The “Western Captivity” and Liturgical Piety

Schmemann turned his critique inward as sharply as outward. He held that Orthodox theology had been captive to Western categories since the seventeenth century — Florovsky’s diagnosis, which he accepted and extended to the liturgy — and that a “liturgical piety” had grown up which is sincere, intense, and largely disconnected from what the Liturgy actually says and does. This file expounds both charges and reports honestly the offense they gave.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (emigration)

The Inherited Diagnosis

The phrase is Georges Florovsky’s. In Ways of Russian Theology (1937) and in his address to the First Congress of Orthodox Theology at Athens in 1936, Florovsky argued that Orthodox theology, from the time of the Kiev Academy and Peter the Great, had undergone a progressive “Western captivity” (zapadnoye plenenie) — adopting the categories, methods, and assumptions of Latin scholasticism and, later, German idealism and Protestant scholarship. He borrowed Spengler’s term “pseudomorphosis” for the result: an Orthodox content forced into alien forms, retaining the outward appearance while losing the shape of its own mind. His remedy was the neo-patristic synthesis: not the quotation of the Fathers but the acquisition of their phronema (Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology, 1937; “Patristics and Modern Theology,” Athens, 1936; see Fr. Georges Florovsky and the Patristic Revival; Georges Florovsky).

Schmemann accepted the diagnosis entire and made one decisive extension: the captivity is liturgical before it is academic.

His argument runs like this. If the Fathers did their theology from within the Church’s worship — if the mystagogical commentary is a central patristic genre and not a curiosity, if Basil argued the divinity of the Spirit from the Church’s doxology and baptismal practice — then a theology that has become a discipline conducted apart from the leitourgia is captive whatever its footnotes say. The seminary curriculum in which “liturgics” is the study of rubrics and “theology” is the study of doctrine, the two taught in different rooms by different men, is pseudomorphosis in its purest form: the shape of the Western academy imposed on a Church whose theology has always been doxological (Schmemann, Introduction to Liturgical Theology, trans. Moorhouse, London: Faith Press, 1966, ch. 1; see Liturgy as Theology; The Divine Liturgy: Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi).

He traced concrete symptoms. Sacramental theology organized around scholastic questions of matter, form, minister, and the precise moment of consecration — questions the Byzantine tradition had not asked in that shape, and which import a mechanics foreign to it (see The Holy Mysteries: Sacramental Theology; The Divine Liturgy: The Epiclesis and the Consecration). The fixing of the mysteries at seven, a medieval Western enumeration received into Orthodox usage through Lyons and the seventeenth-century confessions, which the Orthodox Church has never defined conciliarly (see The Holy Mysteries: The Mysteries and the Number Seven). And, in the penitential discipline, the Ruthenian and Latin influences on the Russian practice of confession in the eighteenth century (Kizenko, “Ruthenian and Russian Innovations in the Sacrament of Penance and their Early Eighteenth-Century Consequences,” Vivliofika 10, 2022, 25–37; see Orthodoxy: Confession).

The repository’s own treatment of these questions confirms that they are real and independently attested; what is Schmemann’s is the unifying claim that they are symptoms of one captivity and that liturgical theology is the way out.

Liturgical Piety

The second charge is the more wounding, and Schmemann knew it.

By “liturgical piety” he meant the whole complex of devotion that has grown up around the services and now largely governs how the faithful experience them: the veneration of icons and relics, candles and commemorations, the aesthetic and emotional atmosphere of Orthodox worship, the personal petitions, the sense of the church as a place of consolation and beauty. His contention was not that any of this is illegitimate. It was that this piety has become autonomous — it has its own logic, it satisfies those who practice it, and it operates largely independently of what the Liturgy actually says and does (Schmemann, Introduction to Liturgical Theology, 1966, chs. 1 and 4; The Eucharist: Sacrament of the Kingdom, trans. Kachur, Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1988, ch. 1).

Three specific complaints recur.

Individualism. The Liturgy is a corporate act in which the assembly becomes the Church, but liturgical piety is largely individual: each worshipper pursuing his own devotion within a common space, the corporate act reduced to the simultaneous private prayer of many people who happen to be in the same room. The most conspicuous symptom, on Schmemann’s reading, was the practice of attending without communing — a congregation present at a rite whose stated purpose is communion, most of whom do not receive (Schmemann, The Eucharist, 1988, ch. 1; see Of Water and the Spirit and Frequent Communion).

Illustrative allegory. The habit of reading each moment of the Liturgy as a picture of an episode in the life of Christ substitutes a dramatization for the reality. The Great Entrance read as Christ’s funeral procession is Schmemann’s standing example, and he argued against it with force (see The Eucharist: Sacrament of the Kingdom; the correction is registered in the repository’s liturgical compendium at The Cherubic Hymn and the Great Entrance). He distinguished throughout between the symbolic realism of the early Church, in which the symbol makes present what it signifies, and an illustrative allegory in which the rite depicts something absent — the theme of the 1973 appendix “Sacrament and Symbol” (Schmemann, “Sacrament and Symbol,” appendix to For the Life of the World, 2nd rev. ed., SVS Press, 1973).

