Three Books on Liturgy - A Book Review by Brother Stavros

Tasting Heaven on Earth: Worship in Sixth-Century Constantinople, by Walter D. Ray. Grand Rapids, Michigan: William Eerdmans, 2012.
The Divine Liturgy of the Great Church, by Paul N. Harrilchak. Reston, Virgina: 2013.
Byzantine Liturgical Reform, by Thomas Pott. Crestwood, New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2010.

I have been scrounging and scrutinizing texts and resources on the Byzantine Liturgy since the days when a Jesuit in my high school lent me Isabel Florence Hapgood’s Service Book of the Holy Orthodox-Catholic (Greco-Russian) Church (1921) and later procured an old paperback set of the Benedictine Monastery of Chevetogne’s La Prière Des Églises De Rite Byzantine in three volumes (1937). These were practically the sole tools for enabling a reader to appreciate the texts in a modern language. The exponential increase in the resources now readily at hand is characterized by the published works cited above in just the past couple of years.

The shortest and most accessible is Tasting Heaven on Earth, which is essentially a workbook in a series, The Church at Worship, which includes a volume on worship in Early Jerusalem as well. It is directed principally at neophytes to Eastern Christian worship and offers valuable background chapters as well as primary sources in a series of commentaries spanning the formative years of the Liturgy. However, the mystagogia—that is, interpretations of the rites of the Liturgy in allegorical or symbolic language—can be misleading. One might conclude (and a vocal segment in Orthodoxy in fact do) that that liturgical rites and acts contain within themselves revealed spiritual powers and reflect the reality of the Heavenly Liturgy; thus, it becomes impossible to speak of liturgical reform, and liturgy becomes an end in itself and prey to magical thinking. The two other books in the review provide a corrective to this danger.

The marginal notes, maps, timelines, photographs, and especially the sketches and cut-aways are all most helpful. A distinctive contribution of this workbook is the reconstruction of St. Basil’s Liturgy as it might have been carried out in Hagia Sophia in the sixth and seventh centuries. The inclusion of Psalm verses for both the Trisagion and the Cherubic Hymn throws light on the renewal introduced by New Skete in the past thirty years. The five-page glossary and discussion points are proper to its feature as an introductory source book.

Father Paul Harrilchak has made a new edition of his Liturgy manual, The Divine Liturgy of the Great Church, also intended to educate the student of liturgy and the average worshiper. This edition is replete with the now jocular, now acerbic commentary, usually on our contemporary un-renewed and illogical received traditions, that spiced the first edition. As readers may note from our recent newsletter, Fr. Paul is a long-time friend of this community and consistently avails himself of published New Skete translations. The text is complex, and reminiscent of Talmud manuscripts, wreathed with educational detail. It also affords much pastoral wisdom and practicability, providing simple melodies for responses as well as of texts of the eight Resurrection Tones used on Sundays, along with those of major feasts, complete with attendant psalmody. His aversion to Western Liturgical terms and parlance could have used an editor’s . This spiral-bound manual is not intended as a pew book, but rather as a guide and meditation for Orthodox and Greek Catholics to better understand how we offer “right praise.” I note two curious omissions: no commentary on “O Monogenes,” an entrance hymn dating back to the time of, and thought to have been penned by, the Emperor Justinian; also, a surprising silence on the ancient practice of the kiss of peace, which in current usage is restricted to the clergy. Its practice among the entire congregation is a normal feature in every other liturgical church, Oriental and Western. Its restoration among the Orthodox needs to be encouraged. Of the three books, this would most benefit both newcomers to Eastern Worship and “sabra” Orthodox, who may tend to take for granted all we do in church and why we do it, and why it speaks to our salvation.

Finally, Byzantine Liturgical Reform, the most erudite and most pertinent as we find our sea legs in the swift current of this 21st century—an era of contracting church attendance everywhere, and when the role of communal religious worship has come to be dismissed as a bygone fixation—this book analyzing what reform was, is, or should be stands as a monumental contribution for those who look to the future.

Thomas Pott, a Belgian priest-monk of the Monastery of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, Chevetogne, offers Byzantine Liturgical Reform. In the first part of this book he examines the dialectic of reform: old and new, organic progress and restoration, in what Robert Taft calls in his Preface “a magisterial analysis of the problematic.”

He goes on to characterize the second part as a “revisionist history,” responding to the necessity of a new historiography of the liturgy “as a phenomenon rooted in a socio-cultural milieu without which it cannot be understood as liturgy” —i.e., rendered by ordinary people united at the Eucharistic table to become the Church and advance the Divine Kingdom.

It is revisionist also in that it challenges the entrenched Orthodox belief that liturgical rites and acts contain within themselves revealed spiritual powers wherein the earthly Liturgy participates in and reflects the reality of the Heavenly Liturgy, thus making it impossible to speak of liturgical reform in the contemporary sense.

This work stands not only as a monument of scholarship, but also as a testament to one who as a monk saturated in the liturgy day after day, year after year, appreciates the depth of the issue from his bones as well as from his brain.