Byzantine Liturgical Manuscripts

The Byzantine liturgist Peter Galadza has said more than once that in many respects the study of all things Eastern, including Eastern liturgics, is at least a century behind comparable Western scholarship. I do wonder, though, if perhaps things have moved rather more quickly in the move to catch up given the avalanche of books pouring forth in the last two decades covering everything from iconography to history, culture, and liturgics. In this latter category, we have a new collection to be released at month's end: Gerard Rouwhorst et al, eds., A Catalogue of Byzantine Manuscripts in Their Liturgical Context: Challenges and Perspectives. Collected Papers (Brepols, 2013, 350pp).

About this book we are told:

The world of Byzantine manuscripts is fascinating but also confusing. Although they play an important part in modern studies on the history of Christian liturgy and on the textual history of the Bible, a clear overview of the vast amount of these manuscripts in their many different forms is lacking. A new approach in their cataloguing is called for. The present volume brings together a number of specialists in the field of Byzantine, liturgical and Biblical studies with the aim to develop a new methodology for codicological research of the Byzantine manuscripts, taking seriously the original environment of the integral codices in the monasteries and the churches in which they were manufactured and functioned.

Vatican II and Eastern Catholics in Canada

As I have noted before, 2012 marks the 50th anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council, that landmark event that, inter alia, did so much to reshape for the better relations between Orthodoxy and Catholicism. A recent book looks at the council's legacy in Canada, and three chapters in that book focus on Eastern Christian reactions: Michael Attridge, Catherine Clifford, Gilles Routhier, eds.,Vatican II: Experiences Canadiennes/Canadian Experiences (University of Ottawa Press, 2011), 580pp.).

About this book the publisher tells us:

Le deuxième concile du Vatican (1961-1965) fut l’un des événements religieux les plus importants du vingtième siècle. Au Canada, il coïncida avec une période de changements culturels et sociétaux sans précédent, entraînant chez les évêques catholiques canadiens un réexamen de la place et de la mission de l’Église dans le monde. Pendant quatre ans, les évêques catholiques canadiens se réunirent avec leurs collègues de partout dans le monde pour réfléchir aux questions urgentes qui se posaient à l’Église et en débattre. Ce livre bilingue étudie l’interprétation et la réception de Vatican II au Canada, analysant diverses questions, dont le rôle des médias, les réactions des autres chrétiens, les contributions des participants canadiens, l’impact du Concile sur la pratique religieuse et sa contribution à la progression du dialogue interreligieux.

The Second Vatican Council (1961-1965) was one of the most significant religious events of the twentieth-century. In Canada, it was part of a moment of unprecedented cultural and societal change, causing Canadian Catholics to reexamine the church’s place and mission in the world. For four years, Canadian Catholic bishops met with their peers from around the globe to reflect on and debate the pressing issues facing the church. This bilingual volume explores the interpretation and reception of Vatican II in Canada, looking at many issues including the role of the media, the reactions of other Christians, the contributions of Canadian participants, the council’s impact on religious practice and its contribution to the growth of inter-religious dialogue.

The chapters of particular interest include:

• The Council Diary of Metropolitan Maxim Hermaniuk and Turning Points in the History of the Catholic Church: An Interpretation (Peter Galadza, Saint Paul University, Ottawa) 
• Canada's Ukrainian Catholics and Vatican II: A Guide for the Future or Struggling with the Past? (Myroslaw Tataryn, St. Jerome’s University, Waterloo) 
• ‘A Great Historic Day’: The Conciliar Diaries of Metropolitan Maxim Hermaniuk (Jaroslav Z. Skira, Regis College, Toronto)

Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies

The spring issue (vol. 53, nos. 1-2) of Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies is beginning to take shape quite nicely. I will have more details as articles move through the review process and are accepted. Here for now are just some of the books we are having reviewed:

Daniel Galadza reviews Stefano Parenti, A Oriente e Occidente di Costantinopoli. Temi e problemi liturgici di ieri e di oggi (2010), a collection of articles by Parenti, a professor of liturgy at the Pontificio Ateneo Sant'Anselmo in Rome and co-editor of the oldest Byzantine euchologion, Barberini gr. 336. Galadza notes that this collection helps to "answer fundamental problems troubling liturgical scholars for the last century."

Galadza also reviews a new book on the Liturgy of St. James first noted here.

