Introduction By Father Andrew Harrison

This article by Fr. Alexander Schmemann is posted on this site because of a growing concern about liturgical practice. Within the Orthodox Church world wide there are two approaches to liturgical practice. One approach considers liturgical practice as part of the unchangeable tradition of the Orthodox Church. It considers the modern practices as a culmination of the guidance of the Holy Spirit and questions whether reform is necessary. There is a concern that any revisions of liturgical practice would lead to the destruction of the Orthodox Church along the lines of what occurred in the Roman Catholic Church.

The second approach is expressed in this document by Fr. Alexander Schmemann. He calls for reform after with much care and deliberation. His position is based on the writings of various pre-Revolutionary Russian theologians. He questions the need for uniformity in liturgical practice since it never existed and that congregational usage with the guidance of the bishop be the prime guidelines for reform.

Notes And Comments 1. On The Question Of Liturgical Practices

A Letter to My Bishop

By Protopresbyter Alexander Schmemann.
Source: . St. Vladimir's Theological Quarterly, Vol. 17, 3, 1973, pp. 239-243.]

I

Your Beatitude:

I read with great attention and interest the instruction on liturgical practice which on November 30, 1972 you addressed to the clergy of the New York-New Jersey Diocese. I fully understand and share your concern for a liturgical situation which is no doubt extremely serious and certainly requires correction and guidance on the part of our Episcopate. And it is precisely because of the seriousness, depth, and scope of the problems challenging us today that I dare respectfully to submit to you some of the thoughts the instruction has provoked in my mind. Having devoted much of my life to the study and teaching of Liturgics I can assure you, Your Beatitude, that I have no other goal but to try to clarify questions which the instruction may raise, and that 1 do this in the spirit of full and unconditional obedience to the Bishop's duty "rightly to define the word" of Divine Truth.

II

The questions raised by the instruction seem to me quite serious. First of all I must confess to you that I find somewhat alarming what seems to constitute the basic presupposition and term of reference of the entire document, i.e., that the self-evident, natural, and seemingly absolute norm for our liturgical life and practices is to be found exclusively in the pre-revolutionary Russian Church, or, to quote the instruction, "in the standard service books which are the typical editions published by the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church."

What I find alarming is the contradiction between this statement and the well-documented fact that the Russian Church herself, through the voice of her own Episcopate, found the liturgical situation in pre-revolutionary Russia extremely unsatisfactory and requiring substantial corrections and changes. To realize the scope of that dissatisfaction and the truly pastoral concern of the Russian Bishops, it suffices to read the Reports of the Diocesan Bishops Concerning the Question of Church Reform written in preparation for the Great Council of the Russian Church and published in 1906 by the Russian Holy Synod (Vol. I, 548 pp., Vol. II, 562 pp.). May I stress that these reports were written not by representatives of some academic group or tendency, but by conservative and pastorally oriented Bishops who clearly realized the growing nominalism and confusion stemming precisely from the "standard books" and a Typikon not revised since 1682.

"Worship," writes, for example, Bishop Seraphim of Polotsk, "is performed by clergy, and as to the people-even if they pray during services, their prayer remains private and not corporate for it usually has no link, external or internal, to what is going on in the church" (I, 176). Almost unanimously the Bishops who write on liturgical matters ask for a parish typikon distinct from the monastic one, since the obvious impossibility to comply with the latter results, according to Bishop Michael of Minsk, in "49,000 parishes celebrating irregular worship." They ask for the shortening of services, "which have become incomprehensible and therefore boring," for the revision of rubrics, and for new translations-from Church Slavonic into Russian. They see the need for certain changes in the Divine Liturgy itself. It is indeed the apostle of American Orthodoxy, the future Patriarch Tikhon then Bishop of North America, who suggests "abolishing certain litanies which are repeated much too often" and "the reading aloud of secret prayers" (I, 537), and he is seconded by several others: Evlogy of Warsaw ("one should without any question abolish litanies for catechumens," II, 287), Constantine of Samara (I, 441) etc. "It is imperative," writes Gregory of Astrach, "to revise the Typikon. This book. . not revised since 1682, has acquired in the eyes of the zealots the character of something eternal, dogmatic and unchangeable. . . . And precisely because of this it ceased to regulate worship. . . . It is essential to revise it in the light of the perfectly legitimate needs of the faithful so that it may again become operative and understandable. Such a revision is perfectly in continuity with the past practice of the Church in this area" (I, 324). Clearly the Russian Bishops see in the nominal, incomprehensible, and often defective worship the source of the people's alienation from the Church, of the growing success of the sects, and of the progressive dechristianization of Russian society.

