Unwashed Masses
Through Their Own Eyes: Liturgy as the Byzantines Saw It
by Robert F. Taft,
S.J.
InterOrthodox Press, 2006
(200 pages, $19.95, paperback)
reviewed by Mike Aquilina
Despite the civil unrest in the late 1950s, a young Jesuit priest serving a parish in Baghdad traveled the Iraqi countryside observing the liturgies of the Syriac-speaking villages and monasteries. And there Robert Taft, S.J., got hooked on liturgics. Since then, he’s written about three dozen books and several hundred articles on the ancient liturgies and the Fathers.
A longtime professor of liturgy and patristics at the Pontifical Oriental Institute in Rome, he is a Catholic priest of both the Latin and Byzantine rites. (And yes, he is indeed part of the family that produced several illustrious American statesmen, including one president.)
It would be an understatement to say that Taft is outspoken. He has a first-rate mind, and he speaks it with force and wit. Read his 2004 interview with John Allen in the National Catholic Reporter. It is the very image of a loose cannon rolling down the tilting deck of the barque of Peter and firing away. I’m sure it sent several dozen ecumenists into damage-control mode for weeks afterward.
His academic work has been a little more restrained in expression, but no less certain in its conclusions.
Bottom-Up Liturgy
But his most recent book, Through Their Own Eyes: Liturgy as the Byzantines Saw It, now that’s another story. Made up of edited transcripts of his 2005 Paul G. Manolis Distinguished Lectures at the Patriarch Athenagoras Orthodox Institute in Berkeley, California, this book combines the academic rigor of the published Taft with the frankness of his live lectures.
It is a book by turns moving and entertaining. Taft sets out to give us a “bottom-up” view of the Byzantine liturgy, as it was experienced by the congregations of late antiquity, rather than as explicated by the church fathers. The situation was, as he points out, “not all incense and icons.”
Citing the Great Fathers, he evinces free-ranging congregations, where young men and women trolled the crowd for romance. Chrysostom complained that the women at church were no different from courtesans, and the men like “frantic stallions.” He also noted that people were talking throughout the liturgy, and “their talk is filthier than excrement.” Old Golden Mouth went on to report that the rush for Communion proceeded by way of “kicking, striking, filled with anger, shoving our neighbors, full of disorder.”
It almost makes today’s American Catholic parishes look reverent.
Mike Aquilina is vice president of the St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology (www.salvationhistory.com) and a general editor of The Catholic Vision of Love catechetical series.
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