Liturgy as Theology

Schmemann’s governing thesis is that the Church’s leitourgia is not a “source” from which theology may quarry proof-texts but is itself the Church’s primary theological act — the place where she knows God, becomes herself, and enters the Kingdom. This file expounds that claim: the meaning of leitourgia, the Liturgy as the Church’s self-realization, the rejection of liturgy-as-source in favor of liturgy-as-theology, and the eschatological structure that holds the whole together.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (emigration)

The Word and the Claim

Schmemann’s whole program is compressed in his handling of a single Greek word. Leitourgia — from laos, “people,” and ergon, “work” — meant in classical usage a public work undertaken by one on behalf of all. Schmemann drew from it a definition that has since become standard in Orthodox self-understanding: a leitourgia is “an action by which a group of people become something corporately which they had not been as a mere collection of individuals — a whole greater than the sum of its parts” (Schmemann, For the Life of the World, Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1973, ch. 2; see The Divine Liturgy: What the Divine Liturgy Is).

From this the central thesis follows. If the Liturgy is the act by which a collection of individuals becomes the Church, then the Liturgy is not something the Church does among her other activities; it is the act in which the Church is constituted as what she is. And if that is so, then the Liturgy is not a subject for theology but its native place: the Church knows God in worshipping him, and theology is the articulation of what is known there. This is why Schmemann insisted on the term liturgical theology and fought to keep it from being domesticated into a branch of the curriculum (Schmemann, Introduction to Liturgical Theology, trans. Asheleigh E. Moorhouse, London: Faith Press, 1966, ch. 1; Russian original Vvedenie v liturgicheskoe bogoslovie, Paris: YMCA-Press, 1961).

These are Schmemann’s theses, and this collection presents them as his. That the Liturgy is central to Orthodox life, that lex orandi bears on lex credendi, that the Eucharist makes the Church — these are the common possession of the tradition (see The Divine Liturgy: Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi). The particular program built on them — the definition of liturgical theology as a discipline, the historical reconstruction that grounds it, the critique of “liturgical piety,” the specific pastoral conclusions — is Schmemann’s own theological work, expounded here on his authority and not presented as the dogma of the Church (METHODOLOGY §4.1; see the collection README).

Against the Liturgy as a “Source”

The polemical edge of the thesis is directed at a habit Schmemann regarded as the characteristic deformation of modern Orthodox theology: treating the Liturgy as a locus theologicus, a repository to be mined.

On that approach, the theologian arrives at the Liturgy with a doctrinal question already formed — the divinity of the Spirit, the veneration of the Theotokos, the nature of the Eucharist — and extracts from the services the hymns and prayers that support the answer. The Liturgy functions as evidence. Schmemann did not deny that this can be done, or that the Fathers did something like it (St. Basil, after all, argued from the Church’s doxology and baptismal practice to the divinity of the Spirit: On the Holy Spirit 27). What he denied is that this is what liturgical theology is. To use the Liturgy as a source is already to have stepped outside it — to have made worship an object over against a knowing subject who stands elsewhere, in the study, with the questions (Schmemann, Introduction to Liturgical Theology, 1966, ch. 1; Schmemann, “Theology and Eucharist,” reprinted in Liturgy and Tradition: Theological Reflections of Alexander Schmemann, ed. Thomas Fisch, Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1990).

The alternative he proposed is that theology be done from within the liturgical act. The Liturgy is not evidence for a theology formulated elsewhere; it is the Church’s own theology in its primary form, and the theologian’s work is to bring that primary theology to expression — to say in the language of thought what the Church has already said in the language of worship. Everything else is secondary theology, legitimate but derivative (Schmemann, Introduction to Liturgical Theology, 1966, ch. 1; Fagerberg, Theologia Prima: What Is Liturgical Theology?, Chicago: Hillenbrand Books, 2004, chs. 2–4, on Schmemann’s distinction between primary and secondary theology).

