The cult of beauty
I tried to post a comment in seraphimsigrist's journal, but LJ said it was too long, so I'm posting it separately here. seraphimsigrist said:
a good many Eastern Orthodox have the idea that if only everyone in the world could see an Orthodox Liturgy they would all rush to sign up, and the more so if told how many days they could be invited to consider giving up meat and milk products and so on, and the possiblity of changing ones name when being received into the church to Barsanuphius or Paraskeva or something of that sort etc, and they attribute the small numbers of Orthodox in America for example to "Orthodxy [being] the best kept secret in America."
This is considerably delusion, some people have no sense of ritual or aesthetics of that sort but also more are looking for a good deal more than the aesthetic.
Yes, I know what you mean, and largely agree. Liturgy is an acquired taste, and I'm still not sure that I've fully acquired it yet.
When I was first attracted to Orthodoxy, it was not by the aesthetics, and it struck me as strange that people would want to buy tapes of church music. What attracted me was the theology as expressed in the Liturgy. The Paschal Vigil at St Sergius in Paris, with everyone greeting each other with the paschal kiss (it took 45 minutes), and the words of the homily of St John Chrysostom said it all. It wasn't the asthetics of it (it was actually rather messy, not one of those carefully choreographed things), but it was the the reality of it, the feeling that it was all real, that this is what the Christian faith is all about. The calf is fatted, let no one go hungry away... Hell was angered, for it was mocked; it was angered, for it was abolished.
But then, a couple of years ago, 25 Paschas later, my daughter was playing a recording of the Paschal vigil music and I found it almost unbearably beautiful, so that I could not do anything else but listen to it. But without the 25 Paschas in between, it would not have meant nearly as much.
And sometimes the Liturgy does not seem very aesthetic. Someone mumbling away in a foreign language out of sight, and someone who is visible wheezing asthmatically. Oh, one can look at the ikons, and meditate on the saints one sees, but that is not the wisdom we are supposed to be attending to, or is it?
In my journal I recently reported on some of our mission congregations. Some of the people came to the Divine Liturgy for the first time on New Year's day. The choir was away, and the music sounded awful. The ikons are not the greatest, certainly nothing like St Gregory's, yet people said, "we thought we were in heaven" (and no, I had not told them the story of St Vladimir's emissaries saying that when they had returned from Constantinople).
And what had got them interested in the first place was the funeral of a priest, held in a Protestant Church, interrupted every 10 minutes by the undertaker urging us to hurry up because he hadn't got all day. They only came because the priest was their neighbour. But suddenly they wanted to join the Orthodox Church. There was nothing aesthetically grand about it, but there was something that they found attractive.
On another occasion, a few years earlier, a recent convert from the Dutch Reformed Church, who had been baptised the previous Pascha, was killed in a car accident. The funeral service was held in the church and then we drove in convoy 200 km to the little village where his parents lived, and some of them who had not been in church came to the graveside. And the following Pascha there were 11 people baptised, who had come to Orthodoxy as a result of the funeral.
What attracted all these, I am sure, was not the "beauty" of the Liturgy, but the Liturgy itself. It was not aesthetics, but reality. It was "the work of the people" -- what they saw was a community of people for whom God was real, and so I think there is a sense in which we can say, "come and see". Not "come and see the beuaty of our liturgy", "come and hear our beautiful choir."
But come and see.
See what?
What you have come to is Mount Zion and the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem where the millions of angels have gathered for the festival, with the whole church in which everyone is a first-born son and a citizen of heaven. You have come to God himself, the supreme judge, and been placed with the spirits of the saints who have been made perfect; and to Jesus, the mediator who brings a new covenant and a blood for purification that speaks more insistently than Abel's.
I think that is what they saw.
a good many Eastern Orthodox have the idea that if only everyone in the world could see an Orthodox Liturgy they would all rush to sign up, and the more so if told how many days they could be invited to consider giving up meat and milk products and so on, and the possiblity of changing ones name when being received into the church to Barsanuphius or Paraskeva or something of that sort etc, and they attribute the small numbers of Orthodox in America for example to "Orthodxy [being] the best kept secret in America."
This is considerably delusion, some people have no sense of ritual or aesthetics of that sort but also more are looking for a good deal more than the aesthetic.
Yes, I know what you mean, and largely agree. Liturgy is an acquired taste, and I'm still not sure that I've fully acquired it yet.
When I was first attracted to Orthodoxy, it was not by the aesthetics, and it struck me as strange that people would want to buy tapes of church music. What attracted me was the theology as expressed in the Liturgy. The Paschal Vigil at St Sergius in Paris, with everyone greeting each other with the paschal kiss (it took 45 minutes), and the words of the homily of St John Chrysostom said it all. It wasn't the asthetics of it (it was actually rather messy, not one of those carefully choreographed things), but it was the the reality of it, the feeling that it was all real, that this is what the Christian faith is all about. The calf is fatted, let no one go hungry away... Hell was angered, for it was mocked; it was angered, for it was abolished.
But then, a couple of years ago, 25 Paschas later, my daughter was playing a recording of the Paschal vigil music and I found it almost unbearably beautiful, so that I could not do anything else but listen to it. But without the 25 Paschas in between, it would not have meant nearly as much.
And sometimes the Liturgy does not seem very aesthetic. Someone mumbling away in a foreign language out of sight, and someone who is visible wheezing asthmatically. Oh, one can look at the ikons, and meditate on the saints one sees, but that is not the wisdom we are supposed to be attending to, or is it?
In my journal I recently reported on some of our mission congregations. Some of the people came to the Divine Liturgy for the first time on New Year's day. The choir was away, and the music sounded awful. The ikons are not the greatest, certainly nothing like St Gregory's, yet people said, "we thought we were in heaven" (and no, I had not told them the story of St Vladimir's emissaries saying that when they had returned from Constantinople).
And what had got them interested in the first place was the funeral of a priest, held in a Protestant Church, interrupted every 10 minutes by the undertaker urging us to hurry up because he hadn't got all day. They only came because the priest was their neighbour. But suddenly they wanted to join the Orthodox Church. There was nothing aesthetically grand about it, but there was something that they found attractive.
On another occasion, a few years earlier, a recent convert from the Dutch Reformed Church, who had been baptised the previous Pascha, was killed in a car accident. The funeral service was held in the church and then we drove in convoy 200 km to the little village where his parents lived, and some of them who had not been in church came to the graveside. And the following Pascha there were 11 people baptised, who had come to Orthodoxy as a result of the funeral.
What attracted all these, I am sure, was not the "beauty" of the Liturgy, but the Liturgy itself. It was not aesthetics, but reality. It was "the work of the people" -- what they saw was a community of people for whom God was real, and so I think there is a sense in which we can say, "come and see". Not "come and see the beuaty of our liturgy", "come and hear our beautiful choir."
But come and see.
See what?
What you have come to is Mount Zion and the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem where the millions of angels have gathered for the festival, with the whole church in which everyone is a first-born son and a citizen of heaven. You have come to God himself, the supreme judge, and been placed with the spirits of the saints who have been made perfect; and to Jesus, the mediator who brings a new covenant and a blood for purification that speaks more insistently than Abel's.
I think that is what they saw.