McGuckin - Encyclopedia of Eastern Orthodox Christianity

Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2011. – 872 p.

ISBN 978-1-4051-8539-4 (hardcover: alk. paper)

 

Orthodoxy is old Christianity, but not antique; for it retains a freshness about it which belies all attempts (by its enemies and some of its supporters) to render it into a sustained exercise in antiquarianism. It is old in wisdom, we like to think, but fresh in its evangelical spirit: renewed by that Omega which is also the Alpha, the beginning, not simply the end. It is a Christian experience that many think they know, and often characterize in terms of its "traditionalism," its slowness to react to many things. This of course can often be a good thing. Being dogged, for example, allowed Orthodoxy to outlive, and more than outlive, its persecutors of the 20th century who greatly outmatched the ferocity of the ancient persecutors of the church; for the 20th century was (by any account) the age of the greatest persecutions the Church of Christ has ever endured. No Nero, Diocletian, or Galerius could ever match up to the oppressions put upon the Eastern Church by the Stalins, Hoxhas, or Ceauşescus of the age of totalitarians. In this gloomy herding together of the Eastern Orthodox world by communist authorities, the witness had to be one of the most basic facts of endurance. Those who know Orthodoxy more intimately than simply seeing its quaintness or its traditionalism will recognize its heroic witness in the course of the 20th century.

 

Today, after the irreversible fall into the dust of so many of these tyrants, who once thought they would rule forever, the intoxicating sense of joyful liberation has often passed away too, in much of Soviet-zone Eastern Europe, and the colder breezes of reality coming after the heady 1990s have been felt. Serious economic and social disorders are still to be dealt with as a long-lasting legacy of the destruction communism left behind itself. For the Orthodox Church, which suffered the purging of so many of its leaders over so many decades, and the wholesale destruction of its social mission, its church buildings, and its educational system, a similar scale of traumatic damage is undoubtedly going to be a legacy that will continue for a few generations to come. After such levels of trauma, recovery takes longer than after simple setbacks. It is perhaps the destiny of our times to see Orthodoxy climbing back up from its knees once more, while at the same time Christian practice and culture in Western Europe seems to enter into a new bleak era, neglected and despised by an alleged new humanism which mocks its own ancestral religious tradition as well as its ancient and inseparable moral and intellectual heritage: things which betoken long-term social problems in terms of the transmission of societal civilized values and ethico-social cohesion in western societies.

 

Orthodoxy, while always having a robust sense of its theological identity, is in the course of this present era in a constant state of flux; involving growth, but also drawing the Eastern Church into areas of indeterminate conditions: strange environments it has not yet been fully able to parallel with familiar ancient precedents so as to help it navigate towards a new hermeneutic. Sometimes western commentators, however unbalanced they may be, have been given a hearing as they attempted to draw the boundaries of civilization as concomitant with the western political and religious borders of the Mediterranean, excluding the Orthodox nations as if they were of little or no importance. This position (which in my mind is a cleverly masked form of prejudice) conveniently forgets that Orthodoxy has had its schools smashed by hostile conquerors or oppressive totalitarians not only for the last seventy years, but for the last five hundred. How many centuries does it take to reestablish an intellectual tradition? A life of the mind to match the élan of a cultural and artistic fabric? While the West was establishing the Renaissance on the base of its late medieval university cities, the Christian East was falling relentlessly before ascendant Islamic military might. It was a submergence into a forcibly imposed Sharia law, a twilight existence for a conquered ethnos, that permitted partial cultic existence to the Orthodox Church but certainly not an independently continuing intellectual life. The schools, seminaries, printing presses, and caucuses of intellectuals belonging to the Orthodox were mostly doomed and soon were almost all entirely extinguished except for symbolic residues – those few able to secure their independence from the power of the Ottomans, or to pay for a limited degree of autonomy. After the fall of Constantinople in 1453, Russia continued on, and Ukraine, Romania, Athos, and Sinai became, at various times, fortresses of Orthodox culture under immense external pressures. But even so, Orthodoxy lost its university ethos definitively; lost its broadly spread intelligentsia, its sponsoring aristocracy; lost therefore its grasp on the tiller of culture-making – a role it had so clearly excelled in for its first millennium. Instead, it had to, by force of hostile circumstance, turn more inward towards cultural and ecclesiastic preservation. Nothing replaced the university and aristocratic caucuses (the leavening effect of the imperial court and its ability to attract international talent to the Orthodox center) and monastic culture took up the fallen crown. Monastic leadership has guided and safeguarded Orthodoxy ever since, and made a faithful job of it; but the wider intellectual culture of the Eastern Church was inevitably narrowed into slower and more mystical channels than Orthodoxy had known as part of its vital fabric in earlier, more independent and more flourishing political circumstances. Those who in recent centuries have often scorned or mocked the alleged inability of Orthodox theologians and church leaders to match the intellectual sophistication of the West, are often laughing, albeit unwittingly, at the sorrows of conquered peoples – in a manner like the Queen of France who thought cake would substitute sufficiently well for the lack of bread.

 

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Epiclesis

 

TODD E. FRENCH

 

The Epiclesis is the invocation of the Holy Spirit in the Eucharistic Anaphora so as to descend and sanctify the people of God, and especially the holy gifts which have been offered. The Epiclesis (Greek for "calling upon") is solemnly recited by the presiding bishop or priest after the words of institution, and is seen as a defining moment when the gifts are sanctified and become the body and blood of the Lord. Although several commentators resist the splitting up of the whole liturgical action of the divine liturgy into moments of consecration (as in line with the Catholic belief that the words of institution form the precise moment of eucharistic consecration), it is nevertheless widely understood in Orthodoxy that the Epiclesis is that most sacred moment when the words of Christ over the holy gifts are spiritually effected by the descent of the Holy Spirit. The faithful bow down low at this solemn moment in the liturgy.

 

The first attestation of the Epiclesis is found in the Apostolic Tradition of St. Hippolytus from the 3rd century. Within this text is a call for the Holy Spirit to descend and strengthen the church through the sacrifice. There are also 4th-century versions of the Epiclesis in the liturgy of St. James, the Euchologion of Serapion of Der Balyzeh, and the writings of St. Cyril of Jerusalem. The theology that serves as a foundation for this prayer demonstrates the patristic teaching that God the Father’s revelation and work comes through the Son and is completed by the Holy Spirit. The church’s call to the Spirit to sanctify and strengthen the community of believers (as well as consecrating the gifts) relates the church and the Holy Eucharist to the day of Pentecost and shows the eschatological nature of the church’s trinitarian prayer. The Epiclesis in the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom marks a shift from the Holy Spirit "showing" the gifts to be the body of Christ towards "making" the gifts into the body of Christ. The earlier form in the Epiclesis of St. Basil is still used on those days on which his liturgy is appointed to be served, notably the Sundays of Great Lent.

 

SEE ALSO: Divine Liturgy, Orthodox; Eucharist; Holy Spirit; St. John Chrysostom (349–407)

 

REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS