Orthodox Christianity, Vol IV, Chp 3: The Divine Liturgy 146-155

This section of chapter three covers The Eucharistic Canon (Anaphora) of St. John Chrysostom of Constantinople. The major contents of this eucharistic canon includes thanksgiving, remembrance of the Last Supper with the “words of institution,” the invocation (epiclesis) of the Holy Spirit with the consecration of the holy gifts, and the commemoration of the saints, both the living and the departed. Religious sentiment of creatures is fully expressed in apophatic language, for example, “incomprehensible” and “invisible.” These terms are important in the Orthodox divine liturgy, and it differs much from western forms of worship. The anaphora prayers use the verbs “to hymn, to praise, to give thanks, to worship” – mostly have a dominant element of the oral and acoustic characteristics of human nature, not exclusively in the realm of vision and logic. Western culture has a highly developed – very useful – visual and cerebral approach to religion and life. However, the Orthodox liturgy teaches us that we cannot rely heavily on our comprehension and what is visible to us. In other words, the whole experience of the divine liturgy is a reality that happens at once with the mouth and the ear, the use of voices and hearing of words along with the iconography that all begins to live in the heart, not primarily the mind or the eye – the cognitive and visual parts of humanity. 

The anaphora prayers are directed to God the Father, given with the Son and in the power of the Holy Spirit. Prayer is united with all creation in the Trinitarian Creator. For example, the saints and angels are asked to attend our worship at the same time with us. The angels sing “Holy, Holy, Holy” that is from the Scriptures, in Isaiah’s prophecy and John’s Revelation. The animals are not only symbolic, but they are mentioned to be present. The eagle sings and shouts to the calf and the calf cries to the lion and the lion speaks to the man (Rev. 4:7-8) from the Gospel of John. So, we get the picture that all creation involves itself in salvation and submission to the Father, to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit in the kingdom of heaven, experienced really in the divine liturgy. The angels conclude with “Hosanna in excelsis deo…” and the kingdom of the aeonian life begins then, now, and will be for many ages to come. Vision and logic require sequence and linearity, but sound and hearing in the context of poetic imagery through words happen all at once like the complete biography of a saint in a single painted panel while we sing her commemoration. All symbols fall away, teaches Metropolitan Hilarion, in the eschatological kingdom, except for one sign, the Cross of Christ. The necessary and beautiful visual imagery, sensations, chronological time, symbols will eventually be removed and renewed so that we can truly see who the real source of all life is. Our bodies will resurrect, and we will continue to create poetic compositions with a new physicality that will be given and sung back to God, which requires not a static existence that some Christians teach, but a dynamic existence of many, many ages to be lived out. What God can offer goes beyond what we can see at once. But we can hear it with a glimpse of it. Only God can be all-seeing, that is, all-knowing. God’s kingdom is like an “inexhaustible cup.” It is full. But it can be refilled again and again as much as we drink from it. 

The anaphora prayers also teach us the meaning of eternal life and offering. The priest prays, “We offer to him his own.” That means we creatures are meant to be poets, makers that take what is given and remake it and return it to God to deify it and unite to creation again. A very possible and starting definition of an age (aeon) is the completion of a created cycle like this. For example, the Holy Trinity gives, creates for us all, we receive it, we work it, we offer it back to God for all things and giving thanks – the essence of eucharistic worship. Since God is inexpressible, unknowable, we require ages and ages to learn and love who God is. We receive blessings in physical matter, the material for poetic compositions, we remake it, and God transforms it into Himself so that “all is in all” and that beauty of resurrected creation is completed, and a new created age will come, something greater than we can imagine than that first poetic, eucharistic common work. God will multiply, not merely add to his creation. Metropolitan Hilarion teaches that this created effort of humanity is “our destination.” Human nature is anaphoric and the anaphora prayers are linked to the ages of ages. Metropolitan Kallistos also explains the same process of salvation. The physical world, matter, is for our eternal survival; without it, we couldn’t offer sacrifices; to make holy is our nature, the nature of “rational” creatures. So, the definition of “rationality”  is to offer back – with a “bloodless” sacrifice – what we’ve been given to transform our work and energy into God’s life so that many of these non-linear happenings occur. The first image of man – the archetype is Christ – makes more images to be transfigured by the power of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Metropolitan Kallistos frames this aeonianlife and prayers with a broad scope, “we do not act alone,” when we offer in this earthly life as well as in the next. He also teaches that “we stand within nature, not above it” like the philosophers of reason and knowledge. Humans are by nature “the offerers rather than rulers.” The ruler is the King of all, Christ Jesus. This comes true in the Lamb offered in the Eucharistic Canon or Anaphora of St. John Chrysostom and St. Basil the Great, two of the major liturgies that are in use among local Orthodox churches. So, rational creatures find their ultimate meaning in the anaphora, a “bloodless” and creative, common work that is united to the Holy Trinity. The priest again prays, “we offer unto Thee this rational and bloodless worship …” Rational nature is anaphorical and offerings are purificatory “for the fulfillment of the kingdom of heaven.” The restoration of all things allows for continual offerings to be made like this – it’s possible. Attaining to this heavenly kingdom requires purification and this anaphora of Christ that we offer to Him. All theology of the Orthodox Church exists in the Eucharistic Canon, Metropolitan Hilarion teaches. The next section discusses The Eucharistic Canon in the Liturgy of St. Basil the Great. 

