Choir: Eis polla eti, Despota!

His Eminence, Archbishop Benjamin of San Francisco and the West: I hereby open the commencement exercises of St. Vladimir’s Theological Seminary for the mid-year commencement 2018 to 2019.

Archpriest Fr. Chad Hatfield: I want to welcome all of you to this 36th annual Fr. Alexander Schmemann lecture series. We don’t have the best of weather tonight in New York, so obviously you’re all brave souls to have come out tonight. I particularly want to welcome our distinguished guests who are with us—His Eminence, Archbishop Melchisedek of Pittsburgh and the Diocese of Western Pennsylvania, and Bishop Kevin Bond Allen, who is the Bishop of Cascadia in the Anglican Church in North America in the Northwest—welcome. And all of our other friends and faculty, staff, and supporters of the seminary, again: welcome.

It’s my pleasure to introduce our speaker this year, Professor David Fagerberg. It’s interesting when you look back over the years at the various topics that have been addressed at this particular lecture. When I actually was given the privilege of seeing a manuscript of this particular book, which is Liturgy Outside Liturgy: Liturgical Theology of Fr. Alexander Schmemann, which is published by Chora Books. I knew instantly that that was a perfect topic for this particular series. We’ve been trying to return to a theme that emphasizes the various aspects of the teaching of Fr. Alexander Schmemann and the continued impact that it has, not only in our Orthodox world, but in particular ecumenically, outside Orthodoxy, and even outside of what he is best known for in terms of the field of liturgical theology.

I was then given the privilege for providing the foreword to this book, and I want to share something that I cited in that foreword. Many of us have a particular book or a particular teaching of Fr. Schmemann’s that seems to be kind of dear and resonates to us. Oddly enough, for me it’s the foreword to his book, The Eucharist. I find I actually pick that up and read it multiple times during the year, and I know from one conversation, sitting with Matushka Juliana Schmemann, that she said, of all of his books, that’s the one that he labored the most with. It was such an incredible topic for him, but he couldn’t quite get it the way he wanted it, and that book was in fact completed posthumously, after his death. But that’s the book that, for me, just in the foreword, is something that constantly feeds me and I return to. I noted that in the foreword to the book, I wrote that Fr. Alexander’s book, The Eucharist, says much about his consistent thinking. It is “not reform, adjustments, and modernization that are needed so much as a return to that vision and experience that from the beginning constituted the very life of the Church.” I actually know of no serious student of the work of Fr. Alexander Schmemann who better captures his prophetic vision with more clarity than our speaker tonight, Professor Fagerberg.

We are being broadcast on Ancient Faith Radio through Voices From St Vladimir’s, and though you have his biography in the program tonight, I’m going to read it for those who will be actually listening in from Ancient Faith Radio.

Dr. David Fagerberg is professor in the Department of Theology at the University of Notre Dame and the author of the recently released Liturgy Outside Liturgy: The Liturgical Theology of Fr. Alexander Schmemann. Dr. Fagerberg integrates Schmemann’s theology among other sources into his own study of liturgical theology. The primary focus of Fagerberg’s work on liturgical theology is its definition and methodology, and he has also investigated how liturgy, theology, and asceticism interrelate. He has authored several books and articles, including the aforementioned study of Schmemann, Consecrating the World: On Mundane Liturgical Theology, On Liturgical Asceticism, Chesterton is Everywhere, and “Consecration of the World as Liturgical Act.”

Professor Fagerberg holds a B.A. from Augsburg College, a Master of Divinity from Luther Northwestern Seminary, an M.A. from St. John’s University (Collegeville), an S.T.M. from Yale Divinity School, and an M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. from Yale University. He taught in the religion department of Concordia College, Moorhead, Minnesota, from 1988-2001; the Liturgical Institute and Mundelein Seminary, 2002-03; and he has been at Notre Dame since 2003. Please join me in greeting and welcoming our 36th annual Fr. Schmemann lecturer, Professor David Fagerberg. [Applause]

Dr. David Fagerberg: I know it’s customary for a speaker to say he is glad to be wherever he is speaking, but I really, really mean it. [Laughter] It’s not just customary for me. The material that’s come out of this place has affected me in my own work, and it’s a privilege for me to be back and make a public statement, a repayment of debt. I came here in ‘95 and said it was to kiss the doorpost of St. Vladimir’s Press which had taken so much of my money up to that point. [Laughter] I didn’t this time, but I did visit the bookstore already. Made sure it was there today.

I know many colleagues who in their dissertation have taken a deep dive into a subject or an author, never to return again to drink from those same waters. Sometimes that’s for the best: some authors who fascinate us during our doctoral teenage years are better left on the shelf when we grow up. Sometimes it’s realistic: we have sucked the topic dry. Sometimes it’s a sign of industriousness, finding new points on the horizon. Sometimes it’s a sign of fickle ambition: an academic must always be on the prowl for the next big thing.

I am grateful to report that none of these circumstances have been the case for me, because I was fortunate enough to have found a topic that continues to fascinate me and an author whose guidance and counsel remain pertinent. Fr. Alexander was an essential guide when I began writing a dissertation simply titled, “What is Liturgical Theology?” and he has remained a reliable pedagogue for the 30 years since, while I have added clay to the bust I am sculpting. I can imagine a critic, heckling from the wings: “Have you not advanced at all? Move on! We’ve heard about lex orandi before.” But to me this sounds like saying to an iconographer, “Have you not advanced at all? Move on! We’ve seen the Theotokos before.” [Laughter]

Yes, we have thought and seen it before, but not exactly in this way. The icon is worth painting again with one’s own brushstrokes, and some thoughts are worth brushing up again in one’s own words. Indeed, my experience when reading a great theologian is to find either my thoughts in their words or their thoughts in my words, and I had that same experience when reading Fr. Alexander. That’s how I know he is a great theologian. [Laughter] So I return to him with regularity, and I’m honored to be able to come here and express my gratitude publicly.

