Liturgical Theology after Schmemann

An Orthodox Reading of Paul Ricoeur

Brian A. Butcher

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780823278282
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Dénominations chrétiennes

While only rarely reflecting explicitly on liturgy, French philosopher Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005) gave sustained attention to several themes pertinent to the interpretation of worship, including metaphor, narrative, subjectivity, and memory. Inspired by his well-known aphorism, "The symbol gives rise to thought, " Liturgical Theology after Schmemann offers an original exploration of the symbolic world of the Byzantine Rite, culminating in a Ricoeurian analysis of its Theophany "Great Blessing of Water.". The book examines two fundamental questions: 1) what are the implications of the philosopher's oeuvre for liturgical theology at large? And 2)how does the adoption of a Ricoeurian hermeneutic shape the study of a particular rite? Taking the seminal legacy of Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann (1921-1983) as its point of departure, Butcher contributes to the renewal of contemporary Eastern Christian thought and ritual practice by engaging a spectrum of current theological and philosophical conversations.

PART

I

“HOW WILL THE LAMP ENLIGHTEN THE LIGHT?”

CHAPTER

1

“AFTER SCHMEMANN”: INTRODUCING RICOEUR INTO THE CONVERSATION

“Liturgical Theology”

We may begin with the commonplace premise that in Orthodox tradition the primary meaning of theology has been taken to be prayer itself—the knowledge and experience of God acquired through participating in a relationship with him. Only secondarily does it imply (as the etymology indicates) “words about God.”¹ Hence the notion of liturgical theology, the theologia prima discussed above, whose elaboration was, of course, the goal of Fr. Alexander Schmemann’s life work.² It is no exaggeration to say that for him the liturgy itself is the fundamental object of interpretation. Regarding Schmemann’s approach to the Eucharist, for example, Peter Galadza states, “It is a mystagogy of the actual celebration. For him—as for the Fathers—the meaning of the sacrament is not ‘behind,’ ‘above,’ or ‘beyond’ the rite, but in it and through it.”³ Indeed, it is the gestalt of the liturgy that arguably enables the very perception of Scripture as the Word of God; through the manner in which it is treated in liturgical celebration, the faithful come to experience the Bible as Holy Scripture. One must therefore give a certain methodological, if not theological, primacy to the interpretation of the liturgical event—especially for Schmemann as communicated via its texts. In other words, the liturgy is at once the experiential site of all authentic theology, as well as an inscribed phenomenon itself in need of interpretation.

Consequently we see, early on in his career, Schmemann identifying the “problem of the Ordo” and the corollary imperative to discern the logic according to which the liturgical tradition is to be understood and performed. More eventful than the historical development of the liturgy itself, he explains, are the vicissitudes of its theological interpretation down through the centuries. In the commentaries of the Fathers we hear a harmonization of three distinct potentially dissonant hermeneutics: the early ecclesiological-eschatological, the secondary historicist-mysteriological and the tertiary ascetical-pietistic.⁴ Salient in Schmemann’s rehearsal of this commentary tradition is his deployment of a Hegelian model of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.⁵ For he asserts that ultimately “within the Byzantine synthesis the original ‘emphases’ and categories of both contrasting liturgical traditions [i.e., the monastic-ascetic and the secular-mysteriological] were interwoven and their contradictions removed.” And again, “From the Areopagite down to Cabasilas we see the elaboration of one and the same theology—a theology simultaneously monastic (ascetical) and mysteriological in its whole spirit and movement.”⁶ His Introduction thus concludes on an optimistic tone.