Orthodox Christianity, Vol IV, Chp 3: The Divine Liturgy 129-145

This next part of chapter three covers these sections: The Beginning of the Liturgy of the Faithful: The Great Entrance, the Preparation for the Eucharistic Offering, and The Kiss of Peace and the Symbol of Faith. The great mystery of salvation is contained in the divine liturgy, and we are empowered by the Holy Spirit through the one sacrifice of Christ Jesus for ages and ages, since God is the creator of the ages, and this age will end with the revelation of His Cross to the faithful and the faithless, when all sin will be gone from the face of the earth. This coming heavenly kingdom, then, connects directly to the holy mysteries of the Orthodox Church. Christ is not only the King of saints, but even the King of sinners and unbelievers, as the New Testament teaches. The holy gifts, the Body and Blood of Christ, and our prayers help us to enter the kingdom of heaven to escape the coming chastisement of the Lover of Mankind. The Scriptures teach, unlike the grim gnostic fatalism of the afterlife, ultimate submission of all to Christ the King at the close of this age isn’t different in meaning than salvation. 

The ordering of the divine services comes from a book of rubrics called the Typikon, typika meaning “ordering” in Greek. It’s a rule of life too. In this service book, there is no mention of a discrete category called “laity,” since the Eucharist is a joint action between the universal priesthood, between the vested priests and the unvested priests. Holy ordination is a special kind of calling and higher service and life of sacrifice for the whole community that is accomplished through the Holy Spirit, in the laying on of hands in the Church. So, the people unvested offer prayers with the priest vested. There is a real distinction in roles here. But in the prayers of the priest and the laity we can read that there is “no worthy man” unless the Holy Spirit comes upon us and the gifts we offer. All celebrants and participants, all the faithful profess to be ‘’unprofitable servants” in the liturgy. There are no worthy esoteric priests or gnostic mystics like the paganism of the past, who did have special access to the strange gods unlike others. Christ is always the high priest who offers prayers for us every liturgy. Nearly of the liturgical prayers are offered to God the Father, explains Metropolitan Hilarion. It’s through Christ as the Priest and King, through his death and resurrection by the power of the Holy Spirit that we find mercy, comfort, and love in the God Father who is alone Good and Our Teacher. The power of the Spirit descends, and the sacrifice of praise ascends to Our Father. This cycle of thanksgiving is the life of the Holy Trinity that we can enter too. The priesthood shows us in the liturgy the unity of prayer of the Holy Spirit, sacrificial praise, union with God, healing, service, and salvation. There is “no personality” showing in the priest celebrating the liturgy because the community understands that Christ is the Priest leading us to the Father’s Holy Table. 

The preparation for the eucharistic offering teaches us that the sacrifice of Christ reflects our human nature to offer something back to God in a refashioned form like common bread and wine. For example, in the Old Testament the sacrifices of Abel, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Aaron and Samuel foreshadow Christ’s sacrifice. However, the Old Testament prophets continually tell Israel that God never required or needs our sacrifices. If no one can offer sacrifice and God doesn’t even need them, it begs the question of why we offer it and what kind of faithfulness each type shared in the sacrificial examples of the Scriptures. Out of love, Christ came to the world and offered himself and was also at the same time the person who offers to God the Father by the Holy Spirit. Christ is both the offered and the one who offers in the hands of the priest and prayers of the faithful. Anything we receive is fully a gift, a loving reward for nothing that we can do humanly speaking. How to guard that gift and how we increase and reform that gift into something better is maybe the right question to ask about human offerings. That human or animal blood couldn’t take away sins according to the Hebrew prophets is a consistent message in the East. So, the prayer reads in St. Basil the Great’s Anaphora: [that] we may receive the reward of wise and faithful stewards on the awesome day of Thy just retribution.” Just as we had a stewardship over the garden, so now we must keep this grace that has been given to us through the mysteries in God’s kingdom, which lives in the heart – the nous. The parables focus on the kingdom of God speak about how to exchange this passing world for the greatest rewards in the next life. The goal isn’t to instill a fear of a never-ending hell, but how to love God and neighbor that will bring us into unity with God and humanity with most benefits bestowed on us in the resurrection. The divine liturgy unites the Old Testament and the New Testament, and the whole history of mankind and it shows the end toward which all things move. 

