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Alexander Schmemann and Orthodox theology: The liturgy as sacred Sprachspiel Newman, Elizabeth, Ph.D.
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ALEXANDER

SCHMEMANN THEOLOGY:

AND

ORTHODOX

THE LITURGY AS SACRED SPRACHSPIEL by Elizabeth Newman Department of Religion Duke University

Date:~ Approved:
~

II},lm

~~~~.

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Religion in the Graduate School of Duke University
1990

I:

Copyright by Elizabeth Newman

1990

ABSTRACT (Religion - Theology and Ethics)

ALEXANDER SCHMEMANN AND ORTHODOX THEOLOGY: THE LITURGY AS SACRED SPRACHSPIEL

by Elizabeth Newman Department of Religion Duke University

An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfilhnent of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Religion in the Graduate School of Duke University 1990

iii

ABSTRACT For some time now, the discipline of theology has been determined, often at an inexplicit level, by epistemological criteria derived from rationalism such as "objectivity," "lucidity," etc. The thesis I wish to defend in this dissertation is that theology is not such a mental, rationalisti c enterprise but is an activity we do before God in the context of the Christian community; in other words, theology is knowing which is internally related to doing. As such, theology is not only "bookknowledge," but is also the knowledge embodied in the liturgy -- rich with gestures, the presence of others, spaces of silence, icons, incense, etc. The above is the critical framework I use from which to examine the theology of Alexander Schmemann who throughout his works relies upon the liturgy as theological source. In Chapter Two, I describe Schmemann's critique of cultural secularism, its influence upon the Orthodox church and what he calls the Western "pseudo-morphosis," or captivity of Orthodox theology, a captivity which has severed theology from the liturgical life of the church. While Schmemann's assessment of the severance between theology and the liturgy is indeed correct, I believe this "divorce" between abstract thought and concrete experience can be better understood by turning to a period earlier than the Western scholasticism which Schmemann regards as the culprit, Thus in Chapter Three, I turn to the ancient Greek world and in particular to the onset of literacy, which I argue drove a wedge early on between the more static and abstract knowledge, as communicated in the written word, and more dynamic, concrete know ledge as communicated through the spoken word. In Chapter Four, I seek to defend the importance of Schmemann's tum to the

IV

liturgy by re-examining the philosophical and theological import of the oral/aural world. Given that, as Schrnemann says, persons today are unable to hear the language of the church, how do we begin to think about worship such that we take seriously the rich verbal and non-verbal actuality of liturgical celebrations? I rely upon Wittgenstein's later philosophy to suggest that theological thought is not strictly a process which occurs only in the head, "in a completely enclosed space." With this critical framework established, I return in more detail to Schmemann's theology and seek to show how Schrnemann theologizes from the standpoint of the liturgy. Thus in Chapters Five, Six and Seven, I describe Schrnemann's theology as derived from the liturgies of baptism and chrismation, the eucharist, and time. In my concluding chapter, I return to Schrnemann's cultural critique of secularism and seek to analyze secularism in greater depth, particularly as it has distorted our perception of liturgical action. For the liturgy is not a private phenomenon as secularism would have us believe but, true to its etymology, a powerful public action or as I have called it a "public place of appearance."

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like first of all to acknowledge the chair of my dissertation committee, Dr. Geoffrey Wainwright, who endured several early drafts of this dissertation. I thank him for his constructive guidance and most of all his patience as he gave me the time and space I needed to develop my own critical perspective on Schmemann. On several Wednesday afternoons, I met with Dr. William H. Poteat and fellow students, John Berkman, Ray Blackwood, and Murray Jardine to discuss various chapters of this dissertation. I thank them all for their firm support, keen insights, and for pushing me to think more critically. I would like to thank other members of my committee, Dr. Teresa Berger, Dr. Stanley Hauerwas, and Dr. Rick Roderick, all of whom offered helpful criticisms. I am also grateful to fellow graduate student, Byron Stuhlman, for reading the dissertation and offering many excellent suggestions. I believe perhaps my greatest thanks is due my parents, Ernestine and Harold Newman, for their wonderful support and most of all their belief in me. Finally I would like to thank Mary-Mallette Acker and Jonathan Baker who each, in different ways, has given me invaluable encouragement. I particularly thank Mary for generously sharing with me her computer wisdom, and Jon for making my time in graduate school and Durham more enjoyable.

VI

TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRA CT........................ ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION iii v 2

II. AN OVERVIEW OF SCHMEMANN: Secularism, "Western Captivity," and the Liturgy as Theological Source 19 Secularism defined A Christian heresy Denial of the world's sacramentality Secularism rampant in the church The Western captivity of theology Historical background Sacrament and symbol The theological situation in modem times The liturgy as theological source 20 27 35

48 60 61 64 76 87 88 93 99 1l4 127 l30 134

m. A RESPONSE TO SCHMEMANN'S "WESTERN CAPTIVITY" ,

Vladimir Weidle: a common heritage The ancient world: Plato and the effects of literacy The "hazard" of modem theology IV. A HERMENEUTICS OF WORSHIP "Hermeneutics": a reconsideration Anton Ugolnik Ludwig Wittgenstein Cognition as "paced-placed" movements V. THE LITURGY OF BAPTISM Baptism as passage Baptismal preparation The catechumen

vii

Exorcism and the renunciation of Satan Baptismal fulfillment. 143 The blessing and anointing of water Baptism as death and resurrection Baptismal preparation and the question of infant baptism...149 Chrismation and the threefold content of Christian spirituality , 153 Kings Priests Prophets VI. THE EUCHARISTIC LITURGY Eucharist and ecclesiology: a mutual misunderstanding Mysteriological and monastic roots The eucharist as journey The assembly The entrance The offering or transfer of gifts The kiss of peace The anaphora Knowing as recognition VII. THE LITURGY OF TIME Historical background The yearly cycle Lent Easter The weekly cycle The daily cycle: vespers and matins
Death

163 166 170 176

191 195 198 209 224 226

230

Vlll. THE LITURGY AS PUBLIC PLACE OF APPEARANCE Secularism and the loss of public space The recovery of public "space (or place) of appearance" The question of relativism An ethical approach: the liturgy as public place BIBLIOGRAPHY

235 235 248 260 267 280

To love is not easy, and mankind has chosen not to return God's love. Man has loved the world, but as an end in itself and not as transparent to God. He has done it so consistently that it has become something that is "in the air." It seems natural for man to experience the world as opaque, and not shot through with the presence of God. It seems natural not to live a life of thanksgiving for God's gift of a world. It seems natural not to be eucharistic. Alexander Schmemann

One of the most dangerous of ideas for a philosopher is, oddly enough, that we think with our heads or in our heads. The idea of thinking as a process in the head, in a completely enclosed space, gives [the philosopher] something occult. Ludwig Wittgenstein

Chapter 1 Introduction
This inquiry is a somewhat unexpected coming together of two separate theological interests of mine. L'1the beginning this study was to be an investigation into Orthodox theology, and I had decided to use Alexander Schmemann as a kind of window into the Orthodox world. However, my theological studies have been shaped and stretched by some rather haunting epistemological concerns, particularly as staked out by Ludwig Wittgenstein, which I found myself unable to put aside. Upon reading Schmemann in more depth, I realized that his theology provided me at once an opportunity to bring these apparently disparate foci together. For Schmemann, as I hope to illustrate, in many ways challenges the manner in which "theology," in the world of Western rationalism, has usually been done. While I will return to a fuller discussion of this in the latter half of this introduction, in short Schmemann's regnant model for his theological inquiry is not the objectivistic model one usually imagines a scientist to have, but rather the eucharistic model as displayed in the life of the church. Alexander Schmemann was born in 1921 into a Russian family with Baltic German ancestry on his father's side. Schmemann moved from Estonia to France during his early childhood where he was to remain until he departed for America in 1951. As a young boy in Paris during the heyday of Russian emigration, his life became part of the rich culture of Russian emigrants. The very hub of that culture was the Russian Orthodox church. One of the ways the Russian emigres maintained their sense of

identity in a new land was by holding onto their faith, which was expressed most fully when they gathered to celebrate the Orthodox Divine liturgy. This was by no means the first time the celebration of the Orthodox liturgy had served as a preserver of the Orthodox faith. Under the Mongols, the Turks, and more recently the Soviets, the Orthodox liturgy has continued to be the chief means through which the Orthodox sustain their identity. Young Schmemann came to Paris as an inheritor of this legacy. His church upbringing, in which his mother had carried him since birth to all the feasts, vigils, etc., was to be one of the primary influences on his own future vocation. Though Schmemann took mandatory religion classes at the Russian military school in Versailles where he was a "cadet" and then later at the gimnaziya (high school), his participation in the liturgy was what continued to play a central role in his initiation into Orthodoxy. At the St. Alexander Nevsky Cathedral in Paris, he assisted as an altar boy and later as sub-deacon. At the early age of ten, Schmemann had already decided that he wanted to become a priest. Upon entering the Theological Institute of Paris in 1940 (also called "St. Sergius''), Schmemann met and was influenced by a variety of persons. It was during this period, in 1943, that Scamemann married Juliana Osorguine, also an Orthodox of Russian background and a student of classics at the Sorbonne. Father Sergius Bulgakov (1871-1944), a former Marxist, was dean of the seminary at the time and taught dogmatic theology. Although Schmemann did not adhere to Bulgakov's more esoteric "sophiology" he was nonetheless influenced and inspired by Bulgakov. Schmemann himself was to say that he experienced a kind of

conversion!

upon reading Bulgakov's trilogy: "The Burning Bush," about

the Mother of God (1927), "The Friend of the Bridegroom," about John the Baptist (1927), and "Jacob's Ladder," about the holy angels(1929), which were all written from within a liturgical context.2 Schmemann was thereby converted to a style of theologizing which was "stirred up" by the liturgy and in which the liturgical texts themselves were used to build a worldview. Schmemann thus came to share with Bulgakov a devotion to the church with a strong emphasis on the liturgy. Another person who played a major role in Schmemann's life was Father Cyprian Kern (died 1960). Not only was Father Kern an outstanding professor of liturgics at St. Sergius, but he was also for years Schmemann's spiritual father with whom Schmemann used to have daily talks. Schmemann had been ordained in 1946 by Archbishop Vladimir Tikhonitsky (head of the Russian Exarchate of Western Europe under the jurisdiction of the Patriarchate of Constantinople) and served as Fr. Kern's assistant at the SS Constantine and Helen parish located near Paris. Father Kern, who was influenced by the Liturgical Movement of the last halfcentury, wrote a comprehensive book on the eucharist which reflected the growing theological concern amongst the Orthodox for the centrality of the eucharist and its theological implications. Fr. Kern writes:

If in our time Eucharistic life is weakened to the point that we have almost completely lost the proper Eucharistic consciousness, and regard the Divine Liturgy being celebrated in our churches as just one of the ceremonies ... then in the IDr. Thomas Hopko, St. Vladimir's Seminary, Crestwood, NY, Interview, 2 May 1989. 2This trilogy can be found in A Bulgakov Anthology, eds. James Pain and Nicolas Zernov (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1976).

times of genuine ecclesiastical life it was not so. The Eucharist was the basis and culmination of all liturgical life. But gradually everything that was concentrated around the Eucharist as the center of liturgical life - the Sacraments, prayers, orders of service ... were turned in the consciousness of Christians into private rites, became the private business of each individual person or family, having (apparently) nothing to do with the concept of the gathered community.3 As we shall see, the eucharist as expressing not a private piety but the corporate life of the Christian community was to become a dominant theme in Schmemann's thought. Likewise influential in terms of Schmemann's eucharistic emphasis was Nicholas Afanassieff (1893-1966), professor of canon law and church history at St. Sergius. Orthodox ecclesiology had become a central focus in modem Russian theology on account of several factors: the rediscovery of the church's "mystico-sacramental essence't+ in the nineteenth century led by A.S. Khomiakov; the decline of the Orthodox empire and the questions which this put to the church's earlier self-identification with it; the Orthodox diaspora to Europe, and the encounters with the non-Orthodox West that raised issues about the nature of the Church and its location. This renewed Orthodox eccesiology tended to go beyond the juridical, institutional definitions of the church in an attempt to rediscover the church's sacramental source. Afanassiev was the "most radical, consistent, and therefore controversial exponent'P of this renewed ecc1esiology.

3Evkharistiya (Paris: YMCA Press, 1947), pp. 25ff, cited by Alexander Schmemann, Introduction to Liturgical Theology (Maine: American Orthodox Press, 1966), p. 27. 4Alexander Schmemann, "Russian Theology: 1920-1972, An Introductory Survey." St. Vladimir's Theological Quarterly 16 (Winter, 1972) : 181. sIbid.

Afanassiev formulated an ecclesiology based on the eucharist, and thus one which was not quantitative in character but qualitative. Appealing to the dominicallogion in Matthew 18:20 on Jesus' presence where 'two or three are gathered in my Name', Afanassiev contends that the 'gathering' is realised in the eucharistic assembly. The whole Christ is present in the Eucharistic Gifts and, as a result, the fulness of his body, the Church, is found in each ecc1esial community that celebrates the eucharistic mysteries, a community consisting, in essence, of people and bishop. Afanassiev's fundamental conception is all the more powerful for its simplicity. It is, as Peter Plank puts it, 'a great idea', which, despite its unilateral character, 'offers a grandiose intuition of the Church'.6 Schmemann came to share this "intuition," and as will be discussed later, an important thread in Schmemann's theology was to become Afanassiev's emphasis on the "eschatological self-fulfillment" when the church gathers to celebrate the eucharist. A fmal person at St. Sergius who influenced Schmemann, and whom Sclunemann was later to follow to the United States to help with the new Orthodox seminary (St. Vladimir's), was Fr. Georges Florovsky (18931979), professor of patrology. Florovsky represented the "other" school of thought at St. Sergius at this time. He was critical of Bulgakov's sophiology, which he thought was non-historical and influenced by German idealism. While Bulgakov and those sharing his theological orientation relied on the western philsophical tradition to supply the conceptual framework of theology, Florovsky advocated a "return to the fathers" and believed that Hellenic categories alone must constitute Orthodox theology. Thus in an effort to re-Hellenize Russian theology,
6Aidan Nichols, Theology in the Russian Diaspora (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 164.

Florovsky denounced the Latin and Protestant influences on Russian theology as a kind of "pseudo-morphosis." Florovsky went so far as to write that "Hellenism in the Church was made eternal, was integrated into its very texture as an eternal category of Christian existence. ''7 Most influential in Schrnemann's development was Florovsky's criticism of the "Westernization" of Orthodox theology. Briefly stated, Florovsky held that since the seventeeth century the Orthodox theology as taught in the theological schools had undergone a dangerous borrowing of Western sources. Such western scholasticism had screened and obstructed the true source and spirit of Orthodox thought: the Patristic foundations. Eastern Orthodox theology had chosen to follow the path of western scholasticism rather than its own historical path, and this had in tum alienated theology from church life, the very heart of Orthodoxy. Florovsky wrote that "theological thought gradually digressed from hearing the rhythm of the Church's heart and thereby lost the 'way' to this heart ... to this extent it can
be justly characterized as a 'wandering theology'."8

This critical

framework which Schmemann learned from Florovsky was one of the factors that gave Schmemann the impetus to stake his "theological post" directly in the liturgical life of the Orthodox church.

7Puti Russkogo Bogosloviya (Ways of Russian Theology>, (Paris: 1937), p. 509, cited by A. Sehmemann, "Russian Theology: 19201972, An Introductory SUIVery," p.179. E.L. MaseaIl writes that "so profoundly did this orientation affect him that he adopted the Greek form of the cassock in place of the usual Russian one shortly after his ordination to the priesthood (1932)" in "George Florovsky," Sobornost 2 (1980) : 69. 8Georges Florovsky, Aspects of Church History in Collected Works of Georges Florovsky, 8 vols. (Massachusetts: Nordland Publishing Company, 1975), 4 :178.

