Posted on 11/10/2005 10:03:40 AM PST by Petrosius
From his friends in Milano Don Capisco hears that in August 2005 a document was prepared in the Roman Curia aimed at preventing a more widespread use of the "old" Roman Missal.
The text is said to have been prepared last August by the Congregation for Divine Worship, and to bear the signatures of the Cardinal Prefect Francis Arinze and his right hand man, Archbishop Domenico Sorrentino, according to a report published at the end of October in the respected Milanese newspaper "Il Giornale," which belongs to the Berlusconi group and seldom hesitates at reporting Catholic topics.
The report stresses that the Congregation's text is not to be taken as an official statement of the dicastery, but is rather intended as a mere expression of opinion. Cardinal Arinze, according to "Il Giornale," believes that it would not be possible to liberalise the use of the "old" Missal because it has been done away with. The text was obviously presented to the Pope.
That is why it was probably not by accident that a few weeks ago, at a press conference on 12 October during the bishops' Synod on the Eucharist, Cardinal Arinze declared that "not a single Synod Father" had made any special effort on behalf of the "old" Mass.
As a matter of fact, however, only three days earlier the subject had indeed been broached by a Curia Cardinal, Dario Castrillon Hoyos. He is of course Prefect of the Congregation for the Clergy and President of the Pontifical Commission "Ecclesia Dei" to which is entrusted the pastoral care of the faithful who follow the "old" rite.
His Eminence expressed the hope that the "old" Mass find mention in the final document of the Synod, and be recognised as one of the various rites in the Catholic Church.
The August opinion of Cardinal Arinze and Archbishop Sorrentino is plainly a very clear counterpoint to the hopes and desires of the Ecclesia Dei President.... But then, too, the opinion expressed by the leaders of the Congregation for Divine Worship seems to be at odds with the attitude of the Supreme Pontiff gloriously reigning....
The former Cardinal Ratzinger has declared on several occasions that bishops should be less niggardly in granting approval for the "old" rite. The legitimate liturgist recalls, for instance, the words uttered by the then Prefect of the Holy Office on the tenth anniversary of the Motu proprio "Ecclesia Dei adflicta" on 24 October 1998.
At that time the eminent Prelate recalled a statement of John Henry Cardinal Newman ( +1890) to the effect that in the course of her long history the Church never simply did away with orthodox liturgical forms, or forbade them : "that would have been completely foreign to the spirit of the Church."
An orthodox liturgy is never a mere conglomeration of ceremonies assembled for purely pragmatic reasons which one could then, in a positivistic sense, re-arrange one way today, and differently tomorrow. Orthodox forms of a rite are living realities which have grown out of the loving dialogue between the Church and her Lord; they are forms of the Church's very life in which the faith, the prayer and the life of many generations has been distilled and concentrated, and in which the mutual interplay of God's action and man's response has taken shape and form.
Depending upon changing historical situations, the Church has authority to restrict and regulate the use of such rites, "but the Church never simply forbids them."
I have a feeling my bishop is one of the vocal objectors.
The idea is also that the Church is not a timely institution, but that, like the faith and our Lord Who gave it to us, transcends all time and all fads and earthly (corrupt) things. Tailoring the Church "according to times" is contrary to that transcendental nature of the Church, which is the Body of Christ. God does not change! And why should the language of the Church change? Again one does not have to become expert Latin speaker to understand Mass in Latin. But, typically, people will give God as little as it takes. Sometimes even one hour on a Sunday is too much for them!
Vernacular on the other hand guarantees change, because it a byproduct of human creatures. That brings corruption into the Church -- and satan managed to convince everyone that that is good! It makes "sense." It is always that rational approach applied to irrational faith that works wonders for satan while making it look as something right and good.
Modern Bulgarian is indeed very different from Church Slavonic, it is basically a language of Slav vocabulary (with a heavy inmixture of Greek and Turkish) and Greek grammar. It is without a doubt the easiest Slav language to learn for an Englishman, -- no cases (as in English, the remnants of cases are only seen in pronouns), rigid word order, definite article abslutely essential, several past and future tenses. Plus is has easy phonetics directly related to spelling.
