The epiclesis of life, 
a radical Orthodox approach

							‘It is not the rite that is ill,
 it is man’s relationship with the rite’
Geneviève Trainar

His Lordship, 
Ladies and Gentlemen,

The organisers of the colloquium on ‘Rituals for Life’ have suggested that I give a presentation on ‘The celebrating community’s relations with the Holy Spirit’. I gladly accepted.   I am very happy to get to know the Leuven University and to have a dialogue with you on such an essential matter. In the 40 minutes that I have, I would like to present the following thesis: Only a new discovery of Eucharistic life as underlying structure of our world, our societies and our own being will allow our modern civilisation to regain the way of jubilation together. That is, only the symbolic and eschatological experience of space and time, as it is experienced in the Eucharistic sacrament, will presently allow reconciliation between the individual and his neighbour, between the nation and society, between local and universal Church. Therefore, I am glad that this intervention happens at the moment when Catholic Church is entering a year consecrated to the Eucharist.

Why have I chosen the title ‘The epiclesis of Life’ i.e. the supplication of life? The main reason is that after 2000 years of christianism, it is a bit hard to be convinced of the absolute novelty of the thesis that I have just presented! As a matter of fact, Eucharistic life has always been at the centre of Church life. So what exactly is this rediscovery of Eucharistic life as a foundation of our world, our societies and our own personal being? In my opinion we can only find the answer to this question if we open our eyes for the ‘supplication of life’ and the psalmist’s very old song: ‘The whole creation praises the Lord’! 

In the twentieth century there has been both in the East and the West and both at the same time a profound renewal of our representation of God and Church. One that can be summarised like this: In the same way as God cannot be impersonal, Church prayer can be nothing else but a cosmic and personal reality both at the same time. And the other way around, if the prayer of Church ultimately means a dialogue between Man and God it will also have to be a river that surpasses us. Church is a divine and human Who, said the Orthodox theologian Serge Bulgakov completely agreeing with Cardinal Hans-Urs von Balthazar. Balthazar in turn wrote in 1943 that Church is a cosmic and corporal reality. It is, he said, the heart of the world. ‘Kneeled and speaking to Christ’ he wrote: ‘It is your name that things are whispering!’ From the Eastern point of view, Father Paul Florenski invented mathematical formulas, which were able to give  ‘a conscious expression of the rhythm of the waves’. These were formula, which thanks to man were able to express the supplication of life when the Crimean sun sets over the Black Sea. 

But how does this who beat like blood in our world? How is the supplication of the world’s energies, of social life and of human existence transformed in a body that is transparent for Logos? How is it held towards Him? In my opinion, a radical Orthodox approach may present some elements for the answer to these questions. 

To do this, I suggest the following: Firstly, I will tell you how in the twentieth century the progressive formulation of an Eucharistic ecclesiology was developed in Slavo-Byzantine Orthodox thinking. Next, I will remind you that in the 90s this evolution surprisingly went hand in hand with the ideas of thinkers from other Christian traditions, who in spite of everything agree to intimately combine the Eucharistic life with the ecclesification of the world. Then, in a last and more technical chapter, I will use the weekly cycle of offices to show that this Eucharistic relation with the world profoundly determines our relation with space and time. I will situate myself in the ecumenical renewal of liturgical theology as Cardinal Daniélou, Father Alexandre Schmemann or Professor Natalia Syrotinska operates it. According to these thinkers the historic and eschatological consciousness of the participation in the mystic banquet of the Eucharist allows Christians to become ‘the body’ and at the same time it brings them closer to the transience of the Kingdom!

As time is limited this will be nothing but an outline. I will go straight to the goal. Please forgive me for all the byways that you will have to take. What is most important to me is that you can share in my vision of a certain contemporary movement of Church consciousness and its consequences on the liturgical practice of Eastern and Western Christian communities. Of course I count on your reactions to give any specification on the elements that were not clear.