Aestheticism and consolation. Orthodox worship is beautiful, and beauty can do the work of meaning. A congregation may be moved, consoled, and transported without any of that engaging what the Liturgy proclaims — and the more beautiful the worship, the easier the substitution (Schmemann, Introduction to Liturgical Theology, 1966, ch. 1). This is the point at which the internal critique meets the external one: worship that consoles by removing one from the world is exactly the “religious department” secularism is content to allow (see Worship in a Secular Age).

The Offense — Stated Fairly

The charge of “liturgical piety” gave real and lasting offense, and this collection does not soften it, because the objection is intelligible and is held by serious people.

What Schmemann was criticizing is, for a great many Orthodox Christians, simply the faith as they have received and lived it: the candles their grandmother lit, the icon in the corner, the akathist said in trouble, the beauty that first drew them and that sustains them. To be told that this is a distortion — that the piety of one’s family and nation stands between the believer and the Liturgy’s true meaning — is not received as scholarship. It is received as contempt.

Three specific objections deserve to be stated at their strength.

1. The devotion he criticized has produced saints. The candle-lighting, icon-venerating, akathist-singing piety of the Russian and Greek peoples is the soil in which the Church’s holiness has actually grown. A theologian who finds it theologically deficient has to reckon with its fruits.

2. The critique can be read as clericalist and academic. It tells the faithful that what they have been doing all along was misunderstood, and that a professor with the historical apparatus is in a position to correct them. Whatever Schmemann intended, the structure of the argument places the scholar above the praying Church — which is an odd position for a man whose whole thesis is that the praying Church is the primary theologian.

3. The received tradition has its own authority. The mystagogical readings Schmemann set aside are not idle inventions; they come from Fathers and saints — Germanus of Constantinople, Nicholas Cabasilas, Symeon of Thessalonica — and were received by the Church over centuries. To correct them on the authority of a reconstructed earlier meaning is to prefer a historical reconstruction to the Church’s own living reception, which is precisely the move the tradition regards with suspicion (see The Divine Liturgy: Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi, on ecclesial reception as a genuine source of theological knowledge).

These objections were pressed in print, and by name. The fullest early statement is Protopresbyter Michael Pomazansky’s, “‘Renovated Orthodoxy’: The Liturgical Theology of Fr. A. Schmemann,” published in The Orthodox Word 6, no. 6 (35) (November–December 1970) and reprinted in his Selected Essays (Jordanville, NY: Holy Trinity Monastery, 1996) — which charges Schmemann with a positivist historiography that leaves no room for grace, and specifically objects to his negative reading of the development of the veneration of saints. The full both-sides treatment of that critique, with its answers, is given in the collection’s §4.2 file (see The Liturgiological and Traditionalist Critique; on Pomazansky, Protopresbyter Michael Pomazansky).

What Schmemann Would Answer

In fairness, his own position was more careful than the polemical formulations suggest, and three points belong to the record.

He was not proposing to abolish anything. Introduction to Liturgical Theology contains no program of liturgical reform: no revision of the rites, no abridgement of the Typikon, no removal of devotions. What it asks for is understanding — and the practical consequences understanding brings, above all the return of the faithful to communion (see The Ordo and the Byzantine Synthesis).

He was criticizing a dissociation, not a devotion. His target was the separation of piety from the meaning of the rite, not the piety itself; his stated aim was the reintegration of liturgy, theology, and piety, which requires all three (Schmemann, Introduction to Liturgical Theology, 1966, ch. 1; see Liturgy as Theology).

And he applied the same standard to himself and to the academy. The critique of a theology severed from worship falls first on the theologians, and the Journals show him turning it with particular severity on his own profession, his own institution, and himself (see The Journals).

Whether that answer is sufficient — whether a critique of the piety of the faithful, however carefully framed, can avoid the charge of condescension — is one of the genuine open questions about Schmemann, and the collection does not close it.

References

Schmemann, Alexander. Introduction to Liturgical Theology. Translated by Asheleigh E. Moorhouse. London: Faith Press, 1966. (The captivity of theology; liturgical piety; the triad of liturgy, theology, and piety.)
Schmemann, Alexander. “Sacrament and Symbol.” Appendix to For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy, 2nd rev. ed. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1973. (Symbolic realism against illustrative allegory.)
Schmemann, Alexander. The Eucharist: Sacrament of the Kingdom. Translated by Paul Kachur. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1988.
Florovsky, Georges. Ways of Russian Theology [Puti russkogo bogosloviya]. 1937. Translated by Robert L. Nichols, Collected Works, vols. 5–6. (The “Western captivity” and pseudomorphosis.)
Florovsky, Georges. “Patristics and Modern Theology.” Address to the First Congress of Orthodox Theology, Athens, 1936.
Pomazansky, Michael (Protopresbyter). “‘Renovated Orthodoxy’: The Liturgical Theology of Fr. A. Schmemann.” The Orthodox Word 6, no. 6 (35) (November–December 1970); reprinted in Selected Essays of Protopresbyter Michael Pomazansky, Jordanville, NY: Holy Trinity Monastery, 1996.
Kizenko, Nadieszda. “Ruthenian and Russian Innovations in the Sacrament of Penance and their Early Eighteenth-Century Consequences.” Vivliofika: E-Journal of Eighteenth-Century Russian Studies 10 (2022): 25–37.