Preface to the book by Fr. Alexander Schmemann "The Liturgy of Death and Modern Culture". How lethargic sleep is recognized and distinguished from the onset of death

Our in every way multi- and poly- world is full of value systems. Every state, ethnic group, every generation, every religion, party, community, every person has their own system of values. I repeat, there are many of them, they stick out and rise, they form huge colonies of stalagmites, rows and chains, palisades and walls. Yes, according to the word of the saint, these partitions do not reach the sky - but in our earthly existence they divide us almost tightly. However, there is a stone that lies at the foundation of every Babylonian pillar, the attitude towards it in one or another system of values ​​determines the entire system, a stone that every person born into the world tries to move from its place - and no one succeeds: death.

The attitude towards death determines the attitude towards life. The lifestyles of people, one of whom believes death is the inevitable end of everything and only dreams of delaying this end for as long as possible with the help of medical technologies, and the other - only a transition to eternal life, are different, like the styles of running a sprinter and a marathon runner. The lifestyle of the sprinter society, conventionally referred to as the "consumer society", is the style of today's Russia: death in its most diverse forms, from savoring terrorist attacks and disasters to reporting on the life of hospices, has only become a media reason for discussions on Facebook, death in the form of dismemberment on the TV screen does not require empathy, but just a glass of popcorn, death seems to surprise no one - but at the same time, the modern Russian prefers not to ask the most important question “how will I die” and pushes the death of his loved ones away, hides it from himself, gives it at the mercy the funeral industry (a part of which often becomes nowadays, alas, the Orthodox parish practice of commemorating the dead…). With the impoverishment of the depth of a person's relationship to death, his life also becomes impoverished.

In this context, quite timely, or, as Christians say, providential, I see the event that took place in October this year - the publication of the book "The Liturgy of Death and Modern Culture" by the Moscow publishing house "Granat". Thirty years have passed since the death of its author, a prominent pastor of the Russian diaspora, apologist, theologian of the Orthodox Church, Protopresbyter Alexander Schmemann (1921-1983), but his books continue to be in demand in Russia, not only by the church reader, but also by the secular - "The Historical Path of Orthodoxy" , Eucharist. The Sacrament of the Kingdom”, “Holy to the Holiest”, “Water and Spirit”, published posthumously “Diaries” and other works of Fr. Alexander are imbued with that special spirit of tragic, but joyful Christianity, which is built around the great event of the resurrection of Christ, His victory over hell and death. Schmemann's theological thought attracts with its utmost honesty, lack of confessional inertness and high prophetic degree, and his language, the language of Shmelev, Zaitsev, Bunin, is an example of excellent Russian literature, which Schmemann himself knew and loved well.

The local council of the free Russian Church gave two escapes: the emigrant one survived and brought intellectual fruit, while the Russian one perished and showed a feat of holiness.

"The Liturgy of Death" is a book, small in volume, but extremely capacious in content. It was born from a series of lectures given by Fr. Alexander Schmemann in 1979 at St. Vladimir's Seminary in the USA, read in English, recorded on a tape recorder by one of the students and subsequently transcribed. The topic of these lectures was an important subject of reflection for Fr. Alexandra - as the translator Elena Dorman notes, he was going to write a book about the Christian attitude to death, its reflection (and distortion) in the liturgical practice of the Church and a look at the death of a secular society, but did not have time. And the current translation of these surviving lectures is all the more remarkable because it carefully preserves the pastor's lively voice, his figurative, often passionate speech, the main - Paschal - message of his entire liturgical thought.

In four chapters - four lectures: "The Development of Christian Funeral Rites", "Funeral: Rites and Customs", "Prayers for the Dead", "The Liturgy of Death and Modern Culture" - Schmemann shows how, over the centuries, the spirit of parousia gradually left the church consciousness how the pagan fear of death and the dreary obsession with the "afterlife", penetrating into the liturgical practice of commemorating the dead, crowded out the main essence of the Good News - the joy of the risen Christ and the confidence of Christians following the Risen One in their own resurrection. They pushed out - but could not completely push out, the Paschal meaning is alive in the Church, although obscured by distortions (the author methodically analyzes, using specific examples of Orthodox funeral services and prayers, how and why this happened), and Christians face the creative task of eliminating these obscurities. However - and here the author's speech becomes comparable to the speech of the Israeli prophets and the great Russian satirists of the 19th century - these obscurities caused the attitude to death to be crushed even outside the church fence. As Sergei Chapnin notes in the preface to the book, “Speaking of a secularist society, Father Alexander defines it through the attitude towards death - this is, first of all, “a worldview, life experience, a way of seeing and, most importantly, live life as if she has nothing to do with death"". The loss of the vertical of being, the devaluation of the meaning of life, the dehumanization of a person who has dehumanized the Divine - Schmemann cites examples from American reality in the 70s of the 20th century in his lectures, but they are also relevant for us, Russians of the 21st century. Bitter words about. Alexandra: “When you go to confession, try, starting right now, to spend less time on your “impure thoughts” - they just flooded confession! - and confess like this: “I confess to You, my Lord and my God, that I also contributed to the fact that this world has turned into a hell of consumerism and apostasy” ”cannot be more applicable to those who today in Russia call themselves“ believers "...

As you know, the earth is full of rumors, the book "The Liturgy of Death and Modern Culture" was eagerly awaited long before its publication, and a fair part of the circulation immediately went from hand to hand. In my opinion, this is a good sign - no matter how religiously thinking and caring people in Russia position themselves, no matter how critically they approach church realities and events, they listen carefully to the word of the Orthodox Church. And a word about Alexander Schmemann is just such a word that is expected from the Church. A word about struggle and victory - but not over our neighbors, as is often declared from various stands and ambos, but about victory over the main enemy of mankind - death, the victory of Christ, which we are called to share.

Ksenia Luchenko

The book of Protopresbyter Alexander Schmemann "The Liturgy of Death", first published 30 years after the death of the author, was twice denied the stamp of the Publishing Council of the Russian Orthodox Church. This means that church censors do not recommend selling it in church bookshops. Temples that still sell it, and there are several of them in Moscow, run the risk of getting into trouble if an inspection comes.

On the same days that Schmemann's book was not approved by the Publishing Council, the official website of the Moscow Patriarchate published a text by Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin, Chairman of the Synodal Department for Relations between the Church and Society, in which he calls for "overcoming the 'Paris captivity' of Russian theology" and writes, that in the “Orthodox intellectual stratum, too many completely betrayed themselves into the hands of the heirs of the theology of the Diaspora, which in the second half of the 20th century tried to declare itself mainstream and continues these attempts to this day. Yes, the Christian thinkers of the diaspora did a great deal to preserve the faith among their flock. However, by definition, the diaspora is a rather marginal phenomenon in the context of the life of free Orthodox peoples.”

There is no collusion here: Archpriest Vsevolod does not influence the work of the Publishing Council. There is no direct reference specifically to Schmemann: the “marginal diaspora” is dozens of theologians who belonged to different church jurisdictions. Nevertheless, this coincidence speaks of a trend. About the desire to limit the significance of the works of Orthodox preachers in Europe and America to the applied preservation of faith among emigrants (despite the fact that these preachers attracted residents of the countries in which they found themselves - English, French, Americans) into their communities. The desire to abandon their experience and thoughts as insignificant for those countries where Orthodoxy is declared the religion of the majority.

Schmemann looks at the modern attitude to death, the dying and the deceased person through the prism of early Christian texts full of confidence in the resurrection.

Protopresbyter Alexander Schmemann is one of the brightest heirs of that same "Paris school" of Russian theology. He studied at the St. Sergius Theological Institute in Paris, where many of the passengers of the "philosophical ship" taught. Schmemann himself belongs to the second generation of emigrants who were born outside of Russia and have never seen Russia.

In his text, Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin contrasts the emigrant theologians with the New Martyrs - Orthodox priests and laity who remained in Russia and died in the first decades of Soviet power, many of whom were canonized. In fact, these are two sprouts from the same root. During the revolution, in 1917-1918, the Local Cathedral of the Orthodox Russian Church worked in the diocesan house in Likhovy Lane in Moscow. It was the first church meeting free from state pressure in several centuries. Several bishops had already been shot, church property was already being requisitioned and churches were being destroyed, and several hundred people were arguing about the Russification of liturgical texts, the participation of priests in politics, the transition to the Gregorian calendar, the involvement of women in church work, the reform of church administration, a new translation of the Bible into Russian language. Subsequently, about three hundred participants of the Council passed through the camps or were shot, and several dozen ended up in exile, and among them are those who founded the St. Sergius Institute in Paris: Metropolitan Evlogy (Georgievsky), the last Chief Procurator of the Synod, historian Anton Kartashev. No development of theology and normal church life in the USSR was possible. The local council of the free Russian Church gave two escapes: the emigrant one survived and brought intellectual fruit, while the Russian one perished and showed a feat of holiness.

The councilors tried to decide how to organize the life of the church community without relying on the state and without the restrictions imposed by the status of the official religion, how to learn again to be simply the Church of Christ. Protopresbyter Alexander Schmemann and other emigre priests (Archpriest John Meyendorff, Archpriest Georgy Florovsky) realized this in America, where several Russian dioceses dating back to the 18th century merged into the American Orthodox Church, which became legally independent in 1970. Schmemann left for America, where he began to teach at St. Vladimir's Seminary and several American colleges, conducted religious programs on Radio Liberty, because life in his native Paris, among the Russian diaspora, became cramped for him. As his widow Ulyana Schmemann (nee Osorgina) writes in her memoirs, Father Alexander suffered from the fact that among the Russian Parisian professors “the majority accepted as truth only what used to be in Russia and, in their opinion, should have remained the same and in the present and in the future." Schmemann, on the other hand, was a man of the 20th century, acutely experiencing all its challenges, Russian by culture and European by fate.

Publishing house "Granat"

American Orthodoxy was distanced from Russia, did not depend on it politically and economically, while it was not fully incorporated into American society, accepting its members. American church (OCA-OrthodoxchurchinAmerica) was never conceived as a church of the Diaspora: Romanians, Americans, and Greeks have entered and are entering it, services are held in different languages. The Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia (ROCOR) remained the Church of the Diaspora in full measure, the basis of its self-identification being loyalty to old Russia and the preservation of Russian piety.

The theology of Father Alexander Schmemann is inseparable from this unique experience of "simply Orthodoxy", when only the liturgy remains at the center of church life - a living communion with God around which the community of the faithful is gathered.

Schmemann was not only a church scholar and an active apologist, but also one of the Russian writers of the 20th century, who, due to some misunderstanding, was not inscribed in the history of literature. His "Diaries", published in Russia in 2006, is a philosophical confessional prose, on the one hand, very characteristic of the era and environment, grounded by issues and events relevant to the 1970s, on the other hand, ascending to the best examples of Christian literature, "Confessions" of Blessed Augustine, « Provitasua" Cardinal Newman and others. Schmemann, as the author of the Diaries, is a Christian left alone with the modern world, without a shock-absorbing ideology and ready-made schemes. He doubts, makes mistakes, experiences fear and disappointment, but even in anxiety he does not forget about God.