However, perhaps due to its simplicity, Bulgarian opens the door for Church Slavonic better than modern Russian. I don't know about Serbian. I cannot explain it scientifically. I am a native Russian, and reading Church Slavonic for me was like reading, for an English speaker, the Beowolf. After I learned Bulgarian, bingo, it all came in focus instantly.
Certainly in Greece there has been no move away from Byzantine Greek for the Divine Liturgy, at least that I have seen or heard and I believe that everyone there understands what is being chanted, rather in the same way, at a minimum, that everyone in the Roman Church used to understand the Latin of the Mass. The uneducated may have a bit of a problem with the Epistle and the Gospel, though, but not enough to require any change in the Liturgical language. I think that Greek is safe for as far in the future as I can see.
Demotic Greek is somewhat informal, but I must say it hasn't been Anglicized the way, say French or Spanish or German have been. One used to read and sometimes hear a form of Greek called Katherevusa, which was very formal and also very artficial, having been developed in the 1800s to try to link the common Greek of that era, which of course had quite and admixture of Turkish and Slavic and Albanian words, with the classical Greek of 5th Century BC Athens. Whewn I was a kid, its what official documents, newspapers and novels were written in and some educated snobs spoke. Its virtually gone now in daily life.
Here in the States Liturgical language is a different matter since there are fewer and fewer native Greek speakers around and so English, depending on the ethnic make up of the parish, is used to a greater or lesser extent. As I said earlier, I suppose it was rather inevitable and frankly, if Orthodoxy was to move out of ethnic ghettoes and reach into the American population, probably necessary. We all say that lex orandi, lex credendi and we believe that. In order for our American compatriots to learn the Faith, they do have to understand the prayers.
The Russians know the meaning of common prayers in Church Slavonic, but I doubt that they can follow a text they have not prevuiously familiarized themselves with, in Church Slavonic, either spoken or written. The Gospel often comes as a side-by-side, C.S. and Russian.
The Greek of the Gospel and modern Greek seem closer than that. At least, I can follow the Greek scripture based on my less-than-fluent knowledge of modern Greek and occasional dictionary help, although the inflections and the vocabulary drifted a bit. I could not understand Church Slavonic with the same ease, until I learned Bulgarian, even though I recognized words. Kolokotronis, how common are side-by side editions of the Greek gospel?
"Kolokotronis, how common are side-by side editions of the Greek gospel?"
I've never seen a Byzantine/modern Greek (Demotic) set of the gospels, but I suspect they exist. Here in the States we have Byzantine/English sets which are used in the Liturgy. We also of course have "missals" with Greek on one page and English on the opposing page, often with a terrible English phonetical rendering of the Greek too! I guess that helps the non Greeks with the chanting, but I find I simply can't read Greek written in English letters.
Your experience with the koine of the NT is to be expected as you already know the Cyrillic alphabet, speak at least two languages anyway and have a greater facility with non Latin or German based language as opposed to the average English speaker who simply doesn't have that ability. Koine is quite different from Demotic Greek, the verb voices and tenses have changed somewhat and there has been some vocabulary drifting as you say, but its still pretty readable, surprisingly. It isn't as far removed from Demotic as Latin is from Italian.
There is, as I pointed out, a big difference between the usage of liturgical languages in the Orthodox Church and in the West.
Other than some temporary situations of the Churches of Romania and Bulgaria and in Churches in the Levant whose faithful later became primarily Arabic speaking, the liturgical languages are generally closely related to the "root" language of a people. And for the Church of Rome, Latin was certainly a root language for most of the territory under Rome up until the beginnings of the process of Schism.
This is very different from having Englishmen and Swahilis worshipping in Latin. The distance between Slavonic and Russian and the other Slavic languages is probably no more than (and perhaps less than) than the distance between Latin and the modern spoken Romance languages. Likewise modern and liturgical Greek.
