Praying with the Senses: Contemporary Orthodox Christian Spirituality in Practice
278
Praying with the Senses: Contemporary Orthodox Christian Spirituality in Practice
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253031662 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press (Ips) |
| Publication date: | 01/06/2018 |
| Pages: | 278 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.60(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
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CHAPTER 1
BECOMING ORTHODOX
The Mystery and Mastery of a Christian Tradition
VLAD NAUMESCU
What makes one orthodox? How does one grow into a faith that weaves its teachings into a rich spiritual tradition, theology, and practice? The sense that one is born Orthodox or grows into it over a long period of time often prevails among observers and believers alike. This view tends to obscure rather than reveal the concrete ways of becoming Orthodox that sustain distinctive and enduring models of ethical life. Even for those who convert to Orthodoxy, motivation varies: aesthetic richness, spiritual depth, or authenticity of prayer is each taken as the most distinctive characteristic of this branch of Christianity. And yet there must be commonly accepted ways to cultivate an Orthodox sensibility that is to be expanded and carried on in life, even beyond loss of belief. As Orthodox-born secular persons often remark, the familiar scents from childhood and images of saints looking back from the icons still move them upon entering a church. This embodied experience of Orthodox spaces and practices leaves a strong imprint on people from very early on. When joining an Orthodox ritual, one can witness children's habituation to the sensory-rich liturgical space, their "hanging around" during services, reciting collective prayers and singing along with the others, joining communal feasts for the dead, and sometimes even playing priest. Surrounded by iconic figures that convey a spiritual presence, they grow into persons within communities of practice centered on sacramental prayer. As adults, they will continue the process of attuning themselves to the rhythms and models of their particular community in pursuit of an Orthodox way of life.
Being "born Orthodox" does not represent a right or an obligation (though it may be presented as such) but is shorthand for a process through which Orthodox Christians absorb their faith during a long-term involvement that is often diffuse and deferential toward church and tradition. Learning through ritual participation plays a major role as it orients their Christian formation through authorized practice and collective worship. This process is informed by an ideal of human becoming, which entails the fulfillment of one's existence in the image and likeness of God (see Gen. 1:26). Theosis, or deification as it is called in Eastern Orthodoxy, conveys a theological anthropology that recognizes in human nature the potential to become like God. Rather than a doctrine, theosis represents a "vision of life and grace" (Evdokimov 1990, 50) that sees human flourishing as the realization of God's likeness within each person. The process of growing from mere image to full likeness provides the space for ethical, spiritual, and social engagement in the world, as Father K. M. George, a contemporary Indian Orthodox theologian, remarked in his lecture "The Human Horizon: 'Mystery and Mastery'" (2013). Inspired by a line of theological thinking that goes from fourth-century Saint Gregory of Nyssa to contemporary Orthodox bishop Kallistos Ware, George sees the human person as a mystery: made in the image of God, humans are like God beyond understanding. The human horizon is thus marked by our attempts to master human nature and the recognition that it remains beyond comprehension. For this, Orthodox Christians are encouraged to embrace their humanity, accept its limits and possibilities, and dwell in the world to become like God. "How could you be God when you have not yet become human?" asks Saint Irenaeus of Lyon in his reflections on human becoming (in Vrame 1999, 72).
This chapter employs the terms "mystery" and "mastery" proposed by the Indian theologian to translate the Orthodox path to human flourishing centered on theosis into concrete processes of ethical formation. This vision of deification permeates Orthodox epistemologies of revelation, the practice of faith, and the ethical relations between humans and saintly figures, three fields to be explored in this chapter through examples drawn from long-standing research on Eastern Christian traditions in Ukraine, Romania, and South India. For this I take a virtue-ethical approach to religious worlds (see Lambek 2000), which comes closest to the way Orthodox Christians see themselves as being shaped in and through their engagement with the Orthodox tradition. In this perspective, "mastery" represents the practical wisdom or knowing how to do the right thing in a given context, which is so well conveyed by the orthopraxy of Orthodox Christianity. "Mystery," on the other hand, describes an epistemology of revelation and the creative practice that translates the space between image/likeness described by K. M. George into concrete models for Christian life. This space is populated with moral exemplars whose role is to remind Orthodox Christians of core values and virtues and to shape their practice of faith. Here living elders (Russian startsy) coexist with the ancient church fathers, national figures with universal Christian saints, to provide models for practice and virtuous life. Their charisma, rooted in a combination of mastery of core techniques and closer access to the mystery of God, gives them the power to actualize church tradition and redefine the criteria for becoming Orthodox. In this way, I will argue, mystery and mastery sustain and transform Orthodoxy and provide the means and ends to human flourishing (Greek eudaimonia).
