Alexander Schmemann

3. The Age Of The Ecumenical Councils (50 pages)

From Schmemann's A History of the Orthodox Church

Page 49

Reflection of Theology and Asceticism in the Services.

A characteristic feature of the period must be recognized in the gradual permeation of theological experience into liturgical poetry and the Church services. While the Bible remained the basic content and framework of the services, as it had always been — the Psalms, the Old Testament hymns, the reading — this framework increasingly included the creations of Church hymn-writers: kontakia, stichera, and canons. First comes St. Romanos Melodus, who died probably in the middle of the sixth century. The rise of the so-called kontakion form of liturgical poetry, later pushed aside by the canon, is linked with his name. What has reached us from him (the kontakion of Christmas, “Today a virgin bringeth forth the Super-substantial”; for Easter, “Though Thou hast descended into the grave, O Deathless One”; and so on)[18] indicates his immense poetic talent, and in his works we fully sense what one may call the miracle of Byzantine liturgical writing: the striking combination of plastic literary form and genuine poetry with a profoundly theological, penetrating content. In comparison with later Byzantine works, which contain so much watery rhetoric, the early strata of our service books reveal real treasures. This is already great Christian poetry, which of course bears witness to the maturity of Christian culture. Another amazing monument from this same period is the Akathistus or “not-sitting hymn” (it was always sung standing), long ascribed to Patriarch Sergius the Monothelite, and composed, according to tradition, after the miraculous escape of Byzantium from the siege of 626.

A somewhat different note is introduced by the works connected with ascetic experience: the Great Canon of St. Andrew of Crete, who died in the first half of the eighth century, is the finest of these and is still read on the first days of Lent. While the heritage of Melodus contained in poetic form the revelation of the Church’s dogma and doctrine, particularly the Trinity and the doctrine of the two natures, the Great Canon is dedicated wholly to repentance. Monasticism had from the first been a road of repentance, but it is characteristic that in the liturgical handling of this theme there is an almost exaggerated self-incrimination and self-blame. Again one must be aware of the whole significance of this element; it emphasizes the defects in the Church previously discussed. The monastic community is not reconciled with evil and does not minimize Christianity. Most important of all, the deep sigh of repentance we now hear in Orthodox Church services as a constant theme expresses again how deeply the image of the Man revealed in the Gospel, and assimilated in the experience of holy men by fasting, prayer, and vigil, had entered into the mind of the Church. Behind the customary images of the Psalter and the all-embracing sense of God’s majesty, before which everything seemed trivial, there now sounded forcefully a longing for man’s “primeval beauty.” It is repentance coming not only from a recognition of broken commandments or from fear or worship of God, but from a human being who recognizes an “image of inexpressible glory” within himself and is therefore able to measure the full depth of his downfall. This was a real longing for divinity, a constant view of oneself in the light of the God-Man.

 

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