The Festal Menaion and the Lenten Triodion

With Mother Mary of the Monastery of the Veil of the Mother of God at Bussy-en-Othe, Ware Englished the two liturgical books that carry the Orthodox year: the propers of the twelve Great Feasts (1969) and the whole of the pre-Lenten, Lenten and Holy Week cycle (1978). His long introductions to both volumes — on the meaning of a feast, on the meaning of the Great Fast, and on the structure of the offices — are substantial theological essays in their own right, and remain the standard English catechesis on the Orthodox year.

Tradition: Orthodox (Britain; Ecumenical Patriarchate)

The Series and the Collaborator

Faber and Faber published the two volumes in a series titled The Service Books of the Orthodox Church. The intention was to give English-speaking Orthodox — and the growing number of English-speaking converts — the actual liturgical texts, translated from the Greek, in a register that could be sung and read in church rather than merely studied.

The collaborator was Mother Mary, a nun of the Monastery of the Veil of the Mother of God at Bussy-en-Othe in Burgundy, France — the Russian-tradition women’s community founded in 1946 whose members included, from 1961, the former Princess Ileana of Romania (Mother Alexandra). The copyright line of the Lenten Triodion records the partnership exactly: “© 1977, Mother Mary, of the Monastery of the Veil of the Mother of God, Bussy-en-Othe, and Archimandrite Kallistos Timothy Ware” (The Lenten Triodion, London: Faber and Faber, 1978, copyright page). Ware was then an archimandrite — the collection titles him accordingly for these works, since he was not consecrated bishop until 1982.

The volumes carry a Foreword by Fr Georges Florovsky, a mark of the seriousness with which the project was received in the emigration (The Festal Menaion, London: Faber and Faber, 1969, foreword by Georges Florovsky).

The Festal Menaion (1969)

The Festal Menaion, translated from the original Greek by Mother Mary and Archimandrite Kallistos (Timothy) Ware, was published by Faber and Faber in London in 1969, and has since been reprinted in the United States by St Tikhon’s Seminary Press. [Disputed: the date of first publication. The volume's own imprint and the overwhelming majority of bibliographies give 1969; some catalogue records and secondary notices give 1977, which appears to reflect a Faber reprint rather than the first edition. This collection follows 1969, consistently with the rest of the repository.]

The book contains the propers — vespers, mattins and the liturgical texts — for the fixed Great Feasts of the Church year: the Nativity of the Theotokos, the Exaltation of the Cross, the Entrance of the Theotokos into the Temple, the Nativity of Christ, Theophany with the Great Blessing of the Waters, the Meeting of the Lord, the Annunciation, the Transfiguration, and the Dormition. It thus supplies in English almost the whole of the fixed festal cycle (see The Twelve Great Feasts).

Ware’s introduction, “The Meaning of the Great Feasts,” treats what a feast is in Orthodox understanding — not the commemoration of a past event but entrance into a present reality — and how the hymnography works: the typological reading of the Old Testament, the structure of the canon, the function of the theotokia. It has served for two generations as the standard English account of the subject.

The Lenten Triodion (1978)

The Lenten Triodion was first published by Faber and Faber in London in 1978. It contains the services of the three pre-Lenten Sundays (the Publican and the Pharisee, the Prodigal Son, the Last Judgement, the Sunday of Forgiveness), the Saturdays of the Dead, the weekdays and Sundays of Great Lent, Lazarus Saturday and Palm Sunday, and Holy Week — the whole of the movable cycle up to Pascha. A companion volume, The Lenten Triodion: Supplementary Texts, followed, supplying the weekday material not included in the main volume.

Ware contributed two long essays: “The Meaning of the Great Fast” (13ff.) and “The Structure of the Lenten Offices” (69ff.). The first is the more widely read, and it is a genuinely theological piece rather than a rubrical one. He states the aim of fasting with characteristic directness: “The primary aim of fasting is to make us conscious of our dependence upon God.” He describes the physical reality — “the Lenten abstinence from food — particularly in the opening days — involves a considerable measure of real hunger, and also a feeling of tiredness and physical exhaustion” — and its purpose, “to lead us in turn to a sense of inward brokenness and contrition,” to make us “poor in spirit,” aware of our helplessness (Ware, “The Meaning of the Great Fast,” in The Lenten Triodion, 1978, 16).

He is equally careful to correct the ascetical caricature: “it would be misleading to speak only of this element of weariness and hunger. Abstinence leads, not merely to this, but also to a sense of lightness, wakefulness, freedom and joy… While involving genuine self-denial, fasting does not seek to do violence to our body but rather to restore it to health and equilibrium” (ibid., 16). And he sets the inward meaning above the dietary one, quoting St John Chrysostom that fasting means “abstinence not only from food but from sins” and that “the fast should be kept not by the mouth alone but also by the eye, the ear, the feet, the hands and all the members of the body,” and St Basil’s warning to those who fast and slander: “You do not eat meat, but you devour your brother” (ibid., 17, citing Chrysostom and Basil).

The essay also contains the “Rules of Fasting” section that is, in practice, the most consulted page of Orthodox fasting discipline in the English language — a sober statement of the traditional rule together with a pastoral note on dispensation and on the danger of legalism.

What the Translations Achieved

The importance of these two volumes is easy to underrate because they are service books rather than authored works. Yet their effect on Anglophone Orthodoxy was probably greater than that of any of Ware’s own books except The Orthodox Church. Before them, English-speaking parishes celebrating in English had to improvise from partial and often poor renderings; after them, there was a common text of high literary quality that could simply be used. The Mother Mary–Ware idiom — a restrained, slightly archaizing English with “thou” for God, close to the register of the Authorised Version and the Book of Common Prayer but built on the Greek — became the default liturgical English of Orthodoxy in Britain and, for a long period, in North America as well.

They are also, incidentally, an argument about method. Ware chose to translate from the Greek liturgical books rather than from the Slavonic, and to give the reader the texts with enough apparatus to understand them rather than a devotional paraphrase. The same choice governs the Philokalia translation (see The English Philokalia).

References

The Festal Menaion. Trans. Mother Mary and Archimandrite Kallistos (Timothy) Ware. Foreword by Georges Florovsky. The Service Books of the Orthodox Church. London: Faber and Faber, 1969; repr. South Canaan, PA: St Tikhon’s Seminary Press. (Ware’s introduction, “The Meaning of the Great Feasts.”)
The Lenten Triodion. Trans. Mother Mary and Archimandrite Kallistos Ware. The Service Books of the Orthodox Church. London: Faber and Faber, 1978; repr. South Canaan, PA: St Tikhon’s Seminary Press, 2002. (Copyright 1977 to Mother Mary of the Monastery of the Veil of the Mother of God, Bussy-en-Othe, and Archimandrite Kallistos Timothy Ware; Ware’s introductions, “The Meaning of the Great Fast,” 13ff., and “The Structure of the Lenten Offices,” 69ff.; the “Rules of Fasting.”)
The Lenten Triodion: Supplementary Texts. Trans. Mother Mary and Kallistos Ware. South Canaan, PA: St Tikhon’s Seminary Press. (The weekday material omitted from the main volume.)
Chrysostom, John. On fasting of the whole body, quoted by Ware in “The Meaning of the Great Fast,” The Lenten Triodion, 1978, 17.
Basil the Great. “You do not eat meat, but you devour your brother,” quoted by Ware in “The Meaning of the Great Fast,” The Lenten Triodion, 1978, 17.
Lossky, Vladimir. The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. London: James Clarke, 1957. (Cited by Ware at “The Meaning of the Great Fast,” 16 n. 4.)