Ceva Bun

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 2/1/2016, SPi
OXFORD STUDIES IN ANALYTIC THEOLOGY

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Michael C. Rea Oliver D. Crisp
OXFORD STUDIES IN ANALYTIC THEOLOGY

Analytic Theology utilizes the tools and methods of contemporary analytic philosophy
for the purposes of constructive Christian theology, paying attention to the Christian
tradition and development of doctrine. This innovative series of studies showcases
high quality, cutting-edge research in this area, in monographs and symposia.
Titles in the series include:

Metaphysics and the Tri-Personal God
William Hasker
The Theological Project of Modernism
Faith and the Conditions of Mineness
Kevin W. Hector
The End of the Timeless God
R. T. Mullins
In Defense of Conciliar Christology
A Philosophical Essay
Timothy Pawl
Ritualized Faith
Essays on the Philosophy of Liturgy
TERENCE CUNEO
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Preface
I can trace my interest in liturgy directly to Nick Wolterstorff ’s influence.

When I read one of his papers on the topic twenty years ago, I had scarcely
given liturgy a thought, at least as a subject that philosophers could dig their
teeth into. I recall finding it both surprising that the subject was so philosoph-
ically interesting and that philosophers had given it so little attention. Twenty
years later, the surprise has not worn off, although it’s now surprise of a
different sort. While I no longer find it remarkable that liturgy is of philo-
sophical interest, I am frequently impressed by how philosophically rich a
topic it is. There is a lot to think about! Because the topic is so underexplored
by philosophers, even posing the right questions can be a challenge.
I say this while recognizing that, in the last fifty years or so, theologians have
made important contributions to our understanding of liturgy.1 Nevertheless,
the questions that theologians raise, the ways that they address them, and the
literature with which they engage tend to be different from the questions that
interest philosophers, the ways in which philosophers pursue these questions,
and the literature with which philosophers engage. An implication of this
disciplinary difference has been that the essays that compose this book do not
simply pick up the discussion of liturgy where the theologians have left off. In
fact, with the notable exception of Alexander Schmemann’s work, most of
these essays explicitly engage with what theologians say about matters of
liturgy rather less than I had anticipated when writing them. Our questions
tend to be different.
I’m grateful to a cadre of philosophers and theologians who’ve helped to
locate the right questions and fruitful ways to pursue them. In 2007, Jamie
Smith, Reinhardt Hütter, Sarah Coakley, Peter Ochs, Nick Wolterstorff and
I—a “seed group” funded by the Center for Worship at Calvin College—met at
the University of Virginia to discuss our work in progress on liturgy. In 2008,
Calvin College sponsored a conference on liturgy in which this work was
presented, along with a host of other papers. In 2009, Nick Wolterstorff and
I led a three-week summer seminar at Calvin College on liturgy that afforded
the chance to reflect extensively and collectively on liturgy, read more widely
on the subject, and locate important themes. I thank Calvin College—and,
especially, John Witvliet—for making these events possible. I’d also like to
thank those who participated in the 2008 conference and the 2009 seminar
for helpful discussion. Specifically, I’d like to single out Andrew Chignell,
1
Fagerberg (2004) provides an introduction to some of the main currents in liturgical
theology, primarily within the Orthodox and Roman Catholic traditions.
vi Preface
Fr. Andrew Cuneo, David Manley, Mark Montague, David O’Hara, Mike Rea,
Howie Wettstein, and Lori Wilson for answering questions and shining light
on some puzzling topics. It goes without saying that I owe Nick Wolterstorff
an enormous debt. He not only planted the seeds of interest in liturgy but also
saw to it that they grew.
Finally, I owe special thanks to Janina Cuneo and Luke Reinsma for
contributing their copy-editing skills to the preparation of the manuscript.
In 2012, I was awarded a grant by the Character Project at Wake Forest
University (and funded by the John Templeton Foundation) to work on
liturgy and character. The time this grant provided to reflect and write on
liturgy has proved invaluable to me. Most of the essays in this volume were
written under the auspices of this grant, and I thank Christian Miller, its
director, for supporting this work. (Of course the views expressed in this book
do not necessarily reflect those of the foundation itself.)
Academics are accustomed to thanking their home institutions when they
provide research support. In this case, however, I’d like to thank a different
type of “home” institution: a group of parishes that I’ve attended over the
last couple of decades. Thanks to St. Vladimir’s Seminary (Crestwood, NY),
St. Paul Orthodox Church (Brier, WA), St. James Orthodox Church
(Williamston, MI), and St. Jacob of Alaska Orthodox Church (Northfield
Falls, VT), for the experience of being part of communal liturgical life.
Acknowledgments
The author and publisher would like to thank these publishers for permission
to reproduce the essays in this volume.
Chapter 1, “Love and Liturgy,” appeared in the Journal of Religious Ethics 43,
2015: 587–605.
Chapter 2, “Protesting Evil,” appeared in Theology Today 70, 2014: 430–44.
Chapter 3 is a lightly amended version of “Another Look at Divine Hidden-
ness,” which appeared in Religious Studies 49, 2013: 151–64.
Chapter 4, “Liturgical Immersion,” appeared in the Journal of Analytic The-
ology 2, 2014: 117–39.
Chapter 5, “Liturgy and the Moral Life,” appeared in Christian Miller, ed.,
Character: New Directions from Philosophy, Psychology, and Theology. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2015: 572–89.
Chapter 6, “If These Walls Could Only Speak: Icons as Vehicles of Divine
Speech,” appeared in Faith and Philosophy 23, 2010: 123–41.
Chapter 7, “The Significance of Liturgical Singing,” appeared in Res Philoso-
phica 91, 2014: 411–29.
Chapter 8, “Ritual Knowledge,” appeared in Faith and Philosophy 31, 2014:
365–85.
Chapter 9, “Transforming the Self: On the Baptismal Rite,” appeared in
Religious Studies 50, 2014: 279–96.
Chapter 10, “Rites of Remission,” appeared in the Journal of Analytic Theology
3, 2014: 70–88.
Chapter 11, “Entering through Death, Living with Doubt,” appeared in Rico
Vitz., ed., Turning East: Contemporary Philosophers and the Ancient Christian
Faith. St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2012: 157–76.
Table of Contents
Introduction 1
1. Love and Liturgy 20
2. Protesting Evil 37
3. Another Look at Divine Hiddenness 52
4. Liturgical Immersion 66
5. Liturgy and the Moral Life 88
6. If These Walls Could Only Speak: Icons as Vehicles
of Divine Speech 106
7. The Significance of Liturgical Singing 126
8. Ritual Knowledge 145
9. Transforming the Self: On the Baptismal Rite 167
10. Rites of Remission 185
11. Entering through Death, Living with Doubt 204
Bibliography 219
Index 225
Introduction
We philosophers are accustomed to having an audience in mind for whom we