Now I begin. Coming up with a title of a talk is a challenge, because one must essentially write the paper months in advance of actually writing the paper. So when Fr. Hatfield asked for mine, I put the muses to work on it overnight. When I awoke, I found that they had placed in my mind a feeling, an intuition, an impression. It was the feeling of an anchor. I felt that Fr. Alexander had anchored his liturgical theology to some bedrock, to some foundation, that grounded and secured his perspective. People fail to understand his idea of liturgical theology if they let lex orandi float free. In this drift, liturgy’s relationship to lex credendi is misunderstood, but the lex orandi does not float free for Fr. Alexander: it is anchored. It has a foundation, a mooring, a substance, if I may make a scholastic pun: something stands under it.

Now if only we could find out what it is. Alas, the muses did not go on to identify it. That’s part of the labor they left for me. What is the fixed point that gives cohesion to Fr. Alexander’s understanding of liturgical theology? We must do, I propose, some archaeology. Recently in Jerusalem there is a man who built his house on a site he strongly suspected had been inhabited during the second Temple period. So this owner began digging under his own home. The entrance to the house was at street level, but below it, underneath it, he found a Hasmonean mansion.

So imagine with me now the house of Schmemann. It is his life’s work, his intellectual construct, his theological paradigm—and this is the house we want to explore this evening. But in order to do so, we must excavate. Most people enter Schememann’s thought at the street-level of liturgy, because that’s what he’s famous for. They expect this floor to be pretty and charming because they suppose he has built his whole house to lodge liturgy, and liturgy must be billeted in a house of mystical and classical adornments. But he himself strongly objects to supposing this is the only floor in his house or supposing that his primary work concerns liturgical decor. Here are three examples of him objecting. Throughout this paper I have lots of quotes. Maybe I should have a red light that goes on every time I’m quoting Schmemann. [Laughter] You can just think: If it sounds good, it’s him, and if it sounds mediocre, it’s me doing the work in between his bricks. [Laughter] First quote:

In the approach which I advocate, by every line I ever wrote, the question addressed by liturgical theology to liturgy and the entire liturgical tradition is not about liturgy, but about theology.

It’s an odd remark for someone who’s famous for writing about liturgy. Second:

In my own tradition, Byzantine, this has meant, for example, the appearance of endless symbolic explanations of worship, and so the eucharistic liturgy that is the heart of the Church has been transformed, in effect, into a series of audio-visual aids.

And third, he confesses:

How spiritually tired I am of all this “orthodoxism,” of all the fuss with Byzantium, Russia, way of life, spirituality, Church affairs, piety, of all these rattles. I do not like any one of them, and the more I think about the meaning of Christianity, the more it all seems alien to me.

The man who is famed as a liturgical theologian says his main interest is not liturgical embellishment. The first floor is not his total occupation. I therefore propose we do him an injustice if we fail to excavate down to the anchor of his thought.

Like an excellent theological architect, he has carefully designed the skeletal structure of his whole house in, I’ve concluded, four strata to his thought. Here they are, in summary, so you can keep track how close I am in getting to the end of my talk. [Laughter] From the top floor, at which we usually enter him, to the foundational first floor towards which we are working, number four: liturgical theology consisting of lex orandi and lex credendi, rests number three upon leitourgia, which is different from our ordinary understanding of liturgy, because, number two, it is anchored to eschatology, whence ecclesiology begins; and number one, all this is built upon Christ. That’s my summary blueprint of the house of Schmemann. What follows is each strata explored, one by one.

So first, liturgical theology. If one enters the Schmemannian digs, it is probably on the floor of liturgy, to see what the man has to say about liturgical theology. I’ll be more cursory in my description here because my other work has already given attention to it. Schmemann’s understanding of liturgical theology continues to puzzle both liturgists and theologians because instead of placing liturgy and theology side by side, the former being decorative illustration, the latter granting academic respectability, Schmemann in fact proposes an ontological dependence of the one upon the other. Here are some examples (quotes):

Liturgical tradition is the ontological condition of theology, because it is in the Church, of which the leitourgia is the expression and the life, that the sources of theology are functioning precisely as sources.

Another:

The Fathers rarely speak of the Church and the liturgy in explicit terms because, for them, they are not an object of theology but its ontological foundation.

And a third:

Theologians have forgotten the essential principle that lex orandi constitutes the lex credendi. They have forgotten the absolutely unique function of Christian worship within all theological speculation.

I have another page and a half of quotations, but I think he’s made his point. But why is it so hard for us to take him seriously when he says this about theology? Schmemann thinks that the alienation of lex credendi from lex orandi occurred when

...the source of theology, that is, the Church’s faith, began to be identified with a specific number of data, mainly texts.” Once faith was identified with propositions, there followed the rejection from the theological process of any reference to or dependence upon experience. And yet it’s precisely faith as experience, the total and living experience of the Church, that constitutes the source and the context of theology in the East.

There is a correlation between life and the Eucharist, but when asked about what that correlation is, he confesses: “It seems to me that I am quite unable to explain and determine it, although it’s actually the only thing I talk and write about (liturgical theology).” Liturgical theology that he writes about is “a correlation between life and the Eucharist. It’s not an idea—I feel repulsed by ideas—I have an ever-growing conviction that Christianity cannot be expressed by ideas.” When he talks and writes about liturgical theology, he is engaged in a search for reality, a search for the connection between God, world, and life. And that’s a more challenging undertaking.

We need liturgical theology as a slow and patient bringing-together of that which was for too long a time and because of many factors broken and isolated. Liturgy, theology, and piety: their reintegration within one fundamental vision.

I found at least three, maybe four places where he repeats that same sentiment: Liturgical theology is reconnecting liturgy, theology, and piety.

