Welcome back! In the previous part of this episode on the flowering of the liturgical arts, I discussed hymnography, especially the way in which it was conceived in early Christendom. In this part, the final part of the episode and the conclusion of Part One of this podcast, I would like to look at some of the actual texts of those hymns and the way in which they gave expression to the vision of early Christendom.

So what hymns could be discussed in a concise way to complete this episode on the flowering of the liturgical arts? What I would like to look at are the hymns that go with that Lenten and Paschal cycle that occurs within the Church every year and which has received enormous attention from the hymnographical talent of some of the Church's greatest saints. Let's look at the texts of a few of these hymns to get a sense of how they express man's journey toward the kingdom of heaven.

The first thing that could be said is that they all, or certainly many of them, represent reflections on man's experience of paradise, both his separation from paradise through sin, but also his journey back into paradise through repentance, and the passion and resurrection of Christ. This long cycle that dominates the entire liturgical year begins several Sundays in the Orthodox East—several Sundays before the actual beginning of Great Lent, and it continues past Pascha for 40 days to the feast of Ascension, and then for another ten days to the feast of Pentecost, and even then it extends another week to the feast of All Saints, and in certain jurisdictions such as the Russian Church and the Orthodox Church in America, the OCA, it also extends to one more Sunday, celebrating the saints of those local churches. So it's an enormous range of liturgical experience. It, as I say, has a high concentration of the Church's reflection on paradise.

How so? Well, first of all, before Lent even starts, the hymnography of the Church emphasizes the theme of spiritual exile, something I discussed briefly in my account of monasticism and the penitential piety that monasticism elaborated in early Christendom. Man was understood to be in a condition of spiritual exile from God, through the experience of the so-called fall, of the expulsion from paradise that began with Adam and Eve. This theme is brought out especially well before Lent even starts of the singing of one of the psalms, Psalm 136 in the Septuagint numbering, and in the Western numbering, Psalm 137, beginning with the phrase, "By the waters of Babylon."

This hymn is assigned in the Orthodox tradition to be sung for the first time—and it's only sung three Sundays in a row—on the Sunday commemorating— And all the Sundays before and during and after Lent, that is to say, during Pascha as well, they all have a theme; they all have a kind of commemorative theme. So one of the Sundays before Lent even begins is the Sunday known as the Sunday of the Prodigal Son, at which Divine Liturgy is read the account from the Gospel of the prodigal son who leaves his father, leaves behind an experience of paradise, goes off because of his passions, and squanders his livelihood and winds up in a miserable condition with pigs, eating their food, until he resolves to repent of that and re-turn to his father, who greets him with joy and brings him into the banquet that the father prepares for the prodigal son. Wonderful image of repentance and return from spiritual exile into communion with God.

As a matter of fact, as we reach the end of this first part of the podcast, and it becomes possible to summarize its overall content to date, it's hard not to make the observation that this re-turn of the prodigal son to his father, this re-turn to paradise, is an act of re-orientation, fitting so well into the architectural vision of the Church and the overall understanding in early Christendom that the purpose of human life is to be oriented toward the kingdom of heaven.

So all of that is brought out in the hymnography of that particular Sunday before Lent begins, but it's also brought out in the use of this one particular psalm, which for many Christians I think modern, Western especially, Christians, is kind of an embarrassment, unfortunately. It talks about being exiled from God. It's associated with the Babylonian captivity that the Israelites experienced after the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians and the enslavement of the Jews, taking them off to Babylon and forcing them to become kind of musicians at the Gentile Babylonian court, entertaining the Babylonian king.

The song begins, "By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept when we remembered Zion," like it was so devastating to be separated from Jerusalem, from the Temple, from the worship of God. And it goes on to talk about how awful this is. "If I forget Jerusalem, let my right hand wither." In other words, let my whole being just kind of dissolve, because all my being is caught up in the worship of God, the one true God. But it ends with this passage that I'm afraid is kind of embarrassing for some Christians and not a few Jews, to the effect of: "Blessed is he who takes your (that is to say, the Babylonians') little ones (your little children) and smashes their heads against the stone." Again, this vengeance theme there.

Well, in the life of the Church, that's all transformed by the Person of Christ. Everything is understood through Christ. The Church doesn't read the Old Testament in a kind of, as it were, direct way, but through Christ: through Christ, through the revelation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, which revelation is not a revelation of vengeance, of returning evil upon a foreign people, an enemy, with equal evil—"return not evil with evil, but return evil with good" is the Gospel—and so the understanding of this passage is the spiritual struggle against the demons. The "little ones" are the demons: the demons, the thoughts, the passions. And the rock, of course, that they're smashed against is the rock of Christ, the rock who is Christ, which Paul himself says as much in the New Testament.