EPISTEMIC HORIZONS: HOLY MYSTERIES AND THE ASPIRATION TO ORTHODOXY
Anthropologists started to explore in recent years how Christianity's central tension between immanence and transcendence plays out in different economies of representation, political theologies, and ethical models. This comparative endeavor has shown how Christian communities manage this tension through different practices and ideologies of mediation, which declare that only "certain words and certain things ... become privileged channels of divine apprehension" (Engelke 2007, 16; see also Morgan 1999; Keane 2007). Unlike many Christians today who claim a "live and direct" relation with God, Orthodox Christians articulate their relationship in the language of mysteries. Mysteries define the scope and concrete modalities of human apprehension of God, mediating God's presence in the world through church sacraments, also called "holy mysteries" in Orthodoxy (Romanian taina, Slavonic tainstvo). From the baby receiving communion and chrismation in the baptism ritual, to the Orthodox community jointly proclaiming the mystery of resurrection in the paschal troparion "Christ is risen from the dead! By death he trampled Death; and to those in the tombs he granted life," to the mystical union with God in hesychast prayer, Orthodox Christians discover their faith through the sensory experience of holy mysteries. The initiation into and experience of the sacraments in liturgical practice becomes a heuristic, embodied mode of knowing, which creates tangible evidence without the claim of a full revelation (compare with Pickstock 2010). This corresponds to the Orthodox meaning of "mystery" as "something revealed to our understanding, yet never totally and exhaustively revealed" (Ware 1991, 281). This epistemology of revelation at the core of church tradition makes God accessible to all Christians through liturgical participation and at the same time reminds them of the limits of human comprehension. In an empowering and yet humbling way, the mastery of practice can lead to a better understanding of the mystery of faith but remains ultimately dependent upon the mystery itself. The interplay of mystery and mastery defines the workings of the Orthodox tradition (Slavonic predanie, Malayalam paramparym); Orthodox Christians refer to it as a "living tradition" (Greek paradosis) constituted through the transmission and practice of mysteries across generations since the times of the apostles. In this way Orthodox tradition aims to preserve the historicity of revelation while providing scope for a creative pursuit of "orthodoxy" in practice (see introduction). This orientation of Orthodox tradition gives a sense of historical continuity and wholeness to what is in reality a very diverse set of communities.
Orthodox Christianity consists of a variety of national and transnational churches rooted in local cultures that share a broad understanding of what Orthodoxy is about and their place in it. To grasp this specificity, one needs to look not only at the ways local Orthodoxies emerged historically but also at how they converge toward an ideal model of being Orthodox: the quest for the "true orthodoxy" of each church and its expression in local traditions (Bandak and Boylston 2014). This quest becomes a vector of change and the measure of what constitutes right worship, leading to a gradual understanding of faith through skilled practice. In practice, the search for orthodoxy materializes into an insistence to do things "the right way": observations or assessments of ritual performance and its efficacy or debates on what constitutes "right worship." Translated in the preoccupation with correct practice (orthopraxy), it also encompasses doubts or uncertainties about the righteousness of one's faith and the hope of salvation. In this sense, "mastery" is a condition not only of orthopraxy but also of successfully managing one's life in light of the aspiration to an ideal orthodoxy.
In the Orthodox world, the aspiration to orthodoxy has been primarily manifested in the formalism of religious practice. It has found a more radical expression in the ritualism of Russian Old Believers, commonly perceived as empty formalism in light of a post-Reformation emphasis on inner faith (see Scheffel 1991, 207). Old Belief emerged in seventeenth-century Russia in response to religious reform within Russian Orthodoxy — a reform that aimed to standardize religious practice by reference to the Greek Byzantine rite that church leaders of the time perceived as the authentic Orthodoxy. Those who fought to maintain the old rite were called Old Believers (Russian starovery) or Old Ritualists (Russian staroobriatsy) because they argued that any change of ritual form altered their relationship with God and thus their becoming true Christians. In this they translated the ideal of orthodoxy into orthopraxy or right worship, taking the seemingly most trivial details of their practice to matter for their salvation: how to make the sign of the cross, the direction of processions around the church, or the number of "hallelujahs" to be added to the short invocation of the Trinity, "Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit." Seeking to keep what they considered to be the "true faith" pushed Old Believers to pursue continuity in faith, ritual practice, and personhood. The pursuit of continuity became thus a form of virtuous practice that shaped their religious and social life, as we will see in the last section.
Such debates about the orthodoxy of faith do not belong to the past but reemerge again and again in the Orthodox world to mark new boundaries, to legitimate claims to authenticity, and to influence local identity politics. I have encountered them in post-Socialist Ukraine, where one Greek Catholic and three Orthodox churches claimed to be the true inheritor of the church of the tenth-century Kievan Rus (Naumescu 2007), and in South India, where eight Syrian Christian churches dispute the inheritance of the Saint Thomas tradition (Naumescu, forthcoming). In each case the different factions disputed the rightness of the other's faith and ritual practice with arguments resting not only on the exact wording of the creed, the direction of church processions, and whether priests should face east or the congregation but also on which religious and secular authorities to commemorate in prayer. While recurrent divisions within the Orthodox world are usually explained through broader social transformations and political struggles, in Old Belief the schism itself worked throughout centuries as a mechanism for reaffirming the orthodoxy of faith by reinvesting it with new meanings (Humphrey 2014; Naumescu 2011). The importance of religious formalism in this process testifies about the ethical, theological, and political load placed on ritual orthopraxy. In the history of Eastern Christianity, such moments led to orthopraxy (right practice) turning into orthodoxy (right belief) under the threat of heterodoxy (schism or heresy).
