|
Newsflash
Archives > Orthodoxy, the Liturgy, and the Crisis of the
West
Othodoxy, the Liturgy, and the Crisis of the West
- by Dr. Robert Moynihan
“Bless the Lord, O my soul; and all that is within
me, bless His holy name! Bless (affectionately, gratefully
praise) the Lord, O my soul... Who redeems your life from
the pit and corruption.” —King David,
Psalm 103:1-2, 4
“...many a time I have been half in love
with easeful Death, Call’d him soft names in many a
mused rhyme...” —John Keats, Ode to a
Nightingale
The central problem for men and women is
always a problem of choosing between “life” and
“death,” between a way that leads to life, and
one that leads “downwards to darkness.” It is
a problem of human choice, of human freedom — a moral
problem. Why do so many call our time one of a “culture
of death”? Because so many in our time seem, to use
Keats’ words, “half in love with easeful Death.”
We all know the choices I refer to. But what is the alternative?
The alternative, as Pope Benedict expressed it so eloquently
in his first encyclical in January, is to be in love with
life, and with the author of life, who is, as David wrote,
“the Lord — bless his holy name!”
When David encourages everyone “to bless his holy name,”
what does this really mean? It means David is calling on himself,
and on all of us, to bless, to praise, to worship God, because
he “redeems” our lives — he gives life,
not death.
But how do we bless God, praise him, worship him?
And what is the best way to do this? This is a problem because
holiness, “being holy,” is the essential attribute
of God; holiness is his glory, his majesty, his eternity,
his very essence and life. But precisely because God alone
is holy, his holiness is the source of a separateness, a distance
from us. So how do we approach him, even to worship him?
This brings us to the word “orthodoxy.” Literally,
“ortho” means “right” or
“correct,” and “doxy,” though
it does have a connotation of “belief,” literally
means “praise” or “worship.” So orthodoxy,
more than “right belief,” means “right praise”
or “correct worship.” When we say we wish to be
“orthodox,” we are really saying that we want
to do what King David said all of us should do: worship God
with “all that is within us” and to do this in
the correct way, in a way pleasing to God and worthy of him.
The central problem the Church faces today, as always, is
the problem of orthodoxy. (From the opposite point of view,
it is the problem of apostasy, of making the decision to no
longer praise God in the right way, or to no longer praise
him at all.) But orthodoxy is not simply a matter of dogmas,
of doctrines, of phrases memorized, of a series of propositions.
It is a matter of “right praise.”
And so we come to the word “liturgy.” The word
“liturgia” in Greek literally means “praise.”
The preliminary, striking conclusion is that the problem
of orthodoxy, the problem of the right worship of God, is
by definition a liturgical problem. What I am saying
is that the problem of orthodoxy, the problem of praising
God, is the central problem Benedict must face in his
pontificate, and this means the central problem has a liturgical
aspect.
But to say the problem is “liturgical” is not
to set it on the margin of things. No, it is to set the liturgical
problem at the center of our culture, as the determining problem
for the future of “the Christian West” (though
“the West,” as Benedict suggested when he recently
dropped the title “Patriarch of the West” from
his list of titles, has been made obsolete by modern technology
— air travel, satellites, the internet — in the
process of “globalization”). I say this because
“right worship” (“orthodoxy”) sets
men and women in a right relationship with the single being
worthy of human worship, the “all-holy” divinity,
and in so doing establishes them in a right relationship
with one another.
Because this is so, “right worship” is, in the
most profound sense, also a political matter.
Without going very deeply into this question, it is enough
to say that “right worship,” just as it can sustain
a man or a woman in the solitude of prison, or in a concentration
camp, or through periods of intense suffering, so too it can
be a central protection for freedom in our political life,
because no political leader, no emperor, no ideology, can
claim our “worship” if we know we must worship
God alone.
In this sense, “right worship” is always a limitation
on totalitarianism, whether it be from the left or from the
right or from any other direction on the compass.
In this sense, Pope Benedict’s action to protect, preserve
and promote the liturgy, to protect “right worship,”
will be his religious duty, but also a supremely — I
would say “sublimely” — political act. It
will not be evidently political in the way John Paul II’s
support of Solidarnosc was. But Benedict’s
work to restore “right worship” will be the work
of a Christian and a theologian and a bishop of Rome profoundly
aware not only of the spiritual crisis of our age, but of
its political crisis as well.
In a Europe threatened by two advancing, non-Christian cultures
and systems of thought — liberal secular humanism, which
seems destined to impose a new despotism of relativism in
a vain search for liberty without the holy, freedom without
God, and Islam, which preaches a God who never was and could
not ever be incarnate in a man — only a radical return
to Christian orthodoxy, that is, to right worship, can protect
the very values that both of these traditions, at their best,
espouse: the dignity of man, and the transcendence of God.
There cannot be a culture of life without right worship,
without a true liturgy. This explains Benedict’s focus
on the liturgy, and on closer relations with the Orthodox,
whose liturgy is regarded by the Catholic Church as “right
praise.”
—Robert Moynihan
Subscription Information
Inside The Vatican (ISSN 1068-8579) is a Catholic news magazine, published monthly except July
and September, with occasional special supplements.
|