1) Orthodox Eucharistic ecclesiology
Let us then start with the 20th-century formulation of an Eucharistic ecclesiology in Orthodox theology. You may know Father Serge Bulgakov’s thesis which says that Orthodox theology integrated three big mysteries of Christian revelation in such a way that it was both full and complete but also progressive and at the same time historical. According to this thesis Church consciousness was in the first millennium first turned to the mystery of Christ’s divine humanity. After which in the second millennium it opened progressively for the mystery of the Holy Spirit as hypostasis of Trinity. All of this happened in order to rediscover - at the start of the third millennium – the mystery of Church as Body of Christ and spouse of the Lamb. I must admit this is nothing but a rough explication of the historical development of Christian doctrine, which is of course much more complex. But as I said, I am ready to discuss this longer with you, to give a justification of such a thesis for instance by referring to Jean-Marc Ferry’s relational philosophy of history. 
Here I will only develop one argument in favour of this spiral vision of Church consciousness i.e. the development of Orthodox religious thinking in Russian emigration between 1930 and 1940. During this period, several Russian thinkers experienced all within a couple of years the same movement as the bi-millennium consciousness of Church. 
After centuries of onto-theology, Father Serge Bulgakov (Dean of the ‘Institut Saint Serge’ in Paris), Nicolas Berdiaev (President of the Academy of Religious Philosophy) and Georges Fedotov (general editor of the magazine Novij Grad - New City) were the first ones to rediscover the central dimension of theanthropy. Unity without confusion and without separation of Christ’s two natures allowed them to react to the ideas of Karl Barth or Heidegger on the one hand and to the crisis of democracy in Europe on the other hand. 
This lasted until their representation of the person of the Holy Spirit was one of individual progress only. Berdiaev ridded his personalist philosophy of all substantialism. In order to denounce the rationalism of the French intellectuals Fedotov insisted on the structural link between intelligence and the heart. 
In think, we should concentrate some more on the third ecclesiological phase, more specifically on the ideas of Father Serge. It is exactly the distinction between the Holy Spirit and God’s being that allows Bulgakov to specify the meaning of the dogma of consubstantiality of Trinity’s three hypostases and to redefine the nature and the limitations of the trinitarian body that is Church. 
For Russian theologians Church tradition - or rather its liturgical and iconographic consciousness - reveals the secret presence of the biblical figure of God’s Wisdom, which is near God and in his creation. Church doctrine in this respect may enable man to think about God’s Tri-unity in a symbolic and realistic way. God’s Wisdom-Glory, which is a loving reality, is not a hypostasis. But is can be turned into one by a given hypostasis and as such continue life. To understand this perspective it is necessary to distinguish between the divine being - the Sophia – and the Holy Spirit. In God’s tri-hypostatic Spirit it is the Holy Spirit which is the hypostasis of Love between the Father and the Son. This movement in triadology, this full acknowledgement of the divine personality of the Holy Spirit, had not yet been accomplished by the Council of Chalcedonies, which only confirmed that He proceeds from the Father. 
But Bulgakov went one step further in the interpretation of Chalcedonies. In 1936, he went back to Saint Gregoire Palamas’ non-created theology of energies, which used pneumatology in Eastern Church. In Bulgakov’s opinion, the energies should not only be seen on a personal level. This led Father Serge to ask once more the question on the nature of Church as a meeting place for created and non-created energies. Research ended with his third triology, finished in 1939 and called: L’Epouse de l’Agneau. Church is both Body of Christ (though it does not belong to it) and the Lamb’s Spouse, which voice can be heard in the last verse of the Apocalypse. In the thirties Berdiaev and Fedotov also dedicated themselves to an enlargement of their representation of Church as Temple of the Holy Spirit and as Body of Christ. However the war interrupted this promising generational movement.

It would lead us too far to tell you here about the evolution of Orthodox thinking in the world from 1944 unto now. I would just say that Orthodox theology in the interbellum progressively integrated the attainments of Russian religious thinking by its development of a triadologic, Eucharistic and personalistic idea. By way of example I will only quote three contemporary Orthodox thinkers.
In his book l’Etre ecclésial the Greek theologian Jean Zizioulas integrated the way, in which Russian thinking interpreted the Council of Chalcedonies. The one and only God is the almighty Father. But the uniqueness of his person is such that it reveals itself in three hypostases. In order to show the antinomy between the person and the hypostasis a new notion the personhood had to be invented. 
Therefore, the present bishop of Pergame says that in Church prayer there is not the Church as an institution on the one hand and ‘the two or three united in my Name’ on the other hand. According to him it is so that ‘by updating Christ’s event in history the Holy Spirit actualises, at the same time, His personal existence as Body or community. Christ does not exist firstly as Truth and next as communion, He is both simultaneously. All distance between Christology and ecclesiology disappears in the Holy Spirit.’  
Hence, Bishop Jean Zizioulas says that it is the Eucharist – seen not as a thing but as an act and gathering of the local Church – which in Church consciousness enables the unity between the One and the many.

With some differentiation we could say that the French Orthodox theologian Olivier Clément shares the same vision of Church as body of Christ and ‘sometimes unfaithful’ spouse. According to him, Church does not possess its unity but it gets its unity and its saintety in its epiclesis, in the invocation and repentance. In his recent article on the Eucharist, which was published by l’Encyclopédie de l’Eucharistie, O. Clément summarises his personalist, Eucharistic and triadologic vision:
‘Through the Spirit and in the Son the Eucharist appears as an enormous theocentric dynamism: consequently, there is in the ‘Father’s house’ a participation of the gathered in trinitarian existentiality. As a result, it is the Eucharist that brings about the Church community.’
In this respect the Eucharist becomes a way of life that participates in the trinitarian way of life.