But the difference in the West was that the use of Latin was instituted amongst people whose native spoken tongues had no linguistic connection to Latin. And these were not temporary situations, they were permanent. This is the big difference between the Orthodox use of language and the traditional Catholic usage.
Vernacularization into the Alaskan tribal languages, into Arabic in the Patriarchate of Antioch (and, I believe Alexandria), Romanian, Japanese, Georgian etc..., were processes that began far earlier than did the process of vernacularization of the Roman Church. In most cases, these vernacularizations took place no later than the 19th c. Serbia and the Ukraine are only the most recent examples -- what I question is how much this really was necessary in those two countries.
If, as Kosta says, comprehension of Slavonic by the average Serb is about 15%, then vernacularization is probably necessary, barring a massive educational campaign.
Keep in mind that prior to communism, in Russia, Church Slavonic was taught in the public schools -- the Turkish yoke made this difficult, if not impossible in Serbia, so the corporate memory of Church Slavonic was probably not as extensive. Education in general was difficult to arrive at in Serbia under the Turks, and as Kosta points out, educational levels in the Serbian language is directly related to comprehension of Slavonic. This is true in English, too.
This process was not seen as being a discontinuity with earlier practices, but was rather seen as the most natural thing in the world. It doesn't seem that St. Innocent in the 19th c. ever considered doing anything but immediately translating the services into the native languages of the tribal peoples. Likewise, St. Tikhon, shortly after arriving in America, commissioned the first translations into English, and intended for those translations to be eventually used liturgically. When Anglicans were holding talks with him about reunion, his plans were to use a modified form of the Book of Common Prayer, it seems. There was never any question, in the long run, of Americans continuing to worship in Slavonic or Greek.
Finally, I would point out that the use of a "liturgical language" (I actually prefer the term "liturgical dialect", since it more accurately describes the situation throughout the bulk of Orthodox history) is very much a part of the Orthodox tradition.
When St. Nicholas translated into Japanese in the 19th century, he took as his model classical Japanese that was associated with ancient religious writings and high literature. All of the early translations into English were in AV/BCP English, and outside of the Greek Archdiocese (admittedly the largest "jurisdiction" in America today), AV/BCP English is still used in the majority of English-worshipping parishes. Likewise, classical Arabic was the model for the vernacularization into Arabic, etc...
As far as I know, the Japanese, Arabic, Inuit, Aleutian, etc... original translations have never been "updated." Same for Romanian, certainly for Georgian.
The idea here is two-fold: a stable liturgical dialect that can remain constant over many centuries and that can preserve chant forms and be memorized through constant repetition, and a beautiful and elevated form of the language that is worthy of the subject.
English translations have been a problem, but mainly because of the pernicious influence of the large-scale move to modern street English in the Protestant and Catholic worlds starting in the second half of the 20th c. Still, one actually probably has a better chance of encountering BCP English in an American Orthodox parish than in an American ECUSA parish.
I write at length to point out that the process of vernacularization in the Orthodox world has a much longer, complex, and more gradual history than some of our posts to this point would at points might imply. As is perhaps appropriate for Orthodoxy, viewed historically, there seem to be a "both/and" approach: a liturgical dialect that is both related to one's vernacular *and* having liturgical distinctiveness and historical continuity.
You raise the key point regarding the future of Church Slavonic. (Again, the situation with Greek *in Greece* is quite different.)
Anyone can memorize the Mass in Latin, the Liturgy in Greek or Slavonic, etc...
But how many Greek Americans can understand the many variable hymns chanted at Orthros every Sunday morning, or the many prayers and hymns of Holy Week or Pascha?
How many Russians attending Vespers, even in Russia, can understand the stichera at "Lord, I have cried..." from the Octoechos or Menaion?
The faith is taught through the services, and if you can't understand them, then you are missing that teaching. Orthodox services are simply too long and varying in content to be able to gain the full benefit without being understand texts that one hasn't been familiarized with.
And this process of hearing the services over and over again and understanding them is a powerful, powerful tonic against the illness of clericalism -- i.e. where the leaders of one's church simply decide that they are going to change things, and where the sheep meekly go along with it, not knowing any better....