The new book, The Liturgy of Death and Contemporary Culture, differs from Father Alexander's previously published books in that he did not write it himself. In the "Diaries" it is written only about the intention to collect a book with such a title, which Schmemann did not have time to realize before his death in December 1983. Preparing for lecture series « LiturgyofDeath", which he taught as an elective course in the late 70s, he only sketched theses and quotations. One of the students, Canadian Orthodox priest Robert Hutchen, recorded the lectures on a dictaphone and transcribed them. Only in 2008, the translator and editor of all the texts of Father Alexander, published in Russian, Elena Dorman found out that these records were preserved. The published book is Schmemann's oral speech, translated from an English person who for many years heard the author speaking both languages, that is, translated with the utmost care. In the Diaries there is evidence of Schmemann's work on these lectures: "Monday, September 9, 1974. Started working on a new course yesterday: “ LiturgyofDeath”. And again I am amazed: how no one did this, no one noticed the monstrous degeneration of the religion of the resurrection into funeral self-pleasure (with a hint of sinister masochism; all these “weep and sob ...”). The fatal significance of Byzantium on the path of Orthodoxy!

St. John Chrysostom in the "Catechetical Oration", which is read in all Orthodox churches on Easter night, exclaims: "Death, where is your sting?! Hell, where is your victory?<…>Christ is risen - and no one is dead in the tomb! This is the very essence of the Christian faith, which age-old stratifications have made less poignant and obvious, and which Father Alexander reminded his listeners, and now to readers. In his book there is no emotionality inherent in Chrysostom. Schmemann is true to himself, calm and reasonable, even sad. He analyzes modern practices related to death and burial - philosophical, medical, psychological and ritual, religious. He talks about how death becomes "aseptic", how they hide it, try to "tame it", but it still takes its toll. Father Alexander does not teach, does not impose faith in the resurrection and salvation through Christ. He himself goes with the reader all the way of reasoning about death, about the fact that without death - terrible and inevitable - the fate of a person will not take place in its entirety. Schmemann looks at the modern attitude to death, the dying and the deceased person through the prism of early Christian texts full of confidence in the resurrection. This does not mean at all that Father Alexander proposes to artificially return to the human condition of the first centuries of our era. He only changes his optics, tries to overcome the inertia of grief and existential despair, deeply understanding the internal structure of modern people, being one of them.

"She is alive!" - Father Alexander quotes in his book an inscription on the grave of a young girl in the Christian catacombs of Rome. “There are people who, many years after death, are perceived as alive,” Moscow priest Dmitry Ageev wrote on the Facebook wall 30 years after Schmemann’s death. Probably, Father Alexander understood something about death, if he is still alive.

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Audio recording of the report of Protopresbyter Alexander Schmemann “Freedom and Tradition in the Church”, as well as reflections on the works of the last period of the life of the famous Russian Orthodox theologian of the 20th century: “... he finds liturgical meaning in many cultural phenomena. And even in those who seem far from the Church.

Description

In 2013, the book by Protopresbyter Alexander Schmemann "The Liturgy of Death and Modern Culture" was published in Helena Dorman's translation. And on the radio "Grad Petrov" a previously unknown report by Father Alexander Schmemann "Freedom and Tradition in the Church" was heard.

The book is four lectures delivered in English, so thoughtful translation was required. But the English text was never written by Father Alexander Schmemann - this is a textual transcript of his oral speeches.

Unlike the book "The Liturgy of Death", we can hear the report "Freedom and Tradition in the Church", it was delivered by Father Alexander in 1976 in Paris at the congress of the RSHD in Russian.

The audio recording of the report was provided to the radio station "Grad Petrov" by the chairman of the radio station "Voice of Orthodoxy" (Paris), Archpriest Vladimir Yagello.

“And, finally, more than that: a kind of spiritual distortion of all shades, the very almost incorrect experience of Christianity. I cannot speak about this now, but I could say and could prove that if the church consciousness was distorted somewhere, it was not distorted because someone wrote some book at the Moscow Theological Academy. Believe me, no one has read this book. Maybe the Catholics read because they read everything. And it had no effect on the Russian consciousness. But already about what enters into worship ten years later, they say: this is Tradition. As the late Boris Ivanovich said to Sove, reading the liturgy at the Theological Institute: “Yes, yes, fathers, go to the parishes and you will see. You will be told: oh, this is the Apostolic Tradition, don't touch it. But be sure that this "apostolic tradition" appeared in the sixties of the last century. And then they will say that this is modernism. And modernism lies in the fact that the Throne itself is simply installed at this point. When you feel that some kind of dark veil is descending here, against which you can do nothing, nothing!”

These speeches refer to the last period of the life of the famous Russian Orthodox theologian of the 20th century. They allow you to reflect on the theological thought of Protopresbyter Alexander Schmemann and open up new horizons for understanding and further development of modern theology.

Marina Lobanova and lecturer at the Institute of Theology and Philosophy Konstantin Makhlak talk about the book by Protopresbyter Alexander Schmemann "The Liturgy of Death and Modern Culture" and the report "Freedom and Tradition in the Church" in the Book Review program.

Konstantin Makhlak:

“Schmemann at the end of his work, when he moved from the theme of liturgical theology in its purest form to a broader understanding of the theme of worship, liturgical tradition, moved on to perceiving it through the prism of culture, through the prism of human existence here and now. This is an important turn, which is rarely found in specialized works devoted only to liturgical theology, historical liturgy, for example. And here he comes to very interesting generalizations. This idea is often found in him, it goes into the context of his statements - he finds liturgical meaning in many cultural phenomena. And even in those who seem far from the Church.

The works of Protopresbyter Alexander Schmemann are constantly being reprinted, even those that are already widely known. However, the understanding of his legacy is always relevant.

Of course, it is important to discuss the previously unknown performances of Father Alexander Schmemann. But in their light, even earlier works can take on a new meaning.

We also bring to your attention a reflection on the collection of articles by Father Alexander "Theology and Divine Service".

There are 3 programs in the cycle. Total duration 1 hour 48 minutes.

The size of the zip archive is 244 MB.

Protopresbyter Alexander Schmemann "Freedom and Tradition in the Church".

Book Review: "The Liturgy of Death and Modern Culture".

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A few introductory remarks

In the Sunday troparion, tone 4, we hear: rebut death... But, taken literally, these words will lead to the immediate closure of our seminar! So I will suggest, at least for now, not to take them literally, and then, of course, the question arises: how are we to understand these words? So, the goal of our workshop is practical. We will try, and precisely at the practical level - pastoral, liturgical, musical - to consider the problems related to that essential area of ​​church life and ministry, which can be called "the liturgy of death." (Note that I use here the word "liturgy" not in its narrow, exclusively liturgical sense, but in the sense that it had in the early Church, where it denoted an essential ministry and function, including the ecclesiastical vision of death. , and the answer to it.) But by saying this, we are already attaching some quality to the word "practical". For nothing in the Church - especially in a field so deep and important - can simply be reduced to the category of the practical, if the "practical" carries in itself an opposition to the theoretical, vision, faith, tradition, or even a break with them.

All practical activity of the Church is always, first of all, the translation into practice of theory, the manifestation of faith. Thus, for example, when in the 17th century a French princess requested in her will that a thousand masses be celebrated in the city of Paris on the day of her funeral, her request reflected a certain type of piety rooted in a certain understanding of "theory", an understanding of death itself. When in the Church (and this time in our own Orthodox Church) an incredibly complex system of rules gradually developed that determined when it was possible and when it was impossible to pray for the dead, and then these rules began to be constantly violated by the clergy themselves (so to speak, at the request of the public, because that people wanted so much), we see in this a clear proof that there have been changes in the very understanding of prayer for the dead and that it is required not only to ensure the implementation of the rules, but first of all to reveal their meaning. Finally, we can look at the long history of cemeteries: at first they were located extra muros, outside towns and villages, and formed necropolis, "city of the dead", separated from "city of the living"; then the cemetery moves to the very center of the "city of the living" and becomes not only a place of rest, but the center of events that have nothing to do with death. (It may surprise you that even entertainment events took place in cemeteries in the Middle Ages and this did not shock anyone.) And then we watch [how another transformation takes place], as a result of which cemeteries turn into beautiful hygienic and peaceful "Forest of Lona" of our time , into the real pride of our culture, and here we must understand that in the very ethos our society has undergone tremendous changes, and this time a change in the view not only of death, but of life itself.

I give these examples - taken, so to speak, at random, illustrating various aspects of the problem considered at the seminar - in order to try to formulate the problem itself. These examples show that we will achieve little if in our “practical” research we bypass or forget the theological, historical and cultural basis that determines the current state of affairs and presents it to us precisely as a “problem”, perhaps even as the main problem facing before us, Orthodox Christians living in the West, in America, in the last quarter of the 20th century and desperately trying to be “Orthodox” in a world and culture not only alien to us, but in the last sense openly hostile to the Orthodox faith and vision.

Challenges of modern culture

Secularism

Thus, I see my task in these four lectures as briefly as possible (and in a sense, in the order of a working hypothesis) to define that scale of values, those starting points, without which we risk discussing "pseudo-solutions of pseudo-problems." And our first starting point, of course, is contemporary culture. Whether we like it or not, it is impossible to artificially separate death from culture, because culture is, first of all, vision and understanding. life, "worldview", and therefore, of necessity, the understanding of death. We can say that it is in relation to death that the understanding of life in a particular culture is revealed and determined - its understanding of the meaning and purpose of life.

For me, it is certain that the majority of Orthodox Christians, especially those who live in the West, sometimes consciously, and sometimes not, have accepted this culture, including its attitude towards death. On others, this attitude has simply been imposed as the only possible one, and they do not realize how radically this attitude differs from the attitude of the Church, which she hastily displays for one hour (I mean the hour that we spend near the tomb, which is brought to the church on the way from the mortuary to the cemetery). But even this hour - the current short funeral service - has already been adapted to the modern state of affairs, so as not to contradict modern culture, but rather to create a kind of alibi for it, to provide this culture with proof of its respect for the "faith of the fathers" (which, like all known, mainly expressed in traditions, rites and ceremonies!).

Thus, if our task (and the task of the Church always and everywhere) is to understand, objectively evaluate and transform culture - any culture, in any place, to transform it in the light of its own faith, embodied and preserved in its heritage and traditions, then we need to first try to understand the ultimate meaning of our modern culture, and that means to understand the meaning that this culture ascribes to death. And here, dear brothers and sisters, the basic and seemingly paradoxical fact is that our culture does not see in death no sense at all. Or to put it another way: the meaning of death in modern culture is that it does not makes sense. I will have to explain this, because in reality this is not a paradox at all, but a natural (and, I would even say, inevitable) consequence of secularism, which, as everyone knows and agrees, is the main, truly comprehensive characteristic of our society. culture.

So, what is secularism, considered in the context we have given? Whatever else is said or could not be said about it (and we, obviously, simply do not have time to discuss all its aspects), secularism is first of all an idea, an experience of life, seeing its meaning and its value in life itself, without attributing it to anything that can be called "otherworldly". As I have already shown in some of my articles (and not only me, of course, but practically everyone who has studied secularism), secularism cannot simply be identified with atheism or the rejection of religion. Thus, we all know (or should already know) that American secularism (different in this from, say, Marxist) is in fact very, almost pathological, religious. However, one need only look at the headlines of sermons (you know, in the Sabbath newspapers announcing events in the Second Baptist Church or Thirty-first Presbyterian) or read the list of events in any parish (completely regardless of its confessional affiliation) to understand that religion in secular culture (as, for example, in American culture), it actually pursues the same goals as secularism itself, namely, happiness, the realization of one's abilities and opportunities, social and personal prosperity. Such goals can be both lofty and noble - saving the world from hunger, fighting racism, or more limited - preserving ethnic identity, maintaining some system of public security. My main interest here is that neither in secularism in its entirety nor in its religious expression is there room for death. as a significant event as "deadline" kairos human destiny. One can say, without fear of coming across as a cynic and without trying to lightly joke, that in our culture the only value of death is the cash value of the life insurance of the deceased: at least there is something tangible, real in this.

