work that Arvo Pärt and John Tavener have done, but not all of it. But I also listen to a fair bit of Classic Country, and I have a soft spot for artists like Train and other such bands from my younger days.

Ben: I am a big fan of big band music (swing and jazz), not just for listening but to swing dance to as well! And this may come as a surprise to many, but non-liturgically, I enjoy listening to modern Christian music sometimes as well. And yes, sometimes when I get in the car, I’ll turn on the Tallis Scholars too.

Favourite past-times or hobbies outside the area of the liturgy?

Peter: Composing music, some of it purely instrumental. Cooking elaborate meals when time permits.  Model rocketry and high-powered rocketry -- my son and I recently built a 7-ft. tall rocket that flies on I-series engines, with a thrust of 320 to 640 newton-seconds.

Kyle: I play baseball in the adult rec league in town. When I find the time, I also enjoy cooking, canoeing, fantasy football, watching House of Cards, Breaking Bad, Longmire, Arrested Development and other such things, exploring with kids, biking with my dog, and dancing with my wife.

Ben: I like to do a little bit of everything! I am currently working toward a degree in computer science at the local university, so I enjoy working on programming, as well as some web design as a small side business, and other technology-related hobbies too. On a somewhat related note, I also enjoy audio engineering, and I have actually built a talk studio for my parish podcast that we are starting very soon.

And finally, I enjoy going on runs, and helping out with the local homeschool cross country team, and as mentioned above, dancing with friends. And on top of it all, I love spending time with my 8 younger siblings, whether that is reading to them before bed or a little bit of roughhousing!

Who are your favorite artists or what are your favorite art styles?

Peter: For odd moods, Blake and Turner. For prayer, Giotto, Fra Angelico, Byzantine icons in the Greek manner (not the Russian). For aesthetic revelry: Dürer, Vermeer, Rembrandt, Pieter Brueghel the Elder, particular pieces by the Pre-Raphaelites. Thanks in part to the good taste and fine library of my wife, who is a painter, I’ve grown especially fond of a number of American artists -- Whistler, Sargent, Twachtman, Inness, Benson, Church, Bierstadt, Moran, Homer, and all three Wyeths. Of living painters, Julian Merrow Smith and Aidan Hart.

Kyle: I like Western Art with its rugged depiction of landscapes and animals. In a completely different vein, I think Cezanne makes great watercolors, and while I don’t really like Michelangelo's painting, I am in awe of his sculpture. In general I appreciate sculpture within the European classical tradition.

Ben: I am truly a lover of the Eastern tradition of icons. I have many throughout my room, and I find them both beautiful as daily surroundings, and aids to prayer. There's something unique and otherworldly about the beauty of a well written icon.

Book Review: Tales of Glory, the Stories Icons Tell

Tales of Glory: The Stories Icons Tell.  Matthew W. Gaul, Phoenix, AZ: Leonine Publishers, 2013. 176 pp.

On July 15th, the Ukrainian Church celebrated the feast of St. Volodymir, Equal-to-the-Apostles, and on that day I told my daughters the well known legend of how the saint decided what religion to establish among the Rus'.  Having sent emissaries to various monotheistic religions, St. Volodymir heard the reports from each.  It was the emissaries returning from Constantinople, in the end, who carried the day.  They declared:

The Greeks led us to the edifices where they worship their God, and we knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth. For on earth there is no such splendour or such beauty, and we are at a loss how to describe it. We know only that God dwells there among men, and their service is fairer than the ceremonies of other nations. For we cannot forget that beauty. Every man, after tasting something sweet, is afterward unwilling to accept that which is bitter, and therefore we cannot dwell longer here.

The author of this book, Tales of Glory, had a similar experience when he walked into the the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church of St. Nicholas in Watervliet, NY.

