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Towards a Pastoral Liturgical Theology: The Co-option of Martin Thornton in Support of Fagerberg’s Ascetical Recension of the Schmemann—Kavanagh School Fr Geoffrey Ready Orthodox School of Theology at Trinity College

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Page 1: Towards a Pastoral Liturgical Theology a Pastoral... · of liturgical theology. It is entirely fitting therefore that, while his liturgical theology has influenced a generation of

Towards a Pastoral Liturgical Theology: The Co-option of Martin Thornton in Support of Fagerberg’s Ascetical Recension of the Schmemann—Kavanagh School

Fr Geoffrey Ready Orthodox School of Theology at Trinity College

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“Manuals and instructions on the liturgy are invariably couched in idealistic terms;

they are mainly ‘devotional’, and although it is very good to have a clear ideal

at which to aim, this is not very practical by itself.”

Martin Thornton, Christian Proficiency

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The recalibration of Orthodox liturgical theology over the past century led by Alexander

Schmemann has been ecumenical both in inception and scope. In overthrowing neo-scholastic

theology and returning to the patristic tradition in which the liturgy is the “living source and the

ultimate criterion of all Christian thought”,1 Schmemann was part of a wider movement of

patristic revival and ressourcement dominated by French Roman Catholic scholars such as Yves

Congar, Jean Daniélou and Louis Bouyer who sought to revitalise the church with “a new and

deeper sounding of ancient, inexhaustible, and common resources.”2 Likewise Schmemann’s

prophetic call for liturgical realism at the heart of the church was consonant with the liturgical

movement of the 20th century which sought the “genuine discovery of worship as the life of

the Church, the public act which eternally actualizes the nature of the Church as the Body of

Christ.”3 While these western movements drew heavily on Orthodox tradition and had a “deep

internal bond with the Church in the East,” to the extent that they could even be viewed as an

“’Orthodox’ movement in a non-Orthodox context”,4 Schmemann was ever cognisant of his

indebtedness to theologians in the West paving the road of return to the sources and renewal

of liturgical theology. It is entirely fitting therefore that, while his liturgical theology has

influenced a generation of Orthodox scholars and students of theology, Schmemann’s thought

has been principally taken up, integrated and furthered by western theologians of Catholic

tradition like Aidan Kavanagh, Robert Taft and David Fagerberg. These liturgical scholars are by

their own admission “more at home in the iconic East than in the pictorial West”5 and continue

to look for inspiration to the liturgy of the Orthodox Church which has preserved the “liturgical

1 Alexander Schmemann, Liturgy and Tradition: Theological Reflections of Alexander Schmemann (Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1990), 12. 2 C Péguy, from a preface to the Cahiers de la Quinzaine of 1 March 1904, repr. in his Oeuvres complètes(Paris: N.R.F., n.d.), 12: 186-192 as quoted by Yves Congar, Vrai et fausse réforme dans l’église (Paris: Cerf, 1950), 602. 3 Alexander Schmemann, Introduction to Liturgical Theology (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1986), 14. 4 Ibid., 15. 5 Aidan Kavanagh, On Liturgical Theology, Reprint edition. (Collegeville, Minn.: Pueblo Books, 1984), 4.

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spirit of the early church and continues to live by it and draw life from its source.”6 Indeed, their

ongoing insights and contributions demonstrate that ‘Orthodox liturgical theology’ continues to

be an ecumenical endeavour.

Criticism of the hegemonic Schmemann—Kavanagh—Fagerberg school of liturgical theology7

has also been ecumenical. As dominant as the school has become, and as axiomatic as its

central tenets have come to be—liturgy is theology, a primary theology integrating our whole

life, and orthodoxy is primarily ‘right worship’, a sacramental encounter constitutive of the

church—the school is not without its detractors of all backgrounds. For a revitalisation

movement that began with the recognition that neo-scholastic theology had failed by creating a

“rupture between theology and life”8 and that there was therefore a need to return to the

fathers for their “profoundly pastoral theology in its ambience, purpose and execution”,9 the

most trenchant criticism is undoubtedly that this school of liturgical theology is not practical: in

spite of the lofty and inspiring words of its proponents, the purpose of Orthodox liturgical

theology remains elusive without pastoral application, a theoretical ideal without a praxis that

regularly transfigures the lives of worshipping Christians. Inheriting the mantle of Schmemann

and Kavanagh, and no doubt sensitive to the critics and aware of academic theology’s

propensity to what the latter called “pastoral astigmatism”,10 Fagerberg has drawn on Orthodox

spiritual tradition and further reflected on the ascetical nature of liturgical capacitation. Yet it is

ultimately by turning to another ascetical pastor and theologian of the wider Catholic tradition,

the Anglican Martin Thornton, writing outside of any movement but drawing on the same deep

wells of patristic tradition, that the Orthodox liturgical theology as articulated by Schmemann,

Kavanagh and Fagerberg can be strengthened by a framework for pastoral application.

6 Dom Olivier Rousseau, Histoire du Mouvement Liturgique (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 1945), 188. As cited by Schmemann, Introduction to Liturgical Theology, 15. 7 The currency of this nomenclature and dominance of the school is noted by Andrew Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present (Westmount, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2015), 196. 8 Jean Daniélou. “Les orientations présentes de la pensée religieuse,” Études 249 (1946): 6. 9 Kavanagh, On Liturgical Theology, 18. 10 Ibid., 19.

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(I) Orthodox Liturgical Theology, or What Does the Liturgy Do?

Prior to liturgical theology as expressed by Schmemann, there was merely ‘theology of liturgy’,

or liturgical studies, looking at “liturgy’s surface to notice its rubrics, sacramentaries, structures,

ceremonies, architecture, etc.”11 Neo-scholastic theology treated liturgy as little more than

“ceremonied adiaphora”,12 certainly not the ground for theology proper. A return to patristic

sources turned this understanding on its head, showing that in effect, liturgy constitutes

theology, that orthodoxy (ὀρθός + δόξα: ‘right glory’ or true worship) is prior to orthodoxy

(ὀρθοδοξία: ‘right doctrine’). For Schmemann, “it is precisely faith as experience, the total and

living experience of the Church, that constitutes the source and context of theology in the

East”13 and that experience is in liturgy.14 To make this point, Schmemann and Kavanagh both

appeal to the famous dictum of Prosper of Aquitaine: ut legem credendi lex statuat

supplicandi—‘that the law of praying establishes the law of believing’. Shortening the phrase to

the tag lex orandi lex credendi, Schmemann emphasises the interdependence of worship and

belief, for faith is “source and cause” of liturgy, but it needs the liturgy as “its own self-

understanding and self-fulfillment.”15 Kavanagh is more definitive still, insisting the terms lex

orandi and lex credendi are not interchangeable, for liturgy founds belief like a house is built on

a foundation.16 True worship comes first:

Belief is always consequent upon encounter with the Source of the grace of faith. Therefore Christians do not worship because they believe. They believe because the One in whose gift faith lies is regularly met in the act of communal worship—not because the assembly conjures up God, but because the initiative lies with the God who has promised to be there always.17

11 David W. Fagerberg, Consecrating the World: On Mundane Liturgical Theology (Angelico Press, 2016), 5. 12 Kavanagh, On Liturgical Theology, 151. 13 Schmemann, Liturgy and Tradition, 54. 14 Ibid., 55. 15 Ibid., 39. 16 Aidan Kavanagh, “Primary Theology and Liturgical Act: Response,” Worship 57, no. 4 (July 1983): 323. 17 Kavanagh, On Liturgical Theology, 91.

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Whereas neo-scholastic theology looked at liturgy, analysing its words and rituals, liturgical

theology looks through liturgy, seeing with a liturgical lens, understanding liturgy “as a way of

living and a way of thinking, expressed ritually.”18 It sees liturgy as coterminous with the church

for it is the “church’s faith in motion” where worshippers transact “the church’s faith in God

under the condition of God’s real presence in both church and world.”19

Liturgy is prior to belief, but it operates as more than simply a source of information for the

theologian. It is rather theology’s “natural milieu” and “self-evident term of reference”20 and

the “dynamic condition within which theological reflection is done.”21 Liturgy is in effect

theologia prima, ‘primary theology’, a direct spiritual apprehension of divine truth through

relationship God Himself, and the necessary condition for further or ‘secondary’ theological

reflection:

Liturgical tradition is not an ‘authority’ or a locus theologicus; it is the ontological condition of theology, of the proper understanding of kerygma, of the Word of God, because it is in the Church, of which the leitourgia is the expression and the life, that the sources of theology are functioning as precisely ‘source’.22

Building on this understanding, Kavanagh articulates how the body of Christ gathered in

worship operates: in the liturgy, the assembly encounters God, who is both object and source

of faith, and stands faithfully in His presence; the assembly is changed as a result of the

encounter; and the assembly must then adjust to this change, and this adjustment is “theologia

itself”.23 This process of adjustment, of theologia prima, is neither “placid” nor “genteel” but

involves “collision, chaos and a certain violence”.24 The liturgical assembly stands “on the edge

of chaos” and only by God’s grace can it stand there or “come away whole from such an

18 David Fagerberg, “Liturgical Asceticism: Enlarging Our Grammar of Liturgy,” Pro Ecclesia 13, no. 2 (2004): 206. 19 Kavanagh, On Liturgical Theology, 8. 20 Schmemann, Liturgy and Tradition, 12. 21 Kavanagh, On Liturgical Theology, 7–8. 22 Schmemann, Liturgy and Tradition, 18. 23 Kavanagh, On Liturgical Theology, 74–75. 24 Ibid., 74.

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encounter, and even then it is with wounds which are as deep as they are salutary.”25 This

theme of utter reliance on God’s grace to stand before Him and worship Him is emphasised

over and again in the Divine Liturgy: “Make us worthy, O Master, that with boldness and

without condemnation we may dare to call on Thee...”26

By locating the operation of primary theology in the church gathered together in, or rather

constituted by, liturgy, Orthodox liturgical theology highlights that theologia is the daily work of

ordinary people assembled for worship in the church’s regular cycles of services. Kavanagh thus

posits a certain Mrs Murphy as the liturgist par excellence. Mrs Murphy is not an academic

scholar, but a simple woman, formed by lifelong immersion in liturgical worship:

Mrs Murphy and her pastor are primary theologians whose discourse in faith is carried on not by concepts and propositions nearly so much as in the vastly complex vocabulary of experiences had, prayers said, sights seen, smells smelled, words said and heard and responded to, emotions controlled and released, sins committed and repented, children born and loved ones buried, and in many other ways no one can count or always account for.27

This is not an anti-intellectual or egalitarian stance as such; it is simply the recognition that we

become primary theologians and members of “that theological corporation Paul calls Christ’s

body” by our baptism.28 Moreover, primary theologians like Mrs Murphy are responsible for an

awe-inspiring task, throwing “flashes of light upon chasms of rich ambiguity”, a much harder

task than the work of the secondary theologians with their “words about words”.29 Liturgists

are simply those who do liturgy: they make up the church, and they are its primary theologians.

25 Ibid., 75. 26 Prayer before ‘Our Father’, from The Divine Liturgy According to St John Chrysostom (South Canaan, PA: St Tikhon’s Seminary Press, 1977), 73. 27 Kavanagh, On Liturgical Theology, 146–147. 28 Kavanagh, “Primary Theology and Liturgical Act,” 322. 29 Ibid., 323,322. “My admiration for her and her colleagues is profound, and it deepens daily,” Kavanagh adds. Ibid.

