Enacting the Age to Come: Sunday Worship in the Orthodox Church as

Eschatological Performance and Divine Carnival

Fr Geoffrey Ready Orthodox School of Theology at Trinity College

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Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.

The Lord’s Prayer – Matthew 6.10 (RSV)

Therefore, we also, O Master, remembering His saving passion and life-creating cross, His three-day burial and resurrection from the dead, His ascension into heaven

and sitting at the right hand of Thee the God and Father, and His glorious and awesome second coming—

Thine own of Thine own, we offer unto Thee, on behalf of all and for all.

The Divine Liturgy of Saint Basil the Great

The good news of the kingdom of God is preached, and every one enters it violently.

Luke 16.16 (RSV)

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Midway through the Divine Liturgy of Saint Basil the Great, after the Great Entrance during which

the offered gifts of bread and wine are carried in procession into the sanctuary and placed on the

holy table, the presider prays the offertory prayer including the words: “Even as Thou didst receive

from Thy holy apostles this true worship, so now, in Thy goodness, accept these gifts from the

hands of us sinners, O Lord.”1 There are undoubtedly worshippers in the Orthodox Church who take

these words literally to mean that the Divine Liturgy as performed every Sunday and feast day in

their churches is same ritual and “true worship” revealed to the apostles on the eve of the Lord’s

passion, performed by them in the early church, and faithfully handed down in a pristine form to

this day. Even without adopting such a naive and extreme stance, however, it is almost axiomatic to

understand Orthodox liturgy as the perfect embodiment of a classical model of ritual which Nathan

Mitchell describes as “symbolic, enduring, invariable, and ultimately independent of human

agents.”2 Orthodox liturgy is indeed highly traditional, mediating through its rich symbolism, formal

acts, ornate decoration and beautiful aesthetics the highest values and theology of an ancient

Christian faith. It is also immensely communal, comprising the collective memory and experience of

a family of Christians with a history unfolding over two millennia, and providing the social cohesion

that enabled its faithful to survive not only the idolatrous mirages of Christian Roman and Russian

imperialism but centuries of persecution and martyrdom. Above all, Orthodox liturgy refers us

beyond our present space and time to a heavenly realm. It self-consciously reflects the experience

of eternal heavenly worship before the throne of God as revealed in Isaiah and Revelation. As the

oft-repeated legend holds, in the late 10th century the ambassadors of Prince Vladimir of Kievan

1 Prayer of the Offertory, Liturgy of St Basil the Great, from Service Books of the Orthodox

Church (South Canaan, Pennsylvania: St Tikhon’s Monastery Press, 2013), 133. 2 Nathan Mitchell, Liturgy and the Social Sciences (Collegeville, Minnesota: Liturgical Press,

1999), 33.

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Rus’, having visited the great cathedral of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople and witnessed its splendid

Orthodox rites, concluded “we did not know where we were, on heaven or on earth,” and this

experience of ascent to the worship of heaven remains a touchstone of Orthodox liturgy.

All this is true, and yet casting Orthodox worship within a static, essentialist model in

which the faithful are merely temporal shadows of eternal and unchanging ideals does not merely

sell the liturgical praxis of the church short, it severely distorts it. In this paper, we will seek to

recover the far more dynamic model of liturgy that gave rise to Orthodox Christian rites of worship

in the first place, a model driven by the early Christian experience here and now of the age to come.

Far from a mere fixed ritual patterned after heavenly realities, Orthodox worship properly

understood is an always emerging and ever-renewing process of becoming and enacting the new

life of the kingdom of God, a divine carnival continuing to upend and transform the world until

Christ be “all in all” (Ephesians 1.23). Armed with this eschatological model of liturgy, we will

explore the performative elements of a specific Sunday worship service in an Orthodox parish to

highlight the dynamic and transformative potential still embedded within this ancient tradition.

(I) Liturgy and the Age to Come3

The clearest and most dominant characteristic of Orthodox Christian worship is that it is

eschatological, concretely symbolising our participation in the life of the age to come: it begins with

“the invocation of the Kingdom, continues with the representation of it, and ends with our

participation in the Supper of the Kingdom, our union and communion with the life of God in

Trinity.”4 In distinction to (mainly post-enlightenment) Christian philosophies dividing an eternal

3 This section is a short abstract of a theme—the New Testament theology of the age to come

and early Christian worship—I will be developing fully elsewhere as a separate chapter of my thesis. 4 John Zizioulas, The Eucharistic Communion and the World (New York: T & T Clark, 2011), 39.

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heaven from a temporal earth and preoccupied with salvation as an escape from our own space and

time to ‘eternal life,’ Orthodox Christianity is grounded in the New Testament understanding of

heaven and earth—God’s realm and the world of His creation— as fundamentally intertwined and

now for ever united in Christ (Ephesians 1.10). Early Christians followed Jewish tradition in asserting

that the real division is not between earth and heaven, but this present age—full of misery, strife,

suffering and death—and the age to come, when on the ‘day of the Lord’ (κυριακῇ ἡμέρᾳ) God

would act decisively according to His promise to put all to rights, turn misery to joy and death to

life, and gather His people under His sovereign power and protection. For the apostles and other

witnesses to the life, voluntary death and glorious resurrection of Jesus, that day has been

inaugurated, and the age to come, as yet not fully revealed, made mysteriously accessible to those

who follow in the pattern of Jesus, gather in His name to worship God and manifest the church, the

new humanity. This worship effectively takes place in the kingdom, on the last day, when heaven

and earth are already united, because the church is precisely “the eschatological manifestation of

the kingdom of God” called to “manifest this identity in the world.”5

(II) Liturgy as Performance and Event

The emergence of the discipline of ‘ritual studies’ in the past few decades, drawing on the

insights of cultural anthropology, has sadly drawn scant attention from Orthodox liturgical

theologians. Ironically, this has meant that Orthodox Christians often continue to look at and

interpret their ancient liturgies through the foreign (whether scholastic or pietistic) lens of

modernity, while many western Christians have employed new ritual awareness and understanding

5 Dimitrios Passakos, “Worship, Rituals and Liturgy in Orthodox Tradition: Insights from

Practice and Theology,” in Worship Today: Understanding, Practice, Ecumenical Implications, ed. Thomas F. Best and Dagmar Heller (Geneva, Switzerland: World Council of Churches, 2004), 26.

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to recover something of the dynamic thrust of premodern Christian worship. If Orthodox Christians

are to return fully to the patristic liturgical vision in which the church’s worship originally emerged

and evolved, then there must be a rediscovery of liturgy as transformative performance rather than

simply as scripted text and rubrics with encoded symbols and ‘meaning.’

Liturgy as performance does not mean liturgy as theatre. Nevertheless, worship shares

characteristics with theatrical drama as an enacted event, meaning that its participants employ

similar tools to understand and interpret it. Liturgical scholar Richard McCall points out that such a

view of liturgy is very ancient indeed, for this interpretive toolset comprises the same method of

“symbolic expansion used since New Testament times,” specifically, the elaborated typological and

allegorical (that is, analogical, tropological and anagogical) symbolic world reflected in the early

fathers and mystagogical commentators on the liturgy.6 Though elaborate, this “old semiotic” was

nevertheless popular and widely grasped by the faithful, as it is “basically intuitive” and “rooted in

the human imagination.”7 This toolset was obscured by modernity, with the rise of scholasticism

and new semiotic categories in the late mediaeval era, which brought about a secularised tradition

of drama separated from a church increasingly obsessed with dialectic and systematic theology.