St. Nicholas Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church
Watervliet, NY

 Mr. Gaul describes his experience in the preface to this unique book:

When I first arrived at St. Nicholas, I felt hesitant and even unworthy, for the presence of God was so obvious that I almost did not know how to handle it.  It was an honor simply to be let in the door....The overwhelming glory of the Lord shines forth in the beauty of the chant and icons, in the passionate language of the texts, and in the humble reverence of the kisses and prostrations.

Having had such a profound experience, Mr. Gaul wrote this book as a way to make that experience accessible to others.  In Tales of Glory, he takes the reader through a visual tour of St. Nicholas Church.  The book is laid out according to the structure of the parish.  Chapter one offers a consideration of the vault and the sanctuary, chapter two the iconostasis, then the side shrines, the feasts and scenes depicted along the sides of the vault, and at last a considerations of the icons on the walls of the nave.  As the reader pages through this treasure, he is given a little taste of that glory that converted the Rus' and astounded Mr. Gaul and many a visitor since.

Fundamentally, this book is an evangelical book.  The reader is offered vibrant pictures of each icon in the Church, and then the author adorns these pictures with the liturgical chant that surrounds them during the Liturgy celebrated within that temple.  Thus, whenever an icon is discussed, Mr. Gaul offers us a sidebar with an appropriate liturgical text, so that we march not only through the physical space of the Byzantine temple, but also are carried through the time of the liturgical year.

This page depicts the evangelists Matthew and Mark, with the side bar noting their respective feast days and quoting the Troparion for each saint. 

 Mr. Gaul also takes the time to explain, where applicable, the reason for the placement of the given icons.  Thus, for the evangelists, he offers:

Although the Church has a vault ceiling, the images of the evangelists are painted where the pendentives would be in a domed church.  Architecturally, the pendentives hold up the weight of the dome, and thus the placement of the evangelists reminds us that they support the weight of the Church.

Throughout the book, Mr. Gaul also offers other aids to the reader, so as to enable us to better enter into the spirituality of these icons.  At the beginning of each chapter, he offers us a picture of the part of the Church in question, and then offers a patristic quote to help frame our meditations. For example, the following page on the iconostasis introduces Pseudo-Dionysius' writing from The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy. Like Pseudo-Dionysius, the reader is invited to penetrate the meaning of the veiled symbol, the revealing screen, so as to comprehend the invisible mysteries.

  At the end of the book, the author includes an index of feasts so that one may read this book in the order of the liturgical year.  As the appropriate feast arises, one can flip to the back of the book and discover what images to contemplate throughout the year.  Also included is a helpful glossary for readers who may not be familiar with some of the technical words of the Eastern tradition.  Combined with the helpful guidance Mr. Gaul offers the reader in interpreting the actual icons themselves and his translation notes which invite the reader to delight with him in the vibrancy of the liturgical language, the book is both easy to use and a beautiful introduction to the liturgical use of icons in the Byzantine tradition.  For those who would like a more thorough preview, you can look at these sample pages.  

One thing to be kept in mind, however, is the goal of the book.  It is an evangelical work, written by an amateur in the truest since of the word.  Mr. Gaul is an amateur, that is, one motivated by love and not by profession or profit.  He wishes the reader to enter into his love affair with the Byzantine icons and their liturgical use.  As a result, readers hoping to find detailed considerations proper to art historians or experts in the development and theology of the icon should look elsewhere. And while Mr. Gaul will occasionally reference particular theological questions: donations for sacred art in relation to charity for the poor, the role of glossalia in the Church, etc. readers will be disappointed if they expect adequate treatment of those debates.

If instead, however, a reader wants crisp images of lovely parish icons arranged according to a liturgical devotional order in an attempt to recreate the wondrous experience of attending a Byzantine liturgy in a well-adorned temple, all well bound and capable of serving as an elegant coffee-table book, than look no further.  And perhaps, as is Mr. Gaul's hope, Tales of Glory will rise from your coffee table and become an evangelical invitation to both the already converted and those still awaiting the Gospel, to breath that incense filled air of Eastern spirituality, and to ascend through the images of grace, on a journey to the Word that all icons speak.