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(II) Orthodox Liturgical Theology Through a Critical Lens

The theological principles articulated by the Schmemann—Kavanagh—Fagerberg school of

liturgical theology represent a ‘high’ understanding of liturgy that is unabashedly part of the

wider Catholic tradition. Its proponents are principally Orthodox and Roman Catholics30 who

share an understanding of liturgy as “inspired, guided, and shaped by the Holy Spirit throughout

the ages” whose “continuity is assured by the continuity of the divine initiative.”31 The main

challenge to Orthodox liturgical theology has thus unsurprisingly come from scholars from

Reformation traditions who do not inherit the same sense of liturgical continuity nor are keen

to look for it in their historical investigation of liturgical development. They sense rather more

discontinuity and multivalency in liturgical forms, interplay between beliefs and worship, and

complexity in the minds of worshippers than they believe ‘high’ liturgical theologians are willing

to admit. In challenging Orthodox liturgical theology, they are joined by other voices, Orthodox

among them, who question how the ideal of liturgy shaping Christian lives works in practice.

Critics charge that, for liturgy to function effectively as the ground of theologia prima, it must

have a “single meaning that can be readily identified.”32 Yet Paul Bradshaw makes use of the

work of Jewish liturgiologist Lawrence Hoffman to show that rituals can have many different

meanings at the same time.33 He distinguishes and contrasts the official meanings, “the things

experts say that a rite means,” from private meanings, “whatever idiosyncratic interpretations

people find in things,” and public meanings, “agreed-upon meanings shared by a number of

ritual participants, even though they are not officially preached by the experts.”34 According to

30 Though the Roman Catholics Kavanagh, a Benedictine, and Fagerberg, a former Lutheran, could be described as having “a definite slant to the Orthodox position.” Cf James L Empereur, “What Is Liturgical Theology? A Study in Methodology,” Theological Studies 54, no. 3 (September 1993): 589. 31 Paul Bradshaw, “Difficulties in Doing Liturgical Theology,” Pacifica: Australasian Theological Studies 11, no. 2 (June 1, 1998): 183. 32 Ibid., 189. 33 Cf. Lawrence Hoffman, “How Ritual Means: Ritual Circumcision in Rabbinic Culture and Today”, Studia Liturgica 23 (1983): 78-97, esp. 79-82. 34 Ibid., as cited by Bradshaw, “Difficulties in Doing Liturgical Theology,” 189.

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Bradshaw, it is obviously the so-called “official meaning” that liturgical scholars define as the

primary theology emerging from liturgical experience, even though that official meaning may

not even be the same in later generations as in the one that framed the liturgical service in the

first instance.35 Despite this focus on the official or true meaning of liturgy, that may not be

what attracts people to worship in the first place, and, as Hoffman argues, “as often as not, it is

any of the other meanings that carry the day”.36

Schmemann and his school are certainly aware of this complexity of liturgical hermeneutics,

and they address this by distinguishing between the fundamental structure of liturgy and the

“myriad particularities of worship” that make up a liturgical rite.37 In a task analogous to that of

the musicologist, the liturgiologist must in the first instance focus on structure, not meaning.38

The task is to uncover, despite “the vagueness and scope and content” of liturgy, that within

the church’s worship which “continues to be defined by a certain general norm or structure

which remains always unchanged.”39 Schmemann calls this the ordo, “the unchanging principle,

the living norm or ‘logos’ of worship as a whole,” which lies behind the “accidental and

temporary” words and rituals of worship.40 Yet it is precisely the existence of such unchanging

norms that critics doubt; they argue that ample historical evidence of change and widely

varying contemporary Christian practice both belie any discernible fundamental structure or

ordo, “except in the very broadest of terms.”41 To believe in such a structure is to attribute, in

35 Bradshaw cites the example of a subsequent reading a ‘higher’ form of Anglican Eucharistic theology into the Book of Common Prayer than Thomas Cranmer intended. 36 Hoffman, “How Ritual Means,” as cited by Bradshaw, “Difficulties in Doing Liturgical Theology,” 189. 37 Kavanagh, On Liturgical Theology, 100. 38 Ibid., 148. 39 Schmemann, Introduction to Liturgical Theology, 38. 40 Ibid., 39. 41 Bradshaw, “Difficulties in Doing Liturgical Theology,” 184.

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Paul Marshall’s words, “some sort of Platonic ideal existence to ‘the liturgy’.”42 At best, it is

romantic43 and idealistic; at worst, it is “liturgical imperialism”.44

It is possible to detect in these critics a Protestant bias towards ‘text’, a reduction of liturgy to

words.45 To be sure, at the level of words, of liturgy as text, one can find endless examples of

variety and competing meanings in liturgical tradition. That is why a historical study of liturgical

texts leads naturally away from discerning the logos or fundamental structure of worship, and

more towards hearing “many different and discordant voices”.46 In order to detect the ordo,

and to discern what Orthodox liturgical theology insists upon as the priority of worship over

theology, it is necessary to appreciate liturgy as ‘icon’. There is multivalency in the presence of

a corporate act or icon47—only a different kind of multivalency than in the competing meanings

of different texts. It is the awesome, complex and ultimately inexpressible experience of

standing in the presence of the One who is “ineffable, inconceivable, invisible,

incomprehensible, ever-existing and eternally the same.”48 The liturgy itself is not the creeds,

texts and prayers; these “all emerged from that dialectical process of change and adjustment to

change triggered by the assembly’s regular baptismal and eucharistic encounters with the living

God.”49 Like the written products of the academic theologian, these texts are themselves a

‘secondary’ order of theology, not the lex orandi itself. Liturgy is about moving “within the

abiding Presence of God in Christ, the uncreated creating Word, who fills the whole of time

past, present, and to come.”50 To approach liturgy otherwise, as texts rather than experience, is

to adopt a form of iconoclasm that essentially destroys liturgy. It makes liturgy more about God

42 Paul Marshall, “Reconsidering ‘Liturgical Theology’: Is There a Lex Orandi for All Christians?,” Studia liturgica 25 (1995): 133. 43 Bradshaw, “Difficulties in Doing Liturgical Theology,” 191. 44 Empereur, “What Is Liturgical Theology?,” 590. 45 Their approach could also be said to reflect a more general western conception of lex orandi as ‘learning experience’. Cf. Kavanagh, On Liturgical Theology, 5. 46 Bradshaw, “Difficulties in Doing Liturgical Theology,” 188. 47 Kavanagh, On Liturgical Theology, 104. 48 The Anaphora, from The Divine Liturgy According to St John Chrysostom, 62. 49 Kavanagh, On Liturgical Theology, 93. 50 Ibid., 154.

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than of God, and precludes understanding liturgy as belonging “the taxis or category of realities

that are fundamental and irreducibly primary in Christian life.”51 There are no doubt “human

limitations” to the liturgy52—as indeed there are with the Scriptures themselves—for the

dialectic of theologia prima ”expresses itself in monuments of ceremony and art which remain

largely anonymous in their authorship, obscure in their intention, and ambiguous in their

meaning.”53 For Kavanagh, however, this ambiguity is not a concern, nor a reason to doubt the

liturgy’s capacity to function as Schmemann’s “ontological condition of theology”; rather, this is

simply in keeping with the numinous aspect of the icon, the power of the liturgy to “cause us to

shiver.”54 And yet, true as that may be, it offers neither pragmatic nor pastoral solutions to a

liturgical assembly, especially when the liturgy does not ‘work’ as intended.

Indeed, it is in the face of such ambiguity and lack of readily grasped meaning in liturgy, the

critics maintain, that worshippers end up imposing their own private meanings on liturgical

experience. The liturgist is not tabula rasa, but brings presuppositions and preconceived

theologies to worship, so that it becomes more of a two-way street than a case of “God speaks

and people adjust.”55 The problem with the conception of liturgy as primary theology is that,

according to Marshall, “its view of liturgy is unilateral and not at all what we might call

interactive”.56 Indeed, such an encounter is “necessarily mediated through the lenses of a vision

of God already formulated by others and by the worshippers themselves.”57 Yet the liturgical

theology model, as elaborated by Kavanagh, is not strictly unilateral, but a “sustained

dialectic”.58 The assembly arrives and enters into liturgy presenting all its life as thesis; the

antithesis is the change the assembly experiences (or “suffers”) through worship—this is

theologia, “a dynamic, critical, reflective and sustained act of theology”;59 and the synthesis is

51 Ibid., 113. 52 Ibid., 114. 53 Ibid., 94. 54 Ibid. 55 Marshall, “Reconsidering ‘Liturgical Theology’: Is There a Lex Orandi for All Christians?,” 135. 56 Ibid. 57 Bradshaw, “Difficulties in Doing Liturgical Theology,” 192. 58 Kavanagh, On Liturgical Theology, 76. 59 Ibid., 77.

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the adjustment the assembly makes because of theologia. This dialectic means that it cannot be

said, as Marshall maintains, that our spiritual posture during liturgy is “essentially passive and

receptive”, nor that forms of liturgical worship cannot adapt as “an adequate expression of

what our faith is or becomes as it is lived in a changing environment.”60 Quite the opposite, for

the thesis brought by the assembly perdures into the synthesis: the “liturgy must be rich and

varied because the assembly of faith itself is rich and varied in its nature and operation, that is,

catholic in the fullest and most basic sense.”61 Kavanagh contends that this dialectic process is

not understood because we have fallen into the trap of secondary theology which has

“imperceptibly rendered us aphasic and inept with regard to it.”62 The difficulty arises, though,

when liturgists themselves fall into such aphasia and ineptitude, when the worshipping

community cannot perceive any change, any “growth in faith and life and spiritual

understanding.”63 Kavanagh admits that the change precipitated in the assembly can often be

“not so much immediately apparent, perhaps, as it is long-term, even eschatological, and

inexorable.”64 Although that may well work itself out in the long run, the liturgist is presumably

left to deal with “whatever idiosyncratic interpretations” were brought to worship in the first

place.

When it works, the dialectic of liturgical theology engages and transfigures the real lives of real

people, for it comprises a “regular, ongoing process of experience, memory, reflection, and

reappropriation carried out by real people in always changing circumstances.”65 When it does

not work as planned, the critics maintain, the real voices of ordinary people at worship are not

actually heard, and worse, their piety is often scorned. Picking up on Kavanagh’s figure of Mrs

Murphy, Bradshaw observes that

it is precisely the expressions of the natural piety of the putative Mrs Murphy and countless other churchgoers—devotions to the sacred heart of Jesus, for

60 Marshall, “Reconsidering ‘Liturgical Theology’: Is There a Lex Orandi for All Christians?,” 135. 61 Kavanagh, On Liturgical Theology, 172. 62 Ibid., 77. 63 The Second Prayer of the Faithful, Divine Liturgy According to St John Chrysostom, 52. 64 Kavanagh, On Liturgical Theology, 93. 65 Ibid.

