The Liturgiological and Traditionalist Critique

Schmemann has been criticized from four directions: by Western liturgical scholars from the first publication of Introduction to Liturgical Theology; by Byzantine liturgiologists who judge parts of his history unreliable; by a monastic theologian who finds his account of the Church has no room for repentance; and by Russian traditionalists who read the whole program as renovationism. This file names the critics, states their arguments in their own terms, gives the answers made on Schmemann’s behalf, and adjudicates nothing (METHODOLOGY §4.2).

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (emigration)

What Is and Is Not in Dispute

It is worth marking the boundaries first, because the criticism is often reported more sweepingly than any of the critics intend.

Almost no one disputes that the Liturgy is theologically load-bearing, that the Eucharist is the Church’s self-realization, or that the eschatological key Schmemann pressed is the right key. Robert Taft — the most authoritative Byzantine liturgiologist of the generation after him, and, as will appear, a critic on particular points — closed his 2009 assessment by saying that “Alexander Schmemann was right on target in his vision of what liturgy is in the life of the Church” (Robert F. Taft, S.J., “The Liturgical Enterprise Twenty-Five Years After Alexander Schmemann [1921–1983]: The Man and His Heritage,” St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 53, nos. 2–3 [2009]: 139–177, at p. 176).

What is disputed is narrower and, precisely because it is narrower, harder to dismiss: (1) whether Schmemann’s historical reconstruction will bear the theological weight he places on it; (2) whether his rejection of the Byzantine liturgical commentators was a misreading of their genre; (3) whether “liturgical theology” as he defined it is a coherent discipline at all; (4) whether his ecclesiology leaves room for asceticism, monasticism, and repentance; and (5) whether the whole enterprise is a modernizing project in patristic dress.

1. The First Debate in Print: Botte and Grisbrooke, 1968–69

The earliest scholarly critique appeared in Schmemann’s own journal and drew replies from him — which makes it the only body of criticism to which we have his direct answers.

Dom Bernard Botte, O.S.B., of the Institut Supérieur de Liturgie in Paris — one of the founders of modern Western liturgical scholarship — published “On Liturgical Theology” in St. Vladimir’s Seminary Quarterly 12, nos. 3–4 (1968): 170–173, with Schmemann’s “A Brief Response” immediately following at pp. 173–174. The following year W. Jardine Grisbrooke, the Anglican liturgical scholar, pressed the argument further in “Liturgical Theology and Liturgical Reform: Some Questions,” St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 13, no. 4 (1969): 212–217, with Schmemann’s fuller reply, “Liturgical Theology, Theology of Liturgy, and Liturgical Reform,” at pp. 217–224. The whole exchange is reprinted in Thomas Fisch, ed., Liturgy and Tradition: Theological Reflections of Alexander Schmemann (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1990), where it remains the best short introduction to what is at stake.

[Corrected: the journal changed its name in 1969. Volumes through 12 (1968) are *St. Vladimir's **Seminary** Quarterly*; from volume 13 (1969) it is *St. Vladimir's **Theological** Quarterly*. Botte's exchange is therefore SVSQ, Grisbrooke's SVTQ, and citations that give "SVTQ" for the 1968 items are anachronistic.]

The objections in that exchange set the pattern for everything after. Is “liturgical theology” a distinct discipline, or simply theology done attentively with liturgical texts? If the ordo is theologically normative, what happens when the ordo itself is the product of contingent history? And — Grisbrooke’s sharpest question — if the received rites embody a declension from an earlier and purer form, does liturgical theology not license liturgical reform, and on whose authority? Schmemann’s reply distinguished his enterprise from a “theology of liturgy” on one side and from historical liturgiology on the other, and denied that his program was a reforming one; what he wanted, he insisted, was understanding, from which the practical consequences would follow of themselves (Schmemann, “Liturgical Theology, Theology of Liturgy, and Liturgical Reform,” SVTQ 13, no. 4 [1969]: 217–224; reprinted in Fisch, ed., Liturgy and Tradition, 1990).