Schrnemann's liturgical approach was informed as well by nonOrthodox sources, namely the Catholic liturgical theologians predominant in the 1940's and 1950's. This group included Odo Casel, Louis Bouyer, Jean Danielou, and also the Anglican Gregory Dix. Though Schmemann criticized various aspects of these theologians, they nonetheless provided a constructive liturgical "atmosphere" in which Schmemann's own thought could grow. Louis Bouyer begins his book Liturgical Piety by asking why the liturgy has come to be considered by many as merely the "official form for the external worship of the church" instead of "that system of prayers and rites traditionally canonized by the Church as her own prayer and worship. "9 Schrnemann took up a similar question as he tried to move away from liturgy as merely an external phenomenon to a consideration of the liturgy, or lex orandi, as the ver-f source of the lex credendi. With Gregory Dix, Scbmemann believed that the living tradition of the liturgy with its center in the eucharistic rite has since apostolic times served as the very heart of corporate life of the church, and that this fact has radical implications for the task of theology. In contrast to much of the theology that was severed from ecclesiallife, Schmemann believed that the official expression of the church's faith was worship, not only as recorded in texts but the actual celebration which included liturgical movements, icons, etc. Schmemann thus wrote that worship is "the public act which eternally actualizes the nature of the Church as the Body of Christ, an act, moreover, that is not partial, having reference only to one function of the Church (her 'corporate prayer') or expressing only one of her aspects, but which embraces, expresses, inspires and defines the whole Church, her whole 9Louis Bouyer, Liturgical Piety (Notre Dame: Notre Dame Press, 1955), p. 1. University of

essential nature, her whole life."IO Quoting Bouyer, Schmemann stated that "the Christian religion is not only a doctrine ... it is a public action or deed." I I While Schmemann had begun his academic career in church history (he wrote a Master's thesis on Byzantine theocracy), he eventually came to discover that his real passion was for the "existential today" of the church. The Orthodox Church, Schmemann believed, "could not be alive either as a defence of the State, or cultural appendix of 'Russianism': it was alive in and through the Liturgy."12 Schmemann's focus on the liturgy did not imply merely a return to the past; he was driven to discern what the liturgy had to do with life in the here and now. The titles of his books reflect this concern: Liturgy and Life, For the Life of the World, Ultimate Ouestions, etc. It was this "existential" concern, combined with a desire to write not just for "theologians" but for all Orthodox believers, that led to Schmemann's best known book, For the Life of the World, which was translated into numerous languages and became an influential source of liturgical renewal. Schmemann's "existential concern" also expressed itself in his close attention to the state of Orthodoxy in his native land, and he followed the Russian drama closely. For twenty years, he broadcast sermons into the Soviet Union through Radio Liberty. Likewise, Schmemann's liturgical "existential" emphasis was a central part of his twenty-year term as dean of St. Vladimir's as he both "succeeded in integrating the school within the very texture of ecclesiastical life," 13 and IOSchmemann, Introduction to Liturgical Theology, p. 12. llibid. 12John Meyendorff, "A Life Worth Living," St. Vladimir's Theological Quarterly, 28 (Winter 1983) : 5. 13Ibid., p. 7.

10

was instrumental in establishing the autocephalous Orthodox Church of America. Schmemann began his post as dean of St. Vladimir's in 1962 when the seminary moved to its present location in Crestwood, NY, a position he maintained until his death in 1983. ill concluding this biographical sketch I want to emphasize that Schmemann's theologizing from the standpoint of the liturgy is rooted in a deeply Orthodox theme. As his wife said to me recently, Schmemann believed that theology is only worthwhile if it is prayer.14 Evagrius, a fourth century monk at Sketis in Egypt, said that a theologian is one who knows how to pray, and the one who prays in truth and in spirit is by that act a theologian. Prayer is here understood in the context of a living relationship with God which is central to both personal and corporate worship. Schmemann's stance by this traditional Orthodox concept enabled him to see very clearly through all that did not pertain to lived prayer. This Orthodox theme that theology is that which is prayed in the church also gave Schmemann a vision or sense of where he was in the world before God. His defmition of the person as primarily homo adorans meant that a person always stands before God with a sense of gratitude (eucharistia) for his or her life. Such a liturgical defmition of personhood (which we will take up again in the following chapters) enables us to see why Schmemann spent so much of his life developing an understanding of the liturgy and its bearings upon our life in the world. ill the fmal half of this introduction, I will now state more specifically the overall purpose of this dissertation. First I wish to state what this dissertation is an argument against. For some time now, theology 14]uliana Schmemann, St. Vladimir'S Seminary, Crestwood, New York, Interview, 2 May 1989.

11

has usually been regarded as a highly rationalistic enterprise. By rationalistic, I mean that which can be made explicit to "reason," a reason which is informed by Enlightenment presuppositions of lucidity, clarity, objectivity, and an "exclusive concern with the logical interrelations of concepts as a means for apprehending truth."15 These values are often not endorsed explicitly, but nonetheless seem to be tacitly called for. However, such a starting "place" for theology occurs at the expense of the theologian's own concrete place in the world. Theology as abstract thought requires -- in fact demands -- that the theologian relinquish his or her own non-abstract, concrete ways of being in the world. In other words, it is an unwritten code that a theologian ought not be too "subjective" or unscientific. However, that which theology takes as its primary focus -whether Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit, God, or the church -- comes to have meaning for us not when we are detached spectators observing how, for example, God works in the world at large. Rather theology as a description of God's activity acquires meaning and passion when God moves in the life of you and me in our particular places, however humble they may be. Just as an intimate relationship with another person cannot fully be described in the abstract, so also theology cannot be exhaustively learned through studying "logical" truths, through reading books, etc. While I do not wish to contest the tremendous benefit of theological books, I do believe the very ground of theology itself collapses when rationalistic values of objectivism are taken as the primary criteria guiding the theological task.

15Nichols, Russian Diaspora, p. 19. "Logical" in this context refers to rationalistic logic.

12

Thus the purpose of my study is to consider how our understanding of the theological task differs when we tum to theology's source: our own engagement in the world before God. In particular, I will focus on our engagement before God in the liturgy. For the liturgy is one of those places where we learn that God's love in Jesus Christ is not a "cosmic truth" or an abstraction but a personal gift from a God who calls us each by name. What happens, then, when we consider theology not as an activity of critical reflection, as strictly a mental enterprise, but as something we do in the presence of God -- with our hands and our mouths and our knees? Stated differently, what is the dissimilarity between theology as "detached" knowledge (rationally conceived) and theology as knowing which is internally related to doing? These are the background questions that have primarily guided my study. You may be wondering how such radical questions relate to the works of a seemingly traditional Russian Orthodox theologian, and on its face you have good reason to wonder. However, it is important to point out that the argument I make in regard to Schmemann's theological thought is in many ways more radical that Schmemann himself would admit. For although at points in Schmemann's argument one can detect strands of Platonism,16 nonetheless in turning to the liturgy as source -- rich with 16For example, we can detect Schmemann's reliance on unchanging Platonic essences when he writes, "Byzantium [is]... the fulfillment of this history [of the Church]. its permanent terminus ad quem beyond which nothing can 'happen' and which therefore can only be preserved. The reality of this unique and ultimate 'world' does not depend on history. The historical collapse of the empire in 1453 not only did not destroy it but, on the contrary, by depriving it of all that is mere 'historical,' i.e. temporary and contingent, transformed it into a truly supra-historical reality, an 'essence' no longer subject to historical contingencies." in Church. World. Mission

13

gestures, words, moments of silence, bended knees, bowed heads, etc. -Schmemann's theology stands as a radical alternative to preconceived ideas of what theology ought to be. Though Schmemann in one sense is a traditional Orthodox theologian, in the way he theologizes he is untraditional, at least according to the tradition of rationalistic epistemology. For throughout his writings, "theology" emerges not as a strictly mental task to be recorded in texts, and not as a completed body of knowledge, but rather as an ongoing activity embodied before God and other believers in our spoken and heard words, in our movements, in our gestures: in short, in our shared liturgical life. Schmemann points out, however, that liturgical life today has suffered the theological fate of being relegated to a "sub-discipline." Robert Taft echoes Schmemann's concerns when he writes: To think that a homily of John Chrysostom or John Calvin, or a book by Karl Rahner or Karl Barth, is worthy of the theologian's attention, and fail to understand how the ways and the prayers by which these same gentlemen along with some other millions have worshiped God is worthy of the same, is the prejudice of those so locked into a narrow concept of expression as to think that only words communicate anything theological.I7 Surely contributing to Taft's criticism is Schmemann's observation that "liturgy" has become a word and concept our secularized society is less and less likely to use with any confidence. "It is a 'religious' word, part of the growing number of concepts that in an increasingly secularized society (New York: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1979), p. 106, my emphasis. 17Robert Taft, "Liturgy as Theology," Worship, 56 (March 1982) : 114.

14

have been removed from everyday use."18 However, this was not always so. In fact "liturgy" at one time had a quite ordinary use. Etymologically "liturgy" is derived from Allt'toa(conceming the people or national community) and epjov (work). And AEt'tOUp'}£tV meant "to do things which are related, not to private concerns, but to the national community, or more briefly to the body politic. More precisely it is to render service to the people (as a common political unity) by discharging a true task for society."19 While liturgy was later used to mean service to God or gods, it nonetheless remained a description of a powerful public action. As Schmemann states, "it meant an action by which a group of people become something corporately which they had not been as a mere collection of individuals - a whole greater that the sum of its parts.,,20 It is from this standpoint that I have referred to the liturgy as a sacred sprachspiel, for I believe the word "game," at least in one common usage, brings vividly before our imagination the concept of people publicly acting together and caught up in a shared telos. Indeed Wittgenstein, who originally used the phrase, wrote that "the term 'language-game' is meant to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity ... "21 18William Swatos, "Liturgy and Lebensform: The Personal God As A Social Being," Perspectives in Religious Studies 7 (Spring 1980) : 42. 19Gerhard Kittel, ed. Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, 10 vols., (Grand Rapids, Michigan: W.B. Eerdman's Publishing Co., 19..64-1975) 4: 216. 20Alexander' Schmemann, For the Life of the World (NY: National Student Christian Federation, 1963), p. 13. 21Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1953), p. lle, #23.

IS

I have some reservation, however, about using the word "game," for in our culture "game" is often taken to be trivial, frivolous, and nonserious, which is exactly the opposite of what I wish to communicate about the liturgy.22 Rather the liturgy as worship given to God is one of the most serious activities in which we participate.23 Nonetheless the seriousness of the liturgy does not negate its joyous, edifying and freeing character. Given this, it has been suggested to me that perhaps "dance" would better communicate my thoughts than "game," for "dance" does not have the sense of triviality as "game" yet maintains the meaning of an activity governed by both tacit and explicit grammar. In fact, at least a part of the Orthodox liturgy, the Great Entrance when the gifts are transferred to the altar, has already been described as a "sacred dance": This sacred dance frequently takes such moving and enchanting forms that many of the faithful cast themselves to the floor and remain lying there. The procession advances over the outstretched 'corpses' and completes its sacred course at the altar, while the choirs repeat the song of the angels, the Cherubikon ...24 22Nicholas Lash sympathizes with my reservation and writes that the emphasis on activity "comes across more forcefully in the chunkyiGerman 'Sprach-spiel', 'speak-play', than in the more portentous 'language game', an expression which evokes with less immediacy the practice of language," in "How Large is a 'Language Game'?" Theology 87 (January 1984) : 27. 23Indeed, Kieran Flanagan describes Catholic theologian Romano Guardini's understanding of the liturgy as a "sacred game played under serious rules before God," in "Liturgy as Play: A Hermeneutics of Ritual Re-Presentation," Modern Theology 4 (July 1988) : 346. 24M. Tarchnisvili, Die byzantinische Liturgie als Verwirklichung der Einheit und Gemeinschaft im Dogma (Wiirzburg, 1939), p. 27, cited by Hans-Joachim Schulz, The Byzantine Liturgy, trans. Matthew J. O'Connell (New York: Pueblo Publishing Co., 1986), p. 217, my emphasis.

16

Yet, I have not just spoken of the liturgy as a spiel but I have further stated that the liturgy is a sprachspiel. By using the word "language" I wish to highlight the complex "theological grammar" of the liturgy. Here I am not simply referring to the written grammar we learn from grammar school books, or theological treatises. While there is no doubt that the study of the various theological books can be helpful, the point I wish to emphasize is that this written grammar, whether of theological books or of liturgical texts, is not all-encompassing. To believe so is to fail to understand that theology is both a dynamic enterprise and, like a second language, a skill to be acquired through hours and hours of practice with actual speakers. "Grammar" so understood is more than what is written in a book. Those of us who have studied the grammar of a second language from a textbook only discover all the "grammar" of the language we have not learned when we actually visit the country where the language is spoken. That is to say, we discover the native gestures, the tempo of various parts of speech, the plays on various words, the linguistic musicality; in summary the language becomes dynamic and an active skill to be gained through hours of practice. Schmemann's whole project reminds us of this fact in regard to theological grammar because he stresses not books but the actual practice of liturgy as theological source. To understand the liturgy as source in this sense is something like visiting the country where the language is actually spoken (and indeed for "outsiders" to participate in an Orthodox Divine Liturgy is like entering another world). The words become dynamic: they are not simply read in silence, but spoken to the celebrant, to other participants, and above all addressed to God. In order to learn how to use this doxological grammar, one must

17

become acclimated to this strange liturgical land: strange, that is, to those unfamiliar with the Orthodox church and its use of incense and icons (or conversely to those unfamiliar with the Baptist church and its use of "amen's" and altar calls). From the standpoint of this broader understanding of "theological grammar," we are then in a position to understand the importance (and primacy) of epistemological sources other than theological books. For theological knowledge like all knowledge is personal. To illuminate Schmemann's tum to the liturgy I refer to the work of Michael Polanyi, particularly to his book Personal Knowledge. Polanyi, who was a chemist and philosopher, writes as a scientist about what it means to know science and make scientific discoveries. Whereas the usual paradigm has been the scientist as subject viewing his or her "objects," whether an insect or the moon, Polanyi challenges this picture. Instead he argues that a scientist is initiated and "apprenticed" into a scientific community, and that when a scientist makes discoveries she enters into and "indwells" what it is she is seeking to know. Scientific knowledge, like all knowledge, is "opentextured" and personal. For example, when Einstein discovered the theory of relativity there is a sense in which he indwelled this theory before he explicitly formulated it. Such indwelling, argues Polanyi, enables one to absorb tacit aspects of which the "mind's eye" is not explicitly aware. This is why, though there was much calculation involved, Einstein's theory came to him in a "flash," as a sudden insight, or, as one writer described, as a "leap of the imagination. "25 Einstein bad, through personal pursuit and "indwelling," incorporated tacit aspects which at some point came 25James E. Loder, The Transforming Moment: Understanding Convictional Experiences (New York: Harper & Row, 1981), p. 23.

18

together -- in a moment -- enabling him to think the theory of relativity. Einstein knew the theory of relativity because he first tacitly indwelt the theory within a framework he had learned from the scientific community. It is not strict ratiocination that gives us brilliant insights, but moving, stretching, and indwelling what it is we are seeking to know. Thus in this dissertation I am moving away from theology as ratiocination, and in its place, seeking to fmd a way to talk about theology as indwelling, as incorporation, as movement, and as action. Alexander Schmemann, as a theologian who turns to the liturgy as source, provides me with a framework from which to articulate a theology which is internally related to doing and indwelling, and thus enables me to draw upon such pertinent epistemological sources as gestures, memory, community, tacit aspects of knowing, orality, etc. From this standpoint, I am attempting to develop a theology as integral knowledge which, so understood, leads towards faith rather than away from it. To paraphrase a comment of Ludwig Wittgenstein, we do not, as children, learn that God exists, but rather we learn to pray to God, to kneel before God, etc.26 By participating in the sacred liturgical sprachspiel as enactment, is not proof but commitment."27 we learn that "theology,

26"Children do not learn that books exist, that etc. etc., - they learn to fetch books, sit in armchairs, Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, trans. Denis Paul Anscombe (NY: Harper & Row, 1969), p, 62e, #476. 27John W. Dixon, The Physiology of Faith (NY: 1979), p. 186.