Liturgical Theology of Pentecost

A colleague shared with me the beautiful description of the traditional Roman Vigil for Pentecost that was posted by The Rad Trad here.  I was struck by the profundity of the ritual, and I delighted in the similarity between East and West’s observance of the ten days between Ascension and Pentecost.  Whereas Christians of the Byzantine Tradition stop singing the song which is characteristic of the Easter season, the traditional Latin observance is to snuff the Paschal Candle.  But in both cases, the traditions want to stress that this absence of the Risen Christ is different than the absence of Good Friday.  As St. Luke notes, after the Ascension, the Apostles “went back full of joy to Jerusalem, where they spent their time continually in the temple, praising and blessing God.”  These last ten days of waiting were joyful days, and so the darkness of the absent Paschal Candle, or the silence of the bells and the Paschal Troparion are filled with joyful expectation.  In the Byzantine Tradition, we still stand for those ten days; the kneeling does not return until its dramatic re-appearance for Pentecost Monday.  (Hopefully, I’ll be able to write on that at another time.  Pentecost is an octave, so maybe even for this year.)

While one could say many things about the comparisons and contrasts of the two traditions, I was struck by a common element that both Traditions transmit: Pentecost is in some sense the culmination of the entire movement of salvation history.  The Paschal Candle is lit for the sake of lighting the Pentecostal tongues of fire, and so the Latin Church plunges the flame into the heart of her Vigil, and sings the Holy Saturday Alleluia, to show, that, as the Rad Trad writes, “Pentecost makes the Resurrection permanent on earth, preserved in the Church unto ages of ages.”

What is evidenced by these dramatic gestures of the Latin Church, is verbalized within the Byzantine vesper service.  Following the lead of St. Athanasius who declared that the entire point of the Incarnation was to divinize man through the gift of the Holy Spirit, the Church sings that Pentecost is the last and final day of the Feast of Pascha.  On the vespers for Sunday evening, we note that today everything was totally accomplished, including the fulfillment of Christ’s Incarnation and Paschal Mystery. 

Like the Latin tradition, the Byzantine tradition traces the story of Pentecost through the Old Testament readings at the vigil, however, there are only three readings in contrast to the five Old Testament readings in the Latin Rite.  The first is from the Book of Numbers, so that, like the Latins, the Byzantines portray Moses as a type of Christ.  The focus for the Byzantines, however, is the Lord giving the seventy elders a portion of the spirit of Moses such that they are able to prophesy.  The reading ends with Moses prayer, “Would that all the People of Israel could prophesy!”  

There are other references to the story of Moses in the Matins service.  The Katavasia at the end of Ode 1, following the verse that declares Pentecost as the fulfilment of the Law and the Prophets, sees Moses as a prefigurement of the Pentecostal revelation, singing, 

Enveloped by the Divine cloud, the man of unsure speech taught the Law written by God; wiping the dust from his eyes, he saw the One Who Is, and was initiated into the knowledge of the Spirit.

The Katavasia at the end of the eighth ode points to the burning bush and the three youth in the furnace as prefigurements of today’s feast.  The flames do not consume the Apostles, and those who were formerly of unsure speech become ambassadors to the world.

The second reading is from the prophet Ezekiel.  The dry-bones prophecy that the Latin Church employs for the Vigil of Pentecost is the final Old Testament reading for the Byzantine Tradition’s Easter Vigil.  For Pentecost Eve our reading is from the chapter just prior: 

And then I will pour cleansing streams over you, to purge you from every stain you bear, purge you from the taint of your idolatry. I will give you a new heart, and breathe a new spirit into you; I will take away from your breasts those hearts that are hard as stone, and give you human hearts instead. I will make my spirit penetrate you, so that you will follow in the path of my law, remember and carry out my decrees. 

