Steven Matthews
Book Review
Derek Krueger, Liturgical Subjects: Christian Ritual,
Biblical Narrative, and the Formation of the Self in Byzantium. University
of Pennsylvania Press (Philadelphia, 2014), 328 pp, 24 illustrations, endnotes,
bibliography and index. ISBN: 9780812246445
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English language scholarship of the Christian East, whether conceived as
“Byzantium” or something more comprehensive, hovers at the margins of relevance
for most scholars of the Early Modern period and Renaissance. This is
unfortunate, given the prominence of Eastern Christian influence on the major
thinkers of the Italian Renaissance, and the role which the Byzantine world had
in mediating the texts of classical antiquity which exerted such strong influence
upon the intellectual development of the West. Apart from singular, and very
unrepresentative, figures such as Manuel Chrysoloras or Gemistos Pletho, the
East seldom crosses over into Renaissance and Early Modern scholarship, despite
the steady flow of people, books, and ideas westward which accompanied the
Islamic conquest of the Balkans. For those seeking a single volume with the
potential to introduce the Christian East on its own terms, there is no better
choice than Derek Krueger’s most recent book.
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Krueger’s work, both in this book and his previous publications, represents a
departure from what many still expect in Byzantine studies: the “top down”
political histories on the one hand, and the analyses of doctrinal debates on
the other. Krueger is interested in the lives and identities of the common
Eastern Christians. In this book Krueger uses the liturgical developments of
the sixth through ninth centuries, developments which impacted every citizen of
the Empire because of the centrality of Christian time and ritual, as a window
into understanding the development of the self identity of Byzantine people. What
emerges in the course of seven chapters is a summary of the Byzantine culture
and worldview that endures to this day, and the book serves to explain the
shared heritage of modern Russia, Serbia, and Greece no less than the medieval
Byzantine world. Here the scholar of the Renaissance may also come to
understand the people behind the Council of Ferrara–Florence who so impressed
certain Florentines, as well as a sense of the profound difference in
perspective which ensured that Council would fail.
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Krueger’s own stated thesis is far more modest than what the book actually
accomplishes: “Working at the intersection of Byzantine Christian religious
culture and contemporary critical approaches to the history of subjectivity,
this book explores Orthodox liturgy as a mechanism for the formation of
interiority.” (p. 6) Krueger acknowledges that the “liturgical model for
selfhood” is but one of many competing “selves” in the Byzantine world,
“although it arguably had the greatest impact on Byzantine Christian
self-conceptions across society.” (p. 7). We may add the obvious, that the
influence of the church ensured that the other “selves,” whether established by
family, gender, military, profession, etc. were all heavily informed by the
liturgical self, as they still are in Orthodox countries today. The period
which Krueger examines is the period in which great changes were occurring in
the Byzantine rites which “transformed the Eastern Mediterranean Christianity
of late antiquity into the Christianity of Byzantium. Between the sixth and the
ninth centuries, the liturgical calendar increasingly brought the Biblical
narrative to life.” (p. 2) These changes were dominated by a tendency of
liturgical speech toward the first person, or toward a direct association of
the individual soul with the events of the biblical narrative in which the
individual is invited to insert herself into the narrative as a participant. Typical
of this trend is the sixth century hymn of Patriarch Eutychios now known by
heart throughout the Orthodox world: “At your mystical supper, Son of God,
receive me today as a partaker, for I will not betray the sacrament to your
enemies, nor give you a kiss like Judas, but like the Thief I confess you:
remember me Lord in your kingdom.” (p. 1). This hymn simultaneously blends the
singer and audience as individuals into the events of Holy Week, while
associating the self with the faithful Thief, thereby establishing a self
identity as a “redeemable sinner.” Krueger extends his study, at some points,
to the turn of the eleventh century, but the emphasis is strongest on these
early developments in the liturgy which establish a distinctive “self.” The
implications for other scholarly literature on the development of interiority
are significant. Krueger places the development of “an emergent awareness of
the self” in the East far earlier than the twelfth century in which scholars
such as Colin Morris and John Benton claim that it developed in the West. (p.
13) Similarly, Krueger’s thesis challenges the idea that a “normative model of
the religious self” developed primarily as a result of the influence of
Augustine. (p. 14) Since Augustine had no real influence in the East, Krueger
has identified a very different point of origin for the religious self, which,
necessarily, produces a very different religious self.