2. The Historical Critique: Peter Galadza

The substantial modern critique of Schmemann’s history is Peter Galadza’s, and it should be attributed to him rather than to the more famous names who have endorsed it. Galadza — the Kule Family Professor of Liturgy at the Sheptytsky Institute — argued the case in “Schmemann between Fagerberg and Reality: Towards an Agenda for Byzantine Christian Pastoral Liturgy,” Bollettino della Badia Greca di Grottaferrata, terza serie, 4 (2007): 7–32.

The title states the argument. David Fagerberg’s influential systematization had presented Schmemann as the exemplary practitioner of theologia prima (David W. Fagerberg, Theologia Prima: What Is Liturgical Theology?, Chicago: Hillenbrand Books, 2004; see also Fagerberg, “The Cost of Understanding Schmemann in the West,” SVTQ 53, nos. 2–3 [2009]: 179–207). Galadza’s contention is that the Schmemann of that reading is a theoretical construct, and that when his actual historical claims about the origins and development of Byzantine liturgical practice are checked against the evidence, a significant number of them do not hold — with consequences for a pastoral liturgy that has been built on them.

The critique bites because of the structure of Schmemann’s argument. His theology is not merely illustrated by history; it is carried by a historical narrative — an original eschatological ordo, a Constantinian sacral overlay, a monastic reshaping — in which each stage is evaluated as fidelity or declension. If the narrative is unreliable in its particulars, the theological verdicts that ride on it are exposed (see The Ordo and the Byzantine Synthesis).

An attribution trap, flagged because it is widespread. The much-quoted sentence that “Schmemann was not a liturgical historian and he often was wrong on key liturgical and historical points” is William C. Mills’s own formulation, in “Alexander Schmemann’s For the Life of the World: A Retrospective,” Logos 54, nos. 3–4 (2013): 199–228, at p. 227, where Mills footnotes it to Galadza. It is regularly misattributed to Taft. [Corrected: the sentence is Mills's, not Taft's; Mills credits the substance to Galadza (2007). Taft endorses a comparable judgment in his own words — see below — but did not write this line.]

3. What Taft Actually Says

Taft’s 2009 memorial essay is the single most quoted piece of writing about Schmemann, and it is quoted in both directions, usually inaccurately. Three things need separating.

First, Taft concedes the factual criticism, and credits it to Galadza. He writes that “some of Fr Alexander’s statements on factual matters regarding the origins and nature of certain Christian liturgical practices were dubious, and in some cases dead wrong,” footnoting the indictment to Galadza’s Grottaferrata article (Taft, “The Liturgical Enterprise Twenty-Five Years After Alexander Schmemann,” SVTQ 53, nos. 2–3 [2009]: 176). He also observes, in the same essay, that Schmemann “was not a systematician” and that he “often used hyperbole.”

Second, Taft’s own criticism is about mystagogy, not about the cathedral/monastic narrative. What he faults is Schmemann’s dismissal of the Byzantine liturgical commentators — Maximus, Germanus, Nicholas Cabasilas and their successors — and their allegorical mystagogy: a tradition, Taft writes, “that, ironically, Fr Alexander himself neither understood nor accepted” (p. 170), adding, “I have always thought he misunderstood the literary genre of this Orthodox mystagogy” (p. 174). The disagreement is real and consequential — it is the difference between reading the Great Entrance as the King’s royal entry and reading it, with the commentators, as the burial procession — but it is a disagreement about how to read a genre, not about the history of the office.

[Corrected: a claim circulates that Taft criticized Schmemann's cathedral/monastic "synthesis" narrative. He did not; that critique is not in the 2009 essay. Taft was in fact the framework's **chief modern defender** — see his "Cathedral vs. Monastic Liturgy in the Christian East: Vindicating a Distinction," *Bollettino della Badia Greca di Grottaferrata*, ser. 3, 2 (2005): 173–219 — and the recent revisionist pressure on that distinction bears on Taft at least as much as on Schmemann. The revisionist case is set out in the repository's office collection at [Cathedral and Monastic Office](../../the-psalter-and-the-daily-office/05-the-history-of-the-office/cathedral-and-monastic-office.md).]

[Disputed: the pagination of Taft's essay. The article runs to p. 177; the journal's own running head, and a number of citations following it, give the range as 139–163. Citations to "SVTQ 53 (2009): 163–64" for this article — as in Plekon's bibliography — reproduce that misprint.]

