The Joy of Freedom
Eastern Worship and Modern Man
Dr. Paulos Mar Gregorios
First Edition: 1967
Second Edition: 1986
Foreword
This book is neither by a scholar, nor for scholars. It is meant primarily for intelligent Western Christian readers, but others too may find themselves addressed here.
I am grateful to Professor J. G. Davies for suggesting that I should write such a book. My debt to my many Western Christian teachers can never be repaid.
Five monastic communities gave me their generous hospitality, warm fellowship, and a peaceful atmosphere for the writing of this book: the Jesuit Community in Mont de la Pourviere near Lyons, the Benedictine Abbeys of Bec-Helouin and Hautecombe in France, the Dominican Community in Fribourg, Switzerland, and the Reformed Community of Grandchamp near Neuchatel, Switzerland. To have prayed and lived with these Western brothers and sisters has been a deeply enriching experience. I am grateful.
P. Verghese
Communaute de Grandchamp
Feast of the Presentation (mayeltho), 1966
Preface
The English word Worship seems to have no exact parallels in other modern or Biblical languages. It includes personal prayer as well as the corporate acts of worship of the Church.
Patterns of Christian worship originally emerged from one common form, but they soon developed into diverse liturgical and spiritual traditions in various cultures. All traditions of worship owe something to the pre-Christian cultural milieu in which they took shape. The Eastern tradition is no exception to this. It bears the marks of Egyptian, Jewish and Syrian, Iranian and Greek cultures, to mention only a few. It would be an error to assume however that there is only one Eastern tradition of worship. No such homogeneity of Eastern culture and tradition existed at any time - not even in the days of the “One undivided Church.”
Cultural diversity, even in a small geographical area like the modern Middle East, gave rise from the beginning to a great number of spiritual and liturgical traditions. The Jerusalem tradition was never identical with the Antiochene or Alexandrian traditions. Asia Minor had its own cultural patterns and traces of this can be discovered even in the earliest traditions as reflected in the New Testament. Byzantium, which inherited all these traditions along with the Greek and Roman cultures, developed something peculiarly its own. To what extent then are we justified in speaking of an Eastern tradition in general? Despite the distinctive features of different African, Asian and European cultures, can one justify the effort to delineate a common pattern that underlies the worship of Antioch and Alexandria, Byzantium and Persia, Ethiopia and the Slavonic countries? If we limit ourselves to a study of the texts of the various liturgical anaphoras, the general lines of diversity and similarity between the several traditions can be delineated with comparative ease. That work has been ably attempted by liturgiologists in the past1 and research continues to this day in this field.
The purpose of this slender volume has to be something less ambitious. All that it can hope to achieve is to set Eastern worship in the context of the present world; it is a plea rather than an analysis. It seeks first to clear away certain popular misunderstandings. This effort should not be taken as polemic, or even as apologetic. It is a commendation before everything else, but in the best ecumenical interests. No tradition can fail to benefit from a pattern of worship which has succeeded in holding the Church together for centuries when all else seemed to have been taken away from her.
The first chapter of this study seeks to deal with the objection that, for the educated modern man, not just Eastern worship, but in fact any form of worship is irrelevant and useless. There are certain elements which modern men and women need in worship; but worship is first a duty and only secondarily something useful. Western readers may also too easily associate a vague kind of mysticism with the East, and therefore keep away from trying to come to terms with it. This book seeks to show that the fear is based on assumptions which may not be justified.
A study of Eastern worship is difficult for others either because they think that it ignores historical reality in order to escape into another world, or that it is too fixed in a given historical period. For others, study of Eastern worship is an attempt to find the “true” original form of worship. For the Eastern Church, history is a form of memory which is more than mental; it is the re-living of a past experience in joy. The content of that memory can be illuminated but not supplied by the historical method.
This book attempts simply to point to some general features of Eastern worship, and not to describe it in any detail. Its purpose is to create interest in the average reader rather than to instruct the scholar.
The notion of priesthood is inseparable from worship; but priesthood should first be understood, so the Orthodox believe, as belonging to the whole Church and therefore to every baptized Christian. The ordained bishop or priest fulfils a special function within this common priesthood. The worship of the Church requires both the common and the special priesthood. This Orthodox understanding of priesthood should be acceptable even to many who are anticlerically oriented.
The final chapter deals again with the question of prayer, which has become so difficult for modern man. My thesis is that prayer and worship are the real characteristics of a christian. The free access with confidence into the presence of the Father, through Christ, in the Spirit, is the source of the joy of freedom.
1. See for example A. Archdale King, The Rites of Eastern Christendom, 2 vols, 1950; Donald Attwater, The Christian Churches of the East, 2 vols, 1948, and Eastern Catholic Worship, 1945; F. E. Brightman, Liturgies Eastern and Western, Vol. I, 1896.
Preface to the Second Edition
This small book, my first major work; was written some 20 years ago, primarily for western readership. I was then living in the West, in Geneva, in a predominantly Protestant Christian milieu, and the allusions in the book are sometimes difficult to follow for an Indian Christian unfamiliar with the western Christian debates of the sixties of our century. There were three concerns central to my mind at that time, and this book reflects those.