write. Those of us who work in metaphysics write for fellow metaphysicians.
Those of us who work in ethics write for fellow moral philosophers. And so on.
Of course we often hope that those outside our intended audience will listen
and join in the conversation, seeing the relevance of our work for theirs or
perhaps having their interest sparked by topics that they’d not considered
before. But much of the time these hopes go unrealized; our intended audience
more or less exhausts those who engage our work.
The essays that compose this book do not have an intended audience in
anything like the sense just described. The simple explanation is that these
essays are philosophical explorations of liturgy, and nearly no one in profes-
sional philosophy works on the topic of liturgy.1 (In a moment, I will have
more to say about how I am using the term “liturgy.” For now, think of it as
what many would call the religious service.) To state this explanation even
more sharply, the chapters in this volume are mostly philosophical explor-
ations of the liturgies of a specific Christian tradition, namely, the Christian
East, and almost no one in professional philosophy works on the liturgies of
the Christian East. At the risk of making an apparently esoteric topic seem
even more so, if you were to identify those in fields such as theology, religious
studies, and ritual studies who work on Christian liturgy, you would identify
only a small number of scholars. And those who do work on the topic tend to
approach it much differently than a philosopher would; their work is often
purely historical, sociological, or philological, having little to do with the sorts
1
A caveat: some contemporary philosophers and philosophically inclined theologians have
written on the metaphysics of the eucharist. For example, see Adams (2006), Pruss (2009),
Hütter (2010), Toner (2011), and Baber (2013). Generally speaking, however, this work on the
metaphysics of the eucharist has treated it like any other puzzle in metaphysics, paying relatively
little attention to the eucharistic celebration as a liturgical activity. In the broadly Anglo-
American analytic tradition, Nicholas Wolterstorff is an exception to this trend, having worked
on issues in the philosophy of liturgy for some years. See Wolterstorff (2011a) and (2015),
especially. In the broadly Continental tradition, James K. A. Smith is also an exception; see Smith
(2009).
2 Ritualized Faith
of issues that would interest a philosopher, such as the ethical dimensions of
ritualized activity.
Still, those familiar with the history of theology know that commentary
and reflection on liturgy is nothing new. There is, for example, a venerable
tradition in the Eastern Christian tradition in which figures such as Maximus
the Confessor, in the seventh century, St. Germanos, in the eighth century, and
Nicholas Cabasilas, in the fourteenth century, offered extensive commentaries
on the Divine Liturgy. Might this collection of essays be viewed as an effort to
rehabilitate this more or less forgotten and defunct tradition?
Not in any direct sense. While I locate myself within the religious tradition
to which these figures belong—namely, Eastern Christianity—I find the
neo-Platonic philosophical framework within which they operate alien in
important respects. (In this, I doubt that I am unusual. Most contemporary
philosophers would answer similarly.) For me, the experience of reading the
commentaries just mentioned is that of entering into a philosophical world
profoundly different from ours, animated by concerns and presuppositions
that are often baffling. Connecting my own experience of the liturgy with what
they have to say about it is challenging.
There is, perhaps, a deeper reason for not viewing this collection of essays as
a natural extension of ancient liturgical commentary, articulated most sharply
by the Orthodox liturgical scholar and theologian Alexander Schmemann. In
his Introduction to Liturgical Theology, Schmemann notes that representatives
of the so-called mysteriological school, such as Maximus, Germanos, and
Cabasilas, take an approach to liturgical commentary that consists in offering
elaborate symbolic and typological interpretations of the actions that compose
the liturgy.2 To give you a taste of their approach: if you were to attend a
performance of the Orthodox Divine Liturgy, you would notice that early in
the service the priest enters the altar holding a copy of the Gospel aloft. In their
commentaries, advocates of the mysteriological school tell us that this action
symbolically represents Christ’s entrance into Jerusalem.
In Schmemann’s view, this approach to liturgical interpretation is mistaken.
The problem is not primarily that these figures offer forced, even artificial
interpretations of liturgical action. It is rather that, in some important respects,
they advance a deeply distorted understanding of the reality and significance
of liturgical activity, according to which the liturgy is “a sanctifying
mystery . . . a means of rising by way of initiation from the profane to the
sacred, from the material to the spiritual, from the sensual to the noumenal.”3
2
Schmemann (1966). Central to Schmemann’s work is the distinction between the liturgy
itself and its reception. In Schmemann’s view, while the reception of the liturgy has been heavily
influenced by certain elements of neo-Platonism, the fundamentals of the liturgy itself have not.
3
Schmemann (1966), 130. Elsewhere Schmemann writes: “The explanation of the Eucharistic
liturgy as a symbolic depiction of the earthly life of Christ is an artificial explanation for anyone
who is even slightly familiar with the history, prayers and structure of the liturgy. And yet not
Introduction 3
Schmemann charges this approach with being deeply unfaithful to the Chris-
tian vision. I agree. When properly understood, the Christian vision does not
operate with or presuppose the legitimacy of the categories to which Schme-
mann adverts, let alone advocate a view according to which worship consists
in turning away from the profane to the sacred. Instead, liturgical worship
presents the world as a manifestation of God and God’s activity to which we,
in worship, respond in thanks.
I have claimed that a collection of essays on the philosophy of liturgy is
unlikely either to find a “ready-made” audience or to be a natural extension of
a long-standing tradition of liturgical commentary that deserves rehabilita-
tion. But if not, why write such essays? Why would anyone think it worthwhile
to think philosophically about liturgy? Or to phrase the question somewhat
more exactly: suppose that topics do not simply sort themselves into categories
such as “amenable only to philosophical reflection” or “amenable only to
theological reflection,” since philosophers often legitimately reflect on topics
of interest to theologians and vice-versa. If this is so, why think philosophically
about liturgy? And if one were to do so, why focus on the liturgies of the
Christian East?
Let me approach these questions indirectly. Those familiar with contem-
porary philosophy of religion know that, within the last forty years or so, the
discipline has experienced a renaissance in the Anglo-American analytic
tradition. As Nicholas Wolterstorff observes in his essay “Analytic Philosophy
of Religion: Retrospect and Prospect,” the renaissance is remarkable (in part)
because it was unpredictable; during the heyday of logical positivism in the
mid-twentieth century, it would have been impossible to have foreseen either
the collapse of positivism or the resurgence of philosophy of religion, which
occurred in the wake of positivism’s collapse.4
While unpredictable, the renaissance in philosophy of religion has taken a
definite shape. Most of those who have contributed to it are not neutral
observers of religion but practitioners of one or another religious tradition,
typically the Christian tradition. And to an overwhelming degree, within the
philosophy of religion, their work has focused on issues of epistemology and
metaphysics. In the epistemology of religious belief, the central issue has been
to address the charge, leveled by many, that there is something deeply defect-
ive about religious belief: it is irrational, unreasonable, unjustified, in conflict
with the findings of science, or the like. In this respect, work in the epistem-
ology of religious belief has been outward looking, addressing a challenge that
only has it been since Byzantine times the most popular and widely accepted explanation, it may
also be regarded as the occasion for a whole series of additions and accretions in the ritual of the
liturgy which have tended to destroy its original structure” (98). Not all are as pessimistic,
however. Meyendorff (1984) highlights what he takes to be of value in Germanos’ commentary.
4
Wolterstorff (2011b), ch. 1.
4 Ritualized Faith
arises, in large measure, from outside the theistic traditions. In contrast, work
in the metaphysics of theism has not been outward looking in the same way, as
it has been primarily concerned to tackle issues that arise from the theistic
traditions themselves, such as how to understand the divine attributes and to
reconcile our freedom with God’s foreknowledge or sovereignty. A third large-
scale project of developing responses to the so-called problem of evil has cut
across these two areas, drawing upon (among other areas) work in the
metaphysics of modality and probability theory.5
Given its shape, the contemporary renaissance in philosophy of religion has
had its limitations. The most obvious limitation, I believe, is that the contem-
porary discussion has tended to proceed at a very high level of abstraction,
having relatively little to say about lived religious life “on the ground” and the
sorts of questions and challenges that issue from and concern the religiously
committed life. In this respect, contemporary work in philosophy of religion
differs markedly from work done in other domains of philosophy, such as ethics.
Within ethics, many dedicate themselves to addressing foundational and ab-
stract questions, such as whether there are any moral truths, whether we can
have moral knowledge, and what the nature of right action might be. But, in
addition, many others primarily focus on the lived moral life and the questions
and challenges it raises. Their discussions include fine-grained analyses of the
virtues, explorations of whether we can legitimately hold corporations respon-
sible for their actions, and assessments of the legitimacy of blame and praise—all
of which are aimed at deepening our understanding of the lived ethical life.
In gesturing toward the limitations of contemporary work in the philosophy
of religion, I need to emphasize that I have no interest in casting aspersions on
it. On the contrary, I have a very high estimation of much of this work, largely
because it has, in my view, considerably enriched the contemporary philo-
sophical discussion. Unlike some philosophers and theologians, then, I do not
believe that, when practiced in a way that is aware of its own tendencies and
limitations, philosophical reflection on the nature of God or the problem of
evil is morally or religiously illegitimate.6 To gesture toward the limitations
of a movement is not to disparage it.
And yet I harbor worries. My primary concern is not that contemporary
philosophy of religion is entirely out of touch with religious life on the ground.
5
Interestingly, although work on the problem of evil has made extensive assumptions about
the nature of value and of the rights, responsibilities, and obligations we may have toward God
and that God may have toward us, very little of this work has been done by those who work in
value theory or the foundations of ethics. This, I believe, has heavily colored the discussion of
the topic.
6
I find myself ultimately disagreeing, then, with theologians such as Tilley (2000) and Surrin
(2004) and philosophers such as Trakakis (2008), despite agreeing with some of what they say.
Recent movements in so-called analytic theology might be a sign that changes are afoot in the
discipline. See Crisp and Rea (2009).
Introduction 5
What philosophers of religion talk about, after all, often springs from elements
of the religious life. Anselm, for one, is famous for having formulated his
ontological argument in the context of composing a prayer. Moreover, I am
aware that the insights offered by contemporary philosophers of religion
sometimes trickle down to communities of non-philosophers, helping them
to appreciate the resources available for thinking through certain issues or
addressing challenges. The issue that concerns me, then, is not that contem-
porary philosophy of religion and religious life fail to intersect. It is rather that,
when they do intersect, they do so at only certain points, yielding a picture of
the religious life that often looks to me oddly out of focus.
Let me present this concern in more detail. Begin by noting that while
philosophical questions sometimes have their roots in the religious life, the
lived religious life tends not to concern itself with the questions that animate
philosophers, such as whether there are counterfactuals of creaturely free-
dom or whether God is metaphysically simple. Nor, for that matter, does the
coherence, legitimacy, and attractiveness of this way of life ride on how
philosophers answer these questions. In this regard, the religious life enjoys a
certain degree of autonomy from higher-order reflections on it. What, then,
does the lived religious life concern itself with? I would say that it primarily
concerns itself with issues such as these: first, how to understand the
teachings, ideals, practices, and responsibilities of the religious life as they
are presented in one’s religious tradition; second, how to conform one’s life
and the life of one’s community to these teachings, ideals, practices, and
responsibilities; and, third, when some teaching, ideal, practice, or putative
responsibility with respect to some subject matter is deemed inadequate or
unacceptable, how to identify—given one’s religious commitments—other
teachings, ideals, practices, and responsibilities with regard to that subject
matter that are adequate or acceptable. As to the teachings, ideals, practices,
or responsibilities that are the concern of the religiously committed life,
these would include interpretation of scripture and other important texts,
broadly ascetic practices such as fasting, prayer, and almsgiving, the educa-
tion of children and converts in the ways of a tradition, the creation and
engagement with works of the arts such as hymns and icons, being involved
in or advocating certain social or political movements and, most relevantly
for my purposes, corporate worship.
This last point is important for my purposes, since, for many of the
religiously committed, corporate worship lies at the heart of their religious
commitment. And yet I imagine that someone thoroughly familiar with
contemporary philosophy of religion could, from having read this literature,
only guess that an activity such as worship is important, let alone fundamental
to the religious life. The topic is simply not addressed. In fact, if the amount of
time and ink dedicated to an issue is any indication of the degree to which that
issue matters, such a person might well have the impression that, when it
6 Ritualized Faith
comes to religion, what matters is the defensibility of Molinism or the rational
credibility of religious belief.
The concern I am raising, then, is that much of the discussion in contem-
porary philosophy of religion is detached from the religious life in such a way
that it threatens to offer a distorted picture of what is important to this way of
life. A corollary is that contemporary philosophy of religion has largely failed
to deepen our understanding of what it is to be a religiously committed agent
and how one ought to be such an agent. A consequence, I believe, is that we do
not understand crucial components of lived religious life as well as we should.
I can make the point I am pressing more vivid by returning to an analogue
introduced earlier: imagine that philosophical work in ethics were more or
less entirely consumed with metaethical questions about whether there are
moral truths, answering skeptical challenges as to whether we ever have moral
reasons to act, or what grounds our moral obligations. In this imagined
scenario, moral philosophers touch only in passing upon lived ethical life
and the sorts of issues that confront ethical agents. If this were the case, we
would rightly be concerned that the field was not simply unbalanced but also
disconnected from important elements of its subject matter. If someone were
interested in better understanding various contours of the ethical life, this
person would probably not be served by reading work in ethics, since the field
fails to provide us with deeper understanding of what it is to be a moral agent
and how we should understand the ethical life.
The concern I am voicing is that something similar is true of much of the
contemporary discussion in philosophy of religion. This discussion is not
simply incomplete but also, to a considerable extent, disconnected from
what may be the very life-blood of religious ways of life. Arguably, though,
we want discussions in philosophy of religion to proceed on multiple levels: we
want to have not only high-level discussions of abstract topics about God, the
epistemic status of religious belief, and the compatibility of freedom and
foreknowledge but also philosophically astute reflection on the religious way
of life that deepens our understanding of that way of life. The hope would be
that, in these respects, philosophy of religion should more closely resemble
contemporary work in ethics than it presently does.
Given the present orientation of philosophy of religion, it is natural to cast
about for explanations as to why it’s taken the direction it has. Specifically, it is
natural to search for explanations as to why contemporary philosophy of
religion has shown almost no interest in such a religiously fundamental
activity as worship. As much as I would like to have some more or less
comprehensive explanation, I have none. The best we can do, I believe, is to
identify dynamics that might contribute to such an explanation.7
7
Wolterstorff (2011b), ch. 1, also addresses some of these dynamics, drawing attention to the
context in which contemporary philosophers of religion have worked.
Introduction 7
To that end, consider the observation made by the late anthropologist of
religion, Catherine Bell, that religious traditions divide into those that are
more or less “orthopraxic” (from the Greek, meaning “straight, right practice”)
and those more or less “orthodoxic” (also from the Greek, meaning “straight,
right belief ”). Christianity is typically offered as the prime example of an
orthodoxic tradition. Indeed, Bell writes that “being a Christian has meant, for
a good part of Christian history, that one believes in the divinity of Jesus
Christ . . . it is not sufficient simply to be born of Christian parents or raised in
a Christian home.”8 As such, orthodoxic traditions such as Christianity, Bell
writes, tend to cast rituals into a secondary role, “as expressions of things that
should already be in the heart.”9 When reflecting on her own experience of
teaching the subject of ritual to undergraduates, Bell continues:
Students know they may be at a disadvantage when they step into one of my
classes if their only previous coursework addressed Christianity, but I think the
disadavantage is quite different from what they imagine. It is not of knowledge,
but perspective. Christianity is the religious tradition least likely to be taught with
reference to its key rituals. In most religious studies departments, undergraduate
courses on Judaism or Islam naturally discuss some of the main ritual compo-
nents of these traditions, often presented as more orthopraxic in orientation than
Christianity. They also deal with the significance for a Jew or Muslim of the ideal
of living a life defined by observing all of the ritual responsibilities laid out for a
man and a woman. There are always classes celebrating a seder at Rosh Hasha-
nah,10 or making visits to mosque services . . . . Yet courses on Christian history or
theology that refer to the liturgical expressions of key doctrinal ideas will do so
without ever examining what these liturgical expressions mean to anyone but
theologians.11
If Bell and other anthropologists of religion are right about how Christians
have tended to understand their own tradition, then it might go some distance
toward accounting for why, in contemporary philosophy of religion, some
topics have received a great deal of attention and others have not.
Take, as an example, the epistemic status of religious belief. Suppose the
belief that certain propositions are true were fundamental to the Christian
way of life, since it is these beliefs that determine (at least in large measure)
whether one belongs to the tradition. (The assumption must be that the
attitude of faith, which any Christian would regard as central, includes
something very belief-like.) And suppose that philosophers were primarily
concerned to understand belief states and the various ways in which they
can be meritorious or not. If we suppose these two things, then it would shed
8 9
Bell (1997), 194. Ibid. Cf. also p. 215.
10
I assume that this must be a slip of the pen on Bell’s part. In the Jewish calendar, a seder is
celebrated only once a year, at Passover.
11
Bell (2007), 187.
8 Ritualized Faith
light on why philosophers have paid so much attention to the epistemic
credentials of religious belief. In doing so, they would be focusing on what,
according to Christianity and to philosophy, matters. More importantly than
this, however, Bell’s observation would also help explain why other topics
have been ignored by contemporary philosophers of religion, such as the
role of ritualized activity. If ritualized activity belongs to the periphery of the
Christian way of life, as Bell suggests many hold, then it would make some
sense of why it is not a topic of philosophical conversation. Any importance
it might have would be derivative, perhaps because it functions to express
theological beliefs, strengthen our commitment to them, energize the faithful
for doing good works, increase social cohesion, or the like.
If the proposal we’re now considering were along the right lines, it would
not only help to explain why liturgy has not been discussed by philosophers,
but also deflect the charge that—to the extent that it engages with religion “on
the ground” at all—contemporary philosophy of religion offers a distorted
picture of the religious life. The reply is that while it would probably not be
inappropriate for philosophers of religion to engage topics peripheral to the
religious life, such as ritualized activity, they cannot be expected to do so. By
not engaging secondary dimensions of the religious life, the contemporary
discussion might be incomplete. But it would not, as I have suggested, thereby
offer a misshapen portrayal of the religious life. To which it might be added
that some philosophers will wonder what the fuss could be about, asking what
could be said about liturgy that is of philosophical interest!
Were they correct, Bell’s observations would represent only part of an
explanation as to why contemporary philosophy of religion has taken the
form it has. And as far as partial explanations go, it would be limited, for as
Bell herself acknowledges, she paints with broad strokes in the passages I’ve
quoted.12 Christianity comes in many varieties, and not all are all belief-
centered in the way that Bell describes. This is certainly true of various
forms of the Roman Catholic, Anglican, and Mennonite traditions, for
example—and might also be true of so-called non-liturgical traditions such
as Quakerism. However that may be, it is especially true of the Christian
tradition that occupies my attention in this book, namely, Eastern Christian-
ity. While issues of correct belief have occupied its attention—this is, after all,
the tradition that crafted the Nicean–Constantinopolitan creed—Eastern
Christianity has much in common with Bell’s description of Judaism and
Islam: if one wished to introduce students to the tradition, there would be no
adequate way to do so without taking into account the role that corporate
ritualized activity, especially liturgical worship, plays in it. In fact, so far that
I can see, the role that liturgy plays in Eastern Christianity has no parallel in
12
See Bell (1997), 197.
Introduction 9
other corners of Christendom. For Eastern Christians, the liturgy functions as
the centerpiece of the Christian way of life. It is the paradigmatic expression
of the tradition’s mind—the sense of the term “mind” referring not simply or
even primarily to various doctrines or claims but also to ways of conducting
oneself and viewing the world, whose rich character and significance might be
difficult and perhaps impossible to capture in wholly propositional terms.13
In short, if one wanted to understand the religious and ethical vision of
Eastern Christianity, one would have to attend carefully to its liturgies.
It may help to unpack these points, beginning with the claim about the
liturgy’s central role in the Eastern church. Why, in contrast to other branches
of Christendom, would the liturgy play such a crucial role in the life of the
Eastern church? In the memorable first chapter of his book For the Life of the
World, Schmemann contends that the answer cannot be attributed to hap-
penstance. Rather, the liturgy’s central role is the expression of a deeply
embedded anthropology in which the function of human beings is to play a
mediating or “priestly” role. Commenting on this role, Schmemann writes:
All rational, spiritual and other qualities of man, distinguishing him from other
creatures, have their focus and ultimate fulfilment in this capacity to bless God, to
know, so to speak, the meaning of the thirst and hunger that constitutes his life.
“Homo sapiens,” “homo faber” . . . yes, but, first of all, “homo adorans.” The first,
the basic definition of man is that he is the priest. He stands in the center of the
world and unifies it in his act of blessing God, of both receiving the world from
God and offering it to God—and by filling the world with this eucharist, he
transforms his life, the one that he receives from the world, into life in God, into
communion with Him.14
In this passage, Schmemann articulates a rationale for why liturgical action
takes the form it does and why it would matter that human beings engage in it.
His explanation is broadly teleological: by playing the mediating role of
receiving the world from God and offering the world to God, we thereby
transform both the world and ourselves, fulfilling our appointed role as human
beings. If Schmemann is correct, this is why the liturgy deserves to occupy a
central place in the religiously committed life, since it is an enactment of this
role. The centrality of the liturgy to the Eastern Christian life, then, is simply
the practical expression of the tradition’s conviction that the liturgy deserves
to occupy this role. While what Schmemann says seems to me broadly correct,
I would prefer to state his insight somewhat differently, not in terms of
identifying the implications of a particular “definition” of the human being
but in terms of what we are called to do. Under this related approach,
participating in liturgy with its rhythm of blessing and thanksgiving is not
13
In speaking of the “mind” (φρόυημα) of the tradition, I follow Florovsky (1975), 18.
14
Schmemann (1973), 13.
10 Ritualized Faith
so much a fulfilment of our nature as a response to divine invitation. It is the
recognition and fulfilment of a vocation.
The passage I have quoted from Schmemann makes it apparent why, for
Eastern Christians, the liturgy could not be an addendum to the Christian life,
something that one does when not performing good works or communicating
the teachings of Jesus. Still, this passage conveys little of the richness of
liturgical life, the multiple ways in which it expresses the mind of the tradition.
Since conveying some of this richness will be useful, given my purpose of
explaining why it is worthwhile to think philosophically about liturgy, let me
turn to that task.
To do so, it will be helpful to have some distinctions before us. Begin with
the distinction between a liturgical script and a liturgy. For present purposes,
think of a liturgical script as a set of guidelines addressed to a group of people
who might participate in the liturgy—what I’ll call the assembly—that specifies
which actions these people are to perform, who among them are to perform
them, when, and how. A given script might, for example, direct someone in
the role of deacon or priest to read a passage from the Gospels at a particular
point in a certain way, say, by chanting it. While a script is a set of guidelines, it
bears emphasizing that it needn’t exist as a set of notations and can be more or
less specific, leaving rather significant room for ways in which an assembly
might conform to it.
Corresponding to each liturgical script is a liturgy, which is a sequence
of act-types that its corresponding script instructs an assembly to perform.
These act-types would, among others, typically include entering a space of
worship, singing, bowing, listening, eating, and the like. When they form a
sequence, these act-types are not stitched together by what Hume would call
principles of association, but exhibit a certain type of unity—the sequence to
which they belong having a proper beginning, middle, and end, which are
specified by the guidelines of its corresponding liturgical script. Since such a
sequence can be performed on multiple occasions by a variety of assemblies, it
is naturally viewed as being a type of universal—an action-sequence universal. If
this characterization of a liturgy is correct, it has the implication that an
assembly could not perform a liturgy accidentally. Rather, for the performance
of a sequence of act-types to count as a performance of a liturgy, it must conform
to some sufficient degree to its corresponding script—where conforming to a
script consists (at least in part) in an assembly having the intention to conform
to that script by performing the actions it directs them to perform.15
As I’ve indicated, a liturgical script typically instructs an assembly to
perform a wide variety of actions, such as singing, listening, eating, and the
like. Prominent among these actions are those that engage with a liturgical
15
Does this formulation imply that groups such as assemblies can have intentions? I am
inclined to think so, but won’t defend that claim here.
Introduction 11
text, by which I have in mind a composition typically consisting in hymns,
poetry, creedal declarations, and prayers, which a liturgical script directs the
assembled to recite, follow, or listen to. (Like a liturgical script, a liturgical text
needn’t consist in a set of notations.) In fact, however, the scripts of the
Eastern liturgies instruct assemblies to engage with a good deal more than
texts. They also instruct them to engage with liturgical props, where these are
non-linguistic items such as icons, chalices, vestments, candles, water, and oil.
Those familiar with the liturgies of the Christian East know that these engage-
ments take various forms: when performing the liturgy, the assembled do such
things as decorate and kiss icons, bless food with water, vest bishops, light
candles at particular times, and so forth. Those familiar with the Eastern
liturgies also know that actions such as these are pervasive components of
these liturgies.
What the distinctions we’ve drawn help us to see is at least these two
things: first, while speaking in a loose and general way of liturgy is indis-
pensable, speaking thus can mask a great deal of complexity, since it might
concern any of the items distinguished above. Thinking philosophically
about liturgy would require one to operate with these distinctions, paying
attention to how the items they designate might relate, how we might
relate to them, and what their significance might be. Second, and relatedly,
by highlighting these distinctions, we are better placed to see why liturgy
functions as a vehicle that can, in a wide variety of ways, express (and shape)
the mind of the tradition, some of these ways being difficult to capture in
wholly propositional terms. For by composing and authorizing a series of
liturgical scripts and liturgical texts, the tradition expresses (and shapes) its
mind not simply in the contents of the texts it selects for liturgical use, but
also in the actions that it instructs an assembly to perform, the props with
which it directs them to engage, and the understanding that they are to have
of the assembly’s actions.
Rather than simply issue these general claims, let me try to substantiate
them to some degree by focusing for a moment on a particular dimension of
liturgy, exploring some of its nuances. The topic that I address is one that, to
my knowledge, philosophers have not discussed.
There is probably no theme more pervasive in the Gospels and the
liturgy than that of repentance. In the Gospels, it is the very first injunc-
tion Jesus issues. Indeed, Jesus repeatedly enjoins his audiences to repent,
even at the seemingly most inopportune moments, such as when they tell
him of some horrifying actions taken by the Roman authorities (Luke 13:
3). In the Eastern Christian tradition, the activity of repenting is woven
through all its liturgical activity, even at its most celebratory moments. At
various points in the liturgical calendar, however, such as during the
season of Great Lent, the activity of repenting assumes a central role in
liturgical life.
12 Ritualized Faith
At each weekday office during the services of Great Lent, the script of these
liturgies instructs the assembly to recite the Prayer of St. Ephraim:
O Lord and Master of my life, give me not a spirit of sloth, despair, lust for power,
and idle talk.
(prostration)
But give to me your servant a spirit of sobriety, humility, patience, and love.
(prostration)
O Lord and King, grant me to see my own faults and not to condemn my brother:
for blessed are you to the ages of ages. Amen.
(prostration)16
This is the church’s paradigmatic prayer of repentance. Interestingly, it is not a
confession in any straightforward sense; were one to recite this prayer sin-
cerely, one wouldn’t thereby confess that one has wronged God or one’s fellow
human beings. That one has done so seems to be taken for granted. Instead,
the prayer takes the form of a petition, asking God that one not have certain
characteristics, such as lust for power and despair, but that one exhibit others,
such as patience and humility. But if this is so, why think of this prayer as one
of repentance?
The answer, I take it, lies in the bodily actions that one performs when
reciting the prayer: after each verse, one fully prostrates oneself on the ground,
touching the ground with one’s forehead. Etymology is helpful here. The
Greek term for repentance is the same as that used to refer to these prostra-
tions, namely, metanoia. Once one sees the significance of the prostrations, it
becomes evident that the prayer is a blend of petitioning and repenting. In the
liturgical context, both the linguistic acts of uttering the text of the prayer and
the bodily action of prostrating count as illocutionary (or speech) acts in
which agents alter their normative position with regard to God and fellow
members of the assembly with whom they perform these actions. If the
tradition’s understanding of repentance is correct, the alteration does not so
much consist in expressing states of sorrow, guilt or regret—although it may
include the expression of such states. (In fact, at some points the liturgical texts
include petitions to acquire such states: “Give me tears, O God, as once you
gave them to the woman that had sinned” [LT, 188]). Rather, the alteration
primarily consists in taking on new commitments. Specifically, it consists in
committing oneself to a commitment: that of transforming one’s mind,
turning away from a life that neglects one’s mediating or priestly role—
“transforming of mind” being the literal rendering of metanoia.
16
I cite the prayer as it is found in Mother Mary and Ware (2002), 69. I’ll insert page references
to this work into the body of the text referring to it as LT (for The Lenten Triodion).
Introduction 13
At this point, however, we need to mark a distinction. As I’ve said, what
one does when one conforms to the liturgical script by saying the prayer of
St. Ephraim is to perform the illocutionary act of repenting, committing
oneself to a change of mind. But to perform the illocutionary act of repenting
is not perforce to repent. One can, after all, perform the illocutionary act
insincerely, as when one says “I’m sorry” when one is really not. Moreover,
given the tradition’s robust understanding of repentance, in which it is the
enactment of a resolution to transform one’s mind, one could perform the
illocutionary act of repenting while falling short of enacting the resolution.
Whether one enacts this commitment by genuinely turning away from what
one is called to leave behind is something that happens over time to different
degrees, taking place not simply in the performance of a speech act but also in
one’s day-to-day activities. When sincerely and competently performed, then,
a liturgical action such as the speech act of repenting may have limited
implications, since it wouldn’t imply that the agent who performed it has
actually repented. Although, it may be worth emphasizing that reciting a
prayer such as that of St. Ephraim’s may play the indispensable role of
reminding one of that to which one has already committed oneself to. (Unless
I indicate otherwise, when I speak of repenting, I will mean performing the
illocutionary act of repenting.)
While often having limited implications, the character of repentance as it is
performed in a liturgical context is striking. In the various prayers of repent-
ance, there is never any attempt to identify the fault lines that separate that for
which one is responsible from that for which one is not, or those aspects of
oneself that are afflicted by disorder from those that are not. Instead, repent-
ance is indiscriminate and unreserved. The indiscriminate character of re-
pentance is evident in the norms that govern it, which instruct those who
repent not to separate or disassociate themselves from their actions. The
unreserved character of repentance is especially apparent in the sometimes
hyperbolic language used in the liturgical text, such as when the assembly
compare themselves to figures such as the Prodigal, the Publican, or the
Prostitute who washes Jesus’s feet with her hair.17 In fact, the images used in
the liturgical texts extend far beyond these. At points, the assembly speak of
themselves as prisoners, wounded, barren, storm-tossed, distressed, and
drunken.18 Lying behind the indiscriminate and unreserved character of
repentance, presumably, is the tradition’s conviction that attempting to dis-
criminate between that for which one is responsible and that for which one is
not is generally unhelpful to the moral and spiritual life, and may lend itself
17
“I fall down before You, and as tears I offer You my words. I have sinned as the Harlot
never sinned, and I have transgressed as no person on earth. But take pity on Your creature,
Master, and call me back” (LT, 160).
18
Cf. LT, 178, 186, 191, 190, and 194, respectively.
14 Ritualized Faith
too easily to offering justifications when there should be none. (This convic-
tion also drives the practice of personal confession as it takes shape in the
tradition.) I would add that even if determining the extent to which one is
liable for who one is and what one has done were beneficial when repenting,
the character of liturgical repentance also expresses the tradition’s conviction
that we couldn’t make these distinctions accurately even if we tried.
Let me draw attention to a final point, which is the way in which
repentance—at least as it takes shape in the liturgy—stands in sharp contrast
with the correlative activity of forgiving. Unlike repenting—at least as it occurs
in the liturgical context—forgiving someone for having performed some
action, requires one to make fine-grained distinctions, distinguishing of-
fenders from their acts in such a way that while one continues to be against
their acts, one is not against those who performed them; instead one enacts the
resolution not to hold those acts against the offenders.19 When considered
together, a fundamental asymmetry between repentance and forgiveness
emerges: in the case of repentance, we are to forget about trying to distinguish
that for which we are liable and that for which are not; in the case of forgiveness,
we need to make fine-grained distinctions between the agents’ actions and their
moral standing and apply them in certain ways. Interestingly, this asymmetry
between how we are to treat self and others in the activities of repentance and
forgiveness correlates with another, which is that while both repentance and
forgiveness receive liturgical expression, forgiveness plays a much less central
role in liturgical life than repentance.20 Why is there this asymmetry? I am
not sure.
Obviously, there is more to say about the role of repentance in the liturgy
and what it presupposes about our relations to one another and God.21 But
even this brief discussion should give you a sense of how the mind of the
tradition can manifest itself in the texts, actions, and presuppositions of the
liturgy. Having done this, let me now return to a question that I raised several
pages back, which is whether there is enough of theoretical interest in liturgy
to render it philosophically worthwhile to reflect on it. I hope to have made
some progress addressing this question, pointing out that by doing so, philo-
sophers could tap into deep currents that run through the religiously com-
mitted life, bringing philosophical reflection to bear on topics that are
important but frequently overlooked, and deepening our understanding of
these topics. In principle, doing so would help to balance the contemporary
philosophical discussion, widening and enriching it in various ways. That, in
19
Here I echo the account offered in Wolterstorff (2011b), ch. 15, which strikes me as
basically correct.
20
I don’t mean to suggest that forgiveness fails to play a role in liturgical life. For example, on
the Sunday immediately preceding Great Lent, the assembly performs the Rite of Forgiveness in
which each member individually asks other members for their forgiveness.
21
I do so in Cuneo (forthcoming).
Introduction 15
turn, might help to ameliorate the sense that the contemporary discussion in
philosophy of religion is often disconnected from what matters in the religious
life.22 And, finally, I hope to have illustrated to some degree that thinking
philosophically about liturgy requires one to focus on a variety of issues and
how they relate: liturgical scripts, liturgical action, liturgical texts, liturgical
actors, and so forth. As will be evident in the essays that follow, some of these
topics come closest to those which philosophers of art address when they
explore the nature of literary, music, and dance performance, the function of
texts and the proper ways to interpret them, the social functions of works of
the arts and the proper ways to engage them, and so forth. Indeed, of all the
subfields within contemporary philosophy, work in philosophy of art has been
especially helpful to me in thinking through various aspects of the liturgy.
Still, it might be asked why a discussion on liturgy should focus almost
exclusively on the liturgies of one tradition, namely, the Christian East. The
short answer is that I take this approach not simply because these liturgies are
most familiar to me but also because I believe that the best way to make
progress on the topic of liturgy is to speak not of liturgies in the abstract but
particular liturgies, offering thick descriptions of them and drawing out their
implications. For example, although Howie Wettstein writes on Jewish liturgy,
I find his descriptions and interpretations of Jewish liturgical practice consid-
erably more illuminating than general discussions of liturgy.23 The same is
true of Wolterstorff ’s descriptions and interpretations of the Reformed Chris-
tian liturgies.24 Given the richness of their descriptions, it is easier to appre-
ciate both points of contact with and genuine differences from them. That, in
turn, often gives one a better sense of the questions to raise about ritualized
activity as it takes shape in the Jewish and Reformed Christian traditions and,
in my case, in the Eastern Christian tradition.
In addition to holding that a “particularist” approach is the best way to
contribute to the philosophical conversation on liturgy, there is a personal
dimension to this project that shapes its contents. As I’ve already indicated,
I locate myself within the Eastern Orthodox Christian tradition and frequently
find myself engaged in liturgical activity. I also frequently find myself puzzled
by elements of this activity, wondering what certain actions and texts mean,
why certain actions are performed, why liturgical texts say the things they do,
why various things are not said, and so on. Many of the essays that follow are
22
A theme that sometimes surfaces in theological discussions of liturgy is that liturgy is “first
theology.” See, for example, Florovsky (1972), Schmemann (1990), and Kavanaugh (1992).
According to this view, our reflections on God and the religious life ought to be informed and
shaped by liturgy in such a way that if particular theological views do not sit well with our
liturgical practices, that is a prima facie reason to reject them. I have not advocated this view,
focusing instead on understanding crucial aspects of the liturgy.
23 24
See Wettstein (2012). In Wolterstorff (2011a) and (2015a).
16 Ritualized Faith
attempts to work through questions that, as it were, the liturgy puts to its
participants—at least those inclined to reflect on it. Since my own interests lie
primarily in moral philosophy, some of the essays in this volume concern the
ethical dimensions of corporate ritualized activity. The first two essays of this
volume, “Love and Liturgy” and “Protesting Evil,” reflect this interest, being
attempts to explore the moral significance of liturgical activity—why it might
matter morally for us to engage in liturgical rites of various sorts, especially in
the face of vast evil against which we are often powerless. To be sure, these
essays are not primarily addressed to those who lack religious sensibilities or
are hostile to religion. Still, I hope that they help illustrate even to those who
lack religious commitments why corporate liturgical activity might be of moral
value, giving expression to sound moral conviction and shaping moral sens-
ibilities in helpful ways.
Of the various chapters that compose this volume, the third chapter,
“Another Look at Divine Hiddenness,” comes closest to addressing a topic
that receives attention in mainstream philosophy of religion. It also says the
least about liturgy explicitly. Nonetheless, this chapter illustrates how one
might approach the problem of divine hiddenness if one has first thought
about what liturgical action—especially such action as it takes shape in those
traditions committed to sacramental Christianity—presupposes about how
human beings and God relate to one another. The contemporary discussion
of divine hiddenness has assumed that, if God is anything like the theistic
traditions claim, our awareness of God and God’s activity would have to take
the form of noticed awareness in which we take certain events of the world as
being a manifestation of God or God’s activity. Lying deep in the mind of the
tradition, however, is the conviction that our awareness of God often does not
take that form; often, we can be and are both aware of and rightly related to
God via relating to the natural world, to each other, to art, and the like without
have awareness of this type.
While it does not require extended effort to ascertain that the sacramental
traditions assume that fellow human beings, the natural world, and art are
and ought to be points of contact with God, the significance of other aspects
of the liturgy are far less clear. For example, central to the Eastern Orthodox
liturgies is the activity of reenacting elements of the core Christian narrative.
To cite just one example, during Holy Week, the assembly reenact the burial
of Jesus using props of various sorts. It is natural to wonder not only what it is
to engage in such reenactment but also what the point of liturgical reenact-
ment might be. In Chapter 4, “Liturgical Immersion,” I explore the first issue,
asking what it is to immerse oneself in liturgical performance—what sorts of
attitudes and behaviors the liturgical script might call for from members of
the assembly when it directs them to engage in liturgical reenactment. After
canvassing several proposals, I defend a position that I call the immersion
model of liturgical reenactment. If this model is correct, what the liturgical
Introduction 17
script calls for from the assembled is not that they pretend that they are figures
such as Mary of Bethany, Joseph of Arimathea, or Jesus or that they are present
in the circumstances that these biblical figures occupied. Rather, what the
script calls for is that the assembled attend to the content of what I call the core
narrative in such a way that they imaginatively situate themselves within it.
The activity called for is imaginative engagement without pretense.
Chapter 5, “Liturgy and the Moral Life,” takes up the second question
regarding what the point of liturgical reenactment might be. While conceding
that it could have multiple purposes, I focus on the way in which such
reenactment contributes to the formation of what I call an agent’s narrative
identity—this being a story-like event that has an agent as a subject, to which
that agent might refer were she to tell a story of her life. A close look at the
liturgical texts and practices, I argue, reveals ways in which the liturgical script
calls for its participants to construct and shape their narrative identities via
liturgical reenactment. Some of this activity occurs by identifying with char-
acters who are often, in important respects, deeply alien, such as Mary of
Bethany, the Prodigal Son, or the Publican, and committing oneself in litur-
gical action to ideals that these characters represent.
Anyone who has attended one of the Eastern liturgies knows that they are
multi-sensory in character, engaging all the sensory modalities—touching
especially. The next two chapters concern some ways in which liturgical
performance incorporates and engages some of the sensory modalities. In
Chapter 6, “If These Walls Could Only Speak: Icons as Vehicles of Divine
Speech,” I consider what role icons might play in liturgical activity. Given its
topic, one would expect the discussion to concern the ways in which sight is
employed in liturgical performance. And, in a way, it does, but its primary
focus is on not how we engage with the visual arts in a liturgical context but
how icons can function as vehicles of divine action—the claim being that icons
can fruitfully be viewed as vehicles by which God could perform various sorts
of illocutionary acts. Chapter 7, “The Significance of Liturgical Singing,” takes
up a topic that, to my knowledge, philosophers of religion have not discussed,
namely, singing. Its starting point is the observation that the liturgy is en-
veloped in song; there are hardly any actions performed in the liturgy that are
not accompanied by singing. Why, however, would that be so? I present a
position that develops the thought that, given its primary purposes, liturgical
singing is particularly fitting and that its fittingness consists (at least in part) in
a particular sort of form/content marriage in which singing the liturgical text
thereby instantiates important elements of its content.
When engaging with Bell’s observations, I noted that it is not uncommon to
characterize (the core of) Christianity as a set of propositions and the status
being a Christian as the property of being such as to accept or believe (some
subset of) these propositions. In philosophy, this tendency has been mirrored in
contemporary epistemology by an almost exclusive concern with propositional
18 Ritualized Faith
knowledge (and propositional belief). When these two tendencies combine in
the contemporary discussion of the epistemology of religious belief, the result
has been a discussion that focuses almost exclusively on the possibility and
character of propositional religious knowledge and meritorious propositional
religious belief.
Both these tendencies are, however, problematic. Christianity is not a set of
propositions. To locate oneself in the tradition is not, moreover, primarily a
matter of believing propositions of a certain range (although it might para-
digmatically include that). Rather, Christianity is a way of life and one such
that, in some of its paradigmatic forms, ritualized activity figures prominently.
Furthermore, in addition to propositional knowledge, there is objectual know-
ledge in which we know not propositions but objects—some of these objects
being subjects or persons. When we have knowledge of this last sort, we have
personal knowledge in which the object that we know is a subject—often a
subject distinct from ourselves.
But if Christianity is fundamentally a way of life and not all knowledge is
propositional, then it is natural to ask about sort of knowledge is required to
competently participate in this form of life—what kind of know-how its
members would seek to acquire. In Chapter 8, “Ritual Knowledge,” I engage
this question, exploring the ways in which participating in liturgical activity
might contribute to the ways in which we might know God by way of our
gaining and exercising a certain kind of know-how.
As an initial approximation, the fundamental idea is that to know God
would consist in knowing how to engage God. I then explore how knowing
how to engage in rites of various sorts—liturgical rites in particular—might
contribute in important ways to knowing how to engage God. As I’ve empha-
sized, these rites can be deeply perplexing even to those very familiar with
them. To take one example, the text of the baptismal rite makes seemingly
audacious claims about what it accomplishes, claiming that in virtue of being
baptized, the one baptized enjoys states such as illumination, remission of sin,
sanctification, cleansing of soul, and so on. In Chapter 9, “Transforming the
Self: On the Baptismal Rite,” I try to make sense of these claims, suggesting
that there is a model that comes close to doing so—what I call the process
model—according to which the performance of the rite is the initiation of
processes of transformation in the one baptized. The chapter that follows,
“Rites of Remission,” continues in this vein, grappling with the question of
how engaging in activities such as the eucharistic rite could effect remission
of sin, as the liturgical text claims. I contend that making sense of this claim
requires us to distinguish forgiveness from sin from remission of sin, the latter
being interpreted to mean something like being released from the grip of the
sin-disorder. While marking this distinction hardly dissolves the puzzles that
face someone trying to understand how participation in a rite could effect
remission of sin, I contend that it helps us to make progress on them,
Introduction 19
especially if we take account of the way in which rites can affect us on the
sub-doxastic level.
This book closes with the autobiographical chapter “Entering by Death,
Living with Doubt.” This essay is my attempt to communicate what might
draw one to Eastern Christianity and the liturgy, and the attitudes one might
take up toward its claims by someone who is not a skeptic but who nonetheless
harbors genuine doubt.25
25
Jeroen deRidder, Rik Peels, Luke Reinsma, Russ Shafer-Landau, René van Woudenberg,
Howie Wettstein, and Nick Wolterstorff all offered helpful feedback on an earlier version of this
chapter.
Love and Liturgy
For two millennia Christians have assembled on the “day of the sun” to
celebrate the liturgy together. But why do it? Why structure one’s life in
such a way that participation in ritualized religious activity is a fixed point
in the weekly rhythm of one’s comings and goings? There are standard
answers to these questions, perhaps the most obvious of which is that by
doing so Christians express devotion to God, who is supremely worthy of such
devotion. Understood from this angle, the dominant purpose of assembling
for the liturgy is to fulfill the first of the love commandments, namely, to love
God with all one’s heart, soul, and mind (Matt. 22: 37).
There are also, however, less obvious answers to these questions, ones that
appeal to the ways in which participating in the liturgy fulfills not the first but
the second love commandment.
But how could that be so? What does neighbor-love have to do with liturgy?
In this chapter, I’ll contend that the two have a great deal to do with one
another and that authentically participating in the liturgy is an important way
by which one can fulfill the injunction to love one’s neighbor as oneself. My
discussion will begin with the second love commandment itself and its role in
the Christian tradition. Having offered an interpretation of the second love
commandment, I then turn to the liturgy, exploring the ways in which
participation in it is a way to fulfill the second love commandment, which
enjoins love of neighbor.
Those who write on the ethical dimensions of liturgical action sometimes
speak of liturgy in the abstract, as if there were some unified kind the Christian
liturgy whose ethical dimensions we can investigate.1 Given the great diversity
of Christian liturgies, I believe that doing so threatens to impose unity where
there is often none. So, in what follows, I will narrow my focus and limit
myself to a discussion of the ancient liturgies of the Eastern Orthodox Church,
exploring the ways in which participation in these liturgies is a way to fulfill
the second love commandment. I take this approach not simply because these
1
This is true, for example, of some early and important work on the topic by Ramsey (1979)
and Saliers (1979) and (1998).
Love and Liturgy 21

