Review of the book by P. Lebedev "A Brief Teaching on the Divine Services of the Orthodox Church for Secondary Schools"

Compiled in relation to the needs of teaching the subject in secondary secular and lower theological educational institutions, teacher of the Moscow Theological Seminary Pyotr Lebedev. Moscow. 1883 The name of the author of this book is not new in the educational and pedagogical world. Two years ago, Mr. Lebedev appeared on the arena of his pedagogical activity with a textbook on liturgics for theological seminaries, which was approved by the Educational Committee of the Holy Synod. Its good sales prompted Mr. Lebedev to shorten his textbook and publish it in its present form with the title that we wrote out above. The author shortened this textbook and published it in its present form under the title that we wrote out above, and assigned it to guide children of secondary secular and lower theological educational institutions when they studied the divine services of the Orthodox Church. Like all previous compilers of textbooks on the worship of our Church, Mr. Lebedev is trying to find a mysterious sign of all those constituent elements that make up our church rites and sequences, as well as all the sacred things necessary for this service to be performed “in order and gracefully.” But we can only call all attempts of this kind by the author as vain and unsuccessful. Instead of using in this case the writings of the fathers and teachers of the Church related to the interpretation of the divine services of the Orthodox Church, our author tries with great effort to find his own explanations, which suffer from a complete lack of simplicity, naturalness and intelligibility for those young pupils for whom the book we are examining is intended. If the author wanted to join the ranks of exegetes of Christian worship, then he should not forget the basic idea of ​​​​the worship of the Orthodox Church, which was laid down by its Founder, Our Lord Jesus Christ, Who, teaching His disciples at the supper about His true Body, clearly and briefly formulated this: “This. (i.e., the sacrament of the Eucharist) do in remembrance of me "(Luke 22:19). That is, Jesus Christ clearly expressed with these words the idea that the main idea of the Eucharistic service should be the history of the economy of our salvation. And the Holy Church really assimilated this idea "and borrowed, as Patriarch Paisios says in the charter of 1655 to the patriarchy Nikon, not only the power and authority to transform bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ, but also received the opportunity for all subsequent times to perform over the designated Body and Blood of Christ the remembrance of the entire mystery of the carnal economy, i.e. death, resurrection, etc. Therefore, the same patriarch continues, she took care to compose the liturgy in such a way that it embraces the entire mystery of the incarnation of the Son of God from beginning to end, from birth to the ascension and sitting at the right hand of God the Father, and she presents all this to the feelings of her children through material and visible symbols in order to through them lead them to the immaterial and the worldly (Gram. Const. Pat. Paisya 1 to Moscow nat. Nikon. St. Petersburg, 1881, pp. 20–22). Consequently, all that remains for the exegete of Christian worship is, without further ado, to point out how the Church was able to embody the history of our economy in that complex system of sacred ritual actions from which the rites and successions of our Church were made up, to bring this or that moment in the history of our economy closer to one or another sacred rite in our worship, and to describe as fully and clearly as possible the ritual action that serves to express that or another idea so that its correspondence with the symbol is obvious to the student. In a word, we would like to see in textbooks on worship explanations that are first of all historical, and only then mysterious, etc. A historical explanation of the symbolic actions and rituals of our worship has enormous pedagogical benefits. The student at the same time studies the divine services of the Orthodox Church and repeats the course of sacred history that he took in previous classes. In addition, all explanations of this kind will be natural, simple, understandable and will easily fit into the child’s head, which is not yet accustomed to abstractions, which is inevitable with a different explanation of our worship. Mr. Lebedev's book does not satisfy the completely legitimate requirements of pedagogy. Explanations are vague, abstract, not natural, and often incorrect. Here, for example, is what our author writes about the sacred vestments - the surplice and the phelon. “A surplice is called,” he says, “a straight, long garment, indicating (?) the purity of life and spiritual joy required of sacred persons” (page 19). “A phelonion is a round, sleeveless garment, cut out in the front (!) and having an opening only for the head. It points (?) to the sufferings of the Savior and the freedom they acquired for people from sin, curse and death” (p. 20). Apart from the fact that the definitions themselves are not precise, is it possible to think that these sacred clothes, by their form alone (the author does not say a word about the type or color of the clothes in the definition) will indicate to the child what the author himself sees in them, and what he talks about in his textbook. We think not. The child will not see the indications that the author depicted, but he will not even immediately understand how “sleeveless, for example, clothing, cut out in the front and having an opening only for the head,” indicate the suffering of the Savior, etc., and “straight long clothing” - “purity of life and spiritual joy,” etc. Say the author that the Church assigns such a meaning to these clothes, or