Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi

The Orthodox Church holds the Divine Liturgy to be not merely an application of doctrine but a primary source of it — the law of prayer is the law of belief. This file expounds the principle lex orandi, lex credendi, the Liturgy as the Church’s first theology, its bond with the Mysteries and with the theology of the Fathers, and the way the Liturgy both teaches and guards the faith.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Law of Prayer as the Law of Belief

The Latin tag lex orandi, lex credendi — “the law of prayer [is] the law of belief” — condenses a principle the whole Orthodox tradition assumes: that the Church’s worship is a primary bearer and criterion of her faith, not a mere illustration of doctrines established elsewhere. The phrase derives from the fifth-century formula of Prosper of Aquitaine, ut legem credendi lex statuat supplicandi — “let the law of supplication establish the law of belief” — asserting that the Church’s rule of prayer establishes her rule of faith (Prosper of Aquitaine, Indiculus, associated with the Capitula Coelestini; discussed in Wainwright, Doxology: The Praise of God in Worship, Doctrine, and Life, Oxford, 1980). For the Orthodox, this is more than a slogan: the Liturgy is the place where the faith is confessed, celebrated, and handed on most fully, so that theology in its truest sense is doxological — a “singing” of God before it is a discourse about God (Schmemann, Introduction to Liturgical Theology, SVS Press, 1966, on the Liturgy as the source of theology; Florovsky, “The Elements of Liturgy,” in Collected Works).

Fr. Georges Florovsky and Fr. Alexander Schmemann made this the axis of the twentieth-century Orthodox liturgical revival. Schmemann argued that the modern separation of “liturgics” (the study of rubrics) from “theology” (the study of doctrine) was a distortion, and that the Church’s leitourgia is itself the primary theological act, the “ontological condition of theology” — the living experience of the Church from which right doctrine is drawn and against which it is measured (Schmemann, Introduction to Liturgical Theology, 1966; The Eucharist: Sacrament of the Kingdom, SVS Press, 1988, ch. 1). To ask what the Orthodox Church believes about the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Church, or the last things is, on this account, first to ask how she prays these mysteries in the Liturgy — for the faith of the Church lives in her worship before it is written in her manuals (Schmemann, Introduction to Liturgical Theology, 1966).

The Liturgy and the Dogmas

This is not an abstraction; the history of dogma bears it out. The Church prayed to Christ as God, and offered the Eucharist to the Holy Trinity, before the councils defined the divinity of the Son and the Spirit — and the councils appealed to that worship as evidence. St. Basil the Great grounded the divinity of the Holy Spirit partly in the Church’s doxology and baptismal practice, arguing from how the Church prays and baptizes to what the Church must believe (Basil, On the Holy Spirit 27, on the unwritten traditions of worship, including the eastward orientation and the doxology, as bearers of the faith). The confession of the Trinity is woven through the Liturgy — in the opening blessing of the Kingdom “of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,” in “Let us love one another, that with one mind we may confess… the Trinity one in essence and undivided,” in the Trisagion and the Sanctus, and in the whole Trinitarian shape of the anaphora (the Church gives thanks to the Father, remembers the Son, and invokes the Spirit) (the Eucharistic prayer; the Creed and the kiss of peace). The very placing of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed within the Liturgy, immediately before the anaphora, embodies the principle: the Church offers the Eucharist as the confession of the true faith, and the dogmatic definition of the councils is received back into the worship from which, in part, it arose (Orthodoxy: The Nicene Creed; The Seven Ecumenical Councils).

The Liturgy and the Mysteries

The Divine Liturgy is also the matrix of the Church’s whole sacramental life. The Eucharist is not one mystery among seven set side by side but the center around which the others are ordered — the mystery in which the Church herself is realized, and into which the initiated are brought (Schmemann, The Eucharist, 1988, ch. 1; The Holy Mysteries). Baptism and Chrismation are, in their full form, an initiation into the Eucharistic assembly, culminating historically in the newly baptized receiving Communion; Holy Orders exists for the offering of the Liturgy; Marriage and Unction were once, and are theologically still, set within the Eucharistic context (The Holy Mysteries: The Eucharist; Schmemann, Of Water and the Spirit, SVS Press, 1974). To understand the mysteries, then, one looks to the Liturgy in which they are rooted; and to understand the Liturgy, one sees it as the summit of the sacramental economy by which the risen Christ, in the Spirit, deifies his people (The Holy Mysteries: the sacramental life).

The Liturgy and the Fathers

The principle finally binds the Liturgy to the theology of the Fathers. The great mystagogical commentaries — St. Cyril of Jerusalem’s Mystagogical Catecheses, St. Germanus of Constantinople’s On the Divine Liturgy, St. Nicholas Cabasilas’ Commentary — are not marginal curiosities but a central genre of patristic theology, in which the Fathers do their theology precisely by expounding the Church’s worship (Orthodoxy: The Church Fathers; on Cabasilas, St. Nicholas Cabasilas). And the two great anaphoras themselves are patristic texts: the Anaphora of St. Basil is among the noblest theological compositions of the fourth century, so that when the Church prays it she prays the theology of a Father of the Church (the two liturgies and their authors). The Liturgy thus stands with Scripture and the Fathers as a font of the faith — indeed as the place where Scripture is read and the Fathers’ theology is prayed. Fr. Seraphim Rose’s defense of the Church’s living tradition as a genuine source of theological knowledge applies here with full force: what the Church receives and transmits in her worship carries an authority that no individual reconstruction overrides, because the lex orandi is the faith of the Body of Christ itself (cf. the treatment of ecclesial reception in the repository’s Xenia methodology, applying the same principle to hagiography). To pray the Liturgy rightly, in the tradition, is already to confess the Orthodox faith; and to confess the Orthodox faith is to be drawn, again and again, to the altar where that faith is offered and received.

See Also

References

  • Schmemann, Alexander. Introduction to Liturgical Theology. Trans. Asheleigh Moorhouse. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1966. (The Liturgy as the source and condition of theology.)
  • Schmemann, Alexander. The Eucharist: Sacrament of the Kingdom. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1988. (The Eucharist as the sacrament of the Church; theology as doxology.)
  • Wainwright, Geoffrey. Doxology: The Praise of God in Worship, Doctrine, and Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980. (The lex orandi, lex credendi principle and Prosper of Aquitaine.)
  • Florovsky, Georges. “The Elements of Liturgy.” In Collected Works, vol. on the Church. (The liturgical basis of theology.)
  • Basil the Great. On the Holy Spirit 27. Trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 8. (Worship and doxology as bearers of the faith.)
  • Cyril of Jerusalem. Mystagogical Catecheses; Germanus of Constantinople, On the Divine Liturgy, trans. Paul Meyendorff (Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1984); Nicholas Cabasilas, A Commentary on the Divine Liturgy, trans. Hussey and McNulty (London: SPCK, 1960) — the mystagogical genre as patristic theology.
  • Prosper of Aquitaine. Indiculus de gratia Dei (the Capitula Coelestini), the source of lex orandi, lex credendi.