liturgies provide rich resources for reflection, but also because I believe that
the best way to make progress on our topic is to offer thick descriptions of
particular liturgies.2 My own experience is that when engaging other religious
traditions, thicker descriptions of their ritualized activities are often more
helpful, mostly because it is easier to appreciate both points of contact and
genuine difference. That, in turn, often gives one a better sense of the ques-
tions to raise about ritualized activity as it takes shape in these traditions and
one’s own, setting the stage for more informed and fruitful dialogue. That said,
given the sometimes significant overlap between some Christian liturgical
practices, I believe that much of what I say here will have direct relevance to
those who locate themselves within other areas of the Christian tradition.
1.1. THE S ECOND LOVE COMMAN DMENT
In the Torah, the second love commandment makes its first appearance as the
last of a long series of injunctions, which includes directives about how to
harvest one’s fields, how to allocate resources, and how to treat the poor:
When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very edges of
your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest. You shall not strip your
vineyard bare, or gather the fallen grapes of your vineyard; you shall leave them
for the poor and the alien: I am the LORD your God.
You shall not steal; you shall not deal falsely; and you shall not lie to one
another. And you shall not swear falsely by my name, profaning the name of your
God: I am the LORD.
You shall not defraud your neighbor; you shall not steal; and you shall not keep
for yourself the wages of a laborer until morning. You shall not revile the deaf or
put a stumbling block before the blind; you shall fear your God: I am the LORD.
You shall not render an unjust judgment; you shall not be partial to the poor or
defer to the great; with justice you shall judge your neighbor. You shall not go
around as a slanderer among your people, and you shall not profit by the blood of
your neighbor: I am the LORD.
The passage closes by stating:
You shall not hate in your heart anyone of your kin; you shall reprove your
neighbor, or you will incur guilt yourself. You shall not take vengeance or bear a
2
In this respect, the approach I take aligns more closely with that taken by Guroian (1985)
and (1990) and Wettstein (2012a), who offer thick descriptions of liturgical practice of their
religious traditions, than Saliers (1979) and Ramsey (1979), who tend to speak in more general
ways about how liturgy contributes to the ethical life. That noted, my discussion is indebted to
thinkers such as Saliers and Ramsey, since it is a response to their call to think more carefully
about the ethical dimensions of ritualized religious activity.
22 Ritualized Faith
grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself:
I am the LORD. (Lev. 9–18)3
Given the number and variety of commandments presented in this text, it
would not be difficult to read right past the final commandment, viewing it as
one more commandment among many. That, of course, would be a mistake.
Both the Jewish and Christian traditions have viewed the final injunction as
having special importance. But if it is best not to read this injunction as one
injunction among many, the last of a long list, how should we understand it?
In his discussion of this matter, Nicholas Wolterstorff contends that it is the
final commandment’s generality that provides the clue for how to understand
it.4 Read the final commandment, Wolterstorff suggests, as a summary state-
ment that captures both the letter and spirit of the injunctions that precede it.
Specifically, read the last injunction as preceded by a tacit “in short”: “In short,
love your neighbor as yourself.” This reading, Wolterstorff indicates, has the
virtue of meshing with how Jesus and the Jewish tradition have typically
understood the injunction to love one’s neighbor as oneself.
Although this reading strikes me as being along the right lines, let me
register a point of hesitation about it. The relationship between the love
commandment and the injunctions that precede it, I believe, is probably best
viewed not merely as one in which the former simply summarizes the latter.
The relationship is better understood, I think, as one in which the specific
injunctions present paradigm cases of what it is to love one’s neighbor as
oneself. Under this reading, the general love commandment does not merely
summarize the specific injunctions that precede it. Rather, the injunctions that
precede the love commandment help us to understand what it is to love
another as oneself. In principle, different injunctions or cases could shed
more light on what it is to love one’s neighbor as one oneself.
In fact, Jesus is widely regarded as having done just that. That is, in the
Gospel texts, Jesus is widely regarded as having not simply reiterated the
second love commandment and its paradigm Mosaic cases, but also enriched
it in various ways, giving us new and surprising focal cases of the command-
ment. These enrichments, arguably, take two primary forms. In the first place,
there is an emphasis on caring for the distressed, even when they belong to
out-groups, such as ethnic enemies or the ritually unclean. The story of the
Good Samaritan vividly presents this dimension of Jesus’s teaching.5 The
second related way in which Jesus enriches the various injunctions that
compose the Mosaic law is by enjoining his followers to not enact vengeance
3
Here and throughout I use the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) translation.
4
Wolterstorff 2011b, 82.
5
As Waldron (2000), 1077 points out, Jesus’s interlocutor in this story, a lawyer, knows and
correctly states the answer to Jesus’s question about who acts as a neighbor. Apparently, the
point of the parable is not to introduce a wholly novel moral teaching. Cf. Deut. 10: 19.
Love and Liturgy 23

on their enemies and, indeed, to bless those who curse them. In his discussion
of this topic, Wolterstorff argues that when Jesus says these things in the
Sermon on the Mount, we should hear them as not a mitigation of lex talionis,
enjoining us to take no more than an eye for an eye, as some commentators
have claimed. We should instead hear them as a wholesale rejection of what
Wolterstorff calls the reciprocity code.
The reciprocity code is a dual directive, telling us, first, that if someone does
you a favor, then you owe him a favor in return and, second, if someone visits
an evil upon you, then you owe him an equal evil is return. Jesus’s reply is that
this code should be replaced by a different ethic:
You have heard that it was said, “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” But
I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek,
turn the other also; and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your
cloak as well . . .
You have heard that it was said, “You shall love your neighbor and hate your
enemy.” But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute
you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven. . . . For if you love
those who love you, what reward do you have? (Matt. 5: 38–48)
It is, to put it mildly, an issue of great controversy what exactly Jesus means
when he uses these words. Is he advocating pacifism of the most radical sort,
namely, that we are not to resist evildoers at all, in any respect? That would be
the literal reading of the passage. The dominant interpretation in the Christian
tradition, however, has been that this is not what Jesus means. Instead, by
using vivid and often hyperbolic language, Jesus instructs his listeners, con-
trary to the reciprocity code, not to repay harm with harm and instead to seek
the good of even those who do us evil by doing such things as praying
for them.
As the Parable of the Good Samaritan makes clear, however, it is not
enough simply to desire the good of others, to wish good for those who belong
to out-groups or who are our enemies. We must also seek their good, some-
times to the point of giving of our own time, energy, and resources. When
discussing this dimension of Jesus’s teachings, Wolterstorff notes that the
Parable of the Good Samaritan has often been interpreted as presenting an
account of who is a neighbor that goes beyond the one that Moses employs in
Leviticus. Rather than present an implicit definition of “neighbor” that in-
cludes simply one’s kin (and resident aliens), Jesus is teaching us that all
human beings are neighbors in the relevant sense. Wolterstorff contends that a
close reading of the parable reveals that Jesus does not offer any such defin-
ition. When asked by his audience who counts as a neighbor, Jesus’s reply is
indirect; he does not explicitly say who is a neighbor. Rather, when comment-
ing on his interlocutor’s answer, Jesus says that the Samaritan who cares for
the injured man on the side of the road—who is presumably a Jew and, thus, a
24 Ritualized Faith
member of an out-group—acts as a neighbor. In this way, the Samaritan is a
neighbor to the injured man.6
What, then, is the lesson to be gleaned from the parable and Jesus’s teaching
regarding the reciprocity code? Wolterstorff suggests this:
I take Jesus to be enjoining us to be alert to the obligations placed upon us by the
needs of whomever we happen on, and to pay no attention to the fact, if it be a
fact, that the needy person belongs to a group that is a disdained or disdaining
out-group with respect to oneself. Every society has derogatory terms for mem-
bers of one and another out-group: wop, dago, Hun, Jap, nigger, “Dutchman belly
full o’ straw.” Whether we ourselves employ such terms or they are applied to us,
they prevent us from recognizing our obligations to aid those in need. Discard
them all, says Jesus. Do not let them deafen your ear to the cry for help or harden
your heart.7
This reading of the Gospel passage strikes me as correct in one respect but
incomplete in another. It seems right to conclude that, strictly speaking, Jesus
does not offer an implicit definition of who counts as a neighbor—or, for that
matter, a teaching according to which we are to surrender all (or nearly all) our
time and goods to aid those in need. It also seems correct that a central
message of the parable is to enjoin us to be open to recognizing the obligations
that the needs of others place upon us, regardless of whether those others
belong to some out-group.
Nonetheless, when the Parable of the Good Samaritan and the Sermon on
the Mount are read side by side, it seems that Jesus intends to communicate
more than this.
For note that one could be open to recognizing the obligations that are
grounded in the needs of others—including those who belong to out-groups—
but live one’s life in such a way that one does nothing to put oneself in the path
of those who belong to one or another out-group. Similarly, one could be open
to recognizing these obligations but fail to exercise the sort of interest in others
and discernment of their situation that would allow one actually to recognize
them. Finally, one could be open to recognizing these obligations but down-
play their significance, not allowing their import to shape the structure of
one’s day-to-day life. In the Sermon on the Mount, when Jesus says that we
should pray for our enemies, part of what he seems to be driving at is that
we are not only to be open to recognizing those obligations that come our way
but also to take actions designed to re-orient ourselves to those who belong to
various out-groups. We are not simply to be open to the needs of others. We
are also to open ourselves up to the needs of others and the various sorts of
obligations we may have toward them.
6 7
Wolterstorff (2011b), 131–2. Wolterstorff (2011b), 132.
Love and Liturgy 25

If this is correct, Jesus’s teaching is that, in order to fulfill the second love
commandment, we are not simply to react with an open heart to the needs and
obligations we find but also to, some significant degree, direct our attention
and energy to the needs of (and obligations to) those who belong to out-
groups, making them the subject of our concern. In what follows, it will be
helpful to have a way of speaking of this dimension of Jesus’s teaching. Let me
call it an ethic of outwardness. An ethic of outwardness is supposed to stand in
contrast to an ethic of proximity, wherein we conform to various ethical
directives and ideals—perhaps being open to meeting needs and obligations
where we find them—but sparing little effort to expand our attention to the
needs and obligations beyond those which we encounter in the various in-
groups to which we belong, such as family, friends, church, synagogue, or
country.
Understood as incorporating an ethic of outwardness, the second love
commandment is, for most of us, an extraordinarily difficult injunction to
fulfill. Among other things, most of us have many other things to focus on.
Given the press of ordinary daily life, often we do not actively call to mind
those who are distressed or remember those who hate us for the purpose of
blessing or praying for them. We do not perform actions that expand our
attention and our hearts. And even when we try to do so, these actions are
often psychologically very difficult to perform. To love those who oppress us,
to bless those who curse us often cuts against every fiber of our being. Some
find themselves unable to do it. Others find themselves able to do these
difficult things—or at least find themselves desiring to do them—but do so
only sporadically.
For those who identify themselves as followers of Jesus, then, there is a
question to face: How do we conduct our lives in such a way that we better
conform to the second love commandment, where this is understood to enjoin
an ethic of outwardness? In the next section, I explore the idea that an
important way to do so is by participating in the liturgies of the church.
1.2. LITURGY
Even to those who are deeply familiar with them, the ancient liturgies of the
Eastern church are remarkably complex and rich, full of imagery and beauty.
In fact, these services are so complex and rich that it is easy for important
themes to get buried, much in the way that a central melody of a musical work
can be concealed by complex lines of harmony. Still, like many musical works,
when one attends to the structure of the Divine Liturgy—the eucharistic
service that is celebrated by Eastern Christians each Sunday—a pattern
emerges. The pattern, which I will refer to as the central pattern of the liturgy,
26 Ritualized Faith
is that of an alternating rhythm of blessing, petitioning, and offering thanks
to God.8
While the central pattern of the liturgy has a variety of features worth
exploring, I wish to call attention here to the prominence within the pattern
itself of petitioning. ( I will have something to say about the liturgical activity
of blessing later in this chapter.) In The Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, for
example, there are no less than seven petitionary litanies before the eucharistic
celebration itself. To get a feel for how wide-ranging these litanies are, consider
the text of the opening petitions or the Great Litany, which runs as follows:
DEACON: In peace, let us pray to the Lord.
PEOPLE: Lord have mercy [and so after each petition].
DEACON: For the peace from above and for the salvation of our souls,
let us pray to the Lord.
For the peace of the whole world, for the welfare of the holy churches
of God, and for the union of all, let us pray to the Lord.
For this holy house and for those who enter with faith, reverence,
and the awe of God, let us pray to the Lord.
For our Metropolitan, for our Bishop, for the honorable Priesthood,
the Diaconate in Christ; for all the clergy and people, let us pray to
the Lord.
For the President of our country, for all civil authorities, let us pray
to the Lord.
For this city, for every city and country, and for the faithful dwelling
in them, let us pray to the Lord.
For seasonable weather, for abundance of the fruits of the earth, and
for peaceful times, let us pray to the Lord.
For travelers by land, by sea, and by air; for the sick and the suffering;
for captives and their safety and salvation, let us pray to the Lord.
For our deliverance from all affliction, wrath, danger, and constraint,
let us pray to the Lord.9
The text of the Great Litany expands and contracts, like lungs while breathing.
It begins narrowly with petitions for those assembled, but then expands when
the assembled offer prayers for the peace of the “whole world” and the “union
8
I say that the central pattern of the liturgy is primarily constituted by these activities. One
could, however, offer a description of this pattern that is considerably more fine-grained, one
that distinguishes various types of blessing, petitioning, and thanking and includes actions that
are not easily slotted into the pattern, such as listening to God. For present purposes, I will work
with a fairly coarse-grained account of the central pattern, recognizing that in other contexts a
fuller description of the pattern might be more illuminating.
9
I am using the Thyateira (1995) translation of The Divine Liturgy of Our Father Among the
Saints John Chrysostom; also available at <http://www.cappellaromana.org/DL_in_English_
Booklet_Web.pdf> (accessed August 21, 2015).
Love and Liturgy 27

of all.” Contracting again, the text presents petitions for the church, but then
steadily moves outward when the people petition God for the wellbeing of
country, city, and the land. Continuing to move outward, the text presents
petitions for the great many in need, “for the sick and the suffering, captives
and their salvation.” But then it seemingly contracts again, depending on
how one interprets the referent of “our” and “us” in the last line, as these
terms may designate either the assembled themselves or a much wider
group, such as all those who have been the subject of the petitions. If the
last option were the preferred interpretation, the Great Litany itself would be
a vivid case of the people expressing union or solidarity with those for whom
they pray. In the next section, I am going to return to this theme of solidarity,
as I believe it lies at the heart of the actions that compose the liturgy.
In the Litany of Fervent Supplication, which follows the Gospel reading, this
series of petitions is more or less repeated, although in some respects it is even
more expansive, as it includes prayers not simply for the living but also for the
dead. And again, the very same themes of these litanies are voiced by the
celebrant before the Lord’s Prayer when he asks:
Remember, O Lord, the city in which we dwell, every city and country; those who
in faith dwell in them. Remember, O Lord, travelers by land, by sea, and by air;
the sick and the suffering; captives, and their safety and salvation. Remember,
O Lord, those who bring offerings and care for the beauty of your holy churches;
those who remember the poor; and send down upon us all your rich mercies.
And once again:
Look down from heaven, O Master, upon those who have bowed their heads unto
you, the awesome God. Do yourself, O Master, distribute these gifts here offered,
unto all of us for good, according to the individual needs of each; sail with those
who sail, travel with those who travel by land and by air; heal the sick, O you who
are the physician of our souls and bodies.
It is worth, once again, calling attention to the universal scope of these
petitions. The prayers are for all cities and countries, all their inhabitants, all
travelers, all those who are sick and suffering.
A moment ago, I said that a striking feature of the central pattern of the
liturgy is the prominence of petitioning. In saying this, I intended to highlight
both its frequency in the liturgy and the extent to which it figures in the
liturgical script.10 In these respects, the Eastern liturgy has no analogue. Rather
than being cyclical, taking up themes and frequently revisiting them in
10
Kavanagh (1991), 135, draws attention not to the prominence but to the priority of
petitioning in the liturgy when he writes: “In liturgical tradition, the very first thing a new
member of Christ does after baptism is to join with the rest of the baptized in their supplicatio
before God in Christ for the world, that is, in the great priestly Prayers of the Faithful. This must
be done before the eucharist can begin.”
28 Ritualized Faith
modified forms, the liturgies of the Western church tend to be angular and
succinct. The Anglican liturgies, for example, dedicate only one section to
petitionary prayer of the sort found in the litanies of the Eastern church. This
raises a question about the structure of the Eastern liturgies. Why the repeti-
tion? Why the insistence, on at least a weekly basis, of asking “again and again”
for the peace of the world, of leaders, and of the sick and the suffering? Why do
the Eastern liturgies take this form?
Let me propose a partial hypothesis: implicit in the liturgy is a recognition
of our collective situation. Our collective situation is that we are naturally
drawn to our own needs, the needs of our loved ones, and those who belong to
the various communities of which we are a part. Many of us recognize (and are
open to recognizing) the obligations that these needs generate—although it
should be noted that even with regard to these needs and obligations we can be
curiously insensitive. Competing with these needs for our attention are the
many good things that fill our lives, including the good things that fill the lives
of our loves ones and those who belong to the various communities of which
we are a part. For these things we are often ready to give thanks—although,
again, this is something that is often done only in fits and starts.
It is only with difficulty, however, that our attention is drawn from the
cares, obligations, and goods that occupy our attention outward toward those
who belong to out-groups, whether they be the ritually unclean, strangers,
enemies, or oppressors. And, as I have emphasized, when our attention is
drawn outward, it can be difficult to do what Jesus commands, such as blessing
those who curse us and praying for those who persecute us. In this regard, we
should not fail to see that the liturgy’s prayers for those in authority have been,
and often are, prayers for those who have oppressed the church. I want to
suggest, then, that a central function of the cycle of petitions is to help break
the grip that an ethic of proximity can have. It is to enable us to do, in part,
what is so difficult for so many of us to do. The liturgy does this by making
available to its participants, regularly and repeatedly, the very sorts of act-types
that Jesus commands his followers to perform, such as praying for their
enemies and blessing those who curse them.11
A pervasive theme in the work of the Orthodox theologian Alexander
Schmemann is that to engage in the liturgy is not to leave secular space for
sacred space. To the contrary, says Schmemann, there is only one world which
is “this world (and not any ‘other world’)” and only one life, which is “this life
11
Schmemann (1969), 100. The dynamic of what occurs in the liturgy is probably much more
complex than I indicate. For, arguably, there is a sense in which the church performs actions on
behalf of its members, even when those members do not perform those actions themselves. If
that is so, there is a sense in which, when the church prays for those who hate us, it does so on
behalf of its members, even when those members do not offer those prayers themselves. Still, if its
members do not actively engage in the liturgical activity of petitioning, the petitioning may do
nothing to break the grip that an ethic of proximity may have on them.
Love and Liturgy 29