The kiss of peace is directly linked to the Holy Eucharist because it fuels love and peace and faithfulness. After the clergy exchange this peace, the holy gifts are placed on the altar. Affection and touch forms part of our nature too, and we receive grace when this affectionate exchange is done in the Spirit. We are also the temple of Christ so that we kiss the entrance, the porch, and the gates of the mouth, where we praise and partake of the Holy Eucharist. When we open the doors of our hearts, like the royal doors, we enter the heavenly kingdom and paradise of the ages and ages even while this age is coming to an end. To say that God’s kingly justice is one thing, but his love and mercy is another matter is called a heresy that actually divides God, according to the catechetical lessons of St. Cyril of Jerusalem. 

Orthodox Christianity, Vol IV, Chp 3: The Divine Liturgy 107-129

What we do during the week leads up to the Lord’s Day, Sunday, when the priest, hierarch, with the people pray and supplicate the Holy Trinity in the divine liturgy. This chapter is the largest in this volume and much attention is given to the broad and specific meaning and arrangement of phrases, terms, and groups of prayers. There are fifteen sections. A principle that helps to understand why the Orthodox worship liturgically and why we believe in the real presence of Christ Jesus bodily in the Holy Eucharist, also called holy communion, is guided by the revealed truth that humans are by nature sacrificial. People were created to make offerings, to give something back to God, not just giving the same thing back to God. The true Church will have the fruits of true offerings and life-changing practices and doctrines that can be clearly discerned by those who seek it out. This first part will group together several sections: The Proskomedia, The Beginning of the Liturgy of the Catechumens, The Little Entrance and the Thrice-Holy, and the Liturgy of the Word.

A major misconception from many other Christian groups is that priests separate the people from God and replace Christ in actuality rather than representatively like an icon. In Orthodoxy, the priests pray in such a way that reveals the true celebrant of the liturgy – Christ Himself. The liturgy continues the Mystical Supper, not merely remembers Christ as if it were a common person’s birthday. Some may say that our worship cannot be the same because places change, time changes, leadership changes. But the sacrifice that is offered is “bloodless” and “rational.” It is one and unified because Christ is the high priest of every liturgy so that our worship is one and unified — in fact, the same. Christ must be present mystically and truly for there to be unity, truth, authority, and purity of worship. Without that basic assumption and reality, there can be no Christian group who can rightly and logically claim to have the fully revealed way to salvation. Elder Joseph and his disciples experienced Christ’s light and love so intensely that they reported to have felt like dying if that grace-filled state continued any longer than a minute. The fact that we cannot discern Christ’s presence is not God’s fault, but our own sinfulness and rationality working backward. Or, out of love, we are not ready to see what is actually happening.

The prayers of the liturgy are spoken through the entire community. Priests and deacons, the whole clergy, are called by God Himself, not by any person’s choice or will, so that they might lead a higher life of service, even though we are all part of “the royal priesthood.” If we are all priests, some vested, some not vested, then our function as Christians is to offer right praise and sacrifice, the essence of worship in the liturgy. Offering or anaphora in Greek, is our common work. The hierarchs lead us to Christ, not away from or separate from Christ’s living words. The choir symbolizes the people, the deacons call the people to prayer, the priest speaks to the people, prays with us, and at times prays on behalf of us to Christ. In the middle of the popular trend of interfaith dialoguing, many Christians have forgotten that the liturgy is a dialogue between priest and participants and Christ Himself who leads us to the Father through the Holy Spirit. This hierarchy is based on love and service, the very example that Christ set up in the Old Testament priesthood and which is fulfilled in the New Testament with the new commandment: love one another. The resulting lack of this fruitful order among Christian groups is obvious. The Orthodox liturgy gives thanks for Christ’s sacrifice and offering, not just as if in the past, but also now and into the future kingdom of heaven. 

Prayer is iconic. Since we’re in the image of God, the clergy, elders, and eldresses represent an image of service in Christ and the bishops too have a self-sacrificial leading role in Christ. The people represent the priesthood too and the choir of angels. If prayers weren’t ordered in the ways outlined above, worship would be “dissonant” besides being unfruitful. The body of Christ is the body of our of joint prayers. Orthodox Christians have a single mind in prayer, not disparate and contradictory wills in prayer during the liturgy. 

