The Western Rite: Its Fascinating Past and Its Promising Future

By the Rt. Rev’d Alexander Turner, SSB

Editorial note: The following article, written by the first Vicar General of the Western Rite in the Antiochian Archdiocese, has some elements that are a bit dated, as the article was written in the late 50s or early 60s. For instance, Turner’s hope for the liturgical renewal within Roman Catholicism and Anglicanism reflects a pre-Vatican II perspective—and he would have clearly lamented the Novus Ordo reforms of Vatican II. Nonetheless, Turner here presents an excellent historical overview and apology for the restoration of the Western Rite to the Orthodox Church. The article has been somewhat condensed for WesternOrthodox.com.

Our Liturgical Heritage

God, who created all men, intended that all be saved. When his own after the flesh proved indifferent to their mission as harbingers of grace, our Lord turned to the gentiles even to assist in the foundation of the Church. One Lord, one faith, one baptism were confessed in a multiplicity of tongues from the outset. The parable of the wedding feast, the command to baptize and teach all nations leave no doubt of the catholicity of the Church from the beginning. It was to be no private affair, but the new Jerusalem to which all were summoned to newness of life in Christ. A host of witnesses acclaim the new king and when the Holy Spirit descended upon the disciples to launch the infant Church upon its course, it supplied speech according to the hearers (Acts 2). All nations whom thou hast made shall come and worship thee, O Lord, and shall glorify thy name, said the Psalmist in anticipation of this very event (Psalm 86:9). And St. Paul repeatedly reminds his spiritual charges that they must be all things to all men . The same great apostle destroyed the parochialism of the ardently Jewish converts who sought to impose the rites of the old dispensation upon gentile Christians.

While we are left in no doubt about the rites of the new law—either because of explicit ordinance (as the holy sacrifice, baptism, absolution) or because of apostolic practice (as ordination, chrismation, unction) we know surprisingly little of the methods by which they were carried out. That is, we have no ceremonial directions of dominical authority. We know that our Lord took bread, blessed, brake and gave it to his disciples, commanding them to do likewise, and we know little more.

The primitive liturgy had none of the aspects of ceremonial pageantry with which the devotion of subsequent ages would surround it. But it did have an apocalyptic significance which later generations overlooked in their concern for meticulous ceremonial conformity. While the Incarnation had not altered the law of nature, and the Ascension would return nature to its old responsibilities, it was to be a nature transfigured by a new grace and given a completely new and eternal significance. Here was eternal life brought into the moment, the individual and his genesis reunited. Recent study has rediscovered the wealth of import which the early Church saw in this supreme Christian act, as Dom Gregory Dix pointed out in his monumental study:

It is the solemn proclamation of the Lord’s death; but it is also the familiar intercourse of Jesus abiding in the soul…it fulfills all the past…But it also looks forward to the future beyond the end of time…It foreshadowed the exultant welcome of his own at the second coming…By the time the New Testament came to be written the eucharist already illuminated everything concerning Jesus for his disciples—his person.. his messianic office, his miracles, his death and the redemption that he brought. It was the vehicle of the gift of his Spirit, the means of eternal life. This fact of a great variety of meanings found within the…eucharist by the apostolic church of the first generation had important consequences for the future of the liturgy, though it has been curiously little appreciated in modern study.

The Shape of the Liturgy, p. 4

Notwithstanding the scanty ceremonial detail in the first Christian worship, and the extemporary character of liturgical prayer, the officers were established and their duties defined. The first Christian century had not closed when Clement I of Rome reminds the Corinthians of the fixed formal parts taken by the bishop, priest and deacon in the corporate sacrifice. Two centuries were to pass before a written liturgy appeared, though Justin Martyr (c. 135) and The Didache (90–130?), list the elements which have always been universal lessons; from both Testaments with psalms between, sermon, prayers, kiss of peace, offering of bread, wine and water, the Eucharistic thanksgiving, remembrance of our Lord’s death, institution of the Last Supper and command to continue it, Amen said by all the people and Communion.

Today it is difficult to understand the primitive, fluid state of the liturgy, its lack of verbal uniformity. It seems both unfortunate and baffling that the formative history of all liturgies is lost in obscurity and that little survives but casual allusions, often incidental to some other subject. Only travelers seem constrained to describe, and they, because what they saw differed from what they knew at home. Yet they tell us little of what would most concern us today: the text. This is a further reminder that our preoccupation with liturgical details is a modern phenomenon which our fathers did not share.