"Conspiracy of Silence" (death denial)

Death is a fact, inevitable and generally unpleasant (I don't think the latter needs to be explained). As such (and here I am trying to summarize the secularist argument) it should be handled in the most efficient business style, that is, in a way that minimizes its "unattractiveness" to all participants in the event, starting with the dying "patient" (as he is today called ; a person is a "patient" of death), and the anxiety that death can cause to life and the living. Therefore, our society has created a complex but well-established mechanism for dealing with death, the unfailing effectiveness of which is ensured by the equally unfailing [impeccable] help of medical and funeral workers, clergymen and - last of the conspirators in a row, but not least - the family itself.

This mechanism is programmed to provide multiple services to clients in a specific order. It makes death as easy, painless and invisible as possible. To achieve this result, first lie to the patient about his true state, and when this becomes impossible, then he is immersed in a narcotic sleep. Then this mechanism eases the difficult time after death. This is done by funeral home owners, experts in death, and their role is extremely diverse. Very polite and unobtrusive they doing everything that the family did in the past. They are preparing the body for burial they wear black mourning suits, which allows us to keep our .... pink trousers! They are tactfully but firmly guide the family through the most important moments of the funeral, they fill up the grave. They are achieve that their skilled, skillful and dignified actions deprive death sting, turning the funeral into an event, although (it must be admitted) sad, but in no way disrupting the course of life.

Compared with the two most important "death specialists" - the doctor and the director of the funeral home - the third component of the "funeral mechanism" - the priest (and the Church in general) - seems to occupy a secondary and actually subordinate position. The development of events that led the French scientist Philippe Aries (I consider him the best specialist in the field of the history of death) to call "the medicalization of death", which means the transfer of death to the hospital and the treatment of it as a shameful, almost indecent disease, which better kept secret, this "medicine" at first radically downgraded the role of the priest in the whole process dying that is, in that which precedes death. From a medical point of view (and more often than we can imagine, and from a family point of view), the presence of a priest not welcome if he can disturb the patient by giving him the news of his imminent death. But if he agrees (which happens more often today) to “participate in the game”, “become part of the team”, which is precisely striving to “destroy death” as a significant event, hiding it from the dying person himself, then he is accepted with open arms.

The second stage (treatment with the body, or, as the Church says, with the “remains of the deceased”), the Church has completely devoted to culture. She does not participate in the preparation for burial of the body, which is secretly transferred to the workroom of the funeral home and brought to the church already as (please forgive such an expression) “finished product”, personifying our aseptic, hygienic, “decent” way of life and death. The Church does not take part in the invention and choice of the coffin, and she never, as far as I know, protested against this terrible, bright and catchy object, the purpose of which, probably, is to make death, if not desirable, then at least comfortable, solid, peaceful and generally harmless. And now, in front of this strange tastelessly decorated product (which involuntarily makes us think of shop windows and mannequins in large department stores), a funeral service is quickly performed, a service, every word, every action of which denounces feelings, ideas, worldview, which, undoubtedly, most vividly express and are modern funerals.

About this service itself, about the church funeral, I will tell later. And I begin not with our Orthodox “liturgy of death”, but with the culture within which we celebrate it, because I want to prove a position that is essential and decisive for me. Our culture is the first in the long history of mankind that ignores death, in which, in other words, death does not serve as a starting point, a point of "reference" for life or any aspects of life. A modern person may believe, as all modern people seem to believe, "in some kind of afterlife" (I took this from a public opinion poll: "some kind of afterlife"), but he does not live this life, always having this is"existence" in mind. For this death is meaningless. It is, to use the economic term, an absolute complete ruin. And therefore the task of what I called the “funeral mechanism” is precisely to make this death as painless, calm and imperceptible as possible for us who remain to live on.

"Humanization" of death (tamed death)

It may seem that lately this "conspiracy of silence" around death in our secular culture has begun to crack. Death began to be discussed, condemned by the conspiracy of silence around it, the huge success of some books (Elisabeth Kübler-Ross "On Death and Dying"; Vladimir Yankelevich "Death"; Ivan Illich's book about this "medicalization of death", etc.) points to a new and even a fashionable interest in death. But it would be wrong (at least I am sure of it) to see this interest as a sign that people have begun to seek to discover the meaning of death for themselves. On the contrary, it seems to me that this interest is based primarily on the desire to "humanize death", a desire akin to the constant search of modern man for ways to "humanize" his life. And you know what he is looking for and what he finds: natural foods, natural childbirth, jogging, homemade bread - all these “mini-gospels” that, in his opinion, will save him, a modern person, from the fate of the victim of “systems”. (“Milk is excellent!”; I wouldn’t be surprised if in a few years we will hear something like “Death is excellent!” in the continuation of this advertisement). Doctors and funeral directors hide death, make it a mystery! And if so, then let's open it to the world, stop being ashamed of it, look it in the face courageously, like adult reasonable people! And let's discard all the mystery and tragedy, sacredness and supernaturalness, which still managed to survive in this area. I see this motivation at the heart of the return of death as a topic, as an object of interest and study in our culture.

And, I am sure, it is no coincidence that even the bestsellers about the now so fashionable “posthumous existence” are written by doctors! In secularism, everything - even rebellion - must be scientific. Even escapism (avoidance of reality) needs a scientific basis and approval. I hardly need to prove that today spirituality and mysticism are "sciences" that can be studied on a general basis in some higher educational institutions. You know that our pursuit of happiness is "scientific", "scientific" and the study of "afterlife". And if a public opinion poll, which is a scientific tool, tells us that 72% of "patients" who had a near-death experience and came back to life are sure that they experienced "something", then we can be absolutely sure that it is " something really exists. Since, however, this “something” has nothing to do with our life here and now, with our problems and concerns, it does not cleanse death of its hopeless meaninglessness.

Death as neurosis

And this brings me to the last point regarding death and its place in our secular culture. Deprived of meaning, having lost the meaning of the event that gives meaning to life, death in our culture has become a neurosis, a disease that requires treatment. Despite being embellished by the funeral industry, despite the "humanization" of everything "natural" and "natural" by its apostles, death retains its presence in the world, but precisely as a neurosis. And it is precisely because of this painful anxiety that the offices of psychologists, psychoanalysts of all stripes and directions are never empty, it is this anxiety (although never directly named) that underlies endless therapeutic conversations about social adaptation (adjustment), identity, self-realization, etc. For at a depth, under the seemingly impenetrable and scientific defense mechanisms built by secularism, a person knows that if death has no meaning, then life has no meaning, and not only life itself, but nothing in this life. Hence the hidden despair and aggression, utopianism, debauchery and, ultimately, stupidity, which are the true background, the dark subconscious of our seemingly happy and rational secularist culture.

And against this background of all-pervading neurosis, we Orthodox must look closely and rediscover the true meaning of death and the path to it, which is revealed and given to us in Christ. It would be wonderful if this secularized and meaningless death and the neurotic confusion provoked by its silence and suppression, we Orthodox could simply and triumphantly, during these three days of our seminar, oppose a clearly formulated Orthodox point of view and experience of death, the Orthodox way meeting and interacting with her. Alas, in the light of what I have already said, we see that things are not so simple. After all, even the fact that we have gathered here to discuss, try to understand and rediscover the Orthodox way of death and its meaning, confirms that something is distorted somewhere. But what? So we must start by trying to clarify what is distorted, what happened to the Christian idea of ​​death and, accordingly, to Christian practice or, to put it another way, to the Christian liturgy of death.

Christian Roots of "Secular Death"

"Christian Truths Gone Crazy"

Answering these questions, we must first of all remember that secularism, which we today condemn as the source of all evil, appeared and developed - first as an idea, as a philosophy of life, and then as a way of life - within the "Christian culture" , which means that this culture itself arose under the influence of Christianity. Today it is widely accepted that secularism is a post-Christian heresy and that its roots are to be found in the decay, disintegration of medieval Christian civilization. Many of the core ideas of secularism are, in the words of one philosopher, "Christian truths gone mad". And it is precisely this circumstance that makes it so difficult to develop a Christian assessment of secularism and fight against it. I don't know if we all understand that the religious struggle against secularism is waged today very often from pseudo-spiritual, escapist and Manichaean positions. And such positions are not only alien, but opposed to the Christian faith, even when they pretend to be truly Christian, truly Orthodox.

I cannot here (and I do not need to) analyze the Christian roots of secularism, what made it precisely a Christian heresy. But I want to draw attention to a fact that is very important for our discussion: it is impossible to fight secularism without first understanding what brought it into the world, without accepting or at least not recognizing the participation of Christianity in its appearance. And here death stands in the very center. For, as I have already said, a person's attitude to death most clearly characterizes his attitude to life and its meaning. It is at this level that we should look for the distortion that I just spoke about and which was the reason for organizing our seminar. The essence of this distortion, as well as its cause, is primarily in<...>progressive separation by Christians themselves (and this despite the original Christian faith and doctrine!) of life from death, death from life, in the treatment (spiritual, pastoral, liturgical, psychological) with them as with separate phenomena, separate objects or areas of concern for the Church.

memento mori

I see the most striking example of this division in those lists of names that Orthodox (at least Russians, I don’t know about others) serve the priest along with their prosphora for commemoration at the proskomedia. You all know (those who are familiar with the Russian tradition) that the names of the living are written on a piece of paper with red the inscription "In health", and the names of the dead - on a piece of paper with black the inscription "For repose." From my childhood, from the days when I served as an altar boy in the great Russian cathedral in Paris, I vividly remember what happened every Sunday. At the end of the liturgy, a long series of private memorial services began, served according to the wishes of the "customer" either by a priest and one chorister, or by a priest, a deacon and a small choir, or by a priest, a deacon and a full choir. There are still churches in America (and you know about it) in which, with the exception of Sundays, the “black liturgy” (that is, a special liturgy commissioned by private individuals in commemoration of the dead) is served almost every day. As we shall see later, regarding the days on which such commemoration of the dead may or may not be celebrated, numerous and complex rules were developed to somehow regulate the flow of funeral piety that threatened to engulf the Church in the Middle Ages.

Now I want to emphasize this disconnection, this experience of the Church in the conditions of existence two regions, practically independent of each other - the white area of ​​the living and the black area of ​​the dead. The ratio of these two areas in history has been different. Thus, in the relatively recent past, the Church, both in the West and in the East (albeit in different forms and styles), leaned more toward black. Today they seem to have switched places. A priest who in the past devoted most of his time to the dead and whom the people saw as walking memento mori, today - both in his own eyes and in the eyes of those around him - above all supervisor, spiritual and even social leader of the living, an active member of the great "therapeutic community", engaged in the spiritual, mental and physical health of man.

More importantly, death today is obviously important and permanent, but private sector of church activity. Private - and clerical; it is the priest, and not the Church in its entirety, that takes care of the deceased, the priest fulfills the “professional duty” of visiting the sick and suffering. In fact, this "clericalization of death" preceded its "medicalization". It was the Church that for the first time gave death a special "compartment" and opened - psychologically and culturally - the doors to its physical exile into the anonymity of the hospital ward. Death is for the dead, not for the living. They, the dead, of course, deserve the observance of outward propriety and the dubious beauty of the funeral ceremony, up to the incomprehensible, but deeply touching funeral service and commemoration on special days and bringing flowers to the graves on the Day of Remembrance of the fallen in wars. And since, observing these rules, we, the living, fulfill our obligations to the departed, our conscience is completely calm. Life goes on, and we can peacefully discuss the further affairs of our parish. This is what separation actually looks like.