In addition to that, also interestingly, when this hymn is sung in the Orthodox liturgy before Great Lent begins, this hymn of spiritual exile—again, spiritualized, understood spiritually—it ends with— in fact, every verse ends with "Alleluia," which is not there in the original Old Testament version. There's no "Alleluia." There's absolutely nothing to say "Alleluia" about. It's a miserable hymn of exile from God. But in the Christian transformation of that experience, repentance leads to a great Alleluia, and that's built right into the way the Church sings and uses, appropriates, this psalm from the Old Testament. Alleluia, because of the hope and the conviction and the confidence in God's love and mercy to restore to communion, to bring back from exile, like the father of the prodigal son himself, the repentant Christian sinner.

So that's one particular hymn that reminds us of the return from spiritual exile to paradise. There are even more explicit hymns with this kind of emphasis that are associated with the Orthodox commemoration of Great Lent, and those are especially found in the Sunday known as the Sunday of Adam's Expulsion from Paradise. Now, this Sunday happens to be the last day before Great Lent begins as such. It's the Sunday before the Monday that is the beginning of Great Lent, Clean Monday as it's known, the first day of the Great Fast. On the day before that first day is what's known as the Expulsion of Adam from Paradise. That's the theme of the hymnography, although, more popularly, this day is known as Forgiveness Sunday, because it features not only the gospel reading of forgiveness at the Divine Liturgy that Sunday morning, but also that evening, Sunday evening, when the Church reassembles for vespers and serves the first service of the Fast—evening is the beginning of the new day, beginning of Monday—after that service of vespers occurs, the rite, the beautiful rite of forgiveness, mutual forgiveness—more about that in a moment.

But the hymnography that goes with the Sunday of Adam's Expulsion from Paradise, Forgiveness Sunday, repeatedly and for obvious reasons speaks of paradise and man's expulsion from it, man's hope for it, and man's return through the grace and love of God to it. So let me quote just a few of the hymns, the beautiful hymns, from this service.

First of all, in this Sunday commemoration, sin is recognized as a separation from, quite explicitly, paradise itself. Let me quote one of the vespers hymns from vespers; it reads in the following way.

Adam sat before paradise and, lamenting his nakedness, he wept: Woe is me! By evil deceit was I persuaded and led astray, and now I am in exile from glory. Woe is me! In my simplicity I was stripped naked, and now I am in want. O Paradise! No more shall I take pleasure in thy joy. No more shall I look upon the Lord my God and Maker, for I shall return to the earth whence I was taken. O merciful and compassionate Lord, to thee I cry aloud: I am fallen; have mercy upon me!

A hymn, then, about man's exile and separation from paradise. Another hymns speaks about the beauty of paradise, cultivating a longing and desire, an active desire, for paradise that will sustain the Christian throughout the long course of the fast ahead. And this is that hymn:

O precious Paradise, unsurpassed in beauty, tabernacle built by God, unending gladness and delight, glory of the righteous, joy of the prophets, and dwelling of the saints: with the sound of thy leaves, pray to the Maker of all. May he open unto me the gates which I closed by my transgression, and may he count me worthy to partake of the tree of life and the joy which was mine when I dwelt in thee before.

Here, a reflection on the beauty of paradise, the joy of paradise, the leaves that make their beautiful sound in the heart of paradise, in the tree of life there.

Another theme found in the hymnography for the Sunday of Adam's Expulsion from Paradise is the theme of the Incarnation and its significance. By the way, listeners will recall that the very first episode in Part One of this podcast, the cosmology of Christ's Great Commission, brought attention to the Incarnation and its place within traditional Christian cosmology. I spoke, for instance, about Christopher Dawson's studies of Christendom as a civilization and how he, a Roman Catholic scholar working in the middle of the 20th century, claimed that the Incarnation, the doctrine of the Incarnation, is at the very heart of the civilization that became transformed by traditional Christianity. I also quoted St. Sophronius of Jerusalem and his beautiful prayer, read in the Greek tradition of the Orthodox Church, at the feast of Theophany where, every year, the feast of Christ's baptism in the Jordan River brings the Church into an experience of paradise in an eternal today. St. Sophronius repeatedly uses that phrase, today, to talk about how the cosmos is transformed by Christ's incarnation, by Christ's birth and his baptism in the Jordan River.