armchairs exist, etc. etc." in and G.E.M. Harper & Row,

19

Chapter 2 An Overview of Schmemann: Secularism, "Western Captivity," and the Liturgy as Theological Source

The purpose of this chapter is to give a broad and descriptive overview of Schmemann's understanding of the North American culture as secular, and of his critique of the "Western captivity" of Orthodox theology. In my final chpater I return to the theme of secularism and analyze this in greater depth. In Chapters Three and Four, I both criticize and broaden Schmemann's conception of Orthodox theology's Western captivity. First, however, I find it necessary to layout Schmemann's theological and cultural approach. As discussed in the Introduction, Schmemann lived in a variety of cultural settings during his lifetime. It was perhaps this rich cultural contrast which enabled him to become a keen observer of his surrounding climate. Schmemann particularly struggled throughout his adult life with the meaning of Orthodoxy in a North American culture which he perceived as becoming increasingly secular. What was the destiny of the Orthodox Church when it existed "in a world radically different from that which shaped our mentality, our thought-forms, indeed our whole life as Orthodox, in a world moreover marked by a spiritual crisis which acquires with each passing year truly universal dimensions?"! As a result of such secularism, Schmemann believed that the Orthodox church had lost, to a great extent, its own vision and identity.

NY:

IAlexander Schmemann, Church. World. Mission (Crestwood, St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1979), p. 8.

20

Yet not only was Orthodoxy becoming more secular, Orthodox theology had for some time suffered a kind of "Western captivity." That is, Orthodox theologians had relied upon "western" theological categories and "thought-forms" such that Orthodox theology itself had undergone a negative transformation; it no longer reflected Orthodoxy's own rich heritage. Schmemann expressed his concern very explicity at the 1976 Second Congress of Orthodox Theological Schools, in which he presented a paper entitled "The Problem of the Church's Presence in the World in Orthodox Consciousness." At the outset Schmemann observed that the very fact that after 2,000 years the Orthdox felt compelled to ask about the meaning of the church's presence and the role of theology in expressing this presence "is clear proof that something has 'happened' which requires from theology a new effort of reflection ... "2

In this chapter I will examine in more detail both Schmemann's

description of North American culture as secular and his critique of the "Western" captivity of Orthodox theology. In the final section, I will tum to Schmemann's own theological "efforts of reflection" as he sought to recover a more genuine Orthodox framework. Secularism defined According to Scbmemann, one of the most painful "signs of the times" is that Orthodox Christians are simply unaware of any problem between the Orthodox church and North American culture. To be successful, one must "build 'bigger 'n better' churches and all kinds of 'facilities,' keep your congregation busy and happy, serve the prescribed

2Ibid., p. 3.

21

services, constantly affirm that Orthodoxy is the true faith ..."3 Within this present environment of "compulsory official optimism," Schmemann admits that it is not easy to appear as a prophet of doom. Nevertheless he believes that the Orthodox church in our time is in a serious state of crisis. Though "crisis" itself is a word that is much abused, Schmemann uses it in its "original and Christian" meaning: "as judgment, as a situation calling for choice and decision, for discerning the will of God and for the courage to obey it ..."4 The present crisis, Schmemann claims, has resulted from a loss of the Orthodox vision; the deep interconnections between the Orthodox church and the believer's actual way of life in the world have slipped away practically unnoticed. Schmemann thus uses "secularism" as a critical category to describe Western culture. A secular culture is one that has compartmentalized and trivialized religion; and no longer takes the church seriously. While churches may indeed still thrive in a secular age, the criteria upon which they rely are not those of the Christian faith but are derived from elsewhere, Christianity. A Christian heresy Yet at the same time Schmemann points out that secularism survives by relying upon concepts originally derived from Christianity. "Secularism must indeed be acknowledged as a 'Christian' phenomenon, as a result of the Christian revolution. It can be explained only within the Schmemann, "Problems of Orthodox in America: III. The Spiritual Problem," St. Vladimir's Theological Quarterly, 9 (Winter, 1965) : 171. +Schmemann, Church. World. Mission, p. 9.
3Alexander

which results, according to Scbmemann, in a purely nominal

22

context of the history whose starting point is the encounter between Athens and Jerusalem/'f To elaborate this claim I tum to a lecture given by Schmemann late in his life, "Between Utopia and Escape,"6 in which he asserts that modem Western culture has had two contrasting identities. On the one hand, part of Western culture embodies a kind of utopian spirit manifested when persons adhere to a "maximalist projection" toward the future: history is moving toward fulfillment (Schmemann cites Marxism as one example). Schmemann roots the beginnings of such utopianism in the Enlightenment, and the reaction during this time against the pessimism of the Middle Ages. For example, Schelling and Hegel maintained the Christian idea that history was progressing and moving toward the absolute, though they ultimately rejected any understanding of God. In modem times, the utopian coefficient can be heard during political elections as politicians speak of moving towards a greater society. At another level of life, says Schmemann, we hear about a "therapeutic utopia," or the possibility of total health in which mental therapies hold up happiness as the self-evident goal of life. On the other hand, however, a different cultural identity is manifested in a tendency toward escapism - a counter-utopia or "drop-out" mentality - which Schmemann refers to as a "strange counterpart." This escapist mentality perceives that a worldly upotia is a false and unattainable reality and thus seeks to abandon life in the world. Escapism manifests itself in the search for all kinds of world-denying spiritual experiences and SSchmemann, For the Life of the World, p. 84. 6Lecture by Alexander Schmemann, "Between Utopia and Escape," Christ Church, Greenville, DE, 22 March 1981.

23

in the cult of gurus. Schmemann elsewhere describes these two positions (utopia and escape) as anthropological maximalism and anthropological minimalism. The first position is based on the unprecendented exaltation of human potential, while the minimalist position, often affirmed by the human sciences, reduces the person to an entity determined by impersonal natural laws, from which one then seeks escape. In his analysis of these two attitudes, Schmemann states that this is the first time that a culture is denied on both the right and the left. He means by this that from one perspective, culture is something to be judged and overthrown with a focus only on the future; from the other perspective our present life is to be fled, rejected, and considered an object of disgust. Yet Schmemann states that both these attitudes are what a French philosopher termed "the Christian ideas gone mad." The root of both utopianism and escapism is derived from the Christian faith itself: from Christianity's two approaches to the world which the church had previously held together. These two approaches are reflected throughout various biblical passages, and Schmemann cites the following: 1)"God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son" (John 3:16), a love, says Schmemann, that goes back to God's affirmation of the goodness of creation in Genesis, and 2) "do not love the world, nor the things in the world ... for everything in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the boastful pride of life, is not from the Father, but is from the world" (1 John 2:15). Whereas the church had previously held these two attitudes together, in our time these ideas have "gone mad." Thus Schmemann claims that the church needs to rediscover and restate for itself how it can reconcile both the denial (escapism) and affirmation (utopianism) of the world.

24

Affirmation of the goodness of the world alone leads to utopianism; however, the Christian faith also affirms that the world is fallen and has rejected God. But those who seek to escape from the world stand on this latter truth (the world is fallen) alone: they want to transcend a fallen world, but fail to realize that self-transcendence is but another way of rejecting God and thus manifesting their own fallen condition. A reconciliation of these two approaches can only happen, says Schmemann, when the church fully reclaims its historical "triune" vision of the world, a vision of creation, fall and redemption. We are now in a position, given Schmemann's analysis of these two manifestations of secularism, to see more clearly why Schmemann states that "secularism ...is a 'stepchild' of Christianity", and "a legitimate child, but a heresy."] A heresy, says Schmemann, is a distortion, an exaggeration. a mutilation of something true, "one element at the expense of the others ..." Such a distortion calls upon the church to detect the question(s) that the heresy of secularism implies, such as: Why has Christianity been increasingly trivialized? What factors contribute to the church being relegated to one sphere of life? While Christianity, as Paul says, will always remain as a stumbling block to some, as "foolishness to the wise," has the church itself contributed to its own trivialization? Schmemann states that secularism as the heresy of our own time demands from the church discernment, "an effort of understanding so [secularism] may ultimately be overcome by truth." 8

7Schmemann,

For the Life of the World, p. 127.

8Ibid., p. 128.

25

Denial of the world's sacramentality Schmemman begins to address these questions with his own "effort of understanding" by stating that secularism presupposes the autonomy of the world. In other words, secularism, by relying upon the dichotomy sacred/secular, relegates the sacred to one sphere and thus denies the sacramental character of the whole world and of one's place in the world. Secularism is not anti-religious, for it has a defmite "place" for religion, but religion is denied the power of an integrated world-view shaping and permeating all of one's life. Religion holds a relatively "benign" place because its impact on all of life is simply neutralized. The "secularist" may even be a religious person who attends church services, "has his marriage solemnnized, his home blessed, his religious 'obligations' fulfilled, all in perfectly good faith. "9 However, the "religious obligations" of the secularist are not derived from the creeds confessed in church, from the "Incarnation, Death, Resurrection and Glorification of Christ" but rather from other philosophies of life which have nothing to do with the creeds. For example, Schmemann points out that it does not take much to see that many of the key values endorsed by society, such as success, .security, affluence, competition, status, profit, prestige, ambition (defmed in a particular way, i.e., success equated with money), are directly opposed to the entire "ethos" of the Gospel. As Juliana Schmemann (Fr. Schmemann's wife) put it: there is "one kind of loyalty and logic to life and another kind to religion ... the separation in the human of two completely different ways of thinking

9"111. The Spiritual Problem," p. 173.

26

and of belonging."IO To elucidate his definition of secularism, Schmemann quotes biblical theologian Will Herberg: America seems to be at once the most religious and the most secular of nations ...Every aspect of contemporary religious life reflects this paradox: pervasive secularism amid mounting religiosity ...The influx of members into the churches and the increased readiness of Americans to identify themselves in religious terms certainly appears to stand in contrast to the way Americans seem to think and feel about matters central to the faith they profess ...[they are] thinking and living in terms of a framework of reality and value remote from the religious beliefs simultaneously professed. I I Schmemann claims that for a "secularist" it makes sense to be involved in apparently inconsistent ways of life because religion holds only a small "place"; it is seen as a "help" and a sanction for values already held. A fundamental dichotomy remains because, while religion can provide some ethical standards and a sense of comfort, it is not given the power to transform life. Schmemann refers to the life and work of a businessman who can believe in the immortality of the soul and find a sense of help in prayer, but when he enters the office and begins to work he is entirely "self-sufficient and autonomous." Schmemann then draws a distinction between secularism and atheism, for while an atheist rejects the idea of God, a secularist may accept and acknowledge that there is a God. Yet the secularist believes that the world contains within itself its own meaning, and thus denies the sacramentality of the world and of the person. The secularist "may deduce meaning from God and ascribe to God the origin of the world and the laws which govern

lOlnterview with Julianna Schmemann, 2 May1989. llcited by Schmemann in "III. The Spiritual Problem," p. 174.

27

it. He may even admit without difficulty the possibility of God's intervention in the world's existence ... All this changes nothing in his fundamental 'secularity' of his vision of man and world, in the world being understood, experienced, and acted upon in its own immanent terms and for its own immanent sake."12 The world is believed to be an end-in-itself; no sense of "epiphany" is reflected in the imagination of the secularist. Thus when religion holds only a small "place"13 in life, it continues to be an ally for secularism because it leaves the world "secular" and profane, "incapable of a communication with the divine." 14

Secularism rampant in the church Schmemann continues that the clergy are by no means immune to the pervasive cultural secularism and may, in fact, be the first ones to propagate the secularistic philosophy of religion. The easy tendency to focus on "external criteria" results in a reduction of Orthodoxy: "it may be a reduction to a formal 'canonicity' or to an external liturgical 'rectitude' or, fmally, to 'success' as such."IS The laity focus on exterior criteria as well: Orthodox way of life requires attending services regularly, keeping a minimum of external rules, and contributing fmancially to the Church; it is a life that consists primarily in fulfilling one's religious duties. Religion is understood "in terms of sacred 'taboos,'

12Schmemann, 131 return to "place" in my final 14Schmemann, 15Schmemann,

For the Life of the World, p. 124. a broader philosophical/theological discusison of chapter. For the Life of the World, p. 133. "III. The Spiritual Problem," p. 175.

28

legal prescriptions and obligations, of ritual rectitude and canonical 'validity.'''16 Such identification with the external by both the clergy and the laity happens at the expense of the internal. For ultimately, says Schrnemann, these external phenomena of legal rectitude do not matter if they are not related to new life Gospel." "which is the only ultimate preoccupation of the When religion is denied the power actually to transform a

person from within, it easily continues to underwrite secularism. "One cannot be Orthodox in the Church and a 'secularist' in life. Sooner or later one becomes secularist in the Church also." 17 The Church comes to be seen as an institution that should satisfy the people's needs, reflect their interests, and accommodate to their "way of life." Schmemann observes that this is indeed what is happening to the Orthodox church as members participate on Sundays in the "ancient and colorful rites," but then share in the secularized world view during the rest of the week; the Orthodox church is rapidly becoming a "Sunday church." The liturgical life which is limited to Sundays and a few other "must days" such as Christmas and Good Friday is symptomatic of the breakdown in liturgical piety which was at one time woven more vitally into the fabric of everyday life. "The feasts and their eves, the 'bright sadness' of the Lenten services, the unique celestial beauty of the Mariological cycle, the warm, almost personal commemoration of the Saints, the long and solemn crescendo of the Holy Week - all this ...is virtually absent from real Iiturgical Iife.vlf The parish

16Schmemann, For the Life of the World, p. 131. 17Schmemann, "III. The Spiritual Problem," p. 176. 18Alexander Schmemann,"Probems of Orthodoxy in America: II. The Liturgical Problem," St. Vladimir's Theological Quarterly 8 (Winter, 1964): 164.

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has in fact become a secular institution which is well organized and efficient but is "a-liturgical." of life. At the level of the parish a very practical example of this loss is reflected in the church administration.19 If the "content" of the Church administration is to oversee the material success of the parish, why should a priest be any more competent than a group of professionals? However, Sclunemann observes that this question indicates that both the clergy and the laity have accepted "secular" ideas of administration. What does Schrnemann mean by this? He states that this sector of the church's life, administration and economic management, viewed in strictly secular tenus, have not been related to the purpose of the Church as revealed in the liturgy. For example, money and the offering remain unrelated to the eucharist and the eucharist to the whole of life. However, it is the duty of the priest to transform the offering into a religious act; "he offers the sacrifice of the Church to God." Yet Schmemann states that the parish as it exists today, with "officers, by-laws, finances, property, dues, meetings, elections, etc.," is a rather recent phenomenon. What the Orthodox take today to be nonnative With the liturgy no longer woven into the totality of life, the church has lost the ability to communicate its own vision

has not by any means always been the case. For centuries the church was the religious center of a more or less "'natural' community" of a village or a district of a city. "Within this community the Church had no other function, but that of literally making Christ present: in preaching, sacraments, worship, education - and of making the life of the

19Ibid., p. 174.