However, the question remains (and today more pressing than ever): is this disengagement Christian? Does it correspond to the Christian faith, does it express this faith and the true teaching of the Church? Does it fulfill the gospel, that Good News of a one-of-a-kind revolution - the only true revolution, which took place almost two thousand years ago, on the morning of the first day of the week, a revolution whose unique and eternal significance is that it conquered and destroyed once and for all death as separation? We have come to the very core of the problem. To this question [whether this separation is Christian], it is quite obvious that the only answer can be only a firm "no". But this "no" in our current situation (which should be characterized as the secularization of death both in culture and in the Church) requires some explanation.

"Christian Revolution"

Ancient "cult of the dead"

I use the term "revolution" to emphasize the uniqueness of the change brought about by the Christian faith in man's attitude toward death, or rather, the change in death itself. For death (and this does not require proof) has always been at the center of human concerns, and it is certainly one of the main sources of "religion". In relation to death, the function of religion from the very beginning was its "taming" (the expression of Philippe Aries: "to tame death" - that is, to neutralize its destructive influence on life). The so-called primitive man fears not so much death as the dead. In all religions, the dead continue to exist after death, but it is this existence, this possibility that they will interfere with the life of the living, that frightens the latter. In the dictionary of the history of religion, a dead person is mana(meaning: magical power which, if not neutralized, is a danger to life and the living). Thus, the main task of religion is to prevent the approach of the dead to the living, to propitiate them, so that they do not want to approach. Therefore, burials, graves were located extra muros, outside the city of the living. Therefore, numerous sacrificial meals (let us not forget that from the very beginning the sacrifice always involved a meal) were performed not in memory, but for the dead. Therefore, special days were appointed for such sacrifices. Therefore, in all civilizations without exception, certain days were considered especially dangerous, especially "open" for the intrusion of the dead into the lives of the living, days that stand apart as dies nefasti, "dangerous days". These two worlds - the world of the living and the world of the dead - coexist and even to some extent penetrate each other. But in order not to disturb the delicate balance, this coexistence must be based on separation. And the business of religion is to maintain this separation and therefore orderly coexistence.

Let me pay special attention to this ancient "cult of the dead", in which we see a lot of graves, rituals, skeletons, sacrifices, calendars, etc., but in which there is almost nothing (or nothing at all) connected with God, which we (erroneously) regard as the object of all religions and "religion" as such. Nothing! The historian of religions tells us that God in religion is a later phenomenon, religion does not begin with God at all. And even today His place in religion is seriously disputed by many people - the cult of the "afterlife of the dead" or the search for happiness... God in religion is always in the shadows! Primitive man knows nothing of our separation of the natural and the supernatural. Death is natural to him, just as natural as hell, as a necropolis or "city of the dead" - natural and at the same time, like almost everything in nature, dangerous, and therefore he needs religion, its "expert" handling of death. Religion arises primarily as a technology of death.

And only against the background of this ancient cult of the dead, this "forbidden" death, can we understand the exclusivity, the uniqueness of what I called the "Christian revolution". It was indeed a revolution, because its first and most important aspect was the radical transfer of religious interest from death to God. (This may seem self-evident to us, but it was indeed the greatest revolution in the history of mankind.) It is no longer death - and not even an afterlife - that is at the center of the Christian religion, but God. And this radical change was already prepared by the Old Testament - a book saturated primarily with the thirst and hunger for God, the book of those who seek Him and whose "heart and flesh delight in the living God." Of course, there is a lot of death and dying in the Old Testament, and yet - read it! - there is no curiosity for death, no interest in it apart from God. If death is mourned, it is because it is separation from God, the inability to praise Him, to seek and see and enjoy His presence. The very stay of the deceased in sheol (hell), in the dark kingdom of death, is, first of all, the pain of separation from God, the darkness and despair of loneliness. Thus, in the Old Testament, death has already lost its autonomy and is no longer an object of religion, since it does not make sense in itself, but only in connection with God.

Victory over death

But, of course, we find the fullness of the "God-centered" understanding of death, the fulfillment of the revolution begun, declared, prepared in the Old Testament - in the New Testament, in the Gospel. What does this Good News proclaim? First, in the life, teaching, crucifixion, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the incarnate Son of God, death is revealed as an "enemy", as corruption that entered the God-created world and turned it into a valley of death. "The last enemy to be destroyed is death." No more talk about her "taming", "neutralization", "decoration". It is an insult to God, who did not create death. Secondly, the gospel states that death is the fruit of sin. “Therefore, just as by one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men, because all sinned,” writes the Apostle Paul. Death is a ransom for sin, for man's disobedience to God, for man's refusal to live in God and with God, for preferring himself to God; death is the result of a person's alienation from God, in Whom alone lies the whole life of a person. Thus, death must be destroyed, exterminated as the spiritual reality of man's rupture with God. Hence - the Gospel, the Good News: Jesus Christ destroyed death, trampling it with his own death. There is no death in Him, but He accepted it voluntarily, and this acceptance is the result of His complete obedience to the Father, His love for creatures and for man. Under the guise of death, Divine Love Itself descends into Sheol, overcoming separation and loneliness. The death of Christ, dispelling the darkness of hell, is a divine and radiant act of love, and in His death the spiritual reality of death is thus denied. And, finally, the Gospel states that with the resurrection of Jesus Christ, a new life - a life in which there is no place for death - is given to those who believe in Him, who are united with him - united through baptism, which is their own immersion in "immortal death" Christ, their participation in His resurrection; through the anointing with the Holy Spirit, the giver and content of this new Christlike life; through the Eucharist, which is their participation in His glorious ascension to Heaven and the eating of a meal in His Kingdom of His immortal life. Thus, there is no more death, "death is swallowed up in victory."

Early Christian Origins of the Liturgy of Death

For the Ancient Church (and we now turn to the origins of the Christian liturgy of death) these triumphant assurances, which we still repeat weekly, are true, and true literally. What truly strikes the student of early Christian worship, and especially early Christian burial, is the absence of any interest or concern of any kind, either in physical or biological death or (and ) to "existence after death", "afterlife", the state of the "deceased" between death and the final resurrection, that state, which later theologians will call "transitional" and which in the West will result in the doctrine of purgatory. As for the East, this state will become the subject of a kind of “paratheology”, about which serious theologians even today do not know what to say: either this should be taken seriously, or considered popular piety, if not just superstition.

But in the early Church we see nothing of the kind! Of course, Christians buried their dead. Moreover, by studying how they buried them, we learn that they did it in full accordance with the funeral tradition adopted in the society in which they lived, whether it was Jewish or Greco-Roman society. It seems that they did not seek to create their own, specifically Christian funeral rites. No "apostolic commission" for Christian funerals! No development of your own funeral practice! They even used the funeral terminology of the culture around them. Many of us probably do not know that in the earliest prayer (which I will talk about in detail tomorrow) "God of spirits and all flesh ..." petition for the remission of sins, which we say today, pagan terms are used: the departed abide “It is brighter in a place, greener in a place, quieter in a place.” And no difficulties arise when using pagan terminology, if we understand exactly what we mean by them.

Thus, from the outside it might seem that nothing has changed. Christian catacombs in fact are exactly the same cemeteries as non-Christian catacombs or cemeteries. The church maintains its existence under persecution precisely as a collegium funeralium, a community that provides cheap funerals for its members, just as our emigre brotherhoods in America saw proper funerals as their main task. The Eucharist, which was served on the day of the death of the martyr at his grave, was presented to the pagans as a refrigerium, a sacrificial meal, which they also offered to their dead. Nothing seemed to have changed, but at the same time everything had changed, for death itself had changed. Or, more precisely, the death of Christ radically, if you like, ontologically, changed death. Death is no longer separation, for it has ceased to be separation from God and, consequently, from life. And nothing better expresses confidence in this radical change than the inscriptions on Christian graves, like this one preserved on the grave of a young girl: “She is alive!”. The ancient Church lives in a quiet and joyful certainty that those who have fallen asleep in Christ, en Christo, are alive or are, quoting another early formulation of the funeral rite: "where the light of the face of God dwells." The Church does not ask questions about the nature and mode of this "life" until the general resurrection and the Last Judgment - questions that much later will form the only topic of the last chapters of dogmatics, the so-called treatise De Novissimis ("On the Last Times"). And she does not ask these questions not because (as Western theologians believe) of the "underdevelopment" of theology at this early stage, because of the absence of a systematic eschatology developed then, but because, as we shall see, it is free from individualistic - one can even say, egocentric - an interest in death as in my death, as in the fate of my soul after I die, an interest that will appear much later and practically supplant the eschatology of the early Church.

For the early Christians, the general resurrection - namely, the general one - is a cosmic event, the fulfillment of everything at the end of time, the fulfillment in Christ. And this glorious fulfillment is awaited not only by the departed, but also by the living, and in general by all of God's creation. In this sense, according to the words of the Apostle Paul, we (I mean both the living and the dead) are all dead - not only those who left this life, but all those who died in the water of Baptism and tasted Christ's resurrection in the resurrection of Baptism. . We are all dead, says the Apostle Paul, and our life - not only the life of the dead, but also the life of the living - is "hidden with Christ in God." And I repeat once again (because we are already so accustomed to these words that we perceive them as some kind of music, without thinking about its meaning): life is hidden with Christ, and Christ is alive, death has no power over Him. So, living or dead, whether in this world, whose image is passing away, or having left it, we are all alive in Christ, for we are united with Him and in Him we have our life.

This is the Christian revolution in relation to death. And if we do not understand this truly revolutionary, truly radical character of Christianity - revolutionary in relation to religion, everything that man attributed to the mysterious reality of death, if we do not understand this, then we will not be able to understand the true meaning of the treatment of the Church with the dead.

We have no mechanism for "distinguishing" in the long and complex history of Christian "worship of death" the genuine tradition from the distortions and capitulations to the old "cult of the dead" or (to quote Christ's dreadful words) the desire of the "dead to bury their dead". What a terrible picture! Try to imagine it. But it is this kind of “distinguishment” that we need today more than ever. For (let's face it) the death that our secular culture imposes on us is, strange as it may sound, the old pre-Christian death, death tamed, disinfected, vulgarized, it will soon be delivered to us along with a medical certificate guaranteeing "an afterlife existence ". But we know and we believe (or at least we, as Christians, should know and believe) that God created us, called us “out of darkness into His marvelous light,” as the apostle Peter says, not for the sake of the “afterlife” (even if eternal) or, to put it differently, not for the sake of "eternal existence in death", but for the sake of communion with Him, the knowledge of Him, which alone is life, and eternal life.

When man, preferring himself to God, turned away from God and died (for there is no life without God), when (in other words) he turned his whole life into separation, corruption and loneliness, God Himself in the person of the Man Jesus Christ descended into the kingdom of death, destroyed "and to those in the tombs he bestowed his life." It is this life, more precisely, God - the giver of life, and not death, that we glorify in our funeral rites, in our "liturgy of death", the true meaning of which is hidden today even from those who perform it (for such is our interest - one might even say : our unhealthy love - to the "old death"). The meaning of a truly Christian funeral service is that it eternally transforms “the grave weeping into the song “Alleluia!”” - the song of those who, beyond the limits of this life, beyond the limits of death, see God, and only Him alone: courts of the Lord," whose heart and flesh "rejoice unto the living God." It is to this glorification of the living God in the liturgy of death that we will turn tomorrow, in the next lecture.