	In this interpretation Eucharist means all Church life with the latter thus getting a new meaning. That is why John Erickson, the Dean of the Saint Vladimir Orthodox Seminary in the United States, confirms that Orthodox ecclesiology is also a baptismal ecclesiology. But here too, he does not see baptism as a sacred frontier separating the saved from the doomed. If baptism is man’s sacrament of unity ‘in Christ and with Christ’, then it is the Easter faith of the Church community united around the baptised that brings about the Church and not just the mere addition of new members who unto then had still been outside.

2) Eucharist and degree of corporeities

The formulation in Orthodox theology of Eucharistic ecclesiology happened at the same time as an analogous movement in Catholic, Anglican and Reformed thinking. Yet, I would like to value the ecumenical dimension of the consciousness of the centrality of the Eucharist. I will do this in a second point of my presentation: The corporal and personal dimension of Church as exercised most of all in the Eucharistic celebration is also present beyond the institutionalised limits and beyond the dogmatic consciousness of its followers. That is the reason why the mystic body of Church can be experienced on different levels of consciousness and why it presents various forms of corporeities.

Let us start with the individual awareness of the Eucharistic dimension of creation. If man decides to live the triple movement of eschatological memory, of supplication and communion, he will open himself to a new corporeity no matter if he be monk or married, imprisoned or in a public place, a contemporarian of Charles V or Ivan the Terrible. This meta-individual corporeity, this disintegration of the physic wall of our ego, can be felt on the personal level as soon as a look full of love of a friend, a woman or man, a mother or father meets another one. Paul Ricoeur wrote, a photograph is enough to bring back all of a sudden the memory, the authentic presence, the cry from the heart which says: ‘I remember everything’... Add to this the infinite recognition and the confidence in Providence, which shatters all sorrow and which Ricoeur calls the happy memory. 

Cardinal Philippe Barbarin gives another example of this meta-individual corporeity in Hans Urs von Balthazar’s Eucharistic destiny. If Christ consecrated the bread, if He broke it and dealt it to his disciples then it is also because from Maundy Thursday through Easter Saturday He himself had been consecrated, broken and given by his Father. In a similar way, Balthazar became progressively conscious of the fact that his own life had been one of benediction, suicide and a gift. It is only thanks to this triple movement that the Swiss theologian was able to communicate with Péguy and Soloviev, with Origenes and Saint John.

Let us finish this matter of the revelation of the corporeity and personality of Church given to man with some fierce words of Father Teilhard de Chardin. In 1927 this French geologist went on expedition in de Gobi desert. Every morning he celebrated his ‘Mass for the World’. In his prayer he said: ‘As once again, My Lord, not from the forests of Aisne this time but from the Asian prairies, I have neither bread nor wine or altar, I will put myself above the symbols to the pure majesty of the Real. I will offer myself, your priest, on the altar of the entire Earth, the work and punishment of the World…’

The discovery of the personal dimension of the corporeity of creation is the typical feature of individual consciousness. However, there also exists a trinitarian movement of collective consciousness i.e. a trinitarian structure of the collective corporeity. The latter can be found on the level of society and the nation, of the local or universal Church. For modern rational logic, this trinitarian ecstasy of the me is perhaps the most difficult element to admit since this possibility of a me beyond myself can only find its base in the revelation of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. There is not the Absolute God on the one hand and man himself on the other. There is the love between man and God, which leads Paul to say that it is no longer I who live but He who lives in me.

This means that there is not the cogito on one side and the social contract on the other. There is the ‘who’ of the human community, which searches its corporal, personal, and trinitarian expression in the ‘what’ of the public thing, of communicational space. In his book Theology and social theory one of the founders of Radical Orthodoxy, John Milbank, showed that the history of political sciences can be understood as a succession of disguised anti-theologies, which unceasingly deform the vision of the Kingdom of Orthodox christianism. In his opinion, modern society is intrinsically linked with a representation of a violent God whereas the Christian vision of the infinite is not one of chaos but rather one of harmony and peace. It starts from an ontology of violence with the triple institution of the executive, the legislative and the judiciary as a game of equilibrium of powers and counter-powers. Consequently, John Milbank’s answer to the crisis in social sciences is to retrieve the ‘trinitarian God who is transcended peace thanks to the differential relationship’.