Prayer is unified as one offering to the Holy Trinity, and prayer isn’t an individual action, whether in Sunday worship service or in our time alone or at home. Prayer is connected to all people since Christ too prays for all people, and all created things. The proskomedia begins the liturgy. Then, the liturgy of the catechumens who receive instruction and the liturgy of the faithful who receive the Holy Eucharist follows. There are three kinds of offerings. The proskomedia takes place in the sanctuary of the temple and the hierarch or priest reads prayers and names of people. The prosphora is the bread brought before the priest. This offering is traditionally made by the people. It’s used for blessed bread and the Holy Eucharist. Then, a rich series of prayers are offered up in praise, hymns, songs, and supplications for God’s mercy on us and to make us holy with incense. Our prayers rise and we ask the Holy Spirit to come upon us all and to transfigure the bread and wine into the Holy Body and Blood of Christ for our spiritual food. His presence is truly there and within us. Spirituality without a life-changing belief in physicality is not better than empty intellectualism, paganism, or the widespread kind of secularism that gives no place for physicality and spirituality to meet. In fact, the superabundant spiritual bread of Christ can be discerned in the Scriptures. In the garden, the first people saw what was pleasing to them, to their eyes, but God told them, “Don’t take and eat. You will die.” The allurement of sight and senses overpowered the ear and the message of the words. Now, Christ says, “Take and eat. You will live.” The reversal happens to us on the spiritual and physical level in Orthodoxy. The Serpent said then, “Eat. You won’t die.” But we did die. The Serpent says now about the doctrine of the Holy Eucharist, “Don’t eat. Don’t touch that wood of the cross.” Satan today says, consume and touch and do everything in this world except don’t come to the Orthodox Church to eat from that tree. Satan says today, you can have everything. You can pursue life through licentious desires, money, power, success, and fame, but don’t accept any holy bread and wine, don’t accept any of His glory or grace from that cross. The Accuser says that we shouldn’t touch Christ lest we die from our sinfulness. Christ reverses this satanic promise and subtle threat. Christ promises us everything for giving up our passions, if we can take up a cross too. Some Christians doubt this holiness or think themselves unworthy to approach God’s holiness to make them holy. The natural development for all humanity is to restore this relationship.

The prosphora offering is in the shape of a circle called the Lamb with different parts designated for prayers to the Theotokos, the Mother of God, and then the saints, hierarchs, the living and departed, and ranks of angels. Those who have died in Christ are not lost. They are in the center of Christ, this offering of bread and wine brought onto the altar and transformed; now, Christ appears among us mystically. Commemorations of the departed teach us that prayer isn’t limited to this world. Naming and commemorating the dead also links to the biblical genealogies of the Old Testament. The lists of names were a sacred family tree that showed the “unbroken chain of faith” and “the inheritance.” The substance (hypostasis) of people are never lost, Metropolitan Hierotheos of Nafpaktos teaches. The Church has its own genealogy that outlines who has received the rewards, since all will receive resurrection, but not all inherit the same blessings. 

Catechumen is a Greek word that means instruction by word of mouth, or learning by listening and hearing, since the root etymology gives it that force. Christianity was a very acoustic and oral faith. Alphabetic writing was a medium that accompanied and served this aural tradition, especially since the Eastern and Semitic cultures of the time were more of “an ear culture” that was able to unify the visual and auditory world via a non-alphabetic and non-abstracted perspective, to borrow a phrase and concept from the Roman Catholic writer in the 1960s and 1970s, Marshall McLuhan. Homilies also are a form of catechesis that help Christians understand the faith. Since many come into Orthodoxy already baptized from other traditions or left the Church as a youth, though not mentioned by Metropolitan Hilarion, do not need to be separated from hearing the liturgy of the faithful. The content of catechesis could be summarized in about eight lessons, taken from the section called The Beginning of the Liturgy of the Catechumens. Lesson one, “Blessed is the kingdom of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit” begins the liturgy. It is trinitarian and announces a blessing to mankind. The kingdom is coming and is here now. Lesson two, the Forerunner preaches, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” The kingdom is from above and we should turn to it quickly; all resurrect, but not all receive a reward, which are great compared to the little we give up in this life. Lesson three, Christ’s teachings and parables focus on entering the eschatological (end of time) kingdom of heaven. Worldly kingdoms and systems aren’t the answer; they don’t offer blessedness or heaven, though many utopias are built on them. Lesson four, Christ came into conflict with the religious authorities of his time and nations because of His kingdom’s preaching and His commandments. Pilate and Herod are just a few examples. They crucified Christ according to man’s kingdom. Lesson five, Christ was crucified with the plaque: The king of the Jews.” Lesson six, Christ loves mankind. That is shown through his incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection. Lesson seven, Christ presides in love at this and every liturgy for us, awaiting our own resurrection through our death, our falling asleep in Christ and obeying his commandments. Lesson eight, the liturgy’s theme is the kingdom of heaven and the true offering we give back to God in this kingdom, where Christ is the ruler, the king, and we are the transfigured, offering creatures unto ages and ages. We bless and we proclaim Christ to be the King; we experience it now. Whatever kingdom we are coming from doesn’t have the answers, and it probably is going to conflict with the kingdom of heaven and the efforts to enter it with rewards and pure clothing. So, the kingdom of God is connected to the biblical genealogies, the commemorations, and the inheritance we seek. The Beatitudes are Christ’s moral teachings. It pronounces that weakness of spirit, physicality, or circumstances is strength. That unhappiness and sorrow is our joy. That humility, a meek attitude, and poverty in spirit helps us attain to inheriting the kingdom of heaven and its blessings and rewards. Christ’s life-giving Passion for our sinful passions is the only exchange between us and God that can be called a “ransom,” St. Maximus the Confessor teaches. That is what ransom means. Not a transaction between God and the Devil, or the Son and the Father due to assuaging wrath or slaking a thirst for justice. 