(and not some ‘other life’),” which is given to human beings “to be a sacrament
of the divine presence.”12 If Schmemann is right, those who assemble for the
liturgy do not abandon this world when they enter the church building to
participate in the liturgy. If what I have suggested is correct, there is an
additional thing to say, which is that in the liturgy, the world—in all its beauty,
suffering, and need—is not simply present, but also re-presented. When I say
this, I do not simply mean that the liturgical text refers to such evils or that
they are the object of symbolic action in which the assembled stand against
such evils. Rather, the claim is that, in the petitionary activity of the church,
the world is re-presented to the assembled as something requiring focused
attention, concern, and care. When the assembled pray for the sick, those in
authority, strangers, and oppressors, they direct their attention outward to-
ward those for whom they pray, lessening the “ethical distance” that may
separate them from these people, treating these people not as somehow
beyond concern but as their moral counterparts, as people whose good
matters.
1.3. SOLIDARITY
In the ancient liturgical prayers of the church, such as the following sixth-
century prayer, one can find “preparatory petitions” in which the people ask to
be prepared to engage in acts of love:
May he give us charity and brotherly love in the bond of peace.
May he hear the requests of our hearts, he who alone holds power, the holy
Master, resplendent with glory and honor, whose name is the Lord.13
The prayer of St. Ephrem, which figures prominently in the Lenten services of
the Eastern church, is similar:
Lord and Master of my life: take from me the spirit of sloth, despondency, lust for
power, and idle talk. And give your servant instead a spirit of chastity, humility,
12
See also ibid., p. 27. Schmemann (1966) writes elsewhere: “In the eschatological conscious-
ness of the early Church the central categories were not ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’ but ‘old’ and ‘new’;
the fallen and the saved; the regenerated. . . . Their life was not divided up into ‘profane working
days’ and ‘sacred feast days.’ The old had passed, now all things were new. So then their calendar
could not be merely a rhythmic alteration of ‘profane’ and ‘sacred’ days. It expressed the
antithetical conjunction of the Church and the world, in which ‘this world’ and its time . . . is
[sic] transformed into a ‘new creation’ . . .” (183; cf. pp. 114–20, 126–7, 130).
13
As found in Deiss (1967), 244. In addition to such preparatory petitions, there is also
exhortatory hymnody that exhorts us to follow the examples of figures such as the Publican and
the Prodigal Son. See, for example, the liturgical scripts for the Sundays of the Publican and the
Pharisee and the Prodigal Son in Mother Mary and Ware (2002).
30 Ritualized Faith
forbearing, and love. O Lord my King, grant that I might see my own shortcom-
ings and not judge my fellows. For blessed are you to the ages of ages.14
The petitions of the liturgy tend not to be, however, of the preparatory variety,
requests that God grant the assembled the strength to act well. Rather, these
prayers, or so I have been suggesting, are themselves enactments of love, the
fulfillment of Jesus’s injunction to cultivate an ethic of outwardness. This
dimension of the petitions is especially evident in the Apostolic Constitutions,
when the assembled pray:
And we entreat you for those that hate and persecute us for the sake of your
name, for those who are outside and have gone astray, that you would turn them
back to good and soften their hearts.15
It is also evident in The Liturgy of St. Basil, which echoes similar themes:
Be mindful, O God, of those who face trial, those in the mines, in exile, in bitter
slavery, in all tribulation, necessity, and affliction; of all who need your great
compassion; those who love us, those who hate us, and those who commended us,
though unworthy, to pray for them.16
Similar themes are present in the Liturgy of St. Mark:
Bless, Lord, the crown of the year of your goodness, for the poor of your people,
for the widow and the orphan, for the stranger and the proselyte, for all of us who
trust in you and call upon your holy name: “for the eyes of all hope for you.”17
The point I have been stressing is that, by offering these petitions, those
assembled for the liturgy fulfill Jesus’s command to cultivate and enact an
ethic not of proximity but of outwardness. It is a striking feature of the biblical
narrative, however, that when Jesus issues the commands to bless those who
curse you and to be a neighbor to those who belong to out-groups, he does not
also specify what is accomplished ethically by doing these things. Rather, Jesus
emphasizes that the “reward will be great” for those who fulfill these com-
mands; their status will be “children of the Most High” (Luke 6: 35).
Yet, beyond being united to God in such a way that one can properly be
called a child of the Most High, there must be an ethical rationale for
performing those actions that Jesus commands. That rationale, presumably,
14
As quoted in McGuckin (2011), 178. Of chastity Schmemann (1969), 36, writes: “If one
does not reduce this term, as is so often and erroneously done, only to its sexual connotations, it
is understood as the positive counterpart to sloth. The exact and full translation of the Greek
sofrosini and the Russian tselomudryie ought to be whole-mindedness.”
15
As found in Jasper and Cuming (1987), 112.
16
I am using the translation contained in the Service Book of the Holy Eastern Orthodox
Catholic and Apostolic Church according to the use of the Antiochian Orthodox Christian
Archdiocese of North America, 11th edition (2002).
17
As found in Jasper and Cuming (1987), 61.
Love and Liturgy 31

does not lie in the fact that by blessing those who curse you or praying for the
aliens, it is likely that their lives go better. For, by all appearances, as often as
not, the lives of those who are the objects of our petitions do not go better. As
often as not, the sick do not recover. As often as not, the prisoners are not
delivered. And as often as not, oppressors do not turn from their ways. But if
the ethical import of enacting an ethic of outwardness does not lie in enhan-
cing the wellbeing of the objects of our blessings and petitions, where might
it lie?
It lies in at least this: by doing such things as praying for the sick, the
oppressed, the stranger, or the ritually unclean, one stands in solidarity with
them, saying in effect that, regardless of your circumstance or station, we will
not abandon you if we can possibly avoid it.18 Indeed, this activity of standing
in solidarity is not limited to the activity of petitioning. When, for example, in
the liturgy the assembled sing the beatitudes, this is probably best understood
not simply as a case in which they, for the sake of being edified, call to mind
Jesus’s words about the mourners, the meek, the poor in spirit, the peace-
makers, and the persecuted. It is also to bless the members of these groups by
saying these words. In saying to the members of these groups “May you be
blessed,” the people also bless them, taking Jesus’s words as their own. And in
blessing them, the assembled express solidarity with the mourners, the meek,
the poor in spirit, the peacemakers, and the persecuted, saying in effect that we
stand with you even when the rest of the world does not. In fact, in the context
of the liturgy, there is really a double solidarity at work when the assembled
engage in the litanies and sing the beatitudes. For the assembled stand in
solidarity not only with those for whom they pray or bless but also with each
other. In the very first petition of the liturgy, for example, the deacon empha-
sizes that it is in concord or peace that the assembled pray together. And in
some striking language, the Liturgy of St. Basil similarly speaks of the assem-
bled as having one common life: “let us commit ourselves, one another, and
our whole life to Christ our God.”19
Throughout our discussion, I have assumed that it is illuminating to
understand liturgical action against the backdrop of the ethical vision that
animates the scriptural narrative. When we do so, we can see that engaging in
the petitions and blessings are ways by which those engaging in liturgical
action fulfill the second love commandment. This strategy of understanding
liturgical activity against important elements of the scriptural narrative, I believe,
18
What about prayers for one’s oppressors? Does one stand in solidarity with them when one
prays for or blesses them? No, not in the sense of “solidarity” with which I have been working.
Something different, then, needs to be said about what is accomplished when one prays for or
blesses the oppressors. I touch upon what is accomplished in the last section of this chapter.
19
I discuss the import of this language in Cuneo (2014d). This essay is included as Chapter 7
of the present volume.
32 Ritualized Faith
can be extended, as it also helps us to understand the ethical significance of the
activity of standing in solidarity with others.
Think for a moment about the New Testament narrative and the extent to
which its stories are filled with cases of abandonment by others. The cases that
immediately spring to mind are those of Peter’s abandonment of Jesus before
Jesus’s death, and Jesus’s own cry of dereliction from the cross. Given our
topic, which concerns the importance of prayer, a particularly interesting case
is described in the 26th chapter of Matthew. In an emotional state that the
writer of Matthew describes as being “deeply distressed,” Jesus asks his favored
disciples Peter, James, and John to keep vigil with him in the Garden of
Gethsemane, where he will pray that he might not undergo an excruciating
death as a result of being abandoned and betrayed by another of his followers,
Judas. But rather than finding them holding vigil, Jesus finds his followers
asleep—on three separate occasions. “What?” he asks incredulously, “Could
you not watch with me one hour?” (Matt. 26: 40) Abandoning Jesus in his
hour of greatest need is, apparently, something that comes easily to those who
know him best and are most devoted to him. Admittedly, given the circum-
stances, there is little the disciples can do to alleviate Jesus’s suffering or
otherwise alter what is going to happen to him; the wheels of his betrayal
and death are already in motion. And yet it is extremely important to Jesus
that they hold vigil with him. What matters, apparently, is not their ability to
alter Jesus’s condition or somehow enhance Jesus’s well-being by way of their
prayers. Rather, what matters, the text indicates, is that they stand in solidarity
with him in this, his darkest of hours.
Taking full account of the theme of abandonment in the biblical text would
require considering cases not just of dereliction and betrayal but also those in
which men and women stand steadfast in the most difficult of circumstances,
such as Joseph’s refusal to abandon Mary upon learning that she is pregnant
with another’s child; Mary’s own refusal to abandon Jesus when Jesus is being
crucified; and the myrrh-bearing women’s refusal to abandon the body of
Jesus after his death. Even without exploring this theme in greater detail,
however, the ethical significance to the Christian life of standing in solidarity
with others should be apparent.
When we stand in solidarity with others, whether they belong to some
supposed out-group or not, we express the conviction that their cares and
concerns are not beneath us or too far removed from our ordinary lives to be
the subject of our attention and concern. Rather, we express the stance that it
does not matter how far removed the other might be in physical or social
distance. Their plight matters. It is our responsibility to not abandon but to
stand with them. It should also be more evident how the liturgy can function
as a powerful bulwark against the strong tendency to not stand with the
marginalized—the mourners, the meek, and the distressed. For by inserting
ourselves in the liturgical activities of petitioning and blessing, those who
Love and Liturgy 33

identify themselves as the followers of Jesus are provided with the means by
which to fulfill Jesus’s command not simply to open themselves to their needs
but also to stand with them when they most need it.
Up to this point, I have not emphasized the ways in which fulfilling the
second love commandment is also a way to fulfill the first. But it is worth
taking note—if only in passing—of the fact that by standing in solidarity with
the marginalized we ally ourselves with what are, according to the scriptural
narrative, God’s purposes. Given traditional Christian theology, the beatitudes
are divine blessings: it is God, in the person of Jesus, who blesses the mourners,
the meek, the poor in spirit, the peacemakers, and the persecuted. When in the
liturgy the assembled bless what God blesses, want what God wants, stand
with those whom God stands with, they enact what are surely some of the
most important ways by which one can love God.20
1.4. REPENTANCE
My topic has been how participating in the liturgy is an important way in

which one might both develop and enact an ethic of outwardness, where this is
understood to include not only the activity of opening ourselves up to the
needs of others but also standing in solidarity with them. These activities,
I have suggested, are important ways in which one can fulfill the second love
commandment. Let me close this discussion with an observation regarding
how the liturgical activities of petitioning and blessing are to be performed.
The liturgical text offers no instruction regarding the motives from which
those assembled are to engage in the activities of petitioning and blessing. It
does not instruct those assembled—not even tacitly—to offer their petitions
for the sick from motives of empathy. Likewise, it does not instruct those
assembled—not even tacitly—to offer prayers for their enemies from motives
of sympathy or compassion. Nothing at all is said (or assumed) about the
mental states that one must be in when one offers these prayers or blesses the
mourners, the meek, or the persecuted. The fact that the liturgical script is not
directive in this way naturally feeds a concern that one might harbor about
what occurs in the liturgy. For one might naturally worry that the liturgical
activity of petitioning and blessing often is, even for the most devoted, a matter
of merely going through the motions. After all, often those who pray for the
sick and bless the mourners are not at all moved by their plight. And, if that is
right, it is difficult to see how the liturgical activity of petitioning and blessing
could reliably be considered ways of fulfilling Jesus’s command to love one’s
20
This theme is developed in Adams (1986).
34 Ritualized Faith
neighbor as oneself. In the Parable of the Good Samaritan, it is worth
remembering, the Samaritan is said to have been moved by “pity” for the
wounded man on the side of the road.
A pair of observations about this concern: the first is that it is commonly
thought that the Christian ethic does require particular types of motivations to
achieve its ideal. Richard Rorty, for example, writes:
From a Christian standpoint this tendency to feel closer to those with whom
imaginative identification is easier is deplorable, a temptation to be avoided. It is
part of the Christian idea of moral perfection to treat everyone, even the guards at
Auschwitz or in the Gulag, as a fellow sinner. For Christians, sanctity is not
achieved as long as obligation is felt more strongly to one child of God than to
another; invidious contrasts are to be avoided in principle. Secular universalism
has taken over this attitude from Christianity.21
Whatever one might think of Rorty’s description of the “Christian stand-
point,” when one considers the scriptural texts, one finds that Jesus himself
does not enjoin those who conform to the second love commandment to do so
from some particular range of motives. That is not to say that Jesus does not
have a great deal to say about our interior mental lives. He does. But the
second great commandment is not accompanied by a directive concerning
how one should conform to it. In his discussion of this matter, Wolterstorff
writes:
what strikes one immediately is that Jesus says nothing at all about reasons or
motives for loving the neighbor; all he says is that one should love one's neighbor
as oneself. He nowhere rejects caring about some people because one is attached
to them, caring about others because one feels compassion for them, caring about
yet others because one finds oneself attracted to them, and so forth. In all such
cases one is doing what Jesus commanded, caring about the other, seeking to
promote her good and to secure her rights as ends in themselves.22
Wolterstorff continues:
Rather than dismissing care about the other grounded in compassion as not
measuring up to what he is calling for, Jesus offers such care as an example of
what he is calling for. The natural dynamics that lead us to care about the other
are often malformed in their workings. But when they are not malformed, it
makes no difference whether we care about the other because we are attached to
her, because we are attracted to her, because we feel solidarity with her, because
we are moved by compassion, or because we see it as our duty to care about her.
Just see to it that you care not only about yourself but also about your neighbor.23
21 22
Rorty (1989), 191. Wolterstorff (2011b), 116.
23
Wolterstorff (2011b), 118.
Love and Liturgy 35

If this is right, provided that our motives are not malformed, it does not matter
what the motives are from which the assembled offer the liturgical petitionary
prayers or blessings.24 They can be properly offered from compassion, attach-
ment, or duty. What matters is that they are offered. What matters is that the
assembled open themselves up to the plight of those who are the subject of
these prayers, bless those who curse them, and stand in solidarity with those
who are under duress.
The second observation I would like to make is that while the eucharist
liturgy is celebratory—its central event, the eucharistic meal, is fundamentally
an act of thanksgiving—it is also deeply penitential. After each petition in the
litanies, after all, the people sing “kyrie eleison” or “Lord have mercy.” This
phrase is colored with different shades of meaning: on the one hand, it is a cry
for healing and deliverance; on the other, it is an expression of repentance.
When, then, the deacon prays for “travelers by land, by sea, and by air; for the
sick and the suffering; for captives and their safety and salvation” and the
assembled respond with “kyrie eleison,” we should hear this in two ways. We
should hear it, first, as a corporate affirmation of the deacon’s words, some-
thing to the effect of: “Lord have mercy on them: save, deliver, heal those for
whom we pray.” But we should also hear the use of this same phrase as an
expression of repentance, something to the effect of: “Lord have mercy on us:
forgive us, who offer these petitions, of our failings.”
If this is so, the liturgical script (and the community’s understanding of it)
might be more or less non-committal with regard to the motives from which
the petitions and blessings should be offered. But it is not neutral with regard
to the stance from which those assembled offer their petitions and blessings.
They are to issue from a stance in which those who offer these petitions
actively repent of their own shortcomings and, insofar as these petitions are
offered as a community, for the failures of their community. The pattern of
petition, repentance, and blessing of the liturgy is, apparently, not accidental.
Each of these activities complements the other.
It is a good question why this should be so, why in the liturgy the activity of
petitioning is not only accompanied by the activity of repenting but also issues
from a stance of repentance.25 The obvious answer is that doing so is a way of
fulfilling one of Jesus’s most consistent injunctions. In the Gospels, Jesus
repeatedly instructs his audience to repent, even in the face of atrocities,
such as Pilate’s murder of Galilean worshippers: “Unless you repent, you
24
In this regard, I take myself to disagree with Saliers (1979), 178, who seems to assume that
the affections play a central role in the liturgical activity of intercession. But see Anderson and
Morrill (1998) for nuances regarding Saliers’s views.
25
I have only touched upon the degree to which repentance figures in the eucharistic service.
A closer look reveals that it is interspersed throughout the liturgical script, especially in the
Lenten services.
36 Ritualized Faith
will all likewise perish” (Luke 13: 3). That noted, let me offer two further
observations on this score.
In a passage I have just quoted, Wolterstorff notes that the “natural dy-
namics that lead us to care about the other are often malformed in their
workings. But when they are not malformed, it makes no difference whether
we care about the other because we are attached to her, because we are
attracted to her, because we feel solidarity with her, because we are moved
by compassion, or because we see it as our duty to care about her.”26 This
observation generalizes, as the dynamics that move us to express concern for
the other in the form of petitionary prayer are often malformed: we care too
little, we go through the motions, our minds are elsewhere. Often, moreover,
we are unaware of the degree to which our motives are deficient. Indeed,
rather deep in the Christian tradition is the conviction that, given how opaque
we are to ourselves, we are often unable to genuinely appreciate the extent to
which our motives are deficient. To repent while offering these prayers is in
effect to acknowledge, to help one see, and to distance oneself from these
deficiencies; it is to strive for something better while we pray.
The purpose of offering the petitions from a stance of repentance, however,
comes to more than this. In his reflections on repentance in Great Lent, Schme-
mann writes that repentance “is, above all else, a desperate call for . . . divine
help.”27 If that is so, those who call on God to help those for whom they pray
simultaneously acknowledge that they, too, are in need of help; in the mouths
of those who offer these prayers, the phrase “kyrie eleison” is to a plea that
God have mercy on us who pray. The activity of repenting while petitioning
is, then, to acknowledge that there is little difference between the plight of
those for whom we pray and those who pray for them. To return to the
theme that I developed earlier, the activity of repenting is another way by
which the people express solidarity with those for whom they pray. It is
another way to acknowledge our common condition.28
26
Wolterstorff (2011b), 118.
27
Schmemann (1969), 29. Elsewhere, Schmemann writes: “Repentance is all this: man seeing
his sinfulness and weakness, realizing his state of separation from God, experiencing sorrow and
pain because of that state, desiring forgiveness and reconciliation, rejecting the evil and opting
for a return to God, and finally desiring Communion for the ‘healing of soul and body’ ” (124).
28
My thanks to Arthur Kuflik, Luke Reinsma, Nick Wolterstorff, and two anonymous
referees for their feedback on an earlier version of this chapter.
Protesting Evil
Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death