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example, or sentimental nineteenth-century hymns—that are usually denigrated by the professional liturgical theologian and swept away by the liturgical reformer on the grounds that they fail to conform to the inherent spirit of the liturgy! Where is the value attached to theologia prima here?66

Though he erroneously equates theologia prima with natural piety, Bradshaw is right that real

people do not always bring open hearts and minds to worship; they can bring superstition, anti-

sacramental worldviews shaped by pietism and dualism, and preconceived beliefs alienated

from the core teachings of the faith. Certainly, Schmemann laments time and again that, as a

result of these theological presuppositions, worshippers fail to grasp the true meaning of the

services and sacraments of the church, and thus the practical liturgical life of the church

diverges from the essential ordo of its worship. Schmemann contends that ‘nominalistic’

liturgical piety “reigns almost unchallenged in the Church.”67 For instance, the experience of

worship is constructed around the harmful mysteriological division between the initiated and

uninitiated, instead of realising a synergy between priest and people; and in most churches, the

anaphora is prayed silently, suggesting that the “eucharistic prayers exist solely for the benefit

of the clergy.”68 Eucharistic piety has been reduced to “a ‘religious obligation’ to be performed

once a year, or to an individual act of piety, completely disconnected from the liturgy as a

corporate act.”69 Here more than anywhere is manifested the dichotomy between the piety of

the ordinary believer and the liturgy: the eucharist has been “completely subordinated to the

‘spiritual needs’ of the individual believer,” and yet no one senses the contradiction with “the

spirit of the eucharistic prayer itself: ‘And unite all of us to one another who become partakers

of the one Bread and Cup in the communion of the Holy Spirit’.”70

Commenting on those who attend the Divine Liturgy but choose not to commune, despite the

entire service being geared towards that end, Schmemann even describes them as being

66 Bradshaw, “Difficulties in Doing Liturgical Theology,” 192–193. 67 Alexander Schmemann, The Eucharist: Sacrament of the Kingdom (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1987), 18. 68 Ibid., 15. 69 Alexander Schmemann, “Problems of Orthodoxy in America: II. The Liturgical Problem,” St Vladimir’s Seminary Quarterly VIII, no. 4 (1964): 179. 70 Schmemann, The Eucharist: Sacrament of the Kingdom, 12.

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“’worldly ones’ (κοσμικοί), instead of the former laikós, members of the people of God (λαός),

‘God’s own people’ (I Pt 2.9).”71 By falling short of the vocation of laity, worshippers effectively

immunise themselves against the transforming power and spirit of the liturgy, and the liturgy

on its own is impotent to prevent this. Kavanagh notes that while liturgy precedes faith, it does

not mechanically create it, nor does it necessarily correct it; rather it prods its emergence,

throws “flashes of light, coherence and congruence” into the life of worshippers so that they

can sense the presence of God, and it gives faith a foundation.72 When it works, liturgy properly

speaking “drastically affects minds and hearts” such that “reality is perceived in new and

unforgettable ways.”73 Yet much depends on the response of the worshippers, the response of

either of God’s own people or of ‘worldly ones’.

Of course, Orthodox liturgical theology stresses that the point of worship is not a practical

programme or a certain kind of output; it is not “utilitarian, or for something.”74 It is simply to

“stand before the glory of [God’s] holy altar, and to offer worship and praise which are due to

[Him].”75 Yet, because in liturgy the “living God is present to the church”, that presence can

“affect, grace and change the world”,76 and true worship is to have its effect in a “life of

orthodoxia”, a “life of right worship” that is a “life of communion in all God’s holy things and

among his holy persons.”77 Though it is not its goal, the liturgy should result in the “assembly of

faith whole and entire” doing the world as liturgy, 78 a new city as icon of the “kingdom which is

to come” with which God has already endowed us.79 Nicholas Denysenko, an Orthodox scholar

studying renewal on the basis of the principles of Schmemann’s liturgical theology, sets out the

criteria for assessing the impact of any efforts at liturgical reform:

71 Ibid., 232. 72 Kavanagh, On Liturgical Theology, 99. 73 Ibid., 170. 74 Ibid., 151. 75 Prayer before the Thrice-Holy Hymn, Divine Liturgy According to St John Chrysostom, 38. 76 Kavanagh, On Liturgical Theology, 8. 77 Ibid., 95. 78 Ibid., 173. 79 Anaphora, Divine Liturgy According to St John Chrysostom, 63.

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What kind of people is the Church producing, and how is the liturgy shaping their lives? Do Orthodox Christians make significant contributions to society? Does the Church raise global leaders whose vision for the world reflect the teachings of the Gospel and the kingdom of God? Do the people of the Church conduct themselves in ways consistent with the larger aspirations of liturgical reform? So, for example, if we emphasize the Gospel commandment to forgive one another’s sins and to exchange the kiss of peace, and make that ritual moment particularly important in liturgical celebration, can we claim that we are becoming people who habitually forgive the sins of others? Can we claim that we seek to end divisions in our homes, neighborhoods, cities, and countries, and commit ourselves to making peace?80

For Denysenko, good liturgy is not the perfection of ritual performance, but “the emergence of

transformed communities who love God, are thankful for their life in the communion of the

Holy Spirit, and who love and attend to their neighbors.”81 That there should be little evidence

of such all-encompassing life change emerging from worship and the dialectic of liturgical

theology is thus a particularly damning indictment of the lack of engagement of the church with

the liturgical experience which is its very life. Schmemann frequently laments—that, as central

as the liturgy remains to the church—it “has ceased to be connected with virtually all other

aspects of the Church’s life; to inform, shape and guide the ecclesiastical consciousness as well

as the ‘worldview’ of the Christian community.”82 He notes that many people remain attached

to ancient rites but fail to see the liturgy as “an all-embracing vision of life, a power meant to

judge, inform and transform the whole of existence, a ‘philosophy of life’ shaping and

challenging all our ideas, attitudes and actions.”83 That it should have this effect is not to say

that the liturgy should be oriented towards education or training, nor should churches be

reduced to centres of social service. Rather, by drawing the worshipping community into union

with God, liturgy should enable the church to manifest the selfless love of the Holy Trinity to

the world. Without being didactic as such, “the love for God, thanksgiving, and love for one’s

brother and sister must be inscribed upon and communicated by the very liturgical rites we

80 Nicholas Denysenko, “Is Liturgical Reform Possible in Orthodoxy?” (Lecture at the University of St Sophia, 2016), 15. 81 Ibid., 16. 82 Schmemann, Liturgy and Tradition, 51. 83 Ibid., 52.

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engage.”84 Liturgy functions properly each time it “cracks open radical values, invites without

coercing people into them, and celebrates their living presence deep within these same

values.”85 And yet one may well wonder how often it does so function, as we continue to see a

complete “alienation of liturgy from life.”86 When the critics say that liturgical theologians

permit themselves only “slim, very passing, and somewhat sentimental references to care of

the poor and ministry in the world”,87 they may well have a point.

Not every criticism of the Orthodox liturgical theology of the school of Schmemann—

Kavanagh—Fagerberg squarely hits the mark. Some detractors, liturgical iconoclasts voicing

disparagement from outside the Catholic tradition, could never truly understand the

importance of liturgy for they would ultimately reject the fundamental premise that “ecclesia

and leitourgia are coterminous in origin” and the church “is the liturgy by which it worships.”88

Yet having run the gauntlet of the critique of liturgical theology, our Mrs Murphy is a bit the

worse for wear. Far from being the exemplary theologian wielding “symbolic, metaphorical,

sacramental words and actions which throw flashes of light upon chasms of rich ambiguity”,89

she appears to interpret liturgy in a somewhat idiosyncratic way, forming her own theology

based on prior beliefs and her personal experience of worship. She mingles her theology with

pietism and taints her worship with superstitions. Worst of all, she does not allow liturgy to

affect her life. Even Kavanagh admits of liturgical theology done in the round by real people:

“its face is known only in silhouette, its method is elusive, its practitioners nameless, and its

results problematic.”90

84 Denysenko, “Is Liturgical Reform Possible in Orthodoxy?,” 16. 85 Kavanagh, On Liturgical Theology, 116. 86 Schmemann, Liturgy and Tradition, 52. 87 Marshall, “Reconsidering ‘Liturgical Theology’: Is There a Lex Orandi for All Christians?,” 137. 88 Kavanagh, On Liturgical Theology, 97. They are simply aliturgical, though Kavanagh says an “aliturgical Christian church is as much a contradiction in terms as a human society without language.” Ibid. 89 Kavanagh, “Primary Theology and Liturgical Act,” 322–323. 90 Kavanagh, On Liturgical Theology, x.

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(III) Is Liturgical Asceticism the Key?

As the standard bearer for a new generation of Orthodox liturgical theology, David Fagerberg

has been the focus of much of the criticism directed at the school, with his What Is Liturgical

Theology? among the chief works slated. Marshall’s assessment is particularly censorious, not

only of Fagerberg’s rearticulation of such principles as liturgy constitutes the church and is the

purpose for which it exists—“intensifying Schmemann’s view, Fagerberg appears to have

concluded that people are made for the Sabbath”91—but also specifically of his failure to take

account of the members of the liturgical assembly as real people, people needing preparation

for, instruction during and sending out from worship. Fagerberg

gives no real treatment of discipleship (as expressed, for instance, in baptismal rites ancient and modern) as an essential precondition for liturgical celebration or even one of its results. He imparts no sense of the assembly being sent out to ministry by liturgy.92

In criticising the dialectic of theologia prima as an “adjustment process in one direction only”,

Marshall is especially scornful of Fagerberg’s “opaque” presentation of preaching as an act

within liturgy in which the “ministry of the celebrant is preaching and teaching, and the ministry

of the people is in accepting this teaching.”93 Marshall writes that such a “structuralist,

unilateral, and authoritarian model of preaching [...] is problematic on every level” for it denies

the “significance of the personal vessel, no matter how earthen, in which the treasure of the

Gospel is communicated” and “the community’s role in preparing for, participating in, and

reviewing and increasing the effectiveness of proclamation”.94

Without responding directly to such criticism, Fagerberg demonstrates awareness of it, notably

of the suggested failure of liturgical theologians to consider discipleship as an essential element

of the dialectic of primary theology. He has therefore changed tack to enlarge the discussion of

91 Marshall, “Reconsidering ‘Liturgical Theology’: Is There a Lex Orandi for All Christians?,” 136. 92 Ibid., 137. 93 David Fagerberg, What Is Liturgical Theology? A Study in Methodology (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1992), 262. Emphasis added as cited by Marshall, Ibid., 138. 94 Marshall, “Reconsidering ‘Liturgical Theology’: Is There a Lex Orandi for All Christians?,” 138.

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Orthodox liturgical theology—both in the second edition of What Is Liturgical Theology? (now

supertitled Theologia Prima) and in subsequent writings—to return to a principle hinted at by

Kavanagh, that asceticism belongs to liturgical rite95 and should be taken seriously.96 If in going

back to sources Schmemann and Kavanagh enlarged the vision of liturgy in its theological

dimension, Fagerberg draws on the same patristic tradition to widen the ascetical dimension of

liturgy. Defining liturgy as the “Trinity’s perichoresis kenotically extended to invite our

synergistic ascent into deification”, he argues this definition “begs asceticism”: “if liturgy is

heaven on earth, and theologia is deified union with God, then asceticism is demanded.”97 By

asceticism he means the askesis or effort of preparation, training, self-sacrifice and self-

discipline that is analogous to the exercise athletes undergo to discipline their bodies for

contest. Such ascetical effort “is requisite to being a liturgist, and to becoming a liturgical

theologian.”98

For Kavanagh, there is an implied asceticism in the dialectical encounter of worship, for the

adjustment of theologia prima, involving theological judgement and self-criticism, can be

difficult and costly. The assembly’s new life of communion in Christ can only be

sustained in all its openness, totality, sacredness and sent purpose... by the constancy of its standing in the presence of the Source, of its suffering whatever change that Source chooses to work within it, and of its painful coming to terms with that change.99

Yet, while this is the common experience of all the baptised members of the liturgical assembly,

Kavanagh does not expect all to take up the struggle. Rather, he sees the role of the ascetic as

the “virtuoso who serves the whole community as an exemplar of its own life.”100 The life of

struggle for holiness, to be sure, is what life is created for, it is entirely normal—and the

95 Kavanagh, On Liturgical Theology, 160. 96 Ibid., 6. 97 David W. Fagerberg, On Liturgical Asceticism (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2013), 9. 98 Fagerberg, “Liturgical Asceticism,” 206. 99 Kavanagh, On Liturgical Theology, 95. 100 Ibid., 161.