I
First was my concern with a growing movement of what was called ‘secular Christianity’, derived from Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s conception of ‘Religionless Christianity.’ I was basically sympathetic to the reaction against European pietism which condoned or approved Hitler because for too many German Christians religion was primarily a matter of the heart, and the power of the state was a separate realm where the government was supreme. Bonhoeffer wanted this kind of Christianity which put all its weight on personal piety and the worship of God unrelated to the burning issues of politics and economics condemned. He wanted an active Christianity, which did something about an enormous human problem like Hitler’s Third Reich. He was prepared, in the name of Christ, to kill Hitler, and was arrested for plotting to do so. From prison he wrote his now famous letter about ‘Religionless Christianity’, a Christianity which moved away from the cult and the piety of the heart to sober political and economic action in the interests of humanity. This has been the characteristic attitude of liberal European Protestantism - to regard action or mission as primary and worship as ancillary to it. ‘Responsibility’ was the key word. Our responsibility was for prophetic speaking and prophetic action. The Barmen Declaration, which condemned Hitler’s actions and affirmed our basic loyalty to Christ as Lord was true prophetic Christian speaking, and daring plans for action like Bonhoeffer’s plot to kill Hitler were prophetic and responsible Christian actions. Christians were admonished to grow up and recognize the adulthood of humanity. They were asked to assume responsibility for the world, ‘as if God did not exist’ (etsi deus non daretur). Man was now at the centre of reality. For some who repeated Nietzsche’s ‘God is dead’ the new context, the main point was that Humanity had come of age and should accept complete responsibility for society and Its evolution towards justice, democracy and freedom.
‘As if God did not exist’ - as a slogan it had some meaning. But part of that ‘as if’ would be to live without worship. Church services themselves became occasions primarily for prophetic Christian preaching on social and economic questions. Reading the Bible was also to derive inspiration and orientation for prophetic Christian action. ‘Religionless Christianity’ was also a slogan - to put action before cult or worship. ‘God is dead’ was similarly a prophetic slogan, to make Christians realize their central responsibility for political and economic amelioration of the world. ‘Secular Christianity’ was another slogan, but it went beyond to suggest that this world known to our senses was all that existed, and that Christian concern about the ‘other world’ about God, about the pre-existence of Christ, and about eternal life and so on were standing in the way of Christians accepting full responsibility for changing society here and now, in this temporal world.
For me, this was the full flowering of the sickness of western Christianity, this desire to put man and his mind and will at the centre of reality, without worshipful acknowledgement of God as real Master and Lord. It was a focus on human reason and human action, of course to make this World a better place, but worship was the first casualty for western man.
My concern was not just about the haughtiness of industrially advanced western man, but also about his fundamental denial of what is central to Christianity - the unity of God and Humanity in Christ. To separate the humanity and divinity of Christ was for me the central heresy, to be followed by the denial of Christ’s divinity sooner or later. ‘Secular Christianity’ was, for me, true manifestation of western hubris and of liberal protestantism’s basic tendency to ignore the Incarnation of the Second Person the Holy Trinity.
For me as a Christian, God and Humanity are inseparably united in Christ. There is no such thing as Man without God, whether people recognise it or not. Humanity as such is for me, as a result of the Incarnation of the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, a divine-human reality. I cannot be enthusiastic about a secularism which denies God in order to affirm humanity. It is a fact that I find secular people committed to justice and peace congenial. I can work with them. But I cannot affirm their doctrine, or replace my faith with a secular faith. And my faith is the faith of the Church, affirmed above all in the worship of the Church, of course also in life and action. Without God, man makes no sense to me, I must confess. Neither does history or the evolution of the universe make sense to me in a context without God. Even physical nature makes sense to me only in God.
The plea that Modern Man has come of age and that he should, live as if God did not exist, was pure non-sense to me. Having been trained in the so-called modern way of thinking, I found its foundations totally shaky and unreliable. The fact of the matter, for me at least, was that western hubris had led to western humanity’s denial of God and consequent inability to worship Him. Religionless Christianity and Secular Christianity seemed to me high sounding theological justifications of so-called modern man’s desire to overthrow God and take over.
Hence my strong and spirited argument about modern man’s desperate need to worship. The failure and inability to worship God as God ought to be worshipped was the basic human problem for me. He alone truly is, and He alone is truly good. All being and all good come from Him. To refuse to acknowledge this and live in response to His love is to betray our humanity which is a gift from God in Christ. And the whole point of worship is constantly to acknowledge that God alone truly is, that He alone is truly good, and that our being and our good come from Him. To justify our inability to recognise this in the name of a religionless Christianity struck me as simply outrageous. Harvey Cox of Secular City, and Paul Van Buren of The Secular Meaning of the Gospel, appeared to me both uninformed and grossly mistaken. The book which I published in 1967 was an outcry from my sense of outrage.