. . . You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies.
John the Baptizer has been rotting in a Roman prison cell. His crime was that
of having accused the local ruler, Herod Antipas, of having unlawfully wedded
his brother’s wife, Herodias. Although John must have known that his behav-
ior would provoke some such response, the Gospel narrative intimates that
John assumed that he wouldn’t linger in prison, for John believed that the
messiah was in their midst. But as John’s days in prison grew longer, the
doubts in his mind loomed larger. Wishing to address these growing doubts,
John sends two of his disciples to Jesus to ask whether Jesus is in fact the
Chosen One. Jesus’s reply is enigmatic: “Go and tell John the things you have
seen and heard: that the blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the
deaf hear, the dead are raised, the poor have the gospel preached to them”
(Luke 7: 22). While hardly a direct reply to John’s query, it must nonetheless
have given John hope. Jesus was exercising power—power of a sort sufficient
to deliver John from prison. Those familiar with the Gospel narrative know,
however, that these hopes are dashed, for there is no deliverance. Rather than
be emancipated, John is beheaded soon after his inquiry.
The news of John’s murder quickly makes its way to Jesus. It is clear to anyone
following the Gospel narrative that John’s death is not simply one death among
others. On the contrary, it is a major blow to the kingdom that Jesus claimed to
be inaugurating. According to the scriptural narrative, that kingdom had been
announced by John himself. Not only had John announced the coming of this
kingdom, he had also baptized Jesus—this baptismal event being, if orthodox
Christian theology is to be believed, the occasion of the great Theophany or
revelation of the Trinity. It is also what seals John’s reputation as one genuinely
set apart. “Among those born of women,” says Jesus, “there is not a greater
prophet than John the Baptizer” (Luke 7: 28). Wild, uncompromising, over-
flowing with charisma, John had much more life in him. Even at two thousand
years’ distance, his death seems like a tragic waste. Political positioning, sexual
intrigue, and ultimately the abuse of political power cut his life far too short.
38 Ritualized Faith
Jesus responds to the news of John’s death not by ranting against the
powers, but by attempting to withdraw from the public eye with his disciples.
The attempt proves futile, however. Jesus’s popularity is so great that the
crowds anticipate where he intends to go; when Jesus arrives at his destination,
they are there waiting for him. Rather than disperse the crowds or attempt to
withdraw even farther, the Gospels tell us that Jesus was moved with compas-
sion. Aware that the crowds had grown hungry while waiting for him, he
engages in a series of unusual actions. Jesus orders the disciples to gather
whatever food they can find and bring it to him. This they do, presenting him
with five loaves of bread and two fish. Jesus then blesses and divides this food,
distributing it to his disciples. According to the Gospel narrative, they then
distribute enough food to feed five thousand people. Jesus, the disciples, and
the people eat together in what the scriptures describe as a “deserted place”
(Luke 9: 12; see also Matt. 14: 13–21; Mark 6: 30–44).
It is tempting to view these two episodes recorded in the Gospels, the
murder and the meal, as more or less disconnected, having little to do with
each other—the subjects of two pericopes stitched together by an anonymous
editor. But this would, I believe, be a mistake. The feeding of the five thousand
takes place in the shadow of John’s death. Given John’s stature and importance
to Jesus, it could not be otherwise. Might there, however, be an even more
intimate relation between these two events, one according to which the feeding
of the multitudes does not simply take place in the shadow of John’s murder
but is also supposed to be a response to it?
There are textual considerations that favor such a reading. Look, for
example, at the ways in which the two episodes are isomorphic, using parallel
imagery. There are two feasts, the first taking place in a Roman palace to
celebrate Herod’s birthday; the second taking place in a deserted place. Food
is, moreover, central to both episodes. In the first episode, there is plenty to eat;
the feast is sumptuous. Yet the feast takes a bizarre turn when Herod augments
the feast by ordering that which is inedible—namely, John’s head—to be
presented on a platter as if it were food. In the second episode, by contrast,
initially there is almost nothing to eat; the people are going hungry. This feast,
however, also takes a very strange turn when Jesus produces an abundance of
food for the multitude from several loaves and fish. The contrast couldn’t be
more striking: on the one hand, appalling waste, excess, and desecration of the
dead and, on the other, uncanny resourcefulness, abundance, and nourish-
ment for the living.
There is, in addition, a curious interplay between power and voluntary
powerlessness during both feasts. In the first feast, Herod is so enchanted by
the erotic dancing of his step daughter that he promises her anything that she
might want. After consulting with her mother, who has put her up to this
seduction, Herod’s step daughter tells him that she wants John’s head on a
platter. The text reports Herod as being sorry for having made such a rash
Protesting Evil 39
promise. But, in an odd episode of saving face and moral rigorism, Herod
takes his hands to be tied; a promise is a promise and he intends to keep his. So
he issues the command to have John beheaded. In so doing, he commands
what no man has authority to command: the murder of an innocent. In the
second feast, Jesus also exercises remarkable power, although of a fundamentally
different sort from Herod’s. Jesus’s power lies not in his having the authority to
order the slaughter of an innocent. Rather, according to the scriptural narrative,
it consists in his having authority over that which no other man has authority,
namely, the very elements of nature itself (“even the wind and the waves obey his
command”). Still, the exercise of Jesus’s power is muted. Given his mission, Jesus
is in a situation of relative powerlessness: a tragedy has occurred and there is
nothing at present that he can do about it. He cannot level the books, avenge, or
rectify it. His mission requires that he will soon suffer a death much like John’s;
that is, perhaps a reason for thinking that Jesus found the news regarding John to
be not only tragic but also ominous.
The feeding of the five thousand, then, is not a redemption or rectification
of John’s death. But it does take place in its shadow. And, given the parallels
between the two episodes, one has the sense—or at least I have the sense—that
Jesus’s actions address what has happened to John. But if so, his is a curious
way of addressing John’s death. Why would Jesus respond to John’s murder by
doing things with food, providing a meal to feed the people? Is there some-
thing especially fitting about his doing so?
In what follows, I want to pursue these questions. My aim in doing so,
however, is not primarily to dwell on the significance of the feeding of the five
thousand. Rather, it is to reflect on this event in order to understand better
certain elements of the Christian liturgy. For nearly all the early Christians
commentators took the feeding of the five thousand to have liturgical import,
as they believed it to be a proto-eucharistic event. I propose to follow the lead
of these early commentators, albeit at a certain distance. These commentators
were primarily interested in the typological similarities between the feeding of
the five thousand and the eucharistic celebration. I, by contrast, want to probe
the significance of the context in which both the feeding of the five thousand
and the eucharistic celebration takes place. That context is one in which the
assembled eat in the shadow and recognition of vast evil. Taking into account
the significance of this context, I claim, helps us to understand not simply a
fundamental dynamic of the eucharistic liturgy but also its significance.
2.1. SYMBOLIC VALUE
Tucked away in Robert Adams’s magisterial book Finite and Infinite Goods is a
fascinating chapter on symbolic value. Adams notes that most modern and
40 Ritualized Faith
contemporary moral philosophers have had virtually nothing to say about the
topic. The diagnosis of this silence that Adams offers is that, while most
philosophers would agree that the ethical life consists in being for the good
and being against evil, they have understood these phenomena almost exclu-
sively in terms of the consequences of our actions; we are for the good and
against evil, these philosophers claim, to the extent that we promote the good
and prevent evils in various ways by our actions. In this respect, there is a
relentlessly pragmatic cast to modern and contemporary ethical theorizing.
But consider, Adams suggests, situations of relative helplessness, such as
those circumstances in which we or those whom we care about are in great
need but whose need we are more or less helpless to meet. Imagine, for
example, a case in which you are terminally ill, lying in a hospital bed. In
circumstances such as these, Adams writes, it is important to have ways of
being for the good, even though there is very little I or anyone else can do
about the situation. Ethics, after all, says Adams:
is not only about how to act well, but more broadly about how to live well. And
whether we like it or not, helplessness is a large part of life. Human life both begins
and ends in helplessness. Between infancy and death, moreover, we may find
ourselves in the grip of a disease or a dictatorship to which we may be able to
adapt but which we cannot conquer. Even if our individual situation is more
fortunate, we will find ourselves relatively helpless spectators of most of the events
in the world about which we should care somewhat, and many of those about which
we should care most, if we are good people. Dealing well with our helplessness is
therefore an important part of living well. An ethical theory that has nothing to say
about this abandons us in what is literally the hour of our greatest need.1
What, then, ought we to do in circumstances of relative helplessness? Adams’s
answer is that one “of the most obvious answers is that we can give more
reality to our being for the goods and against the evils by expressing our
loyalties symbolically in action.” When our friends are ill,
most of us are not able to do much about their health. But we can still be for them,
and that is important to all of us. Sending cards and flowers are ways of being for
a sick person symbolically. They may also have the good consequence of cheering
up the patient, but that will be because he is glad that his friends are for him. The
symbolic value of the deed is primary in such a case.2
Our lives are lived in the shadow of evil. Often, our only recourse when living
in the shadow is to be for the good and against evil symbolically. Composing
music, making sculpture, planting trees, lighting candles, holding vigil: these
are some of the ways in which a person might symbolically be for the good in
the face of evil, such as a friend’s illness or death.
1 2
Adams (1999), 224. Ibid.
Protesting Evil 41
At no point in his discussion does Adams offer anything like an account or
analysis of what it is symbolically to be for the good or against evil. One can
understand why. Offering an account of symbolic action proves to be extra-
ordinarily challenging; it is extremely difficult to identify a set of necessary and
sufficient conditions which specify how intentions, conventions, the employ-
ment of symbol systems, and fittingness relations conspire to generate sym-
bolic actions which express that an agent is for the good or against evil. As will
become evident in a moment, the category of symbolically being for the good
and against evil is central to the topic that I wish to explore. Like Adams,
however, I have no account to offer of the phenomenon. I will have to assume
that we can recognize central cases of symbolic action, even if there are other
cases that are much more difficult to assess.
While I have no account to offer of the phenomenon of symbolic action,
there is at least one observation about it that deserves mention. Rather often,
symbolic action has a dual directionality. By this I mean that often a person’s
symbolically being for the good at one and the same time counts as his
symbolically being against evil and vice versa. The point I am making is not
the trivial one that to be for the good is ipso facto to be against evil and vice
versa. It is, rather, that symbolically being for the good is often the way in
which we address, stand up against, protest, or pronounce a No to evil.
I say it is often that; but it is not always. In her book For the End of Time: The
Story of the Messiaen Quartet, Rebecca Rischin tells the story of the French
composer Olivier Messiaen.3 In the early 1940s, Messiaen had been taken into a
Nazi death camp, where he and his fellow prisoners suffered considerably.
During this time, Messiaen composed and, with a group of fellow prisoners,
performed for the first time, what is probably his best-known work, Quartet for
the End of Time. Messiaen engaged in these activities for multiple reasons. But
what emerges from Rischin’s telling of the story is that the composition and the
performance were largely motivated by Messiaen’s attempt to cope with his
surroundings. Messiaen’s actions were primarily ways of addressing evil not so
much by standing against it but by coping with it. The dual directionality of
symbolic action in which I am interested is different from this. It is not that of
symbolically being for the good by performing actions that allow us to cope
with evil, although this is an extraordinarily important way in which we can be
for the good. Nor is it symbolically being against evil by simply doing a little bit
of good in the world, whatever that might be. Rather, the phenomenon in
which I am interested is a matter of purposively pronouncing a No to evil by
symbolically being for the good in the performance of one or another action.
The type of symbolic action in which I am interested, we might say, has
vocative import; it addresses a situation, expressing recognition of it as being
an evil that calls for a response in which we express our allegiance to the good.
3
Rischin (2003).
42 Ritualized Faith
2.2. IN THE FACE OF EVIL
Earlier I mentioned that when the early Christians read the scriptural texts,
they were struck by the obvious parallels between the feeding of the five
thousand and the celebration of the eucharist. The parallels between the
Gospels’ presentation of the feeding and what they took to be the original
eucharistic event, the Last Supper, were so evident that they found it irresist-
ible to read the former as anything other than a proto-eucharistic event. The
most obvious commonality between the two episodes is the fourfold action
sequence in which Jesus engages. In both episodes, the Gospels describe Jesus
as taking bread, blessing it, breaking it, and then distributing it. This action
sequence, as theologians such as Dom Gregory Dix have emphasized, is
incorporated into all the ancient eucharistic liturgies of the church.4 What
rendered this sort of proto-eucharistic reading of the feeding of the five
thousand irresistible, however, is not so much the structural parallels that
they found between the action sequence described in the feeding of the five
thousand and the Last Supper, but rather the narrative presented in the sixth
chapter of John’s Gospel. For it is in this chapter that, immediately after the
feeding of the five thousand, Jesus himself draws a connection between the
feeding and the eucharist. In this chapter, Jesus declares that he is the true
bread of life, saying—much to the puzzlement and dismay of his audience—
that this bread is also his flesh and that it must be eaten.
I have no interest, on this occasion, in trying to diagnose what Jesus might
have meant by this saying. However, the parallels that the early Christian
commentators noted between the feeding of the five thousand and the eucharist
interest me. This interest, as I mentioned earlier, concerns not the typological
features that the feeding and the celebration of the eucharist might share with
one another—these being what primarily commanded the attention of
the ancient commentators. Rather, it lies in uncovering the significance of the
context in which these events take place. Specifically, I am interested in
discovering whether what we have said about the context of the feeding of
the five thousand helps us to understand the context of the eucharistic liturgy
and, ultimately, whether this helps us to understand what it is that we are
doing when we participate in that liturgy. Lying in the background is the
assumption—which I won’t try to defend—that which actions we perform on
a given occasion are determined in part by contextual features of that occasion.
Let me remind you of what we said about the feeding of the five thousand.
The feeding takes place in a charged context, one in which Jesus has just
received the news of John’s beheading. This context, I suggested, is important
for understanding what is happening during the feeding of the five thousand,
4
Dix (1945).
Protesting Evil 43
as this event takes place in the face of a great evil that mattered deeply to Jesus.
The feeding, however, is itself not a lashing out against this evil. Nor is it
redemption of the evil. Nor is it merely an attempt to cope with this evil. Nor,
finally, is it plausibly viewed as a case in which someone is trying to do a little
good, whatever that might be, when things have gotten really bad. Instead,
I suggested that the feeding addresses the evil—is a response to it. Specifically,
to use Adams’ conceptuality, it is a response in which, by feeding the multi-
tudes, Jesus thereby symbolically protests or stands against the evil by sym-
bolically being for the good. Of course protests come in different forms. The
sort of protest at issue is not a collective shaking of the fist, a symbolic
declaration that evil of these sorts will not happen again if we can help it.
Rather, to say it again, it is a case in which Jesus stands against evil by taking
food, blessing, and then multiplying it. Why do these actions count as a case of
standing against evil? And why, more generally, would blessing food and
eating together count as a fitting protest to evil? To this point, I have left
these questions unanswered. But we can now, I think, make headway on them
by reflecting on the Christian liturgy.
At the heart of all the ancient liturgies of the church—I have in mind
particularly the ancient liturgies of the Christian East, those of St. Mark, St.
James, St. Basil, and St. John Chrysostom—is a meal, the celebration of the
eucharist. The texts of each of these liturgies clearly communicate the context
in which this meal takes place: it occurs in the face and recognition of vast evil.
Here is how, for example, the liturgy of St. Basil begins. Immediately after the
priest declares the kingdom of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit to be blessed
and after the assembled respond with their Amen or “let it be so,” there is the
Great Litany, which is a dialogue between the deacon and the people. The
deacon begins with the exhortation:
In peace let us pray to the Lord.
He continues:
For travelers by land and sea, for the sick, the suffering, the captives, and for their
deliverance, let us pray to the Lord.
For our deliverance from all affliction, wrath, danger, and distress, let us pray to
the Lord.5
To each petition, the people respond with “kyrie eleison” or “Lord, have
mercy.” The connotations of this phrase are lost in its English translation—
the root of “eleison” being the Greek term for olive oil: that which is used to
5
I am quoting from Jasper and Cuming (1987). There are different translations offered of this
last sentence. Some translate “distress” as “tribulation,” others as “necessity,” still others as
“constraint.”
44 Ritualized Faith
soothe and heal. The cry is not a request for God to stay God’s hand or desist
from condemning, but for God to comfort, heal, and deliver.6
After the antiphons are chanted, the scriptures read, the creed and
Lord’s Prayer sung, the assembly prepares itself to celebrate the eucharist.
Interestingly, during the sequence of events just mentioned, those assem-
bled are, during the singing of the cherubic hymn, directed not to dwell on
evil but to “set aside all earthly cares.” But this injunction to set aside
earthly cares is only a moment in the script. The theme of the shadow of
evil is introduced once again, as the text of the anaphora recapitulates in
greater detail themes voiced at the outset of the liturgy in the Great Litany.
After having commemorated the living and the dead, for example, the
celebrant says this:
Remember, Lord, the people who stand here . . . nourish the infants, instruct the
youth, strengthen the old, comfort the fainthearted, gather the scattered, bring
back the wanderers . . . sail with those that sail, journey with those that journey;
defend the widows, protect the orphans, rescue the captives, heal the sick. Be
mindful, O God, of those who face trial, those in the mines, in exile, in bitter
slavery, in all tribulation, necessity, and affliction; of all who need your great
compassion.7
The anaphora of the liturgy of St. Mark, used by the Alexandrian church, is
similar:
Visit, Lord, the sick among your people and in mercy and compassion heal them.
Drive away from them and from us every disease and illness; expel the spirit of
weakness [from them]. Raise up those who have lain in lengthy illnesses. . . . Have
mercy on all those who are held in prison, or in the mines, in exile or bitter
slavery.8
The anaphora of the liturgy of St. James, used by the church of Jerusalem,
echoes the same themes:
Remember, Lord, [Christians at sea, on the road, abroad], our fathers and
brothers in chains and prisons, in [captivity and] exile, [in mines and tortures
and bitter slavery . . .
Remember, Lord, those in old age and infirmity,] those who are sick, ill, or
troubled by unclean spirits.9
6
Paul Meyendorff cites the following prayer used in the Eastern churches for the conse-
cration of oil: “O Lord, in your mercy (eleei) and compassion you heal the afflictions of our
souls and bodies; sanctify now this oil (elaion), O Master, that it may bring healing to those
who are anointed with it. . . . For you are our mercy (eleein) and salvation, O our God”
(Meyendorff (2009), 42). Lost in translation is the Greek play on words between oil (elaion)
and mercy (eleos).
7 8 9
Jasper and Cuming (1987), 121. Ibid., 60. Ibid., 95.
Protesting Evil 45
For the most part, these liturgical texts refer not to particular historic evils but
to types of evils, ranging from illness to appalling injustice.10 These evils, the
text reminds us, are all around us. We might easily forget—or even try to
forget—that they are all around us. The text pronounces that we are not to do
that. We are to be mindful of them and, in particular, mindful of them at this
point in the service. Moreover, the text addresses these evils in full recognition
that most of them are such that we can do nothing to prevent, correct, or
redeem them. They are too many in number; many are too far removed in
space and time. Even those that occur in our midst are such that we are often
powerless to prevent or alter them.
The text, then, calls us to bring these evils to mind in full recognition that we
are relatively powerless before them. These evils are, after all, the subject
matter of petitions, calls for help. It may be worth adding that this powerless-
ness is to some degree self-imposed. The types of evils to which the text refers
touch us at various points. Many of the assembled know those who are or who
have been held unjustly in prison, subjected to slavery or human trafficking,
widowed or orphaned because of injustice, and so on. Human nature being
what it is, many of us are naturally inclined to try to rectify these evils by
avenging them. In his teaching, however, Jesus forbids us to do that; we are not
to return these evils in kind:
You have heard that it was said, “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” But
I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek,
turn the other also; and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your
cloak as well. . . .
You have heard that it was said, “You shall love your neighbor and hate your
enemy.” But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute
you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven. . . . For if you love
those who love you, what reward do you have? (Matt. 5: 38–47)
While puzzling in certain respects, this passage arguably expresses the very
heart of the Gospel’s ethical teaching: we are to reject the ancient reciprocity
code. We are, that is, to reject that code of conduct that instructs us to return
favors for favors and evils for evils; it is to be for us a dead letter.11 It is this
ethical stance that forms the backdrop against which the assembled pray the
anaphora. The people call to mind the evils that we suffer in the recognition
that not only is there often little we can do about them, but also that we are
forbidden to prevent or respond to them in certain ways. We are not, for
example, to try to rectify them by avenging them.
10
The anaphora of the liturgy of St. Mark is an interesting exception. In addition to citing
types of evils, it includes references to particular historic evils: “Remember, Lord, our holy fathers
who were put to death by the barbarians in the holy mountain of Sinai and in Raitho” (p. 98).
11
On this, see Wolterstorff (2011b), 121–9.
46 Ritualized Faith
After having recited the anaphora, the celebrant, on behalf of the people,
then engages in the very sequence of actions that Jesus himself engaged in,
according to the scriptural presentation of both the feeding of the five thou-
sand and the Last Supper. The celebrant takes the bread, which has been
provided by the assembly itself, blesses it, breaks it, and then distributes it. The
people respond by eating together the food that is blessed. The blessing of the
bread, the breaking of it, and the sharing and eating of it are what constitute
the eucharistic meal.
At this point, the parallels between the feeding of the five thousand and the
eucharistic celebration that I have been pursuing should be plain enough. The
feeding of the multitudes and the eucharistic celebration share a common
context, both meals taking place in the shadow and recognition of vast evil
against which the assembled recognize themselves as being largely powerless.
But I have not yet said why either the feeding of the five thousand or the
eucharistic celebration are plausibly viewed as cases of events in which the
assembled also symbolically address evil by pronouncing a No to it. After all,
the mere fact that both these meals take place in the face and recognition of
evil needn’t also suggest that they in any interesting sense address it. More-
over, the scripts of the ancient liturgies themselves do not demand any such
interpretation. The eucharistic liturgy might best be understood as having two
distinct moments: one in which we call evil to mind, the other in which we
eat—the two events being such that they would appear to have relatively little
to do with one another.
I want to suggest, however, that fundamental to the eucharistic liturgy is
the dynamic between these two moments in the script—the dynamic
between the petitions, on the one hand, and the blessings that constitute
the eucharistic meal, on the other. Let me try to lay out a case for this
understanding by returning to a theme voiced earlier. A few paragraphs
back, I suggested that the petitions of the anaphora are best understood
against the backdrop of Jesus’s teaching that we are to reject the reciprocity
code. We call to mind various types of evils during the anaphora in the
recognition that not only is there often little we can do about their
occurrences, but also that we are not permitted to try to rectify them by
avenging them.
This rejection of the reciprocity code represents, however, only half of
Jesus’s teaching on the Sermon on the Mount. The other, positive side of
Jesus’s teaching is the injunction to bless those who hate and curse you and to
pray for those who abuse you (Luke 6: 27). This is not an isolated theme in the
writings of the early Christians. The same theme is taken up in the epistolary
literature in the New Testament. “Do not,” writes the author 1 Peter, “repay
evil for evil or abuse for abuse; but, on the contrary, repay with a blessing”
(1 Pet. 3: 9; see also 1 Thess. 5: 15; Rom. 1: 17–19). And again in the early
extra-biblical literature: the Didache, for example, tells us that the first maxim
Protesting Evil 47
of “the way of life” is “to bless those who curse you.”12 The Letter to Diognetus
maintains that what, in part, distinguishes Christians from their neighbors is
that they “are reviled, and yet they bless.”13 In the ancient liturgies, this ethical
stance is also voiced in the Apostolic Constitutions, when the people pray:
And we entreat you for those that hate and persecute us for the sake of your
name, for those who are outside and have gone astray, that you would turn them
back to good and soften their hearts.14
It is also voiced in the liturgy of St. Basil, when immediately before partaking
of the eucharist, the assembled pray for “all those who love us and all those
who hate us.”
In the face of evil, then, Christians are called to do a very difficult thing.
They are called to bless. They are not called to bless evil. The early Christians
did not understand Jesus to propound the idea, which Nietzsche once defend-
ed, that we are to accept or smile upon whatever evil comes our way. To the
contrary, they understood Jesus to teach that blessing those who curse you
requires the one who blesses to see the cursing as an evil. And that requires the
one who blesses to be against that evil. Nonetheless, they understood Jesus to
teach that blessing also requires not being against the person who has per-
formed the evil in the sense of wishing evil upon her. Rather, it requires
expressing the thought or desire that the person who perpetrates the evil be
treated in a way that befits her worth, which is considerable. Hence the
extraordinarily demanding nature of the act of blessing—demanding not
simply because it is not easy to bless in the face of evil, but also because it
requires the one who blesses to take up that finely balanced ethical stance of at
once pronouncing a No to evil and yet blessing the evildoer, treating him or
her as one’s moral counterpart.
The activity of blessing, I realize, comes in a variety of forms. In the
preceding paragraph, I have spoken of only one such form that figures
prominently in Jesus’s teaching in the Gospels. Still, we are looking for
patterns, and if our discussion is along the right lines, we have at hand an
important clue about how to understand the link between two moments in the
liturgical text: the petitions, in which the people call various types of evils to
mind, and the eucharistic blessings, in which the celebrant, on behalf of the
people, blesses in response to these evils. The blessing—if the pattern we have
uncovered is illuminating—is a response to the evils; the recognition of evil
and the response of blessing go hand in hand. What we have in the eucharistic
liturgy, I suggest, is the liturgical appropriation and enactment of Jesus’s
teaching on the Sermon on the Mount.
12
I am quoting from the translation found in Richardson (1996), 171.
13 14
Ibid., 217. Jasper and Cuming (1987), 112.
48 Ritualized Faith
If this is right, lying at the heart of the eucharistic liturgy is the dynamic
between petitioning and blessing, the blessings being a response to the evils
that the petitions call to our attention. These evils, I have said, touch us at
various points in our lives. To say that they touch us at various points in our
lives is, however, to understate the reality. The reality is that these evils often
jolt us, triggering in us a variety of instinctive responses. Among the most
pronounced are to disengage from, to despair over, or to curse the natural
world that has produced the tornados, the cancer, the earthquakes; the
inclination to disengage from, to despair over, or to curse our fellow human
beings, who have imprisoned the innocent, orphaned the children, or enslaved
the free; to disengage from, to despair over, or to curse a God, who for reasons
that remain almost completely opaque to us, has permitted the cancer, the
widowing, and the enslavement to occur. In the face and recognition of evil,
our worlds often turn dark; we lose the ability to discriminate. And when we
do, we often view or treat as evil the yield of the natural world, each other, and
God. Many speak, for example, of the world as a fundamentally hostile place
or losing their faith in God or humanity.
It is in the face and recognition of these evils that affect us in these ways
that the celebrant takes in hand the products of the natural world, the bread and
the wine—themselves joint products of nature and human hands—and, on
behalf of the people, blesses them. The celebrant then gives thanks to God, on
behalf of the people, for these things, blessing God for them. Finally, the
celebrant distributes what has been blessed to the people themselves, thereby
blessing them with these good things. At the core of the eucharistic meal is a
threefold blessing. In the face and recognition of vast evil, the celebrant, on
behalf of the people, blesses the yield of the natural world, God, and the people.
The threefold blessing pronounces good that which we are often inclined in
our lives to call or treat as evil. In this respect, it is a discriminatory response to
evil. To the sufferings and the wrongings, the petitions pronounce a No. We
are not, for example, to accept passively the suffering inflicted upon those in
the mines and in slavery but to be against it, even if we can be so only
symbolically. To the natural world, one another, and God, in contrast, the
blessings pronounce a Yes, affirming their goodness. The blessings, for ex-
ample, affirm and treat the natural world, as symbolized in the bread and wine,
as being a means of communion, a point of contact with God. If I understand
it aright, however, the threefold blessing does not simply respond to the evils
brought to mind in the petitions by symbolically affirming the goodness of the
natural world, God, and each other. It does so in the face of the power that evil
tends to wield over us. For evil can hold us under its sway, exerting pressure on
us to live lives in which we, sometimes unwittingly, stand opposed to the
good—lives, for example, in which things go dark and in which we disengage
from the goodness of the natural world, each other, and God, treating the
former not as points of contact with but as barriers to God and one another.
Protesting Evil 49
To this power, this pressure that evil exerts on us, the threefold blessing also
pronounces a No. In so doing, the assembled thereby pronounces that evil will
not worm its way into our lives, separating us from the goodness of the natural
world, each other, and God. That is also how we symbolically stand against it.
In the Gospels, Jesus admonishes his listeners, telling them that unless
they become like little children, they will not inherit the kingdom of God
(Matt. 18: 3). This passage is often interpreted as one in which Jesus calls for
innocent and childlike faith, the sort of faith that does not fully reckon with
evil. But our discussion suggests another reading of this passage. According to
this reading, we are to reckon with evil; this, we have seen, is one important
function of the petitions in the eucharistic liturgy. But in doing so, we are not
to allow our worlds to turn dark. In reckoning with evil, we are not to become
cynical, jaded, or disengaged. Rather, we are to be like children who, for all
their shortcomings, are remarkably resistant to the darkness and power of evil.
Jesus, it should be noted, makes no claims about this being an easy task. It may
be that the exhortation to become like little children belongs to the hard
sayings of Jesus, one whose fulfillment requires the difficult activity of blessing
in the face and recognition of evil.
When viewed against the liturgical petitions, the eucharistic blessings are,
I have said, helpfully viewed as a symbolic protest against evil. When describ-
ing these blessings, I have spoken of the celebrant, on behalf of the people,
engaging in a scripted sequence of act-types, which are themselves presented
in the Gospels as having been performed by Jesus. It might, however, be
helpful to speak somewhat more precisely. For the self-understanding of the
church is that the actions that the celebrant and the people perform are actions
performed by the church. If this is right, in the celebration of the eucharist, it is
the church that blesses the natural order, each other, and God by way of the
actions of the celebrant and the people. What we have here, then, is a case of
collective action. Not only is it a case of collective action, if the picture I have
presented fits the reality, it is also a case in which the church symbolically
expresses its allegiance to the good by symbolically standing against evil—both
evils of the sort to which it has called our attention in the script of the liturgy
and to the power it tends to wield over us. When assembled, the church
addresses evil, protesting its presence in the world by symbolically being for
the good in the taking, blessing, breaking, and sharing of the bread, just as
Jesus did in the feeding of the five thousand.
2.3. ON THE NEED TO BE FOR THE GOOD
My aim in this discussion has been to arrive at self-understanding of a certain