* A cycle of four lectures "The Liturgy of Death and Modern Culture" was read by Archpriest Alexander Schmemann in November 1979 at St. Vladimir's Theological Seminary in Crestwood (New York, USA). One of the students, now serving in Canada, the priest Robert Hutchen, transcribed the audio recording. Currently, the entire cycle is being prepared for publication in the translation of Elena Dorman, with the kind permission of which “Notes of the Fatherland” publish fragments of the first lecture.

Troparion, tone 4: “The bright resurrection sermon from the Angel, having taken away the Lord’s disciples and rejected the great-grandfather’s condemnation, boasting with the apostle the verb: death is refuted, Christ God is risen, bestowing great mercy on the world.”

Follow-up to the memorial service: “Oh, let them go from all illness, and sorrow, and sighing, and instill them, where the light of the face of God is present, let us pray to the Lord ...” (“For their deliverance from all torment, sorrow and groaning, and settling there, where the light of the face of God shines, let us pray to the Lord.

The title of the new book by Protopresbyter Alexander Schmemann can be at least bewildering. "The Liturgy of Death and Modern Culture" is incomprehensible and very risky. But I would like to caution the reader against wanting to get into an argument about the title without opening the book.

The "religion of the dead" remains a significant part of our culture, even if we do not pay attention to it. In the 21st century, like two and five thousand years ago, the "religion of the dead" penetrates into all traditions and rituals associated with death and commemoration of the dead.

This statement is true for a variety of countries, but the connection with the "religion of the dead" manifests itself in different ways. Protopresbyter Alexander Schmemann talks about America in the 1970s. But modern Russia is no exception. The most striking, but by no means the only example, is the mausoleum with the body of Lenin, which, almost a quarter of a century after the fall of the communist regime, remains on Red Square, and it is unlikely that Lenin's body will be buried in the foreseeable future.

The mummy in the center of Moscow remains the most important symbol of the Soviet past, materially connecting all those living today with this past. This connection turns out to be so significant that the decision on burial becomes not just a political one, but a religious-political one, and not a single Russian president has yet dared to take it.

Protopresbyter Alexander Schmemann - Liturgy of Death

M.: GRANATE, 2013.- 176 p.

Translation from English by E. Yu. Dorman

ISBN 978-5-906456-02-1

Alexander Schmemann - Liturgy of Death - Contents

Foreword

From sub

LECTURE I The Development of Christian Funeral Rites

• Death as a "practical problem" A few introductory remarks
• Challenges of Modern Culture Secularism
• "Conspiracy of Silence" (death denial)
• "Humanization" of death (tamed death)
• Death as "neurosis"
• Christian Roots of "Secular Death" "Christian Truths Gone Mad"
• memento mori
• "Christian Revolution" Ancient "cult of the dead"
• Victory over death
• Early Christian Origins of the Liturgy of Death

LECTURE II Funeral: rites and customs

• Introduction
• Pre-Constantine Christian funerals Continuity of forms / Discreteness of meaning
• A radical new perspective on death
• Surviving "early elements" in the modern funeral rite Prayer "God of spirits and all flesh ..."
• Kontakion "With Saints..."
• The "form" of the initial burial: parallels with Holy Saturday Funeral as a procession: from the place of death to the place of rest
• Service in the church Psalmody. The Word of God. Reading of the Apostle. Gospel

LECTURE III Prayers for the Dead

• The second "layer" of the burial (hymnography)
• Changing attitudes towards death
• Loss of "eschatological vision"
• Commemoration of the dead
• Prayers for the dead

LECTURE IV The Liturgy of Death and Contemporary Culture

• Action plan General considerations Culture. Faith. Hope. Liturgical tradition
• Plan of action Striving for catholicity. The need for education
• Renewal and reunification of the funerary "layers": "Lamentation", "Great Saturday" and "Commemoration"
• On the secularization of death The origins of secularization Rejection of eschatology
• The return of a life of meaning

Alexander Schmemann - Liturgy of Death - "Conspiracy of Silence" - Denial of Death

Death is a fact, inevitable and generally unpleasant (I don't think the latter needs to be explained). As such (and here I am trying to summarize the secularist argument) it should be handled in the most efficient, businesslike manner, that is, in a way that minimizes its "unattractiveness" to all participants in the event, starting with the dying "patient" (as he is today called; a person is a "patient" of death), and the anxiety that death can cause to life and the living. Therefore, our society has created a complex but well-established mechanism for dealing with death, the unfailing effectiveness of which is ensured by the equally unfailing [impeccable] help of medical and funeral workers, clergymen and - last of the conspirators in a row, but not least - the family itself.

This mechanism is programmed to provide multiple services to clients in a specific order. It makes death as easy, painless and invisible as possible. To achieve this result, first lie to the patient about his true state, and when this becomes impossible, then he is immersed in a narcotic sleep. Then this mechanism eases the difficult time after death. This is done by funeral home owners, experts in death, and their role is extremely diverse. Very politely and unobtrusively, they do everything that the family did in the past.

They prepare the body for burial, they wear black mourning suits, which allows us to keep our ... pink trousers! They tactfully but firmly guide the family at the most important moments of the funeral, they cover the grave. They ensure that their skilled, skillful and dignified actions deprive death of the sting, turning the funeral into an event, although (it must be admitted) sad, but in no way disturbing the course of life.

Compared with the two most important "death specialists" - the doctor and the director of the funeral home - the third component of the "funeral mechanism" - the priest (and the Church in general) - seems to occupy a secondary and actually subordinate position. The development of events that led the French scientist Philippe Aries (I consider him the best specialist in the field of the history of death) to call "the medicalization of death", which means the transfer of death to the hospital and the treatment of it as a shameful, almost indecent disease, which better kept secret, this "medicine" at first radically diminished the role of the priest in the whole process of dying, that is, in what precedes death.

From a medical point of view (and more often than we can imagine, and from the point of view of the family), the presence of a priest is not welcome if he can disturb the patient, giving him the news of his imminent death. But if he agrees (which happens more often today) to “participate in the game”, “become part of a team”, which is precisely striving to “destroy death” as a significant event [...], hiding it from the dying person himself, then he is accepted with open arms.

The second stage (treatment with the body, or, as the Church says, with the “remains of the deceased”), the Church has completely devoted to culture. She does not participate in the preparation for burial of the body, which is secretly transferred to the workroom of the funeral home and brought to the church already as (please forgive such an expression) “finished product”, personifying our aseptic, hygienic, “decent” way of life and death.

The Church does not take part in the invention and choice of the coffin, and she never, as far as I know, protested against this terrible, bright and catchy object, the purpose of which, probably, is to make death, if not desirable, then at least comfortable, solid, peaceful and generally harmless. And now, in front of this strange tastelessly decorated product (which involuntarily makes us think of shop windows and mannequins in large department stores), a funeral service is quickly performed, a service, every word, every action of which denounces feelings, ideas, worldview, which, undoubtedly, most vividly express and are modern funerals.

About this service itself, about the church funeral, I will tell later. And I begin not with our Orthodox “liturgy of death”, but with the culture within which we celebrate it, because I want to prove a position that is essential and decisive for me.

Our culture is the first in the long history of mankind that ignores death, in which, in other words, death does not serve as a point of reference, a point of reference for life or any aspects of life. A modern person may believe, as all modern people seem to believe, "in some kind of afterlife" (I took this from a public opinion poll: "some kind of afterlife"), but he does not live this life constantly having this "existence" in mind. For this life, death has no meaning. It is, to use the economic term, an absolute complete ruin. And therefore the task of what I called the “funeral mechanism” is precisely to make this death as painless, calm and imperceptible as possible for us who remain to live on.

12/11/2014 - doc file by scribe

Recognized and processed text of a scanned book in Word-2003 format (*.doc). The work was carried out with the aim of preparing a book for reading in e-readers.

The preface by S. Chapnin is omitted, the preface “From the translator” by E. Dorman is left.

Fixed several typos in the original text (corrected words are highlighted in yellow).

Several notes have been added (in cases where, in my opinion, there are semantic or factual inaccuracies in the text; highlighted in yellow).

"Prot. Alexander Schmemann THE LITURGY OF DEATH AND CONTEMPORARY CULTURE CONTENTS Foreword From the translator LECTURE I The development of Christian funeral rites Death as a "practical..."

-- [ Page 1 ] --

Prot. Alexander Schmemann

LITURGY OF DEATH

and modern culture

Foreword

From the translator

LECTURE I

Development of Christian burial rites

Death as a "practical problem". A few introductory remarks

Challenges of modern culture. Secularism

"Conspiracy of Silence" (death denial)

"Humanization" of death (tamed death) Death as a "neurosis"

Christian roots of "secular death". "Christian Truths Gone Crazy"

Memento mori "Christian Revolution". Ancient "cult of the dead"

Victory over Death Early Christian Origins of the Liturgy of Death

LECTURE II

Kontakion "With Saints..."

The "Form" of the Initial Burial: Parallels with Great Saturday. Funeral as a procession: from the place of death to the place of rest Service in the church. Psalmody. The Word of God. Reading of the Apostle. Gospel

LECTURE III

Commemoration of the dead Prayers for the dead

LECTURE IV

striving for catholicity. The need for education Renewal and reunification of the funerary "layers": "Lamentation", "Great Saturday" and "Commemoration"

On the secularization of death. The origins of secularization Rejection of eschatology Return of the life of meaning Protopresbyter Alexander Schmemann was born on September 13, 1921 in Revel (now Tallinn, Estonia), in 1945 he graduated from the St. Sergius Theological Institute in Paris, where he taught church history. In 1946 he was ordained a priest.

In 1951 he moved with his family to New York to teach at St. Vladimir's Seminary;

Rector of St. Vladimir's Seminary. He died on December 13, 1983. He is the author of the books “For the Life of the World”, “The Historical Path of Orthodoxy”, “By Water and Spirit”, “Great Lent”, “The Eucharist. The Sacrament of the Kingdom”, “Divine Service and Tradition”, “Liturgy and Life”, “Introduction to Liturgical Theology”, “Holy to Holies”, “Diaries” and several collections of articles.

From the Interpreter Every year St. Vladimir's Seminary hosts a summer school - a seminar dedicated to a single topic. In 1979, such a seminar was led by Father Alexander Schmemann, the theme of which was "The Liturgy of Death and Modern Culture." Here is what he himself wrote in his diary: “Thursday, June 28, 1979. All week - a seminar on death, burial, etc.

You give lectures (with inspiration, from the heart, with conviction), listen, discuss - and the inner question grows stronger and stronger: well, what about you? What about your death? How are things with her?"

This question worried Father Alexander, he wrote a lot about death in his Diaries, he taught a course on this topic in the seminary. It would be appropriate to quote here from the Diaries, which are directly related to the course and to reflections on death and burial.

Monday, September 9, 1974 Started working on my new course yesterday: Liturgy of Death. And again I am amazed: how no one did this, no one noticed the monstrous degeneration of the religion of the resurrection into funeral self-pleasure (with a touch of sinister masochism; all these “weep and sob ...”). The fatal significance of Byzantium on the path of Orthodoxy!”

“Monday, September 16, 1974. All these days reading, working in connection with the new course (Liturgy of Death). And, as always, what seemed relatively simple from the outside, suddenly appears in all its depth and complexity. Death is at the center of both religion and culture, the attitude towards it determines the attitude towards life. It is a “translation” of human consciousness. Any denial of death only strengthens this neurosis (immortality of the soul, materialism, etc.), just as it strengthens the acceptance of death (asceticism, the flesh is denial). Only victory over it is the answer, and it presupposes transcensus (going beyond (lat.)) denial and acceptance (“death is swallowed up by victory”).