Well, that’s the floor plan on the top level of the house of Schmemann that we usually visit. But its layout is determined by the strata below it, namely, his definition of leitourgia. I’m on number two. Here’s the point at which I think many people take the wrong turn in interpreting Schmemann. They suppose that since lex orandi is liturgy, and since liturgy is ritual, and since ritual is a human product because it’s a human activity, therefore to say theology rests upon lex orandi sounds like saying theology rests on our own shoulders. At minimum, this sounds tautological; at maximum it should sound blasphemous, because if human ritual actions are the ontological foundation of theology, then it appears we founded the Church’s lex orandi on ourselves.

I don’t think Schmemann is advocating that theology rests on our own composed rituals. In his liturgical theology, lex orandi is anchored to something firmer than the rickety notion of liturgy most of us carry in our minds. I think he resorts to the Greek word leitourgia so often for the purpose of contrasting our understanding with the reality itself. He writes:

In the early Church, even the term leitourgia was not as it is today, a mere synonym of “cult.” It was applied indeed to all those ministries and offices within the Church in which she manifested and fulfilled her nature and vocation. It had primarily ecclesiological and not cultic connotations.

Another:

Leitourgia is a corporate, common, all-embracing action in which all those who are present are active participants. It is an experience of the Church given and received in the Church’s leitourgia, in her lex orandi.

So the anchor of lex orandi is a more vigorous notion of leitourgia. Although it’s true that leitourgia is especially identified with divine cult, Schmemann is adamant that we cannot equate the two, because the Church’s leitourgia is bigger than the Church’s cultic liturgy that contains it. A long quote:

We know that originally the Greek word leitourgia had no cultic connotations. It meant a public office, the service performed on behalf of a community and for its benefit. In the Septuagint, the word acquired naturally a religious meaning, yet still not necessarily a liturgical one. It implied the same idea of service, applied now to the chosen people of God whose specific leitourgia is to fulfill God’s design in history. Their leitourgia is to prepare the way of the Lord.

The early Christian use reflected the same meaning of leitourgia, and the fact that the Church adopted it finally for her cult and especially for the Eucharist indicates her special understanding of worship, which is indeed a revolutionary one. If Christian worship is leitourgia (I’m still quoting), it cannot be simply reduced to or expressed in terms of cult. The ancient world knew a plethora of cultic religions or cults in which worship or cultic acts were the only real content of religion, an end in itself.

But the Christian cult is leitourgia, and this means that it is functional in its essence. It has a goal to achieve, a goal which transcends the categories of cult as such. The goal is precisely the Church as the manifestation and presence of the new eon, of the kingdom of God. In a sense, the Church is indeed a liturgical institution, that is, an institution whose leitourgia is to fulfill itself as the body of Christ and a new creation. Christian cult is therefore a radically new cult.

The Church is indeed a liturgical institution, but that does not mean an institution of this world conducting endless cycles of liturgy. The reason the Church is called a liturgical institution is because she is in a constant state of Passover. The eternal Passover will only come with the second coming of Christ, but here we are given foretastes of it. If leitourgia originally meant a public work on behalf of a people, then to understand leitourgia we should be asking ourselves: What work? By whom? On behalf of what people? And most especially: Toward what end? Schmemann says:

Israel had a leitourgia, and we don’t mean the liturgy in the Temple. Its work was to prepare for the Messiah. The New Israel has a leitourgia, and we still don’t mean the liturgy in the temple. Its work, we shall see, is eschatological. The liturgical cult has the unique function of making the Church the “witness and participant of the saving event of Christ, of the new life in the Holy Spirit, of the presence in this world of the kingdom to come.”

End quote times two. Hard for me to start and stop. Just believe me: if it’s a good quote… If it sounds good, it’s coming from a quote.

Christian leitourgia is not the addition of one more cultive Adam to the world’s stockpile. Christian leitourgia is the cult of the New Adam, perpetuated in his new body, the Church. The liturgy’s inside is bigger than its outside. The leitourgia is bigger than the cult that contains it.

In this world, the eschaton, the holy, the sacred, the otherness can be expressed and manifested only as cult, and the Church must use the forms and language of the cult in order eternally to transcend the cult. The Church does not gather for the purpose of celebrating the cult; she gathers to become, through cultic activity, what she really is. The Church is the mystery of the new creation. She is the mystery of the kingdom.

If I can risk making my point clumsily, I will say that Schmemann is not talking about acts of liturgy; he’s talking about liturgical acts of leitourgia. If I can press my luck further and create a verb, I will say that leitourgia is the action being performed when the Church “cults.” By “culting,” the Church becomes her true self, enjoys her true mystery, exercises her real leitourgia. The Church does not do cult; she uses cult to do leitourgia. And the leitourgia performed in her cult transforms the Church.

When I say the entire liturgy is a transformation, I have in mind something very simple: that in the liturgy each of its parts, each solemn ceremony, each rite is transformed by the Holy Spirit into that which it is, a real symbol of what it manifests. This transformation is the reason why liturgy can be said to be the ontological source of theology. If it is the very function of the leitourgia to be the epiphany of the Church’s faith, to make the Church what she is, then theology must find its way back to those sources. The Church receives a vision from her self-experience in leitourgia, and that vision is theological. The Christian-at-liturgy (that’s hyphenated; the Germans could make one big long word, but I just have to hyphenate some English words) receives a light-in-the-eyes (also hyphenated) which is an eschatological power of seeing, a power of seeing through the material to the spiritual, through the visible to the invisible, through the created to the uncreated.

By leitourgia we are given the light—I mean a vision—by which to see and talk about the real subject matter of theology which is God, man, world. Theology seeks words adequate to the actions of God, but it’s crucial to remember that the opus dei is not only in the past, not only in the future; the work of God on behalf of his people toward the end of salvation can be experienced now, presently, this day, in the journey to the kingdom that the Church experiences in her corporate procession and passage toward fulfillment.