The little entrance and the thrice-holy give us a glimpse into the eternal kingdom of God. The Gospel is taken from the sanctuary into the nave. The liturgy of the word includes the prokeimenon before the Gospel reading and censing. It’s necessary here that prayers are offered to ask God to open our mind and understanding to the teachings of the Gospel. That is a key difference between the Orthodox understanding of Scripture and the Protestant and Roman Catholic one. The Scripture requires assistance, patience, and the help of elders and authorities, and ultimately the Holy Spirit Himself. Salvation is a mystery; that is, how we enter the kingdom of God. To enter and live in this heavenly kingdom, prayer and sacrifice must be right and unified through the power of the Holy Spirit. So, the holy mysteries connect directly to the entrance into the heavenly kingdom. 

Orthodox Christianity, Vol IV, Chp 2: Vespers, Compline, Midnight Office, Matins, the Hours

The meaning and creative structure for poetic compositions in the Church comes from its order. If the Holy Trinity created the universe that orders our earthly experience into morning, day, and night, likewise prayer is going to be ordered similarly.  Because of secularism, Christians tend to become skeptical of worship that doesn’t make much distinction between ordinary life and Sunday church attendance. In economics, business hours work on a financial cycle and the Romans used cycles to order provinces, indictions, and censuses. Order also helps Christians make a strong effort on earth, which we call asceticism or struggle. Metropolitan Hilarion explains that the meaning of Vespers can be found in its order of prayers. The Church chose which psalms and poetic compositions, and hymns will be used to create order of worship so that it can work on us in a certain way depending on the time of day, feast, or fast. The Church directs our attention and remembrance to certain parts of the Christian life. If it were not permissible to order worship, other kinds of ordering would fill its place. During Vespers, the priest reads the “prayers of light” that are tied to different psalms from the Bible. Themes of these prayers include creation, supplication, and how light exists even in the darkness of night. That informs how Christians live daily under whatever circumstances or time. A song called “O Gladsome Light” is sung during vespers, and its origin is likely from an early martyr Athenagoras (Athenogenes) who is said to have “held on the Spirit” at his death. It is a song sung during the lighting of the lamps that is a specific practice only really kept well by Orthodox Christians nowadays. This chapter also explains some common terms such as troparion, kathisma, prokeimenon, aposticha, litiya, and pericopes. Prayer helps us remember God, the Gentle Light, as the Greeks translate it, and it’s also a remembrance of our own evening that symbolizes our final day, our death.

The daily services of prayer have a compositional characteristic that can be adapted to other compositions. Prayers have a thematic and biblical content that hinges on Church tradition for its interpretation. Services are composed of heartfelt prayers that help us practice Christian virtue and disciplines, not simply serving as nice imagery for roundtable talks. Poetry is a language of the noetic human being. It’s an important medium of communication in the fullness of that word’s meaning and effects. Prayer also organizes our day as a year or year as a day. We begin to live in the heavens while we conduct ourselves on earth. We develop an aionian existence “of the ages and ages” with the Holy Trinity. 

Matins is the longest of the daily services at twilight. It begins with the prayer of thanksgiving to God “who has shown us the light.” The Six Psalms are sung with no lamp lit. Electricity and lightening have changed a lot of ways of operation. Ancient people would sleep around sundown and wake up at sunrise. Monks, however, reduced sleeping to increase times for prayer as a very developed form of asceticism. In the midnight office, Psalm 118 was chosen to be sung because of its Christological focus and the condensed teaching of the ascetical life. 

The mystical tradition of the Church produced the Holy Scriptures and the Psalter, which in turn produced Christian hymnography that continues Orthodox mystical tradition. Songs are part of human nature, and how God created people and our noetic tongue. Questions about personal identity, authority of interpretation, and the Bible’s meaning are answered within the Orthodox tradition of hymnography. The hymns of the Church explain to us many teachings, practices, and dogmas about light, love, mercy, time, death, life, ascesis, prayer, services, the commandments, and repentance. The Typikon, then, gives us examples of songs found in the Old Testament that are included in the service of matins called the Ten Biblical Canticles. Each has its own troparion at the end. Some of these canticles sing of Moses at the Red Sea, Hannah’s song, the Prophets Isaiah, Habbukuk, and Jonah’s song. The Three Holy Youths’ song, the song of the Most Holy Theotokos and Zacchariah’s song completes the ten canticles.The Bible is the Song. Personal identity is formed in the liturgical and daily services because our song is found through the scriptures, prayers, and hymns. Matins is also a monastic survival in current parishes. Metropolitan Hilarion points out that technology makes long monastic teachings unnecessary since the availability of texts is widespread now. 

The hours most likely developed out of matins (orthros). Three psalms, a daily troparion and kontakion, and the prayer “Lord have mercy” said forty times is the common structure of all the hours. The daily services lead up to the Lord’s Day, Sunday, when Orthodox Christians gather into one place to partake of the Eucharist, the Mystical Supper of our Lord, the end of time. When Christians begin to practice the liturgical life, the ideas of time, creation and humanity are stretched to new dimensions. The effect is a moral change and inner renewal that happens through the Eucharist, the source of all life.