The Russian Sobor of 1917-18, in preparation for which these reports were written was interrupted before it could deal with liturgical questions. It is permissible to think, however, that one of the reasons for the massive apostasy of the Russian people from the Church is to be found precisely in the state of worship so lucidly and pastorally diagnosed by the Russian Bishops long before the Revolution, And if today among certain Russians deeply wounded by the revolutionary collapse there exists the tendency to idealize-almost fanatically-the pre-revolutionary state of the Russian Church, including her liturgical life, there is no reason for us to make ours their emotional rejection of historical evidence, their blind pseudo-conservatism, and their plain ignorance. Applicable to them are the words written as early as 1864 by one of the pioneers of Russian liturgical scholarship, Archbishop Philaret of Chernigov:

For such people the order of worship with which they are familiar is the original and unchanging order. Why? Because they wholly ignore the history of Church life and, obsessed with themselves, cherish only that which they know. History clearly shows that in liturgical matters the Church dealt with reasonable freedom: she adopted new forms when she saw that the old arrangements were not altogether useful and there was need for a change....Here, as in other matters, she neither accepted the rule of those who, according to apostolic institutions, are to be disciples and not teachers, nor did she allow herself to go into deep sleeping but paid great attention to the needs of the time and the demands of souls. ...

We should rather remember and meditate upon the stormy history of the Russian Church which, for all her wonderful spiritual achievements and examples of unsurpassed holiness, seems to have been periodically plagued precisely with acute liturgical problems, or rather with the inability to solve them due to the absence of theological knowledge and historical perspective. This resulted only too often in the inability to discern between genuine Tradition and all kinds of customs and even deviations, between the essential and the historically contingent, the important and the accidental. We should remember, for example, the tragic case of St. Maximus the Greek who, invited in the sixteenth century to correct "abuses," spent almost all his life in jail because he dared to question errors and defects in the "standard" texts of that time. Also there is the no less revealing case of the Archimandrite Dionisius who in 1618 was condemned by a council, beaten, tortured, and imprisoned for correcting the most obvious errors in the worship of his time. Finally there is the case of the Raskol itself, in which an amazing ignorance, an almost total lack of criteria on both sides, played such a truly fateful part.

III

In view of all this it seems to me not only wrong, but simply dangerous to try to solve our liturgical problems by mere references to the recent past, be it Russian, Greek, Serbian, Romanian, etc. These problems did not originate in America, although they certainly acquired here new dimensions and a new degree of urgency. Their existence was acknowledged in Russia and is being acknowledged today in virtually all Orthodox Churches, Therefore what saddened me more than anything else in the instruction is the total absence from it of any such acknowledgment, of any recognition that problems do exist which are not solvable by decrees which have never solved any real problems and are not likely to solve any in the future. Quite frankly I regret the very tone of the instruction which seems to imply that if it were not for some disobedient priests, "apparently regarding their own judgment as superior.., to the traditions of our Church," there would have existed no problems whatsoever. I regret this especially in view of the fact that it is in the outstanding liturgical scholarship which developed in Russia during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that the liturgical problem, as well as ways and criteria for its solution, began to be formulated, that a renewed interest in the genuine Orthodox liturgical tradition made its appearance.

It is sadly significant, in my opinion, that the instruction reads as if we did not inherit from the Russian Church and Russian theology the universally known editions of the Typika and Euchologia by Dmitrievsky, the monumental studies on the Typikon and its development by Skaballanovich and Mansvetov, on the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom by Karabinon, Krasnoseltsev, and Petrovsky, on St. Basil's by Orlov, on liturgical hymnography by Philaret of Chernigov, on the Proskomidia by Muretov, on the secret prayers by Golubtsov, etc. It is as if we did not know today the complexities and, quite often, the deviations of our liturgical development, the unfortunate impact on Orthodox worship, theology, and piety of Western influences, the defects of a predominantly Western sacramental theology, the alienation of the laity from the sacramental life resulting in a purely legalistic approach to it in our parishes, the disastrous consequences especially in America of Uniatism, the plain fact finally that our Church is sick-liturgically and spiritually-and that it is certainly not by mere legal prescriptions that this sickness can be healed.

IV

Your Beatitude: Do I have to prove the fact that our Church finds herself today in a sad situation? That its financial bankruptcy only reveals and reflects its spiritual state-a state of apathy and demoralization, of distrust and petty rivalries, of parochialism and provincialism, of creeping secularism, of abysmal ignorance of the very foundations of our faith? Do I have to inform you, or any other of our Bishops, what formidable obstacles-spiritual, liturgical, pastoral-each priest encounters daily it he tries to be a true pastor of his flock, to please God and not men? It is no accident that so many of them go through a deep crisis of confidence in the hierarchy, that some progressively sink into an almost cynical indifference, that some others begin to be attracted by the spiritual dead-end and doubtful emotionalism of "Pentecostalism.