The “Today” of the Feast

Orthodox hymnography does not say that Christ was born; it says “Today the Virgin gives birth to the Transcendent One.” This file asks what that present tense claims — and, just as importantly, what it does not claim — since the whole force of keeping a liturgical calendar depends on the answer.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Grammar of the Services

The word is sēmeron, “today,” and it is everywhere in the Byzantine festal books.

“Today the Virgin gives birth to the Transcendent One, and the earth offers a cave to the Unapproachable” — the kontakion of the Nativity, by St Romanos the Melodist (Festal Menaion, trans. Mother Mary and Kallistos Ware, London: Faber and Faber, 1969, Nativity, Matins).
“Today is the beginning of our salvation and the manifestation of the mystery from before the ages” — the troparion of the Annunciation (Festal Menaion, Annunciation).
“Today he who hung the earth upon the waters is hung upon the tree” — the fifteenth antiphon of the Matins of Holy Friday (The Lenten Triodion, trans. Mother Mary and Kallistos Ware, London: Faber and Faber, 1978, Holy Friday).
“This is the day of resurrection: let us be radiant, O peoples” — the first ode of the Paschal canon of St John of Damascus (The Pentecostarion, trans. Holy Transfiguration Monastery, Boston, 1990, Paschal Matins).

The usage is not poetic licence, and it is not a device for making the congregation feel present at an event by imaginative effort. It is a claim about what is happening in the assembly.

What the “Today” Claims

The claim rests on two prior convictions.

The first is that the saving events are once for all. Scripture is emphatic: Christ “now once in the end of the world hath he appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself” (Hebrews 9:26), and “we are sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all” (Hebrews 10:10, ephapax). The Church has never taught that the Nativity recurs or that the Cross is repeated. Anything in a theology of the feast that would imply a repetition is thereby excluded.

The second is that these once-for-all events are not past in the way other events are past. They are the acts of the incarnate God, and their effect is not exhausted in the moment of their occurrence. What the liturgy does is not bring the event forward to us but bring us into the event: the assembly is admitted to a reality that does not recede.

The clearest proof that “remembrance” here is not recollection is a feature of the anaphora that would be nonsense on any other reading. In the Liturgy of St John Chrysostom the celebrant says, over the gifts, “Remembering therefore this saving commandment and all that has been done for us: the Cross, the tomb, the Resurrection on the third day, the Ascension into heaven, the sitting at the right hand, and the second and glorious coming again” (Liturgy of St John Chrysostom, anaphora; text in Hapgood, Service Book of the Holy Orthodox-Catholic Apostolic Church, and in the standard Slavonic and Greek editions). The Church “remembers” the Second Coming. Anamnesis is therefore not a mental act directed backwards; it is a liturgical entry into the whole economy, past and future together (see The Divine Liturgy: The Eucharistic Prayer, where the anaphora is treated in full).

The feast, then, is the calendar’s version of what the anaphora does. On 25 December the Church does not commemorate an anniversary; she keeps the Nativity, and the hymns say “today” because the Kingdom in which the Nativity is eternally present has opened into this assembly.

What the “Today” Does Not Claim

Four denials guard the claim, and they are worth stating because each has been transgressed at some point.

It is not a repetition. The Eucharist is not a new immolation and the feast is not a new Nativity. The Orthodox refusal of the language of repeated sacrifice is firm, and it is the same refusal that governs the language of the feast (see The Divine Liturgy: The Epiclesis and the Consecration).

It is not a re-enactment. The Holy Week services are dense with dramatic elements — the procession with the epitaphios, the Bridegroom icon, the washing of feet — but the Church’s theology of them is not that of a passion play. The rites do not represent the events for the congregation’s edification; they set the congregation inside them. Where the dramatic reading takes over, the rite degrades into pious theatre, and Orthodox liturgical writers have warned about it.

It is not psychological. The presence of the mystery does not depend on the worshipper’s imaginative vividness or emotional temperature. A distracted man at the Paschal Matins is at the Resurrection; an exalted man at home is not.