The question is, however, what this victory consists of. Death reveals, should reveal the meaning not of death, but of life. Life should not be a preparation for death, but a victory over it, so that, as in Christ, death becomes the triumph of life. But we teach about life without regard to death, and about death without regard to life. Christianity of life: morality and individualism. Christianity of death: reward and punishment and the same individualism. Taking life out of "preparation for death," Christianity renders life meaningless. By reducing death to “that other world,” which does not exist, for God created only one world, one life, Christianity makes death meaningless as a victory. Interest in the “afterlife” of the dead makes Christian eschatology meaningless. The Church does not “pray for the departed,” but is (should be) their constant resurrection, for she is life in death, that is, victory over death, “common resurrection.”

"To come to terms with death"… I wrote it in my lecture, but it's "from the inside". At the age of 53 (it struck on Friday...) it's time, as they say, to "think about death" to include it - as a crown, completing and comprehending everything by itself - in that worldview, which I feel more than I can express in words, but which I really live in the best moments of my life.

For memory, I will note the following important "discoveries":

There is no time in death. Hence the silence of Christ and the true tradition about the state of the dead between death and resurrection, that is, about what non-authentic tradition is most curious about.

The horror of dying. Maybe for outsiders? Death, two weeks ago, of Marinochka Rosenshield, who drowned to save her children. The horror of this death for us. And for her?

Maybe the joy of self-giving? Meeting with Christ, who said: “More than this love” (John 15:13) - What disappears in death? Experience the ugliness of this world, evil, fluidity... What remains? Its beauty, something that pleases and immediately torments: “Field paths between ears of corn and grass ...” (From a poem by I. Bunin “And flowers, and bumblebees, and grass, and ears ...”) “Peace”. That Sabbath rest, in which the fullness and perfection of creation is revealed. God's rest. Not death, but life in its fullness, in its eternal possession.

Sixty-four students! And the course is elective (Optional (English)), that is, not mandatory.

“Tuesday, October 20, 1981. How many thoughts, how many “revelations” come while you are giving a lecture. Yesterday (“The Liturgy of Death”) he spoke about the “problem” of salvation, the resurrection of the unbaptized. And suddenly it becomes so clear that the point is not whether they knew or did not know Christ, whether they believed in Him or not, whether they were baptized or not, but that Christ knows them and gave Himself to them and for them. That is why their death is “swallowed up in victory,” and that is why it is also a meeting with Christ for them.”

Father Alexander was going to write a book as well: “Tuesday, March 23, 1976. Yesterday I wrote scripts for “Freedom” about Palm Sunday. In essence, I would like to write to death: “Passionate. Easter. Pentecost”, “Theotokos”, “The Liturgy of Death”, “Nativity and Theophany” So the whole circle would be embraced, covered.... Wednesday, October 8, 1980. In connection with my little book “Liturgy of Death”, I think and read about death or, to be more precise, about the approach to it in Christian theology. But Father Alexander did not have time to write such a book, and there were no notes left for the lectures (“Tuesday, December 8, 1981. Last night I finished the course on the “liturgy of death.” Now we should start putting it in order ... But when?”). Great happiness, just a miracle, that students often recorded lectures on a tape recorder for themselves.

In December 2008, at the international conference “The Legacy of Father Alexander Schmemann”, held at the St. Sergius Theological Institute in Paris, I asked Father Alexy Vinogradov, who had come from the USA, if there were any records of Father Alexander’s lectures on the liturgy of death, and he remembered that one then-student transcribed the audio recording of the summer seminar and used the text for his graduation thesis. He even remembered the name of this student. It turned out that this is the priest Robert Hutchen, who is currently serving in Canada. With the help of friends, I found Father Robert, and he kindly sent me his transcript, he even divided the text into sections and gave these sections titles in order to make reading easier. I take this opportunity to express my deep gratitude to him for saving these four lectures for us.

Father Alexander did not write lectures in advance, he only sketched theses and quotations. Therefore, the text offered to the reader is not a work carefully prepared by the author himself for publication, but a recording of oral speech, figurative, often passionate, which I tried to preserve in translation.

Elena Dorman

LECTURE

In the Sunday troparion, tone 4, we hear: Death has been refuted. (Troparion, tone 4:

“The bright resurrection sermon from the Angel, having taken away the Lord’s disciples and rejected the great-grandfather’s condemnation, boasting with the apostle the verb: death is refuted, Christ God is risen, bestowing great mercy on the world”).

But taken literally, these words will lead to the immediate closure of our seminar!

So I will suggest, at least for now, not to take them literally, and then, of course, the question arises: how are we to understand these words? So, the task of our seminar is practical. We will try, and precisely at the practical level - pastoral, liturgical, musical - to consider the problems related to that essential area of ​​church life and ministry, which can be called "the liturgy of death." (Note that I use here the word "liturgy" not in its narrow, exclusively liturgical sense, but in the sense that it had in the early Church, where it denoted an essential ministry and function, including the ecclesiastical vision of death. , and the answer to it.) But by saying this, we are already attaching some quality to the word "practical".

For nothing in the Church - especially in a field so deep and important - can simply be reduced to the category of the practical, if the "practical" carries in itself an opposition to the theoretical vision, faith, tradition, or even a break with them.

All practical activity of the Church is always, first of all, the translation into practice of theory, the manifestation of faith. So, for example, when in the 17th century a French princess in her will requested that a thousand masses be celebrated in the city of Paris on the day of her funeral; her request reflected a certain type of piety rooted in a certain understanding of "theory", an understanding of death itself. When in the Church (and this time in our own Orthodox Church) an incredibly complex system of rules gradually developed that determined when it was possible and when it was impossible to pray for the dead, and then these rules began to be constantly violated by the clergy themselves (so to speak, at the request of the public, because that people wanted so much), we see in this a clear proof that there have been changes in the very understanding of prayer for the dead, and it is required not just to enforce the rules, but first of all to reveal their meaning. Finally, we can look at the long history of cemeteries: at first they were located extra muros, outside cities and villages, and formed a necropolis, "city of the dead", separated from the "city of the living"; then the cemetery moves to the very center of the "city of the living" and becomes not only a place of rest, but the center of events that have nothing to do with death. (It may surprise you that in the Middle Ages, even entertainment events took place in cemeteries, and this did not shock anyone.) And then we watch [how another transformation takes place], as a result of which the cemeteries turn into a beautiful, hygienic and peaceful "Forest of Lona" (Forest Lawn - a network of memorial parks in America) of our time, into the real pride of our culture, and here we must understand that there have been huge changes in the very ethos of our society, and this time changes in the view not only of death, but also of life itself.

I give these examples - taken, so to speak, at random, illustrating various aspects of the problem considered at the seminar - in order to try to formulate the problem itself. These examples show that we will achieve little if in our “practical” research we bypass or forget the theological, historical and cultural basis that determines the current state of affairs and presents it to us precisely as a “problem”, perhaps even as the main problem facing before us, Orthodox Christians living in the West, in America, in the last quarter of the 20th century and desperately trying to be "Orthodox" in a world and culture not only alien to us, but in the last sense openly hostile to the Orthodox faith and vision.

Challenges of modern culture ________________

Secularism Thus, I see my task in these four lectures as briefly as possible (and in a sense, in the order of a working hypothesis) to define that scale of values, those starting points, without which we risk discussing "pseudo-solutions of pseudo-problems." And our first starting point, of course, is contemporary culture.

Whether we like it or not, it is impossible to artificially separate death from culture, because culture is, first of all, a vision and understanding of life, a “worldview” and therefore, by necessity, an understanding of death. We can say that it is in relation to death that the understanding of life in a particular culture is revealed and determined - its understanding of the meaning and purpose of life.

It is beyond my doubt that the majority of Orthodox Christians, especially those who live in the West, have sometimes consciously and sometimes not accepted this culture, including its attitude towards death. On others, this attitude has simply been “imposed” as the only possible one, and they do not realize how radically different this attitude is from the attitude of the Church, which she hastily displays for one hour (I mean the hour that we spend about coffin, which is brought to the church on the way from the mortuary to the cemetery). But even this hour - the current short funeral service - has already been adapted to the modern state of affairs, so as not to contradict modern culture, but rather to create a kind of alibi for it, to provide this culture with proof of its respect for the "faith of the fathers" (which, as everyone knows , mainly expressed in traditions, rites and ceremonies!).

Thus, if our task (and the task of the Church always and everywhere) is to understand, objectively evaluate and transform culture - any culture in any place, transform it in the light of its own faith, embodied and preserved in its heritage and traditions, then we must first try to understand the ultimate meaning of our modern culture, which means to understand the meaning that this culture ascribes to death. And here, dear brothers and sisters, the basic and seemingly paradoxical fact is that our culture does not see any meaning in death at all. Or to put it another way: the meaning of death in modern culture is that it has no meaning. I will have to explain this, because in reality this is not a paradox at all, but a natural (and, I would even say, inevitable) consequence of secularism, which, as everyone knows and agrees, is the main, truly comprehensive characteristic of our society. culture.

So, what is secularism, considered in the context we have given? Whatever else is said or could not be said about it (and we, obviously, simply do not have time to discuss all its aspects), secularism is first of all an idea, an experience of life, seeing its meaning and its value in life itself, without attributing it to anything that can be called "otherworldly". As I have already shown in some of my articles (and not only me, of course, but practically everyone who has studied secularism), secularism cannot simply be identified with atheism or the rejection of religion.

Thus, we all know (or should already know) that American secularism (different in this from, say, Marxist) is actually very, almost pathologically, religious. However, one need only look at the headlines of sermons (you know, in the Sabbath newspapers announcing events in the Second Baptist Church or in the Thirty-First Presbyterian Church) or read the list of events in any parish (completely regardless of its denomination) to understand that religion in secular culture (as, for example, in American culture), it actually pursues the same goals as secularism itself, namely, happiness, the realization of one's abilities and opportunities, social and personal prosperity. [...] Such goals can be both lofty and noble - saving the world from hunger, fighting racism, [...] and more limited - the preservation of ethnic identity, the maintenance of some system of public security. My main interest here is that neither in secularism in its entirety, nor in its religious expression, there is a place for death as a significant event, as a "deadline", the kairos of human destiny. One can say, without fear of coming across as a cynic and without trying to lightly joke, that in our culture the only value of death is the cash value of the life insurance of the deceased: at least there is something tangible, real in this.

"Conspiracy of silence" (denial of death) ________________

Death is a fact, inevitable and generally unpleasant (I don't think the latter needs to be explained). As such (and here I am trying to summarize the secularist argument) it should be handled in the most efficient, businesslike manner, that is, in a way that minimizes its "unattractiveness" to all participants in the event, starting with the dying "patient" (as he is today called; a person is a "patient" of death), and the anxiety that death can cause to life and the living. Therefore, our society has created a complex but well-established mechanism for dealing with death, the unfailing effectiveness of which is ensured by the equally unfailing [impeccable] help of medical and funeral workers, clergymen and - last of the conspirators in a row, but not least - the family itself.

This mechanism is programmed to provide multiple services to clients in a specific order. It makes death as easy, painless and invisible as possible. To achieve this result, first lie to the patient about his true state, and when this becomes impossible, then he is immersed in a narcotic sleep. Then this mechanism eases the difficult time after death. This is done by funeral home owners, experts in death, and their role is extremely diverse. Very politely and unobtrusively, they do everything that the family did in the past.