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'parishioners' as Christian, as permeated with Christ, as possible. "20 The clergy's spiritual and material governing of the church was not their "right" but their sacred obligation and the reason they were set apart. Schmemann does not want to deny that there were plenty of deficiencies during earlier periods of the church - times of decay and corruption, etc., but his point is that despite these deficiencies the Church stood for something "ultimately serious in the eyes of both clergy and laity ...she called man to repentance and offered him forgiveness and the possibility of a new life and she was here for this purpose and for nothing e[se."21 It was even considered "bad luck" to meet a priest -- a reaction, says Schmemann, which indicated far more respect than our present day understanding of the priest as an "optimistic salesman of reassurance and 'peace of mind' ..." 22 The church stood for "the ultimately serious pole of life" and could not be reduced to one's own image and individual needs. However, as the Orthodox parish has developed in North America, this seriousness has dissolved. What has led to the dissolution of the religious seriousness in the Orthodox church and to its surrender to secularism? Schmemann points to several factors. First, the immigrant Orthodox church upon coming to the States found itself in a different legal framework. Whereas before in Russian or Greek villages, no one ever asked who owned the church because it was considered the property of God, in the new setting the parish became an owner of property. To have a church building and a priest was costly; the immigrant church was poor, so fund raising became a
20Schmemann,

21 Ibid.,

22 Ibid.,

p. 183. p. 184.

"III.

The Spiritual Problem," 182.

31

preoccupation.

Furthermore, the church developed according to an

"American ideal": an anti-hierarchical ideal of society, the cult of private enterprise, a competitive spirit, an emphasis on saving and security, and the exaltation of the people's needs and interests. Above all, the development was permeated by "the pragmatic character of American religion - in which activity and efficiency are the main religious values. "23 A church which gives itself over to these secularized values in seeking "success" will inevitably lose its religious seriousness. Yet Schmemann believes it is precisely such a "parish organization" that has replaced the Church. The clergy and the laity are ironically part of a system that they themselves have helped to establish; "they are literally crushed by a construction in which they have invested so much of their energy, heart and love." 24 Given that within the parish there is a failure to embody the Orthodox "worldview," which is communicated in the liturgy, how much more difficult it is to have any impact on other aspects of life--family, profession, education and recreation. The liturgy has become an "engine not connected to the wheels, producing an energy which nowhere becomes motion, light or wannth."25 Schmemann sums up this radical transformation which has taken place in the fundamental comprehension of the liturgy: The question, which underlies the whole liturgical experience of Orthodoxy, "what does it reveal about me and my life, what does it mean for my activity and my relation to men, nature, and time" is replaced little by little by an entirely different question: "how much of the liturgy is needed to put me in
23Ibid., p. 185. 24Ibid., p. 186. 25Schmemann, "II.

The Liturgical Problem," p. 175.

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'good standing'"? And where religion becomes a matter of obligation and good standing, there inevitably all questions concerning the "right" and the "wrong" practices acquire a kind of independence from their moral, existential, truly religious implications.26 What from the beginning was the rea! fruit of liturgy, that "unique mixture of joy ... and repentance" which challenges and transforms one's whole life, is absent. "The liturgy is still the center of our Church life, unquestioned, unchallenged, unopposed. But it is in fact a center without periphery, a heart with no control on blood circulation, a fire with nothing to purify and to consume, because that life which had to be embraced by it, has been satisfied with itself and has chosen other lights to guide and to shape it."27 The loss of the relevance of liturgy for one's actual life has as well affected the Orthodox person's approach to sin. No longer is an understanding of sin rooted in "a total vision of life as revealed in worship, but somewhere else - in the 'common sense,' the 'golden rule,' the 'ideal of moderation' ... "28 Schmemann states that the Orthodox person in the past was not more moral but "at least, he knew he was a sinner." If one believes that the opposite of sin is following a set of rules and obligations imposed by some higher eccIesiaI authority, one then fails to understand the deeper roots of sin as a way of life, an orientation, a being before a doing. For this reason "it is indeed much easier to live and to breathe within neat distinctions between the sacred and profane ... to understand religion in tennsof sacred 'taboos,' legal prescriptions and obligations of ritual

26Ibid. 27Ibid., p. 175. 28Ibid., p. 165.

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rectitude and canonical 'validity'."29

The focus on obligations and

"shoulds" often blinds one to looking at who he or she actually is. Is my life lived out of a "constantly renewed vision and gift of another Reality"?30 On Schmemann's terms, this vision of "another Reality" is renewed and sustained through worship: "worship is by defmition and act a reality with cosmic, historical and eschatological dimensions, the expression thus not merely of 'piety,' but of an all-embracing 'world view'."31 In the face of North American secularism, Schmemann points out that Orthodoxy has responded in two mutually exclusive ways: on the one hand, there is the pessimistic negativism of the "Super-Orthodox" Western enthusiast of 'secular Christianity."'32 The first approach "prophet of apocalyptic doom," and, on the other, "the optimistic positivism ...of the includes those who reject the "americanization" of Orthodoxy while the second approach in ..the name of' americanization gives up much of Orthodoxy. The super Orthodox retreat to an "artificially created past," and believe that only in such a retreat can the church perserve its faith in the face of apostasy. These deeply conservative Orthodox are attached to everything which is covered by the "halo of antiquity." Provoked by the growth of impersonal technology, this nostalgic attraction to Orthodox antiquity becomes itself a form of utopianism of the past. The retreat to the past fails to be challenged by the timely questions facing the church today; however, the second more optimistic group's acceptance of North America most likely means simply surrendering to secularism.
29Schmemann, 30Schmemann, 31Schmemann, "II.

For the Life of the World, p. 131. The Liturgical Problem," p. 165. For the Life of the World, p. 123.

32Ibid., p. 130.

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Both groups, says Sclunemann, make the world "grace-proof' by having in common the belief that North America is a reality to be accepted or rejected. Sclunemann offers another option: North America is not simply to be rejected or accepted but is a reality "upon which Orthodoxy has to act." Orthodoxy must be "in a creative tension with the world in which it lives";33 it needs to question all the world's "'values' and 'ways of life' and, by relating them to the Truth of the Church - to 're-evaluate' and to change them." 34 What needs to be done, says Sclunemann, is neither accept nor reject but simply face the world in which we live, and face it as Orthodox Christians. "Facing the world" means relating the whole of life to faith: the central and all-embracing idea and inspiration of Orthodoxy that the whole life not only belongs to God, but is to be made God-like and God-centered, transformed into communion with God, and, therefore - no "sector" of human activity or creativity be it the most "secular" or "profane" can be neutral, not capable of being sanctified, i.e. transformed into communion with God.35 Orthodoxy thus lays claim to an all embracing way of life, a "total and catholic worldview." Secularism wants to deny the all-encompassing reach of the Orthodox faith and instead indicates, often in subtle ways, that the secular way of life (or worldview) is the only option. Everyone comes to accept what is "commonly acceptable." To Western ears trained in the practical affairs and "making it in the world," Schmemann's call for the Orthodox faith to transform ali of life sounds like naive optimism. Yet Schmemann declares this is emphatically not so. What appears as 33Schmemann, "II. 34Ibid. 35Ibid., p. 173. The Liturgical Problem," p. 184.

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"foolishness" is precisely that which secularism cannot accept: in the living liturgy of the church we are given both an experience of the presence of God and a vision of how God relates to all aspects of life. In the communal worship of the church we realize the "holy rhythm"; we "see and taste heaven and earth as full of His glory"; we feel the bitter and sweet sadness of the reality of sin. "We are then to relate all life, all activity, all time to this vision and experience, to judge and to transform our life by it."36 Schmemann's "answer" to the question posed by the heresy of secularism is not a return to the past nor an accommodation to the present. Rather Schmemann asserts that we are called to live transformed lives where we have incorporated the liturgy so that how we understand and "move" in the world will be different. This theme of Schmemann's will be expanded upon in the following sections. The Western captivity of theology Schmemann's analysis of culture reflects his belief that the revitalization of theology "must begin with a deep evaluation and critique of the culture in which the Orthodox [person] is immersed ..."31 However, along with a cultural critique, Schmemann believed that one must also critically examine the role of theology itself. It is to Schmemann's critical examination of theology that I now tum in the second half of this chapter. At the Third National Workshop on Christian Unity held in St. Louis in 1966, a report stated that "everyone was in a learning mood; none seemed ready to seize the standard of leadership and say, 'Follow me..."38 36Ibid. 37Schmemann, Church. World. Mission. p. 121. 38"Workshop on Unity," The Orthodox Church, October 1966, p.

9.

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However, the report comments that the "liveliest critique" came from Rev. Alexander Schmemann who, among other things, accused modem theology of reducing the mystery of the Christian faith "to a series of legal questions." This was not the first time, nor would it be the last, that Schmemann called into question and challenged the place of modem theology. Schmemann in fact disdained "academic theology" with a passion;39 he strongly reacted against theologians writing books for other theologians: arguing, for example, about how the Armenians gave the great entrance without ever asking what is that entrance and what does it have to do with my life? In his article "The Task of Orthodox Theology Today," Schmemann states what he believes to be the basic defect of theology today: "its almost total divorce from the rea1life of the Church and from her practical needs. "40 He continues: Since the breakdown of the patristic age, our theology (and not without Western influence) has become exclusively "academic," "scholastic" in the literal sense of the word. It is confmed to a narrow circle of professional intellectuals, writing and working, in fact, for each other ... and, as time goes by, more and more anxious to satisfy and please their peers ... They are reconciled to the supreme indifference of the Church at large to their work because, in their unshakable self-righteousness, they put the blame on the antiintellectualism of the clergy and laity. What they do not seem to realize, however, is that this "anti-intellectualism" is in a way a direct result of their own exclusive "intellectualism," of their quasi-Manichean contempt for the "practical" needs of the Church ... 41 39Interview with Fr. Thomas Hopko, 2 May 1989. 40Schmemann, Church. World. Mission, p. 120. 41Ibid.

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Though Schmemann refers above to the "Western influence" of Orthodox theology, elsewhere and more strongly Schmemann criticizes the "Western captivity" of Orthodox theology (a term, as stated in the Introduction, that Schmemann learned from G. Florovsky). Schmemann himself writes more about the effects of "Westernization" on Orthodox theology than he does about what historically constituted this captivity. Nonetheless Schmemann does offer some historical background of Eastern Orthodoxy in general which sheds light on how Eastern Orthodoxy came to feel negatively influenced by "Western" theology in the first place. Historical background In his book The Historcial Road of Eastern Orthodoxy, Schmemann traces the origins of the conflicts and tensions between the Eastern and Western Christianity to the time of Constantine when misunderstandings between these two halves of Christendom began to grow. While for the Roman, the Bishop of Rome was believed to exercise God-given rights over the church universal, the East did not adhere to this ecclesial structure. Thus during the fifth and sixth centuries two mutually exclusive ecclesiologies developed. In the East, the juridical aspects of the church were less established because the church was believed to be grounded primarily in a sacramental reality, the body of Christ -- the mystical essence of the Church. However, not until the ninth century was the Eastern church clearly able to articulate its opposition to Rome. Schmemann suggests that at least one of the reasons why the East was unable to respond to the developing primacy of the Bishop of Rome was the close Eastern alliance with the empire. While in the West the decline of the imperial state contributed to the growth of the papacy, the East

38

maintained an "organic alliance" between church and state. The Roman claims did not touch the Eastern church, which "solved all its problems of administrative and canonical structure - successfully or unsuccessfully - by coordination with the structure of the state. "42 Thus the East did not react to Rome's eccIesial question since for the Orthodox the question seemed "administrative" rather than "ecclesiological." "The East's insensitivity to the depth of its divergence from Rome in its understanding and experience of the Church resulted primarily from the merging of Church and state in the ecclesiastical cast of mind in Byzantium."43 Thus the Orthodox failed to realize the significance which the popes attached to their jurisdictional claims because, the East assumed, these had to do with the church and state rather than the church alone. The gradual breakdown of political and economic relations between East and West only further contributed to severed ecclesiastical relations. The Roman question never really answered in the East eventually disappeared no longer calling for a solution. The West entered the stormy Dark Ages; Byzantium developed its own dificulties, and both sides became enclosed in their own worlds. Schmemann points out that the result of this separation was that when the two sides did meet again, they seemed alien and incomprehensible to each other. For example, in a meeting between the Patriarchs Photius and Ignatius and Pope Nicholas in the ninth century, the Pope displayed great misunderstanding and intolerance by intervening in the internal affairs of the Byzantine

42Alexander Schmemann, The Historical Road of Eastern Orthodoxy (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963), p. 243. 43Ibid., p. 244.

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church.44

Patriarch Photius was the first to clearly point out the

"innovations" in the Western church that led to schism: the doctrine of procession of the Holy Spirit and the role of the Pope. Though a schism took place in 1054, it was the Crusades which dealt the fatal blow by inflaming racial and religious hatred. The Fourth Crusade ended in 1204 with the capture of Constantinople and the Latin Empire's sixty year reign in the East. The separation was no longer a dispute between the hierarchs or a theological controversy, but became part of the "flesh and blood of the people of the church." "'Latinism' in the East and 'the Greeks' in the West were synonymouns with evil, heresy, and hostility, and became terms of profanity. "45 Later attempts at unity ended in "spiritual catastrophe" for the Byzantine Church: one example is the 1438-39 Council of Florence where the Greek hierarchs capitulated to Rome due to financial pressure and fear of the empire's destruction by Islam. Such calculated attempts at unity reinforced separation. Schmemann concludes, "the Byzantine period in the history of Orthodoxy began with the alienation between East and West. It ended with complete separation: from then on the Orthodox East was divided from the Roman West by an impenetrable wall. "46 Thus due to complex cultural and theological factors a fundamental separation between the Eastern and Western halves of Christendom occurred. Particularly significant in regard to Schmemann's discussion of 44Schmemann states that this intervention by Pope Nicholas and his successors has been acknowledged in Roman Catholic scholarship by Father Dvomik, who reassessed Photius, previously regarded by the Catholics as the father of the schism. See F. Dvornik, The Making of Central and Eastern Europe (London, 1949). 4S Schmemann, Historical Road, p. 252. 46Ibid., p. 254.

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"Western captivity" of Orthodox theology was the fall of Byzantium. For it was after this period that Orthodox theology itself became silent47 and failed to develop its own particular theological resources, with the result that: ...during the Reformation, at the most critical point in the ecclesiastical history of the Christian West - a period of review and re-evaluation of traditional values in the West - the Orthodox Church was mute, and because of this the Western dispute was one-sided, deprived of any genuine universal perspective. The East"could only fence itself off, defend itself, preserve; it lacked resources to contribute its own experience or its uninterrupted tradition as a way out of Western blind aIleys.48 Thus at its most explicit level, the "Western captivity" of Orthodox theology occurred during the Protestant Reformation. The first reformers, who believed that in combating the papacy they were returning to apostolic Christianity, appealed to the Eastern Orthodox who they had heard also did not "like the Pope." The Protestants sent the Orthodox their confessions (Augsburg, Westminster) as a way to communicate to the Orthodox the exact nature of their beliefs. In response, the Orthodox began to write their own confessions which, though often rejecting Protestantism, were nonetheless alien to the Orthodox tradition. For the Orthodox continued using Latin categories for their theological thinking, and accepted a terminology and way of looking at theology which was considerably 47While many cultural factors contributed to the silence of Orthodox theology during this time, Schmemann points out one very crucial factor was the decline in ecclesiastical education during the period of Turkish rule. Schmemann cites one 16th century metropolitan who observed, "not one monk in the diocese knows ancient Greek or understands Church prayers," Ibid., p. 283. 48Ibid ...p. 284.

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different from patristic theology. For example, the Orthodox theological schools of the seventeenth century followed the Latin pattern (not relying on the Greek fathers but on Latin sources, "notably those of Conciliarism and the Calvinist Refonnation")49 and until the beginning of the nineteenth century Orthodox theology was taught in Latin using Western books. The "Western captivity" not only obscured and "deformed" the Orthodox theological mind (exemplified in the patristic tradition) but also radically transformed the function of theology itself in the church. Rather than theology being the concern and function of the whole church it became "that of the 'school' alone and was thus deprived of the living interest and attention without which creative effort is possible."50 Theology was alienated from the church; "[it] ceased to be the answer the Church gives to her questions and having ceased to be such an answer, it also ceased to be the question addressed to the Church." 51 Thus this "scholastic method" adopted by the East caused Orthodox theology to undergo a "pseudomorphosis." If secularism can be called a Western heresy, then Schmemann claims that "our own scholastic theology" has been permeated with it for centuries. Indeed the secular affirmation of

the world's autonomy and self-sufficiency in terms of reason and

knowledge led the Orthodox themselves into the seventeenth century "Western captivity." The scholastic theological method:

49 A. Nichols, Russian Diasopora, p. 6. Nichols confirms Schmemann's argument when he writes that "Russian Scholasticism was to be born not in a Hellenic-Byzantine milieu but, for good or ill, a Latin-Roman one," (p. 6). 50 Alexander Schmemann, "Theology and Eucharist," St. Vladimir's Theological Quarterly 5 (Winter, 1961) : 10. sr Ibid., p. 11.