From that point, “drama would cease to be an acceptable hermeneutical tool for the exposition of

the liturgy because, after all, dramatic performance requires a concrete enactment and a kind of

visual symbol unsuited to dialectic.”8

It is only in the second half of the 20th century, with the advent of a postmodern

worldview including a new dramatic tradition capable of radical experimentation, that the boundary

6 Richard D. McCall, Do This: Liturgy as Performance (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre

Dame Press, 2007), 22. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid., 40.

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between liturgy and drama could once again be transcended. From creative experiments in

dramatic form, evoking in many ways the drama of the premodern era, and from critical reflection

upon them, the new discipline of performance theory emerges, drawing together insights from

“anthropologists, sociologists, semioticians, linguists, and dramatic critics,”9 all of whom underline

the performance quality of social interaction. Prominent among these is Richard Schechner, a

professor of performance studies who adapts cultural anthropologist Victor Turner’s metaphor of

“social drama” for the way societies negotiate transitions. For Turner, such social dramas involve

communal structures passing through four subsequent stages of breach, crisis (the liminal stage in

which an “antistructure” emerges called communitas), redressive action, and reintegration.10

Schechner reappropriates Turner’s metaphor, returning it to its native context of theatrical

performance, and frames the four stages of performance within the acts of “gathering” and

“dispersing.”11 This framing differentiates that which we can describe as “performance” (of a play or

of liturgy) from ongoing social reality. Schechner distinguishes three types of performance:

aesthetic, where viewing an external performance affects the audience’s consciousness; ritual,

where the subject of the ceremony is transformed by the performer; and social drama, properly

speaking, where all (performer and audience alike) are involved and transformed.12 Although all

three types of performance could be said to be at work on some level within every liturgy, McCall

argues that the liturgy of the modern era in the grip of scholasticism belongs primarily to the first,

the aesthetic performance category, whereas in the premodern era, as well as in postmodern

9 Ibid., 42. 10 Ibid., 51. 11 Ibid., 52. 12 Ibid., 54.

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aspiration, liturgy both unfolds and is experienced most fully as a dynamic and transformative social

drama.

This understanding of liturgical worship as a social drama, as a communal process of

change and becoming—coming out of the structure of the world, being pushed into an ambiguous

and disorienting liminal state that challenges that structure and forms an antistructure, and

ultimately not only fosters growth and development but engenders a radical new life—mirrors the

relational and transformative model of liturgy described by Aidan Kavanagh, a theologian

determined to recapture the patristic vision of liturgy. Arguing against a false conception of liturgy

as strictly unilateral—that is, God acting upon us—Kavanagh presents worship as both dialogical

and theological: the assembly arrives and enters into liturgy presenting all its life as thesis; the

antithesis is the change the assembly experiences (or “suffers”) through worship—this is theologia

properly conceived, “a dynamic, critical, reflective and sustained act of theology;”13 and the

synthesis is the adjustment the assembly makes because of theologia. This dialogic understanding

of worship means that it cannot be that our spiritual posture during liturgy remain purely passive

and receptive. In keeping with the disorienting nature of the liminal state, this process of

adjustment is neither “placid” nor “genteel” but involves “collision, chaos and a certain violence.”14

The liturgical assembly stands “on the edge of chaos” and only by God’s grace can it stand there or

“come away whole from such an encounter, and even then it is with wounds which are as deep as

they are salutary.”15 It is in this liminal communitas of social drama that the church is actually

formed, as a communion with what Orthodox theologian Dimitrios Passakos describes as an “anti-

13 Aidan Kavanagh, On Liturgical Theology (Collegeville, Minnesota: Pueblo Books, 1984), 77. 14 Ibid., 74. 15 Ibid., 75.

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structural kind of ecclesiology.”16 Even if the transformation, the new life implied by this

antistructure, is not immediately evident, it is nevertheless “long-term, even eschatological, and

inexorable.”17 It also implies that such a church born in the transformative performance of liturgy is

and must remain a marginal community, radical movement opposed to the structures of this age. It

is fundamentally incompatible with worldly power and tyranny.

According to many performance theorists, performance governs not only social interaction

and transformation, but also of the very construction and critical apprehension of reality. For the

literary and aesthetic theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘being’ itself is actualised in performance, in doing:

There is [...] ‘more’ Being in performance than there is in any abstraction from or generalization about Being. Performance is the only action that adds to Being rather than subtracting from it. The implication for theology is that a performed theology would contemplate Being more actually than a theology built only on abstraction and generalization. The Word must be made flesh; and it must be made unique flesh.18

Such a view dovetails with early patristic tradition, particularly among the eastern fathers, who

emphasise theology as encounter and experience (in contrast to later scholastic speculative

theology) and also focus their christology and Trinitarian theology on the concrete, unique

enhypostasisation of nature (over against a stereotypical western obsession with essence,

metaphysics and what Louis-Marie Chauvet calls “onto-theology”). By drawing heavily on Bakhtin’s

concept of ‘being-as-event,’ McCall contends that liturgy, an icon of life itself, resists abstraction

and schematisation, and must be viewed primarily as process and event, an enactment in specific

moments of space-time by concrete and unique persons “who enter into a relationship with once-

16 Passakos, “Worship, Rituals and Liturgy in Orthodox Tradition: Insights from Practice and

Theology,” 26. 17 Kavanagh, On Liturgical Theology, 93. 18 McCall, Do This, 69.

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occurrent Being-as-event in the real present, providing that they do so answerably.”19 Therefore,

liturgy must be addressed and interpreted not as structured words and rituals, but as a “unified

action, in which word, physical gesture, sound, movement, and plot function as an architectonic

whole.”20 An as expression of being-as-event, liturgy is also not mimesis, “the attempt to represent

or make present that which is ‘somewhere else’ or ‘something else’ (having a separate ontological

reality)”—the basis of the liturgy understood aesthetically in the post-patristic era—but is truly

anamnesis, the “constituting a new thing in the present of which the recalled event remains a

symbol or image but is being constituted in its power and presence in the present.”21 In this, such a

view of liturgical anamnesis conforms closely to the Orthodox and patristic understanding of symbol

as epiphany and of typology as ongoing enactment of symbolic reality.22

(III) Liturgy as Divine Carnival

Combining these insights from performance theory—the social drama of Turner and

Schechner, the ‘being as event’ of Bakhtin, McCall’s worship as a unified action of anamnesis—

together with the early Christian view of worship as participation here and now in the age to come,

a model emerges in which each performance of Orthodox Christian liturgy is perceived as a

dynamic, world-upending and transforming event “whereby we partake in a divine carnival, a divine

irony whereby we overthrow the kingdom of this world.”23

19 Ibid., 72. 20 Ibid., 76. 21 Ibid., 61. 22 See, for example, the chapter “Sacrament and Symbol” in Alexander Schmemann, For the

Life of the World : Sacraments and Orthodoxy (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1973), 135–151.