Third, Taft’s overall verdict is warm, and it is the origin of the phrase this collection uses for the whole subject. He held that Schmemann “finally succeeded in putting Humpty-Dumpty together again,” and closed with the judgment quoted at the head of this file (Taft, SVTQ 53 [2009]: 174, 176; see Influence and a Sober Assessment). Privately he drew the comparison that the guild has always drawn: “Of course Fr Meyendorff was a much stronger scholar than Schmemann, who was gifted in a somewhat different way… I’ve called it ‘the Schmemann phenomenon’” (Robert F. Taft, interview with Deacon Andrei Psarev, 14 December 2012, ROCOR Studies).

4. The Discipline Itself: Spinks and Maxwell Johnson

A second line of criticism doubts not Schmemann’s facts but his category.

Bryan D. Spinks, of Yale, surveyed the field in “From Liturgical Theology to Liturgical Theologies,” SVTQ 53, nos. 2–3 (2009): 231–249, relaying the historical critique and pressing his own objection about competence in the relevant genres: the claim that liturgy is theology requires the liturgical theologian to command the historical, textual, and systematic disciplines simultaneously, and the results have not always shown that command. His larger point is in his title — that “liturgical theology” has fragmented into liturgical theologies, several of which have little in common with Schmemann’s.

Maxwell E. Johnson put the systematic objection sharply in “Liturgy and Theology,” in Paul Bradshaw and Bryan Spinks, eds., Liturgy in Dialogue (London: SPCK, 1993), at p. 208: the lex orandi cannot simply be equated with the lex credendi without begging the question of which lex orandi, at what date, in what tradition, and by whose adjudication. The liturgy is not a single, self-interpreting datum; it is a mass of historically conditioned texts and practices which themselves require theological criteria to be read.

5. The Monastic and Ascetic Objection: Vassa Larin

The sharpest theological criticism in the 2009 memorial volume came from a nun and liturgical scholar. Sister Vassa Larin, in “Fr. Alexander Schmemann and Monasticism,” SVTQ 53, nos. 2–3 (2009): 301ff., documents from his published work and his diary a settled irritation with monastic spirituality, and draws the ecclesiological consequence: on Schmemann’s account of the Church as the eschatological assembly already in the Kingdom, “there is little if any place in this picture for a repenting or struggling Church” (Larin, SVTQ 53 [2009]: 307).

This is the most serious charge in the file, because it is internal. It does not say that Schmemann got a date wrong; it says that an ecclesiology of realized joy has no natural place for the penitential and ascetic half of the tradition — for the Great Canon, for Lent as combat, for the monastic vocation as the Church’s own life carried to its extreme. Nicholas Denysenko has noted the same tension from the practical side, observing that Schmemann’s private impatience with the Great Canon of St. Andrew of Crete — “it is impossible to translate it for the contemporary man” — coexists with a public practice in which he never proposed removing anything from the services (Nicholas Denysenko, “Reviving the Liturgical Enterprise of Alexander Schmemann,” The Wheel 16 [Winter 2019]: 52–56, quoting The Journals, entry of 2 March 1982, p. 314; see The Journals).

6. The Traditionalist Critique: Pomazansky, Azkoul, and the Charge of Renovationism

From the Russian Church Abroad the objection was not scholarly but ecclesial, and it was made at once.

Protopresbyter Michael Pomazansky’s “‘Renovated’ Orthodoxy: The Liturgical Theology of Fr. A. Schmemann” appeared in The Orthodox Word 6, no. 6 (November–December 1970) and is reprinted in his Selected Essays (Jordanville, NY: Holy Trinity Monastery, 1996), 82–102. Its charge is methodological before it is doctrinal: that Schmemann applies to the Church’s worship a positivist historiography in which development is explained by cultural and institutional causes and grace does not appear as a cause at all; that a scheme of original purity and subsequent decline is imported from Protestant historiography; and that on this basis Schmemann sets aside received patristic interpretation on the authority of a reconstructed earlier meaning. Pomazansky objects specifically to the negative reading of the growth of the veneration of the saints (see Orthodoxy: Protopresbyter Michael Pomazansky).

