Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi

The Liturgy is a primary bearer of Holy Tradition: the Church believes as she prays. This file expounds the ancient principle lex orandi, lex credendi — that the rule of prayer establishes the rule of belief — its origin in Prosper of Aquitaine, its logic and its limits, and the ways the Divine Liturgy has functioned across Orthodox history as a source and safeguard of doctrine, so that for most of the faithful the faith has been learned first of all on the knees.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Principle

Among the deposits of Tradition, the worship of the Church holds a special and often underestimated place. The principle that names its authority is the Latin tag lex orandi, lex credendi — literally “the law of praying [is] the law of believing,” or, as it is often rendered, “the rule of prayer is the rule of faith.” The meaning is that the Church’s worship is not merely an application of a doctrine settled elsewhere but is itself a primary witness to and bearer of the faith: what the Church prays reveals what the Church believes, and the continuous liturgical life of the Body is one of the surest indices of authentic Tradition (Ware, The Orthodox Church, Penguin, 1993, pp. 266–267; Schmemann, Introduction to Liturgical Theology, SVS Press, 1966, on liturgy as a source of theology; and the topical article Liturgy as Theology within the sources of theology). For Orthodoxy this is not a pious slogan but a working principle: to know the Church’s mind on a doctrine, one looks not only to the councils and the Fathers but to the anaphora she offers, the hymns she sings, the feasts she keeps.

The reason lies in the nature of Tradition itself. If Tradition is the life of the Holy Spirit in the Church (see Paradosis: The Living Memory of the Church), then the Liturgy — where that life is most fully enacted, where the Church is most herself, gathered around the Eucharist — is Tradition in its most concentrated and continuous form. The faith is not first a set of propositions that later generate worship; it is a life of communion with God that finds its native expression in worship, and from which the propositions are drawn. Fr. Alexander Schmemann made this the program of a whole “liturgical theology”: the lex orandi is a fons theologiae, a source of theology, not merely its object (Schmemann, Introduction to Liturgical Theology, 1966).

The Origin of the Tag

The phrase descends from a fifth-century writer, Prosper of Aquitaine, a disciple of St. Augustine, who in the context of the grace controversy argued that the Church’s rule of prayer should establish her rule of belief. His actual formulation was ut legem credendi lex statuat supplicandi — “let the law of supplicating establish the law of believing” — invoking the universal practice of the Church’s intercessory prayer (that she prays for the conversion of all) as evidence for the doctrine of grace (Prosper of Aquitaine, Indiculus / Auctoritates, c. 435–442; discussed in Wainwright, Doxology, Oxford University Press, 1980, on the history and meaning of the maxim). Prosper’s specific argument was that because the Church universally prays in a certain way, she must believe accordingly — the practice of prayer being a witness to the apostolic faith that antedates and grounds the theological formula. From this the compressed maxim lex orandi lex credendi was later distilled.

The example Prosper had in view is itself instructive. The Church’s baptismal practice — including the baptism of infants, and the exorcisms and renunciations that accompany baptism — was taken as evidence of what the Church believes about sin and grace: one does not exorcise and cleanse those who have nothing from which to be cleansed. The worship testifies to the doctrine. This pattern of arguing from the Liturgy to the faith recurs throughout patristic theology, and it is the operative logic of lex orandi, lex credendi (Wainwright, Doxology, 1980).