If today the field of liturgical studies does not attempt this kind of liturgical theology, that’s partly due to where the interests of today’s scholars lie, but it’s due mostly, I think, to the mistaken detachment of liturgy from leitourgia. Liturgy, absent mysterion, is like the shell that remains after the oyster has died, and the pearl is long gone. Such a view of liturgy invites ritual studies instead of liturgical theology. If liturgy is detached from leitourgia, if cult is no longer a leitourgia task, if liturgy is reduced to cultic categories alone, then of course scholars will run it through the sausage-grinder of ritual studies.

Yet even in such circumstances Schmemann thinks some people will remain enamored of liturgy.

Paradoxical as it may seem, it’s very often the liturgical conservative, the passionate lover of rubrics and externals, the amateur of ancient and colorful rites that is most hopelessly blind to the true meaning of these very rites, to the truth and spirit which gave them birth and of which they are both manifestation and gift. Such passionate lovers will fondle the liturgy but fail to do justice to leitourgia.

One may be deeply attached to the ancient and colorful rites of Byzantium or Russia, see in them precious relics of a cherished past, be a liturgical conservative, and at the same time completely fail to see in them in the totality of the Church’s leitourgia an all-embracing vision of life; a power meant to judge, inform, and transform the whole of existence; a philosophy of life, shaping and challenging all ideas, attitudes, and actions. That should be the outcome of leitourgia. Liturgical theology must be ontologically fashioned to leitourgia.

The theological and liturgical tragedy of the post-patristic age is that the Church’s cult was deprived of its liturgical function, reduced to cultic categories alone, with the sad result that theologians now neglect to learn the oldest of all the languages of the Church, that of her rites, the rhythm in the ordo of her leitourgia.

In that rhythm, or lex orandi, we find an all-embracing vision of life, we find a power that allows us to judge and inform and transform existence—we find eschatology, floor three. To what is leitourgia anchored? That’s the question. My proposed answer this evening is: eschatology.

What eschatology does is to hold together things which otherwise are broken up and treated as separate events, and when they are treated in that way the true function of liturgy is forgotten. Minus eschatology (he says), the Church will become an organization among organization, an activity among activities, an institution among other human institutions.

This is the state of affairs about which Schmemann complains in his journals.

Without putting the Eucharist at the very center, the Church is a religious phenomenon but not the Church of Christ.

In a moment of candor he adds:

If I have a vocation, it is here, in the fight for the Eucharist against this reduction, against the de-Churching of the Church.

An interesting phrase to describe a disastrous condition—“de-Churching of the Church”—because her liturgy does not reveal and communicate the eschaton; instead, the liturgy becomes an activity among activities. Someone will object that it’s incorrect to say that we’ve forgotten eschatology. Is it not still included in our theological curriculum? Students, tell me? Do we not have readings on the last things in the syllabus? Schmemann agrees that manuals of theology have included a chapter, or rather an appendix, entitled “De Novissimis,” in which all kinds of information about the end of the world and what comes after it are given. What disappeared, however, was eschatology precisely as a dimension, a coefficient of the whole theological enterprise, shaping and permeating the whole Christian faith as its dynamic inspiration and motivation.

When this metamorphosis in understanding happens, whereby a living and transformative power in history is changed into some kind of apocalyptic condemnation of history, then being pro-kingdom came to mean being anti-world. And this is one of the greatest tragedies of Church history, Schmemann thinks. This eschatological character of the Christian leitourgia was little by little obscured in both theology and piety, with the result that the Church’s worship lost this eschatological, that is, kingdom-centered, kingdom-oriented, character of liturgy that made it the source of the Church’s evaluation of the world, the root and the motivation of her mission to the world.

Now lost is the radical novelty that should be experienced every time the Church enters into the kingdom on the eighth day. As a result, leitourgia is reduced to cultic dimensions and categories; theology comes to be concerned with obligation, efficiency, and validity; and liturgical theology corresponds to a non-ecclesiological, non-eschatological, pious orientation. But let me allow Schmemann to make his own summary.

I can now make my point, which is very simple, and which will no doubt appear naive to many a sophisticated ideologue of renewal. If renewal is to have a consistent orientation—and this means precisely a theology—this theology must be rooted, first of all, in the recovered Christian eschatology. For eschatology is not what people have come to think of it—an escape from the world. It is, on the contrary, the very source and foundation of the Christian doctrine of the world and of the Church’s action in the world. By referring the world, every moment of its time, every ounce of its matter, all human thought, energy, and creativity—by referring all of that to the eschaton, to the ultimate reality of the kingdom of God, it gives them their only real meaning. Thus it makes possible Christian action as well as the judgment and evaluation of that action. And yet, the locus of that recovery is the liturgy of the Church.

What we witness in leitourgia, what we experience, what fills the Christian’s vision, what the liturgical cult celebrates, what empowers our lives is the kingdom come. True, the eschaton is still coming, but the redemption occurs now, right now. This is Christian eschatology. It is not only an eschatology of the future. The kingdom can capacitate us to evaluate the world and take action in it because it does not simply await us in the future. We cross over into it, through the liturgy, already, now.

Schmemann thinks the tragedy of contemporary Christianity is that we have accepted an either/or alternative and have abandoned the eschatological antinomy of both/and. He thinks we think we must now make a choice between eschaton and time, Church and world, mystery and the mundane, liturgy and life. We assume that we must either leave history or settle into it as our home. This is a bifurcation he wants to destroy. Here’s a lengthy quote from the journals, in which his resistance to this divisive thinking leads him to get one more pronouncement on liturgical theology.

Ultimately, the whole novelty of Christianity consisted (consists) in destroying this choice, this polarization. This is the essence of Christianity as eschatology. The kingdom of God is the goal of history, and the kingdom of God is already now among us, within us: both/and. Christianity is the unique, historical event and Christianity is the presence of that event, as the completion of all events and of history itself.

Here is for me the whole meaning of liturgical theology. The liturgy: the joining, revelation, actualization of the historicity of Christianity and of its transcendence over that historicity. Here is the eternal antinomy of Christianity and the essence of all contemporary discussions about Christianity. The task of theology is to be faithful to the antinomy, which disappears in the experience of the Church as Pascha, a continuous—not only historical—a continuous passage of the world to the kingdom.