The polemic was inseparable from the jurisdictional quarrel of the same months. Michael Azkoul’s “The ‘Sorrowful Epistle’ of Metropolitan Philaret: A Rejoinder to Fr. Alexander Schmemann,” The Orthodox Word VI, no. 3 (May–June 1970): 128–143, attacked the theologian and the architect of the 1970 autocephaly in one motion; the two indictments have been hard to separate ever since (see The Road to Autocephaly).

The American counter-figure is Fr. Seraphim Rose, who defended precisely what Schmemann criticized — elaborate preparation for communion, infrequent reception as reverence rather than neglect, and the received devotional forms as the living inheritance rather than accretion (see Fr. Seraphim Rose’s Theological Contribution). Plekon notes the same reception from the other side: for what he calls a healthy criticism of religious extremism, Schmemann “was labeled ‘anti-monastic’ and ‘modernist’ by neo-traditional opponents” (Michael Plekon, “The Liturgy of Life: Alexander Schmemann,” Religions 7, no. 11 [2016]: 127, p. 8).

7. The Answers

Stated as his defenders state them, and without endorsement.

On the history. Schmemann never claimed to be writing comparative liturgiology; he claimed to be reading the ordo theologically, and a theological reading is not falsified by corrections to particular datings. The general shape of the development he described — an early eschatological assembly, a Constantinian sacralization, a monastic reshaping of the office, the displacement of the Eucharist from the center of parish life — is not in serious dispute even among those who correct his details. Taft, having conceded that some statements were “dead wrong,” nonetheless judged the vision “right on target.”

On mystagogy. Schmemann did not reject symbolism; he distinguished a symbolic realism in which the sign makes present what it signifies from an illustrative allegory in which the rite depicts something absent. Whether that distinction survives Taft’s objection about genre is exactly the open question, and this guide does not close it.

On the discipline. That “liturgical theology” has fragmented is arguably a mark of fertility rather than incoherence; the fragmentation Spinks describes presupposes a field that did not exist before Schmemann named it.

On asceticism. The Journals show a man who applied his critique of religiosity to himself more mercilessly than to anyone else, and Great Lent is a sustained and warm exposition of the penitential season by the theologian accused of having no place for repentance (Schmemann, Great Lent, Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1969; rev. ed. 1974). Whether that answers Larin’s structural point about his ecclesiology is a separate question.

On renovationism. Schmemann proposed no new rites, no new anaphoras, no revised lectionary, and no excision of received material — a fact his critics rarely register and which distinguishes him sharply from his Roman Catholic and Protestant contemporaries in the same decades (Denysenko, The Wheel 16 [2019]: 53). What he asked for was that the existing services be understood, prayed audibly, and completed in communion.

The Standing Disputes

[Disputed: whether Schmemann's historical reconstruction can bear the theological weight placed on it. (a) Galadza (Grottaferrata, terza serie 4 [2007]: 7–32) argues that a significant number of his claims about the origins of Byzantine practice fail against the evidence, with consequences for the pastoral liturgy built on them; Taft endorses this ("dubious, and in some cases dead wrong," *SVTQ* 53 [2009]: 176), and Mills relays it (*Logos* 54 [2013]: 227). (b) His defenders answer that the argument is a theological reading of the *ordo*, not a work of comparative liturgiology, and that the broad developmental shape stands. Not adjudicated here.]

[Disputed: Schmemann's treatment of the Byzantine liturgical commentators. (a) Taft holds that he misunderstood the literary genre of Orthodox mystagogy and dismissed a tradition he had not entered (*SVTQ* 53 [2009]: 170, 174). (b) Schmemann's position is that illustrative allegory displaced an earlier symbolic realism and obscured the eschatological meaning of the rites. Both are serious positions held by serious people; the repository states the balance, without deciding it, at [The Cherubic Hymn and the Great Entrance](../../the-divine-liturgy/05-the-great-entrance-and-the-offering/the-cherubic-hymn-and-the-great-entrance.md).]

[Disputed: whether his ecclesiology has room for asceticism and repentance. (a) Larin (*SVTQ* 53 [2009]: 301ff., at 307): "there is little if any place in this picture for a repenting or struggling Church." (b) His defenders point to *Great Lent*, to the penitential candor of the *Journals*, and to his refusal ever to propose removing penitential material from the services. Not adjudicated.]