23 Anthony Ugolnik, The Illuminating Icon (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1989), 170.

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In his famous treatise, Rabelais and His World, Bakhtin is the one who develops the use of

‘carnival’ as a conceptual tool now widely used by anthropologists and literary theorists. Carnivals,

of course, played a central role in the middle ages and early renaissance period, drawing in people

from all classes in society. Though up to a quarter of the year was dedicated to festivals, the

importance of carnival was not simply the amount of time it took up, “but rather in the unique

sense of the world it embodied.”24 In the mediaeval west and until Rabelais’ day, carnival was one

of the few areas of society over which the power of the Roman Catholic Church and the Holy

Roman Empire did not extend their grip. The festivals were an important vehicle for people to

parody authorities and mock their power, to counteract their fears of a dark, intimidating,

oppressive world—not altogether unlike Soviet Union of Bakhtin’s day—with playful irreverence

and humorous inversion. Carnival represented victory of laughter over fear, “the defeat of divine

and human power, of authoritarian commandments and prohibitions, of death and punishment

after death, hell and all that is more terrifying than the earth itself.”25

A study of the folk culture of feasts and laughter is admittedly at first glance an odd

element in a model for studying Orthodox Christian ritual. Indeed, Bakhtin’s concept of carnival,

along with many of his ideas, is often assumed to be thoroughly anti-Christian.26 Yet in Bakhtin’s

24 Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap

Press of Harvard University Press, 1984), 300. 25 M. M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press,

1984), 90–91. As cited by Coates, 127. 26 Was Bakhtin actually an Orthodox Christian? He is rarely described as anything other than an

anti-religious Marxist literary scholar; he is variously cast as “the linguist, the semiotician, the deviant Formalist, the revisionist Marxist, the theorist of fiction, the categorist of genres.” Charles Lock, “Carnival and Incarnation: Bakhtin and Orthodox Theology,” Mikhail Bakhtin, Volume 1 (London: SAGE, 2003), 285. Yet “Bakhtin’s Orthodox colleagues report that the was immersed in liturgical life; in his later years he most often attended liturgy at the church of the Novodevitchii Monastery in Moscow. Bakhtin was a critic sensitive to genre and form, and his lifelong immersion in this central, archetypal ‘form’ shaped his literary sensitivity. For Russian Orthodox Christians, the liturgy is the central medium for

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reading of Rabelais, carnival is not so much an opposition to Christian faith or the church as it is the

rejection of a certain kind of clericalism and ecclesiastical power, an abusive distortion of the

church and its liturgy that occurs whenever religion is reduced to dogmatic and repressive ideology.

In contrast, the “earlier and purer” life of carnival is free from such constraints:

The basis of laughter which gives form to carnival rituals frees them completely from all religious and ecclesiastic dogmatism, from all mysticism and piety. They are also completely deprived of the character of magic and prayer; they do not command nor do they ask for anything.27

Bakhtin detects within the church festivals of the middle ages two concurrent but separate

celebrations—the “two faces of Janus”—the official feast “whether ecclesiastic, feudal, or

sponsored by the state,” and the true and life-giving feast of the people:

Its official, ecclesiastical face was turned to the past and sanctioned the existing order, but the face of the people of the marketplace looked into the future and laughed, attending the funeral of the past and present. The marketplace feast opposed the protective, timeless stability, the unchanging established order and ideology, and stressed the element of change and renewal.28

Most significantly, the ‘official’ feast is sterile precisely because it is not forward-looking and

eschatological: it “did not lead people out of the existing world and created no second life.”29

On the contrary, [authorities] sanctioned the existing pattern of things and reinforced it [... and] the official feast looked back at the past and used the past to consecrate the present. Unlike the earlier and purer feast, the official feast asserted all that was stable, unchanging, perennial: the existing hierarchy, the existing religious, political and moral values, norms, and prohibitions. It was the triumph of a truth already established, the predominant truth that was put forward as eternal and indisputable.30

apprehension of the gospel. And indeed, many themes implicit in the liturgy express themselves in Bakhtin’s own ideas of narrative.” Ugolnik, Ibid., 169.

27 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 7. 28 Ibid., 81. 29 Ibid., 9. 30 Ibid.

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So, although Bakhtin clearly “had strong reservations about the church (any church) as an

institution wielding power, it would be wrong to categorise him as necessarily anti-Christian on

those grounds.”31

Indeed, although Bakhtin rejects the barrenness of a Christianity construed in terms of

repressive power or along purely metaphysical lines, he teaches that “the gospel, too, is carnival.”32

He sees in the incarnation, life and saving action of Jesus the same liberating truth that carnival

represents. Carnival is primarily an affirmation of the incarnation, and a rejection of Platonic

metaphysics, for carnival’s “grotesque realism” is able to “bring down to earth, turn their subject

into flesh.”33 It is not a rejection of idealism and hope as such, for feast always has “an essential,

meaningful philosophical content,”34 and in order for carnival to be possible, it “must be sanctioned

not by the world of practical conditions but by the highest aims of human existence, that is by the

world of ideals.”35 Yet these ideals are always embodied in experience: living in the “realm of

ultimate questions,” carnival provides “no abstractly philosophical or religiously dogmatic solution;

it plays them out in the concretely sensuous form of carnivalistic acts and images.”36 In addition to

this incarnational foundation, the gospel and carnival share the aim of liberation from fear: where

in carnival there is laughter, in the New Testament—cf. 1 John 4.18, RSV: “There is no fear in love,

31 Ruth Coates, Christianity in Bakhtin: God and the Exiled Author (New York: Cambridge

University Press, 1998), 127. 32 Ibid., 8. 33 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 20. 34 Ibid., 8. 35 Ibid., 9. 36 M. M. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Ardis, 1973), 134. As

cited by Coates, 132.

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but perfect love casts out fear”—“the liberating, fear-destroying principle is love”37 such that, one

commentator on Bakhtin says, we may “speak of a ‘carnival love’ of the gospels.”38 Like the gospel,

carnival is fundamentally eschatological and concerned with the age to come, for it “celebrates the

destruction of the old and the birth of the new world—the new year, the new spring, the new

kingdom.”39 Regarding this future world expressed in carnival, Bakhtin quotes Goethe: “Its crown is

love. Only through love can we draw near to it.”40 In this new world all tyrannies are overthrown

and divisions overcome, and people are “reborn for new, purely human relations.”41 What can be

known of this new world, for Bakhtin, is “modelled in the gospels, and particularly in the life and

discourse of Jesus Christ, the universe’s prime fool and its carnival king.”42

As the gospel has a divine carnival at its heart, so too, despite its appearance of solemn

beauty and profound seriousness, the Orthodox liturgy which it directly informs:

Liturgy in its structure is the very archetype of divine carnival. In proclaiming God’s kingdom, it alters the way in which we see this world and forces us into perpetual re-evaluation. Intellectual tyranny and worldly power take themselves seriously. The gospel mocks that seriousness.43

Although Bakhtin specifically notes that the comic rituals of carnival “are not religious rituals like,

for instance, the Christian liturgy to which they are linked by distant genetic ties,”44 nevertheless

37 Coates, Christianity in Bakhtin, 134. 38 Ibid., 135. 39 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 410. 40 Ibid., 256. As cited by Coates, 136. 41 Ibid., 10. 42 Coates, Christianity in Bakhtin, 151. 43 Ugolnik, The Illuminating Icon, 170. 44 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 7.

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Orthodox Christian worship uses the same process of mirroring, distorting and overthrowing rigid

tyrannical powers:

In liturgy the Christian overthrows the kingdom of this world and celebrates the kingdom of the Trinity. It is the social and religious structure within which the poor are enriched, the meek made courageous, the oppressed made into monarchs. Thus it is hardly an empty ‘cultic’ celebration, an ‘opera’ that is removed from the terms of the lived world. It is indeed in its nature a ‘subversion’ of the structures of tyranny. It demands that we see this flawed and blasted world anew, as renewed in Christ; that we sinners stand as the redeemed. Liturgy does not ‘announce’, in monologue, the Good News. Liturgy dialogically ‘celebrates’ the gospel; it enacts the plan of God.45

Within the liturgy there is “playful restlessness,” there are “constant shifts in frame of reference,”

there is “majestic celebration of what Bakhtin calls alterity, of the ‘otherness’ of God,”46 and above

all there is chaotic, destructive inversion of the world’s structure driving the worshipping assembly

into liminality, antistructure and communion that is “the appropriate mode of existence for

Christians.”47 The communion of the church, thus founded on this antistructure, is “in a

revolutionary fashion, subversive of the established worldly order.”48 Its worship presents an

alternative vision of the world and indeed, “unless the worship of the church manifests its

liminality, it cannot become the church’s self-revelation and an expression of the church in relation

to the world.”49

There would no doubt be many who would be uneasy with the concept of Orthodox

Christian worship having anything in common with the anarchic, chaotic and Dionysian excess of

45 Ugolnik, The Illuminating Icon, 171. 46 Ibid., 169–170, 171. 47 Passakos, “Worship, Rituals and Liturgy in Orthodox Tradition: Insights from Practice and

Theology,” 27. 48 Ibid., 26. 49 Ibid., 28.

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carnival. Yet within the complex ritual acts and symbols of the Orthodox liturgy beats a

fundamentally ‘anti-ritual’ heart of freedom. Just as Orthodox theology properly understood resists

dogmatisation and systematisation, but merely sets bounds to protect theology—the direct

knowledge of God through experience—so Orthodox worship resists formal hierarchies and rigid

rules to protect the communal experience of God in freedom. And “since the dominant ideology

seeks to author the social order as a unified text, fixed, complete, and forever,” Orthodox liturgy,

like carnival, is a “threat.”50

(IV) Case Study: An Orthodox Sunday Worship Event as

Eschatological Performance and Divine Carnival

Employing this model of liturgy as the enactment and ‘carnival’ of the kingdom of God, let

us examine and comment on the Sunday morning worship at an Orthodox parish. To do so, in

keeping with the performance theory understanding of liturgy as the enactment in specific

moments of space-time by unique persons, we will avoid as far as possible analysing the text and

rubrics of the liturgical services involved, and steer away from examining the ritual actions of the

liturgy in the abstract; we will instead endeavour to describe and discuss what a worshipping

community did in the course of a specific performance of Sunday worship. The service for our case

study was the celebration of Mattins and the Divine Liturgy of Saint Basil the Great on the first

Sunday of Lent (5 March 2017), at Holy Myrrhbearers Orthodox Mission, an English-language parish

in the Archdiocese of Canada of the Orthodox Church in America. On this particular Sunday

throughout the Orthodox Church, in addition to the themes and readings pertaining to the first

Sunday of Lent, there is an annual celebration of the ‘Triumph of Orthodoxy,’ commemorating the

50 Clark and Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin, 301.

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final restoration of icons in 843 after the iconoclastic period and, by extension, the return of the

church from heresy to the full Orthodox faith as expressed in the Seven Ecumenical Councils. The

service on this Sunday at Holy Myrrhbearers was thus augmented by hymns celebrating the joyous

victory of Orthodox faith and teaching the incarnational theology of icons, as well as, following the

celebration of the Divine Liturgy, by a special ritual procession with icons around the church.

Holy Myrrhbearers mission meets for worship in the chapel of Trinity College at the

University of Toronto. The chapel is a long and tall Gothic-style Anglican church with a large

sanctuary and central aisle separating wooden pews on either side; it is thus not ideally suited for

Orthodox worship which is celebrated ‘in the round’ within a room as wide as it is deep, and with an

open space without seating save around the outer walls in order to facilitate movement within the

ritual action. The chapel at Trinity College is adapted by Holy Myrrhbearers each week by putting up

an icon screen consisting of four large panels with icons to divide the sanctuary (or ‘altar’) from the

nave. The two central icons—Christ on the right, and the Virgin Mary (Theotokos) holding the infant

Christ on the left—are flanked by icons of the myrrhbearing-women with the angel at the tomb of

Christ on far left, and of the transfiguration on the far right. The panels are arranged to create a

central opening (‘holy doors’) and two side openings (‘deacon’s doors’), though without the normal

doors of an iconostasis. Further icons are put out for veneration on stands: Christ and the

Theotokos, along with an icon placed centrally of the resurrection of Christ. Sandboxes are placed

near these icons for people to light candles. Within the altar, a holy table sits centrally, draped in a

cloth adorned with painted icons of the four evangelists; on the table are a cross, candles and more

icons, along with the gospel book and blessing cross. Behind the holy table on the far wall

(traditionally, the ‘apse’) hangs a large icon of the Theotokos ‘of the Sign’ (Πλατυτέρα, ‘more

spacious than the heavens’). The following photograph depicts these main elements.

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What follows is not a comprehensive or sequential commentary on every aspect of ritual

praxis during the service for this case study. Rather, the main themes emerging from the

performance of the liturgical action have been grouped together for discussion: (i) gradually

assembling as the church, (ii) joyfully celebrating light and resurrection, (iii) dialogically proclaiming

the incarnate Word of God, (iv) offering, sacrificing and uniting, and (v) overthrowing and

transforming the world into the new kingdom.

(i) Gradually Assembling as the Church

What would be particularly striking for many western Christian observers of this service is

that the worshippers did not all arrive around the same time or indeed in time for a particular

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service start time. When the service of Mattins began at 9am, there were fewer than a dozen

people present, but worshippers continued to arrive throughout the Mattins service and the first

part of the Divine Liturgy, until around 60 people were participating in worship.

As they arrived, some simply slipped discreetly into a pew but many moved about the

church, particularly the open space in front of the iconostasis, where they took time to venerate the

icons, light candles and stand in prayer. The worshippers exhibited throughout the service a degree

of freedom of movement despite the presence of the pews, not only moving around the worship

space, but also at various times exiting and re-entering the church as they saw fit. The overall sense

for most of the worshippers was one of being relaxed and ‘at home’ in worship, rather than being

spectators confined to seats at a dramatic performance. As Bakhtin says of carnival, it “is not a

spectacle seen by the people; they live in it, and everyone participates because its very idea

embraces all the people.”51 The pews did somewhat impinge on this, however, by encouraging

people to spread out throughout the length of the nave, putting more space between them and

thereby undermining a more perfect embodiment of assembly as one worshipping community.

Carnival-like freedom of movement extended to the posture adopted by the worshippers,

for not all people adopted the same forms at the same times. Most respected the appointed times

for sitting, such as during the Kathisma (κάθισμα, ‘sitting’) psalms and hymns of Mattins, a

reflective portion of the service characterised by continuous reading of the psalter derived from

ancient monastic practice. For most of the service, however, most of the people stood. Standing is

the typical posture of Sunday worship52 to represent the resurrection and the new kingdom, for as

Saint Basil the Great explains:

51 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 7. 52 As taught, for example, by the 20th canon of the First Ecumenical Council at Nicaea.

—20—

On the day of the resurrection (ἀνάστασις, literally ‘standing again’) we remind ourselves of the grace given to us by standing at prayer, not only because we rose with Christ, and are bound to ‘seek those things which are above,’ but because the day seems to us to be in some sense an image of the age which we expect.53

We stand in worship as “upright people (not fallen), saved people, free people, God’s people”—we

stand “confidently in His presence and await eagerly His return.”54 Though standing (with occasional

sitting) was the main posture for the service, at some points, a few worshippers exercised their

freedom to kneel, a more typical posture for services other than on the Lord’s day, and also made

full bows or prostrations, notably the presider55 after the consecration of the eucharistic gifts.