In the same way, there is not over here the State that has the power and over there Church (or the ideology) that confers its authority. There is Church as Body of Christ and the same Church as Spouse of the Lamb. There is Christ, who emptied himself of all divinity to become man and the same Christ who received from the Father all power over heaven and earth. In its divine-human reality Church is not a separate institution of the society and State. In this respect there is the very rich reflection of Olivier Mongin, chief editor of the magazine Esprit. O. Mongin pointed to the risks of totalitarianism - how these are hidden by the modern societies in their growing negation of the Law. He also pointed to the accelerated erosion of the bodies that intermediate between the State and the people, erosion that is caused by television. O. Mongin wrote: ‘If totalitarianism invented a mechanical body as strong as George Orwell’s nightmare to restore the inadequacies of modern individualism, then Christianism, which preceded our modern world and presented an organic body on institutional level, will always be an invitation to ‘recreate a body’. This is in contrast to the ‘religion of ethics’ which can be seen as an invitation to follow the process of desincarnation and desincorporation.’

Finally, as shown by the protestant theologian Konrad Raiser, Church is a community of men and women who forever and ever go on interpreting the Scriptures. But Church is also in the centre of the world. Its unity, its saintety, its catholicity and its apostolicity all constitute the world. That is why the tension between its unity and saintety, between its catholicity and apostolicity – which stem from their historic accomplishment -, interfere in the world as a cross. This cross alone allows that the self-representation of a people (a representation at once social and national) does not disintegrate and that it stays open.

3) The rediscovery of the invitation to ‘reshape the body’ of our Eucharistic rite
Upto now I have not said anything about the eschatological nature of this Christian ecclesiological summary nor about its consequences on liturgical practice. It is neither a positivist and passive vision of the end nor an ideological and voluntarist vision of the Kingdom. As shown by O. Clément, C. Yannaras and J. Erickson we could say now as a kind of summary that the Christian representation of experienced time is one of sapiental and inter-personal tension, one that is both joyful and crucifying, melodious and harmonious, between the present and not yet. It is this representation of time and space, which is the real source of Church communion and the foundation of our rites.

In 1959, in his Introduction à la théologie liturgique, Father Alexandre Schmemann tried to give an answer to the question that Martin Heidegger had asked in 1927 and that became fundamental for our modernity i.e. the one on the relationships between the Being and Time. For Schmemann, the being should not be seen as full of sorrow but rather as glory that has to be confronted with time. In his opinion, all liturgical life of Church comes from the relationship between the universal Eucharist and the cycles of time. In accordance with his contemporary theologians – from Cardinal Daniélou unto Father Yves Marie Congar - Schmemann showed that the passion and resurrection of Christ are the foundation of daily prayer. He also showed that the Day of the Lord established the weekly rhythm of the liturgical community, and that the Easter and Whit Celebrations are the pillars of the annual cycle of Church prayer. 
The philosopher C. Yannaras thinks that it is not we who change in time but that it is time that changes with regard to our spiritual experience of the cosmos. Are we thrown into the world or are we called to glorify life in the world? If we understand the relationship between time-space and personal consciousness in a mythological way, then all of a sudden the prophetic dimension of the chronotopes of our consciousness can be seen. There is of course a cyclical time given to the whole creation but there is also a spiral time which opens to the meaning of life. The Christian communities will find joy and unity again, not by declaring in an overruling way that the time of the Holy Spirit and spontaneity have come. On the contrary, it is the rediscovery of the sophian, personal and eschatological dimension of Church prayer that could favour a new communal era of Church consciousness.