So with that historical background in mind, here is another hymn sung in the Orthodox Church as she begins her long journey into Great Lent on the Sunday of Adam's Expulsion from Paradise. This hymn is addressed to the Virgin Mary.

Christ the Lord, my Maker and Redeemer, came forth from thy womb, all-hallowed queen, and, clothing himself in me—

It's beautiful how that's said!

—clothing himself in me, he delivered Adam from the curse of old. Therefore, with never silent voices, we praise thee as the true Mother of God and Virgin. And with the salutation of the angel we cry unto thee: Rejoice, Lady, guardian and protection and salvation of our souls!

A final hymn from the Sunday of Adam's Expulsion from Paradise expresses the confidence in God's mercy, the real, powerful, tangible hope that the Christian has in God's forgiveness, something that was emphasized in the monastic literature and wisdom that I discussed in the previous episode. One may recall, for instance, a teaching of St. John Climacus about the hell-hound of despair that deceives one into thinking there is no hope for them in the face of their great sins. Here is how the hymn reads:

Adam was cast out of paradise through eating from the tree. Seated before the gates, he wept, lamenting with a pitiful voice and saying: Woe is me! What have I suffered in my misery! I transgressed one commandment of the Master; now I am deprived of every blessing. O most-holy Paradise, planted for my sake and shut because of Eve, pray to him that made thee and fashioned me, that once more I may take pleasure in thy flowers. Then the Savior said to him: I desire not the loss of the creature which I fashioned, but that he should be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth. And when he comes to me, I will not cast him out.

The beautiful expression of confidence in Christ's love and desire to forgive any who come to him. So that's the kind of eve of the beginning of the Great Fast. And when the Fast does begin, it represents an ascetical journey toward paradise, to return toward that communion with God. The fall is presented in the hymnography of the Fast as banishment from what one hymn calls the "dance of life," the sense of joy. Again, the prodigal son came back to his father and was admitted to the feast where, we are told, at least through the experience of the brother of the prodigal son, there was dancing and great merriment.

The role of forgiveness in this journey back into this communion with God is wonderfully expressed by the very service which inaugurates, which launches the Great Fast in the Orthodox East, a rite known as Forgiveness Sunday vespers. After a vespers service, the rite of mutual forgiveness takes place when, depending on specific parish practices, all of the members of a given parish personally ask for forgiveness from each other member of a given parish, in a beautiful rite that sometimes takes a long time to work out as everyone kind of goes through a long line, asking each other for forgiveness, sometimes even bowing or prostrating themselves to one another and declaring, proclaiming to one another the gospel of forgiveness. "Forgive me" is what one says, and often another one will say in response, "I forgive you" or "God forgives, and so do I." And then the exchange of the kiss of peace, the kiss of love, that Paul speaks of and which is built into the very order of the eucharistic liturgy, which I described in an earlier episode. So this rite of mutual forgiveness is a beautiful expression, before repentance even begins, properly speaking, of forgiveness, that God forgives, that God does forgive, that God forgives.

And it's interesting to kind of contrast this with the Western rite that begins the Great Fast. In the West, that rite is known as the rite of the imposition of ashes, associated with the day known as Ash Wednesday, named after this rite. At this service, the priest imposes, makes the sign of the cross with blackened ashes on the forehead of each believer who comes forward at the rite, imposes the cross on the forehead of the person with the words, "Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return." A beautiful service, very beautiful service, but one which brings attention to death, to the condemnation of Adam and Eve in their fall, because of their fall, and death.

What's interesting I think by way of contrast in the Orthodox East is the emphasis upon forgiveness. The Fast begins with forgiveness; the Fast is all about obtaining forgiveness from God, and it begins with that very expression of forgiveness. As a matter of fact, it's often the custom for the choir of a parish church during this long rite of mutual forgiveness to sing the hymns of Pascha, the Paschal canon or the Paschal verses or something like that, "The Angel Cried," all of these beautiful hymns from Pascha, as it were, seeing the end before even Lent begins, seeing where it all winds up, and that is in the joy of the resurrection.

So the long Lenten experience begins on a note, on a key of joy. The joy of fasting is very apparent from the very beginning. People speak of the joy of this or that, the joy of cooking. Well, the Orthodox Church teaches about the joy of fasting. Fasting is a joyful thing, a joyful thing because it leads to man's restored communion with God, to paradise. Another hymn can be quoted on that very theme, from Forgiveness Vespers itself, and this is the hymn:

Let us set out with joy upon the season of the fast and prepare ourselves for spiritual combat. Let us purify our soul and cleanse our flesh, and as we fast from food let us abstain also from every passion. Rejoicing in the virtues of the Spirit, may we persevere with love and so be counted worthy to see the solemn passion of Christ our God and with great spiritual gladness to behold his holy Passover, his holy Pascha, his resurrection.