While standing, the worshippers frequently made the sign of the cross—a deliberate

movement with three fingers of the right hand joined (to represent the Trinity) and two fingers

pressed against the palm of the hand (to represent the divine and human natures of Christ),

touching the forehead, the breast, the right shoulder and left shoulder, often accompanied by a

small bow from the waist. Worshippers sometimes made this gesture together, for instance during

the Trinitarian doxologies at the end of litanies, but most often they were made individually at

points when they appeared to be appropriating the meaning of a particular prayer or intercession

for themselves. Bowing was also done by many, though not all, when receiving blessings made in

the form of the cross and greetings of “Peace be unto all” from the presider, when being censed,

and at the exhortation before certain prayers “Let us bow our heads unto the Lord.” The presider

often prayed with arms outstretched (the orans posture of early Christian worship), with a few of

the other worshippers following suit, notably during the singing of the Lord’s prayer.

53 Saint Basil the Great, On the Holy Spirit, chapter 27.

http://www.orthodoxprayer.org/Articles_files/Basil-On%20Prayer.html (retrieved 10 April 2017). 54 Anthony M. Coniaris, Sacred Symbols That Speak: A Study of the Major Symbols Used in the

Orthodox Church (Minneapolis, Minnesota: Light and Life Publishing, 1985), Vol. II, 5. 55 The author of this paper.

—21—

The overall freedom of movement and posture that permeated the service nevertheless

respected ‘high’ moments, such as scriptural readings and the eucharistic prayers, with the

worshippers coming to attention. Often these moments were introduced by ritual exhortations

from the presider such as “wisdom, aright” and “wisdom, let us attend”—and, before the anaphora

(main prayer of offering, thanksgiving and blessing): “Let us stand aright. Let us stand with fear. Let

us attend, that we may offer the holy oblation in peace.”56 All these phrases had the effect of

suspending the worshipping community’s movement for short periods of concentrated attention.

Likewise, there was little movement, including no making of the sign of the cross, during the solemn

reading of the Six Psalms at the beginning of Mattins, a passage of ritual often described as

representing the watchfulness of the faithful awaiting the Lord’s return.

From the variety of movements and postures, the worship exhibited not only the freedom

of carnival, but its deeply embodied ritual, with worship encompassing the whole person, body and

soul. It represented the view of ritual understood as a ‘technology’ of the self or body, in which

repeated physical actions are not theatrical gestures, but undertaken to engender and shape a

spiritual disposition. For instance, the word for ‘bow’ in Greek, μετάνοια, is the same as the word

for repentance, and a prostration is simply a ‘great metanoia.’ Body and soul work thus together to

create a complete experience of worship. Anthony Coniaris explains:

The posture of the body will send a powerful message to the mind. Our bodies, then, must be a part of any approach to God because everything is experienced through our human nature. Some of the Church Fathers say that if the body is not praying, the whole person is not praying. God is truly worshipped with one’s whole being. Mind, heart, soul and body are to seek union with God.57

56 Anaphora, Liturgy of St Basil the Great, from Service Books of the Orthodox Church, 138. 57 Coniaris, Sacred Symbols That Speak, Vol. II, 2.

—22—

In the service, the mind—both the spiritual intellect (νοῦς) and rational faculty (διάνοια)—was also

not neglected, with the words of the hymns, readings and homily reflecting a rich theological

tradition, delving particularly on this day into the theology of the incarnation safeguarded by the

proper use of iconography. The service thus captured what Ronald Grimes expresses when he

writes: “The body is cognitive, not stupid; and conversely, the mind is embodied.”58

Western, and especially Protestant, observers would have noticed in the liturgical

assembly a certain division between the presiding priest, accompanied by an altar server, and the

lay worshippers. Physically that was represented by the icon screen separating the sanctuary from

the nave; only the presider and server ever went into the altar area. On one level, this reflects the

all-too-common bifurcation of liturgy into active agents ‘on stage’ in the sanctuary and passive

recipients in the pews. Yet many of the liturgical actions of this service took place in the open space

in front of the iconostasis—prayers, processions, scriptural readings, veneration of icons, the

hearing of confessions, and the reception of communion—such that much of the service took place

in the round and (but for the barrier of the pews) effectively in the midst of the people. Moreover,

when the presider stood within the altar, he did so mainly facing together with the entire assembly

towards the liturgical east, that is, towards the Lord, the “dayspring from on high.” (Luke 1.78) The

significance is that the assembly, while led by the presider, largely acted as one worshipping body

without the “footlights,” as Bakhtin calls them, that delineate the acts and spectators in formal

aesthetic performance.59

58 Ronald Grimes, “Reinventing Ritual,” Soundings 75:1 (1992), 32, as cited by Mitchell, Liturgy

and the Social Sciences, 48. 59 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 7.

—23—

The gradual assembly of the worshipping body in this case study was marked by several

liturgical stages. Most of the gathering took place during Mattins, part of the daily office or ‘liturgy

of the hours’ that represents the unceasing worship of the church; and indeed, apart from the few

present for the opening blessing, the majority of worshippers arrived within an ongoing liturgy, a

service without a discernible beginning. This incremental gathering continued through Mattins into

the first part of the Divine Liturgy, a section of the eucharistic service which until the 11th or 12th

century was performed as a stational liturgy, with psalms, hymns and intercessions sung as the

moving assembly gathered people throughout the city on the way to the church. At the doors of the

church the people would then await the arrival of the bishop or presiding priest, and then all enter

together in a rite preserved in the service today as the Little Entrance, a procession with the gospel

book and prayer of entrance:

O Master, Lord our God, who hast appointed in heaven orders and hosts of angels and archangels for the service of Thy glory: Grant that with our entrance there may be an entrance of holy angels, serving with us and glorifying Thy goodness. For unto Thee are due all glory, honour, and worship; to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, now and ever, and unto ages of ages. Amen.60

By staging their gathering, and formally ‘entering’ together on this prayer and the singing of the

entrance hymn—“Come, let us worship and fall down before Christ, our King and our God,” (cf.

Psalm 95)—the people of Holy Myrrhbearers effectively embodied the stational gathering and

entrance of yesteryear.

The formal constitution of the assembly was further ritualised after the readings and

intercessory prayers by the dismissal of the catechumens. The litany for the catechumens

culminated in the blessing of two people preparing for baptism who made their way to the front

60 Prayer of Entrance, Liturgy of Saint Basil the Great, from Service Books of the Orthodox

Church, 110.

—24—

and placed themselves under the stole of the priest for the prayer and signing of the cross on their

heads; they were then dismissed—nominally, for they just took their places again, though towards

the back of the pews—before the prayers continued with the exhortation “let us, the faithful, again

and again pray to the Lord.” This consolidation of the assembled faithful believers—those in

communion with the church together with those restored to communion by confession during the

preceding Mattins—was further ritualised after the Great Entrance, the processional offering of

bread and wine, by the ancient rite of the Kiss of Peace. The presider exhorted the community, “let

us love one another,” introducing the greeting “Christ is in our midst” and the reply “He is and ever

shall be.” In most Orthodox churches, the kiss of peace is only exchanged between clergy, but at

Holy Myrrhbearers, most of the people joined in with what Alexander Schmemann describes as

“something physical, a sacramental act” of utmost importance, “a transformation of the one who

stands next to me into what the Church is, namely, a true brotherhood, a unity of persons.”61 After

the kiss, the presiding priest introduced the congregational singing of the Nicene Creed, the symbol

of faith: “The doors, the doors. In wisdom, let us attend.” Again, this was only nominal, and no

doors were actually locked as they would have been in the early centuries under persecution, but it

served as a further liturgical reminder of the constitution of a specific assembly for a unique

enactment of the kingdom, and a symbolic protection of the carnival freedom of their worship.

