Page 40 - The Priest, Summer 2015

duce you to heaven, certainly you would not dare to speak to anyone, even when you would see there your father or your brother. In the same way here in the church one should speak only about spir- itual things, because here is heaven! You should be completely lled with great fear and reverence even before the tre- mendous moment of the consecration. Be awe- lled and attentive before you see the holy veils extended upon the al- tar and the choir of the angels preceding the priest. I say you even more: ascend in this moment to heaven!”9
The ancient norm of the Fathers
This short overview of the liturgical teaching of St John Chrysostom unequivo- cally manifests the truth that the rst and fundamental characteristic of Christian worship is the awe- lled adoration of the majesty of the triune God in the Eucharis- tic liturgy. This awe- lled adoration nds her concretisation in the adoration of the Eucharistic Body of Christ in the moment of His offering as the immolated Lamb upon the altar, and again in the moment of receiving Him in holy Communion.
The revealed Word of God itself in the Holy Scripture presents us this character- istic as the indispensable norm of true worship, as it is particularly evident in the Book of Isaiah and the Book of Apoca- lypse. The Church of the Apostles and of the Fathers faithfully and clearly imple- mented this rst and basic characteristic of the liturgy. This is the vertical, trans- cendent, Theocentric and Christocentric dimension, which is expressed through the acts of adoration; the proskynesis with all its variety of exterior manifestation. The creatures who as rst creatures and in a most perfect and exemplar manner real- ise such a worship are God’s holy angels.
When the Word of God and the Church Fathers stress the sacred and transcendent dimension of divine worship, they prefer- entially invoke the angels as examples to be imitated. The letter to the Hebrew de- scribes angels as “liturgical spirits” (pneu- mata leiturgika, Heb 1:14). They are the rst adorers of Christ, the Incarnate Son of God:
When he brings the rst-born into the 9 John Chrysostom, Hom. 36, 5 on 1 Cor.
world, he says, “Let all God’s angels wor- ship [prokynesátoson] him.” (Heb 1:6)
The angels lead the Christians to adore God alone, because they categorically re- ject a worship centered and oriented upon creatures. This mind one can recognize in the following scene from the Book of Apocalypse:
Then I fell down at his feet to worship him, but he said to me, “You must not do that! I am a fellow servant with you and your brethren who hold the testimony of Jesus. Worship [proskýneson] God.” (Rev 19:10)
The same event is repeated in chapter 22, verse 9. From that fact one can recog- nize the great importance of this liturgi- cal law. When one celebrates the liturgy, one must not put creatures in the centre; neither angels, nor human beings, nor even the human celebrant of the liturgy, but only God, the Incarnate God, the Eucharistic Christ. The magisterium of the Second Vatican Council on liturgy remembers precisely this perennial law of the Christian worship insomuch as the lit- urgy has to re ect the very nature of the Church:
in [the Church] the human is directed and subordinated to the divine, the vis- ible likewise to the invisible, action to contemplation, and this present world to that city yet to come, which we seek. (Cf Heb 13:14)10
This rst and most important principle of the liturgy, of the lex orandi, which is rooted in the Word of God, was not only faithfully transmitted by the teachings of the Fathers of the Church, but was con- cretely realized by the manner in which the liturgy was celebrated in their times. Every time the Church tries to reform the liturgy, sometimes renewing and improv- ing it when there are practices alien or contrary to the very nature of the Divine worship, she applied as a criterion the “an- cient norm of the holy Fathers” (pristina sanctorum Patrum norma).
The reform of the liturgy, or better said the renewal of the liturgy, as desired by the Council of Trent and Second Vatican Council, followed this criterion. St Pius V,
10 Vatican II, Sacrosanctum Concilium, no. 2.
publishing the Missale Romanum in 1570 referred in his bull Quo primum to the “an- cient norm of the holy Fathers.” The same phrase was used by the Second Vatican Council in establishing the norms of the reform of the Roman Missal (cf. Sacrosanc- tum Concilium, no. 50) and the criterion is repeated in the General Institution to the Roman Missal (no. 7). The ancient norm of the Holy Fathers is precisely the norm which stresses the sacred, the Divine, the heavenly and eternal, by acts of adoration and their exterior expressions.
All practical norms in the liturgy and even more those which should be revised or changed must have this aim: to express more clearly the sacred, as demanded by the Second Vatican Council:
“In the renewal of the liturgy the texts and rites have to be ordered in such a manner, that they express more clearly the sacred.”11
The same phrase was cited by Pope Paul VI in the Apostolic Constitution Missale Romanum (1969) with which he approved the new Roman Missal. The re- turn to the Fathers without doubt should not have as an effect the impoverishment of the sacred, of the transcendent and of the acts of adoration in the liturgy, but precisely the contrary: the return to more acts and gestures of adoration and holy awe. To impoverish the liturgy by reduc- ing the signs of adoration and diminish- ing the sacred, justifying such a reform as a return to the norm of the Fathers is not only an evident contradiction to the patristic witnesses, but represents also an attitude which the universal Magisterium of the Church condemned as “liturgical archeologism” in the encyclical Mediator Dei of Pope Pius XII.
Two decades before the last liturgical reform in 1969, Louis Bouyer rightly ob- served:
In order not to confuse our perception of its permanent value with any attempt to mimic and copy childishly what they had and what they did that was peculiar to their time alone, it is probably safer not to consider the Fathers in isolation.
11 “Textus et ritus ita ordinari oportet, ut sanc- ta, quae signi cant, clarius exprimant.” Vati- can II, Sacrosanctum Concilium, no. 21.
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