Schmemann’s ostensible appreciation of this “Byzantine synthesis” is intriguingly qualified, however, fifteen years later—only two years before his death—in his article “Symbols and Symbolism in the Byzantine Liturgy: Liturgical Symbols and Their Theological Interpretation.” There he decries a “radical discrepancy between the lex orandi as expressed and embodied in the liturgy itself and its symbolic interpretation, which nevertheless is commonly held to be an organic part of the Orthodox tradition.”⁷ He proceeds to critique the manner in which a correct understanding of the Eucharist has been obfuscated by the figurative readings of patristic commentators, alleging that these present the discrete actions as well as the totality of the rite as “symbolic representations, i.e., acts ‘representing,’ ‘signifying,’ and thus ‘symbolizing,’ something else, be it an event of the past, an idea, or a theological affirmation.” Why is this problematic? Due to “the absence of virtually any reference to such symbols and symbolic meanings in the liturgy itself, and this means primarily in the prayers in which the different rites and liturgical actions are given their verbal expression and thus their meaning.”⁸ If Schmemann concedes that in certain instances the lex orandi does indeed appear to countenance what he terms an “illustrative symbolism,” he nevertheless contends that this is so only in regard to “secondary rites and representations” that should be set aside on account of their late reception into the liturgy and their thematic incongruence with it. His panacea is a recovery of “eschatological symbolism”: none other than the neglected “genuine liturgical theology” of the early Christian community.⁹

An analysis of Schmemann’s views in this respect, therefore, encounters a perplexing, even vexing ambivalence. Does he esteem Holy Tradition after the fashion of Vladimir Lossky, “the life of the Holy Spirit in the Church, communicating to each member of the Body of Christ the faculty of hearing, of receiving, of knowing the Truth in the Light which belongs to it, and not according to the natural light of human reason”?¹⁰ Or is he culpable rather of a kind of archaeologism, an a priori privileging of the earliest stratum of Christian experience as the most authentic site of “the faith of the Church as expressed, communicated and preserved by the liturgy”?¹¹ Stig Frøyshov, in analyzing the discrepancies in Schmemann’s thought with respect to both the issue of liturgical symbolism and the related question of how the liturgy expresses eschatology, argues that Schmemann unwittingly eschewed the issue of whether he too, not unlike his predecessors, did not also bring meaning to the liturgy (while naively believing that he was simply discovering it there):

The method of interpretation that Schmemann aspired to practice, but that he did not, I think, follow, shows itself to be very close to that of the theologians whom he critiques for having, from the eleventh century onwards … destroyed the authentic symbolism: [this method involves] a rejection of every “imposed” meaning, especially allegorical ones, those characteristic of patristic and medieval exegesis. Schmemann wishes to find the meaning and the symbolism of the liturgy itself, its inherent vision.… [There is a] lack of awareness of the interpreting subject and of the act of interpretation.¹²

In the quest for this “inherent vision,” Schmemann would appear to engage in a kind of circular reasoning: The liturgical commentary tradition is not to be trusted because it does not respect the meaning of the liturgical text; where it does so, the liturgical text is in turn not to be trusted inasmuch as it reifies meanings already determined to be illicit. Moreover, one cannot avoid the implicit, perennial question of how exactly primary and secondary “rites and representations” are to be distinguished from one another.¹³

Liturgy and the “Anxiety of Influence”

I think we see here an instance of what Ricoeur calls the invidious “conflict of interpretations”—a kind of conflict his thought seeks rather to negotiate than to quell.¹⁴ The argument of “Symbols” is that the Divine Liturgy has consistently been misunderstood throughout Orthodox history, not only by the common participants in the rite but also, more egregiously, by those charged with explicating it. Nevertheless, Schmemann considers the rite per se to be transparent, affording an immediacy of access to its “essential symbolism” across time and space.

To probe this dilemma, we may adduce a seminal article of Orthodox theologian Anton Ugolnik, to which we will return at length below. For the moment I would like to simply note the author’s optimistic estimation that Orthodox have, by maintaining a liturgical frame of reference, been able to avoid the hermeneutical crisis engendered in the West by its recalcitrant individualism and concomitant “anxiety of influence”:

Its own history has given the West a dynamic and particularly “anxious” relationship to its own past.… [I]n contemplating the classic text it seeks to restore or revive, or even in seeking to recover the oral, communal emphasis on gospel proclamation that had been lost, western inquiry loops back upon a record of its own identity, confronts a “text” and proceeds forward through the encounter. In this “figurative knot” of critical encounter, we find a crisis of identity hidden in the quest for meaning.¹⁵