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first isolates a unit, a phenomenon, a reality from everything else and looks at it in laboratory fashion under a pure, static, essential form. In order to have the object of investigation separated from the rest of theological speculation and revelation, one must clearly define the object. Therefore theology soon becomes a science of precise definitions. Depending on the definitions theological speculation takes different roots and comes up with different answers.52 Schrnemann states that the victim of this split was precisely the liturgical life of the church. Theology became an "intellectual enterprise" no longer rooted in the life and worship of the believing community.

Sacrament and symbol For a concrete example of the effects of the scholastic method, Schrnemann, in his article "Sacrament and Symbol," re-evaluates how the terms "sacrament" and "symbol" underwent a change in meaning. Schrnemann re-examines and compares the "mental context" of Western theology with that of the early church. Patristic theology was no less "intellectual" than scholasticism; the use of the same words however (such as sacrament) concealed the discontinuity between the different sacramental theologies from many historians. For the early church, sacraments were always explained from within 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."53 In the middle ages, however, the dogmatic tract, De Sacramentis , isolated the sacrament from its liturgical context and sought to find its essence. Schmemann points out
52 Alexander Schmemann, "Liturgical Spirituality of the Sacraments," John XXIII Lectures 2 (1966) : 21. 53 Schmemann, For the Life of the World, p. 137.

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that the sacrament comes in fact to be opposed to liturgy: the ritual expression, its signum, still belongs to the "essence" but this sacramental sign is now considered by itself, apart from the liturgy, as the "proper object" of theological study. The result, says Schmemann, is that one can read all the treastises on Holy Orders, both Catholic and Orthodox, and see no mention of the traditional connection between, for example, the eucharist and baptism or the eucharist and ordination. One can read Aquinas on the sacraments and find little mention of their liturgical celebration. This minirnalization of the significance of the liturgy is due to what historians of theology "describe as the progress of 'scientific theology' and the growth of a 'more precise' theological method."54 This change is far more than "external," but is rooted in a deep transformation that had taken place in the theological vision itself. This transformation is reflected in the debate in Western eucharistic theology around the real presence, a debate in which the use of the term "real" implied another type of presence which was "not real." The term for that other presence in the Western theological and intellectual idiom was "symbol." Western theology came to believe and declare that the "symbolical" and the "real" were mutually exclusive. Schmemann continues that despite all the controversies during the reformation, there remains an "incompatibility between symbol and reality," a distinction which was simply not known in the early church tradition. St. Maximus the Confessor, cited by Schmemann as the sacramental theologian par excellence of the patristic age, refers to the Body and Blood of Christ in the Eucharist as symbols, images, and mysteries. "'Symbolical' here is not

54Ibid.

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only not opposed to the 'real,' but embodies it as its very expression and mode of manifestation. "55 Later interpreters of patristic theology did not seem to realize that the patristic use of "symbol" was not "vague and imprecise." Schmemann points out that the primary difference here is a difference in the conception of reality itself. For the Fathers, symbol was not only "the way to perceive and understand reality, a means of cognition, but also a means of participation. "56 Post-patristic theology rejected any continuity between sacrament and symbol. Schrnemann elaborates on the function of symbol: "the symbol is means of knowledge of that which cannot be known otherwise, for knowledge here depends on participation - the living encounter with and entrance in the 'epiphany' of reality which the symbol is."57 Schmemann argues that the relationship between the sign and that which is signified is neither semantic, causal, or representative (post-patristic theology emphasized the signum as cause) but is rather an "epiphany of reality." However because of the theological reduction to discursive and "rational" categories a hiatus appears between the sign and the signified, or between what Schrnemann refers to as "A" and "B." "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."S8 Knowledge 55Ibid., p. 139. 56Ibid. 57Ibid., p. 141. 58Ibid., p. 142. Schn.emann at this point appears to be influenced by Neoplatonism: the created reality reveals the sacred reality which lies behind it, and by its symbolic presence we participate in this sacred reality. In the following chapter I discuss some problems with the Platonic concept of participation, and instead turn here to Schmemann's more significant emphasis on the liturgical context and participation in the liturgy.

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and participation are regarded as constitutive of two separate orders; and knowledge becomes more highly esteemed while the importance and significance of participation is lost. When the significance of participation dropped out, that knowledge could only count which was analytic and scientific (these being understood one way) which led to an emphasis on a semantic, causal or representative understanding of symbol. These understandings did not need the wholeness of the liturgy and participation in the liturgy to be understood. 'reality'."59 What was accepted was an understanding of the liturgy which included "the contraposition of 'symbol' and Thus with the "progressive devaluation" of symbol, the liturgy itself was devalued and no longer considered an epiphany of reality. Originally, however, the sacrament "held together" and made known, through participation, the three levels of the Christian vision: church, world, kingdom. But with the dogmatic reflection on the sacrament isolated from the liturgy, and with the attempt to understand the sacraments in more analytic terms (semantic, causal, representative, etc.), the sacraments became divorced from the very real context which gave them meaning. The liturgical understanding of the sacraments was lost on theologians. "As catholic acts of the Church fulfilling herself, as symbols in 'this world' of the 'world to come,' of the consummation in God of all things - they were simply forgotten."60 The sacraments perserved their value only as means of individual piety and were no longer understood from a liturgical standpoint as holding together the vision of church, world, and kingdom. In the early church, however, the sacrament in the
59Alexander Schmemann, The Eucharist (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1988), p. 106. 60Ibid., p. 145.

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context of worship "held together" the dimensions of the Christian vision of reality. "And 'holding' them together it made them known - in the deepest patristic sense of the word knowledge - as both understanding and participation.wl However, when the liturgy underwent a metamorphosis in its own self-understanding, i.e. no longer understood as the church fulfilling itself, as passage, as communion, but rather for the sake of individual sanctification and efficiency, then the door was left wide open for cultural secularism. Schmemann writes about this understanding of the liturgy: "Having nothing to reveal about world and matter, about time and nature, this idea and this experience of worship 'disturb' nothing, question nothing, challenge nothing, are indeed 'applicable' to nothing. They can therefore peacefully 'coexist' with any secular ideology, any form of secularism."62 And in regard to theology, Schmemann points out that "theology, when reduced completely to a self-sufficient rational structure, becomes, in fact, defenseless in front of secular philosophies and fmishes by accepting them as its own criterion and foundation. "63 The theological situation in modern times Though the theological situation today has changed in some ways due to the "ecumenical" encounter with the West, and various challenges from the modem world, nonetheless Schmemann states that theology in our time still remains a self-centered world. Separated from the so-called "trivial reality of the Church's life," theology is guided by the individual needs and interests of theologians.
61Ibid., p. 144. 62Ibid., p. 133.

63Alexander Schmemann, "Prayer, Liturgy, and Renewal," Greek Orthodox Theological Review 14 (Spring, 1969) : 12.

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Theology constructed on western scholastic models is completely uninterested in worship as it is performed by the Church and in the logic and "order" proper to it. Proceeding from its own abstract presuppositions, this theology decides a priori what is "important" and what is "secondary." And it turns out, in the final analysis, that what is deemed "secondary," as having no theological interest, is precisely worship itself, the very activity by which the Church actually lives, in all its complexity and diversity. 64 The alienation of theology from the life of the church has had tragic theological consequences: theology has become a "mere intellectual activity, split into scores of 'disciplines' with no correlation among themselves and no application to the real needs of the Church."65 The clergy and laity themselves are indifferent to the writings of theologians, even regarding some with open suspicion. "Liberal or conservative, neopatristic or neo-mystical, historical or anti-historical, 'ecumenical' or antiWestern ... theology simply fails to reach anybody but professionals, to provoke anything but esoteric controversies in academic periodicaIs."66 Yet Schmemann argues that this alienation results in a loss for the church as well, for the church needs theology "to constantly refer the empirical life of the Church to the very sources of her faith and life, to the living and life-giving Truth ..."67 Theology is ideally self-criticism of the church; it seeks clarity concerning the ultimate goals of the church's existence. Theology, says Schmemann, needs the church as both its source and aim. 64Schmemann, The Eucharist, p. 13. 65"Theology and Eucharist," p. 11.

66Ibid. 67Ibid.

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Yet in recovering a more genuine Orthodox theology, Schmemann does not advocate returning to some patristic "system" which in reality was non-existent. He does not advocate a return to an antiquated worldview or to theology as it "used to be." Though the patristic era reflects a spiritual freedom and creativity in the Orthodox tradition, to refer to the patristic tradition as a formal and infallible authority would betray its very spirit. It is not a patristic scholasticism that needs to be developed but rather a recovery of the patristic spirit, in which they were true witnesses of the church. We recover that spirit when we make ours the experience of the Church "not as mere 'institution, doctrine or system' ...but the allembracing, all-assuming and all-transforming life ... [This experience] is not to be 'rediscovered' in books and at the conferences."68 Schmemann's own theological aim is out of both an openness to the life of the church and a detailed study (of the liturgy, the cycles, the life of the church) to arrive at a simplicity which would speak about the divine. In the fmal analysis for Schmemann, theology is only worthwhile if it is prayer.69 The liturgy as theological source Schmemann seeks to resolve Orthodoxy's captivity to a more "scholastic" theology by turning to the liturgy as source. For it is here, Schmemann believes, that theology can recover a "knowing" that acknowledges and relies upon participation in the life of the church, a life which is concretely expressed in the activity of worship. Schmemann therefore calls himself a liturgical theologian, liturgy understood as "that living totality and that catholic experience by the Church of her own 68Ibid., p. 16. 69Interview with Julianna Schmemann, 2 May 1989.

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faith."70

Yet Schmemman issues an alert about liturgical theology by

saying that it is an "illegitimate stepchild." Theology only came to be described as "liturgical" after theology "ceased to seek in the lex orandi its source and food ..."71 Before stating more clearly what Schmemann means by liturgical theology, it is important to point out what Schrnemann says he does not mean. Often the liturgy has been understood as "merely symbolical." However Schmemann argues that such a "symbolical" interpretation of rites, which fits well into the secular mentality, leaves the secular world view unchallenged. A very Orthodox example that Schmemann cites is the interpretation of the "Little Entrance" in the Divine Liturgy as symbolizing Christ going to preach. While this may satisfy a fondness for religious pageantry, Schmemann argues that it raises no questions about ourselves or our lives. "Sacred symbolism" ends up leaving intact "the self-suffiency of the 'real life'." On the other hand, to see the "entrance" in the Divine Liturgy as something that happens to the people of God, to the whole Church, "as the real (and not symbolical) movement of the Church entering the Presence of God, summoned to His throne" offers a challenge not only to one's participation in the liturgy but also challenges one's very life. "All of the sudden the liturgy ceases to be a 'venerable,' 'ancient,' 'colorful,' and 'beautiful' rite and becomes a terribly serious thing ....this possibility is here because the liturgy reveals to me who I am, what I am given, it puts me face to face with the glory of the Kingdom and, therefore,

Schmemann, "Debate on the Liturgy: Liturgical Theology, Theology of Liturgy and Liturgical Reform," St. Vladimir's Theological Quarterly 13 (Winter, 1969) : 223. 7lIbid.

70 Alexander

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reveals the exile and alienation from God of my whole life ..."72 In contrast, the reduction of the liturgy to a superficial symbolism is precisely the way "to by-pass and to 'explain away' the seriousness of religion's demands on our lives, religion's demand for commitment and effort. "73 Yet the liturgy is equally misconstrued if one approaches it with the "naive conviction" that worship is a rational construction and an exchange of views. From this standpoint, symbols are merely audio-visual aids for communicating ideas, and new symbols can simply be manufactured when necessary through committee deliberation. Schmemann states that the presupposition of this approach is that traditional worship can have no "relevance" unless a current theme is clearly spelled out. Thus the liturgy becomes "at best a raw material for neat intellectual defmitions and propositions. That which, in worship, cannot be reduced to an intellectual truth is labeled 'poetry' - i.e. something not to be taken too seriously."74 The liturgy is thus reduced to being merely a series of illustrations about various ideas and concepts. Yet Schmemann argues that "the Eucharist is not a symbol of friendship, togetherness, or any other state of activity however desirable. ''75 The purpose of the liturgy is not to communicate ideas or responses to current issues, but rather the liturgical rites are "sacred acts through which the Church prepares herself for the sacrament

72Schmemann, "II. The Liturgical Problem," p. 177. 73Alexander Schmemann, Great Lent (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1969), p. 98. 74Ibid., p. 90. 75Schmemann, For the Life of the World, p. 126.

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of the word of God" 76 not only the words read from the Scriptures but also the Word who is Christ. Finally, Schmemann argues that he is well aware that his call to overcome the alienation of theology from the life of believers by returning to the liturgy, specifically the eucharist, sounds to many theologians like a pious invitation to become more liturgical. In his attempt to rediscover the lex orandi as the lex credendi Sclunemann does not mean a reduction of theology to piety, though he states that such misunderstandings would be expected in the present state of theology. Schmemann is not calling for more liturgical piety in which the "liturgical experience ... simply replaces faith and makes one indifferent to its 'doctrinal' content. "77 In fact Schmemann is critical of those who are "bewitched" only by the form of worship. To make his point, Schmemann contrasts faith and religious feeling. "Religious feeling" is "nourished by itself, i.e., through the gratification that it gives and which, in the final analysis, is subordinated to personal tastes and emotional experiences, subjective and individual 'spiritual needs'."78 Faith, in contrast, is a meeting with the Other, and not only a meeting but also conversion and reception of the Other as the "way, truth, and life." Schmemann states that the religious feeling that dominates Orthodox piety today often issues in a form of pseudo-conservatism. "If religious feeling is so 'conservative,' so devoted to form that any, even the most insignificant change in the latter troubles and irritates it, then it is 76Alexander Schmemann, Liturgy and Life: Christian Development Through Liturgical Experience (Department of Religious Education, Orthodox Church in America, 1983), p. 10. 77Schmemann, "Liturgical Theology, Theology of Liturgy and Liturgical Reform," p. 218. 78Schmemann, The Eucharist, p. 144.

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precisely because it is bewitched by the form, 'form-in-itself,' its immutability, sacredness, beauty."79 Faith which seeks to be integrated into the whole of life is not necessary for the religiosity of the pseudoconversative. From the standpoint of this sentimentalized approach, worship becomes "an inspiring background whose aim is to 'warm up' our hearts ...;t80 However, Schmemann states that the "forms" of Christianity only become something other than a "warm-up" for individual piety when they are themselves identified with "the incarnation and fulfillment of faith." The transformation of the forms into ecclesial communion with God happens only through faith, which seeks to subordinate to itself all of life. In contrast to the above misconstruals of the liturgy, Schmemann believes that the church's leiturgia, a term he says is more comprehensive than "worship," is the "full and adequate epiphany - expression, manifestation, fulfillment of that in which the church believes, or what constitutes her faith."8! The lex orandi, lex credendi "implies an organic and essential interdepedence in which one element, the faith, although source and cause of the other, the liturgy, essentially needs the other as its own self-understanding and self-fulfillment. "82 Thus by identifying himself as a liturgical theologian, Schmemann means that he chooses not to proceed from abstract, intellectual schemata, and "a priori categories," but rather from the liturgy of "work of the poeple." This means that for Sclunemann the liturgy and worship of the church are not simply pious acts having little import, but rather are formative acitivites which, by
79Ibid., p. 145.