(ii) Joyfully Celebrating Light and Resurrection

The Greek word for Mattins is Orthros (ὄρθρος), meaning early dawn or daybreak, and

technically this service is appointed to be served at such a time so that dawn will really break

61 Alexander Schmemann, The Eucharist: Sacrament of the Kingdom (Crestwood, NY: St

Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1987), 150.

—25—

towards the end of the service. At Holy Myrrhbearers, in a condescension to modern sensibilities,

the service began just over two hours after dawn, but the entire service nevertheless symbolised (if

somewhat nominally) rising in the night to wait upon the coming of the light, representing both the

resurrection of Christ and His return in glory. These themes were evinced throughout by the texts of

many prayers—for instance, the 12th collect prayer, “We praise, hymn, bless and give Thee thanks,

O God of our fathers, for Thou hast turned aside the shades of night and shown us again the light of

day”—and the lighting of candles and carrying of candles in procession, but also principally in the

ritual performance of the service of the myrrhbearing women which formed the central axis of

Mattins.

After the solemn Six Psalms and reflective reading of the Kathisma psalms and hymns,

Mattins shifted gears abruptly to an anamnesis of the first Lord’s day when “the first day of the

week, at early dawn, [the women] came to the tomb, taking the spices that they had prepared”

(Luke 24.2 RSV). The joyful singing of the Evlogitaria (hymns of blessing) of the Resurrection was

accompanied by a censing of the entire church, before a reading of one of the eleven-weekly cycle

of resurrection gospels—on this Sunday, Luke 24:1-12—vividly enacted by presiding priest and

server, “two men in dazzling clothes” (Luke 24.4), standing on either side of the holy table

representing the tomb of Christ. After the reading, the gospel was brought out as the people sang

the joyful Hymn of the Resurrection, “Having beheld the resurrection of Christ.” The gospel book

was placed on a stand for the people to come forward and venerate bowing down, signing

themselves with the cross and kissing the icon of the resurrection inscribed on the cover of the

gospel book. After venerating the gospel, the people were anointed with blessed oil, a further

tangible sign of the gladness of the event, and a reminder of their baptism and anointing in the

form of their risen Lord, Jesus the Anointed (χριστός).

—26—

This rite of the myrrhbearing women celebrating the resurrection at the heart of Sunday

Mattins is the epitome of the reversal of divine carnival. The women arrived at the tomb lamenting

the death of their Lord, without understanding, with only the openness of heart and radical trust of

their love. The encountered the empty tomb and the radiant angel transformed them: “Why do you

mingle myrrh with tears of pity, O women disciples?” says the angel. “The time for lamentation is

passed! Weep not! But tell of the resurrection to the apostles” (Evlogitaria). Over and over the

paschal reversal of sorrow to joy, of death to life is celebrated in the words and actions of the

service. Significantly, reversal comes not from some metaphysical enlightenment or new

philosophical category of thought, but from a direct and incarnational experience embodied in the

pilgrimage to and events occurring at the empty tomb: “Behold, through the cross joy has come

into all the world” (Hymn of the Resurrection). Together with the myrrhbearers they represented,

the worshippers in our case study experienced the exuberance that Bakhtin says characterises

mediaeval students on carnival feast days:

They were first of all freed from the heavy chains of devout seriousness, from the ‘continual ferment of piety and the fear of God’. They were freed from the oppression of such gloomy categories as ‘eternal’, ‘immovable’, ‘absolute’, ‘unchangeable’ and instead were exposed to the gay and free laughing aspect of the world, with its unfinished and open character, with the joy of change and renewal.62

The free and joyful response to the resurrection is indeed true carnival, for, in contrast to salvation

or rebirth construed so often as a privatised individual ‘spiritual’ experience, it is a call to communal

and material personhood, to a shared resurrection body and life. All resurrection is communal, for

as Bakhtin says: “The body shall rise from the dead not for its own sake, but for the sake of those

62 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 83.

—27—

who love us, who knew and loved the countenance [the flesh] that was ours and ours alone.”63 The

light of the resurrection is a new life lived for the other, offered for the other in perfect freedom: in

lighting candles and celebrating light, “I bring a light that I myself may become a light, burning and

shining to all that are in the church,” the fire of love of God and neighbour.64

The celebration of the light of the resurrection in our Mattins case study culminated with

the proclamation by the priest, “Glory to Thee who hast shown forth the light”—nominally, at the

precise moment of dawn—and the ebullient singing of the Great Doxology, “Glory to God in the

highest,” accompanied with another full censing of the church. The resurrection themes continued

through the Divine Liturgy following immediately after the Great Doxology, for every Sunday in the

Orthodox church is a mini-Pascha, a celebration of the resurrection, and rings forth with the risus

pascalis, the paschal laughter of carnival.65

(iii) Dialogically Proclaiming the Incarnate Word of God

This communal and embodied celebration of the proclamation of light and resurrection

was further developed in the incarnational and dialogic manifestation of ‘Word’ (λόγος) during the

services. The holy scriptures—the psalms, the resurrection gospel of Mattins, the epistle and gospel

at the Divine Liturgy—were always chanted, and not merely spoken. The New Testament texts in

particular were chanted with great solemnity and accompanied by ritual acts—the veneration of

the gospel book at Mattins, the procession with the gospel book at the Little Entrance of the Divine

Liturgy, the blessing of the epistle reader and her procession to the centre of the church, the

63 As cited by Clark and Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin, 87. 64 John of Kronstadt, Spiritual Counsels of Father John of Kronstadt: Select Passages from My

Life in Christ (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1989), 91. 65 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 146. There is no greater carnivalesque celebration in

Orthodox worship than at Pascha.

—28—

censing and procession of candles for the gospel proclamation—embodying the active and

performative quality of the λόγος του Θεού. The readings were surrounded by multiple dialogues of

invitation (“let us attend”), giving peace and blessing (“peace be unto thee, reader”), and

responded to in the fervent prayers of intercession for the whole world, for the catechumens, and

finally for the faithful constituted as the church and going forward to the celebration of the

eucharist. In a real sense, this celebration of the Word represented God’s engagement of discourse

with His people: “He has oriented His Word, incarnate and material to us.”66

If in the west human consciousness is perceived, at least since the age of enlightenment,

as an individual and autonomous phenomenon, the performance of the rituals surrounding the

Word in the services of our case study served to illustrate the eastern Christian understanding of

consciousness and response as communal, dialogic and incarnational. For Orthodox Christians

“consciousness is a communal product. The self is not owned; it is the product of interaction. The

self is never complete; it is always in interrelationship and ever-becoming.”67 As Bakhtin writes, the

“Word is a two-sided act. It is determined equally by whose word it is and for whom it is meant.”68

This means that dialogue is possible “because what joins two speakers is not a transcendental

principle but material, bodily being.”69 The entire Orthodox liturgy assumes a different audience for

the gospel than simply individual souls called to respond psychologically in their spirit, who join

66 Anthony Ugolnik, “Tradition as Freedom from the Past: Contemporary Eastern Orthodoxy

and Ecumenism,” Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research, Occasional Papers, no 17 (November 1982), 2. As cited by Clark and Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin, 86.

