Among Presbyterians, it stems from sola scriptura, covenant theology and zwingli. the New testament didnt institute icons and liturgy, so those are man made traditions to be avoided. which is why there is only baptism and the lords supper, ...
Three comments briefly, then it's time to put on my minimalist smart suit and tie and go and preach at the equally minimalist Baptist chapel in Penycae! -
1) I think this post comes near the truth, though not only regarding Presbyterians; and I don't think that covenant theology or a Zwinglian view of the 'ordinances' comes into it, for one could have those with an ornate building.
2) I wonder whether this whole thread has the question back to front, or at least starts in the middle not at the beginning. I would rather ask the question, where all the accretions come from that now æsthetically adorn Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism. Not when did we lose them, but when did you gain them.
3) The person who posted the lovely photographs earlier in the thread has a good point; nonetheless, both my wife and I like visiting the simple chapels one often finds in Greece, often in remote places, and many of them we do not find religiously off-putting or offensive. Nonetheless, for me at least - and this may be nothing more than culture and personality - I find a simple and if possible old church (anything from 150 to 1500 years) more conducive to prayer, worship and spiritual meditation than an ornate one.
On your second point by the way, its worth noting that there is some evidence that seems to completely contradict the “accretion hypothesis.”
I myself do not believe the liturgy has grown more ornate through accretion; on the contrary, I believe we have lost a great deal permanently, and much more material is disused.
Let us consider this issue, rite by rite:
- The simple Roman Rite merged with the more complex Gallican Rite, which is now lost in its original form. Its closest relative, the Mozarabic Rite, is basically used in one chapel of the Cathedral in Toledo, and on very rare occasions, it makes an appearance elsewhere. The Mozarabic Rite is one of the most ornate liturgical rites in existence; almost the entire Eucharist service consists of variable propers. 200 years ago there were still 5 parishes and probably a thousand people in Toledo who used the Mozarabic liturgy.
- Variant forms of the Roman Rite have become extinct (the York Rite, for instance, not to be confused with York Rite freemasonry), and others seem critically endangered or are just now being revived after a hiatus of several decades (the Rites of Braga, Lyons, the Carmelites and the Norbertines, among others).
- Other Western rites have been radically simplified, like the ornate Ambrosian Rite, which is celebrated in its original form at one parish only, jn Milan.
Now, moving Eastward:
- The Byzantine Rite used to have a Cathedral Use, used at the Hagia Sophia and other manor churches. This was a magnificent rite which had less hymnody and devotional material than the monastic Studite and Sabaite typikons, and relied more on Biblical Psalms and canticles (e.g. the Nine Odes were sung, all the time, rather than just in Lent, and they were not substitued for by alternate Canons). This Rite at one time had elaborate processions between churches, which were the origen if the splendid litanies of the Byzantine Rite, and elaborate processions within the Hagia Sophia, during the Great Entrance and at other times, and the Emperor himself participated in the rite by offering incense during the Christmas liturgy. There were vast numbers of priests, deacons and singers at every liturgy.
- The Byzantine Rite used to make extensive use of the Divine Liturgies of St. James, St. Mark and St. Peter, and there is a Presanctified Liturgy of St. James which Holy Trinity Monastery in Jordanville, NY, recently celebrated for the first time I think in centuries. In Georgia, several parishes preferred to use the liturgies of St. Mark and St. Peter to those of St. Basil and St. John Chrysostom, and this apparently continued until the forced Russification after Georgia was forced to join the Russian Empire due to Islamic aggression. The Russians also painted over the Georgian frescoes. It is miraculous in my opinion that the three part chant of the Georgian liturgy survived. Likewise, at least one community of Russian Old Believers in communion with Constantinople used the liturgies of St. James, St. Mark and St. Peter, until in the 1950s, fearing for their safety, they fled Turkey, but the Turks copied their liturgical manuscripts. This also brings up the issue of the Russian Old Rite liturgy, which survived, and which is incontrovertibly more complex and ornate than the Nikonian liturgy, with longer services and fewer abbreviations.
- One ancient writer claimed that St. Basil composed his liturgy (actually there are two separate families of liturgies attributed to St. Basil, and there is some reason to suppose he wrote both of them) as a form of oikonomia due to the four hour length of the old St. James liturgy, and that St. John Chrysostom set out to reduce the two and a quarter hour liturgy of St. Basil down to a 90 minute liturgy, as a further accomodation (in this respect he was aided by the ancient Antiochene liturgy, the Anaphora of the Twelve Apostles, which largely matches St. John’s liturgy word for word.
This story may or may not be true, but it is interesting.
- The Coptic Rite, like the Byzantine Rite, apparently lost its Cathedral/non-monastic usages. Also, the music, preserved through oral tradition, for the Coptic Divine Liturgy of St. Cyril, which is a recension of the aforementioned Divine Liturgy of St. Mark, was tragically lost in the past two centuries, although the liturgy is still occasionally served using melodies from the St. Basil liturgy, particularly in Lent.