We do know the major features and outline of the Eucharist from the earliest days which still prevail throughout historic Christendom (i.e. the Church and those ancient bodies which withdrew from it). The outlines which we noted in Justin Martyr and The Didache have not changed, either in East or West. When Innocent I of Rome (402–417) recorded the distinguishing features of his liturgy it was not to the text that he referred but secondary relationships of the parts, the position of the Pax (after the fracture) the position of the memento of the living (within the Anaphora). Even at the beginning of the fifth century it was the sequence of the secondary elements which were the distinguishing features of a local rite, not the textual content nor even the ceremonial customs. But fixed forms inevitably develop for doing important things, and people who repeatedly do the same thing acquire uniform ways of doing it. As the bishop of the chief city (the patriarch) would do, so his clergy would follow, and the language itself became settled, although the priest as well as the bishop originally extemporized.

Long before the tragic defection of the Western patriarchate a wide spectrum of liturgical practice had developed, and the faithful from India to Gaul, Ethiopia to Norway, had adorned this most solemn of acts with the arts and ways of their various civilizations. It would have been unthinkable otherwise: for a Norseman to offer the holy sacrifice in the manner of an Indian, a Celt to affect the customs of an Arab. Historical misfortunes have made it necessary to remind ourselves that liturgical uniformity is abnormal, and liturgical variety is the natural state of the Church.

It is a reminder of the eminence of our mother see that Antioch gave more liturgies to the world than any other ancient Christian center, and has the longest unbroken liturgical tradition in Christendom. This was natural and in keeping with the mother church’s solicitude for souls. With the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70 the Church’s center of gravity moved to Antioch from which the most extensive missions in the East were to originate, pushing even across central Asia as far as India at an early date.

The archetypical Syrian liturgy described in Apostolic Constitutions, Book 8 (late fourth century) was ascribed to St. James, edited by St. Basil (379) then by St. John Chrysostom (407) whose names now designate the Church’s most extensive liturgy and formed the basis of the liturgies used by the Armenians and the separated Persian (Nestorian) Christians. All Christians conscious of the Syrian spiritual genius must regret that this rich spectrum of liturgical worship should have been lost to the mother see, and survive only under auspices now separated from Orthodoxy. With the gradual imposition of the Byzantine Rite by Greek authority the patriarchate was to lose the precedent of a thousand years of colorful liturgical variety and be reduced to a uniformity with that of the imperial city.

Against this brilliant and promising beginning, the creation of the Western Rite Vicariate is as appropriate as it might seem surprising by contrast with the subsequent course of uniformity. Here may be a rebirth, not only for the Orthodoxy of the West, but also for Orthodox piety so long denied its manifold liturgical beauties.

We must be careful not to think of a rite as merely a liturgical text together with associated ceremonial customs. These are the matter of the rite, and have their importance. But its spirit and form should concern us more. These find expression in the entire milieu of a people: its literature, art, architecture, music and mental dispositions. And so, as the Holy Spirit moved the hearts and soul of various races, each responded according to its own endowments to develop our present liturgical families. It should be unnecessary to point out that he who came to save all men, who created all with their peculiar gifts, did not intend that we worship him only in Hebrew, or in Greek, or in Latin. But even now there are those—and Orthodox among them!—who feel that there can be no way but their own. The light of the sun would not be improved by excluding those hues from its spectrum which we might not choose. Nor is the Son of Righteousness glorified by denying the service which his manifold rays have awakened in the faithful of other times and places. It is one thing to defend the faith, vigilant against heresy and wrong. But it is a very different thing to assert that one Lord, one faith and one baptism can only be confessed in the way which is natural to me. Our prayers for unity can not intend that those who have ventured from the Church remain in their errors. Nor can unity mean that all will look and act alike in their Father’s house. There, as we are told, are many mansions.

Liturgical Development and Decadence

The period of liturgical development had virtually ended in the West by the seventh century when the foundations of the modern [pre-Vatican II] Roman liturgy were completed and only a few addenda—often in the nature of private devotions—were still to come: the prayers at the foot of the altar, the florid poetic compositions between Epistle and Gospel (sequences), the prayers at the Offertory, Lavabo, before, during and after communion. It was a Syrian pope, Sergius I (687–701) who introduced the Agnus Dei, sung first during the breaking of bread, now after it.