So that's a hymn from the very service that begins the Lenten journey.

Now, the theme of divine communion is found throughout that journey. For instance, during every— during the first week of the Fast, something known as the Great Canon of St. Andrew of Crete is served in connection with a service called Great Compline in the Orthodox Church. And in fact any weekday when compline is served, it is this great form of it. It's a longer form, but it features a hymn, "God is with Us." "God is with us" is declared in the very center of the church at this service, the Great Canon of St. Andrew of Crete and Great Compline that goes with it, that it occurs within. "God is with us" is declared, so a theme of divine communion for sure.

Also throughout the weekdays of the Great Fast occurs on certain weekdays, usually Wednesdays and/or Fridays, the Liturgy known as the Presanctified Divine Liturgy, where holy Communion that has been consecrated at the Liturgy from the previous Sunday is consumed, in a beautiful and majestic evening service. And that Presanctified Divine Liturgy features a hymn that occurs at the point of the entrance with the holy Communion, a point that's roughly comparable to the Great Entrance and the Cherubic Hymn in the Sunday Liturgy, and the hymn at the Presanctified Divine Liturgy reads in the following way, as the people prepare for holy Communion at the end of a long day of fasting and developing building up a hunger for that communion with God:

Now the powers of heaven with us invisibly do serve.

"God is with us" we heard at the other, Great Compline, service. Now here, "with us" is repeated.

Now the powers of heaven with us invisibly do serve. Lo, the King of glory enters; lo, the mystical sacrifice is upborne, fulfilled. Let us draw nigh with faith and love, and become communicants of life eternal. Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.

A beautiful hymn from the Presanctified Divine Liturgy, which, by the way, is attributed to the work of Pope Gregory of Rome, interestingly, even though it's not served in the Latin West, which has only one Presanctified Liturgy during the year, and that's on Holy Friday.

Finally, the theme of divine communion is found throughout the course of the Great Fast in the Sunday commemorations that occur. I mentioned that every Sunday has a special commemoration before, during, and even after the Great Fast, during the period of Pascha. And these Sunday commemorations, if looked at from a certain point of view, all in their own way express man's restored communion with God.

The first Sunday, the Sunday of Orthodoxy, which sprang out of the experience I described in the historical anecdote to this very episode, the Triumph of Orthodoxy in 843 under the direction of Empress Theodora after the death of her husband, her iconoclastic husband, Theophilus, the celebration of the restoration of icons occurs on the first Sunday, the Sunday of Orthodoxy, the first Sunday of Great Lent. Those icons, of course, as I said in this very episode, represent windows into heaven and the experience of man's restored communion with God.

But also Gregory Palamas, the second Sunday of the Fast, whose teaching about hesychasm and the experience of the uncreated light and the energies of God, something I'll discuss in a later episode of this podcast, all bring attention to man's deification and experience of divine communion.

The third Sunday of the Great Fast is the Sunday of the Cross, the veneration of the cross, which is brought out, often decorated with beautiful, fragrant flowers, in the middle of the church for that Sunday. Here is a hymn from that Sunday of the Cross, which again emphasizes man's communion with God and brings to mind paradise:

Come, Adam and Eve, our first father and mother, who fell from the choir on high through the envy of the murderer of man. When of old with bitter pleasure ye tasted from the tree in paradise, see the tree of the cross, revered by all, draws near. Run with haste and embrace it joyfully, and cry to it with faith: O precious Cross, thou art our succor! Partaking of thy fruit, we have gained incorruption, we are restored once more to Eden, and we have received great mercy.

So that's the third Sunday of the Fast, emphasizing man's experience of paradise.

The fourth Sunday is John Climacus, commemorating the author of The Ladder of Divine Ascent. I've spoken of him already in the episode on monasticism, as I also spoke of St. Mary of Egypt, commemorated on the fifth Sunday of the Great Fast, Mary of Egypt, who died—whose body was discovered facing east after she received holy Communion, facing east, awaiting the resurrection and the restoration of paradise.

All of this leads to the biggest experience in the whole week of the year of the Church, and that is Passion Week. Passion Week, the week of our Lord's Passion, his death on the cross, his burial, and his resurrection from the dead. Many of the hymns of this week also bring attention to the restoration of divine communion and the desire for that communion. The week begins with services of matins, dubbed Bridegroom Matins because they feature a festal hymn entitled, "Behold, the Bridegroom Comes and Midnight." What this is is a reflection on the longing for Christ, the Bridegroom of the Church, and the desire to enter into his heavenly banquet through repentance and through preparation, a desire for that restored communion.

