The Orthodox stayed true

sorry, what do you mean?

rockytopva said:

The Eastern Roman Empire is the only thing Christian on the map. It was Constantine who established this. If I remember the history right he left Rome and built Constantinople to build a much better Christian empire. The Eastern Orthodox are older than the Catholics and Protestants who came afterwards.

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it’s the only Christian empire there, but there are still a ton of Orthodox in the West at that time

rockytopva said:

I post this as I don't believe many understand that there was an Orthodox church before they came around.

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but everyone on here is Orthodox so we are already aware of that point

So in a display of typical ethnic chauvinism and a selective view of history; you have dismissed all the Orthodox who were under the Patriarchate of Rome to include the Irish, the Goths, the Franks, and, the Anglo-Saxons. You have also ignored the Georgians and Armenians who were both Christian for roughly two centuries by this point.

Let us not also forget the Arabs and Syriac peoples of the Middle East.

I guess only Greeks can be Orthodox

rockytopva said:

I forgot who recorded it... But the services seemed like heaven on earth at that time.

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They still are, although unfortunately the Turks control Hagia Sophia and the Cathedral Typikon which was used there and in Thessaloniki and I think in Athens is no longer in use; the Hagia Sophia also had a massive choir and a large number of deacons, resulting in very majestic services. However the beauty of Orthodoxy is what we are able to do with very small choirs in very small parishes as well as very large ones. A Greek church gets along well with a deacon, a cantor and someone to hold down the ison, and a Russian church gets along splendidly with a choir of four. A priest or deacon with a good voice is also always a plus (the diaconal arts contribute heavily to the beauty of our worship).

Indeed the monastic Sabaite-Studite typikon was embraced by the smaller parishes because it let them do more with less than with the Cathedral Typikon, which was specifically optimized for the Hagia Sophia and other large churches.

That said if you are interested in hearing what it sounded like, Dr. Alexander Lingas of Capella Romana has done two recordings of services according to the Cathedral Typikon, as well as recordings of other disused liturgies such as the Rite of the Furnace, recorded with the monks at St. Catharine’s in Sinai.

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By the way I am delighted to see your interest in Orthodoxy. I suggest you plan a visit to an Orthodox Church if you have not done so already.

E.C. said:

So in a display of typical ethnic chauvinism and a selective view of history; you have dismissed all the Orthodox who were under the Patriarchate of Rome to include the Irish, the Goths, the Franks, and, the Anglo-Saxons. You have also ignored the Georgians and Armenians who were both Christian for roughly two centuries by this point.

Let us not also forget the Arabs and Syriac peoples of the Middle East.

I guess only Greeks can be Orthodox

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No, I don’t think @rockytopva intended to do that; and indeed if he were pursuing a Hellenocentric model he wouldn’t be quoting the Primary Chronicle and referencing the conversion of the Kievan Rus.

Rather, it is the case that after 1054, the Byzantine Empire and its allies such as Kievan Rus, Georgia, Serbia, Bulgaria and what would become Romania were torchbearers of Eastern Orthodoxy as Western Orthodoxy was quickly folded into Roman Catholicism (also the Armenians and other Oriental Orthodox restored good relations with the EO during this period, particularly the Armenians, resulting in the adoption of the Liturgy of the Catechumens from the Byzantine Rite for their liturgy (on the other hand, the abandonment of all of their anaphoras except a shortened version of that of St. James called the Anaphora of St. Athanasius, and the addition of the Last Gospel, and the adoption of Latin-influenced mitres for Armenian bishops, if I recall, happened during a subsequent period of attempted RC takeover of the Armenian church, which nearly happened to them at the Council of Florence as it nearly happened to us, but fortunately it did not happen, but this resulted in the Armenian Catholic Church, which, as a horrific testament to the brutality of the Ottoman Genocide and the disruptive influence of the Soviet persecution of Armenians, went from being the largest sui juris Eastern Catholic Church to one of the smallest).