All the time one must leave the world, and all the time one must remain in it. That’s the both/and that’s so difficult to accomplish.

In another place he explains why we are losing this.

This is the paradox, the antinomy, the message, which Christians could not endure because it was too much for them. It’s much easier to have a little religion of the past, a little religion of the present and future, a little religion of commandments and prescriptions. Leitourgia offers us something else, something bigger than this little religion. It offers us an experience of corporate passage from the old eon into the new eon: a liturgy based on divine action now, eternal life made manifest to us here. We touch it, we see it, we taste it in the eschatological antinomy that the liturgy celebrates.

“That means the Church is not a little forum for social reforms,” Schmemann writes; “rather, the Church’s leitourgia is the realized, inaugurated eschatology of the kingdom and at the same time the real knowledge of the kingdom.” Out of such experiential knowledge, theology rises, that is, comes into being. Leitourgia, we were told, is the work that God commissioned the Church to do in the world, on behalf of the world, for the world. And the nature of the Church as institution can be termed sacramental because the nature of that institution is one perpetual Passover, Pasch, passage, a concept crucial to Schmemann. Here are four quotes just underscoring it. He says:

The dynamic essence of the Church is passage from the old into the new, from this world into the world to come, from the kingdom of nature into the kingdom of grace.

Second, he says:

The Eucharist is the sacrament in which the Church performs the passage, the passover from this world into the kingdom, offers in Christ the whole creation to God, seeing it as heaven and earth full of his glory, and partakes of Christ’s immortal life at his table in the kingdom.

Third, he says that

Leitourgia is a corporate procession and passage of the Church toward her fulfillment, the sacrament of the kingdom of God.

Fourth, he says:

The most valuable achievement of the liturgical movement was to discover this Paschal dimension and root of the liturgy, its fundamental nature as passage and passover.

To call the Church sacramental, therefore, has less to do with the contrast between nature and grace, material and spiritual, and much more to do with the contrast between old and new, this world and the world being revived, the kingdom of nature and the kingdom of grace. This is why the Eucharist is the true form of the Church, an expression that Schmemann credits to Nicholas Afanasiev, when he developed the idea of a Church whose form is to be found in its eschatological self-fulfillment at the eucharistic gathering.

What we call the institution of the Church is the sacrament of the kingdom, and she fulfills herself as the new life of the new creation. The passage we experience in the Eucharist is the basis for how we think and speak about matter, world, time, self, sin, death, life—everything. I joke with my students that I believe liturgical theology is like a black hole in space that sucks everything into it. There is no corner of theology that doesn’t find its way here.

So it should be evident, then, why liturgical theology is not primarily concerned with the liturgy. It’s because liturgical theology should not be narcissistic. Liturgical theology is not concerned with liturgy but with the true objects of theology, namely, God, man, and the world—but these are to be understood in a liturgical light. Everything, not just cultic liturgy, but everything is judged in the light of the kingdom of God that suffuses liturgy. The eschatological light that floods into us by the liturgy accompanies us into our daily life, and by that light we can discern the true value of all things.

It is precisely the liturgical eschaton that ascribes real value to every moment of our life, in which everything is now judged, evaluated, and understood in the light of the kingdom of God, the ultimate end and the meaning of all that exists. The true significance of the Eucharist is precisely that of judgment, of transformation, of making infinitely important the whole life.

Why, it’s almost as though liturgical theology is about the life of the world, to borrow the title of Schmemann’s most famous book.

The new covenant’s leitourgia is to perform an eschatological liturgy in the midst of the darkness, for the world’s salvation. Therefore we will not be surprised to hear eschatological overtones when Schmemann describes the Church becoming what she is. One, two, three, four, five bullets this time.

Leitourgia eternally transforms the Church into what she is, makes her the body of Christ and the temple of the Holy Spirit. It makes her the sacrament in Christ of the new creation, the sacrament in Christ of the kingdom. It makes her a realm of grace, of communion with God, of new knowledge and new life. She is the epiphany, the manifestation, the presence and gift of the kingdom of God as its sacrament in this world. And the essential mystery of the Church is being an experience of the kingdom of God as its epiphany in this world.

The Church is the kingdom, sacramentalized in leitourgia. If the Eucharist is not cosmic in scope and eschatological in ambition, then it becomes just one means of grace among others, aiming at individual edification and sanctification. And in that case, the Eucharist ceases to be an experience of the sacrament of the Church.

And the result is a theology exhausting itself in what Schmemann calls “purely formal and truly irrelevant definitions of sacrifice and trans-substantiation, while piety, little by little, subordinates Eucharist to its individualistic and pietistic demands.” Remember: liturgy, theology, and piety need to be reunited.

Ecclesiology is eschatological because the Church has no other foundation, content, or purpose, I mean, no other leitourgia than to communicate the transcendent reality of the kingdom of God.

Closing quote of this section:

It is only when she performs and fulfills this passage when, in other words, the Church transcends herself as institution and society and becomes indeed the new life of the new creation; it’s only then that she is the body of Christ.

I’m coming in for a landing. Number four. When I started my excavation, this is all the further I expected to dig. I wanted to ask what anchors Schmemann’s liturgical theology, and I guessed it was the foundation of eschatology, but while writing I concluded that there’s one final stratum to notice. The house itself is built upon a granite ledge. It is the rock of Christ. Liturgical theology is not only eschatological; it is also Christological, because the Church has no foundation, content, or purpose outside of Christ. For Schmemann, the cosmical, historical, and eschatological character of the Church-at-liturgy (hyphenated again) is anchored in Christ.

It is only because the Church’s leitourgia is always cosmic, that is, assumes into Christ all creation, and is always historical, that is, assumes into Christ all time, that it can be, therefore, eschatological, that is, make us true participants of the kingdom to come.