Great Lent, p. 90. 81Schmemann, "Liturgical Theology, Theology of Liturgy, and Liturgical Reform," p. 217.
82Ibid.

80Schmemann,

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ushering participants to the table where Christ is made known, enable Christians to develop an adequate theological "vision." In the Orthodox worship particularly, this theological "vision" is informed not only by preaching and hymn singing, but also by icons, incense, processions, the partaking of bread and wine, even the act of assembling itself. It is a process of self-identification: by actually entering into the divine celebration, the partaking of bread and wine, the lighting of candles, the prayers to the saints, etc., the person also enters into a particular way of being in the world. It is not that there is a secular sphere and a sacred sphere (where liturgy belongs) but rather worship reveals and restores the genuine nature of all spheres - matter, time, etc. - to their rightful holy and created place, such that the world and life itself become a means of communion with God. Such a sacramental approach is rooted in the tradition of the Orthodox church itself where, before one develops any critical assessment of worship, one first learns what it is to worship. Liturgical theology, then, is not a theology which has the liturgy as its object, but is the attempt to understand the task of theology itself through participation in the liturgy. An approach that has liturgy as its object first develops a theology of worship, then attempts to make the liturgy conform to it by means of liturgical reform, However Schrnemann argues that liturgical theology first relies upon the dynamic liturgy: "It is because liturgy is that living totality and that catholic experience by the Church of her own faith that it is the very source of theology, the condition that makes it possible." 83 Thus, says Schmemann, theology is

83Ibid., p. 219.

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not a matter of mere "individual" interpretations, but rather arises out of and is made possible by the communal experience of the church. This is not to say that there is no critical space for the given liturgical tradition (Schmemann states that there have certainly been many liturgical "defects") but rather that there can be no divorce between "liturgy, theology and piety." While much of the Christian vision of the relation between world, Church and Kingdom still exists liturgically, it is no longer understood and lived as it was in the early church. A certain piety has been lost; the lex orandi has ceased to be related to the lex credendi. This is why an extemalliturgical reform in itself will not solve the present secular crisis in which the church finds itself. The solution does not lie in a fixation on rules and rubrics, the restoration of right practices, nor in the obsession to make liturgy more "understandable." In all these approaches, the crucial problem concerning the devaluation of the celebration of the liturgy is still not addressed. Schmemann importantly states that "it is the language of the Church in the deep all-embracing ... meaning of the word that man and society do not hear or understand, the language which includes the texts and the rites, the whole rhythm and the whole structure of worship. For man has adopted .•.another way of looking at himself and at his life and this makes him truly blind and deaf to the liturgy which he dutifully attends. "84 Elsewhere, in discussing the severance between the lex orandi and the lex credendi, Schmemann writes that "it is as if someone imposed ... on our ears hearing aids that make us deaf to the most explicit. "85 While I will "II. The Liturgical Problem," p. 176 "Liturgical Theology, Theology of Liturgy, and Liturgical Reform," p. 220.
84Schmemann, 8SSchmemann,

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return in the following chapter to look in more depth at Schmemann's claim that persons are unable to hear the language of the church, suffice it now to say that Schmemann is wanting to reclaim the lex orandi - the living and spoken language of the church as it is communicated in the liturgy. In seeking to reclaim the importance of the lex orandi, Schmemann says that the Orthodox East, even in its current desire to return to its own patristic sources, still remains locked within the old Western approach to theology. This approach focuses exclusively on texts and more importantly depends on epistemological criteria derived from the texts. "It is indeed the 'original sin' of the entire Western theological development that it made 'texts' the only loci theologici, the extrinsic 'authorities' of theology, disconnecting it from its living sources: liturgy and spirituality."86 An emphasis was placed on objective and scientific theology, the identification of faith with "propositions," "hence also the rejection from theological process of any reference to or dependence upon experience. "87 Elsewhere Schmemann refers to the tyranny of the "so-called 'scientific mind' ... which confuses the partial and extrinsic truths obtained through investigation with the whole truth, and which rejects as subjective, irrelevant and useless all information that cannot be reduced to its abstract criteria. "88 Thus the ecc1esiological and liturgical context of patristic thought is overlooked or seen as merely secondary precisely because of the "Western 86Ibid., p. 220. 87Alexander Schmemann, "Liturgy and Theology," Greek Orthodox Theological Review. 17 (Spring, 1979) : 89. 88Alexander Schmemann, "Reflections on The Gulag Archipelago," in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: Critical Essays and Documentary Materials, John B. Dunlop, Richard Haugh, Alexis Klimoff, eds., (New York: Collier Books1979), p. 518.

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categories" and criteria that theologians have adopted as the only valid ones. The Fathers rarely speak of the church or the liturgy because for them "they are not an 'object' of theology but its ontological foundation, the epiphany, the reality, the self-evidence of that to which then in their writings they 'bear testimony."'89 Furthermore, patristic texts like biblical texts when divorced from their source and context in the life of the church can be interpreted to prove almost anything. Such interpretations remain "ideas" and "doctrines, confined to academic quarters but alienated from the life of the Church."90 Schmemann summarizes his argument by stating that his hermeneutical foundation is found in the lex orandi: "the epiphany and the experience by the Church of herself and of her faith. "91 While the rightful place of the liturgy cannot be restored through "texts," more piety, etc., it can, says Schmemann, be affected by a refocus on the "personal dimension of Orthodoxy." It will always be difficult if not impossible to convert the parish as organization, except theoretically. "Conversion and faith are always personal"92; it is the person who is the recipient of God's saving grace and love. While organizations and multitudes will not be spiritually restored and converted, we can, says Schmemann, nevertheless trust in the simple truth of "a little leaven which leavens the whole lump." (1 Cor. 5:6) Just as Christ preached to the multitudes but spent a large part of his time teaching the twelve disciples, so we too are called to follow this pattern. Real success is not reported in statistics and numbers. "If but a handful of men and women will discover 89Schmemann, "Liturgical Theology, Theology of Liturgy and Liturgical Reform," p. 221. 90Ibid. 91Ibid. 92Schmemann, "III. The Spiritual Problem," p. 191.

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the sweetness of the knowledge of God, will meet to read and to understand the Gospel, to deepen their spiritual life - we have not labored in vain. "93 Thus Schmemann states that the Orthodox themselves must cease to reduce the "American culture," or "society" or even the "parish" to impersonal dimensions. For when the Orthodox themselves "reduce" the problem, Schmemann claims that "not only do we find ourselves in a vicious circle, but we posit the whole question in an utterly non-Orthodox framework. For in a very real sense no general 'man' - be he American or any other - no 'society', no 'culture' has at any time truly accepted Christianity and from this point of view there is nothing radically new in our American situation. "94 But there have always been persons who have truly lived Christianity. The Orthodox church must, says Schmemann, tum from preoccupations with the "American way of life" and focus on enabling its members to challenge normally accepted secular assumptions which include "marriage and sex, professional ethics and entertainment, indeed ... the whole life. "95 Such a reorientation can only take place when the clergy themselves move from dealing with "externals" to focusing on "internals;" and move from dealing with abstract "people" to concrete "persons." For a secularistic reduction will continue to plague the church as long as both clergy and laity deal with the "general" and "common" rather than the particular and personal. Schmemann himself articulated this emphasis on the "personal" one of many times at an ecumenical gathering. He expressed displeasure over the "current craze" of referring to the participants as representatives. 93Ibid. 94Alexander Schmemann, "The Secularist Reduction of the Person," The Orthodox Church. October 1966, p. 5. 95Schmemann, "III. The Spiritual Problem," p. 181. "Let

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us meet each other as persons ... not as representatives!" Schmemann exclaimed. Schmemann's exasperation reflected his own sense that theology must be rooted not in the general and abstract but in the concrete and personal, which includes above all the liturgy.96 However, Schmemann's emphasis away from the general to the personal does not imply that Christianity is limited to personal or "individual" salvation. On the contrary: its scope is indeed cosmical and catholic, it embraces in its vision the whole creation and the totality of life, it has always been preached and believed as the salvation of the world. It means only that the salvation of the world is announced and, in a sense, entrusted to each person, is made a personal vocation and responsibility and ultimately depends on each person ... The whole world is given - in a unique way - to each person and thus in each person it is 'saved' or 'perishes. '97 And Schmemann believes that this cosmic scope of salvation and personal vocation are made known within the context of the church which has as its center the celebration of the liturgy, or worship. "Our Church," writes Schmemann, "need not be ashamed of her identification with liturgy ...for the liturgy was always experienced and understood in our Church as precisely the entering of men into, and communion with, the reality of the Kingdom of God, as that experience of God which alone makes possible everything else - all 'action,' all 'fight."'98

961 return to Schmemann's emphasis on the person in my final chapter. 97Schmemann, "The Secularist Reduction of the Person," p. 5. 98Schmemann, "III. The Spiritual Problem," p. 188.

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In conclusion, Schmemann in his critique identifies several significant problems for both the church and theology: the secular trivialization of the church; the inability of persons today to hear the language of the church; the divorce between theological thought and religious, ecclesial experience; the dependence of theology on rationalism or the "objective, scientific" mind; the focus on the written text to the exclusion of the dynamic, liturgical tradition. Schmemann states that these problems are specifically manifestations of North American culture and the result of the Western captivity of theology. However at this point we need to ask Schmemann some questions that could add more clarity to his overall project. Is the "Western captivity" of theology an adequate explanation of what Schmemann calls the divorce between thought and experience? Why is it that Eastern Orthodoxy so easily fell victim to Western rationalism? How is the exclusive focus on texts, which Schmemann criticizes, central to "rationalistic" or "scientific" theology? Finally, why is it that theology came so easily to ignore the liturgical context: both the communal liturgy and prayer? In the following chapter, I will address these questions.

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Chapter 3 A Response to Schmemann's "Western Captivity"

In the previous chapter I discussed how Schmemann locates the separation between liturgical experience and theological thought in the "Western captivity" of Orthodox theology. Though he does not go into great detail, Schmemann for the most part locates this "Western captivity" in the adoption of the scholastic method by Orthodoxy. To briefly place Schmemann's argument, let us recall that scholasticism, generally assumed to cover six centuries from Anselm (1033-1109) to Descartes (1596-1650), had as one of its distinguishing marks a fascination with the clarifying powers of logic. Anselm, for example, used such logic in his "ontological argument" for the existence of God. A second feature of scholasticism was a shift in both location and style. The center of learning moved from monasteries and catherdral schools to universities; and the style changed from biblical commentary to "a specific question introduced by a dialectical opposition of objection and response, and followed by a logically elaborated expostia'i as exemplified by Peter Abelard's (d. 1142) Sic et

Non. Scholasticism certainly remained concerned about the relation between faith and reason; however, as Schmemann rightly describes, the context for theological thought increasingly became the autonomous university rather than the church and its liturgical tradition. While there is no doubt much to be learned from Schmemann's analysis of the "Western captivity" of Orthodoxy theology which gradually lAlan Richardson and John Bowden, eds., The Westminster Dictionary of Christian Theology (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1983), p. 524.

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ignored ecclesiallife,

we nevertheless need to ask, in light of Schmernann's

overall project of a theology that has the liturgy in its multi-faceted dimensions as its source: Does Schmemann himself "put the question marks deep enough down?"2 In other words, if Sclunemann wants fully to recover the liturgy and prayer as source of theology: the dynamic, lively process of the liturgy versus the more abstract, "textual" and "scientific" theology, is his critique of scholasticism and Western theology sufficient? My hypothesis is that it is not, but that the root of the tension between the dynamic liturgy as experienced, on the one hand, and theological "thought," on the other, as source of knowledge can be traced back to antiquity; and that this tension which developed in the ancient Greek world is a common heritage of both Eastern and Western Christendom. In developing this argument,

r hope

to illumine

Schmemann's problem of why theology has failed to take seriously the liturgy of the church. Vladimir Weidle: a common heritage First, to clarify the terms "East" and "West,"

r want

to tum to the

Orthodox "theologian of culture," Vladimir Weidle, who Schmemann himself said gave "new and sometimes original treatment" to the problems of culture.3 In an important article "Russia and the West," which Schmemann included in his edited volume Ultimate Questions: An Anthology of Modem Russian Thought, Weidle writes about the relation between the eastern and western halves of Christendom. In his article 2Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, trans. Peter Winch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 62e. 3Alexander Schmemann, "Russian Theology: 1920-1972, An Introductory Survey," p. 189.

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Weidle speaks about the schism between "Westernizers" and "Slavophiles," a drama which has played a central role in the Russian intellectual and spiritual life. Weidle's thesis is that in this "irreconcilable contrasting between Russia and the West," both groups of theoreticians share the same fundamental error: "there is insufficient breadth and flexibility in their concept of Europe."4 Weidle argues that the "East" is construed in any convenient way as long as it is either positively or negatively contrasted with the West. However, Weidle states that while Eastern Europe may be contrasted with Western Europe, both of these groupings as Europe must be compared with the Asiatic East, near or far: One may call Orthodoxy Eastern Christianity, but it is impossible to call Christianity Asiatic. One may call Russian culture Eastern European, but it was born and developed in Europe, not in Asia ...One may speak only about the national cultures of Russia and Spain, in which features brought in from the East have played a greater role than in the national cultures of other European countries.S Weidle's point is that Byzantium is not Asian but that it developed, as did the "Western" world, out of the ancient and Christian foundations of European culture: "the East and West of Europe are not two unrelated (although intercommunicating) worlds but two halves of one and the same culture, a culture based on Christianity and antiquity." 6 Weidle does not want to deny that much can be gained by contrasting the European East and the European West with one another, but he importantly adds that this is

4Vladimir Weidle, "Russia and the West" in Ultimate Questions. An Anthology of Modern Russian Religious Thought, ed. Alexander Schmemann (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir's Press, 1977), p. 11. SIbid., p. 12. 6Ibid.

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because they are "inwardly united by a great spiritual heritage, developed in different ways but not having thereby lost its unity."? Weidle continues: If the Byzantine Empire was geographically to a large degree an Asiatic empire, is it not also true that ancient Greek culture bloomed in the cities of Asia Minor, that Christianity was born neither in Athens nor in Rome, and that while the historian will regard St. Augustine, the greatest of the Western fathers of the Church, as a European, the geographer will leave him in Africa?8 Weidle admits that there are no doubt genuinely Eastern and Asiatic elements in Byzantine culture, but these are peripheral: "just as the Moors did not succeed in turning Spain into a non-European country, neither did these adopted elements eliminate Greek Christianity, Byzantium, and therefore Europe from Russia. "9 While Weidle has other important insights about "Russia and the West," the point I want to use as a springboard for my argument is his emphasis on what unites both sides of divided Christendom: their common cultural roots -- a culture based on christianity and antiquity. I highlight this fact because while there is no doubt some truth in speaking of the Westernization of Orthodox theology, I believe that the essential problem that Schmemann is dealing with, i.e., the divorce between "thought and experience" has roots more ancient than medieval scholasticism, roots which go back to antiquity itself and which therefore are common to both "halves" of Christendom, since antiquity is a shared heritage. Given that the source of what Schmemann refers to as "rationalistic" theology has
7Ibid., my emphasis. 8Ibid. 9Ibid., p. 17.