At any rate let’s befriend @rockytopva and encourage his exploration of Orthodoxy while showing him the richness and ethnic diversity of the Eastern Orthodox communion.

rockytopva said:

The Primary Chronicle reports that in the year 987, after consultation with his boyars, Russian leader Vladimir the Great sent envoys to study the religions of the various neighboring nations whose representatives had been urging him to embrace their respective faiths. The result is described by the chronicler Nestor. Of the Muslim Bulgarians of the Volga the envoys reported there is no gladness among them, only sorrow and a great stench. He also reported that Islam was undesirable due to its taboo against alcoholic beverages and pork. Vladimir remarked on the occasion: "Drinking is the joy of all Rus'. We cannot exist without that pleasure." Ukrainian and Russian sources also describe Vladimir consulting with Jewish envoys, and questioning them about their religion but ultimately rejecting it as well, saying that their loss of Jerusalem was evidence that they had been abandoned by God. His emissaries also visited Roman Catholic and Orthodox missionaries. Ultimately Vladimir settled on Orthodox Christianity. In the churches of the Germans his emissaries saw no beauty; but at Constantinople, where the full festival ritual of the Byzantine Church was set in motion to impress them, they found their ideal: "We no longer knew whether we were in heaven or on earth," they reported, describing a majestic Divine Liturgy in Hagia Sophia, "nor such beauty, and we know not how to tell of it."

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Remember, this beauty that St. Vladimir’s envoys experienced still exists, despite Turkish control and profanation of Hagia Sophia, in a great many Orthodox parishes and monasteries, even those which use the English language. You can see what they saw now.

More than almost anyone else, Orthodox churches focus on liturgical beauty. Historically the Roman church had some who focused on this, but there was a counterweight to this which focused on brevity and simplicity in the services (particularly in the Old Roman Rite, as opposed to the Gallican, Mozarabic and Ambrosian Rites; in antiquity, the Old Roman Rite, before it was modified with influences from the Gallican Rite and the introduction of Gregorian Chant by St. Gregory, who had been a legate in Constantinople and had learned Byzantine Chant, the Roman church largely used monotone, and the Low Mass continued to be chanted in monotone until the 900s AD when they switched to doing it in silence, except in France where the norm was organ accompaniement. And the Low Mass was where Roman Catholic laity received Communion, since at the Solemn Mass only the celebrant would communicate (this resulted in a bit of a problem in the Medieval Roman church where the high point of the liturgy was the Elevation of the Consecrated Host rather than partaking of it).

rockytopva said:

. I believe there was a beauty there like none other for a full thousand years.

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This beauty continues, and we have reconstructions of services at Hagia Sophia according to the Cathedral Typikon by Dr. Alexander Lingas.

As splendid as those services were, I think Orthodox worship has grown more beautiful since then, in these respects:

Firstly, Hagia Sophia did not have a full Iconostasis, but rather a Templon - the exquisite towering iconostases with three or more rows of icons, sometimes as many as five or seven in some Russian churches such as in the Kremlin, and in some Ukrainian and other Slavonic churches, developed over the course of several centuries concurrently among the Coptic and Byzantine Orthodox from earlier arrangements which might be called “proto-iconostases” which developed from the classic liturgical curtain still in use in many Syriac Orthodox and Assyrian churches of the Church of the East, and the Armenian variant with the altar combined with the Bema as a raised platform with a row of icons in between the platform and the floor*

The extent to which having a towering wall of exquisite icons, combined with icons pained in frescoes along the floors and ceiling, cannot be overstated, and in this respect the newer Orthodox churches are particularly resplendant. Several of them follow the design of the Hagia Sophia very closely, including St. Alexander Nevsky in Sophia, which is my favorite Orthodox Church from an architectural standpoint (I also love St. Basil’s in Moscow, the Church on Spilled Blood in St. Petersburg, and various other churches the list of which would be too long to post here).

Secondly, since the time of the Hagia Sophia liturgical music has developed, with exquisite polyphonic music emerging in the Russian and Ukrainian churches as a result of the training of Slavonic composers by Italian and German composers during the Baroque, which allowed them to learn four part harmony and tonality (which were natural developments of the antiphonal form of hymnody developed by St. Ignatius of Antioch, which was historically avoided by the ultra-conservative church in Rome but embraced by the Gallican Rite churches starting with the Church in Milan under St. Ambrose during a vigil to prevent the Emperor from handing a church over to the Arians in 386 AD. Later, this style of music appeared in the Greek, Romanian, Serbian, Bulgarian and Antiochian churches, where it has complemented but not replaced Byzantine Chant. The Georgians use a beautiful system of three part harmony which I also have a recording of in Greek, although I don‘t know the history of it in the Greek church, but that would be interesting to explore.