such and such a father explains their meaning in this way - this is still It would be more likely that the child would understand, if not with reason, then at least with memory, although even in this case, if we leave the author’s definitions in their entirety, the inquisitive mind of the child will hardly understand such a rapprochement of the Savior’s suffering with the crime of a priest. – We think that it will be much more difficult for a child to learn, if only he learns something, the author’s explanations regarding the covering of the cup and paten with air at the proskomedia, than, according to the author, the priest “confesses the kingdom and greatness of the Lord not hidden under the cover of flesh and His wonderful incarnation” (p. 46). As an example of his completely unfounded explanations, and therefore incorrect, I will point out his treatise on the meaning of blowing air over gifts while singing the Creed. “Before the beginning of the singing of the creed,” says Mr. Lebedev, the primate opens St. gifts, raising the air of the mountain so that the confession of faith could be pronounced as if before the face of Jesus Christ Himself, and then vibrates the air, blowing it over the holy gifts. This trend signifies the overshadowing of gifts by the power and grace of the Holy Spirit, which the priest expresses by kissing the air and saying the words: Grace of the Lord... (p. 52). The author, obviously, did not read the text of the liturgical prayers carefully enough, because, firstly, absolutely nothing is said in this place in the prayers about the infusion of gifts by the grace of the Holy Spirit, and this is discussed much later, and secondly, the exclamation he indicated: “Grace of the Lord” is addressed to the people and has absolutely nothing to do with the gifts on the throne. In this case, the most rational explanation of this moment of the liturgy can be considered the explanation of the already mentioned Patriarch of Constantinople Paisius 1st, who in this wafting of air over the gifts sees a visual image of the great earthquake that occurred at the resurrection of Jesus Christ and from which the soldiers fled (Gram. p. 52). The definitions that Mr. Lebedev gives in his book to clarify the concepts of those subjects that he has to talk about with his students are more likely, in our opinion, to obscure the child’s immediate perception and understanding than to really clarify; because the author’s definitions are either inaccurate or incorrect, and the latter are even more numerous than the former. “An iconostasis is called, says Mr. Lebedev, a plank wall on which St. icons." It is intended “to separate the middle part (of what?) from the altar (p. 14) “A censer is a vessel in which a palm is placed on burning coals for incense (p. 22). “A star is a name for bent and cross-shaped souls connected in the likeness of a star” (Jbid.) A paten is an open flat and round vessel with a saucer, on which (on a saucer?!) during the liturgy the saint is ascended. bread and is consecrated into the Body of Christ” (p. 21), etc. The first definition is so inaccurate that a Muscovite boy, having visited the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, where there is, one might say, no mention of plank walls, and a boy from a village where there is a chapel without an altar, using this definition of the iconostasis, will not be able to indicate it in these places of public worship. Under the second definition, we can safely include “gorges”, which, according to the charter, are delivered with incense before the altar before the start of Easter Matins, and just a brazier, if you put a palm in it. There is nothing to say about the last two definitions: their inaccuracy is very obvious. As a sample of his incorrect definitions, I will point out a few, although there are quite a few of them scattered throughout Mr. Lebedev’s textbook. “The font,” he says, is the name of the vessel in which the sacrament of baptism is performed” (p. 23). “The deacon serves the bishop and presbyter during the celebration of the sacraments, especially the Eucharist, but he himself does not perform the sacraments (except baptism)” (p. 26). According to Mr. Lebedev, the only difference between church liturgical books: the charter (typikon) and the service book is that the first contains instructions “regarding the lifestyle of believers” (p. 24). The book of prayer chants “has the same content,” as does the book of Breviary (p. 25), etc., etc. Due to inaccuracies in definitions, contradictions also occur. In one place, Mr. Lebedev says that the book of Proverbs “offers rules for a godly life” (p. 68), and in another that it “depicts the coming of the Son of God to earth” (p. 70). There are also historical errors in the book we are considering. So, for example, Mr. Lebedev says that the ancient Christians before Constantine the Great “constantly gathered to perform divine services either in upper rooms or generally in houses” (p. 13), positively forgetting that it was at this very time that Christians, of necessity, were mostly forced to perform divine services in dungeons or catacombs. G. Lebedev writes that the liturgy of the pre-consecrated gifts “was set out in writing by St. Gregory Dvoeslov, Bishop of Rome” (p. 69), despite the fact that back in 1850, in a study by Smirnov (Moscow), it was most convincingly proven that this liturgy cannot in any way belong to the named father. If we add to what we have said about Mr. Lebedev’s book, the author’s passion for using without any explanation the words and expressions of church liturgical books (pp. 6, 13, 27, 62, 65 – etc.) and some errors against the pure Russian language (for example, for all of them, Vlasov, teaching, etc.), then we will have to admit that Mr. Lebedev’s book does not stand above other well-known ones textbooks on worship. You might be interested in: