Orthodox Christianity, Vol IV, Part One: The Worship and Liturgical Life of the Orthodox Church

In the preface of Volume IV, Metropolitan Hilarion describes religion as a “worldview.” We make connections with our experiences about the events around us, and we proceed with assumptions about what might happen. Religio, a Latinate word that entered our language around 1200, had a much broader meaning that might encompass conscience, reverence, faith, and action toward the divine, not a sanctimonious spectacle. Ancient Latin authors thought the verb religare, to reconnect, bind, go through again to God, was what religion meant. Early Christian writer, Lactantius, wrote, “we are tied to God and bound [religati] to Him (Divine Institutes IV, xxvii). 

In Orthodox Christianity, our relationship was broken by sin and death, some grace was lost, but our nature continues and remains, and God has always been a Lover of Mankind; He hasn’t changed. What was bound and tied together was the body taken from the Most Holy Theotokos and the Divine Nature of Christ who lives with us now. This re-joining between God and man makes it possible for us to recover both the soul and the body together. This relationship with Christ, prevents us from becoming demon-men, which is clear through the progression of mankind’s history. St. Augustine teaches that “having lost God through neglect, we recover Him [religantes] and are drawn to Him” (The City of God X.3). Everyone has a certain view of the world. Systems of thought vary within and outside many different cultures. Answers to life and death have been recycled through the times and even newer ones through more discoveries and technological advances, which seek to recover humanity lost. 

Metropolitan Hilarion structures Orthodoxy’s unique perspective of life and death, religious beliefs, and practices systematically in Part One. Religion is built up in order. It can be described as a synergistic effort to recover ourselves to God, a joint work between God and people. This system is personal, not based on strictly mathematical or mechanistic views that are a commonplace approach to answering and guiding the questions of our wonder and anxiety. Orthodoxy views this world as a place for recovery and renewal of beauty, goodness, and truth through a recovering of our deepest past and renewing our inner life and core identity. If all directions led to the same path, reflection, practical knowledge, and asking questions about life and death wouldn’t be very valuable, if all roads led to Larissa. In Plato’s Meno, Socrates questions whether absolute knowledge is more important to have than true belief. Unless knowledge is “tied down,” according to Socrates, by truth, then this knowledge isn’t worth attaining because it won’t weather the storms of life toward the end. Some practices lead to renewing our body and soul, others do not help us to accomplish that end. The holy traditions passed down to us through the saints and holy fathers of the Orthodox Church conserve the right medicinal treatment for humanity’s recovery and the reordering of our desires and fears. 

Christian denominations or religions cannot boast of a tradition that has not undergone some development. Historically Orthodox Christians have kept apostolic tradition mystically. It produces holy men and women even up to our times. It renews our spiritual senses and our bodies through heartfelt prayer and the receiving of consecrated physicality to heal us. Prayer is the center of Orthodox life and Christ too is the center of all things. So, our prayers to saints, angels, and the Most Holy Virgin Mary are tied together, they are inseparable in seeking out the good of each person and place. The foundation of Orthodox worship is prayer. It’s not an accidental feature. Prayer also requires effort, humility, discipline, and a desire to have a relationship with God who is in relationship with everyone else. The divine liturgy of the Orthodox Church is the foundation for theology, the recovery of our nature, and our final renewal or theosis, deification. It’s where the major thoughts about life and death questions can be answered. 

Brad S. Gregory has outlined the recent consequences of divisions between Christian religious groups, mostly Catholics and Protestants. There is a deep, faithful connection between a person’s effort and struggles and prayer in the East. Asceticism and prayer are not thought to be separated in Orthodoxy as it can become often in other Christian assemblies. Orthodox theology is based on heartfelt prayer in the divine liturgy and ascetical disciplines. These traditions of prayer have been practiced since the times of the Hebrew Old Testament righteous patriarchs, women, and children. Theology is formed from the liturgy. In Roman Catholicism, worship is informed by theology. Here theological principles worked out through argumentation, disputation, and propositions are the criteria for forming correct worship. So, there is not an emphasis, overall, on deification (renewal, theosis), ascesis, and noetic prayer or heartfelt prayer. Instead, the strength of intellectual systems holds preeminence when it is approved via the ultimate authority for the Church on earth, the Papal office, which has the sole ownership of making such judgments to secure liturgical worship. Protestantism often claims to have no need of any mediators, saints, or Mary, except Christ. But Orthodox noetic, heartfelt prayer is a kind of mediation through the grace of Christ that allows us to enter paradise while we live here and it allows us to live on a more real level and with more deeper connections to people, whether alive or dead. Disciplined prayer opens our spiritual eyes over time, and through many cycles of worship in Orthodox liturgy, we recover our true sight. That doesn’t happen in Protestant theology or practice, nor do they want to claim that can happen. Roman Catholicism claims to have the sole authority and correct Christian belief and knowledge. They take the Holy Apostle Peter in Rome there. The spiritual understanding of worship differs from the Eastern churches. They conserve the rights of office and apostolic authority. But Orthodox Christians have an undeniable link to thousands of saints, including St. Peter, all the Apostles. From Abel and Abraham to Silouan the Athonite and Elder Joseph the Hesychast, the saints testify to the Orthodox Church’s liturgical life. Greek Orthodox Christians, mostly laity and married people who lived in Turkey during the 19th and 20th century also displayed the same gifts, holiness, and ability to heal others as did the previous Hebrew righteous, early Christians, and monastic ranks. Their authority is guided by the Holy Spirit because they sought God through constant, heartfelt prayer, the attendance in the divine services and liturgical cycles, feast, and fast days. The saints build up the foundation of Orthodox worship. It continues to grow strongly and mystically. Despite those differences, Christians from East and West share a “common heritage,” as Protopresbyter John Meyendorff teaches.

Order and prayer organize liturgical life. The system of a human body needs a spirit and the ordering of physical members in the world to interact properly. Likewise, there are cycles of worship. It’s not a gnostic system of levels or intellectual challenges. It’s not the meditative or analytical stripping down of the outward shell of nature or accidentals of the physical world to find the core meaning without any mediation. Order and beauty work harmoniously like a body. The Church is Christ’s body. Christ’s body came from the Most Holy Theotokos. The Most Holy Theotokos is a transfigured person, inextricably bound to God. We strive to become transfigured and eternally tied with the Holy Trinity. The liturgical cycles give us a glimpse into this life unto ages and ages, eternally. The liturgy tells us about life after death and what we can do now. Many Protestants and even Catholics will question why liturgical language, ceremony, and calendar are important topics in Orthodoxy or why are they included in worship at all. The Holy Trinity created time, the sun, moon, planets, and stars. The Holy Trinity created our bodies to move and perform action and work with different parts like the eyes, mouth, ears, head, and hands. The Holy Trinity created words and language for expressing our worship; He gave us speech, sound, and names. All creation is involved in recovery and renewal. Creation isn’t the main obstacle to worship. Rather, it’s man’s sin and death, as well as the demonic creatures, that continue to cover up in blindness what is made good. Orthodox liturgical life includes certain words, names, times, and actions. These are all on the same course of salvation and we use them in our daily life. 

Orthodox Christianity, Vol III, Chp 14: Bells and Bellringing

This survey of Orthodox church music is from the perspective of Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev from the Moscow Patriarchate and the history of his culture. He is also an accomplished composer in the tradition of classical European and Russian music. He knows it and can produce it himself. Orthodox Christians in western cultures can also relate to this important tradition of bellringing. Church bells have been a part of not only early Slavic Orthodoxy but also Italian, German, and other European Christian traditions. Byzantium, in fact, was late in accepting church bells because of its association with paganism and their suspicions due to the Schism between the Greeks and Latins. Christians in Italy called the church bells kampan, from the word campus, field. 

The Typikon and other services of the Orthodox church mention the use of bells to summon and call Christians to the divine services. The main function of bellringing was to call Christians to worship. It is a percussive instrument that is made from a variety of different materials. European countries such as Italy, Germany and Poland rang church bells by swinging them back and forth. They didn’t take this ringing beyond a call to prayer; they did tend to name their bells like in Russia. But in Russian Orthodoxy, the bells are struck by hand with ropes and strings, and that’s why bells are called bila from the verb biti, to strike. In this way, it is an instrument that can produce tones with many overtones, with a rhythm, and with a tempo that would fit with the mood of the Church’s feasts and fasting periods. Bellringing reached full integration into the Church’s worship beyond a mere summoning or town alarm. It’s a complex and beautiful sacred instrument. The trumpet mentioned and used in the Old Testament is a forerunner to bells in their function and have a vaguely similar conical shape and material, although trumpets are wind instruments. 

After the ancient Rus’ and the other Slavs were baptized into Orthodoxy, bells became a “sacred craft.” Many prayers for consecrating bells and their reverence are found in Orthodox prayer books and practice. They have taken bell casting and crafting to the level of sacred art, even more so than the religions of the Far East and Western Europe. Many Christians, both Catholic and Protestant, might find this tradition odd or think that physical objects and sounds are unnecessary to our salvation – they are only accidental. But Metropolitan Hilarion mentioned before that music is a part of human nature. Sacred music enlivens the dead members of our body and soul, our noetic senses, and it arouses us to worship the Holy Trinity. It prepares us to worship and enter heartfelt prayer. Worship takes preparation. Since church bells are sacred, they can function also as sacraments. For example, the litanies request, “That it [the sacred bell] may drive away every power, craft, slander of invisible enemies …arouse [the faithful] to observance of the commandments.” The physical world helps us and protects from the invisible warfare. Orthodoxy isn’t an extremist or alarmist religion; it isn’t going to fearmonger people by nature or by unseen spiritual forces, but there is an acknowledgement of these real dangers and it’s dealt with appropriately and effectively through the prayers of the Church, and it’s through the Church’s prayers that the physical world is being saved through “the all-consecrating Spirit” that makes bells holy for worship. 

The form of the bells also drives the function. The overtones that are produced by striking the bells has a tremendous effect in conjunction with the prayers of priests in the Orthodox Church and when it is included during the divine services. Our ears hear church bells in a unique way. Each bell has its own arrangement of sounds and tones. There is a dominant tone that is surrounded and cloaked by many overtones that would be considered “dissonant” according to classical musical standards. Each bell has a characteristic that could be described as soft or sharp like each human voice has its own identifiable sound. But like Byzantine neume notation, there isn’t an exact pitch or precision to the sounds, even if they are written into letter notation, it’s only approximated to what is heard. The church bells are not like instruments that have a single pitch nor are they like instruments that have many pitches. The relationship between the main tone and the overtones in addition to the character and rhythm that is appropriate for the mood of the divine service has a powerful effect on worshippers. From Tales of a Moscow Bell Ringer, Marina Tsvetaeva wrote a poem about this experience: 

The freezing temperatures nipped. Knocking their boots together to warm their toes, people were growing tired of waiting, when, suddenly and without warning, their waiting was over. It was as if the sky burst open! A thunder-clap … Suddenly a steam of bird’s chirping sounded – the flowing singing of certain unknown large birds in a festal jubilation of bells! A shouting of sounds, bright and shining against the background of the rumbling and booming! Alternating melodies, vying and yielding voices. A flood which gushed forth in streams and inundated the neighborhood …. The bells were like giant birds emitting brass, rumbling peals, golden and silver cries. They strike against the dark blue silver of swallows’ voices, filling the night with an unusual bonfire of melodies. 

Like architecture, icons and chanting, bells too were martyred and destroyed by anti-Christian regimes and philosophies. These holy melodies resounded across a cold Russian landscape many years ago and people renewed the spiritual hearts. Church bellringing can be a symbol that we need the consecrated sounds of our world to wake us up, to give us strength to endure, and to pray fully with our heart. Next, Volume IV discusses this topic of worship and the liturgical life of the Orthodox Church. 

Orthodox Christianity, Vol III, Chp 13: Church Singing in Other Local Orthodox Churches

Georgia in the Caucasus Mountains, Serbia, and Bulgaria, both in an area called Rumelia by the Turkish sultans, a remnant of Roman colonization, are some of the other local Orthodox churches surrounding Russia. They share some history together in this area bordering Europe and Asia. The Ottoman Empire once not too long ago controlled the Balkan peninsula. The Georgian monarchy, anciently called the Kingdom of the Iberians, fought off the Seljuq Turks after the Byzantines were drained of power in Asia Minor. From Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Bulgaria inherited the Byzantine “one-voiced” kind of chanting while later an ‘ison’ drone was added. Russia incorporated the harmonized four-voiced, “part” singing from Latin Christians, which predominates in Slavic countries. Georgia has maintained a unique three-voiced chant from the 11th c. apparently derived from its own folk melodies. Orthodox singing has varied the arrangement of voices, whether the voices are harmonized in parts or in unison – the one-voiced singing. But all these churches have used neume notation and the eight tones in some way coming from Byzantium. 

Like znamenny chant, Serbian chanting borrowed some folkloric elements along with its Byzantine musical heritage. Bulgaria can lay claim to the origins of the “Old Slavonic” liturgical language, and it has a very ancient musical beginning in the 9th -10th c. as old as the Kievan Rus’. Amazingly, during the Ottoman rule over Bulgaria, although it was an intense struggle, the Bulgarian Christians still held onto their Orthodox music. Georgia’s unique chant survived a period of struggle against the Muslim Seljuqs and later Russification in the 19th c. just as Russia held onto pieces of znamenny chant after a time of heavy Latinization, largely welcomed by certain ideological groups. The development of Orthodox singing has both an ethnic and a common tradition. The music could be described as ethno-tonic, not ethnocentric. The mode of each country differs from the next and each culture has its own tone so to speak. But they follow the eight-tone system and neume notation to guide their liturgical worship toward Christ. In this way, each local Orthodox church remains in communion with the other so that liturgical music finds its common inspiration, foundation, and union in Christo-centric singing. There is no need for coercion or a cultural “rebirth” in the Orthodox Church. A large part of the changes and rapid developments of Orthodox music have come with political upheavals and policies of the worldly-minded ethos of state or imperial governments. American Protestantism in the 18th c. produced its own kind of church music that often rallies revival movements as well as riots. Methodist hymnody became the backbone of spreading the evangelical message of “new birth” in God among Anglican clergy like John and Charles Wesley and George Whitfield. That traditional approach has continued today in many Protestant denominations.

 Russia is a prime example for Orthodox countries because they have shown the way of struggle under different political circumstances like the Rurik dynasty, the Muslim Tatar rule, the Russian empire, and lastly secularism under Peter the Great and then the Soviets. They are now seeking to revive their unique traditions. Unlike Russia and Serbia, Bulgaria doesn’t seem to have undergone as much western musical influence, and they may not have as much western layers to unravel but maybe some Ottoman influence to undo. America has not been subjugated by other religious forces like Russia, Serbia, and Bulgaria. The closest military ground invasion of the United States came during the Mexican-American War of 1846-1848 when Mexico attacked Brownsville in the Thorton Affair, and nearly again between 1916-1917 by Mexico involving the revolutionary, Pancho Villa, called the Punitive Expedition. But President Carranza and Wilson dissolved the conflict before war could break out. America, a culturally Protestant nation, unlike these Orthodox countries, has not been under direct, foreign oppression and rule that would impose another language and law upon generations of Christian people here. Our culture is used to spreading its peculiar gospel of freedom in a missionary kind of manner from both a secular and Christianized perspective. The Orthodox peopling of America seems to be in progress because of the freedom we have been given and most importantly the saints we’ve been given. Our Orthodox heritage in this land began with saints from Alaska, Syria, Russia, and Serbia like St. Peter the Aleut, St. Innocent, St. Herman, St. Raphael Bishop of Brooklyn, and the “Serbian John Chrysostom,” St. Nicholas of Zhicha. Although the United States hasn’t undergone something like Turkification or Russification in its history, we have been experiencing an aggressive and growing secularization. Music is part of human nature, and it is also a part of the liturgical life of Orthodox Christians, not an accidental aspect of worship. Like architecture and iconography, liturgical chant can help Christians through persecution and in times of peace.