The leitourgia is the presence and communication of the kingdom the incarnate One brought. Therefore the uniqueness of Christian leitourgia lies in its stemming from the faith in the Incarnation, from the great and all-embracing mystery of the Logos-made-flesh.

Schmemann describes the Church as the mystery of a new creation entered through baptism.

By water and spirit, in the likeness of Christ’s death and resurrection, which gathers the faithful on the Lord’s day to hear his word, eat and drink at his table in his kingdom, to relate all time and cosmos with Christ who was to fill all things with himself, and all this is not understood as mere cultic acts, but above all as the fulfillment by the Church of her very nature.

The Church finds her fulfillment in Jesus. The liturgy, then, is about entering into Christ, which is entering into the kingdom. Schmemann sees this in every entrance rite of the Divine Liturgy, when the celebrant approaches the altar. He writes:

This has been given all possible symbolic explanations, but it’s not a symbol. It’s the very movement of the Church as passage from the old into the new, from this world into the world to come.

These are the terms under which liturgical theology should operate, terms in which symbol is real. And this creates for us a final antinomy. We’ve seen two so far. We’ve seen a cultic antinomy, wherein the leitourgia that transcends cult is expressed by cult, but the leitourgia is bigger than the liturgy which contains it. We’ve seen an eschatological antinomy, wherein the kingdom still to come is already present. Well, here we have a final, Christological, antinomy, wherein Christ who has come to the world, has been rejected by the world, and yet still saves the world. Maybe it’s a triple antinomy; I don’t know if there’s a different word for that.

Despite claiming that the sacramental Church exists for the life of the world, Schmemann is sternly realistic about the condition of that world and the reason why it needs salvation. Three examples:

Having rejected and killed Christ, its Creator, Savior, and Lord, this world sentenced itself to death and does not have life in itself.

Second:

While the world can be improved, it can never become the place God intended it to be. Christianity does not condemn the world; the world has condemned itself, when on Calvary it condemned the One who was its true self.

And third, another long passage. I’m safest when I’m quoting long passages from Schmemann and not writing my own ideas.

The body of Christ is not and can never be of this world. This world condemned Christ, the Bearer of new life. It condemned him to death and by doing this it has condemned itself to death. The new life which shone forth from the grave is the life of the new eon, of the age which in terms of this world is still to come. The descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, by inaugurating a new eon, announced the end of this world. For no one can partake of the new life without dying in the baptismal death. No one can have Christ as his life unless he has died and is constantly dying to this world. “You are dead and your life is hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3).

But then (Schmemann still continuing) nothing which is of this world—no institution, no society, no church—can be identified with the new eon, the new being. The most perfect Christian community, be it completely separated from the evils of the world, as a community is still of this world, living its life depending on it. It’s only by passing into the new eon by an anticipation in faith, hope, and love of the world to come that a community can partake of the body of Christ and manifest itself as the body of Christ.

The body of Christ can never be a part of this world, for Christ has ascended into heaven, and his kingdom is in heaven. Apparently, then, to be a liturgist, one must have died, be dead, and be constantly dying to this world. The eschatological liturgy that will save the world comes to the world from without because nothing within this dead world can give the body of Christ its life. So here’s the antinomy: The body of Christ can never be part of this world, yet it is in the world to bring the world salvation. In rebellion, the world saw the son of the owner of the vineyard coming and said, “Let’s kill him, and the inheritance will be ours.” And after we have killed the Source of Life, then there will be no more liturgy, no more Eucharist, no more peace, no more sacrament, no more sacrifice, no more reign of God over us.

So Schmemann frankly points out that the Church was born as a reality in opposition. Externally visible and even more internally invisible, it was born into opposition to this world. Lose that opposition, and the hope of the world is lost. Lose that opposition and the Church is de-Churched. And, alas, this is a very great temptation.

The Church gradually became a religious “servicing” of the world. Christianity, not the Church in its mystical depth, but Christianity has lost its eschatological dimension, and turned towards the world as law, judgment, redemption, recompense: a religion of the future life. Having ceased being eschatological, it made the world eschatological.

If we lose the true eschatology, then, we fall for an ersatz eschatology, and the world’s utopia become an earthly eschatology.

In a foolish effort to win back respect in the world’s eye, Christianity

...accepts this earthly eschatology and begins to convince itself and others that it’s always striving for this earthly happiness, that neither Christ nor the Church ever taught anything else. Wrong. The hope of the world lies in the Church’s opposition to it. The life of the world is contingent upon Christians constantly dying to it. Truth will only be found by leaving the world to stand in the kairos of liturgy, for there, in liturgy (he writes), we stand before God, in Christ, who is the End, the Eschaton, the Fullness of all our humanity. And in him offer to God the only reasonable service of the redeemed world: the Eucharist. And in the light of it we see and understand and recapitulate in Christ the truth about God, man, and the world…

Now do you see why liturgy is the foundation for theology?

...about creation and fall and sin and redemption, about the whole universe and its final transfiguration in the kingdom of God, and we receive this truth in participation of the body and blood of Christ, in the unending Pentecost that guides us into all truth and shows us all things to come (John 16). The task of theology (Schmemann concludes—this was another long quote from him) is to bear witness to this truth, and there’s no end to this task. Each theologian will see it only partially, and only partially reflect it.

Our liturgical life reflects the strangest paradox ever. The world killed Christ, and yet Christ gives life to the world. That is the perpetuation of the mystery of cross and resurrection. The world cannot contain Christ, and therefore it’s useless for the Church to try to adapt herself to the world, and yet—here’s the antinomy again—if the Church were to isolate herself, Schmemann says she would cease to be Church, because it is by being mission, by loving those for whom Christ died, the Church realizes herself as a fullness.

A Church that would isolate herself from the world and live by her eschatological fullness, a Church that would cease to evangelize and bear witness to Christ in the world would simply cease to be the Church, because the fullness by which she lives is precisely the agape of God as revealed and communicated in Christ. Mission cannot therefore be a static relationship with the world. Mission means to fight with and for the world. It means a constant effort to understand and to challenge, to question and to answer.