The Byzantine liturgy, on the other hand, was not to reach a comparable stage of fixity until several centuries later, and to completely vanquish the primitive rite of Syria in its homeland by the 13th or 14th century, and reduce the entire Church to an almost complete uniformity until this century, relieved only by the rare accession of a few converts from the Jacobite Church, and the exceptions made on St. James Day at Jerusalem and Zante. And it is also to be noted that the present day St. James is but a remote and hellenized descendant of the original. Contrary to what we might suppose, Rome was liturgically the most conservative of the patriarchates, Jerusalem the most adventuresome! Despite regional rivalries and those theological pretexts upon which political antagonism would seize, the Church was spiritually unified through this formative liturgical period.

Every parish priest knows what tenacious loyalties attach to the externals of worship which are at once the most conspicuous and the least important—the location of an icon, the color of a vestment, the hour of the liturgy. So we would expect liturgical differences to have been the most fruitful area of antagonism. And if the heated atmosphere of the great schism were to generate grievances aplenty, it was more often a clue to personal temper than to spiritual insight. Neither side today can take much pride in the memory of charges that married men, or bearded or unbearded men were ineligible for ordination; that the East had removed the filioque from the Creed; or that saying or omitting the alleluias in Lent was important! If these petty vexations assumed ridiculous proportions, it only serves as a reminder of how normal the liturgical varieties of Christendom had become, which were virtually untouched by these heated polemics. Aside from the azymes and epiklesis, none of the serious issues involved in the schism could be said to have any liturgical character per se, and that notwithstanding those extensive superficial distinctions to which popular loyalties attach with such fervor. Had the liturgical differences any importance to the hypercritical mind of the time, we may be certain that they would have been eagerly seized upon as grounds for dispute.

The same oversimplification by which we tend to see two areas of Christendom clean-cleft by divergences of faith and custom has misguided our thinking in regard to the time and effects of the schism, which is usually thought of as a fracture taking place at an established date and resulting in two clearly distinguished bodies. Such was not the case. And the era of the Church’s true liturgical catholicity was longer than commonly supposed. Latin settlements survived in the East after the signal date of 1054—which is engraven deeper on the Christian memory by Latin insolence, perhaps, than by its actual importance. A Benedictine monastery existed on Athos until the end of the 12th century at least. Latins continued in full communion at Constantinople and elsewhere into the 12th century. As the breach between the, new and old Romes widened, it appears that Antioch and Jerusalem retained their communion with both until the First Crusade. Even during the Latin kingdom, Syrians, Georgians and Latins had their own chapels in the Holy Land, and participated in common services at the Holy Sepulchre, where the forcefully intruded Latin patriarch presided. When Alexandria became uncertain about the Latins, c. 1190, the Patriarch Mark consulted the celebrated canonist and Titular of Antioch, Theodore Balsamon, and was advised to excommunicate them—a severity which caused some dismay in the East. Even the excommunication of the Patriarch of Constantinople by the Latin legates (of a deceased pope!) was not regarded for awhile as a breach between the churches, but as the intemperance of a less mature hierarch of a younger and less seasoned area. Latin rite priests were ordained in the diocese of Durazzo into the 13th century by the Greek metropolitan. Thus for more than half of the Church’s history it was both multi-ritual and not clearly separated from the West.

Even before the central tensions leading to the great schism developed, there began what must be regarded as a liturgical decline which affected East and West allke. This was partly attributable to an attempt to express intangibles in finite terms, leading to a quest for a precise moment when the Eucharistic elements became the holy Body and Blood. East and West alike suffered from this unfortunate tendency, which began as early as the 4th century. The idea of an instant of transformation, with its almost magical undertone, was not considered in the primitive Church, which was preoccupied with the liturgy’s eternal character and apocalyptic singificance. And the sense of awe which crept over the Byzantine mind together with the proliferation of icons raised the wall between clergy and faithful, suggesting a division in the Church incompatible with its rational emphasis on the unity of its members regardless of station. Thus a dramatic and objective approach to the holy sacrifice replaced the original sense of personal membership and participation.