Robert Klymasz, the Zurawecky Research Fellow at the Centre for Ukrainian Canadian Studies at the University of Manitoba, reviews Myrna Kostash, Prodigal Daughter: A Journey to Byzantium, calling it a book whose journey leaves the reader "humbled, enlightened, and refreshed." 

Michael Plekon reviews Antoine Arjakovsky, En attendant le Concile de l'Eglise Orthodoxe. (For my own thoughts on this book, see the lengthy review here.) Plekon notes that this book "witnesses that he [Arjakovsky] is...a wonderful theologian of the Christian life in the 21st century."

Bradley Daugherty reviews Allen Brent, Cyprian and Roman Carthage, saying of it that it will "become a standard work and necessary reading for those seeking to understand the bishop of Carthage and his milieu."


Brenda Llewellyn Ihssen reviews John Renard, Islam and Christianity: Theological Themes in Comparative Perspective, calling it an "articulate and eloquent rendering of the major features of the theological language of Islam and Christianity."

North America's greatest Dante scholar, Anthony Esolen, reviews E.D. Karampetsos, Dante and Byzantium.

Michael Lower of the University of Minnesota reviews Thomas Asbridge, The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land. Asbridge's scholarship has attracted a great deal of attention recently, especially in Britain. Lower says that anyone interested in the Crusades "can learn a great deal from this book," which he further calls "a wonderful achievement."


Peter Galadza reviews Thomas Pott, Byzantine Liturgical Reform: A Study of Liturgical Change in the Byzantine Tradition. In a long, critical review, Galadza notes that the book is not without several problems, but that it raises crucial issues in a groundbreaking way and it "will become a classic work on Eastern Christian liturgical reform."


Myroslaw Tataryn reviews Chris Hann and Hermann Goltz, eds., Eastern Christians in Anthropological Perspective, saying of this collection that it is "very readable, well organized, and highly recommended for its refreshing and thorough perspectives on contemporary Eastern Christianity."

Augustine of Hippo and Orthodoxy

Too many Orthodox polemicists and apologists, who--as the Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart has himself admitted--invariably know very little about what they are railing against and have almost never read the sources they fatuously criticize (and do not have the languages to read those sources in their originals), are fond of holding up Augustine of Hippo as one of the worst offenders in Western theology's supposed long trajectory into heresy and outer darkness and ultimately separation from the East. To be able to sum up thus the unspeakably vast and complex corpus of Augustine's works is a little breath-taking. (That is not to say that there are not aspects of Augustine thinking unworthy of criticism--indeed there are.)

The place and understanding of Augustine came up last weekend at the outstanding ASEC conference where Amy Slagle--on whose wonderful new book I shall have more to say next week I hope--presented a paper on the influence of the late Seraphim Rose. In the discussion after her lecture, I asked for her thoughts on why, in some respects, Rose seemed to return to Augustine each year for the former's Lenten readings when (a) Rose seemed to rather severely misunderstand Augustine; and (b) Rose was so highly critical of many other aspects of Latin Christianity.

I read Rose many years ago now and put him out of my mind as an obvious crank whose interpretation of Augustine (to whom he always referred with strange circumlocutions and epithets), inter alia, was, to put it charitably, sui generis. But in misunderstanding Augustine, Rose is not at all sui generis in many respects. Augustine is, in fact, regularly (tendentiously) misunderstood by some Eastern Christians today, though if they attended to three recent studies many of the misunderstandings would be cleared up. First, more than ten years ago now, there was Myroslaw Tataryn's Augustine and Russian Orthodoxy, a careful study that still repays attention today.

Then in 2008, we had two important studies. The first was a very lucid and compelling article by Peter Galadza, “The Liturgical Commemoration of Augustine in the Orthodox Church: An Ambiguous Lex Orandi for an Ambiguous Lex Credendi,” St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 52 (2008): 111-130.

The second was a very welcome, and widely praised, collection of articles by George E. Demacopoulos and Aristotle Papanikolaou, eds., Orthodox Readings of Augustine (St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 2008), 304pp.