Perhaps our problem ends in being too eager to exchange the liturgy of the Church Militant for the liturgy of the Church in Glory. We must learn patience and perform our work, our leitourgia, where we are. To do so will require us to link faith and love with hope. And Christian hope is without foundation if it is not rooted in the resurrection of Jesus. Ecclesiology and eschatology are linked in Jesus’ resurrection. And with full recognition of the treatment that Christ received from the world, Schmemann says:

Christ must remain the foundation of our eschatology, which is the foundation of our leitourgia, which is the foundation of the lex orandi on which the Church’s lex credendi rests.

And that is the house that Fr. Alexander built.

Thank you for your kind attention, and pray for me, a sinner. [Applause]

Fr. Chad: Thank you, Dr. Fagerberg. We have a little bit of time for some very tight questions. While we’re setting up that microphone, I wanted to take this opportunity to thank Michael—Mickey Herzak of Insurance Systems that’s based in Cleveland, Ohio. He’s a very generous sponsor of this year’s Schmemann lecture, and we’re all grateful for the work that Mickey does for the Orthodox Church throughout the country. We’re very grateful for his sponsorship of the lecture this evening.

The first question: if you would come up, when you approach the microphone, please state your name, and then give a very tight, concise question. You might want to queue up behind each other so we can make this move a little faster.

Dr. Fagerberg: If I was a schizophrenic, I would go there.

Fr. Chad: They are, yes. [Laughter]

Dr. Fagerberg: I could go to the microphone and ask myself: What in the world were you talking about? [Laughter]

Mr. Raymond Davison: Good evening, Dr. Fagerberg. Thank you for coming tonight. My name is Raymond Davison. I’m a second-year student here at St. Vladimir’s. The question that came to mind during your lecture—and I may have gotten fixated on this portion—when you discussed the Great Entrance, that it is not a symbol of the entrance into the kingdom, but entrance into the kingdom itself. Now, there are rites within that which claims to be the Church catholic that do not have a Great Entrance. Is it possible, then, in Fr. Alexander’s liturgical theology, to comprehend other rites that lay emphasis to particular portions of who Christ is through the way those rites refer to Christ’s eschaton? Or is that not really possible outside of that which developed because the great church in Constantinople had a separate building in which the Gifts were prepared so we ended up with this liturgy where we’re walking them in that has deep theological significance, however, possibly tied to a historical accident? Thank you.

Dr. Fagerberg: It occurs to me to ricochet your question into an article title: “How Does Your Liturgy Get Into the Kingdom?” [Laughter] I mean, where’s the entrance? It doesn’t have to be that entrance, but there has to be an entrance, and there has to be a place and a way for that symbol-become-reality to occur. How does it happen? Schmemann is writing about his Orthodox symbolized reality, but that reality must happen if it’s a—how far out on a limb do I want to go here?—if it’s a true church and it’s a real leitourgia, that has to happen. Where? How? How do you actually enter this, do this pascha?

I just like that as a question to write down on a piece of paper and send home with everybody. We have some ecumenical meeting, and then: Write this question and send it for discussion among yourselves. I like the question; it’s nice. My point is that he’s saying: Liturgy people, members of my guild, thrash around on all this symbol stuff, but it’s actually—something is occurring. Now you would have to sense that occurring somewhere, somehow. Where is the entrance? What’s the mousehole for the mouse to make this entrance? I like the challenge of the question. I think it can happen elsewhere. It must; it has to.

Mr. John Thetford: Good evening, Dr. Fagerberg. I’m John Thetford, also a second-year seminarian here. My question has to do with something you said earlier in your presentation about the relationship between cult and liturgy. I think one issue that could happen there… I think the way you presented it—correct me if I’m remembering it wrong—you said the cult kind of brings us into the liturgy. The cult is not itself the liturgy in a certain way. Do you think there’s a risk of dividing those concepts too much, of the actual actions we’re doing—the singing and the liturgy—as a concept?

Dr. Fagerberg: Hang on and do a little more work. [Laughter] If the division happened, what would be the consequence? What’s the downside?

Mr. Thetford: The liturgy could become too abstract of a concept compared to what we’re doing.

Dr. Fagerberg: Ah.

Mr. Thetford: Kind of a spiritual/material…

Dr. Fagerberg: We have this leitourgia thing floating in the clouds over our head, but all that we know how to do, all that we have rubrics to do is this cult. And if—let’s do the flip side—if they weren’t distinguished—notice I switched from the word “divided” to the word “distinguished”—if they weren’t distinguished, then what would be the downside? It would be thinking that we exist for the sake of this cult instead of existing for the life of the world. I think that that notion of what Schmemann calls by the phrase “cultic antinomy”... And that was one of the hardest things for me to finally get my head around; it took my reading Florensky’s Pillar to understand antinomy to get to what I think Schmemann was saying.

We have all kinds of theological kinship coming in here, I think. Don’t you sacrament… Can I speak Western Scholasticism without getting stoned in the audience? Res tantum and sacramentum tantum: there’s a reality here, but the sacramentum tantum is a symbol of the reality. You have the fact that my metaphor—the leitourgia is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside—the way Mary’s womb could contain the One who contains the universe that contains Mary. That kind of kenotic action by God—he seems to like small places—he comes into small cults. He comes into these liturgical spots. All Schmemann is up to is saying: Don’t confuse this bigger agenda, the bigger activity of God with the symbolism gutted of its reality, in some way, with that cult part.

So he goes after this I think quite often; this cultic antinomy is important to him. I’ve forgotten now whether we were trying to increase attention or overcome attention, but I think he wants attention to remain. Of course we’re going to do the cult because of our human nature; that’s the only way we can do this. But what we’re doing in the cult is something that transcends cult. I find that a fascinating challenge by him.