But, in order to do this the living tradition of Church should first be retrieved from under the rubble of our modern consciousness. In this respect I would like to present briefly the work of Natalia Syrotinska, a music professor at the Catholic University of Ukraine, on the liturgical cycle of Octoec – that is the cycle of eight tunes that was adapted to weekly Church prayer. Octoec stands for a collection of texts that covers eight weeks. For each day there are liturgical compositions that are integrated in the office of that particular day. The melodies of the hymns vary according to the day of the week and as to the weeks themselves. The first tune starts after Whitsun; when the eight weeks are completed the first one will restart. Since the period between Easter and Whitsun is omitted there are in total six cycles of eight tunes in a year. 
The Fathers Cyprien Kern, Alexandre Schmemann and Boris Bobrinskoy reminded that differently from Judish messianic consciousness (which finds the week’s end in the Sabbath), Christian consciousness of time identified the resurrection of Christ, the Sunday, the first day of the week, with the eighth day, the one that shatters the cosmic cycle of time. In the same way Whitsun is celebrated seven times in seven weeks plus one day after Easter, in which the extra day is the 8th eschatological day of the Holy Spirit’s descent. Already very soon the liturgical week was seen as an icon of the transience of the Kingdom with the resurrected Christ in the centre and around Him each day of the week with its own particular tonality. The representation of space had to be organised in a melodious system of vibrations that corresponded with the symbolic numbers.
But our modernity has lost this sense of identification that Church consciousness established between the notes of the musical scale and our participation in cosmic life. The same holds true for the transient and cosmic correspondence between Monday and the angels, between Tuesday and John the Baptist, between Wednesday and the treason by Judas, between Thursday and the Disciples, between Friday and the Holy Virgin, and finally between Saturday and all the dead.
Professor Johann von Gardner (1898-1984), the eminent specialist in history of Russian liturgical chant at the Munich University started his answer to this enigma by referring to the link between Orthodox hymnography and the iconographic consciousness of the Eastern Church. For the structuring of the double scale of 4 tunes he also distinguished between the two Western and Eastern liturgical and hymnographic traditions. In the Western world, the Gregorian system caused the whole scale to be changed by an association of a plagal or minor tune after each authentic or major one (the first tune being associated with the second, the third with the fourth, etc.) This resulted in a vertical and dynamic music script which favoured polyphony and was in contrast with the Byzantine system which considered the first 4 tunes to be authentic and the last 4 ones plagals (1-5, 2-6, etc.), resulting in an horizontal and mystical music script that favoured unison.
Natalia Syrotinska’s these, presented this year at Lviv, was to show that hymnographic tradition of medieval Rus’ drew the hymnographic consequences from Christian eschatological consciousness. The Kiev liturgical consciousness associated the first tune with the 8th and consequently the 2nd with the 7th, the 3rd with the 6th, and the 4th with the 5th. It is this determining evolution which makes it possible to understand the sophian representation of the present-day world in the cycle of weekly prayer as an immense Deisis. The major and minor tunes are nothing but the infinite intersection - and creators of energies - of non-created Wisdom with those of created Wisdom. The day of the angels is associated with the one of the dead, the day of the preacher with the one of the Holy Virgin, the day of treason with the one of the Disciples. Church saw the time of the week not as a succession of days but as the theurgic divine-humanity, the creative encounter between the heavenly One and the earthly seven. That is the reason why the whole annual hymnographic cycle of the octoec is centred on the Eucharist,- with the exception of days on which a feast modifies normal rhythm, - on the circulation of the 7 human melodies around the unique divine vibration.

Conclusion
This sapiental key of the organisation of the offices shows the profound unity in the Christian liturgical tradition. This thesis lets us also retrieve the symbolic depth of the rites. The whole organisation of space and time is at stake when Christians meet around Christ and when they rediscover the sapiental and personal depth of the Church. Modern individualism killed by the finiteness of time can – from a Christian point of view – only be cured by a new confidence in time as consoling factor. Indeed, Christian faith confesses that God became incarnated under Pontius Pilate, that he was crucified and that he resurrected on the ‘third day’. The Orthodox participation in the Eucharistic mystery is exactly the memory of this divine-human history, the supplication addressed to the Consolator to realise this 3rd day and to give a foretaste of the Kingdom through a communion in God’s gifts.

Since the end of the XIX century the Western world had been assisting in the rediscovery  of the praying community’s participating vision. Therefore Natalia Syrotinska’s discovery has to be seen parallel to research by another woman, the Anglican universitarian Catherine Pickstock, who is also one of the editors of the collection Radical Orthodoxy. This English philosopher has indeed tried to understand the separation between the harmony and melody in the history of European music. In her analysis of Saint Augustin’s De Musica, which was composed in 391, C. Pickstock reminded that for the Father of Church the music of the world, of the people and of instruments, that this music measured the relation between body and soul. That is why in her opinion the negation of the transcendence has led modernity to dissociate body and soul, and also space and time. But C. Pickstock also thinks that the history of music – both in the East and the West – was man’s forever restarted illumination of chaos. The communitarian renewal of Christianism in the West should also begin by retrieving an attentive ear to celestial liturgy. All man’s work and collective life will find their accomplishment in a liturgical offering for God.

Please allow me to add one last word on the Byzantine tradition in Christianism. The communal renewal of Christianism in the East itself has probably got to retrieve an attentive ear to terrestrial liturgy. A good start is to change the porters of the primitive Church in ‘greater’ people in charge of reception, as it has been done in certain Orthodox parishes of the US. But getting conscious of the sapiental dimension of sexuality, of eco-systems or political institutions is an immense field, which is still waiting for a profound and radical reflection from Orthodox theology.

									Antoine Arjakovsky