By contrast, the author argues that Orthodoxy is characterized by a profound sense of continuity with the past. Not perceiving its own history as punctuated by the caesurae axiomatic to Western historiography, such as the Renaissance or Reformation, it has not felt, in turn, the corollary burden of retrieving something lost. The past has instead been seen as perennially flowering in the on-going life of the Church. For Ugolnik, the process by which this occurs is not passive: Each generation must assume afresh responsibility for the transmission of tradition. And yet, this handing on of what has been handed down does not display the kind of atavistic struggle to which the West seems ever prone.

But pace Ugolnik, I would suggest that Schmemann appears to be compelled by just such a stereotypically Western “anxiety” in his own quest to identify a singular interpretation of the Ordo, convinced as he was that the liturgy lauded by Ugolnik (and countless others) as the sine qua non of authentic Orthodox theologizing had itself been subject to distortion. There has been, according to Schmemann, a “discontinuity in the comprehension, i.e., in the understanding and, deeper, in the experience of the liturgy by the ecclesial society at large.”¹⁶ It appears in turn that the hermeneutical foundation constituted by the liturgy must actually be regarded as a task, and not simply a given—a frame of reference that does not simply abide but is continually under construction, as it were, vulnerable to weathering by the elements of history.¹⁷

By way of example, we can consider Schmemann’s treatment of the Prayer of the (Little) Entrance, which he regards as a “primary” layer of the lex orandi. Curiously, he avoids the question of whether the same historical-critical method invoked to identify what he terms the ancient, “eschatological” import of the Entrance (in contradistinction to the interpretations subsequently given it by patristic commentaries) might not result in a reductio ad absurdum. That is, why not conclude that the prayer in question is itself also secondary: an ancillary, symbolic interpretation of what was originally merely the practical—untheologized, so to speak—action of entering the church building to commence the service?¹⁸ Furthermore, Schmemann evades the fact that the rite’s allegedly authentic meaning (namely, that “the liturgy, we may say, happens to us. The liturgical entrance is our, or rather, the Church’s entrance to heaven”¹⁹) is no longer borne out by the lex orandi, since today it is only the clergy who (re)enter the altar, and not the whole congregation that together enters the church building to begin its common worship, as in former times.²⁰

Nevertheless, Schmemann is adamant that the classical liturgical commentators—many of whom, of course, are canonized saints in the Orthodox Church—have, in interpreting what is actually happening, illegitimately “imposed” their own meaning upon the Divine Liturgy (subsequently impressed upon the minds of the faithful) such that “even to question it is, in the eyes of an overwhelming majority, tantamount to subversion and heresy.”²¹ Schmemann’s indictment of the commentators, however, invites the obvious question of why such a pantheon proved unable to grasp the liturgy’s “own” meaning, while he himself can so readily achieve this herculean task; why, that is, his perspective is not to be reckoned as but one more idiosyncratic interpretation foisted upon the believing community.

Is Schmemann in this instance perhaps mimicking Ugolnik’s stereotypical “Western inquiry,” which “loops back upon a record of its own identity, confronts a ‘text’ and proceeds forward through the encounter,” in whose “ ‘figurative knot’ of critical encounter, we find a crisis of identity hidden in the quest for meaning”? Indeed, Schmemann appears here to succumb to the same vice he elsewhere abjures: “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 theology from its living source: liturgy and spirituality.”²² For he himself insists upon the liturgical text as the privileged bearer of meaning vis-à-vis the received tradition of popular, allegorical, or mystagogical interpretation—less concerned as this is with texts, than with, inter alia, choreography, gestures, and appointments.

I wonder if it is even apropos to suggest a parallel here between Schmemann’s view of Tradition and the classically Protestant concern to establish the perspicuousness of Scripture, to unburden it from any necessary connection to the patristic and subsequent medieval accrual of “senses,”—i.e., the Quadriga comprising the literal, allegorical, tropological, and anagogical modes of exegesis.²³ Galadza, ...