kind. Specifically, it has been to gain a better understanding of what actions
50 Ritualized Faith
the church performs when celebrating the eucharistic liturgy. In so doing,
I have, however, no reductive aspirations. It is not my purpose to claim that
the eucharistic celebration is nothing more than a way by which the church, in
a situation of relative powerlessness, symbolically stands against evil by sym-
bolically being for the good. I mean only to point to one, albeit one important,
dimension of that complex sequence of actions that constitutes the eucharistic
celebration. One matter that would be ripe for further exploration, given the
parallels that hold between the eucharistic celebration and the feeding of the
five thousand, is the interplay between the exercise of power and powerless-
ness in both cases. I have emphasized the sense in which, as the assembly
stands before evil, it acknowledges that it is largely powerless to prevent or
rectify it. It calls for help. But as the church has traditionally understood the
eucharistic celebration, it is, like the feeding of the five thousand, an occasion
for the exercise of divine power. In the celebration of the eucharist—so the
church has affirmed—God also exercises authority over the elements of
nature. According to the Eastern church’s understanding, God exercises
authority over the elements of nature in such a way that they become a
means of communion, points of contact with God. They are swept up into
the divine life, rendering it apt to call both them and the assembled people the
body of Christ.
The church’s understanding and celebration of the eucharist has undergone
significant alteration in the last five hundred years. Large stretches of the
Christian community rarely celebrate the eucharist. And the liturgical scripts
they employ to celebrate it tend to be very different from those which we find
in the ancient liturgies; they are considerably starker, raising no awareness that
the eucharistic meal occurs in the shadow of evil. Nor, for that matter, do they
prescribe the performance of actions that allow us symbolically to stand
against evil in the celebration of the eucharist. The dynamic of petition and
blessing is absent. This alteration in the Christian community’s understanding
and celebration of the eucharist seems to me a turn for the worse. I say this not
primarily out of the conviction that the liturgical practices of the contempor-
ary Christian community should more nearly articulate with those of the
ancient church. I say it because, to live well, we need ways of symbolically
being against evil by symbolically being for the good. About this Adams seems
to be absolutely right. Here is how Adams himself makes the point, this time in
a passage in which he addresses the issue of worship:
Something of ethical importance can be done in worship that we cannot accom-
plish except symbolically. . . . [W]e can hardly deny that our ability to do good,
and even to conceive of good and care about it, is limited. Our nonsymbolic
activity, perforce, is a little of this and a little of that. Getting ourselves dressed in
the morning, driving or riding or walking to work, and then home again to
dinner, we try, on the way and in between, to do some good, to love people and be
kind to them, to enjoy and perhaps create some beauty. But none of this is very
Protesting Evil 51
perfect, even when we succeed; and all of it is very fragmentary. One who loves
the good should be for the good wherever it occurs or is at stake. But we don't
even know about most of the good and opportunities for good in the world, and
we cannot do very much about most of what we do not. We can care effectively
only about fragments that are accessible to us. . . . I have an inkling of goodness
too wonderful for us to comprehend, but concretely I must devote myself to
getting the text I am writing a little clearer and more cogently argued than the
last draft.
Symbolically we can do better. Symbolically I can be for the Good as such, and not
just for the bits and pieces of it that I can concretely promote or embody.15
I would add only that, to live well, we need ways in which we can regularly and
corporately symbolically stand against evil by symbolically being for the good.
On these matters, we are better left not to our own individual whims. There
are multiple reasons for this, some of which are closely connected with the
psychological difficulty of pronouncing a No to evil by blessing the natural
world, each other, or God in the face and recognition of this evil. For
sometimes we find ourselves psychologically unable to bless in these ways.
The pain is too raw, the resentment too hot, the light of hope too dim. When
this is the case, sometimes we can, by engaging in the corporate actions of the
church, perform those actions that, simply by our own power, we would
otherwise find impossible to perform.16
15
Adams (1999), 227.
16
I delivered a version of this chapter at Georgetown University and thank members of the
audience there, especially my commentator, Karen Stohr, for their feedback. Thanks, also, to
Nick Wolterstorff, Rico Vitz, and two anonymous referees for their helpful comments.
Another Look at Divine Hiddenness
In a passage appealed to frequently by homilists but rarely by philosophers, the

author of the Gospel of Matthew attributes the following words to Jesus:
Then the King will say to those on His right hand,
“Come you blessed of My Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from
the foundation of the world: for I was hungry and you gave Me food; I was thirsty
and you gave Me drink; I was a stranger and you took Me in; I was naked and you
clothed Me; I was sick and you visited Me; I was in prison and you came to Me.”
“Then the just will answer Him, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see You hungry
and feed You, or thirsty and give You drink? When did we see You a stranger and
take You in, or naked and clothe You? Or when did we see You sick, or in prison,
and come to You?”
“And the King will answer and say to them, ‘Assuredly, I say to you, inasmuch as
you did it to one of the least of these My brethren, you did it to Me.’ ” (Matt. 25: 34–40)
Those familiar with this text know that its context is one in which Jesus is
presenting his teaching regarding the Great Day of Judgment. Among other
things, Jesus is informing his listeners that they will be judged on the basis not of
such things as their degree of conformance to cultic requirements, but rather
how they have treated “the least of these.” Indeed, under a natural reading, this
passage tells us that the Great Judgment will be rendered primarily on the basis
of how we have treated the hungry, the alienated, and the sick.
Like so many passages from the Gospels, this passage from Matthew is at
once gripping and puzzling. It is also, I want to suggest, important to take into
account when thinking through the phenomenon of divine hiddenness, at
least from the perspective of traditional Christian theism. My task in this
chapter is to explain why.
3 .1 . WH A T J E S U S IS S A Y I N G
What exactly is Jesus saying in the passage just quoted? Jesus is presumably
saying something more than that he approves of feeding the hungry, housing
Another Look at Divine Hiddenness 53

the stranger, and visiting the sick. After all, who wouldn’t? The pivotal
sentence is the one in which Jesus says that inasmuch as we do such things
as visit the sick, we do these things to him. The performance of such actions,
Jesus claims, counts as actions taken toward him. Those of us who are reading
this passage as philosophers, however, want to know which actions Jesus is
claiming we are performing towards him by doing such things as visiting the
sick. A flat-footed reading might have it that Jesus is claiming that, by visiting a
sick person, we thereby visit Jesus, who is also sick. But this cannot be what
Jesus means. If Jesus is among the persons with whom we can visit, then
presumably he is not also sick.
We needn’t cast about much, however, to see what Jesus is getting at, for
analogies are close at hand. When I was a child, my grandmother would tell us
the story of how her family fled from their Russian homeland to Estonia to escape
the October Revolution. As family lore has it, while in Estonia, on a cold winter’s
night, the family took in a total stranger in a park who had nowhere to go. Out
of gratitude, this woman pledged to be their sponsor in America if the family
wished to immigrate; she told them that she had the right connections to provide
work for my great-grandfather. When the family eventually decided to immi-
grate, this virtual stranger did as she promised, sponsoring my great-grandfather.
By doing this, she had thereby performed an act of great kindness toward the
entire family. Things, of course, could’ve gone very differently. Had this stranger
repaid the hospitality shown her by breaking her promise upon my great-
grandfather’s arrival in America, she would’ve thereby wronged the entire family.
When understood in light of such analogies, Jesus’s pronouncement comes
into focus: by doing such things as feeding the hungry and visiting the sick, Jesus
claims, we thereby bless and honor him. Conversely, by doing such things as
ignoring or harming the least of these, we thereby wrong and dishonor him. In
this respect, Jesus highlights a striking difference between the relationship that he
bears to the least of these and the ones that we typically do. I cannot bring it about
that providing food for a Haitian refugee counts as my having performed an act
of kindness toward John Schellenberg (whose work I'll engage with in a mo-
ment). Nor can I bring it about that my having failed to visit a stranger in prison
counts as my having wronged Schellenberg. Neither I nor Schellenberg bear the
right sort of relationship to these people for this to be the case. Under a natural
reading, Jesus claims that he does, however. If the passage from Matthew is to be
believed, a person’s having fed the hungry counts as her having blessed or
honored Jesus. Her failing to do so, by contrast, counts as her having wronged
or dishonored him (see Matt. 25: 41–6). Suppose one now adds to the mix the
traditional Christian claims regarding the divinity of Christ. If so, then Jesus’s
claim is that a person’s having fed the hungry counts as her having blessed God,
while her failing to do so counts as her having wronged God.1
1
Recall, also, St. Paul’s account of his experience on the road to Damascus in which, after
having violently persecuted the early Christian church, he reports having been blinded and
54 Ritualized Faith
On this occasion, I won’t pause to reflect on what it is about Jesus’s
relationship with the least of these that brings it about that a person’s
performing actions of one sort toward them counts as performing actions of
another sort toward God. Suffice it to say that in the passage quoted above,
Jesus himself indicates that it is because he bears something akin to an
intimate familial relation to the least of these. Most important for my purposes
is to highlight the following implication of Jesus’s words, at least when they are
understood against the backdrop of traditional Christian theology: it is in
virtue of an agent’s having behaved or failed to behave in certain ways toward
the least of these that she bears morally freighted relations with God, includ-
ing, if the text is to be believed, being a friend of God. According to the biblical
text, then, these actions and omissions are such that they bring her into a
meaningful relationship with God in a perfectly ordinary English sense of the
phrase “meaningful relationship.” Because of her actions or omissions with
respect to the least of these, she can, for example, be the object of divine
approbation or disapprobation, as the case may be.
To this point, I have drawn attention to the claim, made by the author of the
Gospel of Matthew, that certain actions of ours taken toward the least of these
count as actions taken toward God. Because of this, we find ourselves in
relationships of various kinds with God, ones for which we can be held
accountable. There is, however, another point that bears emphasis, which is
this: according to the biblical text, we can be entirely ignorant of the fact that
we stand in these relationships in virtue of our actions and omissions. “When
did we see You sick, or in prison?” ask the characters in Jesus’s story.
Remarkably, the biblical text suggests, whether we have correct beliefs regard-
ing God or God’s relationship to the least of these does not matter much when
it comes to the Great Day. The divine judgment is, at least in large measure,
determined by the ways in which we have actually conducted ourselves toward
the least of these and, thus, toward God.
We also have analogies to which we can appeal to understand this. Suppose,
in the story I told earlier, the stranger in the park had met, on that cold winter’s
night, not my grandmother’s entire family, but only my great-grandfather.
Suppose, for illustration’s sake, that she had no idea whether my great-
grandfather had a family. If the stranger had done my great-grandfather a
favor or harm, she would’ve thereby brought herself into a meaningful rela-
tionship with my grandmother’s family. A favor would’ve formed the basis for
gratitude; violence would’ve been the occasion for rightful resentment. For
these things to be true, it wouldn’t matter what beliefs the stranger had about
my great-grandfather. If the stranger had returned my great-grandfather's
kindness with harm, for example, her ignorance or false beliefs about my
hearing an audible question posed to him by the risen Christ: “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute
me?” (Acts 9: 4).

great-grandfather’s identity would be irrelevant to the issue of whether she had
wronged him. Jesus indicates that our relationship to God is similar. To pinch a
phrase from Hilary Putnam, Jesus appears to suggest that vitally important
components of the divine-human relationship just ain’t in the head.
3.2. D IVINE HIDDENNESS
For nearly twenty years, John Schellenberg has pressed a type of argument
against traditional theism that he calls the Hiddenness Argument. In his fine
book The Wisdom to Doubt, Schellenberg redeploys the argument to advance a
version of religious skepticism, this being the view (roughly) that we should
withhold judgment regarding whether there is some ultimate and salvific
reality whose properties we could apprehend.2 In the context of Schellenberg’s
discussion, the Hiddenness Argument is not supposed to function as an
isolated justification for religious skepticism. It is but a single strand of
argument that Schellenberg offers for the view. Still, it is an interesting strand,
well-deserving of attention. In what follows, I wish to explore it.
Schellenberg formulates the Hiddenness Argument as follows:
(1) Necessarily, if God exists, anyone who is (i) not resisting God and
(ii) capable of a meaningful conscious relationship with God is also
(iii) in a position to participate in such a relationship (able to do so just
by trying).
(2) Necessarily, one is at a time in a position to participate in a meaningful
conscious relationship with God only if at that time one believes that
God exists.
(3) Necessarily, if God exists, anyone who is (i) not resisting God and
(ii) capable of a meaningful conscious relationship with God also
(iii) believes that God exists.
(4) There are (and often have been) people who are (i) not resisting God
and (ii) capable of a meaningful conscious relationship with God
without also (iii) believing that God exists.
(5) So, God does not exist (204–6).
There is a great deal to say about this argument. In the interest of brevity,
I will assume that we should accept premises (2) and (4). I propose to focus on
the argument’s first premise, which Schellenberg tells us is the critical one.
I shall argue, first, that this premise deserves a different gloss from the one that
2
Schellenberg (2007). I will insert references to this book parenthetically in the text.
56 Ritualized Faith
Schellenberg gives it. I shall then contend that, even when glossed differently,
the theist has insufficient reason to accept it.
Let me begin with the first task. Consider a case of a person who, in no
interesting sense, willfully resists the divine. Suppose, furthermore, that this
nonresistance is stable; it doesn’t wax and wane. Call such a person a nonresister.
If God exists, a nonresister, Schellenberg states, is at all times “in a position to”
engage in a meaningful, conscious relationship with God. She can do so just by
trying and, apparently, with little effort. Schellenberg takes this to be a very
plausible, albeit “radically democratized” account of the conditions under which
we can experience God. For if God were perfectly loving, Schellenberg argues,
then some form of conscious awareness of God is “not the preserve of the
spiritually elite.” It should be readily available to any nonresister (201).
I am dubious. It is one thing to say that awareness of God is not the preserve
of the spiritually elite. It is another to suggest that it is easy to achieve for the
nonresister, as Schellenberg suggests. After all, through no fault of her own, a
person might inhabit social conditions that are fairly hostile to theistic belief.
Imagine, for example, her society’s attitude toward religion has been power-
fully shaped by the resisters, even though she herself is not among them. As a
result, those with whom she regularly interacts tend to fall into two camps:
they are either resisters or those who tend not to think about God at all.
In this case, an agent who is a nonresister and curious about God might find
herself puzzled by what she has been taught about God and the attitudes about
God that are “in the air.” In such conditions, it might take some hard work on
her part to cut through the prevailing attitudes and teachings to get to such a
point where it makes sense from her point of view to think seriously about and
be open to a meaningful relationship to the divine.
If this is right, however, then we should understand premise (1) of the
Hiddenness Argument differently from the way that Schellenberg does. To be
in a position to participate in a meaningful, conscious relationship with God
might take an honest and extended effort. And because it may require such an
effort, I find it implausible to say, as Schellenberg does, that “all capable
creatures would at all times have available to them some form of conscious
awareness of God, if there were a God” (201). In what follows, then, I shall
understand premise (1) of the Hiddenness Argument to incorporate this quali-
fication. I shall understand it to say that, if God exists, then a nonresister, having
made an honest effort to engage in a meaningful, conscious relationship with
God, is in a position to do so. I will assume correlatively that the nonresisters of
which Schellenberg speaks in premise (4) are also of this variety.
So much for the issue of how to understand premise (1) of the argument.3
Let me now indicate why I believe a traditional Christian theist will have
insufficient reason to accept this premise. The first premise, recall, says:
3
Does the gloss of premise (1) I have offered beg the question against the proponent of the
Hiddenness Argument? It is difficult to see how. This gloss is, after all, consistent with our being

(1) Necessarily, if God exists, anyone who is (i) not resisting God and (ii) capable
of a meaningful conscious relationship with God is also (iii) in a position to
participate in such a relationship (able to do so just by trying).
Focus for the moment on the phrase “meaningful conscious relationship with
God” and, in particular, the qualifier “conscious.” The Christian theist who has
Matthew 25 in mind will wonder: Why suppose that, if God exists, then at all
times, a nonresister can participate in a meaningful conscious relationship with
God just by trying? Why not instead affirm something weaker, namely, if God
exists, then at all times, a nonresister can participate in a meaningful relation-
ship with God just by trying, even though she may not be aware of God
as God?
We can, then, distinguish two versions of the first premise of the Hidden-
ness Argument. The first is that accepted by Schellenberg, which I have just
stated. The second, I am suggesting, is that accepted by a certain range of
traditional theists. It says:
(1') Necessarily, if God exists, anyone who is (i) not resisting God and (ii) capable
of a meaningful relationship with God is also (iii) in a position to participate in
such a relationship (able to do so just by trying).
While many traditional theists will be wary of (1), they will not be similarly
wary of (1'). In fact, they will embrace not only it, but also two further claims.
In the first place, they will affirm that:
Necessarily, if God exists, anyone who is not resisting God and capable of a
meaningful relationship with God is in a position not only to participate in such a
relationship but also to apprehend God’s presence and activity.
The idea behind this last claim is that a nonresister needn’t remain at a
distance from God in this sense: she can apprehend the presence and activity
of God inasmuch as she apprehends and positively interacts with the goodness
able to come into a conscious relationship with God just by trying, which is what (1) says; it
simply specifies what the trying might involve. Moreover, the Hiddenness Argument allows that
there can be resisters whose actions can have all sorts of deleterious effects on the world. If so, it is
difficult to see how the argument could rule out the possibility that among these effects is the
creation of inhospitable conditions (for nonresisters and resisters alike) for apprehending God.
In fact, I am tempted to say that if the proponent of the Hiddenness Argument were to claim that
such a thing is impossible, he has stacked the deck against the theist. For, if I understand the
argument correctly, its strategy is to claim that, given what we know about the nature of love and
what theists say about God and God’s relationship to human beings, God would not actualize a
world that included nonresisting nonbelievers. But if this is so, the proponent of the argument
must be prepared to concede, for argument’s sake, certain things that theists say about God and
God’s relation to human beings. Among the things that theists say is this: no one is brought into
proper relationship with God, others, and the natural world alone. Your actions may abet or
impede my ability to rightly relate to God, you, and the natural world. This is the theme,
prominent in the Christian East, of the solidarity of salvation.
58 Ritualized Faith
and beauty she finds in the natural world, in her activities, and in her relations
with other human beings. For these qualities, the Christian will maintain, bear
particularly intimate relationships with God, such as being manifestations of
divine activity or ways in which some aspect of the divine nature discloses
itself. The Eastern Christian tradition, for example, speaks of these manifest-
ations and disclosures as the divine energies. Fundamental to the spiritual life,
according to this tradition, is the aim of learning to see the natural world, our
activities, and our relationships with others as manifestations of these energies.
To be sure, the nonbelieving nonresister will not think of the goodness and
beauty she apprehends as manifestations of divine activity or energies. Still, the
important point to see is that traditional Christian theists will grant that, at all
times, a nonresister is in a position both to enter into a meaningful relation-
ship with God and to apprehend God’s presence and activity.
But, traditional Christian theists will continue, we will not always see
through a glass darkly. For it is also true, they will claim, that:
There will be some time in which every nonbelieving nonresister will be in a
position to have a meaningful conscious relationship with God.
Perhaps that time will be at the Great Day of Judgment, as Matthew 25

suggests.
I have distinguished two ways of understanding the first premise of the
Hiddenness Argument—a strong and a weak version. From this point for-
ward, I shall understand the weak version to incorporate the claim that every
nonresister is in a position not only to have a meaningful relationship with
God but also to apprehend God’s presence and activity, albeit in some cases
only in a veiled manner. Schellenberg needs the strong version of the first
premise for his argument to go through. So, why does he think we should
accept it?
We should accept it, says Schellenberg, because embracing the alternative is
incoherent. What I shall call the Case from Love helps us to see why. Both
theists and their rivals, Schellenberg claims, should accept:
(i) If God expresses the most perfect love toward each human being at all times,
then there is no time at which nonresisters are not in a position to apprehend
God’s presence as God’s presence.
If, however, premise (1) of the Hiddenness Argument were false, then it would
be true that:
(ii) There are times at which nonresisters are not in a position to apprehend
God’s presence as God’s presence.
But theists are also committed to:

(iii) God expresses the most perfect love toward each human being at all times.