- The Armenian Rite had 13 anaphoras and a presanctified liturgy at one time; all of these except the heavily Byzantinized and Latinized Divine Liturgy of St. Athanasius (which is really just a concise form of the liturgy of St. James, and is different from the Ethiopian liturgy of the same name), are disused, including the Presanctified Liturgy. The loss of the presanctified liturgy in most of the OO churches is particularly tragic, given that the scholarly consensus attributes the first presanctified liturgy to St. Severus. The Eastern Orthodox at present, and until the innovations of Pope Pius XII, the Roman Catholics, used, albeit at different times, a presanctified liturgy attributed to Pope St. Gregory the Great, who also is credited along with St. Ambrose, with greatly improving the music in the Roman Rite.
- The Syriac Orthodox Church has more than 80 anaphorae, but I have never found a parish or monastery that uses more than four of them. The Western US diocese kind of cheats by using the shortest anaphora, that composed by St. Dionysius bar Salibi, but, to get around rubrics that require the use of the longest anaphora, that of St. James, on certain occasions, the Institution Narrative and Epiclesis from the St. James liturgy are copied over.
- Liturgical languages are falling increasingly out of use; I am not opposed to the use of a vernacular liturgy, but I think the way to do it is with a mix of the liturgical and vernacular tongues, with a translation provided in real time; the Copts and Syriacs do this, using LCD monitors to display the liturgy in English, Arabic and Syriac or Coptic, but no one else has implemented this as far as I am aware.
- A very large number of Orthodox parishes do not even bother to serve Vespers on Saturday evening; some also rush their way through Orthros (Matins), the most ornate and variable part of the Byzantine liturgy, which contains most of the hymondy and much other material for each specific liturgical occasion.
- Whereas the Byzantine and Coptic rites lost their Cathedral uses, the Assyrian Church of the East, following the genocide of Tamerlane, in which all Assyrian Christians in Tibet, China, Mongolia, and Central Asia were progressively exterminated, leaving the church a small area in modern day Iraq and Iran, the Assyrian church lost its wonderful monasteries and its monastic use, the prayers said by their greatest saint, St. Isaac the Syrian, whose holiness was such that he is venerated in all four of the ancient apostolic churches (this scandalizes some traditionalists, who have attempted to discredit the scholarship of Sebastian Brock on this point, but their work reads a bit like wishful thinking). Happily, the Assyrian Church of the East recently reopened its first monastery in about 800 years or so, in Modesto, California, but they are having to adapt a Cathedral use for monastic purposes; I beliece that, like Anglicanism, the East Syriac Rite has only two or three daily prayers (Matins, Vespers and maybe Compline). It lacks the Hours that feature prominently in all of the other rites I have mentioned.
So when we consider all of this, I think it is quite plain that liturgical accretion is a myth; the only accretion I can think of has been the bloating out of the Novus Ordo Missae in the RCC with an excessive variety of options, with too many priests ignoring this and always using the shortest service, Eucharistic Prayer no. 2; then, in the Anglican communion, the simultaneous existence of the old Book of Common Prayer in the UK along with Common Worship, which features some traditional language services, and the 1979 American BCP, which has a traditional “Rite One” and a modernistic “Rite Two” basically copied almost wholesale from the initial English text of the Novus Ordo Missae, right down to the skin-crawling substitution of “And also with you” for “et cum spiritu tuo / and with thy spirit”, which, by the way, is one of a handful of phrases common to every liturgical rite I just mentioned.
Thus, the reforms which sought to do away with this mythical accretion had the effect of creating it, whereas conversely, due largely to political issues and persecutions, the beautiful, ornate liturgies that the Church couod boast of in 1054 have been rendered much less beautiful, with a great deal of excessive simplification and a huge loss of liturgical-cultural heritage. One of the few people doing anything about this is Alexander Lingas, who with his superb choir Capella Romana, has managed to reconstruct portions of the Cathedral Rite and also other lost services, like the Service of the Furnace celebrated in honor of the three youths saved by our Lord from the murderous Nebuchadnezzar.
Given all of this, I just don’t think you can make a case for liturgical accretion. If it happened, if the liturgy was “fleshed out,” so to speak, it had largely happened by the early third century, where we find the Anaphora of Hippolytus (still in active use by the Ethiopian Orthodox, among several other anaphoras), with all the standard features one would expect in an anaphora (indeed, that anaphora is the basis for Eucharistic Prayer #2 in Catholicism, and the copies of it, like Eucharistic Prayer B in Rite Two of the Episcopal Church, and the communion service in the 1992 United Methodist Book of Worship, among other places.
My great desire is to see as many parts of the disused liturgy as possible brought back into use, but in a carefully planned manner where they would not replace, as a rule, any existing services in parishes, but rather, as an example, in parishes which lack weekday liturgies, the Liturgy of St. Peter or of St. Mark could be used in the Byzantine Rite, and if we ever, God willing, get the Hagia Sophia back, or build more impressive cathedrals like St. Savvas in Serbia or the new cathedral in Kronstadt in Russia, it might be possible to implement surviving parts of the Cathedral use, ideally alongside the traditional Sabaite use.
