Should the Text of the Divine Liturgy Be Revised?
Should the text of the Divine Liturgy be revised? I for one say: yes. Over the two millennia of its development the Divine Liturgy has become convoluted and confusing, as some parts were added to meet the needs of the time that no longer exist now, and some others were added unnecessarily, in duplication, or in misplacement. Robert F. Taft, SJ, refers to the Liturgy as an overloaded circuit:
[W]hen liturgy has evolved to the point where the circuits are overloaded and something has to be unplugged, what gets suppressed are more often elements of the ancient structure and not some of the newer accretions.
Taft, 2000: 51; italics his.
Taft suggests reforming the Divine Liturgy but he does not seem to dare to carry it out himself, while deferring to the church authorities and collective decision making bodies. For example, he proposes removing the entire litany before the Lord’s Prayer (2004: 428) and restoring the Trisagion after the Creed (2004: 424-25).
In my humble opinion, the Creed should also be removed, except for the baptism—as it was originally recited by catechumens before the immergence—and spare the current long wait-time endured by the presiding clergy, during which (as it used to be) the aer was waved up and down in a pointless ritual, as the Creed was recited by the faithful. See Taft on “the curious contemporary practice of removing the aer right after the pax [peace greeting] and waving it over the gifts during the creed” (Taft, 2004: 418, 421-23).
“In the very beginning,” Taft’s mentor, Juan Mateos, SJ, notes, “… the liturgy started directly with the readings” (2016: 47). The current beginning with the blessing of “the Kingdom of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit….” followed by the Great Litany is a later addition. Why should the Divine Liturgy begin with the litany of petitions, Mateos asks?
Mateos suggests (as below) that the Liturgy should begin, as was in the 4th- and 5th-centuries, with the entry of the Word, i.e., the Little Entrance, that symbolizes Christ’s descent into the world. Once the Word has entered the world, Christ’s earthly ministry begins: his birth, death, and resurrection. But Christ’s ministry culminates on the Cross. But what is the meaning of the Cross?
Is the Cross the sign of humiliation and suffering endured by Christ? Is it a symbol of injustice the Son of God underwent? Or, as the Armenians believe, the symbol of life and Christ’s resurrection? Or is the Cross the ultimate symbol of sacrifice understood as offering? Liturgically, does not the Cross refer to the self-sacrifice/offering of Christ on the altar, where His Risen Body is lifted up to God the Father in offering, in which we too participate by “receiving” Him (προσδέχομαι, as we sing in the Communion Hymn) in communion with Him. Is not the Cross the way of our divinization to become children of God?
The essence of the Liturgy can be compressed in the two processions: the descent of the Word (the Little Entrance) and the ascent of the Risen Christ (self) offered as sacrifice (the Great Entrance). The Crucifixion is the lifting up of the Word as offering in God’s glory (because it is fulfillment of God’s will), according to St John. Like Christ, we too offer ourselves as a prayer of the “evening sacrifice,” like a sweet smell of incense that arises to God (Psalm 141.2). Christ’s descent in Incarnation is our ascent with Christ to the Father.
The bishop incenses after the Little Entrance… “because that is where the Divine Liturgy once began” (Taft, 2000: 51).
According to Juan Mateos, S.J., the liturgy started with the readings from the Old and New testaments (the Prophets (which disappeared in the 7th-century), the Apostle, and the Gospel)—as it once was in the Byzantine Church (Tateos, 2016: 217, 218). The bishop literally carried the Gospel book into the church, symbolizing the entry of the Word into the world. By doing so, Mateos says, the meaning of the liturgy became clear:
… in Christian life, God has the initiative. We must first of all listen to him, be called by him, learn from him, and only then ask for what we need [as we do in the litany of petitions].
[…]
The change of the synaptê’s [litany’s] place to the very beginning of the liturgy, that took place in the twelfth century [however], put the emphasis on human needs rather than on God’s praise [i.e., the triporion that preceded the scriptural readings, accompanying the entry of the Gospel].
Mateos, 2016: 47, 48.
In other words, the Great Litany that starts the Divine Liturgy does not belong there. Mateos argues:
[The Great Litany] at the beginning of the Divine Liturgy, before the first antiphon, was formerly placed elsewhere.
In fact, in the documents of the fourth and fifth centuries, the synaptê [litany] was recited after the Gospel, once the catechumens and all the other categories of people not in full communion with the Church had bees dismissed… Later on, probably in the eighth century, the Great Synaptê was transferred to a new place, before the Trisagion, immediately after the Entrance; there it remained in the celebration until the twelfth century. Only after this epoch, at least in Constantinople, was the Great Synaptê put in the place it occupies now, at the beginning of the liturgy.
Mateos, 2016: 46-47.
Placing the Great Litany at the beginning of the Divine Liturgy obscures another important theological meaning: that
The Liturgy of the Word, besides being an instruction, is chiefly a purification, a conversion to God, an opening of the heart for a greater docility to the Spirit.
Mateos, 2016: 48.