If this last claim were true, however, then theists would be committed to the
inconsistent position that God both does and does not express the most
perfect love to each human being at all times (201–3).
The Case from Love turns on the truth of (i). Yet (i), Schellenberg tells us, is
extremely plausible. It is, he says, implied by the following conceptual truth:
every case in which a person A loves a person B in an admirable way is such
that “A does whatever she can to ensure that B is always able just by trying to
engage in a meaningful conscious relationship with A.” This, Schellenberg
maintains, “is just part of love for any admirably loving mother or husband or
brother or friend” (202–3). Since God’s love would have to be admirable, it
follows that God would have to do whatever God could to ensure that humans
are always able, just by trying, to engage in a meaningful conscious relation-
ship with God wherein they apprehend God as God. For ease of reference, let’s
call this claim regarding what must be true of any admirable love relationship,
whether human or divine, the consciousness constraint.
We have been exploring the question why we should accept premise (1) of
the Hiddenness Argument. The pattern of argument that we’ve uncovered so
far is this. Premise (1) of the Hiddenness Argument is implied by the Case
from Love. The Case from Love, in turn, rests on premise (i). (i), however, is
not a stand-alone assumption. It is, says Schellenberg, implied (when com-
bined with some auxiliary premises) by the consciousness constraint, which
is itself a conceptual truth. If this is right, the argument before us has the
following distinguishing characteristic: officially, it appeals to claims about
what would have to be true of perfect love. But closer inspection reveals that
these claims about perfect love are not doing any real work in the argument.
For one could replace all instances of the phrase “most perfect love” with
“admirable love,” and the argument would go through. Properly understood,
Schellenberg’s charge is that, if God were hidden, then God’s love would not be
admirable, let alone perfect.
Is this right? Is it true that anything worth calling admirable love between
persons is subject to the consciousness constraint? I believe not. Let me
illustrate why by offering a modified version of the stranger-in-the-park
story I introduced earlier.
Imagine that, on a wintry evening, you have taken in a person who, to the
best of your knowledge, is a complete stranger. Imagine, however, that in
reality this person is no stranger at all. She is your benefactor. Because she is
your benefactor, she has been and is keenly interested in your long-term
flourishing. Unbeknownst to you, it was she who had orchestrated your
family’s escape from Russia some years ago. Your benefactor, however, does
not wish to retain perpetual anonymity. She also wishes to pursue a close
friendship with you, partly because you are kin. While the benefactor could
easily reveal her identity to you on this wintry evening, she conceals it instead,
choosing to remain anonymous for present purposes.
60 Ritualized Faith
This is for two reasons. First, she knows that because there is time for a
friendship to develop, there is no special urgency attached to revealing her
identity here and now. And, second, she knows that entering into a close
friendship with you will, in some respects, be difficult. For the benefactor is
dedicated to numerous and demanding benevolent purposes, including work-
ing in dangerous conditions to emancipate others from political oppression.
Close friendship will require that you work together closely on these projects.
In fact, if you do form a close friendship, the benefactor will have to depend on
you in significant ways, giving you weighty responsibilities. This, she knows,
will not be easy for you, as you are rather attached to your own projects, as
trivial as they may be. Given the situation, the benefactor knows that the better
tactic at this point is patience. Being patient does not, however, imply remain-
ing idle. In the meanwhile, the benefactor intends to forge bonds of various
sorts with you. She will give you numerous opportunities to dedicate yourself
to causes that are important to her, although you will be ignorant of their
provenance. If you react well and wisely to these opportunities, you are likely
to develop the sorts of characteristics and commitments that will promise, in
the long run, a close and stable friendship.
Is the benefactor in this story exercising love of an admirable sort? I would
think so. She has your best interests in mind. She is, moreover, pursuing, in a
patient and resourceful way, a more intimate relationship with you. Finally, by
remaining anonymous she does not wrong you, nor has she demeaned you in
any fashion. Yet her care for you fails the consciousness constraint. She is not
doing whatever she can to ensure that, just by trying, you can have constant
conscious awareness of her true identity. That, however, is not a reason for
believing that the benefactor fails to love you in an admirable and resourceful
way. It is, rather, an excellent reason to believe that the consciousness con-
straint is, far from being a conceptual truth, not even true. But if it is not, then
the case Schellenberg offers for premise (1) of the Hiddenness Argument is
defective. The consciousness constraint does not specify a minimum threshold
that anything worth calling admirable love must satisfy. It is possible for one’s
love of another to be altogether admirable and resourceful, while simultan-
eously failing the consciousness constraint.
3.3. ANOTHER L INE OF THOUG HT
I have presented the official line of argument that Schellenberg offers for the
first premise of the Hiddenness Argument, arguing that it rests on a false
claim. I suspect, however, that the official line of argument that Schellenberg
presents may not be what lies deepest in Schellenberg’s thought. In what
remains, I would like to offer an alternate interpretation of the consciousness

constraint that could be employed to justify the Hiddenness Argument’s first
premise. I do this with some hesitation, as Schellenberg nowhere explicitly
endorses this further line of argument. Still, I think it is a line of argument
worth presenting. This is not because I think this argument is better than
Schellenberg’s official argument. It isn’t. Rather, it is because having this line of
argument before us should allow us better to see why there is reason to believe
that the constraint, even when modified, fails to apply to God.
It did not require a great feat of imagination to produce counterexamples to
the consciousness constraint. Given more space, we could easily present
others. Nonetheless, Schellenberg is clearly impressed by the constraint. He
presents it as if it were an obvious conceptual truth. Why is that? A clue might
lie in a passage that I quoted earlier in which Schellenberg claims that the
constraint is true of “any admirably loving mother or husband or brother or
friend” (202–3; cf. also p. 235). This phrase suggests that Schellenberg thinks
of the consciousness constraint as being true not of all admirable love rela-
tionships but only of admirable love relationships of a certain range, such as
that between a parent and a child under ordinary conditions. And that seems
plausible. Under ordinary conditions, admirable intimate relationships of
these types are subject to the consciousness constraint.
To appreciate this last point, consider another variant of the stranger-
in-the-park story. According to this version of the story, you have an an-
onymous benefactor. While she could easily reveal her true identity to you, she
conceals it instead. However, according to this version of the story, you bear
the following special relation to your benefactor: you are her child. This
version of the story, it might be said, strains the imagination. Unless she had
very powerful countervailing reasons to remain anonymous, how could she
non-defectively love you and fail to reveal her true identity? It might be
claimed, however, that it is this version of the story that more nearly approxi-
mates what God’s relationship to human beings would have to be like, were
God to exist. God’s love, it might be said, would have to be akin to that which a
parent has toward her child in which there is the constant intended availability
of some form of conscious relationship, at least under ordinary conditions. If
so, advocates of the Hiddenness Argument needn’t defend an unqualified
version of the consciousness constraint. They need only defend a qualified
version of the consciousness constraint, arguing that it would have to apply
to God.4
In various places, Schellenberg chastises theists for trimming their concep-
tion of God to fit the actual world rather than honestly stating what God
would have to be like were God to exist (197–8). There is, however, an equally
dangerous tendency to which religious skeptics may fall prey. And that is to
4
In his response to an earlier version of this chapter, Schellenberg pressed something similar
to this line of argument.
62 Ritualized Faith
engage in overly simple analogical thinking when characterizing divine love,
insisting that God’s love would, on the whole, have to resemble that of a
human parent (or some other form of familial love) under ordinary condi-
tions. This tendency, arguably, is at work in the argument we are considering.
But it is a tendency that should be resisted. True enough, in its dogged and
unconditional pursuit of our wellbeing, God’s love may be like a parent’s love
for a child under favorable conditions. And certainly scripture presents God’s
love in this light (think of the story of the prodigal son in this regard). Still,
insofar as genuine intimacy with God is contingent upon our aligning our
will and purposes with God’s, divine love may be rather unlike a parent’s
love for a child. In some respects, it may be more akin to the sort of care
which a visionary philanthropist has for those to whom he has entrusted the
day-to-day operations of his foundation, as scripture also suggests (cf. Matt.
18, 20). At any rate, the point is that we cannot assume that features that are
typically true of ordinary parent-child relationships (or familial love in
general) would also be true of divine-human relationships, as the argument
we are considering does.
This last point, in fact, may understate just how radical the gulf is between
divine and human love. Let me try to highlight this difference by reflecting on
the consciousness constraint for a moment longer. The consciousness con-
straint, I have suggested, is probably best understood to apply to a certain
range of intimate relationships under ordinary conditions. The reason it
applies is this: absent the availability of conscious awareness, we typically
cannot form or sustain the bonds of union and intimacy in which love
between persons consists, as there typically are no other available means by
which to form and sustain these bonds. Think, for example, of friendship
under ordinary conditions. Imagine that two people have been fast friends for
years but that their relationship has recently deteriorated. While the one friend
does all she can to keep in contact, the other does not. Perhaps this is because
she is no longer invested in the friendship. Or perhaps this is because she is too
busy with other matters and will be so for many years. Typically, when
something like this happens, the friendship withers and dies; what remains
are memories. Given our human condition, this is how things must be.
Contrast this with God’s relationship to the world. Christian theists main-
tain that God bears a relationship to the world of such a kind that the world’s
beauty and goodness are manifestations of the divine life, and certain actions
we perform toward each other count as actions performed toward God. If this
were so, then God’s relationship to the world is utterly different from ours.
The world is not and could not be permeated in the same way by whatever
goodness and beauty we might have. Earlier I pointed out that this has the
implication that nonresisters could, in principle, be aware of God at all times.
The point I wish to make now is that, if Christian theism were true, then there
would be ways of being aware of God and God’s activities that, in general, are

not and could not be ways of being aware of each other and each other’s
activities.
Take a case in which I am aware of beauty, such as when I listen to a fine
performance of Mahler’s Third Symphony. Upon doing so, I could be remind-
ed of the goodness and beauty of your character. But I would not thereby be
presented with your goodness and beauty; the beauty of the symphony is not
(and ordinarily could not be) a way in which you disclose your goodness and
beauty to me. You do not bear the right sort of relationship to the symphony’s
beauty for this to be so. Theists claim, by contrast, that the beauty of a
performance of Mahler’s Third is in fact a manifestation of God’s goodness
and beauty; it is a way in which God discloses God’s goodness and beauty to
us. It is a commitment to this understanding of God’s presence in the world,
I take it, that lies at the heart of the sacramental traditions of Christianity. For
these traditions maintain that the created order is the primary locus of divine
presence and activity—the primary means by which we are presented with the
divine energies.
Let me elaborate on this last point. A striking feature of the liturgies of the
sacramental traditions, such as those of Eastern Orthodox Christianity, is their
emphasis on beauty—beauty in the art displayed, the vestments worn, the
movements made, the music sung. One way to think of this emphasis is that it
represents an effort on the assembly’s part to offer their best to God. (As a
child, this is the reason I was given for why we dress up for church.) In fact,
however, the emphasis in these traditions falls on not the assembly’s efforts
but the ways in which God acts via the assembly’s actions. The beauty of the
visual art produced or the music sung is not something that accompanies
God’s presence and activity in the liturgy, whatever that might be. Rather, it is
itself a manifestation of God’s presence and activity, whether one is aware of it
or not. Those with no religious commitments are often drawn to this beauty.
(The Irish novelist James Joyce, who was not religious, made it a point to
attend the services of Holy Week in the Orthodox Church annually because of
their beauty.) The tradition would say that in being so drawn, these people are
being drawn to God in such a way that their connection with this beauty can
and sometimes does form the basis of a meaningful relationship with God.
With these points in mind, suppose God were not to do everything possible
for us to be in a conscious relationship with God at all times. Even if this were
so, there would, nonetheless, be untold ways in which God could manifest
Godself to us and for us to be aware of God. These manifestations, moreover,
could be expressions of divine love, as they could be the means by which God
forges and builds bonds of union and intimacy with us, even when we do not
recognize them as such. Not only could they be the means by which God
forges and builds bonds of union and intimacy, these manifestations could
also be constitutive of such union and intimacy, even when we do not
recognize them as such. Whether they are constitutive of such bonds will
64 Ritualized Faith
depend on how we respond to the goodness, beauty, and need we find in the
world.5 It follows that, even if God were not to do everything possible for us to
be in a conscious relationship with God at all times, there could be ample,
intimate, and lovely ways of being in relationship with God at those times. In
this way, the divine-human relationship would enjoy a multidimensionality
and resilience that, in general, is not present in relationships between human
persons. It may even be that, as Matthew 25 suggests, what matters most to
God is forging and building union and intimacy of this sort. And it may be
that the importance of our consciously recognizing the true nature of this
union and intimacy is, for God, secondary. However that may be, the upshot is
this: the main reason we have to think that the consciousness constraint is true
of any case of admirable and intimate human love in ordinary conditions—
viz., that typically we have no other available means by which to form and
sustain the bonds of union and intimacy—is not a reason to think that the
constraint is also true of any admirable and intimate case of divine love for
human beings.
Let me summarize. The first premise of the Hiddenness Argument, I have
claimed, admits of two readings. The strong reading has it that every non-
resister would be in a position to be aware of God as God, while a weak reading
implies only that every nonresister would be in a position to be aware of God,
although not necessarily as God. Schellenberg maintains that we should accept
the strong reading. We have seen that his case for this version of the premise
turns on the truth of the consciousness constraint. We have also seen that
there are excellent reasons to believe that this constraint is false. There are,
however, weaker versions of this constraint that could be used to support a
strong reading of premise (1) of the Hiddenness Argument. But a weakened
version of the constraint could support such a premise only if God’s love were,
in the relevant respects, like a human parent’s love for his children under
normal conditions. This last claim, I have said, should also be rejected, as
divine-human love may be subject to demands fundamentally different from
ordinary cases of parental love (or familial love in general). Finally, we saw
that there is reason to believe that there is an even deeper divide between
human and divine love. While there are reasons to believe that the conscious-
ness constraint applies to admirable and intimate love relations under ordin-
ary conditions, these reasons are absent when it comes to divine love. For,
unlike human beings, God has resources available both to express and com-
municate God’s love and to draw us into and build intimate relationships even
when God does not at all times do everything God could for us to recognize
God as God. Were a modified understanding of the consciousness constraint
5
A consequence of this way of thinking is that it becomes increasingly difficult to specify
what a nonresister is. To the extent that we fail to respond well and wisely to the goodness,
beauty, and need we encounter, we are all resisters.

true of divine love, then it would not be for the same reason that it is true of the
love we have for each other. There would have to be some other reason.
Let me close by picking up a loose strand of argument. Earlier I pointed out
that Schellenberg’s official argument for the first premise of the Hiddenness
Argument—the Case from Love—does not essentially hinge on the claim that
God’s love is perfect. Rather, it turns on the consciousness constraint, which
identifies a minimum threshold that anything worth calling admirable love
must satisfy. The charge that Schellenberg levels is that God’s love fails to
satisfy this minimum threshold. Suppose, however, an advocate of the Hid-
denness Argument were to concede that God’s love meets the minimum
threshold of admirability. This person could still insist that, if theism were
true, God’s love would have to be not only admirable but also perfect. And the
phenomenon of divine hiddenness, this person might claim, is evidence that
God’s love is not perfect. For wouldn’t it be better—a more fitting expression
of love—this person might ask, if God ensured that all nonresisters are in a
position vividly to apprehend God’s presence as God’s presence?
This is a fair question. Let me make one observation in response. Through-
out his discussion, Schellenberg repeatedly claims that God could do better
than God does (200–3). Given God’s power and resourcefulness, God could
easily bring it about that there are no (or few) nonbelieving nonresisters.
Furthermore, Schellenberg maintains, it is difficult to see how a world in
which there are no (or few) nonbelieving nonresisters could fail to be better
than the actual world, in which there are lots of them. After all, the constant
availability of conscious awareness of God would arguably be the greatest gift
that God could grant us. Why, then, the stinginess?
We should, I think, be deeply wary of this style of argument. For there is no
straightforward inference from the claim that:
actualizing a state of affairs would be better than actualizing its available
alternatives,
to the further claim that:
a failure to actualize this state of affairs would count as a defect in the goodness or
the love of a person who could actualize it.
If this were so, we cannot infer from the fact that it would be better that there
are no nonresisting nonbelievers the further claim that God’s love is somehow
deficient—somehow less than perfect. Whether such a failure would count as a
defect hangs on the correct answer to deeply contested issues in normative
ethics, ones which divide consequentialists from their rivals. It is to these
matters, I believe, that further discussion concerning divine love must turn.6
6
Thanks to Dan Howard-Snyder, Steve Layman, and John Schellenberg for their comments
on an earlier version of this chapter.
Liturgical Immersion
Call that story, central to the Christian tradition, which presents the history of
both the ways in which human beings have engaged God and the ways in
which God has engaged human beings the core narrative.1 The ancient
Christian liturgies engage the core narrative in a striking variety of ways:
they retell it, interpret it to explore its meaning, reenact elements of it,
celebrate it, and creatively extend it in some surprising ways. It is as if, despite
their highly scripted character, these liturgies are restless, determined to
explore the core narrative from as many angles as they feasibly can.
An intriguing feature of the Eastern Orthodox liturgies is that the activity of
reenacting central elements of the core narrative figures so prominently.
When I say that these liturgies reenact elements of the core narrative, I have
something fairly specific in mind. I mean that there is a sequence of act-types
that is prescribed by the liturgical script—what I call the liturgical sequence—
and a sequence of event-types that belong to the core narrative—which I call
the narrative sequence—that bear the following relations to one another: the
performance of some segment of the liturgical sequence represents some
segment of the narrative sequence because either (i) the former imitates and
repeats the latter or (ii) the former, via the use of non-linguistic symbols or
props, imitates the latter but does not repeat it. An example of the first type of
reenactment would be the actions that compose the eucharistic rite. During
this rite, the celebrant performs actions that imitate and repeat a sequence of
act-types that the Gospels attribute to Jesus at the Last Supper, which includes
1
There are at least two different ways to understand the ontological status of the core
narrative. According to what we can call the object theory, the narrative consists in those events
reported in scripture and the oral tradition and their properties and relations to one another.
According to the content theory, the narrative consists in a representation of these events and
their properties and relations to one another (where “representation” is not taken to be a success
term). The latter view has the advantage of allowing for there being elements of the narrative that
do not refer to any actual events or their properties and relations. Given its flexibility, I will think
of the core narrative along the lines of the content theory, although I will often speak loosely of
the actions and events that compose the core narrative. (I use the term “event” broadly enough so
that it can refer to either events that are acts or those that are not.)
Liturgical Immersion 67
taking bread, breaking it, blessing it, distributing it to his followers, and then
eating it with them. An example of the second type of reenactment would be
the actions that compose the Orthodox service of Holy Friday. In this service,
the assembled use props—such as an icon of the entombed Christ and a
“tomb” that is constructed, adorned with flowers, and placed in the nave—
to perform actions that signify the act-sequence of burying the body of Jesus
but without repeating that act-sequence.2
Two main questions face anyone wishing to understand liturgical reenact-
ment: First, how should we understand its character, what it is that occurs
when one competently engages in liturgical reenactment? And, second, what
are its purposes, its dominant functions in the context of liturgical action? As
should be apparent, these questions are closely related, for there is no neat
separation of the descriptive from the normative in liturgical action: to explain
what it is, you need to understand what it is for. While these two questions are
closely related, it is nonetheless possible to devote the bulk of one’s attention to
one question rather than the other. In this discussion, I focus on the first
question, exploring the second question at more length elsewhere.3
Those who have theorized about the ancient Christian liturgies have offered
some deeply puzzling accounts of the character of liturgical reenactment. In
what follows, I will spend some time engaging with some of these theories,
explaining why I find them unsatisfactory. The primary purpose of doing so is
to introduce an alternative model, what I call the immersion model of liturgical
reenactment. This model, I believe, puts us in a much better position to tackle
the larger question of what the dominant functions of liturgical reenactment
might be.
4.1. LITURGICAL REENACTMENT
The fact that the Orthodox liturgies incorporate liturgical reenactment does
not distinguish them from many other Christian liturgies. Nearly all the
Christian liturgies that bear any sort of affinity to the ancient liturgies incorp-
orate elements of liturgical reenactment to some degree or other. Rather, what
sets the Orthodox liturgies apart from so many of these other liturgies is—as
I indicated earlier in this chapter—the prominence that they give to the
activity of liturgical reenactment. It will be helpful, I think, to begin by giving
you a taste of the place of reenactment in the Orthodox liturgies. In doing so,
2
Here I use the term “icon” loosely. Typically, what is used in this service is the epitaphion,
which is an oblong piece of cloth on which is painted or embroidered the figure of the dead
Christ laid out for burial.
3
In Cuneo (2015a), included as Chapter 5 of the present volume.
68 Ritualized Faith
I should note that there is a venerable history of liturgical commentary, and
many who have contributed to this project—such as those who operate within
the “mystagogical” tradition, including Theodore of Mopsusestia, Maximus
the Confessor, and Germanus—work with an extremely permissive account of
liturgical reenactment.4 These thinkers find liturgical reenactment at nearly
every turn in the liturgy, interpreting actions of all sorts as signifying actions
depicted in the core narrative. I will not be working with anywhere near such a
permissive approach.
Let us begin with the obvious cases of reenactment. These would include the
services of Holy Week, such as the rite of foot washing, which is celebrated by
many Orthodox on Holy Thursday, and the burial of Christ, which is cele-
brated the day thereafter, on Holy Friday. In the first rite, by washing the feet
of the parishioners or the deacons, the celebrant reenacts the biblical story in
which Jesus washes the feet of his disciples. The hymnody leaves no question
about the rite’s significance: “Humbling yourself in your compassion, you have
washed the feet of your disciples, teaching them to take the path that you have
followed.”5 In the second rite, by the employment of a series of props, the
assembled reenact the burial of Christ. The reenactment typically involves a
deacon or priest reading the Gospel account of Jesus’s burial (“and taking the
body, Joseph wrapped it in a white cloth”) while the Priest removes a wooden
corpus of Christ from a replica of the cross, wrapping it in a white cloth. The
priest then chants a mourning hymn: “Down from the tree Joseph of Arima-
thea took you dead, who is the life of all, and wrapped you . . . in a linen cloth
with spices.”6 Once again, in this case, there is no ambiguity concerning the
significance of the liturgical acts performed. It is interesting to note, though,
that the cases of reenactment just mentioned incorporate elements not found
in the biblical narrative, creatively extending it in certain directions. At various
points, for example, the people sing hymns from the perspective of Joseph:
“How shall I bury you, O my God? How can I wrap you in a shroud? . . . What
songs can I sing for your exodus, O Compassionate One?”7 At other points,
the people sing hymns from the perspective of Mary Theotokos, who is
present at the burial, lamenting: “In my arms I hold you as a corpse. . . .
I long to die with you . . . for I cannot bear to look upon you lifeless and
without breath. . . . Where are you going now, my son? Have you left me here
alone?”8 In these passages, the liturgical script invites the participants to take
up something like Joseph of Arimathea’s and Mary’s first-person perspectives
on Jesus’s death and burial.
4
These commentaries date from the fifth, seventh, and eighth centuries, respectively.
5
And: “let us remain at the Master’s side, that we may see how he washes the feet of the
disciples and wipes them with a towel; and let us do as we have seen, subjecting ourselves to each
other and washing one another’s feet” (Mary and Ware [2002]), 550, 552. I have modernized the
English used in the translation. In what follows, I will refer to this work as LT.
6 7 8
LT, 614. LT, 615. LT, 619, 620.
Other liturgical actions lack the overtly dramatic elements of the rite of foot
washing and the burial of Jesus but are plausibly viewed as cases of liturgical
reenactment nonetheless. These would include the eucharistic rite in which
the celebrant performs the act-sequence that the Gospels attribute to Jesus at
the Last Supper of taking bread, breaking it, blessing it, distributing it to his
disciples, and eating it together. They would also include—somewhat more
controversially—the baptismal rite, which is said to be “after the pattern” of
Christ’s burial and resurrection.9 Arguably, however, some of the more inter-
esting cases of reenactment are more subtle and interspersed throughout the
liturgy. Some of these are actions performed by the celebrant. At various
points during the liturgy, for example, the priest turns from facing the altar,
moves toward the assembled, and blesses them with Jesus’s words to the
disciples gathered together in the upper room: “Peace be with you” (Luke
24: 36; John 20: 19). The Gospels report that, immediately after uttering this
blessing, Jesus “breathed on them and said, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit.’” Anyone
who has witnessed the Orthodox baptismal rite and knows of its pneumato-
logical dimensions will recognize that this is exactly the act-type that the priest
performs with regard to the one to be baptized: he breathes on him or her
three times, making the sign of the cross with his actions.
Other examples of reenactment—also not decisively clear cases but sug-
gestive nonetheless—are actions performed not by the priest but by the
assembled. During the procession of the eucharistic gifts, for example, the
assembled will often reach out to touch the hem of the priest’s vestments, just
as the woman with a hemorrhage is said to have touched Jesus’s garments
(Matt. 9: 20–2; Mark 5: 25–35; Luke 8: 43–8). 10 Moreover, it is customary for
those entering the nave to venerate the icon of Jesus by kissing it, imitating the
action, which the tradition attributes to Mary of Bethany, of kissing Jesus’s
body (Luke 7: 38; John 12: 1–8).11 Interestingly, on Wednesday of Holy Week,
the hymnody explicitly identifies the actions of the assembled with Mary’s,
taking poetic liberties with the biblical text: “I will kiss your most pure feet and
wipe them with the hairs of my head, those feet whose sound Eve heard at
9
Service Book of the Holy Eastern Orthodox Catholic and Apostolic Church according to the
use of the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America (2002), 156. See also,
Gregory of Nazianzus’s comments on baptism in his Festal Orations (2008), 125. There is an
interesting question of the role that intentions play in liturgical reenactment. If some act-
sequence counts as a liturgical reenactment, must it be inserted in the liturgy with the intention
that it function as a reenactment? Although I won’t defend the point, I am assuming that it
needn’t.
10
Interestingly, the Lenten prayers also refer to the event: “O wretched soul, do as the woman
with an issue of blood: run quickly, grasp the hem of the garment of Christ; so shall you be healed
of your afflictions and hear Him say, ‘Your faith has saved you’ ” (LT, 396).
11
For a discussion of the matter, see Stump (2010), ch. 12. Although the liturgical script
simply refers to this woman as “the woman who had sinned,” I’ll refer to her as Mary of Bethany
for ease of reference.
70 Ritualized Faith
dusk in Paradise.”12 Finally, the phrase of repentance issued by the Publican in
Jesus’s story of the Publican and the Pharisee (Luke 18: 9–14) is repeated over
and over in the liturgy when the assembled respond to the petitions with their
“kyrie eleison.” On the Sunday of the Pharisee and the Publican, the church’s
hymnody draws the connection between this phrase and the biblical story: “In
days of old, humility exalted the Publican who cried aloud lamenting ‘Be
merciful,’ and he was justified. Let us follow his example, for we have fallen
down into the depths of evil. Let us cry to the Saviour from the depths of our
hearts: We have sinned, be merciful, O you alone who loves humankind.”13
4.2. HOW S HOULD W E UNDERSTAND