It was the West, however, which would suffer more from these unhappy inclinations, with the emergence of a professional clerical society aloof from the faithful, and a dichotomy between the performer on the one hand and the observer on the other. Mass was said by the priest, heard by the attendants. This movement reached its denouement in the magnificent theatrical productions of the Baroque period, staged with consummate artistry, and overwhelming in their grandeur. From a corporate act of the Christian family, Mass became a religious extravaganza on the one hand, or a mysterious incantation on the other. Small wonder that the layman left the holy sacrifice to professionals and occupied himself instead with devotions—self-centered, sentimental reveries such as the Rosary, or pious irrelevancies assigned to give mystical symbolism to parts of the liturgy. This provided little spiritual nourishment, but it did encourage an appetite for religious sensationalism and novelty, to be fed by a stream of fashionable saints and devotional fads. We can be thankful today that our Roman brothers are making determined efforts to reverse this trend and to return to the spirit of the primitive Church. Strangely enough the epiklesis, which was the Church’s indicated formula for consecration, and about which dispute was to arise later vis-a-vis the Roman belief in consecration by the Words of Institution, does not seem to have received much attention until the 14th century when Nicolas Cabasilas condemned the Roman doctrine as a novelty at variance with the text of the Roman anaphora (George Every, The Byzantine Patriarchate, p. 196).

The Heresies

Liturgies do, of course, reflect the faith of their users. And so the Western rite, subsequent to the schism, accumulated evidences of doctrinal waywardness. These have been magnified by those anxious to perpetuate old animosities, and even to deny the Church its divinely appointed catholicity. But the grace of God has providentially preserved the structure of western worship unaltered, while the accretions are few, superficial, and easily removed without affecting its structural integrity. Only trifling emendations have been required to fit it for Orthodox use.

The doctrine of papal infallibility is unnoticed by the present Roman rite except in a few extra-liturgical prayers said after mass or at devotions. The apostolic princedom of St. Peter is stressed, as we might expect, and a common mass for one or several popes was introduced in 1942 to emphasize the dignity of the Roman pontiff, to render him the homage of the Church’s submission, and to answer to the attacks against the See of Peter, (The St. Andrew Missal).

The theory of the Immaculate Conception of our Lady is given a proper Mass and Breviary office. Western Orthodox follow the earlier forms which do not allude to the theologumenon.

Supererogation is the only heresy which has found an extensive place in the modern Latin Missal, usually in prayers that we may benefit from the merits of the Saints. The few allusions in the Ordinary of the Mass and the many which occur in the proper collects are easily changed to ask their intercession, or if that is asked in the same prayer, merely omitted.

The theory of the double procession is expressed in some breviary hymns as well as in the creed. Western Orthodox omit such phrases as the filioque, and rephrase the hymns to stress some attribute of the Trinity, as the unity of the Godhead or the Triune majesty. In all of these respects the authorized Western use has been edited to conform to Church’s doctrine and teaching, and an epiklesis has been restored to its original place in the Anaphora, from which it disappeared in the West at some unknown date.

Aside from these trifling exceptions, the contemporary Latin liturgy is as Orthodox as it was before the schism—though it does reflect the faith as it has moved the mind and spirit of the West.

East and West Today

The Byzantine Rite will first impress a Western Christian as rhapsodic and profuse, as opulent and even sensuous. And the Western rite at its best may seem stark, angular and even concentrated to an Orthodox of the Byzantine rite. Such are broad generalities of course, for each tradition has its exceptions as well as its unbecoming moments when piety is unmatched by discrimination and we find the sacred functions conducted in an atmosphere of poor taste and even frivolity, more appropriate to the carnival than to the holy sacrifice. But in general it can be said that the Western liturgy stresses the seriousness of the business, that its approach is direct, methodical, that it is concentrated and that it proceeds by marked stages.