They prepare the body for burial, they wear black mourning suits, which allows us to keep our ... pink trousers! They tactfully but firmly guide the family at the most important moments of the funeral, they cover the grave. They ensure that their skilled, skillful and dignified actions deprive death of the sting, turning the funeral into an event, although (it must be admitted) sad, but in no way disturbing the course of life.

Compared with the two most important "death specialists" - the doctor and the director of the funeral home - the third component of the "funeral mechanism" - the priest (and the Church in general) - seems to occupy a secondary and actually subordinate position. The development that led to what the French scientist Philippe Aries (I consider him the best specialist in the history of death) called the "medicalization of death", which means the transfer of death to the hospital and the treatment of it as a shameful, almost indecent disease, which better kept secret, this "medicalization" at first radically diminished the role of the priest in the whole process of dying, that is, in what precedes death. From a medical point of view (and more often than we can imagine, and from the point of view of the family), the presence of a priest is not welcome if he can disturb the patient, giving him the news of his imminent death. But if he agrees (which happens more often today) to “participate in the game”, “become part of a team”, which is precisely striving to “destroy death” as a significant event [...], hiding it from the dying person himself, then he is accepted with open arms.

The second stage (treatment with the body, or, as the Church says, with the “remains of the deceased”), the Church has completely devoted to culture. She does not participate in the preparation for burial of the body, which is secretly transferred to the workroom of the funeral home and brought to the church already as (please forgive such an expression) “finished product”, personifying our aseptic, hygienic, “decent” way of life and death. The Church does not take part in the invention and choice of the coffin, and she never, as far as I know, protested against this terrible, bright and catchy object, the purpose of which, probably, is to make death, if not desirable, then at least comfortable, solid, peaceful and generally harmless. And now, in front of this strange tastelessly decorated product (which involuntarily makes us think of shop windows and mannequins in large department stores), a funeral service is quickly performed, a service, every word, every action of which denounces feelings, ideas, worldview, which, undoubtedly, most vividly express and are modern funerals.

About this service itself, about the church funeral, I will tell later. And I begin not with our Orthodox “liturgy of death”, but with the culture within which we celebrate it, because I want to prove a position that is essential and decisive for me.

Our culture is the first in the long history of mankind that ignores death, in which, in other words, death does not serve as a point of reference, a point of reference for life or any aspects of life. A modern person may believe, as all modern people seem to believe, "in some kind of afterlife" (I took this from a public opinion poll: "some kind of afterlife"), but he does not live this life constantly having this "existence" in mind. For this life, death has no meaning.

It is, to use the economic term, an absolute complete ruin. And therefore the task of what I called the “funeral mechanism” is precisely to make this death as painless, calm and imperceptible as possible for us who remain to live on.

"Humanization" of death (tamed death) ___________ It may seem that recently this "conspiracy of silence" around death in our secular culture has begun to crack. Death began to be discussed, condemned by the conspiracy of silence around it, the huge success of some books (Elisabeth Kübler-Ross1 "On Death and Dying"; Vladimir Yankelevich2 "Death"; Ivan Illich's book3 about this "medicalization of death", etc.) points to a new and even a fashionable interest in death. But it would be wrong (at least I am sure of it) to see this interest as a sign that people have begun to seek to discover the meaning of death for themselves.

__________________

1. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (1926-2004) - American psychologist of Swiss origin, creator of the concept of psychological assistance to dying patients; her book "On Death and Dying"

became a bestseller in the United States in 1969 and in many ways changed the attitude of doctors towards terminally ill patients.

It was with this work that the mass movement of hospices began. The book was translated into Russian and published in 2001 in Kyiv by the Sofia publishing house.

2. Vladimir Yankelevich (1903-1985) - French philosopher, psychologist, culturologist and musicologist.

The book "Death" was translated into Russian and published in 1999 in Moscow by the Literary Institute. A. M.

Gorky.

3. Illich Ivan (1926-2002) - social philosopher and historian of Croatian origin.

On the contrary, it seems to me that this interest is based primarily on the desire to "humanize death", a desire akin to the constant search of modern man for ways to "humanize" his life. And you know what he is looking for and what he finds: natural foods, natural childbirth, jogging, homemade bread - all these “mini-evangelies” that, in his opinion, will save him, a modern person, from the fate of the victim of “systems”. (“Milk is excellent!”; I wouldn’t be surprised if in a few years we will hear something like “Death is excellent!” in the continuation of this advertisement). Doctors and funeral directors hide death, make it a mystery! And if so, then let's open it to the world, stop being ashamed of it, look it in the face courageously, like adult reasonable people! And let's discard all the mystery and tragedy, sacredness and supernaturalness, which still managed to survive in this area. I see this motivation at the heart of the return of death as a topic, as an object of interest and study in our culture.

And, I am sure, it is no coincidence that even the bestsellers about the now so fashionable "posthumous existence" are written by doctors! In secularism, everything - even rebellion - must be scientific.

Even escapism (avoidance of reality) needs a scientific basis and approval. I hardly need to prove that today spirituality and mysticism are "sciences" that can be studied on a general basis in some higher educational institutions. You know that our pursuit of happiness is "scientific", "scientific" and the study of "afterlife".

And if a public opinion poll, which is a scientific tool, tells us that 72% of "patients" who have experienced clinical death and come back to life are sure that they have experienced "something", then we can be absolutely sure that it is " something really exists. Since, however, this “something” has nothing to do with our life here and now, with our problems and concerns, it does not cleanse death of its hopeless meaninglessness.

Death as a "neurosis" ________________

And this brings me to the last point regarding death and its place in our secular culture. Deprived of meaning, having lost the meaning of the event that gives meaning to life, death in our culture has become a neurosis, a disease that requires treatment.

Despite being embellished by the funeral industry, despite the "humanization" of everything "natural" and "natural" by its apostles, death retains its presence in the world, but precisely as a neurosis. And it is precisely because of this painful anxiety that the offices of psychologists, psychoanalysts of all stripes and directions are never empty, it is this anxiety (although never directly named) that underlies endless therapeutic conversations about social adaptation (adjustment), identity, self-realization, etc. For at a depth, under the seemingly impenetrable and scientific defense mechanisms built by secularism, a person knows that if death has no meaning, then life has no meaning, and not only life itself, but nothing in this life. Hence the hidden despair and aggression, utopianism, debauchery and, ultimately, stupidity, which are the true background, the dark subconscious of our seemingly happy and rational secularist culture.

And against this background of all-pervading neurosis, we Orthodox must look closely and rediscover the true meaning of death and the path to it, which is revealed and given to us in Christ. It would be wonderful if this secularized and meaningless death and the neurotic confusion provoked by its silence and suppression, we Orthodox could simply and triumphantly, during these three days of our seminar, oppose a clearly formulated Orthodox point of view and experience of death, the Orthodox way meeting and interacting with her. Alas, in the light of what I have already said, we see that things are not so simple. After all, even the fact that we have gathered here to discuss, try to understand and rediscover the Orthodox way of death and its meaning, confirms that something is distorted somewhere. But what? So we must start by trying to clarify what is distorted, what happened to the Christian idea of ​​death and, accordingly, to Christian practice or, to put it another way, to the Christian liturgy of death.

Christian Roots of "Secular Death"

"Christian Truths Gone Crazy"

Answering these questions, we must first of all remember that secularism, which we today condemn as the source of all evil, appeared and developed - first as an idea, as a philosophy of life, and then as a way of life - within the "Christian culture" , which means that this culture itself arose under the influence of Christianity. Today it is widely accepted that secularism is a post-Christian heresy and that its roots are to be found in the decay, disintegration of medieval Christian civilization. Many of the core ideas of secularism are, in the words of one philosopher, "Christian truths gone mad." And it is precisely this circumstance that makes it so difficult to develop a Christian assessment of secularism and fight against it. I don't know if we all understand that the religious struggle against secularism is waged today very often from pseudo-spiritual, escapist and Manichaean positions. And such positions are not only alien, but opposed to the Christian faith, even when they pretend to be truly Christian, truly Orthodox.

____________________

1. The idea that many modern ideas are nothing but Christian truths gone mad belongs to the English writer and journalist G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936). See "Orthodoxy".

I cannot here (and I do not need to) analyze the Christian roots of secularism, what made it precisely a Christian heresy. But I want to draw attention to a fact that is very important for our discussion: it is impossible to fight secularism without first understanding what brought it into the world, without accepting or at least not recognizing the participation of Christianity in its appearance. And here death stands in the very center. For, as I have already said, a person's attitude to death most clearly characterizes his attitude to life and its meaning. It is at this level that we should look for the distortion that I just spoke about and which was the reason for organizing our seminar. The essence of this distortion, as well as its cause, is primarily in the [...] progressive separation by Christians themselves (and this despite the original Christian faith and doctrine!) of life from death, death from life, in conversion (spiritual, pastoral, liturgical, psychological) with them as with separate phenomena, separate objects or areas of concern of the Church.

Memento mori ______________

I see the most striking example of this division in those lists of names that Orthodox (at least Russians, I don’t know about others) serve the priest along with their prosphora for commemoration at the proskomedia. You all know (those who are familiar with the Russian tradition) that the names of the living are written on a piece of paper with a red inscription "To health", and the names of the dead - on a piece of paper with a black inscription "For the Repose". From my childhood, from the days when I served as an altar boy in the great Russian cathedral in Paris, I vividly remember what happened every Sunday. At the end of the liturgy, a long series of private memorial services began, served, according to the wishes of the "customer", either by a priest and one chorister, or by a priest, a deacon and a small choir, or by a priest, a deacon and a full choir. There are still churches in America (and you know about it) in which, with the exception of Sundays, the “black liturgy” (that is, a special liturgy commissioned by private individuals in commemoration of the dead) is served almost every day. As we shall see later, regarding the days on which such commemoration of the dead may or may not be celebrated, numerous and complex rules were developed to somehow regulate the flow of funeral piety that threatened to engulf the Church in the Middle Ages.

Now I want to emphasize precisely this separation, this experience of the Church in the conditions of the existence of two regions that are practically independent of each other - the white region of the living and the black region of the dead. The relationship of these two areas in history has been different.

Thus, in the relatively recent past, the Church, both in the West and in the East (albeit in different forms and styles), leaned more toward black. Today they seem to have switched places. The priest, who in the past devoted most of his time to the dead and in whom the people saw a walking memento mori, today - both in his own eyes and in the eyes of those around him - is primarily a leader, spiritual and even social leader of the living, an active member of the great "therapeutic community”, concerned with the spiritual, mental and physical health of a person.

More importantly, death today is an obviously important and permanent, but private sector of church activity. Private - and clerical; it is the priest, and not the Church in its entirety, that takes care of the deceased, the priest fulfills the “professional duty” of visiting the sick and suffering. In fact, this "clericalization of death"

preceded her "medicalization". It was the Church that for the first time gave death a special "compartment" and opened - psychologically and culturally - the doors to its physical exile into the anonymity of the hospital ward. Death is for the dead, not for the living. They, the dead, of course, deserve to observe the outward decorum and the dubious beauty of the funeral ceremony, up to the incomprehensible, but deeply touching funeral service, and commemoration on special days, and bringing flowers to the graves on Memorial Day fallen in wars (last Monday in May)). And since, observing these rules, we, the living, fulfill our obligations to the departed, our conscience is completely calm. Life goes on, and we can peacefully discuss the further affairs of our parish. This is what separation actually looks like.