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“ascetic is simply a stunningly normal person who stands in constant witness to the normality

of Christian orthodoxia in a world flawed into abnormality by human choice”101—but the ascetic

alone manifests it. In his recension of Kavanagh’s thought, Fagerberg goes further, picking up

on the patristic notion that asceticism is actually intended for all. Given that liturgists “make up

the church, and the church is made up of liturgists, and the term is virtually synonymous with

baptized or with laity, to name the members of the mystical body of Christ”,102 it follows that

“liturgical asceticism is for every baptized Christian.”103 This struggle “is incumbent on every

Christian” for “Christian liturgical asceticism is born in the waters of the font where the liturgist-

in-formation is immersed into the blood of a suffering Christ.”104

Ascetical effort is about discipleship and spiritual growth, and it “capacitates a person for

liturgy”105 for it is “the discipline which increases the measure by which the Christian can

participate in the liturgical life.”106 If the liturgy, standing in the presence of God, is experienced

as fire and light, it is liturgical asceticism that “makes us combustible.”107 Frequently during the

Divine Liturgy, the deacon exhorts the faithful to stand ‘aright’: at the beginning of the

Anaphora, for instance, “Let us stand aright! Let us stand with fear! Let us attend, that we may

offer the Holy Oblation in peace.”108 For us to strand aright, we must think aright, and

asceticism, Fagerberg says, is necessary for us to think properly “about ourselves

(anthropology), the world (cosmology) and God (theology)”.109 The fruit of asceticism is a

complete change in the worldview of the liturgist that enables liturgy to function properly:

[It] yields a doctrine of creation that asserts matter was made to be sacrament; it yields an eschatology that asserts everything is destined for glory; it yields an anthropology that asserts the image of God can attain the likeness of God (deification); it yields a christology that asserts the reign of

101 Ibid. 102 Fagerberg, “Liturgical Asceticism,” 202. 103 Ibid., 214. 104 Ibid. 105 Fagerberg, Consecrating the World, 2. 106 Fagerberg, “Liturgical Asceticism,” 213. 107 Ibid. 108 Divine Liturgy According to St John Chrysostom, 62. 109 Fagerberg, “Liturgical Asceticism,” 210.

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God brings with it obligations to the poor, imprisoned, and outcast; and it yields an ecclesiology that asserts the Church manifests the potency of the world.110

In other words, so long as we have the requisite liturgical askesis, and our liturgists are

capacitated to participate fully in liturgy, the idealised world envisaged by the liturgical

theology expounded by Schmemann and Kavanagh should fall naturally into place—the church

assembled in worship experiencing and manifesting theologia prima arising from the direct

encounter with God.

Nonetheless, postulating the necessity of ascetical preparation as the solution to the apparent

ineffectiveness of liturgy as primary theology is not ultimately sufficient to address the practical

problem. Fagerberg asserts simply, “We should expect Mrs Murphy to know all this. It is

required of her as a Christian.”111 That is true, but is it helpful?112 It is hard to overlook the fact

that few of the laity, who are meant to be coterminous with the liturgists, are actively engaged

in asceticism, or indeed aware of their “synergistic participation in the economy of God, as the

Almighty gathers up history to bring it to eschatological perfection.”113 Have we not therefore

simply shifted from an eloquent and inspiring yet apparently unachievable conception of liturgy

as the all-sufficient ground of encounter with God, to an equally eloquent but impractical

expectation of the faithful being capacitated by asceticism for their participation in liturgy as “a

deified people, a filial race grafted by the paschal mystery into eighth-day existence” setting

about their liturgical vocation to create a “new heaven and a new earth”?114 Can Mrs Murphy

be truly be enough of an ascetic to be a full liturgist and primary theologian?

110 David Fagerberg, Theologia Prima: What Is Liturgical Theology?, 2nd edition. (Chicago: Hillenbrand Books, 2003), 226. 111 Ibid. 112 Cf. Empereur, “What Is Liturgical Theology?,” 590. 113 Fagerberg, “Liturgical Asceticism,” 206. 114 Fagerberg, Theologia Prima, 222.

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(IV) Rethinking Liturgical Proficiency

For liturgical asceticism to be the true key to the proper function of liturgy, it must be rendered

practical and helpful; it must in other words be made available for pastoral application to

transform the assembled members of the community of faith, Mrs Murphy included, into

functioning liturgists. It is worth remembering that when Kavanagh first introduced us to his

friend Mrs Murphy, she was in the company of “her pastor”, who is a primary theologian

alongside her.115 To rethink liturgical proficiency and recast it for pastoral application is also to

give the pastor his role in increasing the measure of the community’s participation in liturgical

life.

To help develop a framework for the pastoral application of liturgical theology we turn, not to a

liturgical theologian as such, but a pastor and self-described ascetical theologian of the wider

Catholic tradition, the Anglican Martin Thornton. Another child of the ressourcement that gave

rise to the liturgical theology of Schmemann, Kavanagh and Fagerberg, Thornton draws in his

writings and thought on the broad Catholic tradition of English spirituality from the fathers

through the Middle Ages and the post-Reformation English church. Much of his work concerns

spiritual direction, and in elaborating his vision of the Christian life he offers a synthetic and

practical spiritual theology on the “bold and exciting assumption that every truth flowing from

the Incarnation, from the entrance of God into the human world as man, must have its practical

lesson. If theology is incarnational, then it must be pastoral.”116

Deeply rooted in patristic theology, Thornton certainly appreciates the ideal conception of what

liturgy is, couched in the words and rituals of the liturgy itself and commented upon throughout

spiritual tradition, but he is determined throughout his works to establish a more practical

starting point for development towards this ideal:

Manuals and instructions on the liturgy are invariably couched in idealistic terms; they are mainly ‘devotional’, and although it is very good to have a

115 Kavanagh, On Liturgical Theology, 146. 116 Martin. Thornton, English Spirituality : An Outline of Ascetical Theology according to the English Pastoral Tradition (London: S.P.C.K., 1963), 21.

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clear ideal at which to aim, this is not very practical by itself. There is one little Mass book, ostensibly for children, which, at the elevation of the sacred Host, gives the curt direction ‘look up and adore’—excellent advice, no doubt, but it is rather like telling a golfer to hit the ball of the tee and into the hole: it is not quite so easy as it sounds. If it is not an irreverent comparison, both imply the very peak of perfection.117

Perfection remains ever the aim of the ascetic and liturgical life, but what is needed is not more

idealistic inspiration, only “ascetical theology on an ordinary pastoral level”118 that builds what

he calls “Christian proficiency”: “We must go on striving for the ideal and around the throne of

the Lamb in Heaven we may reach it, but meanwhile can we be proficient?”119

Christian proficiency is Thornton’s equivalent of Fagerberg’s “capacitation” through liturgical

asceticism. As true askesis, the development of proficiency involves not only training and effort,

but coaching and guidance: Christ “not only loved his disciples but trained them, and there is no

reason to suppose that his attitude has altered.”120 True pastoral practice is the application of

dogmatic theology “to the everyday experience of souls to the furtherance of faith and

religion.”121 Devotion and asceticism are interwoven strands in the Christian life, both centred

on worship, with one the “fruit of the other because although devotion may incite us to prayer,

only ascetic can tell us how to do it.”122 Like the early fathers (and the Orthodox tradition as a

whole), Thornton makes prayer and worship, rather than ‘morality’, the focus of the spiritual

life:

Against Pelagius and all extreme humanism the contention is that we do not embrace religion primarily to improve our morals, but rather undertake the moral struggle in order to improve our Prayer. However interdependent the two may become, the end of man is not purity of heart but the vision of God. The best way to attain the former is by aiming purposefully at the latter.123

117 Martin Thornton, Christian Proficiency (London: S.P.C.K., 1959), 19. 118 Martin Thornton, Pastoral Theology: A Reorientation (London: S.P.C.K., 1958), ix. 119 Thornton, Christian Proficiency, 19. 120 Ibid., 1. 121 Thornton, Pastoral Theology, 6. 122 Thornton, Christian Proficiency, 3. 123 Thornton, Pastoral Theology, 10.

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‘To pray’, he says, is the verb form of ‘religion’ and “the whole pastoral function is concerned

with the nurture of religious men—in other words with Prayer.”124 But at the same time he

insists upon the whole, transforming experience of prayer, not merely subjective feeling or

ecstatic experience, and that “to measure progress in terms of devotional fervour or quasi-

mystical feeling is to embark on an intricate voyage with an inaccurate compass and the wrong

map.”125 Proficiency is objective and measurable, and acquired through a slow and steady

process of asceticism, through “sacrifice and discipline.”126

In his seminal work, Pastoral Theology: A Reorientation, and following a Thomistic scheme,

Thornton elaborates five distinct stages in the development of Christian proficiency.127 The first

stage consists of natural contemplation and the development of an elementary religious

awareness. The second stage is the development of a natural human life, ordered by reason

and will; it is at this stage we are reoriented to our proper purpose in life. The third stage is the

beginning of the supernatural life of grace, in which the gifts of the spirit and theological virtues

are given to us. The fourth stage is “the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ” (Eph.

4.13 RSV) when we are united in a community that has become the body of Christ. The fifth

stage is theosis, union with God and the immediate sense of the presence of Christ. This final

stage cannot be part of any ‘system’, though, as it is a direct gift of God. In this overall scheme,

the first and second stages correspond to the ‘purgative way’ of classic patristic spirituality, the

third and fourth to the ‘illuminative way’, and the fifth to the ‘unitive way’.128 Thornton is quick

to point out that the five stages are but “an ascetical scheme of general classification, an

outline map of the spiritual country, not to be used too rigidly.”129 Like the classic patristic

threefold spiritual way, the stages are not strictly sequential, as natural and Christian prayer

124 Ibid., 4. 125 Ibid., 6. 126 Ibid., 157. 127 Ibid., 138–139, 160ff. 128 More typically, in the eastern fathers: purification, illumination and glorification (theosis). 129 Thornton, Pastoral Theology, 139.

