A Jesuit That Likes Old And Edgy Liturgy

The Other Side of Ancient Liturgy

I found this on Mike Aqualina's blog, The Way of the Fathers.
Wednesday October 04th 2006
If you’ve read anything by Jesuit Father Robert Taft — or, better, if you’ve ever heard him speak — you know it can be a wild ride. He’s brilliant. He seems to have read all the ancient sources and committed them to memory, in the original languages.

A longtime professor of liturgy and patristics at the Pontifical Oriental Institute in Rome, he served the early years of his priesthood in Baghdad. During civil unrest in the late 1950s, he traveled the Iraqi countryside observing the liturgies of the Syriac-speaking villages and monasteries. And there he got hooked on liturgics. Since then, he’s written about three dozen books and several hundred articles on the ancient liturgies and the Fathers. He is a Catholic priest of both the Latin and Byzantine rites.

It would be an understatement to say that Father Taft is outspoken. He has a first-rate mind, and he speaks it with force and wit. If you don’t believe me, read his 2004 interview with John Allen. It is the very image of the loose cannon rolling down the tilting deck of the barque of Peter. 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. But his most recent book — Through Their Own Eyes: Liturgy as the Byzantines Saw It — now that’s another story. This is a book that combines the academic rigor of the published Father Taft with the frankness of his live lectures. Indeed, the book is made up of edited transcripts of his 2005 Paul G. Manolis Distinguished Lectures at the Patriarch Athenagoras Orthodox Institute in Berkeley, California. It’s a book by turns moving and entertaining.

Father 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 explicated by the mystagogues. The situation was, as he points out, “not all incense and icons.”

Citing the Great Fathers, he evokes 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.” Chrysostom 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.”

Read the full piece (here)