 The resurrection of the dry bones, prophesied on Easter Vigil, is now linked to a new heart, cleansing water, and a penetrating spirit.  The Gospel proclaimed at Liturgy on Sunday stresses the fulfillment of this theme (Jn. 7:37-39):

 On the last and greatest day of the feast Jesus stood there and cried aloud, If any man is thirsty, let him come to me, and drink;  yes, if a man believes in me, as the scripture says, Fountains of living water shall flow from his bosom. He was speaking here of the Spirit, which was to be received by those who learned to believe in him; the Spirit which had not yet been given to men, because Jesus had not yet been raised to glory.

The resurrection of the body is realized through the purifying gift of the living water of the Spirit.  Pascha is achieved through Pentecost, the last and greatest day of the Feast.

The last Old Testament reading for the Vigil (depending on the tradition) is from the prophet Joel.  On the Wednesday of Cheesefare Week, the Church read the first Old Testament reading for her Lenten cycle, and so it is fitting that the prophet Joel also be the last Old Testament reading for Paschal season.  Before the beginning of Great Lent, Joel had proclaimed (Joel 2:15-17): 

 The day of the Lord is coming; his the dominion, his the doom...Blow the trumpet in Zion; sanctify a fast; call a solemn assembly; gather the people. Sanctify the congregation; assemble the elders; gather the children, even nursing infants. Let the bridegroom leave his room, and the bride her chamber.Between the vestibule and the altar let the priests, the ministers of the Lord, weep and say, "Spare thy people, O Lord,

But now, the day of the Lord has arrived, and through the prophet Joel the Lord promises: 

I will pour out my spirit upon all mankind, and your sons and daughters will be prophets. Your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men see visions; everywhere servants of mine, handmaids of mine, inspired to prophesy! I will shew wonders in heaven, and on earth blood, and fire, and whirling smoke.

Russian icon, circa 17th century.  In the Byzantine tradition the Pentecost icon is an icon of the meaning of Spirit's presence in the Church more than a historical recreation of the event. Normally, the center seat (the teacher's seat) is left empty to show Christ is the teacher even when not present on earth, and in his absence, the Spirit governs through the Apostles.  In this icon, however, the Theotokos is placed in the central seat to highlight the Russian idea that it is the saint, in this case the most perfect saint, who makes Christ present in a visible way in His Church. Icons of the Ascension have Mary at center point to communicate the same idea.

The Day of Lord has come.  With heaven shown the wonder of a man triumphantly ascending as King of the angels, and earth newly washed in the blood of the Lamb, the fire and whirling cloud of the Spirit have descended upon the earth.  The Law, the Prophets have been looking forward to this day.  And it is this day that completes the feast of feasts, not by surpassing it, but by extending it through time.  For this reason the Icon of Pentecost pictures Mark, Luke, and Paul sitting in the Cenacle. [See Gregory DePippo's post below for a great icon that communicates this idea.]  Today is not the merely a historical event, but the celebration of the reality of the resurrection made permanently present in the Church.  The Spirit that descended on the Eleven and made them prophesy is the same Spirit that descends on the later evangelists and Apostle to the Gentiles.  Today, the last and greatest day of the feast, is a day that gives placement to every Sunday hence.  For the rest of the year, all Sundays are Sundays after Pentecost, and it is by their link to Pentecost that these Sundays continue as little Easters.

Hence, today, for East and West, is the summation of the story.  And so the Priest prays at the conclusion of Sunday evening vespers:

May he who emptied himself and came forth from the bosom of God the Father, and descended from heaven upon the earth, and took upon himself our entire nature and rendered it divine, and after that ascended again into heaven and sits at the right hand of God the Father, who also sent down upon his holy disciples and apostles the divine and Holy Spirit who is equal in substance, in power, in glory, and in eternity, who enlightened the apostles by the Holy Spirit and through them the whole world, may the same Christ our true God, through the prayers of his most holy Mother; through the might of the precious and life-giving Cross; through the prayers of the holy, glorious, and praiseworthy apostles, heralds of the divinity and bearers of the Spirit; and through the prayers of all the saints have mercy on us.