Also in the early part of that week, at those services is sung the hymn, "I See Thy Bridal Chamber," which brings to mind the imagery of the Song of Songs, when the bridegroom and the bride are exchanging expressions of their powerful love for each other, an expression of divine eros, and the idea of gazing in on one's beloved, into thy bridal chamber, I see thy bridal chamber. This, of course, is something I discuss in the episode on the divine eros in the context of traditional Christian marriage.

And finally, on Holy Saturday itself, at the canon for that beautiful service commemorating the burial of Christ, the hope in the resurrection, something I discussed in images or icons of Christ's crucifixion and deposition in the tomb, the hope and confidence in Christ's resurrection, always there in front of one during the course of Passion Week. It is expressed wonderfully in the ninth ode of the canon of Holy Saturday, which features the expression, "Do not lament me, O Mother, for I shall arise."

There's a larger context from which that phrase comes, but what's very beautiful in the Russian tradition is, again, at compline, just before the Paschal services are celebrated in the middle of the night, Saturday going into Sunday, the Sunday of the Resurrection of Easter, Easter Sunday, the priest is instructed to come out to where the cloth icon of Christ's deposition in the tomb is placed in the middle of the church on something representing the tomb of Christ. And just as the choir sings that passage, he raises, the priest does, raises—it's a completely dark church in most cases—raises that icon into the air, "for I will arise," and he solemnly carries it into the altar, closes the royal gates and the veil, and that service, compline, comes to an end, and with it all of Great Lent. And very soon after that begins the singing of "Thy Resurrection, O Christ our Savior," the beginning of the celebration of Pascha.

And that celebration, to conclude not only this part of the episode but the episode itself and with it the entire first part of this history of the rise of Christendom, the celebration of Christ's holy resurrection wonderfully expresses the experience of man's restored communion with God in the hymnography of the Orthodox Church. "Pascha" is the Greek for the Hebrew word for Passover, and what this represents of course is the passing over from death to life and the eternal life that Christ offers through his resurrection.

In so many of the hymns for Pascha itself, especially on the night of Pascha, that wonderful experience of salvation is expressed. Some of these hymns emphasize the union of heaven and earth, something brought to mind in the architecture I explored in the previous part of this episode, especially of the central dome, heaven on earth. One hymn emphasizes this:

It is the day of resurrection! Let us be radiant, O ye people. Pascha, the Lord's Pascha! For from death to life and from earth to heaven Christ God has brought us as we sing the song of victory.

Another hymn, from Paschal Matins, emphasizes the re-creation of the cosmos, the re-creation of creation, emphasizing how human brotherhood and all of society is spiritually transformed by the resurrection, and this is how it reads:

It is the day of resurrection! Let us be radiant for the feast, and let us embrace one another. Let us call brothers even those that hate us. Let us forgive all things for the sake of the resurrection. And thus let us cry aloud: Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life!

Beautiful hymn ending with the Paschal troparion, the main Paschal hymn, "Christ is Risen."

So all of these hymns together from Pascha emphasize that experience of man's restored communion with God after a long journey through Great Lent, a journey of repentance but a journey also of joy, of what St. John Climacus called "joy-making mourning." A journey which was prepared by the conscious bringing to mind of the expulsion of Adam from paradise, and a journey which is now fulfilled, completed, in the joyful celebration of the resurrection of Christ, a celebration that unites man to God and, by doing so, unites man to man through forgiveness and love, leading to a spiritual transformation of society and an experience of paradise in this world, a celebration which will never come to an end and which begins even in this life.

One of the most beautiful hymns from Pascha, in my mind, is that hymn from the Paschal canon, from the ninth ode of the Paschal canon, in which is sung, "Grant us truly to partake of thee in the day without evening of thy kingdom." "Grant us to partake of thee," "thee" being God, to partake of God himself—not of God's grace or God's life or God's anything, but of God himself. What a powerful expression of the experience of deification itself, partaking of God "in the day without evening of thy kingdom." In other words, there begins now in this life and is fulfilled in eternity the Divine Liturgy or the Mass for which there is no dismissal—for which there is no dismissal, which never comes to an end: a day without evening of the eternal experience, begun in this age, of paradise.

Join me next time when I begin Part Two of this podcast by exploring the origins of the Great Schism.