Thirdly, despite some setbacks such as the unfortunate Nikonian schism, the Sabaite-Studite Typikon became particularly exquisite, with more services, longer services and better services, celebrating more saints, with more beautiful vestments in a larger variety of colors. The colors themselves aren’t specified in the Typikon, which only indicates light or dark vestments, but several Orthodox churches, in particular the Slavic churches, have embraced liturgical color with gusto and have developed a few different but equally beautiful liturgical color schemes, the most common of which is the Russian color scheme that uses gold as the primary liturgical color, blue on feasts of the Theotokos, Green on Palm Sunday and on the Feast of the Trinity on Pentecost Sunday and on Holy Spirit Monday and, feasts of ascetics and confessors and sometimes on All Saints Day, purple on feasts of the Cross and on most Saturdays and Sundays in Lent, black during Holy Week except for Holy Thursday, white on feasts of our Lord, red in Advent and on feasts of the martyrs and during much of Eastertide (in most Russian churches except for ROCOR and emigre churches, there is a change from black vestments at the Vesperal Divine Liturgy on Holy Saturday to white vestments, and then at night between the Paschal Matins and Paschal Divine Liturgy vestments are changed again from white to red, for two color changes of vestments (and paraments) in less than 24 hours. This use of color is relatively recent and is amazing, and the vestments are incredibly beautiful, whether the black and silver vestments used on weekdays in Lent and Holy Week, or the gorgeous blue vestments used on feasts of the Theotokos in a variety of shades, or the vibrant red, magisterial purple, royal gold, lush green and radiant white vestments. There are also more feasts as a result of more martyrs.

While some things are not as good as they were, for example, the Divine Liturgy of St. Mark is very nearly disused, in other respects some previously disused liturgies are being revived as well, for example, the Divine Liturgy of St. James, which was previously marred by what we might call an imaginative or speculative translation in the 19th century, but now Holy Trinity Monastery in Jordanville, which operates the main seminary for ROCOR, has published a more carefully translated edition which lacks the dubious practices of most of the Greek translations, and this promises to improve the image of the Divine Liturgy of St. James and increase access to it. Also, with the emergence of Western Rite Orthodoxy, Western Christians who care about worshipping in spirit and truth have access to Orthodox ideals of liturgical beauty combined with a traditional Western liturgical style in both ROCOR and the Antiochian Western Rite Vicarate. ROCOR’s Western Rite focuses on worship before the forced conversion of all of Western Europe to to post-Orthodox Scholasticism, while the Antiochian WRV focuses on adding Orthodox values to the traditional Roman and Anglican liturgies, thus offering, for example, the traditional Roman mass celebrated in the vernacular with the Eucharist in both kinds (which is not unlike what Vatican II intended in its reformed, but they received a different bill of merchandise altogether).

Also the Orthodox continue to celebrate the Divine Office, which is extinct in most Western churches (aside from the Anglican Communion, where it was revived, but has become endangered in the past few decades by the overall decline in the Anglican Communion), and which does not really exist outside of monasteries and some cathedrals in other Western churches.

This is extremely important, because the most beautiful and ornate liturgical services composed in most liturgical rites are those of Matins, which contain the majority of proper hymns and related material for each liturgy; in many Orthodox churches, Matins is celebrated the night before, combined with Vespers and Prime and sometimes other offices to form the All Night VIgil.

So if you want to experience the liturgy in its fullness, whether for Holy Matrimony, or the anointing of the sick with oil (which is efficacious), or the Great Blessing of Water on the Feast of the Baptism of Christ, or the beautiful Memorial liturgy, or any other service, particularly Vespers, Matins and the Divine Liturgy, the Orthodox church celebrates it, and you will not be able to tell whether you are in heaven or on Earth.


*The Armenian style is also used by the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholics as well as the Armenians at the jointly operated Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, where it provides a convenient dual-level design that provides a liturgical altar above the exact place where the Blessed Virgin Mary gave birth to God. On the other side of a shared wall is the Syriac Orthodox Church of St. Mary’s, which is also used by the Copts, and which mirrors the layout of the Church of the Nativity.