[Disputed: whether the program is renovationism. (a) Pomazansky (*The Orthodox Word* 6, no. 6 [1970]; *Selected Essays*, 1996, 82–102) and the ROCOR polemic of 1970 read it as a modernizing project resting on a positivist historiography. (b) The defense is that Schmemann sought no textual reform whatever, only understanding and communion. The dispute is entangled with the autocephaly quarrel of the same year and is rarely conducted apart from it.]

References

Botte, Bernard, O.S.B. “On Liturgical Theology.” St. Vladimir’s Seminary Quarterly 12, nos. 3–4 (1968): 170–173. With Schmemann, “A Brief Response,” ibid., 173–174.
Denysenko, Nicholas. “Reviving the Liturgical Enterprise of Alexander Schmemann.” The Wheel 16 (Winter 2019): 52–56.
Fagerberg, David W. Theologia Prima: What Is Liturgical Theology? Chicago: Hillenbrand Books, 2004. And “The Cost of Understanding Schmemann in the West.” St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 53, nos. 2–3 (2009): 179–207.
Fisch, Thomas, ed. Liturgy and Tradition: Theological Reflections of Alexander Schmemann. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1990. (Reprints the 1968–69 Botte and Grisbrooke exchanges with Schmemann’s replies.)
Galadza, Peter. “Schmemann between Fagerberg and Reality: Towards an Agenda for Byzantine Christian Pastoral Liturgy.” Bollettino della Badia Greca di Grottaferrata, terza serie, 4 (2007): 7–32. (The source of the historical critique.)
Grisbrooke, W. Jardine. “Liturgical Theology and Liturgical Reform: Some Questions.” St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 13, no. 4 (1969): 212–217. With Schmemann, “Liturgical Theology, Theology of Liturgy, and Liturgical Reform,” ibid., 217–224.
Johnson, Maxwell E. “Liturgy and Theology.” In Paul Bradshaw and Bryan Spinks, eds., Liturgy in Dialogue. London: SPCK, 1993, at p. 208.
Larin, Vassa (Sister). “Fr. Alexander Schmemann and Monasticism.” St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 53, nos. 2–3 (2009): 301ff.
Mills, William C. “Alexander Schmemann’s For the Life of the World: A Retrospective.” Logos 54, nos. 3–4 (2013): 199–228. (Source of the “not a liturgical historian” sentence, at p. 227, footnoted to Galadza.)
Plekon, Michael. “The Liturgy of Life: Alexander Schmemann.” Religions 7, no. 11 (2016): 127.
Pomazansky, Michael (Protopresbyter). “‘Renovated’ Orthodoxy: The Liturgical Theology of Fr. A. Schmemann.” The Orthodox Word 6, no. 6 (November–December 1970); reprinted in Selected Essays, 82–102. Jordanville, NY: Holy Trinity Monastery, 1996.
Azkoul, Michael. “The ‘Sorrowful Epistle’ of Metropolitan Philaret: A Rejoinder to Fr. Alexander Schmemann.” The Orthodox Word VI, no. 3 (May–June 1970): 128–143.
Schmemann, Alexander. Great Lent. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1969; rev. ed. 1974.
Schmemann, Alexander. Introduction to Liturgical Theology. Trans. Asheleigh E. Moorhouse. London: Faith Press, 1966. Russian original: Paris: YMCA-Press, 1961.
Spinks, Bryan D. “From Liturgical Theology to Liturgical Theologies.” St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 53, nos. 2–3 (2009): 231–249.
Taft, Robert F., S.J. “The Liturgical Enterprise Twenty-Five Years After Alexander Schmemann (1921–1983): The Man and His Heritage.” St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 53, nos. 2–3 (2009): 139–177. (The journal’s running head misprints the range as 139–163.)
Taft, Robert F., S.J. “Cathedral vs. Monastic Liturgy in the Christian East: Vindicating a Distinction.” Bollettino della Badia Greca di Grottaferrata, ser. 3, 2 (2005): 173–219.
Taft, Robert F., S.J. Interview with Deacon Andrei Psarev, 14 December 2012. ROCOR Studies.