67 Ugolnik, The Illuminating Icon, 164. 68 Attributed originally to Valentin Volshinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language – a

work latterly assigned by most scholars to the authorship of Bakhtin. As cited by Clark and Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin, 86.

69 Charles Lock, “Carnival and Incarnation: Bakhtin and Orthodox Theology,” in Mikhail Bakhtin, vol. 1 (London: SAGE, 2003), 294.

—29—

together in a moral association called church. It is rather the gospel embedded in the body of the

faithful in a dialogue that is social and material; it is the word functioning, in the theme of this

Sunday and as elaborated in the homily, iconographically. It is thus a reflection of the incarnate

Word who “may be said to represent the perfect reconciliation of language with the body.”70

Since the ritual dialogic celebration of the Word within Orthodox liturgy is in essence “the

divine dialogue that is the emblem of ‘reciprocal definition’,”71 it calls the faithful through “‘co-

consciousness’ in the gospel” to “‘inter-being’ in the community of the church.”72 This is the call to

the communion or fellowship (κοινωνία) of the Word as expressed vividly and even carnally and

sensually in the first epistle of John:

That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life (Λόγου τῆς ζωῆς)—the life was made manifest, and we saw it, and testify to it, and proclaim to you the life of the age to come (ζωὴν τὴν αἰώνιον) which was with the Father and was made manifest to us—that which we have seen and heard we proclaim also to you, so that you may have fellowship (κοινωνίαν) with us; and our fellowship (κοινωνία) is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ. (1 John 1-3, RSV)73

In our service under study, the response to the proclamation of the living Word calling them from

their individualistic lives in this sage into the communion of the new kingdom was ritually expressed

by the response of the faithful in the prayers and offering, and culminating just before the

eucharist—and the actual praxis of communion—with the congregational singing of the Nicene

Creed. The symbol of faith begins in the first person, “I believe,” yet it is sung together:

70 Coates, Christianity in Bakhtin, 134. 71 Ugolnik, The Illuminating Icon, 169. 72 Ibid. 73 As per the Revised Standard Version, though correcting the translation of ζωὴν τὴν αἰώνιον

from ‘eternal life’ to ‘life of the age to come.’

—30—

Each ‘I believe’ is sung in a chorus of ‘I believes’; each voice tends toward a hearer in its audience. Christians express the act of belief not only privately, to God, but also publicly, to each other. In our mutual belief, we help to effect each other’s belief. Liturgy is a dialogic act, an expression of our mutuality as Christians.74

The communal confession “is what linguists call an ‘illocutionary act,’ a statement that brings itself

into effect.”75

(iv) Offering, Sacrificing and Uniting

The central liturgical theme of offering can be traced ritually by looking at the actions

surrounding the bread throughout the Sunday worship service. The first act was the baking of the

bread—always leavened bread in the Orthodox Church—with one main round loaf for the eucharist

and many smaller round loaves for commemorations. Traditionally worshippers would come to

church with their own loaves of bread baked at home and deposit these with wine and other

offerings on their entrance to the church, along with lists of living and departed people to be prayed

for during the liturgy. At Holy Myrrhbearers, following the contemporary practice of most Orthodox

parishes, one person baked the bread but many of the faithful had submitted their lists of names

prior to the service. The Mattins service was preceded by a short rite of preparation called the

prothesis during which the eucharistic elements were prepared by the priest accompanied by the

altar server. This rite used to be done in the skevophylakion, a small building outside the church

where worshippers would bring their offerings; in most Orthodox churches the prothesis table is

now located within the altar, but at Holy Myrrhbearers the side chapel is used so that the faithful

may participate if they wish (though few do), by bringing their offerings and commemorations and

74 Ugolnik, The Illuminating Icon, 172. 75 Ibid.

—31—

attending the rite, and also to retain the sense of linear movement and ascension in the Great

Entrance—an action meant to represent “linear movement from history to the last times”76—rather

than relegating it to a circular procession from within the altar only to return there again.

During the service of the prothesis, within a series of prayers and Biblical citations the

priest cut a cube-shaped portion of bread called the lamb from the main loaf and placed it on the

diskos (a paten with a base), and wine and water were poured into the cup. Triangular pieces of

bread were cut from the other loaves and placed around the lamb—a larger triangle for the

Theotokos on one side, nine smaller triangles in three ranks on the other, representing nine

categories of saints from the Old and New Covenant and throughout the life of the church. At Holy

Myrrhbearers the saints commemorated included all the traditional ones in addition to saints from

the ancient western church and the patron saints of all members of the parish. Then further

particles were cut and placed below the lamb to commemorate the bishops of the church and all

people, living and dead, whose names are on the

commemoration sheets. The scores of names

commemorated included not only members of the parish,

but extended the reach of prayer through family and

friends into the wider world. The diagram (right) represents

the preparation of the bread, with Christ (the lamb)

surrounded by the saints and faithful of the church. The rite

of prothesis concluded with the veiling of the diskos and

cup, and a censing.

76 Zizioulas, The Eucharistic Communion and the World, 95.

—32—

During the Great Entrance, during the singing of the Cherubic Hymn—“Let us who

mystically represent the cherubim, and who sing the thrice-holy hymn to the Life-creating Trinity,

now lay aside all earthly cares, that we may receive the King of All, who comes invisibly upborne by

the angelic hosts. Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia!”77—the prepared and veiled gifts were brought from

the side chapel through the nave of the church and the assembled people bowing and crossing

themselves and then into the sanctuary. During the entrance the priest made numerous

commemorations—of hierarchs, civil authorities, people suffering and sick, the recently departed—

asking the Lord to remember them “in His kingdom.” Placed on the holy table, on the antimension

cloth depicting the icon of Christ’s burial in the tomb and inscribed with the name of the ruling

hierarch under whose spiritual care the liturgy was celebrated, the bread and wine were unveiled.

In the Anaphora, the great sacrifice of thanksgiving (εὐχαριστία), the offered bread and

wine were described as “memorials of [Christ’s] saving passion” and as “antitypes of [His] Holy Body

and Blood.” 78 Following a commemoration (ἀνάμνησις) of all God’s saving acts—including the

remembrance of Christ’s “second coming,” showing that the liturgical action was taking place

already in the age to come—the diskos (with the bread iconographically depicting Christ, the saints

and all the world) and cup were held aloft by the priest who prayed: “Thine own of Thine own, we

offer unto Thee, on behalf of all and for all.”79 The ritual action thus highlighted the expansive

nature of the offering and sacrifice of praise, the work of the “Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church,

which is from end to end of the universe.”80

77 Cherubic Hymn, Liturgy of Saint Basil the Great, from Service Books of the Orthodox Church,

128. 78 Anaphora, Liturgy of Saint Basil the Great, from Ibid., 142, 145. 79 Ibid., 144. Emphasis added. 80 Ibid., 150.