Orthodox Christianity, Vol IV, Chp 1: Worship Services of the Daily Cycle

Part One covered the features of Orthodox worship and the connection between the primacy of the liturgical life and the theological flowering that blooms thereafter like the true vine. Part two now outlines the structure of daily worship cycles in the Church. Three chapters included are: Formation of the Daily Liturgical Cycle, the Hours, and the Divine Liturgy. As we discussed before, it’s human nature to sing and offer sacrifice to God. 

Chapter one begins with the Mystical Supper. Oral history and experience of the divine through the relationship of prayer preceded the written word in the Old Testament. Christians did not write down the form of worship first, then put into practice what they conceived. They did not use the Scriptures to discover what Christ meant by His words and actions. They first followed, listened, and ate and drank of the mystical and paschal meal; then later, for generations, they wrote down what they knew was the right practice. The Holy Scriptures are a type of written medium that relies on revealed practice. Tradition gives worship a structure and content that conforms not to man’s imaginations or “old world” cultural norms, but to the revelation of Christ in the Mystical Supper. There is a great cycle of traditional practices from the old Hebrew righteous, prophets, and the Holy Scriptures that link to the Gospels that link to other forms of Orthodox worship: the eucharist, the liturgy or anaphora, hymnography and other prayers dedicated to saints, to unbelievers, to the Theotokos, and to guardian angels. 

The Jewish tradition of keeping the Passover, in remembrance of the Exodus, was linked to Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection. Remembrance begins in the heart and mind. The only time God gave his people a written form to be included in worship was Moses’ Ten Commandments. The New Commandment was given at the Mystical Supper, and nothing was written until much later in chronological order. When the Holy Spirit descended on the Apostles, the gifts helped order, structure and form worship. Similarly, the Holy Spirit inspired the prophets and poets in the Old Testament, for example, King David and his Psalms. Love was the new commandment, which is best expressed through a poetical medium like the Psalter and the hymnography composed by the members of the Church instead of making conformity and philosophical consistency the highest regulation.  Love is the rule and structure of Orthodox tradition. 

There were common organizing elements among early Christian communities, even though there wasn’t a uniform worship service in the 1st and 2nd c. St. Justin the Philosopher notes that universally there were readings, a presider, prayers, thanksgiving, eucharist, and a gathering into one place among Christians. The wording and phrases, the duration, the number of prayers, the style and where they met were allowable variables. 

The major liturgical rites of the East, as well as some rites in the West not mentioned by Metropolitan Hilarion (Mozarabic, Gallican, Ambrosian) grew out of the Roman Empire in the East where St. Basil the Great, St. John Chrysostom, and St. James the Apostle gave us liturgical worship. All of them have Anaphora (offering, liturgy) Prayers, but the exact wording and length of singing differ between them. Holy Tradition produced the New Testament and those writings produced more systematic and poetic hymns and songs to be incorporated into rules for how to follow them. For example, there was a liturgical enrichment during the 4th c. where public services and ceremony increased after persecutions became less common. There is a freedom to “incarnate the heavenly ideal” on earth during liturgical worship because the Mystical Supper set up a form of prayer that exists outside of time; it exists in aeonian time approaching the eschaton, all which rests on Christ’s incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection from the dead. That enriching the prayers of the Church is tainted by the encroaching syncretism of pagan Greco-Roman ceremonies is a prejudice of late European Protestant revolution in the 1500s. Secularism would be the equivalent of syncretism in modern Western forms of worship services.

Two main parts of the liturgy exist. The liturgy of the catechumens and the liturgy of the faithful. This form of worship isn’t scholarly just because it has been organized by Byzantine and Syrian Christians during imperial history. But its prayers are full of a perspective that watches the world and the heavens with an eschaton-oriented view. Ancient and modern people have tried to track time by using solar, lunar, and other forms of lighting. For God a day is like a thousand years and a thousand years like a day. Likewise, for Orthodox Christians, the cycle of services and the liturgy on Sunday is a condensed form of a day and in turn a day of prayers arranged orderly by the Church is like the whole span of created time. The Holy Trinity is described as The Light, both “all-consuming” and gently “gladsome,” many times in Orthodox services and in all the scriptures. St. Cyril of Jerusalem teaches that “for whatsoever the Holy Spirit has touched, is sanctified and changed.” That holy teaching from tradition explains almost all forms of Orthodox worship and the mysteries that make us so different from the kinds of services offered especially by Protestants and sometimes Roman Catholics. If the Holy Spirit has touched water, it is holy. If the Holy Spirit has touched a bishop, he is holy. If the Holy Spirit has touched a hymn for praise, it is holy and can be put into our services on Sunday or any day of the week. Theology doesn’t start with an abstracted understanding of beauty, truth, knowledge, or goodness. The Holy Spirit at Pentecost touched the disciples and began the transformation and procession of transfiguration of all through them. The liturgy isn’t considered daily worship because it symbolizes the end of the age and the age to come. Orthodox Christianity begins with Light. A mockery of that liturgy is the so-called Enlightenment, which has influenced nearly all traditions of Western Christian denominations.

