Vestments, Chant, and Language

The Liturgy is clothed in vesture, sound, and speech. This file treats the liturgical vestments of deacon, priest, and bishop and their meaning; the traditions of Orthodox chant, Byzantine and Slavic; and the perennial and sober question of liturgical language — the tension between the sacral tongues in which the tradition was received and the vernacular in which the Gospel is preached.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Vestments

The ministers of the Liturgy serve vested, and the vestments are understood not as mere ornament but as signs of the ministry and of the heavenly service into which the clergy enter. Each order has its proper vesture, added cumulatively with rank (Hapgood, Service Book; Ware, The Orthodox Church, Penguin, 1993, Part II):

  • The deacon wears the sticharion (a long tunic), the orarion (a narrow stole worn over the left shoulder, which he lifts at the litanies), and the epimanikia (cuffs). The orarion is the deacon’s distinctive sign, associated in the tradition with the wings of the angels whose ministry the deacon images.
  • The priest wears the sticharion (as an undergarment, the podriznik), the epitrachelion (the stole gathered before the breast, without which no priestly act may be performed — the sign of the grace of priesthood), the zone (belt), the epimanikia (cuffs), and the phelonion (the great cape-like outer vestment). Dignitaries may also wear the epigonation and the nabedrennik.
  • The bishop wears, over the priestly vesture, the sakkos (in place of the phelonion), the omophorion (the broad band about the shoulders that is his distinctive sign, imaging the lost sheep carried on the Good Shepherd’s shoulders, Luke 15:5), the mitre, the panagia and pectoral cross, and bears the dikirion and trikirion (the two- and three-branched candlesticks) with which he blesses.

The mystagogical tradition reads the vestments symbolically — the epimanikia as bonds on the Lord’s hands, the phelonion as the seamless robe or the purple mockery-robe, and so on — and the vesting prayers, drawn largely from the Psalms (e.g., “Thy priests shall be clothed with righteousness,” Psalm 131/132:9), frame the putting-on of each garment as the clothing of the minister in the grace and the sufferings of Christ (vesting prayers, Divine Liturgy; Germanus, On the Divine Liturgy, trans. Paul Meyendorff, SVS Press, 1984, on the vestments). The colors of the vestments follow the season and feast — bright and gold for the great feasts and Pascha, dark or purple for Lent and the Cross, and so on, according to local custom rather than a single fixed canon.

Chant

Orthodox worship is entirely sung: the Liturgy has, traditionally, no spoken parts and no instrumental music, but is chanted throughout by clergy, chanters, and choir, the human voice alone being held to befit the reasonable worship of rational creatures (Gardner, Russian Church Singing, vol. 1, SVS Press, 1980; Wellesz, A History of Byzantine Music and Hymnography, Oxford, 1961). The classical system is the Octoechos, the “eight tones” — eight sets of melodic patterns, traditionally associated with St. John of Damascus, through which the Church’s hymnody rotates week by week (Wellesz, A History of Byzantine Music, 1961; on the eight tones, Orthodoxy: The Daily Cycle).

Within this common framework the several Orthodox peoples developed distinct musical traditions. Byzantine chant — the monophonic, modal chant of the Greek-speaking Church, sung with an ison (drone) — preserves the medieval Byzantine musical tradition, notated in its own neumatic system and carried on by the Greek, Antiochian, and other Churches of Byzantine musical heritage (Wellesz, 1961). The Slavic Churches received Byzantine chant and reshaped it: the old Russian znamenny chant (an unaccompanied monophonic chant in its own “hook” notation) gave way, from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to harmonized choral polyphony, so that the Russian tradition became one of unaccompanied four-part choral singing, ranging from simple harmonizations of the old chants to the great composed settings of the modern period (Gardner, Russian Church Singing, 1980). Georgian chant, with its distinctive three-part harmony, and the other national traditions add further riches. In all of them the principle is the same: the music serves the word, carrying the text of the Liturgy to the assembly and lifting the assembly into prayer, never displacing the word with mere sound (Gardner, 1980; Schmemann, For the Life of the World, SVS Press, 1973, on worship and beauty).

The Question of Language

The Orthodox Church has no single sacred language. From the beginning it has held, in principle, that the Liturgy should be prayed in the tongue of the people — the Pentecost gift by which each heard “in his own language the wonderful works of God” (Acts 2:6–11), and the mission of Sts. Cyril and Methodius, who in the ninth century created a Slavonic alphabet and translated the services so that the Slavs might worship in their own speech, is the classic Orthodox precedent against a fixed liturgical language (on the Slavonic mission, Orthodoxy: The Church Fathers and the standard histories). Against the medieval Western “three-languages” theory (that only Hebrew, Greek, and Latin were fit for worship), the Byzantine mission affirmed the translatability of the Gospel and the Liturgy.

In practice, however, the languages in which the tradition was received have often become sacral and archaic: Church Slavonic, the ninth-century literary language, is not the vernacular of any modern Slavic people and must be learned; liturgical (Byzantine) Greek stands at a distance from spoken demotic Greek; and similar gaps exist elsewhere. This produces the perennial and genuinely debated question of the vernacular. The case for the vernacular rests on the Pentecost and Cyrillo-Methodian principle that the people should understand and pray the Liturgy in their own tongue, and on the missionary situation of the Orthodox diaspora, where English and other modern languages have increasingly been adopted (Schmemann, Church, World, Mission, SVS Press, 1979, on the missionary and pastoral case). The case for retaining the traditional liturgical languages rests on their consecrated dignity, their precision and stability, their unifying force across an immigrant Church, and a wariness of the losses that translation and constant revision can bring — a preference strongest in parts of the Slavic and Greek traditions. The matter is not settled by any pan-Orthodox rule but is worked out jurisdiction by jurisdiction and parish by parish, and it is best treated soberly: both the demand that the faithful understand and the reverence for a received liturgical tongue are genuine Orthodox instincts, and the Church has, at different times and places, honored each (Ware, The Orthodox Church, 1993, on language and the diaspora). What the tradition does not permit is to make of any language an idol, or to forget that the Liturgy exists to be prayed by the whole people of God.

See Also

References

  • Gardner, Johann von. Russian Church Singing. Vol. 1, Orthodox Worship and Hymnography. Trans. Vladimir Morosan. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1980. (The tradition of Orthodox and Russian chant; znamenny and choral singing.)
  • Wellesz, Egon. A History of Byzantine Music and Hymnography. 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961. (Byzantine chant and the Octoechos.)
  • Germanus of Constantinople. On the Divine Liturgy. Trans. Paul Meyendorff. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1984. (The symbolism of the vestments.)
  • Ware, Kallistos. The Orthodox Church. New ed. London: Penguin, 1993. (Vestments; language and the diaspora.)
  • Schmemann, Alexander. Church, World, Mission. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1979. (The missionary case for the vernacular.)
  • Schmemann, Alexander. For the Life of the World. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1973. (Worship, beauty, and the sensible clothing of the mystery.)
  • Hapgood, Isabel Florence. Service Book of the Holy Orthodox-Catholic Apostolic Church. (The vestments and vesting prayers.)
  • Scripture: Luke 15:5; Acts 2:6–11; Psalm 131/132:9.