However, the question remains (and today more urgent than ever): is this disunion Christian? Does it correspond to the Christian faith, does it express this faith and the true teaching of the Church? Does it fulfill the gospel, that good tidings of a one-of-a-kind revolution - the only true revolution that took place almost two thousand years ago, on the morning of the first day of the week, a revolution whose unique and eternal significance is that it conquered and destroyed, once and forever, death as separation? We have come to the very core of the problem. To this question [whether this separation is Christian], it is quite obvious that the only answer can be only a firm "no". But this "no" in our current situation (which should be characterized as the secularization of death both in culture and in the Church) requires some explanation.

"Christian Revolution"

Ancient "cult of the dead"

I use the term "revolution" to emphasize the uniqueness of the change brought about by the Christian faith in man's attitude toward death, or rather, the change in death itself. For death (and this does not require proof) has always been at the center of human concerns, and it is certainly one of the main sources of "religion". In relation to death, the function of religion from the very beginning was its "domestication"

(an expression by Philippe Aries: "to tame death" - that is, to neutralize its destructive influence on life). The so-called "primitive man" is afraid not so much of death as of the dead. In all religions, the dead continue to exist after death, but it is this existence, this possibility that they will interfere with the lives of the living, that frightens the latter. In the dictionary of the history of religion, a dead person is a tapa (meaning:

magical power that, if not neutralized, is a danger to life and the living). Thus, the main task of religion is to prevent the dead from approaching the living, to propitiate them so that they do not want to approach.

Therefore, burials, graves were located extra muros, outside the city of the living. Therefore, numerous sacrificial meals (let us not forget that from the very beginning the sacrifice always involved a meal) were performed not in memory, but for the dead.

Therefore, special days were appointed for such sacrifices. Therefore, in all civilizations without exception, certain days were considered especially dangerous, especially "open" for the intrusion of the dead into the lives of the living, days standing apart as dies nefasti, "dangerous days." These two worlds - the world of the living and the world of the dead - coexist and even to some extent penetrate each other. But in order not to disturb the delicate balance, this coexistence must be based on separation. And the business of religion is the maintenance of this separation and, therefore, an orderly coexistence.

Let me pay special attention to this ancient "cult of the dead", in which we see a lot of graves, rituals, skeletons, sacrifices, calendars, etc., but in which there is almost nothing (or nothing at all) connected with God, which we (erroneously) regard as the object of all religions and "religion" as such. Nothing! The historian of religions tells us that God in religion is a later phenomenon, religion does not begin with God at all. And even today His place in religion is seriously contested by many things - by the cult of the "dead men who continue to exist" (sic) [...] or by the pursuit of happiness... God in religion is always in the shadows! Primitive man knows nothing of our separation of the natural and the supernatural. Death is natural to him, just as natural as hell, as a necropolis or "city of the dead" - natural and at the same time, like almost everything in nature, dangerous, and therefore he needs religion, its "expert" handling of death. Religion arises, first of all, as a technology of death.

And only against the background of this ancient cult of the dead, this "forbidden" death, can we understand the exclusivity, the uniqueness of what I called the "Christian revolution". It was indeed a revolution, because its first and most important aspect was the radical transfer of religious interest from death to God. (This may seem self-evident to us, but it was indeed the greatest revolution in the history of mankind.) It is no longer death - and not even an afterlife - that is at the center of the Christian religion, but God. And this radical change was already prepared by the Old Testament - a book saturated, first of all, with the thirst and hunger for God, the book of those who seek Him and whose "heart and flesh rejoice in the living God" (see Ps 83:3). Of course, there is a lot of death and dying in the Old Testament, and yet - read it! - there is no curiosity for death, no interest in it apart from God. If death is mourned, it is because it is separation from God, the inability to praise Him, to seek and see and enjoy His presence. The very stay of the deceased in sheol (hell), in the dark kingdom of death, is, first of all, the pain of separation from God, the darkness and despair of loneliness. Thus, in the Old Testament, death has already lost its autonomy and is no longer an object of religion, since it does not make sense in itself, but only in connection with God.

Victory over death ________________

But, of course, we find the fullness of the "God-centered" understanding of death, the fulfillment of the revolution begun, declared, prepared in the Old Testament - in the New Testament, in the Gospel. What does this Good News proclaim? First, in the life, teaching, crucifixion, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the incarnate Son of God, death is revealed as an "enemy", as corruption that entered the God-created world and turned it into a valley of death. "The last enemy to be destroyed is death." No more talk about her "taming", "neutralization", "decoration". It is an insult to God, who did not create death. Secondly, the gospel states that death is the fruit of sin. “Therefore, just as by one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men, because all sinned,” writes the Apostle Paul [Romans 5:12].

Death is a ransom for sin, for man's disobedience to God, for man's refusal to live in God and with God, for preferring himself to God; death is the result of a person's alienation from God, in Whom alone lies the whole life of a person. Thus, death must be destroyed, exterminated as the spiritual reality of man's rupture with God. Hence - the Gospel, the Good News: Jesus Christ destroyed death, trampling it with his own death.

There is no death in Him, but He accepted it voluntarily, and this acceptance is the result of His complete obedience to the Father, His love for creation and for man. Under the guise of death, Divine Love Itself descends into Sheol, overcoming separation and loneliness. The death of Christ, dispelling the darkness of hell, is a divine and radiant act of love, and in His death the spiritual reality of death is thus denied. And finally, the gospel states that with the resurrection of Jesus Christ, a new life - a life in which there is no place for death - is given to those who believe in Him, who are united with Him - united through baptism, which is their own immersion in the "immortal death" of Christ. , their participation in His resurrection; through the anointing (sic) with the Holy Spirit, the giver and content of this new Christlike life; through the Eucharist, which is their participation in His glorious ascension to Heaven and the eating of a meal in His Kingdom of His immortal life. Thus death is no more, "death is swallowed up in victory" [cf. 1 Cor 15:54].

Early Christian Origins of the Liturgy of Death ________________

For the Ancient Church (and we now turn to the origins of the Christian liturgy of death) these triumphant assurances, which we still repeat weekly, are true, and true literally. What truly strikes the student of early Christian worship, and especially of early Christian funerals, is the lack of any interest or and significantly) to "existence after death", the state of the "deceased" between death and the final resurrection, that state which later theologians will call "transitional" and which in the West will result in the doctrine of purgatory. As for the East, there this state will become the subject of a kind of "paratheology", about which serious theologians even today do not know what to say:

either this should be taken seriously, or considered popular piety, if not just superstition.

But in the early Church we see nothing of the kind! Of course, Christians buried their dead. Moreover, by studying how they buried them, we learn that they did it in full accordance with the funeral tradition adopted in the society in which they lived, whether it was Jewish or Greco-Roman society. It seems that they did not seek to create their own, specifically Christian funeral rites. No "apostolic commission" for Christian funerals! No development of your own funeral practice! They even used the funeral terminology of the culture around them.

Many of us probably do not know that in the earliest prayer (which I will talk about in detail tomorrow) "God of spirits and all flesh ..."1 petition for the remission of sins, which we say today, pagan terms are used: the departed dwell "in a place of light, in a place of greenery, in a place of peace." And no difficulties arise when using pagan terminology, if we understand exactly what we mean by them.

1. “God of spirits and all flesh, righting death and abolishing the devil, and bestowing life on Your world: Himself, Lord, give rest to the soul of Your deceased servant [or the deceased of Your servant] name, in a bright place, in a green place, in a place of peace, sickness, sadness and sighing will run away from nowhere. Any sin committed by him [or her] by word, or deed, or thought, like a good philanthropist God, forgive, as if a person is not, who will be alive and will not sin. You are the One except for sin, Your truth is truth forever, and Your word is truth.

(Following the funeral of the laity.) Thus, from the outside it might seem that nothing has changed. Christian catacombs in fact are exactly the same cemeteries as non-Christian catacombs or cemeteries. The church maintains its existence under persecution precisely as a collegium funeralium, a community that provides cheap funerals for its members, just as our emigre brotherhoods in America saw proper funerals as their main task. The Eucharist, which was served on the day of the death of the martyr at his grave, was presented to the pagans as a refrigerium, a sacrificial meal, which they also offered to their dead. Nothing seemed to have changed, but at the same time everything had changed, for death itself had changed. Or, more precisely, the death of Christ radically, if you like, ontologically, changed death. Death is no longer separation, for it has ceased to be separation from God and, consequently, from life. And nothing better expresses confidence in this radical change than the inscriptions on Christian graves, such as this one preserved on the grave of a young girl: “She is alive!” The ancient Church lives in the quiet and joyful certainty that those who have fallen asleep in Christ, ep Christ, are alive, or abide, quoting another early formulation of the funeral rite, "where the light of the face of God dwells"1. The Church does not ask questions about the nature and mode of this "life" until the general resurrection and the Last Judgment - questions that much later will form the only topic of the last chapters of dogmatics, the so-called treatise De Novissimis ("On the Last Times"). And she does not ask these questions not because (as Western theologians believe) of the “underdevelopment” of theology at this early stage, because of the absence of a systematic eschatology developed at that time, but because, as we shall see, it is free from the individualistic - one can even to say, egocentric - an interest in death as in my death, as in the fate of my soul after I die, an interest that will appear much later and practically supplant the eschatology of the early Church.

_____________________

1. Following the Panikhida: “Oh, let them go from all illness, and sorrow, and sighing, and instill them, where the light of the face of God is present, let us pray to the Lord ...” (“For their deliverance from all torment, sorrow and groaning, and the installation where the light of the face of God shines, let us pray to the Lord.

For the early Christians, the general resurrection is precisely universal, it is a cosmic event, the fulfillment of everything at the end of time, the fulfillment in Christ. And this glorious fulfillment is awaited not only by the departed; it is awaited by the living, and in general by all of God's creation.

In this sense, according to the words of the Apostle Paul, we (I mean both the living and the dead) are all dead - not only those who left this life, but all those who died in the water of Baptism and tasted Christ's resurrection in the resurrection of Baptism. . We are all dead, says the apostle Paul, and our life - not only the life of the dead, but also the life of the living - is "hidden with Christ in God"

[Col 3:3]. And I repeat once again (because we are already so accustomed to these words that we perceive them as a kind of music, without thinking about its meaning): life is hidden with Christ, and Christ is alive, death has no power over Him [cf. Rom 6:9]. So, living or dead, whether in this world, whose image passes [cf. 1 Corinthians 7:31], [...] or leaving it, we are all alive in Christ, for we are united with Him and in Him we have our life.

This is the Christian revolution in relation to death. And if we do not understand this truly revolutionary, truly radical character of Christianity - revolutionary in relation to religion, everything that man attributed to the mysterious reality of death, if we do not understand this, then we will not be able to understand the true meaning of the treatment of the Church with the dead.

We have no mechanism for "distinguishing" in the long and complex history of Christian "worship of death" the genuine tradition from distortions and capitulations to the old "cult of the dead" or (to quote Christ's terrible words) the desire of "the dead to bury their dead" [Luke 9:60 ]. What a terrible picture! Try to imagine it. But it is this kind of “distinguishment” that we need today more than ever.

For (let's face it) the death that our secular culture imposes on us is, strange as it may sound, the old, pre-Christian death, death tamed, disinfected, vulgarized, it will soon be delivered to us along with a medical certificate guaranteeing the "existence after death." But we know and we believe (or at least we, as Christians, should know and believe) that God created us, called us “out of darkness into His marvelous light”, as the apostle Peter says, not for the sake of “existence after death (even if eternal) or, to put it differently, not for the sake of “eternal existence in death”, but for the sake of communion with Him, the knowledge of Him, which alone is life, and eternal life.

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