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often overlap, and “all the Saints remain to some extent in a life of purgation and the vast body

of Christian people are occasionally illuminated by grace.”130

Neatly dovetailing with Thornton’s scheme, in his recent Consecrating the World: On Mundane

Liturgical Theology, Fagerberg extends his discussion of primary theology and liturgical

asceticism within a liturgical theology of the cosmos—within which, of course, once we are

capacitated, we ‘do the world’ as it was meant to be done—by exploring five activities of the

Holy Spirit (the “Dove”) in the sanctification of the human person and consecration of the world

in preparation for the liturgy that is theosis. In Fagerberg’s first stage, the “descent of the

Dove,” asceticism begins with both the negation (of all that is self-referential worldliness and

sin) and affirmation (of all that is good and a symbol of God) of the natural world, and the

awakening of desire—desire for beauty, wholeness, the fulfilment of all that this world

suggests, a desire ultimately for the divine life:

Liturgical asceticism both blesses the world and leaves the world, simultaneously. To find the treasure that will satisfy our desire, we must pick up every pebble with our right hand, and then drop it again with our left when we realize it is not the pearl of great price.131

In the second stage, the “ear of the Dove,” we begin to hear the background call to our true

vocation, and we sense the “irruption of the eschaton into history”:

I propose that Christians live in an eschatological estuary. Actually all human beings live under this ecology, not only Christians, because all humanity is being carried along the river of history toward the Divine Sea, but I single out the Church now because Christians are the people who are aware of what is causing the turbulence. Not only aware of it, they are enlisted as its agents. The sacramental eddy fuels a redemptive ecosystem of which Christians are a product.132

This background disturbance we experience, often mistaken outside Christian Orthodoxy as

division between body and spirit, is the new age of the kingdom breaking into this world and

130 Ibid. 131 Fagerberg, Consecrating the World, 18. 132 Ibid., 30.

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reclaiming us and the world for our original purpose. The third stage, the “wing of the Dove”

represents the movement from the incarnation through to the ascension of Christ carrying all of

humanity, and creation with it, into a new life in God; it is our redemption by Christ, whose

pattern of emptying and elevating becomes our liturgy of salvation: “We are joined to Him who

for our sake was incarnate and who deified our nature, who died and rose again.”133

In Fagerberg’s fourth stage we then begin to see with the “eye of the Dove.” Illumined by the

Holy Spirit we have a new way of seeing with the eyes of Christ Himself, a new vision of the

world that affects everything: “The world can only finally function as sacrament if our hearts

are ascetically capacitated for liturgy. Our eyes become capacitated for divine sights, and that

includes the appearance of God amongst his creatures.”134 At this stage, the true substance of

the world can be grasped, and expressed in liturgy:

Mrs Murphy is a theologian insofar as she can see that substance. Mrs Murphy is a cosmic priest insofar as she can put creation’s glorification into words: liturgical words, words of praise. Mrs Murphy is an ascetic insofar as she is able to accomplish this.135

The fifth stage, or “voice of the Dove,” is our complete union with Christ, our God who revealed

Himself and His love most perfectly to us on the cross. To be united with Him is to embrace fully

His offering and self-sacrifice, to receive and offer the whole world as true sacrament and to

live this in our daily life. It is our participation in the liturgy that “exists for the salvation of the

world.”136

Thornton’s and Fagerberg’s fivefold schemes do not align exactly—the one is directed at

theosis, the other at the consecration of the world as the culmination of our union with God—

but the many points of convergence at each of the first four stages invite a productive

intersection between Fagerberg’s lyrical and literary paean to the fruits of liturgical asceticism,

133 Nicholas Cabasilas, The Life in Christ (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974), 66. As cited by Fagerberg, Consecrating the World, 66. 134 Fagerberg, Consecrating the World, 87. 135 Fagerberg, Consecrating the World, 90. 136 Ibid., 112.

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and the practical, prosaic treatment of the development of Christian proficiency by Thornton. In

this way, the latter may provide something of the pastoral direction required to ensure a fuller

implementation of Orthodox liturgical theology in the local church.

In laying out his pastoral theology of Christian proficiency, Thornton insists in the first instance

on a clear distinction between scale and value.137 The five stages of development in ascetical

proficiency are a progressive scale, not a judgement of value. While “the essential work of

pastoral priesthood is ascetical direction”,138 priests or pastors are altogether mistaken if they

set about trying to move or direct the people within their care up the scale from one stage to

another, for the particular stage someone is at depends on “vocation or election by God rather

than ascetical struggle.”139 They must rather concern themselves with progress in value,

progress such as “when [someone] prays better, when his faith deepens and his worship

expands, when his adoration becomes more real.”140 To explain this distinction, Thornton offers

the analogy of the distinction between health and growth: a mother is at all times concerned

with the health of her children, but she has little or no direct influence on their growth.141 So

too in the Christian life, in pastoral practice our aim ought always to be to promote and

maintain health, and so “direction seeks only to promote progress in value; it is not concerned

with progress in scale, which is the prerogative of God alone.”142

The one exception to this rule of pastoral practice, Thornton teaches, concerns moving from

the third to the fourth stage, becoming a full and faithful member of the body of Christ, the

culmination of “the period of growth from natural spiritual experience through initial

conversion to the fulness of Christian Prayer.”143

137 Thornton, Pastoral Theology, 139. 138 Ibid., 7. 139 Ibid., 139. 140 Ibid. 141 Ibid., 135–136. 142 Ibid., 140. 143 Ibid., 141. Of course, in certain times and places this would coincide with integration into the church by the sacrament of baptism, but Thornton is addressing a parochial environment in

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Our aim is not to lift souls through the stages of the ‘three ways’, it is not to turn meditatives into Contemplatives; it is to promote progress in value only. But here, in this one instance, we are bound to aim not only at better prayers, better worship, greater recollection, piecemeal, but at raising the soul onto the different and higher plane of life within the full corporate Rule of the Church: that is life truly, creatively, and vicariously, in Christ.144

Such an integrating move is part of the vocation of the existing faithful of the church,

“parochially and individually,”145 and it is realised when the new member accepts with love and

absorbs with zeal the “duty and volitional discipline” of the church’s threefold rule—the

eucharistic liturgy, the daily office and private prayer.146 The involvement of the pastor and

faithful is necessary because this move involves going from individual to correlated but “higher

grade” corporate prayer.147

By contrast, the gaps between the earlier stages—between the first and second, or the second

and the third—can be narrowed by pastoral practice, but not altogether eliminated. On the

basis that “natural and revealed religion are to be seen as two parts of a continuous line rather

than as parallel and opposing lines,”148 the pastor and faithful of the church ought to strive to

narrow and bridge the gaps between natural sacramentalism and the unique sacraments of the

church, between the order of nature and the order of grace, a task made possible because of

the organic relation between them.149 Asceticism in these stages involves the application of

true doctrine, applied dogmatics being the “true core of pastoral practice.”150 At the first and

“sub-Christian” stage, the process of ascetic theology begins with a primitive, natural feeling of

which most everyone in society is baptised as an infant, whether they or their families belong in any meaningful sense to the church or not. 144 Ibid., 143. 145 Ibid., 141. 146 Ibid., 143. Thornton insists on the central importance within church life of “Rule”, an “integral ascetical system like the Prayer Book scheme of Office, Eucharist and private prayer, or the Regula of St Benedict; a comprehensive system aiming at wholeness, or better holiness, of life in Christ.” Ibid., 10. 147 Ibid., 143. 148 Ibid., 115. 149 Ibid. 150 Ibid., 6.

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“‘being in harmony with the environment’—the state of natural religion not infrequently

attained instinctively by vocational farm-workers, artists, craftsmen, and lovers.”151 From this

stage to the next, the pastor and faithful reach out to the world by the application of the

doctrine of the incarnation, an affirmation of the goodness of creation and of the world as sign

and icon of God. The church “sanctifies and exudes love” to all of creation,152 and making no

“rigid distinction between sacred and secular” it accepts “all possible things may be discussed

as of ascetical import.”153 This reaching out is not teaching the faith as such, but rather

providing direction and coaching to people to deepen their natural prayer so that faith may

arise by encounter with the Holy Spirit. We must moreover “uphold the possibility that an

illiterate ploughboy may be more truly religious than a divinity student, and that knowledge,

though a useful part of direction as a whole, is never self-sufficient.”154 As in Fagerberg’s outline

of the “descent of the Dove”, a sincere journey to seek fulfilment of desire awakened in the

natural world involves both affirmation and negation: “our progress is a zigzag. Because we are

in the image of God, we have a desire for God, and the icon will always seek its prototype; but

because we are fallen, our desire regularly fastens upon inadequate objects.”155 Once we have

heard our call (Fagerberg’s “ear of the Dove”), conversion is called for: so, for the movement

from the second to the third stage, what is required is the application of the redemptive

pattern of Christ’s life (the “wing of the Dove”), particularly His death and resurrection. The

unveiling of the passion and cross demonstrates the need along the path of development

towards Christian proficiency for suffering and sacrifice, for the leaving behind of

entanglements and sin, for the embracing of “Rule, discipline, struggle and penitence.”156

151 Ibid., 162. 152 Ibid., 118. 153 Ibid., 11. 154 Ibid., 9. Cf. of course, our Mrs Murphy. 155 Fagerberg, Consecrating the World, 18. 156 Thornton, Pastoral Theology, 17.

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Thornton considers those at the second and third stages to compose the vast majority of the

contemporary parish church. They have had a basic conversion from natural religion to

Christian faith:

They are those souls with some real self-recognized religion, who, because of grace, environment, upbringing, or social tradition look to the Church as a relevant part of religion. They have not reached full Christian maturity, they have little recognizable vocation, and no zealous urge to fling themselves wholeheartedly into the Church’s Rule. But they are not unwilling to be gently guided. They cannot simply accept ascetical Rule, but they might one day reach it.157

As potential members of the faithful, they must be treated with care. It is must be remembered

that it is the Holy Spirit, not the priest-pastor or members of the church, who is responsible for

conversion and growth.158 Therefore, Thornton is anxious to dismiss the typical pastoral

obsession with conversion and the “exaggerated soteriology and extravagant emotionalism

which surrounds” it.159 The stress should not be on soteriology (who is saved)—the prerogative

of God alone—but on vocation: “we are called into the Church, which implies not final salvation

but a job.”160 So conversion in the church arises not from preaching and exhortation or from

individual evangelists, but as the fruit of people simply carrying out their baptismal calling to

worship (in the threefold rule of eucharist, liturgy of the hours, and private prayer) and works:

Through Rule, the overflow of spiritual power into the world is a necessary, unalterable, and fundamental part of the divine plan. Once assured of this we can forget about converts until they arrive; which in God’s good time they must. It is plain enough that diverse gifts produce diverse works, through which spirituality impinges upon the world.161

157 Ibid., 144. 158 Ibid., 137. 159 Ibid., 69. He likewise dismisses the problem of ‘election’ (or predestination) by insisting that the elect are “not individual people but the Corporate Body” and that the “problem is clarified if we stop thinking of what we may be elected to and consider what we are elected for.” Ibid., 66. 160 Ibid., 66. 161 Ibid., 73.

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Put simply, conversion and growth in Christian proficiency is the work of the Holy Spirit,

occasioned when the worshipping faithful forget all about recruitment and “trying to

convert.”162 Furthermore, “our single modern need is not so much recruiting campaigns, but

pastoral shape.”163

The fourth stage is the ‘final’ stage of Christian proficiency as such—the fifth stage of union

with God (theosis) being but a fleeting gift by God’s grace in this life and only rendered

permanent in the kingdom to come—so it is at this fourth stage we “can give all our attention

to the maintenance of spiritual health and leave progress to God in faith.”164 If at the earlier

stages the doctrines of the incarnation and of the resurrection foster growth in Christian

proficiency, at the fourth stage it is the doctrine of the Trinity that is applied pastorally to

maintain and deepen spiritual health:

Religious health springs directly from the soul’s experiential conception of God and the Christian experience of God is a synthesis of the transcendent Father objectively adored, the immanent Spirit subjectively experienced, and what has been called a personal ‘I-thou’ encounter with Christ in love. This synthesis is ultimately expressed by the worship of the Trinity in the Body of Christ; in more familiar language worship of the Father, in the Spirit, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Ascetical theology we have defined as applied dogmatic, thus the maintenance of adult spiritual health, the formation of ascetical balanced diet, depends on the pastoral application of the doctrine of the Trinity.165

Fagerberg agrees, describing this stage as “holiness, a seed faithfully sown in this life to be

reaped beatifically in the next, which conforms us to God and capacitates us to participate in

the life of the Trinity.”166 It is only at this stage, we must recall, that one fully becomes a

member of the body of Christ. Indeed, for Thornton, it is only at this stage that we are actually

capacitated for liturgy. This makes sense if liturgy is indeed, as we have already seen Fagerberg

defines it, “the perichoresis of the Trinity kenotically extended to invite our synergistic ascent

162 Ibid., 69. 163 Ibid., 91. Pastoral shape is precisely what is elaborated below in section (V). 164 Ibid., 190. 165 Ibid., 190–191. 166 Fagerberg, Consecrating the World, 6.