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roots in antiquity, it can then be better understood why not only Western Christendom but also Eastern Christendom became so easily captivated by a more "rationalistic" approach. In order to discern the more ancient roots of Sclunemann's problem, we need to ask what was going on in the Greek world such that it initially became a possibility to think in terms of abstract thought and ideal knowledge, on the one hand, and experience (of the senses) on the other? Or, in other words, how did it become feasible for the Greek imagination to think along the lines of "objective" knowledge versus "subjective" knowledge, and how did "rational" come to be exclusively identified with "objective" knowledge? While I realize these are broad questions the answers to which are complex and took centuries to develop, nonetheless I think by paying attention to the broad strokes we can move closer to getting to the root of Schmemann's problem concerning the severance of thought from experience. The ancient world: Plato and the effects of literacy Before I continue my analysis, however, I think it is significant that Schmemann himself at a few points realized that the problem of the divorce between theological thought and liturgical experience had roots deeper than medieval scholasticism. For example, in his discussion on the Orthodox concept of deification or theosis (a life of participation with God through the Holy Spirit), Schmemann observes that at points in Orthodox history, deification was misinterpreted to mean the "destruction within oneself of everything that is human, which was regarded as low and unworthy, 'a bad

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smell that soon would pass away'."IO He traces this misinterpretation to Origen and the Alexandrian tradition which emphasized the mystical and spiritual interpretation of Scriptures and the ideal of gnosis. Schmemann states that while the East adopted much that was valuable from the Alexandrian tradition, some dangers became more clearly discerned in the sixth century. These dangers "lay in the 'spiritualizaiton' of Christianity, the very subtle and innennost 'de-incarnation' of man ... a danger from Greek idealism which had not been overcome - the desire to replace 'salvation' by contemplation." I I Though Origenism was condemned in the sixth century, I believe that this "subtle de-incarnation of man" persists and in fact lies at the root of Schmemann's problem which he, at least at one point, rightly traces back to the ancient Greek world. I will now more thoroughly examine the ancient Greek world in order to get a grip on the deeper roots of Schmemann's problem, especially as it was manifested in the thought of Plato whose philosophy in many ways determined the ancient Greek world and who thus profoundly influenced Christianity. In this section I do not claim expertise on Plato's philosophy nor do I wish to deny the great heritage Plato left to subsequent generations. Also I am not explicitly examining the influence of Plato's philosophy on theories of human nature or God, i.e., that persons possess a "divine spark" and thus are open beings to God, or that the Divine Logos is related to the Forms and thus, for example, the sacraments become "antitypes" which participate in the Form, or "prototype." Rather I am more interested in examining a facet of Plato's cultural context which enabled him to develop the theory of knowledge he did: which allowed him lOSchmemann, The Historical Road, p. 131. llIbid., p. 159.

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to imagine an ideal, objective reality as suggested by his theory of the Forms, in contrast to the more mundane world of "appearances." That Plato was able to develop a notion of abstract and unchanging concepts which were independent (and possibly preexistent) of our ordinary world has been linked to "the muse learning to write."12 In other words, as the Greek culture shifted from being oral to literate, there is no doubt that changes occurred in the way persons came to "see" reality and the world. In the following section, I will unpack the effects of the onset of literacy in the Greek world, particularly as manifested in the thought of Plato.13 These effects have been well-researched by numerous classical scholars, among whom are Eric Havelock and Walter Ong who themselves were initially influenced by the work of Milman Parry. Parry was the first to put forth the thesis that Homer's epics were originally composed as oral performances, and were only later written down as texts. This thesis, when it was first put forward, shook the literary world by challenging the established view of the composition and construction of Homer's epics, which it was commonly believed had always been written. Parry's work stimulated later classical scholars to investigate the dynamics of primarily oral cultures in contrast to primarily literate cultures; and the findings have in many cases been revolutionary. Eric

12This phrase is taken from the title of Eric Havelock's book, The Muse Learns to Write (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986). 131 am also not addressing in this context the question of whether or not Plato was a Platonist, though as Jerry Gill points out, "it is clear that there are passages in his dialogues that seem to lend support to the traditional interpretation of his thought, especially as it pertains to the 'theory of Forms'" in Mediated Transcendence. A Postmodern Reflection (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1989),

p. 5.

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Havelock has used the contrast between a primarily oral world and a world captured by the onset of literacy to illumine the tension in Plato's thought. It was precisely the tension between what Schmemann has labelled "thought," and "experience" that Plato himself was struggling with. Havelock suggests that Plato's imagination had been captured by a paradigm of reality increasingly derived from the word as written. Though the Greek alphabet was invented around 700 B.C., Havelock argues that it was not until the time of Plato that literacy had been sufficiently interiorized as to affect the culture's understanding of thought and knowledge. While Plato himself in the Phaedrus and Seventh Letter expresses reservations about writing as an inhuman way of processing knowledge, as unresponsive to questions, and as destructive to memory, at the same time Plato's philosophical approach depended on writing. Havelock argues that Plato was in fact trying to replace a knowing which depended on orality with a knowing derived from the written word. It is from the standpoint of the static written word, Havelock claims, that Plato (in The Republic) criticizes the poetic tradition which he considers to be mere "opinion" and subjective experience. Plato equates poetry or mimesis with non-abstract and non-philosophical experience: an unqualified state of mind below that of the exact science which knows the Forms. The poetic state of mind is located below the Forms, according to Plato, because "mimesis" calls forth a world of sound, color and shape, and focuses on acts and events, all of which are filled with contradictions. Whereas the "Homeric mind" depends on recitation, drama, rhythm and singing, the "Platonic mind" is seeking a more rational, scientific, and logical mode of knowledge. In fact Plato calls mimesis, the medium used by the poet to render an account of reality, a vice which cripples the

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intellect and a phantom of reality.14 Influenced by the medium of the written word, Plato believed he had discovered a mode of knowledge which represented reality: the word as written stands for the real. Furthermore with writing, the word is no longer fleeting, as it now appears to be from the standpoint of literacy, but becomes immortal. Plato thus wanted to replace the discourse of becoming, of endless doings and events, with the discourse of being which would be free from timeconditions. Havelock suggests that the opposition between being and becoming in Greek philosophy was not prompted by the sophisticated speculation of metaphysics or mysticism, but was "simply the crystallisation of the demand that the Greek language and the Greek mind break with the poetic inheritance, the rhythmically memorised flow of imagery, and substitute the syntax of scientific discourse, whether the science be moral or physical." 15 In order to make this break, Plato had to destroy the "immemorial habit of self-identification" which takes place in the oral tradition between the poet and the audience, for self-identification destroys the autonomy of the subject in relation to the object Thus with Plato, a new concept, the separation of the knower from the known, arises; such separation was not a possibility in the strictly poetic world, where you were not asked to grasp thought through rational analysis, but rather you were invited to become "musical" and enter into the journeys, lives, and deaths recited in rythmic verse.16 However, what Havelock refers to as the "refreshment of

14Eric Havelock, Preface to Plato (Cambridge: University Press, 1963), p. 165. 15Ibid., p. 182. 16Ibid., p. 159.

Harvard

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memory" 17 through written signs enabled the reader to do away with such emotional identification and focus instead on the abstract "thing itself," the essence apart from act and event. With abstracted knowledge derived from the written word, one was able to leave behind the plurality of action in time, color, and visual poetic imagery, and move, alternatively, into the unseen and final realm of pure being. Plato's brilliance lay in the fact that he recognized that the problem was one of new vocabulary and syntax, A different language of "isolated abstractions, conceptual and formal" was needed which emptied events and actions of their immediacy. "No longer ... was it a matter of 'this corpse on the battle field' but of 'body' anywhere and everywhere." 18 "Thought" must deal with "the thing itself." It must be abstracted from the many to become one; but "it is not only a 'one,' it is also a 'being' ... this abstracted object, divorced from concrete situation [of becoming], no longer needs to be visualized."19 unseen:" We see the ship, and the men and cargo, and the sea over which they sail, the sail bellying in the wind, the wave breaking foamy and white, even as we hear the wind whistling and the wave hissing. These effects are all there in the saga language - they have to be in order to enlist the indirect aid of mental vision and so reinforce the acoustic resources of the ear. But as the specific sensual nuances of the situation dissolve into a treatise on navigation the visible becomes invisible, the sensual becomes dissolved into an idea. So the abstracted object of knowledge has to lose not only plurality of "Real" knowlege then becomes identified with "the

17Ibid., p. 208 18Ibid., p. 301. 19Ibid., p. 219.

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action in time but also color and visibility. unseen.'20

It becomes 'the

Plato thus was able to imagine abstract (and unseen) thought separate from concrete experience. In fact, as Rowan Williams points out, the Platonic tradition "generally assumed that the intellect, when sufficiently purified, led back from the multiplicity of things to pure simplicity, [and] would naturally 'gravitate' to its proper 'home' in the transcendent. "21 Thus, the knower no longer needed the concrete, rhythmic and participative oral/aural setting of the poets; in fact such a poetic context filled with multiplicity could be deceptive, a belief which contributes to Plato's banishing the poets from the city: "if you receive the honeyed Muse in lyric and epic, be sure that pleasure and pain will be kings in your city, instead of law and whatever reasoned argument the community shall approve in each case to be best. "22 Plato's effort to achieve a new level of discourse, a new logos, reached its climax in his conceptual addition of the "Forms" which, as Iris Murdoch points out, Plato speaks of "with a remarkable combination of absolute confidence and careful ambiguity."23 Nonetheless we can say that the Forms generally referred to abstract, static and non-material essences: the "in itself' (au 'to lC(l9 (lu'to). The Forms were Plato's answer to the question "which so many philosophers have asked since (Hume and Kant 20Ibid. 21Rowan Williams, The Wound of Knowledge (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1979), p. 59. 22Plato, The Republic. Book X in Great Dialogues of Plato, eds. Eric Warmington and Philip Rouse (New York: New American Library, 1956), p. 407. 23Iris Murdoch, The Fire and the Sun. Why Plato Banished the Artists (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), p. 26.

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asked it with a passion): how do we seem to know so much upon the basis of so little?"24 Plato claimed that we know so much about Beauty, for example, because the soul remembers having seen it before birth, and it is through anamnesis as recollection (in contrast with the degenerate and veiled anamnesis of art) that we are able to remember Beauty. Whereas the Form of Beauty within us is fallen and infected, the Form of Beauty in itself shines forth singular and eternal. In Plato's mind, then, the need for Forms is a moral need; "the theory expresses a certainty that goodness it The Forms something indubitably real, unitary, and (somehow) simple, not fully expressed in the sensible world, therefore living elsewhere."25 which "live elsewhere" are known because they participate in the particulars thereby giving them some degree of reality. However, as Plato later increasingly emphasized the separateness of the Forms, the metaphor of participation was replaced by one of imitation.26 For the purposes of my argument which locates the divorce between abstract thought and concrete experience with Platonism, I want to stress that Plato was by no means entirely wrong to develop a new level of abstract discourse. Indeed as this later developed it opened up scientific, 24Ibid., p. 24. 25Ibid., p. 25. 26The concept of Platonic participation has often been preserved in theological thought. However, this is not what I am seeking to reclaim. Rather I am critically re-evaluating the entire Platonic theory of abstract Forms as the primary place where reality is located. Furthermore, I am analyzing why Platonism, so understood, thus ends up denigrating liturgical, poetic, dramatic and ritual participation. This participation is not that of the Forms participating in the particulars, but rather personal participation of the knower in the known. "You are the music while the music lasts" in Rowan Williams, "The Philosophical Structures of Palamism," A Journal of Eastern Christendom 9 (1977) : 41.

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analytic, and technological advances. However, my point is that certain dangers lay in Plato's characterization of knowledge and his theory of Forms, especially when these were taken to be primary and absolute. When "truth," "justice" or "goodness," etc. are believed to have only one universal and essential Form, then one presupposes that "thought" must deal with a singular objective reality. However, this entire paradigm taken as primary results, as I hope to show more fully in following sections, in a distorted understanding of "reality" and a deceptive picture of how we ourselves are as knowers in the world. For Plato's monolithic "view" of reality essentially negates the personal ways we ourselves participate, create and lay claim to the richly complex worlds we daily inhabit. Although we may no longer adhere to the Platonic theory of Forms, similar concepts as the Forms, which are the effects of literacy, are deeply eng rained in Western culture and increasingly so. Havelock notes that the radical shift of the fifth century Athenian "enlightenment" away from oralism was characterized by linguistic symptoms which have since underlain all "European consciousness": a "proliferation of terms, for

notions and thoughts and thinking, for knowledge and knowing, for understanding, investigating, research, inquiry. "27 While the invention of the alphabet and of the ability for abstract analysis are certainly among the outstanding achievements of the Greek civilization, the habitual tendency to think of language as written has in many ways constrained our imaginations and narrowed our "view" of reality. Writing itself is a restrictive medium. It makes words appear as visible marks, similar to

27Havelock, The Muse Learns to Write, p. 115.

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things. Walter Ong in his book Orality and Literacy observes that writing "tyrannically locks [words] into a visual field forever."28 Reduced to objects in visual space, words are disengaged from their "nonverbal actuality." Writing becomes an "autonomous discourse," which contrasts sharply with oral utterances which are "convivial" and embedded in "nonverbal existence. "29 Ong continues: Writing separates the knower from the known and thus sets up conditions for 'objectivity', in the sense of personal disengagement or distancing. 111e'objectivity' which Homer and other oral performers do have is that enforced by formulaic expression: the individual's reaction is not expressed as simply individual or 'subjective' but rather as encased in the communal reaction, the communal 'soul'. Under the influence of writing, despite his protest against it, Plato had excluded the poets from his Republic, for studying them was essentially learning to react with 'soul', to feel oneself identified with Achilles or Odysseus.30 Under the influence of writing, the knower is able to perceive him or herself as a spectator of the world rather than a participator.31 With the 28Dng, Orality and Literacy (New York: Methuen, 1982), p. 12. 29Ibid., p. 160. 30Ibid., p. 46. 31 Walter Ong argues that language itself becomes a phenomenon rather than an act of communication. In The Presence of the Word. Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967) Ong states that Immanuel Kant concretized the tendency to deal with intellection by analogy with vision (as understood by looking at the written word). The essential Kantian problem, whether one can get beyond surfaces, evolves from Kant's use of sensorium (p. 74). Focussed on sight alone, understanding is condemned to deal only with surfaces which have a "beyond" that it can never attain. "As soon as one sets up the problem of intellectual knowing in terms of a visualist construct such as 'phenomena,' the question of 'noumena' thus automatically arises" (p. 74).

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apotheosis of the visual medium of the written word, the typical ideal of knowledge, derived from sight, becomes objectivism, clarity and distinctness. Both Havelock and Ong give evidence to the fact that Schmemann's divorce between abstract static thought (of a theological spectator) and concrete dynamic experience (of a liturgical participator) runs deep in the imagination of East and West European culture, and originated with the onset of literacy in the ancient Greek world of Plato. To reconsider Schmemann in the light of this Platonic shift, we need to understand at this point how closely Schmemann's description of the liturgy and worship (which I will investigate in more depth in the following chapters) resembles the Greek poetic tradition of Plato's day. For Schmemann describes the liturgy as a sacred drama with its own sacramental rhythm of assembling, offering, thanksgiving, etc. According to Schmemann, the celebration of the liturgy needs and relies on the senses; thus liturgical theology is always "an invitation to taste and see, and a promise to be fulfilled in communion, vision and life .:" 32 In liturgical worship we are given a "vision of the kingdom of God ... made partakers of the new Reality."33 For Schmemann there is then in the liturgy a selfidentification of the knower with the known - a participation in the concrete act and celebration. Likewise the memOIY (or anamnesis) plays a central role: "'Remember,O Lord' ... Without exaggeration one can say that the commemoration ... constitutes the heartbeat of all the church's worship, her entire life. "34 Just as the "Homeric" poet depended on recitation, drama, rhythm, singing, self-identification, memory and vision, 32Schmemann, "Liturgy and Theology," p. 98. 33Schmemann, "II. The Liturgical Problem," p. 173. 34Schmemann, The Eucharist, p. 123.