It is not magical. The date does not cause anything. This denial matters directly for the rest of this collection. A feast kept on 25 December Julian and a feast kept on 25 December Gregorian are the same feast, keeping the same “today,” and neither date has power in itself. The reasons for preferring one reckoning to another, set out in The Case for the Old Calendar, are reasons about the integrity of a received liturgical structure — not claims that God attends one date and not another.

An Honest Note on Mystery-Presence Theology

Twentieth-century liturgical theology produced a systematic account of exactly this problem, and Orthodox writers have used it without always saying so. The Benedictine Dom Odo Casel argued that the Christian liturgy makes the saving acts of Christ objectively present under the sacramental sign — Mysteriengegenwart, the presence of the mystery itself and not merely of its fruits (Casel, Das christliche Kultmysterium, Regensburg, 1932; ET The Mystery of Christian Worship, ed. Burkhard Neunheuser, London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1962).

His thesis is reported here in its own terms because it is a serious and influential proposal, and because it is close to what the Byzantine texts appear to say. It was also heavily criticized, within Roman Catholic theology and outside it, on two grounds: that its derivation of the idea from the Hellenistic mystery cults was historically unpersuasive, and that its account of how a past act becomes present was philosophically underdetermined. Fr Alexander Schmemann, who was sympathetic to the general direction, kept his distance from the system and located the presence of the mystery in the Church’s passage into the Kingdom rather than in a metaphysics of the rite (Schmemann, Introduction to Liturgical Theology, Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1966, ch. 1, on the “liturgical problem”; and For the Life of the World, 2nd ed., 1973, ch. 3).

The honest summary is this: the Church confesses the “today” in her prayer and does not possess a defined dogmatic theory of how it works. That is not a gap to be embarrassed about. Lex orandi lex credendi runs in the direction the phrase states — the rule of prayer establishes the rule of belief, and the systematic account, where it exists at all, comes after (see Holy Tradition: Lex Orandi Lex Credendi; The Divine Liturgy: Lex Orandi Lex Credendi).

The Feast Has Duration

One further feature belongs to the “today,” and it is the practical bridge into the rest of this collection: a Great Feast is not a day. It has a forefeast, an afterfeast, and a formal leave-taking (apodosis), so that the Church dwells in the feast across a season and then takes leave of it deliberately. The Nativity has a forefeast from 20 December and an afterfeast to 31 December; Pascha’s afterfeast runs forty days to its leave-taking on the eve of the Ascension; Pentecost, Theophany, the Transfiguration and the Dormition each have their own span (see The Twelve Great Feasts and the Calendar, which treats the structure in full, and Hymnography and the Shape of a Feast).

Because feasts have extension and fasts have extension, they can collide, and the Typikon exists in large part to adjudicate the collisions. The extreme case is Kyriopascha, the coincidence of the Annunciation with Pascha itself: two “todays” in one day, the conception and the resurrection sung together, with a special order of service prescribed by the Markan chapters of the Typikon (see The Fixed and the Movable Year; Orthodoxy: The Church Calendar).

This is where a theology of liturgical time stops being abstract. The “today” is carried by a structure — dated, ranked, and interlocked — and structures can be well or badly maintained. The remaining sections of this collection are about that structure and about a real dispute over how to keep it.

References

Casel, Odo. The Mystery of Christian Worship. Ed. Burkhard Neunheuser. London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1962. (German original: Das christliche Kultmysterium, Regensburg: Pustet, 1932.)
Hapgood, Isabel Florence. Service Book of the Holy Orthodox-Catholic Apostolic Church. Various editions.
The Festal Menaion. Trans. Mother Mary and Kallistos Ware. London: Faber and Faber, 1969.
The Lenten Triodion. Trans. Mother Mary and Kallistos Ware. London: Faber and Faber, 1978.
The Pentecostarion. Trans. Holy Transfiguration Monastery. Boston, 1990.
Schmemann, Alexander. Introduction to Liturgical Theology. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1966.
Schmemann, Alexander. For the Life of the World. 2nd ed. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1973.
Typikon (Ustav), the Markan chapters on the concurrence of feasts.