Offsetting the greater formality of the Western rite is what may be termed an inherent choreography, a delination in space and movement of the sacred drama in which the worshipper automatically participates, of which the Basilica is the classic setting. Here the architectural features fall into an ordered pattern conforming in space to the stages of the Christian life: the Narthex or place of the catechumens, the Baptistry at the entrance, the Confessional beyond for those who have fallen from grace after Baptism, the Nave where the body of faithful offer their sacrifice of praise and prayer, the Choir where those more particularly called do their service, the Ambo between Nave and Sanctuary where heavenly things are told to earthly hearers, and finally the holy place where the sacrifice is offered, the terminus of a linear pattern approached by the stages of the Christian life. Complementing this dominant longitudinal axis is the transverse dimension of the lengthened Western Altar at the center of which, where these two lines intersect, the offerings of the community become the sacred Body and Blood. The Cross is suggested by the priest’s ceremonial positions: before the Altar for the preparatory prayers, the approach to the Altar, to the right for the proper Mass psalm, collect and first lesson, to the left for the Gospel and back to the center for the Mass of the faithful. So the practical functions of the Eucharist have found a geometrical form in the west which corresponds broadly to the deisis and pictorial cosmogony which surround the eastern worshipper. The late Adrian Fortescue observed that the ceremonies of the Western rite all had a purpose—nothing was done for mere show. The solemnity of an occasion would be augmented by the way in which something was done but not merely by doing more, unnecessary things. A Solemn Pontifical High Mass in a cathedral is more ornamental than a field Mass said in the open. But they are identical in content and even in tempo and character. And similarly, the features of the Western rite at its best, whether they are textual, architectural or decorative, are given a sharpened significance by restraint.

These spacial moving relationships also impart an interesting note of corporate action to the Western liturgy when it is fully and properly conducted by adding a shifting perspective to the text and music of the rite. The visual element is further heightened by the liturgical colors: white for feasts of our Lord, our Lady, confessors and virgins; purple for penitential seasons; red for Pentecost and martyrs’ days; green for the lesser Sundays and ferias through the year; and black for funerals and requiems. Others have found a place in certain local uses, as blue, yellow and gray, but are seldom seen today.

Although much of the present ordinary of the mass had its origin in private prayers of the celebrant, it is well suited to the corporate act. As private—hence personal—prayers, it expresses sentiments of the occasion which should be those of the faithful as well as of the celebrant, which can be followed in spirit and endorsed by their responses. The penitential preparation, offering, intercessions, pray ers for worthy reception speak for the community. So the liturgical revival taking place in Latin and Anglican Churches follows a course already prepared for it by the innate Eucharistic dispositions of past generations.

It is appropriate, certainly, that the faithful assume a role which is both active and integrated with the action of the altar, as the Church has encouraged them to do. In American Orthodox missions, therefore, there are no silent parts. Even the solemn parts—as the anaphora—said in a lowered voice, are always audible, and the responsive and antiphonal parts are assigned to the laity and not confined to the ministers or servers. Choral parts likewise, are commended to the participation of all, for the liturgy is an offering of the Mystical Body in toto, not something performed in the presence of mute and passive witnesses. For similar reasons it is customary to avoid parallel action and to maintain an orderly sequence of unconfused sections in the liturgy.

The other Sacraments and the Divine Office preserve a similar, direct, clear-cut outline. In the West as in the East, the sanctification of man’s activities has been the subject of a considerable ritual development, with blessings available for all manner of things and occasions.

The Western Divine Office (Horologion), like the Eucharist, is adaptable to varying degrees of solemnity from choral performance with chant to private recitation. Tidy groups of psalms together with hymns, brief Scripture lessons, versicles and prayers are assigned to each of the day hours.

All Christian calendars are outlined by the major dominical anniversaries: the Nativity, Crucifixion, Resurrection, Ascension and Pentecost. In the West, the Sundays are counted from these pivotal events, rather than called by topical names. Thus there are seasons of varying length after Christmas, after the Epiphany, after Pentecost (or after Trinity). These, together with the Great Fast of Lent, and the Christmas Fast called Advent, comprise the cycle of the Church Year.

Western Rite Orthodox have their own calendar which commemorates the more important pre-schism Saints of both East and West, together with several later saints such as Seraphim of Sarov and Sergius of Radonezh. And the important names of the Church’s formative centuries are given appropriate rank: the early Fathers, together with those doctors and confessors to whom we today owe the exposition and preservation of the faith. In general, the emendation has been guided by three main objectives: to achieve a proportional and balanced catalogue of the great lights of the Church, to restore to active status commemorations of many of the Eastern Fathers which have lapsed in the popular Western calendars, and to recognize such Western Saints as have been obscured by the predominantly Latin character of Western Catholicism. The Western Orthodox Calendar is therefore both Orthodox and Western without dominant regionalisms: entirely catholic in character, stressing the essentials, omitting the exotic: biblical and patristic, and representative of the Church’s life in all lands and all ages…