While another person is coming to the microphone, I’ll tell you my two stories that I tell at the beginning of class on liturgical theology to try to rattle the students. One is when a friend of mine heard I got the job and was going to Notre Dame, he said, “Oh, and you like liturgy. Wait till you see a football game there!” [Laughter] Okay, maybe that’s what liturgy is, or maybe leitourgia is thicker than that definition of liturgy.

The other anecdote is that I was dressed like this, waiting to go into commencement exercises, and the colleague behind me, who knew that my field was in liturgical studies, said, “You must like this sort of thing.” [Laughter] Oh, yes, this is why I went into liturgical studies, because we just like this—squirrel! Oh, look, there’s something shiny! Schmemann is trying to get us to a substance of liturgy, and I didn’t work it into the talk, because it’s about him and not about me, but I’ve come up with the thickest definition I could come up with for liturgy so far—I’m not dead yet. Liturgy is the perichoresis of the Trinity, kenotically extended to invite our synergistic assent to deification. That’s the swoosh of liturgy, protological to eschatological.

Okay, he’s made it. The audience at home will think there’s a 500-yard walk because I stole some time while you were approaching.

Q1: Thank you. One of the themes that I’ve seen in Fr. Alexander’s writings that I really enjoy hearing him talk about is joy.

Dr. Fagerberg: Oh, yeah.

Q1: I’m wondering…

Dr. Fagerberg: Can I come back next year and just rework it with a little more joy? [Laughter]

Q1: I just wanted to offer an opportunity and just ask if you would reflect on where that works into the house that you’ve built for us this evening.

Dr. Fagerberg: Boy. As you asked it, the answer flashed in my mind: that is eschatology. Perfect, exact fit. That’s all over the place in the journals, isn’t it? And it fits in the final section as well, because it’s a joy that the world can’t offer. So it fits in—I’ve forgotten how I’ve numbered my floors here—but the Christological and eschatological floors—one and two—the joy: faith, hope, love—and joy. It’s almost like he puts a fourth—you can’t rewrite Scripture, but it’s like he puts a fourth reality there.

Or maybe it would make an interesting approach to say that in the perichoresis of faith, hope, and love, joy issues. And liturgy should bring about this joy. That’s resurrection life. That’s eighth-day existence. And that’s what a Christian should live, walking through this valley of the shadow of death, so that somebody else notices and says, “Man, what have they got? How come they’re like this?” This would be a basis for evangelization. That’s nice. That’s a good one.

Q1: Thank you. [Applause]

Fr. Chad: Last year was the first time we combined the annual Schmemann lecture with a mid-year commencement exercise. It’s generally a small group, but we do have two degrees to confer this evening on two Doctor of Ministry candidates. I’ll introduce to you for the first time our new academic dean, Dr. Ionuţ-Alexandru Tudorie, to do the conferring of the degrees.

Dr. Ionuţ-Alexandru Tudorie: Thank you. My humble idea tonight is to confer these two degrees. It’s therefore a very short reading here.

By virtue of the authority vested in the Board of Trustees and the faculty of St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary by the Board of Regents of the University of the State of New York, the degree of Doctor of Ministry is conferred upon Rev. Dr. Alcuin Kellerhouse in absentia, and Rev. Dr. David Subu in absentia. [Applause]

Fr. Chad: Just a little more housekeeping detail. After we recess out of the auditorium tonight, there is a lovely reception waiting for us downstairs on a couple of levels. We also have a bookstall set up out in the front. I’m sure that if you make a donation to St. Vladimir’s Seminary tonight that our guest speaker will sign his book for you, enthusiastically. [Laughter] If you’re really hungry for books, the bookstore is going to remain open for about 30 minutes during the reception. To find your way to the bookstore, if you don’t know, you go out of this building and keep going in that direction and you’ll eventually find it. [Laughter]

So again, my thanks to all of you for being here this evening, and our thanks to Insurance Systems in Cleveland, Ohio, for its sponsorship; Ancient Faith Radio who is an excellent partner with us over many, many years. Now we’ll hear from His Eminence, Archbishop Benjamin of San Francisco and the West.

Choir: Eis polla eti, Despota!

His Eminence Archbishop Benjamin: A friend of mine’s grandson just shortened it to ‘pota. [Laughter] Please be seated. Just a few remarks. First of all, it’s always a joy for me to return here. I first came here over 40 years ago as a student. It’s hard to believe. I look in the mirror and my red hair has turned white, and I’ve gotten older—I hope a bit wiser—but it’s always a joy to come here to the seminary and to be at the place where my sense of liturgy, of the joy of being Orthodox, was born.

The seminary has changed quite a bit since I was a student. I was a student here at the time when there was a pre-the[ology] program, and we had a football team known as the Powerless Bodies. [Laughter] There was a very active music program, and I’m grateful that that continues, because one of the things that Fr. Schmemann spoke about was the beauty of the liturgy and its ability to transform lives. I believe even the Russian nation was converted by the beauty of the liturgy, and if I had a word for the students, I would say: When you graduate, if you are ordained, make the liturgy beautiful. The world needs the beauty of the liturgy, the deep beauty of the liturgy.

Again, my thanks to Fr. Chad and for all of you for your patience and for serving the liturgy with me this morning. God bless you all. [Applause]

Fr. Chad: If you would, please stand. We’ll sing “It is Truly Meet.”

All: It is truly meet to bless you, O Theotokos, ever-blessed and most pure and the Mother of our God. More honorable than the cherubim and more glorious beyond compare than the seraphim, without corruption you gave birth to God the Word. True Theotokos, we magnify you.

Choir: Let us who love their words gather together with hymns and honor the three great torch-bearers of the triune Godhead: Basil the Great, Gregory the Theologian, and John Chrysostom. These men have enlightened the world with the rays of their divine doctrines. They are sweetly-flowing rivers of wisdom, filling all creation with streams of heavenly knowledge. Ceaselessly they intercede for us before the Holy Trinity.