After we are purified (or convicted) by the Word of God, we can then proceed to petition for our needs and to offer the divine sacrifice in the Eucharist. Likewise, in the Old Testament, the Levitical sacrifice was preceded by the ritual of purification (Lev 16).
There are currently no less than four litanies said during the Divine Liturgy: first, the Great Litany that begins the current Liturgy (which was placed between the troparia and the Trisagion until the 12th-century); second, the ektenia [the fervent prayers] after the Gospel; third, a repeat of the Great Litany during the pre-communion rites; and fourth, the litany before the Lord’s Prayer (Mateos, 2016: 177). Do we need all these? Some, if not all, interrupt the flow of the liturgy and create confusion. Some belong to the dismissal at the end of the Liturgy (“angel of peace;” petitions for seasonable weather, abundance of the fruits, and peaceful time, for travel, for sick and suffering, etc.).
Both the Trisagion (“Holy, holy, holy, the Lord of sabaoth”) and the baptismal troparion (“All you baptized into Christ, have been clothes in Christ. Alleluia”) were processional hymns. As such they should be revived as processional (Mateos, 2016: 198; “in the sixth century the Trisagion appears to have been the fixed entrance hymn of the liturgy” (2016: 200)).
There are several other revisions that Juan Mateos suggests in his groundbreaking book The Liturgy of the Word.
In the same vein, Mateos’ disciple Robert F. Taft, S.J., speaks of the superfluousness of the Creed in the Liturgy:
Like so many other later additions to the liturgy, the creed is really superfluous. The eucharistic prayer itself, with its account of salvation history and its repetition of the banquet of the New Covenant, is an entirely sufficient profession of faith.
Taft, 2004: 404-405.
The Creed was introduced during the Monophysite crisis (5th through 7th centuries) (Taft, 2004: 426). According to O’Grady, elements of the Creed was “authorized by the First Ecumenical Council” (325), “added to by the Second Ecumenical Council” (381), “and sealed with divine authority by the council’s degree at the Third Ecumenical Council held in Ephasus in AD 431” (2016: 56). In any event, the Creed is derived from the widely circulated baptismal formula recited by the catechumen in various versions. It thus does not belong to the anaphora, according to Taft, where the catechumens are supposed to exist the church so that the Eucharistic rite may begin.
If the Creed is eliminated, the waving of the aer above the elements (done while the Creed is currently recited by the people) would also disappear. See Taft on this “curious contemporary practice of removing the aer right after the pax [peace greeting] and waving it over the gifts during the creed” (2004: 418-423). According to O’Grady, the practice of waving the aer arose from the practical need “to keep any flying insects from alighting upon the prepared Holy Gifts.” He continues: “the waving of the aer keeps off flies as well as symbolizing the earthquake that occurred at Christ’s Resurrection or the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost” (O’Grady, 2016: 56). The earthquake also happened at the time of Christ’s death on the cross (Matt 27.50-54). Once we begin to allegorize symbolism, the sky is the limit: meaning becomes superfluous.
[The Nicene Creed is referred to by the Orthodox Christians as “the symbol of faith” [symbol in the sense of a sign] or as Maximos the Confessor puts it “the intellectual kiss of peace” [νοεροῦἀσπασμοῦ, noetic embrace or greeting] (On the Ecclesiastical Mystagogy, 830; 2019: 83). In its nature it is liturgical and public, recited initially at baptism and later as part of the Divine Liturgy prior to receiving the communion, excluded from the catechumens. For the Greeks both baptism and the liturgy are the initiation rites through which the initiate enter into the Mysteries. As an integral part of the sacramental Eucharist, the Creed functions as the initial ‘greeting’ toward or ‘kiss’ or ‘embrace’ of the Divine in union. Maximos describes the union this way:
[God] will deify the whole soul and transform it unalterably into himself, so as ‘to be,’ as the all-holy Dionysius the Areopagite says, ‘an image and manifestation of the unseen light, a mirror, pure, bright, untarnished, unspotted, receiving, if one say so, the whole loveliness of the divine goodness and purely enlightening within itself as far as possible the goodness of silence in the inner sanctuaries.
Mystagogy, 875-882; 2019: 85.
In Maximos’ allegorical interpretation, the Creed serves as the kiss of embrace, a foreplay as it were, before the nuptial union between Christ and the Church consummates in the sanctuary, the bridal chamber, as Maximos calls it. As a baptismal credentialing, as it was recited by the catechumen before baptism, the Creed signifies one’s readiness to die and to live “in Christ.” Only the faithful with such a disposition may enter into a union with Christ at the table of the Eucharist.
But are not the faithful supposed to have such a disposition at this point in the Liturgy—after having received the Word of God and after witnessing Christ entering Jerusalem as the “King of all” escorted by Cherubim? Reciting the Creed as part of Anaphora (lifting of the Symbol of Christ) seems to pause, if not dispirit, the movement of the Liturgy that is built at the moment toward the climax of the consummation with Christ. The movement toward the bridal chamber should not be held at abeyance with the doctrinal recredentialing.]
