Posted on 05/29/2005 7:55:52 AM PDT by kosta50
Dear Kolokotronis,
I usually find Hermann's posts enlightening, and those submitted to this discussion are not the exception to that general rule.
sitetest
?????
Could you cite this attitude somewhere in posts 188 and 194?
What exactly was your point in bringing up some Liturgy which on Google has exactly 15 hits and none in Greek?
You were discussing the Epiklesis, and I was citing an Orthodox Liturgy in use in the East that did not include one as traditionally understood.
Please don't poison the well.
I wasn't aware that providing information is "poisoning the well" or attempting to "win debating points". I didn't believe I was debating anything.
Exactly.
Where? I'm genuinely curious. Most of this period's interrelations is of the Roman Church providing priests to teach the rudiments of faith in the East, something now considered a horrific imposition by modern Easterners.
In fairness the reverse is also true and that as late as the supression by the Soviet Union under Stalin (with the full cooperation of the Russian Church) of Ukrainian Rite Catholics.
The partitions of Poland, with the subsequent supression of the original Unia Sees in Ukraine and Belarus in 1795, 1839, 1869, and 1875 provided a stark example of this practice as a model to the 1946 participants.
If we are all going to point fingers at each other and recite the litany of wrongs committed by the other side we will still be at it come the final judgement.
I'm really not interested in that. I'm interested in the future. I had nothing to do with whatever occurred in the past.
It is not really accurate, as I pointed out in my post, to refer to Old Believer practices as "incorrect." These practices should more properly be referred to as "Old Rite" -- since there are Old Rite parishes both under the Moscow Patriarchate in Russia and under the ROCOR in the diaspora.
It is furthermore incorrect to say that the Old Believers "forgot" how to make the sign of the cross, etc... There is very strong evidence that the old Russian way of holding the hand in making the sign of the Cross is more ancient -- or at least as ancient -- as the "modern" Orthodox way of doing so. (As always, "modern" is a relative term in Orthodoxy.)
Likewise for many of the texts that were changed and liturgical practices that were changed to bring things into line with what then modern Greek practice. In some cases, the Greek practice was more ancient, in other cases the Russian practice was more ancient. Both had grounding in tradition, and both had theological implications.
I will retract the "forgot" part but will maintain the "incorrect" label because Orthodox means correct. Maybe the way of signing was older (and also learned by them from the Greeks) but was learned at a time before the signing of the cross was fixed. Over time the Orthodox way of signing the cross changed but they did not 'update' in some parts of Russia because of the barrier represented by Mongol rule. Being new or old has nothing to do with determination of its 'orthodoxy' - the Nicean Creed was for example an 'innovation'. I accept the definition of 'Old Rite' as a better term. How one signs a cross or other such rituals has zero to do with being Orthodox or not. In all things the 'Old Rite' are Orthodox - though some are in schisim.
My point was that if things in the Old Rite such as a different way of making the sign of the Cross were truly incorrect, the Russian Orthodox Church wouldn't accept it today -- but they do. There is a large cathedral in Moscow for the Old Rite.
Although the Old Rite schism was in general very bad for the Russian Church (the Old Believers who went into schism were in many ways amongst the most devout believers in Russia, and their loss was felt), there have been some silver linings to the cloud.
One of these is the fact that the adherents of the Old Rite have preserved practices that shine a light on some of the "why's" of the Russian Typikon (the book that prescribes how the services are to be put together). They have a living tradition of the Old Rite Typikon, from which the New Rite Typikon was derived, and some of the inexplicable parts of the New Rite Typikon make sense when one knows what the Old Rite Typikon said, and more importantly, when one can talk to people in a living tradition of using that Typikon.
Another benefit became evident when hundreds of thousands of former Uniates returned to Orthodoxy in the US in the late 19th century. When the Russian Church was examining their service books and practices, it was initially thought that many of their practices and texts had spontaneously deviated. The presence of the Old Rite communities helped some scholars come to the realization that these isolated Uniate communities in Eastern Europe had actually preserved intact texts and practices that were pre-Nikonian.
One of the benefits that has affected me has been the fact that only in Old Rite communities has a continuous living tradition of Znamenny chant been maintained. They have also preserved numerous chant melodies that were lost to the rest of the Russian Church. These are now being reintroduced. On the 7th Sunday of Pascha (the Sunday of the Holy Fathers of the 1st Council), for instance, there are stichera set to a melody called "In despair on account of her life..." (also known as "The wretched..." -- these melodies take their name from the first line of the text to which the model melody was set.) The only surviving examples of this melody in the Russian tradition are found in the Old Believer books and in the old Ukrainian irmologia. I use the Old Believer melody -- very simple and beautiful.