The Russian Church has apparently made the decision to stick with Slavonic and to begin the process of education of the faithful anew. I personally am very glad for that decision, but the challenges should not be underestimated.
The process is well under way, and should happen before too long. I'd say that by the end of the century, we will have a single American Orthodox jurisdiction. What form it will take and whether it will be autocephalous or under an "old country" church is unknown.
Practically, we would probably do best under either the Church of Greece or the Moscow Patriarchate, but politics will probably necessitate autocephaly.
Regarding chant traditions, there are two basic trends. One trend is the use of Russian/Slavic chants, which, because of the nature of Church Slavonic texts, are very flexible and can be fit to English text very easily. Hymns can thus be translated without regard to meter and the Slavic chants can be easily made to fit.
The other trend is the use of traditional Byzantine chant. This is difficult, because Greek hymnography is metered (not in a Western sense, but metered nonetheless), and if one wants to use traditional Byzantine melodies, one has to translate the texts in a particular way to fit the music.
We use a few Byzantine chant pieces at our parish -- sometimes it really works well. Most other things are various Slavic chants. My prediction is that (again in 100 years or so), there will be a recognizably distinctive American chant system starting to coalesce that involves a pastiche of various "old" chant systems that are massaged to work well with the English language.
Even with Slavic chant melodies, they sound slightly different in English, simply because the cadences of our language are simply different.
There are a few people around who advocate completely tossing away the old chant systems and just composing new chant out of whole cloth. I personally think that this is unnecessary, and even a mistake. I believe that the chant melodies themselves carry spiritual content, and that we should use them. There will be a natural process whereby the chants develop into something that distinctively fits the English language, and there is no need to rush this.
Has there been any thought been given to the use of Anglican chants? (I always thought that this would have been a better choice on our part rather than the use of hymns unconnected to the liturgy?) Or is the musical style just too distant to that familiar to the Orthodox?
I think that sticking with Church Slavonic or Koine Greek is wise. The liturgy requires an effort on the part of the faithful. A liturgy translated in vernacular assumes that the faithful benefits from swallowing without first making the effort to chew, if you permit the analogy. It weakens the vertical aspect of the liturgy, as a dialog with God. Its horisontal aspect is weakened also, because it reduces the congregation to those physically attending service, while a universal, albeit it inside an ethnic grouping of nations, language reminds us of fellow Christians in other countries and other times, who are in communion with us in heaven.
Naturally, it is to be avoided that the congregation simply cannot follow the liturgy. When I was describing the inability of an ordinary Russian to follow Church Slavonic, I had a completely uncatechized product of Soviet degeneracy, such as myself, in mind. A once-a-week class in school could rectify that. given a healthy society. Which, as I look around, is apparently too much to ask.
I agree, but only in places like Greece and Russia. Again, I think that it has been shown pretty clearly over the centuries that if a liturgical language is connected and related to the vernacular, then even the poorly-educated pious faithful can become quite proficient and even understand texts that they are unfamiliar with.
Is there any doubt that a 14th century Italian peasant understood the Latin liturgies better than did a 14th century Swedish peasant?
If the language has little or no connection with the vernacular, then only the educated (and even amongst them, only the linguistically gifted) can be proficient, and the less educated and less gifted can memorize from rote the commonly repeated things.
I know too many bright, educated Americans who genuinely want to learn a liturgical language like Greek or Slavonic, and truly work at it -- but just don't "get it," and would never be able to make another language their true language of prayer.
There are always bright exceptions, but they remain just that.
Anglican plain-chant as I recall it from my Anglican days is similar in many ways to traditional Slavic chant melodies in its simplicity and flexibility. I am unaware of them being used in Orthodox churches today, but it might be happening somewhere.
I am unfamiliar with the origins of Anglican plain-chant -- how ancient it is, what its roots are, etc...
My recollections of Anglican plain chant is that it is a bit *too* plain by comparison to traditional Orthodox chants.