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into deification.”167 Relabelling the stages of Christian proficiency in terms of prayer, Thornton

gives the following order of development: “(i) the ‘first form of contemplation’, or ‘natural’

contemplation, then (ii) meditative prayer, then (iii) vocal prayer, then (iv) corporate

worship.”168 It is only “because we have recognized a sense of the Presence of God and because

we have ruminated meditatively on this, we are capable of colloquy; and because of this we are

fit to take our place ‘in church’.”169 And ‘in church’ means the full participation within the “Rule

of the Church, when, and only when, its items are interpreted ascetically”—a life of regular

worship corresponding to what Fagerberg describes as “constant and regular exposure to the

proletarian, quotidian and communitarian theologia prima.”170

That our participation in corporate liturgical worship should only take place from the fourth

stage of Christian proficiency means that it does not make sense that at the “very first stirring

of spiritual consciousness” people are “told brusquely to go to church.”171 When we do this, the

whole order of development of Christian proficiency is actually reversed in what Thornton

decries as an ironic “Satanic twist.”172 Nevertheless, “even the babe may benefit if he is allowed

to watch corporate worship, occasionally and from a safe distance.”173 And so long as we do not

say simply ‘going to church’ but focus rather on the purpose of going to church—for the

neophyte, to be instructed; for the faithful, to worship and adore God—then the worship of the

church can be accessible to more than just those at the fourth stage of Christian proficiency:

the liturgy “is thus the end of one spiritual journey and the beginning of another: the end of

one’s basic education and the beginning of one’s life work.”174

167 Fagerberg, On Liturgical Asceticism, 9. 168 Thornton, Pastoral Theology, 189. 169 Ibid., 190. 170 Fagerberg, Theologia Prima, 135. 171 Thornton, Pastoral Theology, 189. 172 Ibid. In other words, we begin at the end with corporate worship, then ‘progress’ backwards through learning to say prayers, discover natural meditation and contemplation, and only find “Recollection, purgation, humility, and consecration” at the end. 173 Ibid., 190. 174 Ibid.

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(V) Liturgical Proficiency in the Actual Orthodox Parish

The stages of Christian proficiency elaborated by Thornton offer a practical framework for

Fagerberg’s model of liturgical asceticism. Most specifically, within the role of the full, faithful

members of the church at the fourth stage, the nature of the development and function of

what may properly be called “liturgists” emerges and we begin to understand “their duties,

their training, their significance, their resources.”175 What it means for Mrs Murphy to be

“capacitated by liturgical rite in the language of primary theology”176 now has practical

substance and pastoral direction.

We can now also start to understand how it is in the assembly of the local church that the

liturgy may well be for everyone there present, and capacitation for worship by liturgical

asceticism is expected of everyone, but in practice only a few participate fully or—by any

objective measure—successfully. We are only actually capacitated for liturgy, only become

proficient participants in the corporate prayer of the church at the fourth (and penultimate)

stage of spiritual development. As Thornton as rightly observed, most of those present at

worship in our churches are not yet proper liturgists, but at an earlier stage of proficiency,

typically the second or third, following their natural religious instincts or an inchoate Christian

faith. In a proper sacramental order, entry to the fourth stage would coincide with the

mysteries of initiation—baptism, chrismation (confirmation) and divine communion—following

a period of catechesis and discipleship, and so only those thus initiated would be present,

making everything Orthodox liturgical theology says about the liturgical participant as primary

theologian achievable.

Thornton grounds his ascetical theology of liturgical proficiency in a broad Catholic tradition

including the Bible and patristic writings, so it is not surprising that the structure of the

traditional liturgical rites of the church reflects his insights. The Divine Liturgy of the Orthodox

175 Fagerberg, Theologia Prima, 222. Fagerberg specifically lists these as the things he would like “one day to write an article about”. Perhaps, as we have observed, Thornton has saved him the trouble! 176 Ibid., 133.

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Church follows the classic twofold structure of the ‘liturgy of the catechumens’ (or the ‘liturgy

of the word’), consisting of the first part of the service with its litanies, readings and homily, and

the ‘liturgy of the faithful’ (or the ‘liturgy of the eucharist’), the celebration of communion. At

the end of the liturgy of the catechumens, after a special litany and prayer on their behalf,

those who are not ‘liturgically proficient’ are dismissed. Today it is only the litany and dismissal

of the catechumens that is extant in the liturgical texts, but in the early centuries of the church,

there were also separate prayers and dismissals for the ‘penitents’—those who for reasons of

serious public sin or apostasy had been excommunicated for a period of time. A further

category emerges from the mid-point of Great Lent when those in the last stages of preparing

for baptism at Pascha—those ‘preparing for holy illumination’—are separated from the

catechumens into a different grouping and dismissed separately, with prayers still found in the

Lenten Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts. Significantly, just before they are dismissed, the prayer

for all those as of yet liturgically unproficient and incompetent is that God may unite them to

the church and make them worthy to worship: “That with us they may glorify Thine all-

honourable and majestic name: of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, now and

ever and unto ages of ages.”177 The dismissal is then commanded by the deacon in no uncertain

terms: “All catechumens, depart. Depart, catechumens. All that are catechumens, depart. Let

no catechumen remain.”178 The finality of the departure is sealed a few minutes later when the

doors are locked just before the faithful sing the Symbol of Faith, the Nicene Creed: “The doors!

The doors! In wisdom, let us attend!”179

After the dismissal, the deacon exhorts to prayer those who remain, those who are deemed—

by logical implication of the dismissal they did not obey—“worthy to worship” and capable of

glorifying God’s all-honourable name, and gives them their name of “faithful”: “Let us, the

faithful, again and again in peace pray unto the Lord.”180 They are the faithful, not by their

merit or worth, but because—as elaborated by Thornton in his description of the fourth stage

177 Prayer for the Catechumens, Divine Liturgy According to St John Chrysostom, 49. 178 Dismissal of the Catechumens, Ibid. 179 The Creed, Ibid., 60. 180 Litanies of the Faithful, Ibid., 49.

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of Christian proficiency—they have been united to Christ and become members of His body. As

the prayers of the liturgy make abundantly clear, only Christ Himself is “worthy”: just before

communion is distributed, at the moment of elevating and breaking the holy bread, the

celebrant says, “The Holy things for the holy!” and the faithful reply, “One is Holy. One in the

Lord Jesus Christ, to the glory of God the Father.”181 In the liturgy, Christ is proclaimed the

“Offerer and the Offered, the Receiver and the Received”182—it is in Him that all categories of

priesthood and sacrifice are contained. But we the faithful are His body, and He shares His

vocation of priesthood with us so that we are “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation,

God's own people” (I Pet. 2.9 RSV).183 This understanding enables us to make sense of two

prayers that follow, the so-called ‘prayers of the faithful’. In the Divine Liturgy of St John

Chrysostom,184 the first reads:

We thank Thee, O Lord God of Hosts, who has accounted us worthy to stand even now before Thy holy altar, and to fall down before Thy compassion for our sins and for the errors of all Thy people. And enable us also, whom Thou hast placed in this Thy service, by the power of Thy Holy Spirit, blamelessly and without offence, in the pure witness of our conscience, to call upon Thee at all times and in every place; that hearing us Thou mayest be merciful to us according to the multitude of Thy great goodness.185

Along with most of the collects, prayers at the end of litanies and even the prayers of the

anaphora itself, for many centuries in most places these prayers have been said quietly, apart

from the exclamation at the end. This has led to the erroneous belief that they are ‘prayers of

the priest-celebrant’ rather than of the faithful, despite the aforementioned exhortation by the

181 Elevation and Fraction, Ibid., 75. 182 Prayer before the Great Entrance, Ibid., 53. 183 The recovery of the New Testament and patristic theology of lay priesthood—conveyed by baptism and the ‘laying on of hands’ and anointing at chrismation, and renewed by the holy eucharist—was a major subject of the patristic ressourcement and liturgical movement of the last century. In the Orthodox Church, four theologians in particular drew from the early fathers and liturgical texts to articulate this theology anew: Nicholas Afanasiev, Paul Evdokimov, Dumitru Staniloae, and naturally, Alexander Schmemann. Q.v. Nicholas Denysenko, Liturgical Reform after Vatican II: The Impact on Eastern Orthodoxy (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2015), 41-48. 184 The prayers are similar in the Divine Liturgy of St Basil the Great. 185 First Prayer of the Faithful, Divine Liturgy According to St John Chrystostom, 49-50.

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deacon and the assembled faithful’s “Amen” at the end of each.186 Consequently, the “we” and

“us” of the prayer are read exclusively as referring to the clergy, rather than both to the clergy

and to the entire assembly of the faithful, the capacitated liturgists sharing in Christ’s own

priesthood by membership in His body, all of whom have been “accounted worthy to stand”

before God’s holy altar.187 From this one-dimensional reading emerges a clericalism in which

liturgy is vicariously celebrated by the clergy for the people, depriving them of their full

participation as concelebrants of the liturgy and, ultimately, as primary theologians. Of course,

the celebrating priest—or bishop, as it always was in earliest times, with the priest today only

servicing as his representative—serves a special consecrated role within the body of Christ,

leading the prayers of the faithful, but every liturgy is the act of the entire church. The vicarious

nature of the liturgy is not the priest or clergy for the faithful, but rather Christ—and by

graceful extension, His body, the assembled, capacitated faithful both clergy and lay—on behalf

of the whole world. This vicarious offering is on behalf both of those who have earlier been

dismissed—perhaps to be included, despite their liturgical incompetency, among the “all Thy

people” referred to each of the prayers of the faithful188—and indeed of the entire world

beyond them. The latter all-encompassing nature of the eucharistic offering is clearly expressed

186 Drawing on his unparalleled study of the liturgies of the Byzantine rite, Robert Taft suggests that only four prayers in the Divine Liturgy belong properly to a separate category of ‘prayers of the priest’: the prayer before the gospel, the prayer before the great entrance, the prayer before communion, and the prayer before the consummation of the gifts at the end of the liturgy. These prayers are private prayers of preparation that the priest says before specific actions are performed. None of them involve an “Amen” from the faithful as they are not heard. Robert F. Taft, S.J., Through Their Own Eyes: Liturgy as the Byzantines Saw It, (Berkeley,CA: Inter-Orthodox Press, 2006). Q.v. Follow-up discussion of this point by David Petras on “The Byzantine Forum” on 28 July 2007. Accessed 31 December 2016. http://www.byzcath.org/forums/ubbthreads.php/topics/247686/2 187 As with many deep theological truths, the answer to an either/or proposition is most truthfully “both.” In the latter half of the second prayer of the faithful, though—“Grant also to those who pray with us, O God, growth in life and faith and spiritual understanding. Grant them to worship Thee blamelessly with fear and love, and to partake without condemnation of Thy Holy Mysteries, and to be accounted worthy of Thy heavenly Kingdom.” (Ibid., 51-52)—the “those who pray with us” should be understood as the assembled faithful (the non-liturgist people having been dismissed), and therefore the “us” would be the celebrating clergy. 188 Though (to Schmemann’s disappointment, no doubt), the reference is “τοῦ λαοῦ σου” not the “worldly ones (κοσμικοί)”.