Anyway, that's more that you want to know. I have a good friend who is an Old Rite chanter, and have learned immeasurable amounts about Znamenny chant and Russian liturgical practice from him. It's like talking to someone from the 16th century...
I am sorry, but the Immaculate Conception is Catholic doctrine. As a Catholic, you're really not free to disagree with it. Doing so only works against your salvation.
I do not recall disagreeing with it. And for the record I do not. Perhaps you have me confused with someone else.
The tracing of this usage through Mt. Athos is very likely, since each Athonite monastery holds zealously to its own Typikon and manuscripts. The general usage on Mt. Athos (whether by Greeks or Slavs) is of the family of Typika generally known as the Sabaaite, which is the same as that used in most Slavic countries. But, there are oddities in Mt. Athos usage of very old usage -- things one wouldn't necessarily expect to find. Mt. Athos has long been a "melting pot" of Orthodoxy.
I see in the notes to the Liturgy of St. Peter itself that in later Byzantine usage, the explicit epiclesis of the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom was inserted into this Liturgy of St. Peter. But the notes also correctly indicate that the commentaries of Nicholas Cabasilas on the Divine Liturgy indicate that he felt that the Roman liturgy *did* have an epiklesis (albeit an "ascending" one.) Cabasilas felt that the absence of the kind of explicit "descending epiklesis" that is in the Eastern Liturgies was not a valid point of criticism of the Roman Liturgy. Of course, not everyone agrees with Cabasilas on this point. (This friendly approach to the Roman liturgy may be why B16 has been known to quote Cabasilas on occasion!)
In the Orthodox liturgical mind, the priest also stands in the place of Christ (or perhaps more correctly, is an icon of Christ), so that in and of itself is not a criticism, although it is closely related to my main criticism (and I say this as someone who admits to knowing far more about Eastern liturgics than Western liturgics.)
The valid criticism of the Tridentine Rite is to be found in the way that the Roman church came to interpret their own liturgy through the introduction of Aristotelean logic (trans-substantiation), and through the way that the liturgical actions (ringing of bells, etc...) indicated that the consecration was "done" at the time of the words of institution by the priest, thus rendering everything else around the words of institution malleable. One of the reasons that the kind of liturgical chaos that exists in the Roman Church today was possible, IMHO, is that the theology of the mass in the Roman church used principles of dialectic and reduction to simplicity that boiled things down to "essentials" and "non-essentials."
Examples of this minimizing tendency are the low mass, the elimination of the other services (Vespers, Compline, Matins, etc...), etc... When one identifies one part of the liturgy as being the "essential part," then it isn't all that long a step to the idea that any of the rest of the liturgy can be played with, as long thas that is left unchanged.
By contrast, the Eastern understanding (and which was almost certainly the understanding in the Western churches in the early centuries, prior to things being analyzed and dissected ad infinitum) is that the consecration is the work of the entire Liturgy, and that one can't really define one moment at which the bread and wine instantly become the Body and Blood of Christ.
For this reason, the Liturgy is served and sung exactly the same when we have a packed house and a full choir at Pascha or when the only two people in the church are the priest and a chanter. (In the Orthodox tradition, a priest never serves a Liturgy without at least one other person present.) In fact, the traditional Orthodox understanding is that it really isn't ideal to serve Divine Liturgy as a stand-alone service.
This sometimes happens, especially here in America, but this is the result of external influences -- and it is becoming less common as the years go by. We never serve a Liturgy at our parish without having at least served Vespers the night before, and at Great Feasts, both Vespers and Matins should be served. In the Russian Old Rite, they are very strict (maintaining the strict pre-Nikonian tradition of the Russian Church, which is drawn from old Greek monasticism) about never serving a Liturgy unless the entire cycle is served as part of the feast: Vespers, Compline, Midnight Office, Matins, 1st, 3rd, 6th, and 9th Hours.
No. The schism initially was driven by POLITICAL issues which acquired a dogmatic ring to them. Politics on BOTH sides pushed things beyoond dialogue or councils.
Oh, dear, I've gotten the Greek hierarchs muddled again. I'm fairly certain it was Pittsburgh, so it must have been +Maximos. (Unless the meeting was in Pittsburgh, and it was +Isaias.)
Nah conservonator -- Lyin in Winter purely trolls Catholic-Orthodox threads as a Catholic-baiter and actively seems to seek to keep the two lungs apart. LIW is also a Protester and posts like the one you pointed out seem to prove the instigatory aim.
"Oh, dear, I've gotten the Greek hierarchs muddled again."
There are those who say that our hierarchs are easily muddled! :)
But I'll bet it was +Max. He's close to the Roman Hierarchy and would feel free to rib them that way.
Thanks for the post!
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