There is also the problem that most Orthodox hymnology is assigned to one of the 8 tones, and there are many appointed "special melodies" (podobny) for various . My choir can sing between 30 and 40 distinct Slavic chant melodies, using only marked English text. I can chant another dozen or so in addition to those -- and I am by no means a master chanter.
As to the matter of distance, even most American converts to Orthodoxy (including former Catholics and Anglicans) have no real connection to traditional Western chant forms of any kind. Gregorian or Anglican chants would be just as foreign to them as would be Znamenny...
But in the Latin context, Anglican chant would be far preferable to what I encounter in the missals of Catholic pews...
Petrosius, let's clarify this: Church Slavonic was never a vernacular. It was and is a liturgical language based on what used to be vernacular. The same is true of liturgical Latin.
I also want to clarify what Agrarian mentioned regarding the use of vernacular in Serbian and Ukrainian churches. In Serbian churches, the vernacular is used by the priest, but the choir responds in Church Slavonic, so there is no alienation per se, and anyone following the Divine Liturgy is exposed to both -- which is what you were suggesting earlier for the Latin side.
You don't have to become a language expert to follow the Divine Liturgy in another language. We are deaing with perhaps a few hundred words in all.
One does not have to know the grammar or the case or gender of "Kyrie elleison" any more than one word we all memorized -- Amen!
"Petrosius, let's clarify this: Church Slavonic was never a vernacular."
Precisely. It is, as I like to call it, a "liturgical dialect." It was developed specifically for liturgical use. This does not mean that it was and is not intelligible to Slavs.
This is, BTW, true of AV/BCP liturgical English. There is nothing in English literature quite like it -- and the examples that are closest to it actually *predate* the AV and BCP by a century or more. It was a dialect that was specifically "designed" to have a Christian religious connotation, and was *not* English as it was spoken on the street even at that time. It was consciously somewhat archaic, even at the time.
Bp. Kallistos (Ware) makes the same point about liturgical Greek.
Granted, with the passage of time, the distance between vernacular and liturgical dialect can't help but grow, especially the farther one is from the linguistic epicenter. But most Orthodox liturgical dialects seem, more often than not, to have been consciously religious from their inception.
I think that the Latin Mass in the English speaking world is the hardest case, because a native English speaker (or Swedish, German, etc) has no Latin intuition and so learning even liturgical Latin can only be asked of the educated class. The same applies, of course, to the Orthodox services in Church Slavonic or Greek. So, anathema as it is to the traditionalist Catholics here, I think that the original idea of Vatican II: that Latin is used as a backbone of the liturgy, but more verbose parts are translated, -- is I think a wise one. The unfortunate fact is that Vatican II fell on the dry soil of Western liberalism and got corrupted beyond recognition.
You are right. One does not have to be a language expert to follow the fixed portions of the liturgy in another language. But the Divine Liturgy is only the step on the liturgical ladder. Having ones exposure to the services be restricted to the Divine Liturgy is like sitting down at a table full of meat, vegetables, fish, dessert, and wine -- and only drinking the wine.
I have a better than average knack for languages, and can follow the core texts of the Divine Liturgy in Greek, Slavonic, and a couple of modern European languages pretty easily. But these are not, and never can be, my language of prayer. It simply is not the same to "follow along" as it is to pray in a language that one fully, deeply, and fluently understands.
I will guarantee you that if you were to attend a full festal Vigil service in Church Slavonic, that even you -- a native speaker of a Slavic language -- would have a tough time understanding and absorbing the hymns and prayers flying by your ears -- hymns that you might hear once a year at most, perhaps once every 5 - 7 years, and for which you have no text in front of you to follow along.
Even in English, in which I am fluent and highly educated, it takes significant concentration to hear and absorb the texts at Vespers and Matins. I'm talking about 2 1/2 hours of non-stop prayers and hymns, most of which change from service to service.
But I do hear, understand, and absorb all of those hymns and prayers, as does everyone who attends the services.
This is what I mean when I say that only those who are gifted and educated and who invest a significant amount of time and study can ever truly and deeply understand and pray the Orthodox services in a language with little or no connection to their own vernacular.
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