www.byzcath.org Forums Mysteries: The Life of Worship Vespers, Matins & the Divine Liturgy The Revised Divine Liturgy Is the scientific method appropriate for the study of liturgy ?

Let me begin by saying God bless Fr. Taft for all his good work whatever it is. But don�t we see in his writing the seeds of the liturgical chaos which we now have? Exactly what is this �scientific objectivity,� the �historical-critical distance� which is supposed to be the standard by which we judge theology and liturgy? What I sense in Fr. Taft�s position is that man has become the measure, when in fact in matters of liturgy and theology, God, not man, is the measure. Look at what he says:


http://web.archive.org/web/20041009165606/praiseofglory.com/taftliturgy.htm



The scientific model, by its very nature is ordered more to improving nature, not understanding it. It is not intrinsically opposed to understanding, but it is more ordered to action and improvement, not standing in awe of what is before it. While it is a great method for improving our understanding of the material world in order to manipulate that world, it also gives us a sense that we are gods because we can manipulate nature�for good or ill.

What strikes me about the Fathers, is that they didn�t study things under what we call the �historico-critical method� or with �scientific objectivity.� Instead theology and liturgy measured them. It was a very different attitude, one which is far more appropriate for theological and liturgical discourse.

I don't wish to be discourteous, and anyone who knows me knows that I approach the Church's worship with awe, fear, reverence, and a consciousness of my own unworthiness and inadequacy. However, I have every wish to defend Father Archimandrite Robert Taft (even though he needs no defence from someone as insignificant as I am, he is nevertheless a friend of fifty years standing, and his contribution to our knowledge and appreciation of the Church's liturgical tradition is massive).

The words do not indicate that the writer of those words either knows or respects the work of Father Archimandrite. This becomes even clearer as he continues.


In a word, no, we do not. It would be child's play to describe liturgical chaos which was afflicting the Church severely, long before Robert Taft was born. One of the causes of liturgical chaos is a precisely a lack of respect for scholarship - even a lack of appreciation of what liturgiological scholarship is. This in turn leads to some of the strangest liturgical aberrations that the human mind (perhaps with diabolical assistance) can concoct. This contempt for liturgiology borders on Gnosticism, and not infrequently crosses that border. Gnosticism is a conglomerate of various forms of Christian heresies and sheer paganism, bound together only by the idea that the mystic knowledge is accessible only to the Gnostic initiate. That is not either Catholic or Orthodox Christianity.

If I understand the complaint correctly, lm would like everyone to come to church and do quite a variety of rituals - and God forbid that anyone should ask the authentic significance of these rituals or the meaning of the texts used (should the Church forbid the study of liturgical Greek, lest someone find out what the prayers say?).

There is no authentic Christian piety which demands that we all become obscurantists. Shall we, for example, burn all the extant copies of the Mystagogic Catecheses of Saint Cyril of Jerusalem, just to make sure that no one reads them? Does lm seriously ask us all to pretend to think that on Mount Sinai along with the Ten Commandments God gave Moses a complete set of the Byzantine liturgical books? Are we forbidden to compare, for example, different editions of the Menaion, because in making such comparisons we might learn something?

To give an example of liturgical chaos which Father Taft could not possibly have caused, if only for chronological reasons: for many decades the Greek Archdiocese in the USA has had the practice of going straight from the Gospel or the sermon to the Ecphonesis which immediately precedes the Cherubic Hymn, while simultaneously asserting that the Priest recites the several "secret prayers" before intoning the Ecphonesis, which is obviously impossible.

Not so many years ago, the Divine Liturgy of Presanctified Gifts was unknown in a great many parishes; those parishes that did have it had it only in the mortning, apparently on the premise that there is something of special reverence in chanting "now that we come to sunset; now that we see the Evening Light" around 8 AM. While no doubt that particular bit of liturgical ambiguity can still be found somewhere, it has become the exception, not the rule - and much of the credit goes to Father Protopresbyter Alexander Schmemann, who was himself an excellent liturgiologist and a friend of Father Archimandrite Robert.

Not so very long ago, MANY Orthodox parishes in the USA did not baptize by immersion. Does lm wish to send us back to that, because it was clergy and faithful who had been taught that a consistent understanding of the matter could not accept such a state of affairs as normal whi brought about the restoration of Baptism by immersion?

Anyone who thinks that education and scholarship cause chaos should take a hard look at what ignorance causes.

I could continue at very great length, but just mentioning these things is disedifying. So I will close by wondering if lm has read A Canticle for Leibowitz.


Fr. Serge

Actually that objectivity has great value in looking at the widest possible set of observations in terms of historical liturgical usage, comparisons with the extant texts and reviewing current usages and desuetude.

Dear Father,

Forgive me if I say that I do not think you are actually responding to Im but to some caricature of Im that you've created so that you may say what you think needs to be said here.

I happen to agree that there is nothing inherently wrong with positing the science of theology and then examining our liturgy in its light. But to act as if the method is foolproof or that there is some perfection in Father Taft that brooks no possibility for error, etc.....You see what I mean by caricature. It doesn't serve dialogue.

I believe that Im is neither provincial in his thinking, nor a dunce.

So it might be better, if this is to become a dialogue, for you to give a small measure of thought to Im as a human being and generally thoughtful person, which is demonstrable from his postings in other places in this Forum.

I say these things, in heartfelt charity toward you and toward Im, and anyone else with an active intellect, in the hopes that this discussion can continue without turning Im's concerns into something that they are not.

Were Im a complete and total unknown it would still be kind to inquire before unloading. But he is not an unknown, and I did not read him nearly so harshly as you have in defense of an old friend who is not flawless, any more than the rest of us, however intelligent he may be, nor is his method.