The point was made independently, and in strikingly similar terms, by the Roman Catholic liturgist Aidan Kavanagh in On Liturgical Theology (1984), who distinguished theologia prima — the liturgical assembly’s own theological act — from theologia secunda, reflection upon it. The convergence has been noticed and welcomed, and the phrase theologia prima has become the standard shorthand for what Schmemann was arguing (Kavanagh, On Liturgical Theology, Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1984, ch. 3; Fagerberg, Theologia Prima, 2004; Orthodoxy: Liturgy as Theology, on the Kavanagh parallel).

Three Terms and Their Divorce

Schmemann analyzed the modern situation with a triad that recurs throughout his work: liturgy, theology, and piety — three things that belong together and have come apart.

Liturgy without theology becomes ritual — an order of services performed correctly, with the question of meaning never raised, so that “liturgics” degenerates into the study of rubrics and the training of clergy in how rather than why.
Theology without liturgy becomes an academic discipline in the Western manner, organized by borrowed categories and answering questions posed from outside the Church’s own life — Florovsky’s “Western captivity” reappearing in the seminary curriculum (see The “Western Captivity” and Liturgical Piety; Fr. Georges Florovsky and the Patristic Revival).
Piety severed from both becomes a private devotional world with its own logic — individual, emotional, often intensely sincere, and no longer governed by what the Liturgy actually says and does (Schmemann, Introduction to Liturgical Theology, 1966, chs. 1 and 4; The Eucharist: Sacrament of the Kingdom, trans. Paul Kachur, Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1988, ch. 1).

The divorce, on his account, is the crisis of modern Orthodoxy: not heresy, not persecution, but a slow dissociation in which the Church continues to serve the right services, teach the right doctrines, and cultivate a real devotion, while the three have ceased to be one thing. The reintegration of the three is his program (Schmemann, Introduction to Liturgical Theology, 1966; Fagerberg, Theologia Prima, 2004, ch. 1).

The Church Becoming Herself

The positive content of the thesis is ecclesiological. Schmemann’s most quoted formulation is that the Eucharist is “the sacrament of the Church” — the act in which the Church “becomes what she is,” not one sacrament among others performed within an already-existing Church but the sacrament in which the Church herself is realized as the Body of Christ (Schmemann, The Eucharist: Sacrament of the Kingdom, 1988, ch. 1; see The Divine Liturgy: What the Divine Liturgy Is).

This is the eucharistic ecclesiology of Afanasiev, received and turned in a new direction (see Nicholas Afanasiev; Orthodoxy: Ecclesiology). Afanasiev’s concern was structural and canonical: where the Eucharist is celebrated under the bishop, there is the whole Church, and ecclesiology must be built from the local assembly rather than from a universal institution. Schmemann took the principle and pressed it into liturgical theology proper — not chiefly to settle questions of primacy and canonical order, but to say what the Liturgy is and what happens in it. The detailed exposition of Afanasiev’s own position, and of the differences between the two men, belongs to the sibling collection (see Nicholas Afanasiev; and for Schmemann’s development, The Eucharist: Sacrament of the Kingdom).

One consequence is worth drawing out, because it shows how much work the thesis does. If the Liturgy is the act in which the Church becomes herself, then it cannot be performed by an individual: it requires the gathered ekklesia, the assembly that is the Church’s first and constitutive name. The Orthodox refusal of the private Mass is not a rubrical peculiarity but a doctrine about what the Eucharist is (Schmemann, The Eucharist, 1988, ch. 1, “The Sacrament of the Assembly”; see The Holy Mysteries: Communion and the Life of the Church). And if the assembly is constitutive, then the laity are not an audience: they are celebrants together with the priest who presides among them, and the reduction of the faithful to spectators is a theological error and not merely a pastoral disappointment (Schmemann, The Eucharist, 1988, ch. 1).

The Eschatological Key

What finally holds Schmemann’s account together is eschatology, and without it the whole is misread.

The Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom opens not with “Blessed is our God” — the beginning of every other Orthodox service — but with a proclamation: “Blessed is the Kingdom of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” Schmemann built everything on this. From its first words the Liturgy declares its destination; the whole action that follows is an ascent, a passage of the Church out of “this world” into the Kingdom, and a return (Schmemann, The Eucharist, 1988, ch. 2, “The Sacrament of the Kingdom”; For the Life of the World, 1973, ch. 2; see The Divine Liturgy: The Enarxis and the Little Entrance).

The Liturgy is therefore neither a memorial of a past event nor a petition for a future one but the presence now of the age to come — inaugurated eschatology in its concentrated form (see Orthodox Eschatology: Inaugurated Eschatology and the Kingdom; Liturgy as Eschatology). “We have seen the true Light, we have received the heavenly Spirit,” sung after communion, is on this reading not a pious hyperbole but a plain description of what has just happened (Schmemann, The Eucharist, 1988, chs. 9 and 14; see The Divine Liturgy: The Reception and Thanksgiving).

Two things follow that are easy to miss. First, the eschatological reading is what makes Schmemann’s liturgical theology not an aestheticism: the Liturgy is not beautiful worship that transports the soul but the real irruption of the Kingdom, and its criterion is truth, not effect. Second, it is what makes it not an escapism: precisely because the Church has entered the Kingdom, she is sent back — “let us depart in peace” — into the world as its salt and light, and the Liturgy issues in mission rather than in withdrawal (Schmemann, For the Life of the World, 1973, ch. 2; Church, World, Mission, Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1979). The often-quoted phrase “the liturgy after the Liturgy” names exactly this movement, and Schmemann’s whole social and missionary vision depends on it.

The Historical Question

A thesis of this kind has to answer a historical question: if the Liturgy is the Church’s primary theology, why has it so widely ceased to function as such? Schmemann’s answer is the historical argument of Introduction to Liturgical Theology — a reconstruction of how the original eschatological ordo was overlaid by the sacral piety of the Christianized Empire and by the monastic reshaping of the Church’s worship. That argument is set out in the companion file, and it is also the point at which the liturgiologists have contested him most sharply (see The Ordo and the Byzantine Synthesis; and, for the criticism, The Liturgiological and Traditionalist Critique).

References

Schmemann, Alexander. Introduction to Liturgical Theology. Translated by Asheleigh E. Moorhouse. London: Faith Press, 1966. Russian original: Vvedenie v liturgicheskoe bogoslovie. Paris: YMCA-Press, 1961. (The definition of liturgical theology; the critique of liturgy-as-source; the triad of liturgy, theology, and piety.)
Schmemann, Alexander. The Eucharist: Sacrament of the Kingdom. Translated by Paul Kachur. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1988. (The Eucharist as the sacrament of the Church and of the Kingdom; the sacrament of the assembly; the eschatological ascent.)
Schmemann, Alexander. For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1963; revised edition 1973. (The definition of leitourgia; the Liturgy as passage into the Kingdom and return into the world.)
Schmemann, Alexander. Church, World, Mission: Reflections on Orthodoxy in the West. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1979. (The missionary consequence.)
Schmemann, Alexander. Liturgy and Tradition: Theological Reflections of Alexander Schmemann. Edited by Thomas Fisch. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1990. (Includes “Theology and Eucharist” and other programmatic essays.)
Fagerberg, David W. Theologia Prima: What Is Liturgical Theology? Chicago: Hillenbrand Books, 2004. (The primary/secondary theology distinction; the fullest sympathetic exposition of Schmemann’s program.)
Kavanagh, Aidan. On Liturgical Theology. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1984. (The independent Roman Catholic formulation of theologia prima.)
Basil the Great. On the Holy Spirit 27. Translated in NPNF, Second Series, vol. 8. (Argument from the Church’s doxology and baptismal practice.)