About this book, the publisher tells us that it

not only presents Eastern Orthodox readings of the great Latin theologian, but also demonstrates the very nature of theological consensus in ecumenical dialogue, from a referential starting point of the ancient and great Fathers. This collection exemplifies how, once, the Latin and Byzantine churches, from a deep communion of the faith that transcended linguistic, cultural and intellectual differences, sang from the same page a harmonious song of the beauty of Christ. Contributors are: Lewis Ayres, John Behr, David Bradshaw, Brian E. Daley, George E. Demacopoulos, Elizabeth Fisher, Reinhard Flogaus, Carol Harrison, David Bentley Hart, Joseph T. Lienhard, Andrew Louth, Jean-Luc Marion, Aristotle Papanikolaou, and David Tracy. 

In the last review he ever wrote for Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies, the noted Augustine scholar J. Kevin Coyle--before his untimely death a year ago--noted of Orthodox Readings of Augustine that "all the volume’s entries are thoughtfully written and rarely does the reader’s mind wander" and in sum this book constitutes "a welcome contribution to dialogue between East and West on Augustine."

David Fagerberg on Edith Humphrey's Grand Entrance

I have received a book review from the liturgical scholar David Fagerberg of Notre Dame, himself the author of one of my favorite books in liturgical theology, which I ensure my students always read: Theologia Prima: What Is Liturgical Theology? 

In his book, Fagerberg shows, inter alia, extensive familiarity with the great--many would say the greatest--Orthodox liturgical theologian of the last century, Alexander Schmemann.

I asked Fagerberg, at once equally at home in Western and Eastern liturgical sources, to review a new book by Edith Humphrey, a former Canadian Anglican who entered the Antiochian Orthodox Church recently. We will publish Fagerberg's review in Logos next spring.

As I noted previously, Humphrey has written a number of really excellent critical reviews for Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies including of  Partakers of the Divine Nature: The History and Development of Deification in the Christian Traditions and also, more controversially, Eugene Rogers' After the Spirit.

She is also herself the author of a number of interesting books, to be discussed in more detail next week when we have an interview with her on here. I asked Fagerberg to review her most recent book, Grand Entrance: Worship on Earth as in Heaven (Brazos Press, 2011), 272pp.

The contents of Grand Entrance are as follows:

Introduction: The Crisis of Corporate Worship and the Life of the Church
1. "Teach Us to Pray": What Is Worship, and Where Does Corporate Worship Fit?

2. "Praise God in His Sanctuary": Worship as Entrance in the Old Testament

3. "In Spirit and in Truth": Entrance in the New Testament

4. "From You Comes . . . Praise": Traditional Liturgies of the East

5. "In the Great Congregation": Traditional Liturgies of the West

6. "Your Church Unsleeping": Expressions of Worship Today

7. "That Your Prayers Not Be Hindered": Avoiding Pitfalls in Corporate Worship

Conclusion: "To Sing Is a Lover's Thing"

Glossary

Index

Humphrey's "ecumenical" approach is an encouraging one, and puts me in mind of  a book I recently received: Anton Usher, Replenishing Ritual: Rediscovering the Place of Rituals in Western Christian Liturgy (Marquette UP, 2011), 277pp.  Usher shows some familiarity with noted Eastern liturgists and historians, including Robert Taft and Peter Galadza.

But back to Humphrey. Fagerberg's review of her book notes that one of Humphrey's major concerns is to rescue the very notion of corporate-communal worship from the individualistic culture of today, especially among some evangelicals. A related concern is justifying the use of very ancient forms and venerable traditions in Catholic and especially Orthodox worship. As he drolly puts it:

The answer to questions like why cannot we reverse the sequence of word and sacrament, or why we cannot revise the stations of the cross to align with the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals is simple: it is not done this way. Asking "what elements do you include in your worship?" is like asking "in our laboratory we make water with two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom – what do you use?"

Byzantine Liturgical Reform

Indisputably the most controversial change in the Latin Church following Vatican II had to do with liturgy. Debates about liturgical reform continue to roil the Church of Rome today, and show no sign of abating any time soon. Most Eastern Christians look on this with a mixture of pity (for those suffering the changes) and gratitude that our own traditions have been largely spared such upheaval. Some Orthodox I know look upon Pope Benedict XVI's motu proprio of 2007, Summorum Pontificio, as a great advance in the struggle to restore liturgical tradition in the Latin Church. Other Eastern Christians,  perhaps most notably Robert Taft, think the reforms of Vatican II a great success. I asked him about them at a conference last summer, and he reacted with great disdain (which I thought a bit de trop) for those who criticize the liturgical reforms after the council, calling himself "a Vatican II loyalist." 