I wonder even now, how much sense all this makes to the intelligent Christian reader in India. I think that the temptation to follow the western liberal path is very strong in the intellectual elite of India, both Christian and non-Christian. I do not know if what I say here has any relevance for their thought. I leave it to them.
II
My second concern was about the alienation of the Christian person in worship - alienation from the community and from the created order. I was furiously opposed to that peculiarly western form of ‘mysticism’ which sought union of ‘the alone with the alone’ - away from other people, away from things, from smells and sounds and tastes and tangibility. Christian worship was for me communitarian as well as personal, spiritual as well as physical, mediatorial and vicarious. Worship is offered primarily by the community of faith, the universal community with the living and the departed (the departed forming the majority), standing with Christ as the mediating High Priest of all creation, on behalf of all humanity, before God, offering back the creation to God in thanksgiving (eucharistia), through the offering of material things like bread and wine. This is what distinguished Eucharistic mysticism from the one-to-One mysticism of some seers in the west and east. And in this mysticism the mediation of Christ is not only not ignored, but in fact most comprehensively acknowledged and manifested. People like Emil Brunner and the Barthians in general, who saw an opposition between the gospel and mysticism had absolutely no understanding of this eucharistic mysticism of the community through material offerings. Eucharistic mysticism, far from being the enemy of the gospel, was its most adequate manifestation.
I am not sure about my success in making this point clear in my book. For me, it is still the central affirmation of Christianity, that the eucharist is the most adequate and full manifestation of the gospel.
III
My third concern was about freedom - a much misused word in the west. Most western conceptions of freedom were for me basically formed in the context of alienation. The individual should be free to do as he or she pleases, unhindered by anyone else. Only in order to make possible the freedom of all individuals the west had been prepared to concede some limitations to freedom in the form of order. I was revolting against this notion in the fifties and sixties. For me freedom was not primarily for the individual, but for the community, in fact for the whole of humanity as a single entity, and for the created order as a whole. And freedom is not doing what you like. Only God alone is truly free, in that He is always freely creating the good, unimpeded by lack of power or by restraint from others. It is this freedom which expresses itself in creative love which has created us and which has manifested itself in Christ. Freedom was to be able and empowered to create the good effectively, out of a genuine inner impulse, not by law or constraint, not for gain or reward, but simply because the good was good.
Our unwillingness and inability to identify ourselves fully with God, with other people, and with the created order, is our unfreedom. Our full liberation is inseparable from the liberation of the community in the resurrection, from the liberation of humanity as a whole, and from the liberation of the created order as a whole. The whole creation is groaning for that liberation, and waiting for the full liberation of the children of God (Romans 8:21 ff). This freedom of the children of God in which the whole creation shares is not doing as you please, but rather: (a) negatively being free from the twin enemies of evil and death, and (b) positively to enter the presence of God, there to be united with Him in true loving community and to be empowered to participate freely in the free creativity of God.
This notion of freedom explains the title of the book. True worship brings the joy of true freedom, the freedom from evil and death, the freedom to enter the Presence and there to be united with Him in community and in loving creativity. Access into the presence banishes boredom and brings true joy.
* * * *
I have always been intrigued by the parallelism between western secularism and current forms of Sankarite Vedanta in India. For some of these pedantic Sankarite Vedantins who seldom reflect the tranquillity and grace that comes from true realisation, salvation is basically an individual’s experience of identity with the whole, unrelated to community and the material world except in terms of that identity - an undifferentiated identity unrelated to the process of temporal reality, and therefore unrelated to socio-economic reality. The main difference between western secularism and some modern forms of academic Vedanta is that the former fully affirms the temporal order while denying everything else, whereas the latter virtually denies the whole temporal order and its significance. But in true Vedanta too, worship is something that belongs to the immature and the unrealised. There is no worship possible, ultimately, because the One to be worshipped is none other than the worshipper himself. If there is none else to be worshipped than one’s own True Self, then does not worship become folly and stupidity? Sankara himself worshipped and encouraged worship. Perhaps it was an unresolved tension in his own life. For me the position of modern academic Sankarism is a far cry from the authentic insights of the Vedic tradition, which are basically centred on cosmic integrity, sacrifice and worship, rather than individual fulfilment.
The indigenisation of worship in India cannot be a matter of adjusting our forms to Hindu symbols and terminology. To restore Hindu forms of a given period in the past will not make Christian worship in India any more authentically Indian. It can only make it Hindu-Christian in a dated way. What is more needed in India is to make worship truly communitarian, truly eucharistic, truly related to the transcending reality of the Body of Christ in time and beyond. That requires more than theoretical knowledge of the principles of Christian worship, which theoretical knowledge is now sadly lacking in many of the indigenisation movements in the Indian churches. It also has to spring from the life of a genuinely worshipping community, so rare in India today. The book may be regarded as an invitation to form such authentic Christian worshipping communities.
I have added as an appendix a short essay on prayer which I wrote some time ago for our young people.
PAULOS GREGORIOS
New Delhi
Easter, 1984
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