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so also does the liturgy according to Schmemann. And when Plato believed that the oral world of the poet was not only insufficient but was in fact deceptive ("a phantom of reality"), he concretized a way of perceiving the world that has shaped our own perceptions of worship and the liturgy today and in tum influenced our understanding of the theological task. Given the Platonic emphasis on the language of "isolated abstractions, conceptual and formal," it is little wonder that theology today, as Schmemann says, is unable to hear the language of the church, or we could say, the orality of the Christian liturgy. Anton Ugolnik, a contemporary Orthodox thinker and deacon in the Orthodox church, makes similar critiques of theology's reliance on a written paradigm of reality to the exclusion of other dimensions. In his article, "An Orthodox Hermeneutic in the West," Ugolnik discusses the power that the word understood primarily as written has had on the imagination of modem thinkers. The "western hermeneutic," Ugolnik argues, "envisions a reader's encounter with a text as the model., "35 Ugolnik states that the "modem mind has localized meaning ... in the act of reading. And this is not the loud, lips-moving act that the ancients used to perform, or that the orthodox Jews do today, for then the spoken word rings out... Reading is for us a manifestly private act."36 He as well refers to how differently critics understood Homer after Milman Perry and Alfred B. Lord determined Homer's epics were composed not as texts but as performances. Quoting Lord, Ugolnik writes: "It is conceivable that a man might be an oral poet in his younger years and a written poet later in 35Anton Ugolnik, "An Orthodox Hermeneutic in the West," St. Vladimir's Theological Quarterly 27 (Summer,1983) : 115. 36Anthony Ugolnik, "Redeeming the Senses: The Text is Not Enough," Liturgy 7 (Summer, 1987) : 89.

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life. but it is not possible that he be both an oral and a written poet at any given time in his career." 37 In contrast to the hermeneutical model of a reader encountering a text. Ugolnik stresses the "oral, liturgical environment" of Eastern Orthodoxy. Ugolnik claims as a hermeneutical model the Orthodox oral/aural public celebration of encounter with the Word. While I will return to Ugolnik in the following chapter, I refer to him at this point because he recognizes to some degree the effects that the shift from orality to literacy has had on theological thinking. From the standpoint of the postenlightenment model of "individual rationalist inquiry." which Ugolnik relates to the isolated reader before a text, the liturgy "has become a 'grand incidental' - nice. perhaps even necessary, but hardly vital. "38 Ugolnik, like Schmemann, gives evidence that Plato's demotion of the Greek poetic world of orality influenced by literacy continues to hold sway over the modem (theological) imagination, which in turn results in a failure to take the dynamic liturgy and worship seriously. In other words, I along with Schmemann and Ugolnik am stating that theology has come. even if not explicitly, to have as its model the written word, and thus has increasingly subjected itself to a pervasive rationalism. The model for the real is not the dynamic, temporal oral/aural world full of movement, personal presence and participation, but rather that which is abstract, atemporal and static. The "hazard" of modem theology

37"An Othodox Hermeneutic," p. 112. 38"The Text is Not Enough," p. 88.

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Erich Heller in his article "The Hazard of Modem Poetry," recognizes, as the title suggests, the hazardous path on which Plato embarked when he devalued the oral poetic world and discounted it of any degree of reality. Plato, Heller asserts, was "the first great man of Greece [to charge] poetry with the offense of confounding man's soberly useful notions about reality ..."39 Plato's Athenian enlightenment was clearly connected with the enlightenment of which Ulrich Zwingli was a part. Heller refers specifically to the theological dispute of the sixteenth century between Martin Luther and Ulrich Zwingli about the nature of the eucharist.40 Are the bread and wine the body and blood of Christ. or are they "mere" symbols?41 Heller points out that for Luther, the word and sign were not "merely 'pictures of thought,' but the thing itself."42 However, Zwingli, who was more thoroughly influenced by the enlightened Italian Renaissance, considered Luther's claim a "barbarous absurdity." "The sacrament is 'merely' a symbol, that is, it symbolically represents what it itself is not "43 Heller points out that Zwingli's

39Erich Heller, The Disinherited Mind (New York: Barnes & Noble Inc., 1971), p. 269. 40As I described in Chapter Two, Schmemann himself refers to the eucharistic debate between the real presence and symbol as problematic. Heller's significance for my argument is that he traces this philosophically to Platonism. 41It is important to realize that the Luther/Zwingli debate between the real and the symbol was not the first but had been preceeded by similar such debates. In the ninth century, for an early example, Paschasius Radbertus and Ratramnus both published works by the title De Corpore et Sanguine Domini. In these works, they debated whether the elements of bread and wine when called Christ's body and blood should be considered symbol (figura) or reality (veritas). 42 Heller, Disinherited Mind, p. 266. 43Ibid.

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argument was the theological climax of a deep revolution (which had been simmering for hundreds of years) which caused a radical change in one's understanding of reality. Zwingli's claim concerning the "mere" symbolic nature of the sacraments concretized a growing tendency in which "not only the sacraments but the holiness of all that is holy will cease to be 'literally true.' ... Body will become merely body, and symbol merely symboL." 44 It is important to note, in the context of my argument, that the Luther/Zwingli debate as Heller describes it is only possible after literacy has become engrained in the cultural imagination. The debate over whether or not the sacraments (or anything, for that matter) are "literally" true can only take place after one has the concept of "literal" - by the letter - and "letter" is of course that which is written (or printed). In this context "literal" becomes identified with the real and all that which is not "literal" is less real or a mere appearance. This dichotomy is clearly at work when one argues over whether the bread and wine are literally the body and blood of Jesus Christ or "mere" symbols. "Literal" has thus been used to mean not only "by the letter" but also "factual;" however, in both cases the same very narrow understanding of reality is predetermined, thus succesfully denying reality to all that which is not "literal." In other words, the real is only that which is static, factual and monolithic. Heller continues with the claim that the "enlightenment" that Zwingli experienced, prefigured by Plato, reached its climax in the nineteenth century when "nothing real seemed of value any more. Value was the contraband of unreality smuggled into the real world by cunning poets. 44Ibid.

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Poetic creativeness became the illicit traffic in smuggled goods. "45 Heller states that not only the language of art but also the language of religion was deprived of an "essential degree of reality": with religion."46 "in talking about poetry we are concerned with aesthetics, and with politics, and with morality, and All of these disciplines were thus robbed, to some degree, of the "real." Heller describes the estrangement that took place when art, poetry and religion were deprived of "reality": The symbol was made homeless in the real world, and the real world made itself a stranger to the symbol. Architecture, the most 'real' of all the arts, steadily declined. After the seventeenth century Europe no longer dwelt or worshipped or ruled in buildings created in the image of authentic spiritual vision. For all that was real was an encumbrance to the spirit who, in his tum, only occasionally called on the real, and even then with the embarrassment of an uninvited guest. He was most at home where there was least 'reality' - in music. The music of modem Europe is the one and only art in which it surpassed the achievement of former ages. This is no accident of history: it is the speechless triumph of the spirit in a world of words without deeds and deeds without words. The great revolutions in human history do not change the face of the earth. They change the face of man, the image in which he beholds himself and the world around him. 47 Heller's "speechless triumph," in which the "literal" word and merely human deed have parted company, parallels Schmemann's abstract thought divorced from concrete experience. And as Heller profoundly notes, European culture has paid a tremedous price for failing to challenge the philosophical tradition on its severance of word from deed, and of thought
45Ibid., 46Ibid., 47Ibid., p. 288. p. 296. p. 269-270.

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from experience. The secondary status given to the dynamic, oral world has become "hazardous" as one particular set of (abstract) criteria has increasingly determined our understanding of meaning, value, and reality. (Notice even here, however, that value is not eradicated but rather one particular set of values is endorsed: objectivism, mentalism, etc.) The despair that results from being cut off from other avenues of what is genuine and real, which means being cut off from ourselves in the world, is surely captured by Holderlin, whom Heller cites: "...in such spiritless times, why be a poet at all?" Heller concludes that "the great experiment of separating meaning from reality, and symbol from fact, has ended in failure. "48 However, in response to what could well be called the ''hazard of modem theology," ScJ:nnemann challenges the secondary status that the dynamic celebration of the liturgy has been given in formal theological reflection. Throughout his works, Schmemann insightfully emphasizes the importance of worship and the liturgy, not only as an inspiration or boost to piety, but as a theological source. Yet ScJ:nnemann's insight will be missed if one thinks that he is referring to the liturgy as primarily a written source, which Schmemann himself disclaims. The import of Schmemann's discernment lies in the fact that he considers the dynamic, "oral/aural" world of worship and the liturgy not as a "phantom of reality," as Plato considered the oral poetic world of his day, but as that which has serious standing for the task of theology. In other words, ScJ:nnemann is seeking to endorse and acredit the residual beliefs of orality which a literate culture tends to denigrate. He is thus relying on 48Ibid., p. 299.

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epistemological criteria derived not from the more abstract written text, but from the concrete and vibrant oral world of gesture, recitation, movement, and spoken words. In Schmemann's critique of the divorce between thought and experience, and in his attempt to claim the dynamic liturgical world as a theological source, Schmemann's project can be described as an attempt to get his readers to lay claim to one's personal involvment in the activity of corporate worship as an authoritative source of knowledge.49 In order to illumine the problem Schmemann discerns between theological thought, on the one hand, and worship experience, on the other, I refer to an article written by H.A. Nielsen entitled "A Meeting of Minds on Water." In his article Nielsen reflects on two statements: one by Kierkegaard- "water is a profound truth which becomes more interesting the more one plumbs its depths ...," and the other by Wittgenstein - "while still in school our children are taught that water consists of hydrogen and oxygen ... Anyone who doesn't understand is stupid. The most important questions are concealed."50 As Nielsen seeks to understand "where" 49How, one may ask, is this not sheer subjectivism? My hypothesis is that the objectivism/subjectivism dichotomy as the only alternative is the result of an imagination so heavily influenced by literacy that it can only imagine reality is visual metaphors. If there is no objectively real which is static and unchanging (like words seen on a page) then everything becomes subjective and/or relative (I return to relativism in my final chapter). However, as I hope will become more evident in my discussion of hermeneutics in the following chapter, I am attempting to work out of an entirely different framework. SOH.A. Nielsen, "A Meeting of the Minds on Water," in The Grammar of the Heart: New Essays in Moral Philosophy and Theology, ed. Richard Bell (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988), p.

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Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard are coming from, he writes that "something like a corporate mentality, that of the science textbook with its official criteria of what shall count as understanding, crowds out the individual mentality that is part of the child's original endowment."51 The child is trained to acquire a habit of thought which, for example, understands water in a "standard, official, thin and impersonal" way, without ever being taught to consult him or herself, i.e., what do I know about water when I hear it defmed as H20? Nielsen continues that while we might want to agree water in the abstract consists of hydrogen and oxygen, we need to bear in mind that water in the abstract does not exist: In the abstract, or at the furthest remove from our senses, water is always the same thing, but in existence water is endlessly varied and on the move. The contrast between abstraction and existence becomes overwhelming if you compare the scientific account of water with the enormous variety of things we observe about an existing body of water such as the Niagara River.52 While the "stripped-down notation," H20, can prove important for chemistry and biology, Nielsen points out that the "ways of its own that water exhibits" can slip out of the picture. Science can dull our imaginations by leading us to believe that water defined as H20 is the "real thing," "water itself' while causing us to overlook the millionfold ways water actually is. Nielsen replies to his interlocuter who imagines that science gets at "water itself': "What do you mean by 'water itself? When is it not itself?,,53 The query of Nielsen's interlocuter echoes a central
51Ibid., p. 77. 52Ibid. 53Ibid., p. 78.

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theme in the Platonic philosophical tradition: the "thing itself' versus the concrete plurality manifested in the world. Just as the official "textbook science" teaches us to understand water in a "thin and impersonal" way, so also Schmemann would agree that academic theology out of the tradition of "rationalist inquiry" teaches us to understand theology/faith in a thin and impersonal way. Nielsen calls the reader to pause and imagine the millionfold ways he or she actually experiences water in the world -- standing before the Niagara falls; listening to a babbling creek; drinking a cool cup of water. Nielsen concludes that Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein challenge the entire "essentialist" paradigm and instead tum to discovering water as a profound truth in the many ways of water in the world. In light of Nielsen's argument, we can say that Schmemann too wants t~ move away from any understanding of the "essence" of the liturgy or of theology, which he claims would be reductionistic. Schmemann argues against his critics, W.J. Grisbrooke and Bernard Botte, that his task as a liturgical theologian is not to recover a logical and lucid "essence" of the liturgy or of theology.54 Rather Schmemann wants us to give serious attention to the lively, dynamic "ways of faith," communicated most profoundly, according to Schmemann, in the celebration of the liturgy which is the "manifestation, communication and fulfillment" of the Church's faith. For Schmemann what has "slipped out" of the theological picture is any sense of the actual manifold "ways of faith" as expressed in worship and the liturgy, i.e., assembling together with fellow believers, celebrating the Eucharist, standing before the icons, singing the harmonic hymns, being baptized into a faith community, etc.
S4Schmemann, "Debate on the Liturgy: Liturgical Theology, Theology of Liturgy and Liturgical Reform," p. 217.

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Thus far in my response to Schmemann, I have argued that Schmemann's attempt to recover the dynamic liturgy as a theological source is a move to reclaim the residual orality for the theological task.55 By orality, I have meant not only spoken words but also the non-verbal actuality and the lively context which are deeply intertwined with speaking. I have located the source of the tension between "rational thought," and concrete experience not in scholasticism, as Schmemann does, but in the Greek world of Plato with the onset of literacy. The tension in the Platonic dialogues between the Greek poetic tradition and the Platonic thoughtforms parallels, at least in some ways, the modem tension between the liturgical tradition and theological thought. For the Orthodox liturgy, like the oral performance of the early Greek poets, demands from the audience (or congregation) the element of participation if it is to be entered into and enacted. Such dynamic participation involves rhythm, drama, singing, moving -- and in the Orthodox Divine Liturgy, drinking and eating. In contrast, as Schmemann states it, modem theological thought has tended to leave behind such dynamic, liturgical participation and has sought more abstract, and even alien, thought forms. My argument in this chapter is that such movement away from the active oral/aural and bodily participation of the liturgy has its initial model in Plato, who wanted to move beyond (and above) the deceptive and changing world of oral poetry to that realm, so he imagined, of pure abstract thought. I have further S5Schmemann as an Orthodox might have been better prepared to discern and retain beliefs derived from orality. As Anton Ugolnik points out, "For a variety of reasons, the 'vernacular values' so suppressed in the West have been largely present in Orthodox cultures" in "Tradition as Freedom from the Past: Eastern Orthodoxy and the Western Mind," lournal of Ecumenical Studies, 21 (Spring 1984) : 284.

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argued, agreeing with Havelock and Ong, that this picture for reality was influenced by the written word, for with writing the imagination was for the first time able to conceive of the word (the logos) as a static and unchanging entity. I will continue to examine this tension between the liturgical tradition and theological thought in the following chapter as I seek to construct a hermeneutic which gives a central place to the oral dynamic liturgy. Before moving on to the next chapter, however, I wish to address one concern that has been raised in regard to my argument thus far. And that is that most worship is governed by texts, and they are read. Though texts are used in Orthodox worship services (as in most services), I still wish to claim the significance of the oral/aural dimension versus the literate as my model in the liturgical context. Though for many who have attended liturgical services since childhood the responses, hymns, creeds, etc. are usually recited by heart, for those who read the text out loud in the presence of others a necessary difference remains between this reading and a silent reading, say, in the privacy of one's home. This distinction can perhaps be better discerned if we imagine the difference between reading a play alone and in silence, and actually reciting a part (either by memory or with the prompting of a written text) in an actual drama with other performers/actors, In the second scenario as we actually perform the Or, for drama, we enter into a committed relationship with other actors and with an audience, all of which is absent in the solitary, silent reading. another example from the liturgy itself, imagine the difference you would feel between silently reading a wedding service while sitting at a desk in contrast to actually participating in a wedding service: either pledging your witness and support to the engaged couple in the presence of a

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gathered community or yourself taking wedding vows. Again the second scenario of the actual wedding performance is serious in a way that the first is not: as a participant before others, you enter into a verbal commitment with them. This same thing could be said about the liturgy of baptism or the eucharist. Thus, in conclusion, the theological "model" I am relying upon is not the silent reader before the written text but rather the participator in what I am calling the oral/aural dimension of the liturgy: the one who participates either by publicly reading out loud or stating by
memory the creeds, confessions, responses, prayers, etc., and all this within

the rich non-verbal activity that makes up every actual liturgical celebration.