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during the anaphora when the gifts are raised and the celebrant exclaims, “Thine own of Thine

own we offer unto Thee, on behalf of all and for all”,189 as well as a few moments later in the

prayer, “Again, we offer unto Thee this reasonable worship for the whole world”.190

Of course, even though the litanies and prayers for doing so remain in use today, there are few

Orthodox parishes that still dismiss and exclude catechumens along with others who are not of

“the faithful” or lock the doors to the church before proceeding to the liturgy of the eucharist.

Nevertheless, the icon of the church depicted by the eucharistic liturgy which is the church’s

very foundation is one of concentric circles around Christ and His holy table: the clergy and the

proficient faithful who are the ascetically-capacitated and ordained liturgists, offering their

sacrifice of prayer and thanksgiving, and uniting themselves to Christ’s own sacrifice—on behalf

of the wider parish community of catechumens, penitents, enquirers and otherwise loosely

affiliated, and, further still, in a wide circle encompassing all, on behalf of the whole world. As

Thornton observed—a situation which has been largely though not always the case since the

legalisation of Christianity in the fourth century, when the masses poured into church and the

carefully-devised dismissals of the liturgically unproficient ceased to function—we must cope

with the confusion and theological disarray arising from the co-existence within the assembled

community of worship of people belonging to different strata of those concentric parish groups.

In short, liturgy does not work today as Orthodox liturgical theology intends for everyone

present because not everyone is supposed to be present, nor would they be if the ordo of the

liturgy and the proper form of the church it delineates were adhered to. That much is clear, and

even somewhat comforting for the pastors and liturgists struggling to do their job, but it is not

yet altogether helpful in pastoral practice where the multitudes remain present. Yet Thornton

offers a further insight in his pastoral theology, specifically concerning the ideal pastoral shape

of the parish, which may provide the final key to the practical implication of the liturgical ideals

expressed by Schmemann, Kavanagh and Fagerberg within the local Orthodox parish.

189 Anaphora, Divine Liturgy of St John Chrysostom, 65. Emphasis added. 190 Ibid., 69.

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In the first half of his Pastoral Theology: A Reorientation, entitled “Parochial Theology,”

Thornton outlines a model for the organisation and pastoral shape of the local parish

constructed on the same model of concentric groups depicted in the Divine Liturgy as described

above. His starting point is an identification of the need to balance Christ’s call for us to engage

in ascetic struggle towards holiness and theosis, a vocation apparently taken up by the rigorous

few, with a parochial responsibility to provide pastoral care for the whole world, because God is

Father of all and sent His Son to save all.191 Between these poles he seeks a “working

synthesis”192 and draws hope from the model of Christ: “he who died for all converted so

few.”193 Viewing the issue sacramentally through the lens of a high eucharistic ecclesiology—

“the Church is the Body of Christ because it feeds on his Eucharistic Body and Blood”194—he

views each parish as the microcosm of the whole body of Christ, as the concrete, local

expression of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. Following the fathers, he invests

the local church with a Catholic universality, for “the parish is the Catholic Church in

microcosm,” and the liturgy in every parish brings together the whole communion of saints

from all ages.195 The parish is thus no way ‘narrow’ or ‘insular’, but it has an infinite importance

that encompasses every one of its activities, no matter how insignificant they seem or sparsely

attended they be:

When parochialism is organic and when ye are the Body of Christ, it is the antithesis of narrow because it is, in place, the Catholic Church. There is but one Bread, so each altar is microcosmic of the Throne of the Lamb in heaven.

191 Thornton, Pastoral Theology, 17. 192 Ibid. 193 Ibid. 194 Ibid., 19–20. 195 Ibid., 20. Cf. Georges Florovsky: “In the Eucharist the essential unity of Christians finds its perfect expression. This unity is not restricted or confined to those who are taking actual part in a particular celebration on a particular day. Each celebration is in reality universal, and the Eucharist is ever one. Christ is never divided. Every Liturgy is celebrated in communion with the whole Church, Catholic and Universal. It is celebrated in the name, and by the authority of the whole Church. Spiritually in every celebration the whole Church, ‘the whole / company of heaven’, takes an invisible, yet real, part. This unity extends not only to all places but also to all times. It includes all generations and all ages.” “The Worshipping Church,” The Festal Menaion (London: Faber and Faber, 1969), 35-36.

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There is one Church and one Body, so that the work of each server, each organist, each verger, each good lady who arranges the flowers is of Catholic significance because it is truly parochial. This is why the Church’s Office, said by two souls in the village church on Monday night, is an infinitely tremendous thing; the ‘special’ service with its teeming congregation is trivial by comparison.196

Further, the parish’s pastoral scope is itself universal: although not all belong to it, the parish

claims all people, and quoting Eric Mascall, Thornton insists that no one “is altogether excluded

from the Church’s redemptive life, which, like a river in flood, overflows its formal boundaries

and irrigates the surrounding land.”197

At the core of this, the whole Catholic church subsisting in the local parish, in the first of the

concentric circles, is what Thornton calls the ‘remnant’: consisting of the priest-pastor and the

liturgically proficient faithful members, this remnant is the microcosmic body of Christ and “the

creative pastoral agent, vicarious, evangelistic, and redemptive, of the whole organic parish.”198

The term ‘remnant’ is admittedly problematic for some of the things it connotes,199 and over

the course of his writings Thornton moves away from using it,200 without altering the parochial

196 Ibid. 197 Eric L. Mascall, Corpus Christi : Essays on the Church and the Eucharist (New York: Longmans, 1953), 12. As cited by Thornton, Pastoral Theology: A Reorientation, 21. 198 Thornton, Pastoral Theology, x. 199 As we have already seen, Thornton carefully excludes the soteriological from his theology of Christian proficiency, but it is hard to employ the term ‘remnant’ without implying ‘only the remnant is saved’. For a fascinating discussion of ‘remnant’ as a New Testament theme, q.v. Ben Meyer, “Jesus and the Remnant of Israel,” Journal of Biblical Literature 84, no.2 (June 1965): 123-130. Meyer explains that remnant points at ‘judgement’ (though not necessarily salvation), and insofar as the eucharistic liturgy is a foretaste of the kingdom, the concept of judgement is not wholly excluded from liturgy and liturgical proficiency. Cf. Kavanagh, On Liturgical Theology, 154: “Liturgical theology leans far into this eschatological wind, finding there as nowhere else not only grace’s motive but its promise of judgment as well.” 200 ‘Remnant theology’ as such takes up the whole of the first half of Pastoral Theology: A Reorientation and is referred to throughout the second half on pastoral asceticism. In the 1958 second edition, Thornton responded to criticism in a note and by amending the text to clarify his theology, specifically that by speaking of the ‘remnant’ he does not mean to “‘expel’ any baptized soul from the Mystical Body” (x). A year later, he prefaces his Christian Proficiency by noting it is addressed to ‘proficients’ (and those aspiring to be), but he does not further develop the theology of ‘faithful remnant’ as such. The remnant gets only passing mention in 1963’s

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theology he initially applies it to. The essence of this theology is that this core group of

proficients within the parish “is the very heart which recapitulates and serves the whole.”201

This recapitulation and service is joined to the person and model of Christ Himself, for “the life

and function of the Church must follow the same pattern, the same overall principles, that are

to be found in the earthly life of Jesus.”202 In his earthly life, our Lord travels very few miles,

focuses on a handful of disciples, speaks in parables, and prays not for the world, but for those

the Father has given Him.203 Like ‘universal’ local parish, though, this is not exclusivism, for “in

the prayer and worship of Jesus the environs of Bethlehem is the world, his little social group is

both his cure of souls and the microcosm of all ages, creeds, and classes.”204 By focusing on the

microcosm, Christ saves the entire world. Most of “Christ’s ‘public’ ministry is concerned with

the private direction of the Apostles”205 but “this preoccupation with the Remnant of the

Twelve is but the forging of an instrument to save the whole.”206 And that instrument follows

Christ into His vicarious ministry of working for the salvation of all: “atonement is achieved by

the vicarious sacrifice of God incarnate, and that its benefits are perpetuated through a Church

that began with Twelve.”207 The heart of the parish being a small, faithful group of people made

proficient by their ascetical struggle to participate in the theologia prima of liturgy, not as an

English Spirituality, and then mainly in the context of 17th-century religious societies. By 1972’s Prayer: A New Encounter, he deliberately backs away from the term in favour of the image of an “open-ended spearhead” that is the “active working Church, the existential Church” which is a “vicarious minority.” Martin Thornton, Prayer: A New Encounter (New York: Morehouse-Barlow, 1972), 117. We will afford Thornton the courtesy of presenting his theology without insisting on a terminology that he himself no longer insisted on. 201 Thornton, Pastoral Theology, 23. 202 Ibid., 29. 203 Cf. Florovsky: “The Sermon on the Mount was not addressed to an occasional crowd of accidental listeners, but rather to an ‘inner circle’ of those who were already following Jesus in the anticipation—or with the conviction—that He was the ‘One who should come’, that is, the Messiah. ‘The Little Flock’, that community which Jesus had gathered around Himself was, in fact, the faithful ‘Remnant of Israel’, a reconstituted ‘People of God’.” “The Worshipping Church,” 22. 204 Thornton, Pastoral Theology, 32. 205 Ibid., 38. 206 Ibid. 207 Ibid., 30.

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elite, but precisely in order to offer their sacrifice and prayer for all, is in perfect keeping with

the model of Christ and the apostolic church.