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As he did ten years earlier in his book, Writing
and Holiness: The practice of Authorship in the Early Christian East (U.
Penn., 2004), Krueger here adopts a “case-study” approach in which he lays out
his argument in the first chapter, and supports it with careful analyses of
select sources in the remainder of the book. It is really these remaining six
chapters which open the door to the Byzantine world in a more profound way than
I have encountered in other literature. A first glance at the chapter titles
suggested that he might have been overly selective, when the private prayers of
the Eucharist and the Hymn of the nun Kassiani might give a more nuanced image
of the Byzantine mindset than the Great
Kanon of Andrew of Crete would alone. The chapter titles are a bit
misleading, however, since Krueger manages to cover these topics as well,
subsuming his discussion of the Hymn of
Kassiani under St. Andrew’s Great
Kanon, and the discussion of private Eucharistic prayers under his
consideration of the Anaphora. The
result is a tour de force of the
landscape of Byzantine faith and theology, which reveals the comprehensive
worldview that is established through the liturgy.
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Chapters two and three blend together somewhat, since his examination of the
hymns of the sixth century Romanos the Melodist in chapter two cannot be
separated from the developments in the liturgical calendar (the focus of
chapter 3) at the same time. Chapters four, five, and six, cover the
Eucharistic Prayers of the Anaphora,
the Great Kanon of St. Andrew, and
the hymns of the “Lenten Triodion” respectively, but they do far more. They pan
all of Orthodox theology from the perspective of the worshiping individual, and
as such they serve as an excellent introduction to the “lived theology” of
Orthodoxy, which is potentially a far more effective way of communicating the
unique features of Eastern Christianity than the more dogmatic approach found
in comparative theology. It is one thing to acknowledge that the Augustinian
doctrine of inherited original sin is absent in the East, or that the East does
not have a forensic understanding of the “Atonement” (no courtroom with an
Angry God), but another to see how that affects the experience of sin and guilt
as expressed in Orthodox hymnography. As Krueger states, “Prayer scripts the
self. The recitation of set prayers conforms the speaker to a particular model
of self-understanding and self-expression. In praying, one becomes the subject
of the prayer, both in the sense of becoming the persona the text talks about
and in the sense that one is acted upon, is under the creative power of the
prayer to produce a particular self.” (p. 162)
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Chapter seven, “Liturgies of the Monastic Self,” looks at somewhat later
liturgical developments that are associated with Theodore the Studite and his
school. The chapter serves both as a
summary of developments to that point, and a transition to the changes which
would occur in the eleventh century as the liturgies of the monastery
increasingly shaped practice outside the monastery in parish churches.
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Krueger’s prose is fluid and accessible, and he strikes a fine balance between
the two audiences that a Byzantine scholar must try to reach: those who know
and study the Byzantine world, and those for whom it is foreign territory. My
only criticism is one which could apply to all current scholarship of
Byzantium: Krueger tends to emphasize the distinctiveness of the “Byzantine”
over continuity with classical antiquity in the way he describes the changes of
the sixth through ninth centuries. This can give the modern reader something of
a false understanding: the people of the time would have emphasized continuity,
and would be puzzled about the distinction we make by using the artificial word
“Byzantine.” In other authors this has produced a historical narrowness which
makes one wonder if they understand the previous eras. In Krueger’s case, it is
just a habit of speech, for he has a thorough knowledge of prior history, and
he easily connects the themes that emerge in the liturgy of the sixth century
and following with their clear antecedents in the sermons of Chrysostom, Basil,
and the like.
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This book will profit any reader who wishes to understand more thoroughly the
deeply rooted cultural differences between Eastern Europe and the West. It also
would be a profitable read for Eastern Orthodox theologians who often lose
sight of the stages in the historical development of their own faith, and particularly
its intense “interiority” from the sixth century onward.
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Steven Matthews is Associate Professor of
history and department head of history at the University of Minnesota, Duluth. He
holds a Masters in Divinity from Concordia Theological Seminary, and a Ph.D. in
History from the University of Florida. He specializes in the history of
science and the history of Christianity with an emphasis on the foundations of
both and their subsequent interactions. He is also an Eastern Orthodox lay
theologian.
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APPOSITIONS:
Studies in Renaissance / Early
Modern Literature and Culture,
http://appositions.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1946-1992,
Volume Eight (2015): Dialogues & Exchanges
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