One of the most famous cases was the iconoclastic controversy in the eighth and ninth centuries when the popular veneration of icons eventually led to a doctrinal statement that established the theological foundations of this devotional practice (Heo, this volume; Mondzain 2005). More recent examples that illustrate this dynamic can be found in the post-Socialist as well as the postcolonial contexts where I have done research. The Syrian Christian churches in Kerala, for example, emerged out of an indigenous Christian tradition allegedly established by Saint Thomas the Apostle in the first century. Syrian Christians had to reaffirm the orthodoxy of their faith against Portuguese Catholics in the seventeenth century when a major part claimed allegiance to the Syriac Orthodox Church in Antioch. The encounter with Anglican missionaries in the nineteenth century led to further schisms and the establishment of new churches, each professing the "true faith" of the Syrian or Saint Thomas Christians. Among these churches, the attribute "Orthodox" is claimed today only by the Jacobite Syrian Orthodox and the Malankara Syrian Orthodox (also known as Indian Orthodox), but even they try to distinguish themselves from each other by pursuing different forms of orthodoxy (what constitutes right faith). An emerging movement in the Jacobite Church seeks to define its Orthodox character by reaffirming the connection with the Syrian Orthodox Patriarchate in the Middle East. The Indian Orthodox Church, on the other hand, looks for inspiration among Orthodox churches of Byzantine tradition, which have traditionally embraced autocephaly and national traditions. Each church aspires to be Orthodox in a distinct way, but the orientation is common, and so is the churches' return to tradition. Their current attempts to articulate the right faith generate new orthodoxies out of the once shared orthopraxy of Saint Thomas Christians and reinforce the "ortho" in orthodoxy.
The gap between the various modes of practicing Orthodoxy and "orthodoxy" as an aspiration toward the perfection of God (the image/likeness model) brings forth not only the creative production but also the ethical dimension of religious practice: one strives for the good by striving toward right worship. But orthodoxy can be pursued only through claims for continuity, by drawing on the past to affirm and sustain one's practice in the present. The historicity of orthopraxy and the overall aspiration to orthodoxy make the pursuit of continuity both necessary and virtuous, an aspect that singles out Orthodox churches within contemporary Christianity. Tradition provides the historical, social, and ethical grounds for an Orthodox becoming by supplying the models for virtuous practice and the inherited models of moral exemplarity.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: The Senses of Prayer in Eastern Orthodox Christianity / Sonja LuehrmannPart I: Senses1. Becoming Orthodox: The Mystery and Mastery of a Christian Tradition / Vlad NaumescuA Missionary Primer / Ioann Veniaminov2. Listening and the Sacramental Life: Degrees of Mediation in Greek Orthodox Christianity / Jeffers EngelhardtCreating an Image for Prayer / Sonja Luehrmann3. Imagining Holy Personhood: Anthropological Thresholds of the Icon / Angie HeoSyriac as a lingua sacra: Speaking the Language of Christ in India / Vlad Naumescu4. Authorizing: The Paradoxes of Praying by the Book / Sonja LuehrmannPart II: Worlds5. Inhabiting Orthodox Russia: Religious Nomadism and the Puzzle of Belonging / Jeanne KorminaBaraka: Mixing Muslims, Christians, and Jews / Angie Heo6. Sharing Space: On the Publicity of Prayer, between an Ethiopian Village and the Rest of the World / Tom BoylstonPrayers for Cars, Weddings, and Well-Being: Orthodox Prayers en route in Syria / Andreas Bandak7. Struggling Bodies at the Crossroads of Economy and Tradition: The Case of Contemporary Russian Convents / Daria DubovkaCompeting Prayers for Ukraine / Sonja Luehrmann8. Orthodox Revivals: Prayer, Charisma, and Liturgical Religion / Simion PopEpilogue: Not-Orthodoxy/Orthodoxy's Others / William A. Christian Jr.GlossaryIndexWhat People are Saying About This
Precisely by looking at so varied a group of locations home to Orthodox practice, this book conveys the fragility—and durability—of traditional religion in a postmodern, secular age.
"Precisely by looking at so varied a group of locations home to Orthodox practice, this book conveys the fragility—and durability—of traditional religion in a postmodern, secular age."
Precisely by looking at so varied a group of locations home to Orthodox practice, this book conveys the fragility—and durability—of traditional religion in a postmodern, secular age.
A well-documented, interdisciplinary examination of devotional practices, rituals, and understandings of prayer in contemporary lived forms of Eastern Christianity across a wide variety of traditions, including Coptic, Ethiopian, Greek, Indian, Russian, Syrian, and Ukranian. These essays define the phenomenon of prayer broadly in both its private and collective liturgical dimensions.
A well-documented, interdisciplinary examination of devotional practices, rituals, and understandings of prayer in contemporary lived forms of Eastern Christianity across a wide variety of traditions, including Coptic, Ethiopian, Greek, Indian, Russian, Syrian, and Ukranian. These essays define the phenomenon of prayer broadly in both its private and collective liturgical dimensions.