According to Taft, the deacon’s shout to close the doors (to ban the catechumens) prior to reciting the Creed was not found in Constantinople churches prior to the 12th-century (Taft, 2004: 406). And the practice of drawing the curtain across the Royal Doors at the center of the iconostasis during the mixing of the Elements was a medieval monastic practice “unheard of before the 11th century” at least in Constantinople (2004: 413).
Theodore of Mopsuestia (d. 428) makes no mention of ‘Our Father…’ in his list of the precommunion rite (Taft, 2000: 61). He lists the following: Greeting, Manual act of fraction, consignation, commixture, communution, Litany and collect, Greeting, ‘Let us attend,’ ‘Holy things are for the holy,’ and Communion (Taft, 2000: 61).
Cyril of Jerusalem (d. 386) makes the first mention of ‘Our Father’ in the precommunion rite—between the anaphora and the ‘Holy things are for the holy’ (Taft, 2000: 62). Chrysostom had the Lord’s Prayer in his precommunion rite, when he was a presbyter in Antioch (Taft, 2000: 62).
Iconostasis is a later invention. In Hagia Sophia “the pre-iconoclast Byzantine chancel was a barrier that impeded [physical] access, not visibility, just as in the West” (2004: 413). The altar was visible from the nave and was not blocked from the view with or without curtains drawn. The ciborium above the altar too did not have a curtain: “The majority of miniatures, frescoes, etc. representing early Byzantine sanctuaries show a low parapet-type chancel barrier and a curtainless ciborium” (2004: 414, 413, 415).
The tall iconostasis with rows of icons almost reaching the ceiling, entirely blocking the view of the altar was first commission by Prince Andrei Bogoliubsky for the Assumption Cathedral in Vladimir, Russia, who brought the famous icon painter Andrei Rublev from Moscoe to paint the icons thereon around 1408.
Is such a wall-like structure, blocking the view of the altar, necessary for or complementary to the rite of the Eucharist that culminates in communion with God and with the clergy and the faithful?
Taft notes that there are no “Byzantine euchology or diataxis that makes the slightest mention of icons as having any place whatever in the ritual of the mass” (2004: 416). He further writes:
Only in the later printed editions do we find rubrics indicating that the icons on the iconostasis are to be incensed…. Historically [icons] play no role in the ritual of the Byzantine mass and their presence on an iconostasis or elsewhere cannot be deemed essential to the celebration of the liturgy of the Great Church [Hagia Sophia].
Taft, 2004: 416.
Among other changes suggested for revising the current pre-anaphoral rites, Taft lists the following:
Only the deacons should bear in the gifs during the Great Entrance, while the main celebrant awaits at the Royal Door to receive the gifts.
The antiphonal chant should be restored and should “not be interrupted by commemorations or a blessing of the people with the gifts.”
The incensing be limited to the altar and the gifts on the prothesis credence.
The procession of the Great Entrance should pass through the nave.
Move the procesis chamber to “near the entrance of the church” so that the Great Entrance may have its full effect, starting from the narthex, passing through the nave, and entering into the sanctuary. This will have the effect of the Little Entrance (of the Word) being “the true introit of the mass.”
“The litany should be suppressed completely.”
The kiss of peace be restored at all liturgies, to be exchanged among the congregation as well as among the clergy; and eliminate the diaconal commend: “Let us love one another” for duplication.
Eliminate “the doors, the doors, let no cachecumens remain.”
The troparia and other lesser formulae should not be allowed to disturb the flow or obscure the meaning of the rites, as they “clutter up the liturgical text.”
Taft, 2004: 427-28.
Taft laments in the Conclusion of his great book The Great Entrance:
We have seen the gradual evolution of the Byzantine preanaphoral rites from extreme simplicity to the jumbled complexity of some of the later MSS [text]… According to our reconstruction, the primitive rite of the Great Church [Hagia Sophia] before the 6th century consisted in the preparation of the altar and transfer of gifts from the skeuophysakion [a treasury outside, next to the apse] by the deacons, while the presbyters prepared themselves for the anaphora by saying the accessus [entrance] prayer. The preparation of the altar may have included an incensation, and that of the clergy a lavabo. Then followed the deposition and covering of the gifts, probably with an incensation. The final warning to guard the doors and the kiss of peace concluded the preparation for the anaphora.
Taft, 2004: 426.
Taft finds the following deficiencies or corruption of the current form of the Divine Liturgy:
Further developments in the 7-10th centuries show signs of overburdening the rites with unnecessary elements. The Nemo dignus [“No one is worthy…”] prayer first introduced into BAS [Byzantine Liturgy of St Basil] duplicates an already existing accessus [entrance] prayer. And the litany after the Great Entrance, in scope a litany of dismissal, is completely out of place. It is not only untraditional but also superfluous, coming so soon after the litanies that end the Liturgy of the Word. Furthermore it interrupts and delays the preparation for the anaphora, which is the scope of the rites and prayers of this part of the mass. On the other hand the orate fratres [“Pray, brethren…”] dialogue between concelebrants, in its uncorrupted form, provided a felicitous opening to the accessus rites.
Taft, 2004: 426