The services that are not offering the eucharist have their own cycle that relate to the aeonian and eschatological time, the ages of ages. St. John Chrysostom teaches that “the light of [the Bible’s] teaching is burning on our tongue,” and he wasn’t speaking figuratively about that experience. The Scriptures can only be ‘’lighting the fire” through prayers, ceremonies, eucharist, readings, and composed hymns by saints because the Holy Spirit is fire, the Holy Trinity is the Light. From the scriptures and tradition, we find that there were certain times of the day with Christological and symbolic meaning. From this, Orthodox Christians developed praying at specific hours of the day and evening: 3rd hour, 6th hour, and 9th hour. For example, the third hour, about daybreak, is when the Holy Spirit descended on the disciples. Other divisions and hours were added later to make up seven discrete times to prayer so that the symbolic concept of completeness is followed. Praying the hours took different forms because monasticism and the laity led different lifestyles and had different circumstances. When the Byzantine Empire fell, most of the monastic practices survived while many parish rules fell out of use. The Typikon has preserved many of the monastic rules for prayer in parishes today. This chapter also explains the common terms troparion, kontakion, stichera, and canon. The Typikon underwent changes due to major historical events. The sack of Constantinople in 1204 by the Crusaders and then the sack of Constantinople in 1453 by the Turks halted further liturgical development. 

Christian hymnography grew out of these traditions. Historically, monasticism from the 4th to the 5th c. flourished in the writing of hymns and the arrangement of singing the psalms. Although the laity are more involved in the dealings of world, there wasn’t an idea that Christians had to live two separate lives, one at the job and the other on Sunday. Metropolitan Hilarion omits any distinction of this kind between unceasing prayer for laity and monastics since both are ascetic in their own ways. For example, St. Basil the Great teaches in Long Rules that “when the day’s work is ended, thanksgiving should be offered for what has been granted us or for what we have done rightly therein and confession of our omissions, willingly or unwillingly …” There doesn’t seem to be any concept of having other pursuits that would obstruct lay Christians from completing a full day of prayer. Although the Greek and Russian Church have adapted monastic practices to fit modern parish life, there isn’t any major discrepancy between filling up the day with prayer and working with our normal duties as much as our ability allows us.

Yet monasteries became places where it was conducive to write rich liturgical poetry and many compositions. St. Ephraim the Syrian lived in the Persian Empire in the 4th c. He influenced the Greeks in Constantinople, especially St. Romanos the Melodist, and the blending of Syriac and Greek hymnography began and lasted into our current compositions. St. Ephraim is unique because, unlike the Greeks as well as the tendency among the Latins, he didn’t rely on definitions to teach the faith, but he used the poetic medium. The American academic, Marshall McLuhan, famously wrote that “the medium is the message.” He concisely worded that to describe the consequences of using certain technologies, such as writing, TV, radio, but that could include poetry versus prose styles of texts. The use of a technology has a broader effect than the message. In this case, poetry broadens the effect of the theological message than if it were written plainly, legally, or philosophically. Plato understood this consequential effect. He wrote his philosophy by using dialogues that could be compared to that of St. Ephraim and others who used liturgical dialogues to explain and arouse in us an understanding, a desire for prayer, and an effort to seek the transformation of our souls. Poetry is the noetic language of mankind. It connects to mystical truths. It works on people differently than rhetoric or prose. The incarnation makes poetry possible to help us transform into Christ’s image. Orthodoxy structures how Christians spend our time, and it works toward repentance and asceticism in pursuit of The Light of day and evening. 

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. 

Orthodox Christianity, Vol III, Chp 12: Russian Church Singing

Russian church singing began with the Baptism of the Rus’. Prince Vladimir the Great of Kiev was the ruler of the Rus’. He was baptized by the Greeks from Byzantium. There is a general pattern in the history of the Russian people. It tends to repeat; inspiration comes from the Greeks and a downfall in ethical and spiritual life from the West, particularly the Renaissance heritage that many Europeans have clung onto even today in its many morphing secular forms. This chapter divides itself into three parts: znamenny chant, partesny chant, and contemporary church singing. Today Russian liturgical singing is a mixture of znamenny and partesny chant. The first type grew organically when the Slavs of the Rus’ lands learned chant and the use of neume notation from the Greek Orthodox Christians in Constantinople. The second type came from Roman Catholic singing informed by the Renaissance; that time also coincided with a powerful combination of the Papal States and the new secular humanism of the rulers, nobles, and learned men. Partesny came to Russia through the Latinized influence of Poland and Ukraine. Partesny singing isn’t really chanting, but harmonization of parts from different voices, unlike the unison singing mentioned in previous chapters from Hellenism, Judaism, and early Christianity. Now Russian church singing is mixture of the eastern and western ways of practicing and conceptualizing church singing. Like genealogy, znamenny chant is the ancestral and authentic heritage of the Rus’ lands and peoples. The western influence, like architecture and iconography, brought an end to Orthodox practices and tradition. It seems to be reviving slower than iconography and theology in Russia after the breakup of the Soviet Union; znamenny chant is still practiced in some monasteries there. Metropolitan Hilarion identifies a “genetic” link between Gregorian chant in Latin Christianity and Byzantine and znamenny chant; they both have the unique rhymical quality of “unmeasured beats.” But he doesn’t pursue that connection further in the chapter. Before the Schism, liturgical singing called Ambrosian, Gallican, and the “melismatic” Mozarbic in Western Europe existed and they do have direct links to Byzantine chant. The Gallican chant sometimes even uses Greek texts. The best contrast to today’s theatrical church singing in Orthodoxy is the choral singing of the Carpatho-Russians in Eastern Europe. Metropolitan Hilarion hasn’t commented on the survival of this tradition of participatory singing of the whole congregation in areas that once encompassed the old Slavic lands of the Rus’ like the Carpathians, eastern Slovakia, Ukraine, and Belarus.