—33—

The consecrated bread and wine in this rite represented not only the all-encompassing

reach of the church in the age to come, but also the unity in love and freedom experienced in the

kingdom. Bowing down in veneration, and invoking the image of the consecrated bread—the body

of Christ—and the commemorations surrounding it, the presider led the community in asking that

God may “unite all of us to one another who become partakers of the one bread and cup in the

communion of the Holy Spirit.”81 In an extended intercession, prayer was then offered for God’s

abundant mercy to be poured out upon the whole world and everyone within it, including “those

who love us and those who hate us; those who have asked us to pray for them, unworthy though

we be” and “all those whom we have not remembered through ignorance, forgetfulness or the

multitude of names.”82 The recklessly infinite scope of these prayers indicates that, as with carnival,

while liturgy lasts “there is no other life outside it. During carnival time life is subject only to its

laws, that is, the laws of its own freedom. It has a universal spirit; it is a special condition of the

entire world, of the world’s revival and renewal, in which all take part.”83 The eucharistic liturgy is

not therefore a form of sacramental escape from the world, but sacrifice precisely as mission to the

world, an invitation to “the outside world to participate in the new humanity which is formed as the

body of Christ, a humanity of love, unity, equality, justice and freedom.”84

81 Ibid., 146-147. 82 Ibid., 151. 83 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 7. 84 Passakos, “Worship, Rituals and Liturgy in Orthodox Tradition: Insights from Practice and

Theology,” 24.

—34—

(v) Overthrowing and Transforming the World into the Kingdom

In the Sunday worship service of this case study, the central liturgical act was of course the

sharing of communion, partaking of the banquet of the age to come. All save a few present—the

catechumens and a few visitors—responded to the invitation “In the fear of God, with faith and

love, draw near” and went forward to receive the consecrated bread and wine which were brought

out from the altar in the cup. Communicants approached, arms crossed on their chest, and received

the eucharist on a spoon from the priest. That the service culminated in a meal is telling: the

presence of the Lord is incompatible with mourning and fasting (cf. Matthew 9.15), for it is always

the occasion of festivity and joy. In the words of the Saint Macarius of Egypt, an ascetic renowned

for his fasting prowess, “Christianity is food and drink.”85 Bakhtin insists that the banquet of the

carnival “always celebrates a victory”86 and invokes eucharistic imagery when he says that bread

and wine “disperse fear and liberate the world.”87 It is a feast in complete freedom “from all that is

utilitarian, practical. It is a temporary transfer to the utopian world.”88

The victory banquet of the eucharist is the representation of this dispersal of fear and

liberation, of the complete overthrow of the powers of this age and the transformation of the world

into the kingdom of the age to come. For Bakhtin, “the triumphal banquet is always universal. It is

the triumph of life over death. In this respect it is equivalent to conception and birth. The victorious

body receives the defeated world and is renewed.”89 During the service, this confrontation with the

85 As cited by Christos Yannaras, The Freedom of Morality (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s

Seminary Press, 1984), 93. 86 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 283. 87 Ibid., 285. 88 Ibid., 276. 89 Ibid., 283.

—35—

powers of this age had been signalled in the extolling of the “paradoxical enjoyment of God’s order

of things”90 in the Magnificat during Mattins—“He has shown strength with His arm, He has

scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts, He has put down the mighty from their

thrones, and exalted those of low degree” (Luke 1.51-53)—and in the antiphonal psalms at the

beginning of the Divine Liturgy, including celebrating the Lord “who executes justice for the

oppressed and gives food to the hungry” and who “lifts up those who are bowed down” (Psalm

146.7-8). In place of the tyrannical authorities and structures of this present age, the Divine Liturgy

presented an alternative vision—in its antistructures—for the life of the world. They were

expressed throughout the ethos and ritual praxis of the Sunday worship service, and summed up in

the congregational singing of the beatitudes (the Third Antiphon) at the beginning of Liturgy. The

experience of these antistructures in worship challenges the assembled faithful and pushes them

into the liminal state, the limbo-like interim state in which communitas, that is, true communion

and community, becomes possible. For Passakos, this liminal state is where the church must

currently abide: “These ‘anti-structures’ should never become institutionalized, since the church is

looking to the eschata for its identity, and for the time being remains in a state of transition.”91

From the carnival banquet of victory and the upending of the world’s powers the church

emerges, not as an institution, but as communion, and this is the starting point of its mission to the

world.92 From every Divine Liturgy, the faithful are sent out as missionaries to enact the age to

come. In our case study, as it was the feast of Orthodoxy on the first Sunday of Lent, the service

90 Passakos, “Worship, Rituals and Liturgy in Orthodox Tradition: Insights from Practice and

Theology,” 27. 91 Ibid., 28. 92 Ibid.

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ended not with a simple dismissal but with a procession out into the cold (sub-zero degree)

sunshine of the world. Embracing all creation, the carnival feast cannot be “separated from bodily

life, from the earth, nature, and the cosmos,” for indeed, “the sun shines in the festive sky, and

there is such a thing as ‘feast-day’ weather.”93 Led by the priest and servers with candles, and

accompanied by the choir singing hymns, each of the faithful carried an icon and went out from the

church. The procession stopped at the four sides of the church for hymns of the feast and

intercessory prayers for the world. The procession culminated before the outside doors of the

church where the synodikon of Orthodoxy from the Seventh Ecumenical Council (787) was

pronounced—the celebration of the “faith that established the universe”—and Psalm 77 was

triumphantly sung: “Who is so great a god as our God? Thou art the God who workest wonders.”

The church, created in the eucharist and participating already in structures of the age to

come, is called to go forth into the world, not to reintegrate with it, for the only true and full

reintegration is eschatological, taking place in the age to come,94 but precisely to announce the

world’s overthrow and transformation. The church does not belong to this world—and from the

perspective of this age the carnival life of its liturgy is always on the ‘margins’—but “gradually

affects the world outside and its structures from the perspective of the kingdom of God.”95

Specifically, the new life of the age to come “brings the marginalized of the world into the

foreground and denounces injustice, oppression and every institutionalized evil.”96

X X X X X

93 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 276. 94 Passakos, “Worship, Rituals and Liturgy in Orthodox Tradition: Insights from Practice and

Theology,” 27. 95 Ibid., 28. 96 Ibid., 24.

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The heavenly nature of Orthodox worship is unquestionable; we would not wish to gainsay the

fabled ambassadors of Kievan Rus’ who discerned long ago in the celebration of the Divine Liturgy

at Constantinople the unity of heaven and earth. Yet too often this has been understood to mean

an aesthetic experience and spiritual apprehension of what Bakhtin rightly characterises as the

“gloomy categories” of eternal and unchangeable metaphysical ideals,97 depicted in the rich and

formal symbolism of ancient liturgical rites. In such a conception, liturgy degrades into a comforting

ritual, a source of stability for insular communities, providing them with a spiritual identity and a

temporary escape from the harsh realities of the profane world into the ‘holy’. In the end, this kind

of liturgy is revealed as having really nothing to do with anything at all.

In this paper, we have argued for a rediscovery of Orthodox worship not only as a glimpse

and foretaste here and now of the last things—the revelation of the day of the Lord and the age to

come—but a transformative enactment of the already inaugurated kingdom, the life of heaven and

earth already intertwined in the manifestation of the communion of the body of Christ. The liturgy

should be feast in the purest sense, incapable of reduction to earthly aims and transgressing “all

limited objectives.”98 As we have explored in our case study, a worship service on the feast of the

Triumph of Orthodoxy, the liturgy should be an expression of divine carnival, an icon mirroring the

present age in inverse perspective, toppling its tyrannies and exalting those on the margins,

transforming darkness into light and death into life, and creatively exemplifying a new human life of

freedom, justice and unbridled joy. Only in such an appreciation of the liturgy can the church be

truly revealed as an alternative communion to the life of the world, and only then can its worship

be truly described as Orthodox (ὀρθός + δόξα, ‘right glory’).

97 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 83. 98 Ibid., 276.

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