Pouring Water on Acid: The Sad Consequences of Spiritual Ignorance
The Sad Consequences of Spiritual Ignorance
by Bishop Chrysostomos of Etna and the St. Gregory Palamas Monastery
I remember, as an undergraduate student in a university
chemistry laboratory, a fellow student who was having tremendous
difficulty understanding the basic principles of laboratory
science. A pre-medical student, she lacked both proper high
school preparation in the general ideas of science and any
concept of the importance of procedure in experimental
methodology. Having accomplished very high scores on college
entrance examinations, she was capable of learning what she did
not know. However, something prevented her from understanding her
ignorance.
Try as I might to help this young woman during our long
laboratory sessions, I proved myself unable to do so. As I was
unsuccessfully explaining to her one day the principles of a
certain experimental technique, the doctoral student who was
directing the session happened by. He asked if he might help me.
What he said to the girl—directions which turned around her
performance in the class—has always stayed in my mind.
Looking at her intensely, he noted:
"Your intelligence is protecting your
ignorance. In science we must not think that 'things are as
they are' and that an intelligent person is one who discovers
this fact. In science, we must treat our knowledge of events
as a form of ignorance. Then we are free to ask, 'Why is this
as it is?' For example, we are told that we should never pour
water on acid. If we learn this piece of information, it may
allow us to appear intelligent. But we are in fact ignorant.
And unless we learn 'why' we should not pour water on acid,
we will invite disaster. For one day, knowing the fact but
not the 'why,' then we would never have made this error. In
science, then, we must always understand causes and effects
and know the 'why' of things. Otherwise we are ignorant with
facts."
I have often thought of this wise teacher while reading texts
on Orthodox liturgical theology—a subject in which I have
great interest and which has invited the attention of some
modernist Orthodox theologians. Many of our contemporary Orthodox
thinkers know a great deal about the history and development of
the Liturgy. Under the influence of Roman Catholic scholars, they
have even produced cold, critical commentaries on the Liturgy
which aim at exposing its supposed inadequacies. Using the catchy
phrases of contemporary scholarly trends, they spew forth snide
and even sarcastic analyses and critiques of the worship services
which the Fathers of our Church have always approached with awe
and trembling.
In all of their ponderous studies of the Orthodox Liturgy I
suspect that many of these popular scholars suffer from the same
ignorance that I found in my laboratory companion at university.
They know facts. They observe historical data. They criticize and
attack the Church's liturgical traditions. But in the end, I
wonder if they really know the 'whys' and the rationale that
underlie what we might call "procedural" liturgics.
Under the influence of these scholars, many young Priests wish
to dispense with the Icon screen in Orthodox Churches, prompted
as they are by the poor scholarship of their mentors, who have
invented a history of the templon that ignores its early
use and development. Recently I heard of a Priest who dispensed
with one of the entrances in the Liturgy. Yet another Priest has
proclaimed the expression, "Again and again" in the
liturgical petitions redundant. And all of these innovations are
no doubt backed up by high-sounding "facts" and
historical observations. They reflect the idea that the Liturgy
is a man-made drama subject to the tastes and developments of
various ages and cultures.
But what of the "why" of the Liturgy? What of its
procedural realities? In fact, the Icon screen in our Churches
divides the Holy of Holies from other sections of the Church. And
this division is not architectural or merely "spatial."
The Eucharist rests in the Altar on the Holy Table. And its
Presence there sanctifies and changes that place. In the
procedure of the Liturgy, the Icon screen protects that which is
holy from the profane and that which is profane from the power of
the holy. No historical acrobatics meant to prove that the Icon
screen is an impediment to worship can change the fact that the
Altar contains something which must be protected and concealed,
except in those moments when the Holy Things are brought out for
the sanctification of the people. Such acrobatics represent the
ignorance of knowledge without "whys." And just as
water poured on acid can cause a tremendous explosion, so too can
an ignorance of liturgical procedure bring spiritual harm to
those who know facts but cannot put them, in context.
The Liturgy is a mystical event. Its development is subject to
historical investigation. But the "whys" of its
development lie within the action of the Holy Spirit. The Liturgy
is a formula, as it were, by which the earthly lifts itself up to
the heavenly. It exists for this purpose. Any changes and
developments which we see in it are not the result of human whim
but of maturation and the development of Divine procedure. When
St. Basil, for example, wished to utter the Liturgy in his own
words, this proved impossible. Rather, by his own account, holy
personages came to him and guided him.
The entrances in the Liturgy are not just processions. They
re-enact, outside time and space, events in human salvation. They
bring those events into fruition for the Faithful. When we say
"Again and again" in our prayerful petitions during the
Liturgy, we are not being redundant. We are expressing in a
mystical language, the symbolic language of Liturgy, the inner
intensity of our prayer. We are expressing with repetition the
dimensions of prayer in a realm which is open-ended, just as we
close many of our petitions with the words, "unto the ages
of ages." In every liturgical act and phrase, we are
adhering to a Mystical formula by which what is transcendent is
made present and by which the unholy are deemed worthy to behold
the holy. To understand these acts and phrases as mere movements
and words is to be ignorant. To participate in them by knowing
their meaning as a procedure is to be a true worshipper.
The Church has taught us liturgical procedure. Those who
analyze this procedure without knowing why it has been taught to
us risk great danger. Our scholars and clergy have begun to throw
water of human disbelief and rationality on the acid of spiritual
truth. The Liturgy has been chopped to pieces in the modernist
Churches. Evangelicals coming into the Church without proper
preparation have made what is often a cheap circus act of what
should be a window into eternity. Snide scholars, the masters of
"Punk Patristics," have suggested that the Liturgy is
an a "sad state." And spiritually deluded fakirs in the
guise of Orthodox believers have begun to rewrite and redefine
the Liturgy.
The explosion that awaits those who fail to understand the
Liturgy at a procedural and spiritual level is a sad one. It
consumes not only the Priest, but the Faithful. It consumes not
only the body, but the soul. It burns and disfigures not only
external belief, but internal faith. Those who follow the
heterodox in their treatment of worship as something man-made and
invented—a device for "creating" Grace—have
failed to know that the Orthodox Church alone preserves that
which is authentic. They have defiled what is holy by associating
it with that which is indeed an invention of man. They sin not
only against the Church’s Divine worship, but against the
very Church itself.
It is time that the modernists either cease their deprecatory
studies of Orthodox worship or openly join the heterodox whom
they so wish to please by their adolescent rebellion against the
Faith. And it is time that modernist clergy cease taking pride in
their ignorance and immerse themselves in an understanding of the
general nature of worship in Orthodoxy and of the authenticity of
spiritual experience which the Liturgy guarantees to those who
enact it with fidelity to the spiritual formulas by which its
power is made manifest.
What I have said may seem harsh. And it may seem that I have
not allowed for sympathy for the modernist clergy who, coming
into the Orthodox Church with no knowledge of its true spiritual
power, are themselves victims. I am, however, compelled to speak
truthfully, for through the Liturgy we Christians receive the
very source of life: The Body and Blood of Christ. If the Liturgy
is defiled, our food becomes defiled. And if one can sympathize
with modernists who have gone astray, this sympathy prompts us
also to speak firmly to them about their responsibility to
overcome ignorance and its dangers.
From Orthodox Tradition, Vol VIII, No. 2, p. 5
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