Beyond this faithful core group at the heart of the parish Thornton describes two further strata,

those who have not yet reached the fourth stage of Christian proficiency, who are not fully

participating members of the body. The second circle consists of “enthusiastic supporters,

learners, or the generally ‘up and coming’”—what in a properly constructed liturgical taxis

would be the ‘catechumens’, though most since the fourth century have already been

baptised—and the third and widest circle comprises “the rest, spectators, the apathetic or the

antagonistic.”208 Not only does the liturgy reflect these concentric groups, but so too does the

Lord’s high priestly prayer in John 17, which Thornton calls “the core of the priesthood, the

pastoral heart of the Body of Christ.”209 The prayer encompasses the faithful (“those whom

Thou hast given me”, v.9 RSV), the learners (“those also which shall believe in Me through their

word”, v.20 RSV) and the whole world (unto whom He sends them). Thornton points out that,

because of the desire to preach to all and serve the entire world, these “multitudes” are most

often what attract much of the pastoral attention and energy of the local parish. Mission

programmes are organised, special services and events are held, and modifications are made to

services to attract them—and the assembly obsesses itself with ‘church growth’. Thornton

disparages this approach as multitudinist, for conversion and growth (as we have seen in the

stages of Christian proficiency) are the prerogative of the Holy Spirit alone, and we must

concern ourselves instead with spiritual health and value, which is developed and maintained

by faithful ascetic struggle and worship in accordance with the traditional rule of eucharistic

liturgy, divine office, and private prayer. He contrasts multitudinism with the life of the early

church that was in keeping with the ministry of Christ Himself and characterised by “worship in

stability, the close knit bond of love, vicarious prayer for all the world, ascetical discipline—the

same Body of Christ in the world, yet set apart from it, is the parochial pattern which grew and

converted because it cared little about conversion.”210 From the pattern of Christ, the logical

208 Ibid., 21. 209 Ibid., 56. 210 Ibid., 64.

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conclusion Thornton draws—one that would no doubt be a surprise to many pastors and

faithful—is that, if we seek to bring all to Christ, then nine-tenths of pastoral work should be

directed to “the training and direction of the Remnant.”211 For real pastoral and evangelical

work we must choose “consistent worship of the Remnant in place” over against “evangelistic

stunts”.212

The work of the faithful core of the parish is primarily liturgical, Thornton argues, for church

(ecclesia) means “assembled for worship”213 and the “most direct route to Christ is the worship

of the Church, especially the Eucharist.”214 Within the life of the parish, the celebration of the

eucharist should therefore take primacy of place:

It is not always appreciated how much the love of God is manifested in the paradox that the Mass is far and away the greatest act that ever happens on earth, yet at the same time it is amongst the simplest and most easily available. When we really think of what the Mass is, and what it does, all other worldly works and problems seem insignificant, which suggests that this greatest of all values should take precedence over all other things whatsoever.215

This responsibility laid upon the faithful core members of the church is also patterned after

Christ, the whole of whose earthly life is adoration and worship of the Father:

His perpetual adoration is as vicarious as his defeat of sin in the wilderness, and a great deal of confusion would be avoided if all his pastoral activities were seen against this background. His preaching, teaching, healings, absolutions, and miracles are all meaningless if they are isolated from adoration.216

211 Ibid., 42, 145. Though the faithful core group “will always have the prior right” to the pastor’s prayer and time, “the second stratum must not wholly be disregarded—at least we have one-tenth of our energy left.” Ibid., 146. 212 Ibid., 128. 213 Ibid., 60. 214 Ibid., 48. 215 Thornton, Christian Proficiency, 149. 216 Thornton, Pastoral Theology, 32.

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For the parish properly to serve the world, and to fulfil its vicarious responsibility for it, the

faithful must therefore aim “at constant adoration of the Father” not specifically at

programmes and works, though as a result of a life of adoration, works will naturally flow,

including “feeding the multitudes with broken bread and washing their feet.”217 This is done in

place—for only “the Remnant can embrace all because it is the efficient Body localized in

place”218—and as one body, not a collection of individuals, doing ordinary parish work, so long

as it is done within the church’s ascetical rule.219 In this parish model, the ‘multitudes’ will be

served, not by the direction attention or special services and programming of the parish, but by

a faithful core that recapitulates in itself the whole parish—as an image indeed of the whole

world—and offers its proficient liturgical worship “in behalf of all and for all.” Though it takes

no note of church growth plans and numerical success, if the faithful group of liturgists and

primary theologians at the heart of the parish “really plants in prayer and waters in worship,

there need be no doubt of God giving the increase—so long as we leave his prerogative to

him.”220

In the meantime, by historical accidental if nothing else, the multitudes are there, present in

the divine services, and Thornton suggests that their presence does yet have some value for

them. He refers to three “very lowly yet not wholly ineffective stages in the ‘technique of going

to Church’.”221 If “despite distractions, sins, headaches, drowsiness, boredom and aridity,”

217 Ibid., 42. 218 Ibid., 53. 219 Ibid., 54. Thornton often stresses there is nothing extraordinary about asceticism and Christian proficiency, that it can be done by anyone, and that every member of the faithful core group of the parish is of value: “the very ordinary Proficient member of the very ordinary parish, need have no heartsearchings as to his value, he need never bemoan his lack of gifts, or despair at the constancy of his temptations: humility yes, but he need never feel that he is not pulling his weight or think of himself useless to others. The lone fighter-pilot may get the medals—and rightly—but without a large, efficient, trained ground-crew, he would not get into the air at all: the expression ‘mystical flights’ is here most apposite.” Thornton, Christian Proficiency, 16. 220 Thornton, Pastoral Theology, 146. 221 Thornton, Christian Proficiency, 19.

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people show up and are present, then through the action and grace of Christ it can be “a lowly

yet efficient act.”222 Secondly,

without much devotion of fervour, we can follow the action of the Mass with a cold and probably undistracted recognition of what it is. We may fail to ‘look up and adore’ but we shall recognize, by faith and by will, that Christ is there; we may not feel his Presence and we may forget the theology of it all. We may not be fervent but we are obedient.223

Lastly, it is possible for “illumination, sensible devotion, spontaneous acts of praise and

resolution” to occur, and this is a “real advance”, the work of the Holy Spirit bringing conversion

and growth.224 Fagerberg agrees exactly with this, when he writes:

On the one hand, in his mercy God does not require that our asceticism be finished before he will grant us entry into his temple; on the other hand, in his justice God does not leave the unclean lips of a sinful man untouched by his holy fire. Because our God is a God of both mercy and justice, we live a rhythm of liturgy and asceticism. His mercy permits us to celebrate the Eucharist while we are still incomplete, and his justice will not leave us alone until we are co-sons with his Son.225

Ultimately, for Thornton, the holy mystery of the eucharistic liturgy at the heart of the parish,

which is the very foundation and purpose of the church, works in spite of any proficiency or

theology for none of “these things make the remotest scrap of difference as to what the Mass is

or what it does, or who does it.”226 Fagerberg concurs, citing the words of Colman O’Neill: “The

Church’s visible act of sacramental worship is taken over by Christ and given value of

sanctification quite beyond what it possesses as an act of Christian worship.”227

Thornton’s model for the pastoral shape of the parish constructed around the proficient faithful

core group as “the creative pastoral agent, vicarious, evangelistic, and redemptive, of the whole

222 Ibid., 20. 223 Ibid. 224 Ibid. 225 Fagerberg, Consecrating the World, 70. 226 Thornton, Christian Proficiency, 20. 227 Colman O'Neill, O.P., Meeting Christ in the Sacraments (New York: Society of St Paul/Alba House, 1991), 119. As cited by Fagerberg, Consecrating the World, 51.

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organic parish”228 is perhaps uniquely pastoral and pragmatic, but it is nevertheless an

embodiment of ideal models proclaimed by the liturgical theologians. For Schmemann, liturgy is

“an icon of that new life which is to challenge and renew the ‘old life’ in us and around us”229—

it is therefore not something ‘sacred’ separate from the ‘profane’ world, but a place of fervent

activity holding up to the world a mirror of its true life and purpose. Kavanagh elaborates a

similar image in which the church is a city, an icon of the already redeemed world. As an icon, it

uses inverse perspective: it is a “many-faceted, dynamic and corporate sacrament” that

“functions as a vast mystery which itself inverts perspective, projecting World out of Gospel

rather than Gospel out of World.”230 The city contains all the church’s “clientele”, both saints

and sinners. And within that city there is, significantly, a central workshop, where the city’s

agenda—an agenda set by world around it, which it serves—is carried out: “The scope of this

agenda is such that the Church must first of all be and act in a manner which is catholic, that is,

Citywide and Worldwide in its nature and ends. Catholicity is a quality endowed upon Church

by City and World.”231 In these three elements of Kavanagh’s extended metaphor—the world,

the city and the central workshop—we see the same three concentric groups Thornton

describes as world, parish, and ‘remnant’ or faithful core group, and hear the same insistence

that the heart of the body is not sectarian, but Catholic, working and praying vicariously “on

behalf of all and for all.”

228 Thornton, Pastoral Theology, x. 229 Schmemann, Liturgy and Tradition, 52. 230 Kavanagh, On Liturgical Theology, 42. 231 Ibid., 43.

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Conclusion

The ascendancy of the Schmemann—Kavanagh—Fagerberg school of Orthodox liturgical

theology in the second half of the 20th century overthrew a narrow neo-scholastic conception

of liturgy that—oblivious to the dialectic of direct, transforming encounter with God in

theologia prima—was unlike the pastoral theology of the church fathers in which “life itself is

liturgical.”232 This rediscovery of the patristic vision of liturgical theology has been largely

successful within the theological discourse of the academy, but it has left many Orthodox

Christians across most parishes still nescient of the lex orandi behind their ancient rites and the

“true spirit and meaning of liturgy, as an all-embracing vision of life, including heaven and earth,

time and eternity, spirit and matter and as the power of that vision to transform our lives.”233

Schmemann proposed the solution to this ongoing liturgical crisis would be a spiritual

renewal—not a liturgical movement consisting of ”reform, adjustments and modernization,”

but an educational movement, aimed at returning “to that vision and experience that from the

beginning constituted the very life of the Church.”234 The successful outcome of such a renewal

would be for all Orthodox to know the true meaning and function of liturgy, to know its power

to immerse us in “the spiritual reality, beauty and depth of the Kingdom of God,” to transform

our minds and hearts with the love of God, and help us to live according to the Orthodox vision

of life.235

Fagerberg’s efforts to root the ideals of liturgical theology as expressed by Schmemann and

Kavanagh in a fertile ground of asceticism and capacitation for liturgical participation have been

aimed directly at achieving the spiritual renewal that Schmemann proposed. Into this

conversation as a concrete buttress for Fagerberg’s liturgical asceticism we have co-opted the

unlikely figure of Thornton, not a liturgical scholar, it is true, but a true pastor and liturgist

232 Eric L. Mascall, Christ, the Christian and the Church: A Study of the Incarnation and Its Consequences (London: Longman, 1963), 164. As cited by Thornton, Christian Proficiency, 15. 233 Alexander Schmemann, “Problems of Orthodoxy in America: III. The Spiritual Problem,” St Vladimir’s Seminary Quarterly IX, no. 4 (1965): 188-189. 234 Schmemann, The Eucharist: Sacrament of the Kingdom, 10. 235 Schmemann, “Problems of Orthodoxy in America: II. The Liturgical Problem,” 165.

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equally steeped in the patristic tradition, and one who has sought in his ascetical theology to be

practical “without idealism and without evading the facts.”236 His theological approach is akin

to that of the early fathers, described by Kavanagh as “a necessarily and intimately pastoral

task, something regularly done by servants of the community, done live and in its solemn if

often rowdy presence.”237 It is from Thornton we learn that the real solution to the liturgical

crisis, and the basis of the spiritual renewal that will make life itself liturgical, is not merely

education and endless touting of liturgical ideals, but proper pastoral shape and direction.

By the application of sound Christian doctrine, practised with serious ascetic discipline,

Thornton sets out a practical framework for the development of Christian proficiency

culminating in capacitation for corporate worship and full spiritual health lived in accordance

with the rule of the church—frequent participation in the eucharistic liturgy, daily celebration

of the liturgy of the hours, and private prayer. He establishes clear pastoral priorities, steering

clear of the seductive trap of chasing after the multitudes, and focusing almost all pastoral

practice on the strengthening and deepening the ascetical life of the parish’s faithful core

group. In this way, the liturgists like our Mrs Murphy—and anyone who with her is “an

experienced and astute participator in Christian liturgical worship”238—are empowered as the

body of Christ to manifest the life of the kingdom and vicariously intercede for the life of the

world. Lived in this way, within a proper parish pattern and shape, the liturgy will indeed be the

ground of theologia prima, of union with the life of God, “as the daily fare of those who have

received and live by the promise of One who said ‘I am with you always’.”239

236 Thornton, Pastoral Theology, 20. 237 Kavanagh, On Liturgical Theology, 18. 238 Ibid., 76. 239 Ibid., 77.

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