Now a new book is out to look at the issue of liturgical change in the Byzantine tradition. I have asked Fr. Peter Galadza to review next year in Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies:

Thomas Pott, Byzantine Liturgical Reform: A Study of Liturgical Change in the Byzantine Tradition, trans. Paul Meyendorff (SVS Press, 2010).

The Holy Spirit in Eastern Christian Worship

It is a commonplace that the West's Pneumatology is weak while the East's is strong--but is that the case always and everywhere? Is that not one of those received stereotypes or shibboleths--like saying the West is always "scholastic" and "rationalist" while the East is always "patristic" and "mystical"--that was tendentiously reasserted again and again as an excuse for East-West division, and even a justification for their ongoing separation? As David Bentley Hart has rightly noted, we have too often allowed bad history to be used by many Orthodox Christians to justify their disdain of, and separation from, the Catholic Church. Such ideas as a supposedly defective or deficient Western Pneumatology--in contrast to the supposed superiority of the East on this point--are usually based on only a passing familiarity with actual history, and rightly do not withstand serious scholarly scrutiny. We see precisely such welcome scrutiny in a new book, bringing together some leading North American liturgists to examine the issues:

Teresa Berger, Bryan Spinks, eds., The Spirit in Worship: Worship in the Spirit (Liturgical Press, 2009).

Among the articles of particular note to Eastern Christians will be, first, Peter Galadza's "The Holy Spirit in Eastern Orthodox Worship: Historical Enfleshments and Contemporary Queries." With his characteristic lucidity and cogency, and his usual willingness to pull no punches, Fr. Peter shows fairly that the accepted ideas about Orthodox Pneumatology are not always borne out in practice, and the theology of Chrismation raises more questions than is usually thought. What, e.g., are we to make of the fact that St. John Chrysostom held that the prebaptismal anointing was sufficient to convey the "seal" and "gift" of the Holy Spirit, obviating the need for "chrismation" as a second, separate sacrament? These and other questions he discusses by combing sources, ancient and modern, in Greek, Russian, Slavonic, French, English, and Ukrainian. The influence of the historical-comparative methods of Anton Baumstark and Robert Taft can be seen throughout the article. 

Other articles of note include Simon Jones on Syrian baptismal theologies and Habtemichael Kidane on the Holy Spirit in the Ethiopian Orthodox tradition.

Look for this book to be reviewed in Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies next year.

Warrior Saints and Historical Methodology

The great historian Robert Taft has noted that, for all our theologizing about icons as being not physical representations but instead incarnations of spiritual reality, the Byzantines nonetheless quite straightforwardly approached icons as realistic representations of people as they actually existed. Elsewhere he has noted, in his reflections on historical method in his book Through Their Own Eyes: Liturgy as the Byzantines Saw It  (reviewed in Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies by Peter Galadza),  that one of the useful means for filling in historical lacunae is to look at indirect evidence. If, say, one is trying to understand the position of children in the liturgy of the Great Church in the tenth century, sources treating this topic will only take one so far. But other sources, ostensibly on other topics, may be unintentionally useful insofar as they report relevant details and would have no reason not to do so in a manner relatively free from any distortion or tendentiousness. Thus, in addition to reading treatises directly on children, one might also read priestly rubrics for the administration of Holy Communion to understand if children were present, and how they received the Eucharist if such were mentioned in those rubrics.

Now Brill tells me today of a new book that has come along to approach questions of war and iconography using a similar method: 

Piotr Ł. Grotowski,  Arms and Armour of the Warrior Saint: Tradition and Innovation in Byzantine Iconography (843–1261), trans. Richard Brzezinski (Brill, 2010), 704pp. 


The publisher's blurb tells us:

The question of the independence of Byzantine iconography continues to draw attention. Following extensive research on the persistence of Classical motifs in Byzantine art, interest has recently turned to the originality of the latter and its reliability as a historical source. This study examines whether military equipment (armour, weapons, insignia and costume) shown in images of the warrior saints reflects items actually used in the mid-Byzantine Army or merely repeats Classical forms. Such representations are compared with documentary evidence gathered chiefly from Byzantine military manuals. The author demonstrates that military equipment, being a vital branch of material culture subject to constant evolution, provides a good indicator of iconographic innovation in the art of Byzantium.