Mary

Bless Father,

Please excuse my vast ignorance for I am not a very intelligent man--far less knowledgeable than those who post in this forum.

Was it not Fr Taft who reviewed and approved of the RDL for the Ruthenian Catholic Church? Is he not in favor of horizontal inclusive language?

Dear Father Serge,

I know I have very limited knowledge and intelligence. Please have patience with me.

I believe Im has a healthy respect for scholarship. Just look at a few of his posts and it will become clear, I hope.

After reading Im's comments, what I would like to understand is:

How does one subject science to the faith?

Fr. Taft said he is a historian in the article that Im posted. What is the role of the historian in the Church? What contributions do historians give the Church? What are the limits, if any, of a historian? I would assume historical considerations would play a part in a renewal of the DL, but how does one examine or protect the renewal in light of the Faith?

thanks for any help,
jody

There are many "scholars and experts" in the southwest that the world could probably do without.

To the extent that I have offended Fr. Taft, I apologize. As Fr. Serge has set forth, Fr. Taft has done much good. To the extent I question his first principles, I hold fast.

I would expect that he would be one of the opponents of the Revised Liturgy. Certainly his influence could work wonders.

As to the substance of my comments, I think there is place for serious consideration. The scientific method has its place but it is that method divorced from a knowledge of, and submission to God, that could give us a scenario such as in "A Canticle for Leibowitz." Modern science, in any of its forms, must finally submit to a higher authority, the one which created nature which man "observes."

The original scientific method as espoused during the scientific revolution, saw the world and nature as something which could simply be seen under a microscope, in which man himself was merely an outside observer.

In the current scientific model, man understands that he cannot observe without changing the phenomena. There is no, as it were, "objective" view where man can see reality simply apart from himself. The first principles which Fr. Taft sets forth as his criteria are, at least according to the truly modern scientific model, outdated.

The new scietific model of course means we affect, and are affectd by, the things we observe, whether we intend to change them (or us) or not. (There is, I think, a lesson to be learned here about the Revised Liturgy). To that extent, therefore, that we see the old "objective" scientific model as a means of determining what's "objectively" true, perhaps we simply can't do it. We remain, as creatures, measured by God whether we like it or not. To the extent that we are measured by Him, we are all left as players in His grand game. And the game's afoot! And the Revised Liturgy is having its consequences for the good or ill of souls.

I have most certainly never claimed that Father Archimandrite Robert Taft is infallible - he and I have often disagreed about this and that. At the immediate moment, Father Archimandrite and I disagree about the issue of "inclusive language" and the issue of reciting the Anaphora aloud. But Father Archimandrite does not require his friends to agree with him all the time - in fact, he rather enjoys a scholarly disagreement now and then, and is not offended when someone produces facts which cause him to modify his previous opinion. That, too, is part of the scientific method.

It is also true that some things are not subject to the general rules of modern science. Attempting to "prove" Transubstantiation by chemical analysis, for instance, would be a complete waste of time. Ordination has no discernible effect on the ordinand's DNA. And so on. But I've never noticed Father Archimandrite falling into such elementary traps.

More seriously, science can provide us with some of the data which contribute to making moral decisions, but science cannot make those decisions for us. For example, science can tell us with reasonable accuracy what the effects of using nuclear weapons will be - but science cannot tell us what the morality of using nuclear weapons is. That requires a different sort of discernment. Some problems must be solved by virtue, not by technology.

But to stick to my academic guns: I remember only too well the Ruthenian "Low Mass" as I experienced it some decades ago. Liturgiology could (and did) tell us that such a service was senseless - and that is quite true. I remember articles written by a now-deceased Ruthenian hierarch openly mocking the views of those who based their liturgical opinions on something besides sheer personal preference. And on, and on.

I might have been more favorably impressed had lm demonstrated that he has actually read, for example, the volumes already in print of Father Archimandrite's History of the Divine Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom, and told us what precisely he objects to either in the methodology or in the analysis. By writing as he did, lm comes across as something of an antilerate energumen - and please note that I have not called him any such thing; I have suggested that this is the impression created by this one particular posting.

Fr. Serge

This is a very nice letter in response, Father. Thank you. I appreciate both the message content, and the sentiment. It's very interesting a topic so I hope it continues for a while.

Mary

Socrates was accused of such things, so if you were acusing me, I would consider myself in good company!


I read his article (and a few others) in which Fr. Taft seems to have set forth his first principles, his grand tool with which he studies the liturgy, - the "modern" scientific hitorical-critical method. So I am objecting to his method. And with it we seem to get inclusive language and Anaphoras said aloud. The tool, then, might have problems.

Maybe the problem is more serious than I thought. How is it that can study the Eastern Liturgy with tools that arise from Western rationalism? I am somewhat serious here.

The same way that the doctrine of the persons of the Trinity and of the Incarnation are derived from Greek reasoning and rational thinking, and in the substantial language of the philosopher.

Mary

I would draw a distinction between rational thinking and rationalism. The "scientific method" these days seems often to involve the latter. Note that modern scientific thinking has given us worldwide atheism and lots of other evils.

Rational thinking, on the other hand, makes us realize we are all still men, no matter what the Revised Liturgy says!

Well then...you would have to demonstrate that someone was exercising a form of rationalism, placing method before substance, subordinating substance to method, replacing substance with method...rather than simply thinking in an orderly fashion.

One of the clues that helps us to discover an exercise in rationalism, is that very often the thinking of the rationalizer is not all that orderly when it peeled open beyond the surface.

Mary

My thoughts exactly!