Melody is our feeling guided and embodied by the unison of voices and divine words toward the Holy Trinity, the ultimate transcendent one. Znamenny chant can be understood as a collection of “melodic formulae,” each with their own characteristic name. Unlike the more emotional singing of the Greeks, maybe even the Syrians too, the Russians used some of their own folk melodies to make a calmer sounding chant. The neume notation wasn’t exact in nature like modern western letter notation on a staff; it had to be literally taught from person to person by practice. Like the alphabet, Byzantine neume notation was borrowed into Russian chant; they created the kriuk notation and znamenny signs to guide the voices. It’s a kind of chanting that depends on the divine services and oral tradition, not on precision of notes, pitch, or exact training. The liturgy, people, choir, and clergy were the main educators of znamenny chant. People who wrote these melodic formulae were like the rhapsodists of ancient Greece. It wasn’t purely an academic or scientific study or training that made this system of chant complex and beautiful; the Russians attained this chant by living within the mysteries of the Orthodox Church and maintaining tradition. The introduction of “cinnabar markings” made the liturgical chant more like the technology of texts rather than the simpler way of guiding and guarding the living traditions of znamenny. It was this kind of approach that began the slow decline of chanting toward the ultimate consequence of the contemporary “church concerts,” which are now a common, exhilarating, and diverse feature of Roman Catholic and Protestant Christian music. 

The American writer from the South, Richard M. Weaver, comments on this same cultural decline through technology and the dogma of precision; he calls these symptoms of fragmentation a loss of metaphysical center. An insidious insistence on precision, absolute pitch, cinnabar markings, staff notation were all signs of a disintegrated mind and chant had to flee from church services. Church singing lost its “submissiveness” to the core of the spiritual wording of the divine texts of the liturgy; they speak of Christ as the center of all creation. The spirit of humanistic analysis and a strict demand for exactitude scattered the focus of znamenny and Byzantine chant on Christ, the Son of God. Rebirth, called renaissance in French, now changed meaning from a spiritual renewal of the heart in Orthodoxy through chanting to a rebirth that denotes a turning over of tradition to discovery and the value of constant change in the service of progress toward the peripherality of experience to the point of losing all attention to spiritual sensitivity and growth. Gavriil Lomakin in the 19th c. spoke against this “Italianism” when he said, “a rebirth implies a death of something that went before … “For Russia, the death of cross-in-church architecture, wooden churches, iconography, znamenny chant and theology informed by asceticism had to die to make room for the new ideas coming from Rome, the capital of Renaissance humanism and the Papacy.  

Renaissance Europe developed and merged secular and church music into the “performative” arts. From this, enthusiastic Italian composers of church concerts came to Russia and changed Orthodox divine liturgy into an experience like opera or orchestral theatre. Instead of centering our feelings and desires toward the good and beautiful, we are now harnessed by “pain or pleasure” and our emotions are not used to struggle and to transcend this captivity to the world but to revel in it. Our feeling is to be oriented toward its natural end: to pray and praise the Holy Trinity in unison, many of our holy fathers teach this. But many well-known Russian composers were engulfed by the Renaissance music of Roman Catholic Europe. Some Russians tried to mix the world and the church; others genuinely sought to recover the past of znamenny chant through western methods of composition. The consequences of changing the purpose of music became evident in their way of thinking. For example, Pyotr Tchaikovsky lamented that the old Russian chants and melodies couldn’t be revived because they are lost to the past. But according to Holy Orthodoxy, we neither are bound by the past nor are slaves of the unknown future because the Church’s wisdom stands in the center, not limited to time as understood as the passing of moments. If Renaissance humanism were the correct path, then Tchaikovsky and other academicians would be correct. Now, the Choir of the Moscow Patriarchate seeks to revive the ancient melodies of znamenny. The next chapter discusses the church singing in the other patriarchates and local churches of Orthodoxy such as Georgia, Serbia, Romania, and Greece. Russia is an example to other Orthodox countries in its formation under its spiritual ancestry from Byzantium to its acceptance of the false philosophies of secularism.