The Liturgy as a Source and Safeguard of Doctrine

In Orthodox history the Liturgy has functioned again and again as both a source and a safeguard of doctrine. St. Basil the Great’s argument for the divinity of the Holy Spirit in On the Holy Spirit turns in large part on the Church’s doxology — the manner in which she glorifies the Spirit with the Father and the Son in her worship: the liturgical practice of glorifying the Spirit is itself a confession of the Spirit’s divinity, and Basil defends the received doxological form as a witness of Tradition (Basil, On the Holy Spirit 27; trans. Anderson, SVS Press, 1980). The great feasts encode and transmit dogma: the Nativity and Theophany confess the Incarnation, the Transfiguration the uncreated glory, the Dormition the mystery of the Theotokos and the resurrection of the body. The hymnography — Byzantine at its richest in the Theotokia and the dogmatic stichera — is a versified dogmatics, teaching the two natures of Christ and the dignity of the Mother of God to congregations who never read a treatise (Ware, The Orthodox Church, 1993, pp. 266–271, on worship as the teacher of doctrine; and the fuller treatment in The Divine Liturgy).

This is why the Orthodox have so often said that the surest way to learn the Orthodox faith is to attend the services. The convert is catechized as much by the Liturgy as by the catechism; the child receives the faith by chanting it before she can define it; the illiterate faithful of many centuries held the whole dogmatic inheritance in the form of prayer and hymn. The Liturgy is Tradition’s great school — the place where, for most Christians in most ages, the faith has actually been handed on (Ware, The Orthodox Church, 1993, p. 271; Schmemann, Introduction to Liturgical Theology, 1966).

The Logic and Its Limits

The principle must be stated with care, for it can be misused. Lex orandi, lex credendi does not mean that every element of every liturgical text is a dogmatic definition, nor that liturgical practice is above correction. The Liturgy itself has developed and been reformed across history; hymns have been added, rites have varied, and the tradition has on occasion corrected liturgical usage in the light of dogma (as the iconoclast controversy corrected an aberrant practice by the standard of the faith). The relation between prayer and belief is therefore not simply one-directional. The best modern statement holds that lex orandi and lex credendi stand in mutual and reciprocal relation: worship is a primary and privileged witness to the faith, and the faith in turn norms and purifies worship, each testing and informing the other within the one Tradition (Wainwright, Doxology, 1980, on the reciprocity of the two “laws”; Kavanagh, On Liturgical Theology, Pueblo, 1984).

[Disputed: the exact force of *lex orandi, lex credendi* — whether the rule of prayer strictly *establishes* (statuat) the rule of belief, so that liturgical practice is a nearly autonomous theological authority (a strong reading associated with the "liturgical theology" of Schmemann and, in the West, Aidan Kavanagh's "theologia prima"), or whether prayer and belief norm one another reciprocally, with dogma retaining priority in cases of conflict (Geoffrey Wainwright's more balanced account). The disagreement is one of emphasis within a shared conviction that the Liturgy is a genuine and primary bearer of Tradition; the compendium reports the range rather than fixing a single measure.]

What is not in dispute is the central claim: that the worship of the Church is not a decorative appendage to the faith but one of its primary carriers, and that in the continuous lex orandi of the Orthodox Church — the Divine Liturgy above all — Holy Tradition is handed on with an authority the councils themselves recognized when they grounded their definitions in what the Church prays. The Church believes as she prays; and she prays what she has received, generation upon generation, at the one altar.

References

Ware, Kallistos (Timothy). The Orthodox Church. New ed. London: Penguin, 1993. (Worship as the teacher and bearer of doctrine, pp. 266–271.)
Schmemann, Alexander. Introduction to Liturgical Theology. Trans. Asheleigh Moorhouse. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1966. (The Liturgy as a source of theology; lex orandi.)
Wainwright, Geoffrey. Doxology: The Praise of God in Worship, Doctrine, and Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980. (The history and reciprocal reading of lex orandi, lex credendi; Prosper of Aquitaine.)
Kavanagh, Aidan. On Liturgical Theology. New York: Pueblo, 1984. (Liturgy as theologia prima.)
Basil of Caesarea. On the Holy Spirit 27. Trans. David Anderson. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1980. (The doxology as witness to the Spirit’s divinity.)
Prosper of Aquitaine. Indiculus de gratia Dei (Auctoritates), c. 435–442. (“Ut legem credendi lex statuat supplicandi.”)