REENACTMENT?
If our primary project were the descriptive one of illustrating the extent to
which the Orthodox liturgies incorporate reenactment, there are a good many
other examples to which we could appeal. Let us, however, move from the level
of description to the level of interpretation in which we address the question of
how to understand the character of these reenactments. To do so, unfortu-
nately, is immediately to leave terra firma and step into a philosophical void,
for philosophers have had next to nothing to say about the issue of ritual
reenactment. Indeed, I am aware of only one essay that addresses the topic:
Nicholas Wolterstorff ’s “Remembrance of Things (Not) Past.” As it happens,
this is an excellent place to start, so let’s begin our exploration with
Wolterstorff ’s discussion.14
Wolterstorff frames his wide-ranging essay by presenting and rejecting two
accounts of the character of liturgical reenactment.15 The first account, which
I’ll call the anamnetic theory, takes several forms, but its guiding idea is that by
reenacting in the liturgy event-types that belong to the core narrative, the
events belonging to the core narrative are made present to those assembled at
the liturgy.16 In the hands of the influential anthropologist of religion Mircea
Eliade, the view tells us that by engaging in ritual events, those who perform
them take themselves to enter into a different time frame—so-called sacred
time—in which these events originally occurred. Moreover, when they so
enter, they understand their performance of these ritual events to actualize
12 13 14
LT, 540. LT, 103. Wolterstorff (1990).
15
These are not the only two views that Wolterstorff considers, but they are the ones on
which he focuses.
16
Literally rendered, the Greek term “anamnesis” (ἀνάμνησις) means memorial. But as
numerous liturgical commentators point out, the term expresses the idea of a memorial—a
remembering—that makes what is remembered present. It is this last idea of making present that
I am picking up in my use of the term “anamnesis.”
the events they appear to be reenacting.17 By contrast, in the hands of Church
Fathers such as Cyril of Jerusalem, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Theodore of
Mopsuestia—at least under a certain reading—the performance of some
segment of the liturgical sequence somehow makes mystically present to
those assembled at the liturgy the corresponding events that belong to the
narrative sequence. It is as if, under this view, event-tokens are the sorts of
things that can be conjured from the past (or, in the case of Theodore, the
future) by repeating the types under which they fall.18
The second view that Wolterstorff considers, what he labels the dramatic
representation theory, is much less exotic. At the heart of this view is the claim
that by performing some segment of the liturgical sequence, the assembled
reenact a corresponding segment of the narrative sequence. They do so,
moreover, by playing the roles of those agents who act in the core narrative.
No entrance into sacred time, no mystically making present what is past;
rather, liturgical reenactment consists in the dramatic performance of event-
types of the same sort that compose the core narrative.
Neither of these views, Wolterstorff maintains, is satisfactory. Begin with
the anamnetic theory and, in particular, Eliade’s version of it. This position,
Wolterstorff charges, is oddly imperceptive. When Eliade develops his theory,
he does so with the aim of providing an account of the character not of
liturgical reenactment in particular but of religious ritual reenactment in
general. And, at a certain point, he indicates that his theory applies to the
Christian liturgy, since the liturgy retains elements of the mentality charac-
teristic of “archaic” ritual.19 But even a moment’s reflection reveals that
Eliade’s account of ritual reenactment does not apply to the Christian liturgy.
For, according to the Christian tradition, the sequence of event-types that
compose the core narrative occurs not in some other temporal dimension—
so-called sacred time—but in the same temporal dimension that you and
I presently occupy. Hence the oddly imperceptive character of Eliade’s inter-
pretation; it fails to take into account the historically embedded character of
the core Christian narrative.
In principle, Eliade’s account could be modified to allow for the fact that,
according to the Christian tradition, the core narrative occurs not in sacred
time but in the same time frame that you and I occupy. However, if Eliade’s
account were so modified, Wolterstorff charges, the view would be fantastic.
For Eliade’s theory implies that the performance of the liturgical sequence
actualizes the corresponding segments of the narrative sequence; strictly
17
Wolterstorff (1990), 125, 129. In his discussion, Wolterstorff distinguishes two readings of
Eliade. I am working with the second interpretation that Wolterstorff identifies, the “actualiza-
tion” interpretation.
18
See, for example, Finn (1976) and Harrison (2008). The figure who seems to be chiefly
responsible for propagating this reading of the Church Fathers is Odo Casel; see Casel (1962).
19
Wolterstorff (1990), 127.
72 Ritualized Faith
speaking, then, in Eliade’s view, there is no liturgical reenactment, as the
performance of those act-tokens that compose the liturgical sequence is
numerically identical with the occurrence of those act-tokens that compose
the narrative sequence. If it were correct, Eliade’s theory would imply (among
other things) that the Christian tradition takes those who participate in
liturgical reenactment to engage in time travel, transporting themselves to
those times at which events of the core narrative occurred, such as that time at
which the Last Supper took place. By all appearances, however, this is not so.
The tradition does not hold that when engaging in liturgical reenactment, the
assembled engage in time travel.20
Wolterstorff has little to say about the second version of the anementic
theory, despite its presence within the Christian tradition itself. Since the view
may be even less familiar than Eliade’s, let me quote a recent elaboration of it,
in which the view is attributed to Gregory of Nazianzus:
Anamnesis means re-presentation of God’s saving works so that the worshipers
can participate in these events as present realities and thereby receive the
eschatological salvation, new life and sanctification divinely accomplished
through them. Anamnesis thus unites past, present and future in a single present
event of worship.
If this is so,
Anamnesis is historical but is not primarily looking back to the past. Festal
celebration is not nostalgia, it is not a commemoration of what once took place
but is now present only as a memory, a mere mental phenomenon that the
worshipers work to reinforce in order to preserve it from oblivion. Rather,
anamnesis is an encounter in the present with the Lord who transfigures and
transcends history . . . it is important to note that the saving events are made
present in their liturgical celebration, not only the persons who once participated
in those events. . . . Since God's saving actions transcend the limitations of tem-
poral sequence, the historical events in which God has acted can be present now
and in the future. . . . In festal celebration the boundaries of sequential time are
transcended as the original saving events and the present experience of the con-
gregation join together. The past events of Christ's incarnate life and the Spirit’s
descent, the present experience of the Christian community, and the future par-
ticipation in God’s kingdom are made one.21
Under a natural reading, the view is not that liturgical reenactment renders
past events present in the way that, say, film footage of the Normandy
Invasion makes that historical event present to viewers here and now. Rather,
the position seems to be that, in liturgical reenactment, something extraor-
dinarily unusual takes place: the ordinary temporal divisions between past,
20 21
Wolterstorff (1990), 129. Harrison (2008), 24–5.
present, and future no longer hold; liturgical reenactment somehow binds
together all three temporal dimensions in one time frame.
Given what Wolterstorff says about Eliade’s position, it is not difficult to
discern what he would say about this second version of the anamnetic theory.
For one thing, rather than feel like an explication of the tradition’s understand-
ing of what occurs in liturgical reenactment—and what various figures such as
Nazianzus have said about such reenactment—it feels more like interpolation.
When N. V. Harrison, for example, attributes the anamnetic theory to Nazian-
zus, she cites passages in which Nazianzus writes such things as:
Christ is born, give glory; Christ is from the heavens, go to meet him.
And:
Today salvation has come to the world, to things visible and to things invisible.
Christ is risen from the dead; rise with him.22
But liturgical data of this sort radically underdetermine the anamnetic inter-
pretation of liturgical reenactment. There is just no way to squeeze the theory’s
understanding of liturgical reenactment out of pronouncements such as these,
evocative as they may be.
The deeper worry about the view, however, is this: there might be models of
time and our relation to it that render the anamnetic theory coherent. For
example, it might be coherent to claim that, in liturgical reenactment, we enter
some other temporal dimension, “liturgical hyper-time,” in which we can
simultaneously experience past, present, and future events of ordinary time.
But it is one thing to say that such models are coherent; it is another thing
altogether to maintain that, when engaging in liturgical reenactment, partici-
pants in the liturgy regularly enter into such a temporal dimension.23 This
proposal, like Eliade’s position, is extravagant.
When compared to the anamnetic theory, the dramatic representation
theory looks pedestrian. Even so, Wolterstorff finds the view no more com-
pelling than the anamnetic theory, albeit for different reasons. One concern,
says Wolterstorff, is that when one actually looks at the liturgical scripts of the
ancient liturgies, they do not conform to the theory’s account of their charac-
ter. Consider, for example, the eucharistic rite. Proponents of the dramatic
representation theory would be correct in their observation that, in the ancient
22
Harrison (2008), 25. See also Mantzaridis (1996).
23
This is not to deny that the Christian tradition has advocated claims regarding the
eucharistic rite, such as the doctrine of transubstantiation, that also appear fantastic. Regardless
of what one thinks of such doctrines, they seem to belong to a different category, as they are the
attempt to work out a deep commitment of the church, namely, that the bread and wine used in
the eucharist rite become the body and blood of Christ. That liturgical reenactment makes event-
tokens of the core narrative present, by contrast, does not have this sort of pedigree; it can hardly
be considered part of the tradition’s self-understanding.
74 Ritualized Faith
Christian traditions, the priest not only represents Christ but also quotes
Christ’s words in this rite, saying such things as “This is my body which is
broken for you” and “Do this in remembrance of me.” But, Wolterstorff
maintains, this would not imply that the priest plays the role of Christ in the
eucharist rite. To represent a figure and to quote what he has said needn’t be to
play the role of his saying it.
To this first point, Wolterstorff adds a second, which is worth quoting. The
theory, Wolterstorff writes, “feels all wrong”:
[the] celebrant actually blesses; he does not play the role of Christ blessing. We
actually give thanks; we do not play the role of the disciples giving thanks. What
matters is that the celebrant actually gives bread and wine, not that he plays the
role of Christ long ago giving bread and wine to his disciples. What matters is that
we actually eat the bread and drink the wine, not that we play the role of the
disciples long ago eating the bread and drinking the wine distributed to them by
Christ. The dramatic representation theory displaces the focus from the actuality
of what is presently taking place.24
While I find the objections that Wolterstorff presses against the anamnetic
theory decisive, I find neither of the reasons offered against the dramatic
representation theory persuasive, at least in their present form. Let me explain
why, since doing so will help to throw into sharper relief the model I wish to
defend.
Begin with the first objection. When one takes account of the full range of
rites performed in the Orthodox liturgies, which includes not simply the
eucharistic rite but also the rites of foot washing and the burial of Christ, it
is, I submit, difficult not to be struck by the fact that they bear the marks of
being dramatic reenactments of events that compose the core narrative,
segments of the narrative sequence. Interestingly, many of the early liturgical
commentators agree. Earlier I mentioned that Theodore of Mopsuestia is
sometimes presented as an advocate of the anamnetic theory. But the case
for his being a proponent of the dramatic representation theory is, arguably,
more impressive. Commenting on the eucharistic rite, Theodore writes:
The duty of the High Priest of the New Covenant (i.e., Jesus) is to offer this
sacrifice which revealed the nature of the New Covenant. We ought to believe that
the bishop who is now at the altar is playing the part of this High Priest.25
Concerning the Great Entrance in which the Gospel is brought to the altar,
Theodore says: “By means of the signs we must see Christ now being led away
to His passion . . . you must imagine that Christ our Lord is being led out to
His passion.”26 And regarding the baptismal rite, Cyril of Jerusalem maintains:
24 25
Wolterstorff (1990), 146. Quoted in Meyendorff (1984), 29.
26
Quoted in Meyendorff (1984), 31.
“You . . . submerged yourselves three times in the water and emerged: by this
gesture you were secretly re-enacting the burial of Christ's three days in the
tomb.”27 By quoting these passages, I am not suggesting that their interpret-
ations of liturgical reenactment are correct or normative. I wish only to
advance the point that these thinkers found something like the dramatic
representation theory, with its emphasis on role-playing, to be the natural
interpretation of important elements of the liturgy.
Why would one disagree? Here is a diagnosis: when Wolterstorff offers
his reasons for holding that the eucharistic rite is not a dramatic reenactment,
he focuses almost exclusively on the acts of speech performed in this rite. In
the context of the liturgy, to perform the same speech act-types as Jesus,
Wolterstorff points out, is not perforce to play the role of Jesus performing
those speech act-types. Suppose, though, we were to focus our attention not on
the verbal actions performed in the rite but on the non-verbal ones. Were we
to do so, I submit, the dramatic representation theory would begin to look
considerably more attractive. For, as we noted earlier, the rite consists in the
celebrant performing the same act-type sequence that the Gospels report Jesus
as having performed, namely: taking bread, blessing it, breaking it, distributing
it, and eating it with his followers.28 This last observation, admittedly, hardly
vindicates the dramatic representation theory, but it should give its opponents
pause; any case against the view has to consider carefully the character of the
non-verbal actions performed in the liturgy.
Let’s now turn to the second objection that Wolterstorff offers against the
dramatic representation theory, which is contained in the longer passage
I quoted a few paragraphs back. As I read it, this objection contains two
sub-arguments. Let me postpone engaging with the first sub-argument and
consider the second, which is that if role-playing were central to participating
in the liturgy, it would displace “the focus from the actuality of what is
presently taking place.” The idea seems to be that by directing our attention
to role-playing, the theory offers us a distorted depiction of what is going on in
the performance of the liturgical rite. What is fundamental to the performance
of the rite is not playing the role of blessing but actually blessing, not playing
the role of thanking but actually thanking, and so on.
I doubt, however, that the dramatic representation theory displaces, ob-
structs, or overshadows what actually takes place in the performance of
liturgical action. At least it needn’t. By drawing our attention to the fact that
the celebrant plays the role of Jesus in the rite of foot washing, the theory
needn’t obstruct or distort the significance of what is happening in the rite,
namely, that the celebrant is expressing Christ-like humility in washing others’
27
Quoted in Meyendorff (1984), 34.
28
Wolterstorff is aware of the point; see Wolterstorff (1990), 151. But I am not sure why he
does not bring the point to bear upon his treatment of the dramatic representation theory.
76 Ritualized Faith
feet and setting an example for the rest of us. In fact, in this case, I suspect that
the opposite is true. If a model of liturgical reenactment were to disassociate
the celebrant’s actions from those that Jesus performed when he washed the
disciples’ feet, then it would genuinely displace or obstruct appreciation of the
actuality of what takes place. It is precisely because the dramatic representa-
tion theory draws our attention to the fact that the celebrant, by imitating
Jesus’s actions, plays the role of Jesus that we can better appreciate the rite’s
significance, and what it is to express humility.
The dramatic representation theory, then, seems to me not vulnerable to the
objections that we’ve been considering. Nonetheless, I do not think that we
should accept it, for I share Wolterstorff ’s underlying suspicion about its
adequacy. The problem with the dramatic representation theory, I believe, is
not that it somehow displaces, obstructs, or overshadows what actually takes
place in the performance of liturgical action. Rather, it is that the theory is
insufficiently illuminating. For what we ultimately want from a model of
liturgical reenactment is an account of its dominant functions—what it is
for. The dramatic representation theory, however, does not give us any sense
of why role-playing is especially important or apt in the liturgical context. If,
for example, the point of liturgical activity is to do such things as bless and give
thanks, the dramatic representation theory owes us an explanation of what it is
about role-playing that helps us do these things.29 It provides no such
explanation.
4 .3 . T H E I M M ERS I O N M O D E L
In the last section, we considered two theories of liturgical reenactment: the

anamnetic theory and the dramatic representation theory. By engaging with
Wolterstorff ’s treatment of these views, we found that there is ample reason to
reject the first view: it is, among other things, extravagant. We also saw that the
second position is not so much clearly wrongheaded as incomplete; we need
more from an adequate model of liturgical reenactment. One of the lessons
that emerged from our discussion, I believe, is that given the diversity of types
29
In his essay, Wolterstorff focuses on the liturgical activity of commemorating, recommend-
ing what he calls the imitation/repetition interpretation, according to which commemorative
liturgical reenactment is a matter of not playing roles but imitating the behavior represented in
the core narrative by repeating the act-types performed in that narrative (Wolterstorff [1990],
150–2). If the imitation/repetition interpretation were offered as a general model for under-
standing liturgical reenactment, I think it would be vulnerable to the same type of worries just
raised regarding the dramatic representation theory. Imitation can, after all, be used to many
different ends. To be satisfactory, the model would have to give us insight into why, in the
context of liturgical action, imitation is so important.
of liturgical reenactment, we should probably be wary of trying to identify a
single model that covers all cases of the phenomenon. Some models might be
suited to explain some cases; other models others. Still, we’re looking for
models that smoothly accommodate a wide range of liturgical data and are
supple enough to incorporate the best insights and commitments of rival
models. At this point, we’re in search of such a model.
It might be worth stepping back for a moment to identify what we want
from a satisfactory model of liturgical reenactment. I think any such model
will have at least three characteristics. In the first place, it will be both sensitive
to the diversity of liturgical actions and fit the liturgical data, not distorting
what the model is trying to accommodate and explain. Unlike Eliade’s theory,
then, it won’t impose an interpretation on the liturgical data that is incom-
patible with core commitments of the Christian tradition, such as the claim
that important elements of the narrative sequence occur not in sacred time but
in ordinary history.
Second, any such model will not simply describe what participants are
doing—or what they think they are doing—when engaging in liturgical re-
enactment. Much of what we actually do—and think we are doing—when
participating in the liturgy is, after all, defective, the expression of false or inapt
views about the significance, value, or role of liturgical action.30 Nor will such a
model simply reiterate what the liturgical script says about the character of
such reenactment, since the liturgical script is typically silent on this matter.
Rather, an adequate model will identify those ways of engaging in liturgical
reenactment that the liturgical script calls for. Admittedly, it is not easy to
specify precisely what this “calls for” relation is, but actors and musicians are
familiar with it. Scripts and scores prescribe actions. But there are more or less
fitting ways to perform these actions, ways of acting about which scripts and
scores say little or nothing. Given a script or score, good actors and good
musicians will not simply identify the actions prescribed by that script or score
but also interpret that script or score in such a way as to identify fitting or apt
ways of performing those actions. A good model of liturgical reenactment,
then, will be one that identifies the sorts of attitudes and behaviors called for
by the liturgical script—with this qualification: the attitudes and behaviors
called for are those of competent participants in the liturgy, these being those
who are sufficiently familiar with the performance-plan of the liturgy and the
character of the core narrative. In what follows, I’ll assume this qualification to
be understood.
Finally, a good model will identify what the purposes might be of engaging
in liturgical reenactment. That is, it will identify why it is that imaginative
engagement of the sort that the liturgical script calls for is important for the
30
On this matter, see Schmemann’s comments on liturgical piety in Schmemann (1966).
78 Ritualized Faith
ethically and religiously committed life—what it is supposed to accomplish.
Unlike the dramatic representation theory, then, a satisfactory model will
illuminate why liturgical reenactment takes the form it does.
In this section, I introduce what I believe is a promising model of liturgical
reenactment. As will be apparent, this model, which I referred to earlier as the
immersion model, has affinities with but is not simply a variant of the dramatic
representation theory. Let me introduce the immersion model somewhat
indirectly by returning to Wolterstorff ’s discussion of role-playing in the
liturgy. My point in doing so is to identify an important element of the
liturgical data that a good model of liturgical reenactment should accommo-
date. Once we have identified this element, we will be in a better position to
appreciate the attractions of the immersion model.
Recall that Wolterstorff raises the concern that, given its emphasis on role-
playing, the dramatic representation theory misrepresents the character of
liturgical action. In liturgical reenactment, the priest does not play the role
of someone who blesses; he actually blesses; the people do not play the role of
those who thank; they actually thank. And so forth.31 While there is something
to this worry, it is important to recognize that roles come in different varieties.
One sort of role—the type on which Wolterstorff seems to have his eye—is a
pretense role. In occupying a pretense role, one pretends to act or be some way;
one “plays the part” in the sense of pretending to act or be some way. Another
sort of role, of a rather different sort, is what I shall call a target role. When one
assumes a target role, one acts the part of being some way for the purpose of
being that way, becoming like or identifying with that which one imitates. One
doesn’t pretend to be that way; rather, in acting in that way, one thereby
aspires to be that way.32 My own view is that pretense roles have almost no
place in the liturgy (despite what commentators such as Theodore of Mopsu-
sestia seem to suggest in places). The scripts of the eucharistic rite and the rite
of foot washing, for example, do not call for the activity of pretending to be a
disciple at the Last Supper. Nor, for that matter, does the performance-plan of
the liturgy call for the activity, when venerating the icons of Christ, of
pretending to be Mary of Bethany. Any such interpretation of the liturgical
performance-plan strikes me as forced, requiring of those assembled at the
31
Under a natural reading, Wolterstorff seems to rely on the principle that if one plays the
role of one who Xs, in playing that role one does not thereby X. Applied to the case at hand,
the claim seems to be that if, in the liturgy, the priest plays the role of being one who blesses,
he does not actually bless. The principle just enunciated, however, is false—and it is false no
matter how one thinks of roles. Suppose, in a dramatic reenactment, I pretend to be someone
who amuses others, playing the role of a comedian. That’s compatible with my being such
that, in virtue of playing that role, I actually amuse others.
32
As I am thinking of them, target roles come cheaply. I assume that when one identifies with
a character by imitating her in one’s own actions for the purpose of being like her—“playing the
part”—one thereby assumes a target role. Nothing more is needed.
liturgy to engage in rather extraordinary feats of imagination, the success of
which threatens to distract from the actuality of what is taking place. Partici-
pation in the liturgy shouldn’t require the skills of an expert Shakespearean
actor!33
By contrast, that the liturgical script invites those participating in the liturgy
to assume target roles is, I believe, apparent in the script itself. Consider, for
example, just a sample of texts from the services in Holy Week. The script
from the Monday of Holy Week has the assembled sing:
When the Lord was going to his voluntary passion, he said to the Apostles on the
way, “Behold, we go up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man shall be delivered up, as
it is written of him.” Come, then, let us also go with him, purified in mind. Let us
be crucified with him and die for his sake to the pleasures of this life.34
On the Sunday of the Publican and the Pharisee, the people sing:
In our prayer let us fall down before God, with tears and fervent cries of sorrow,
emulating the Publican in the humility which lifted him on high. . . . Let us make
haste to follow the Pharisee in his virtues and to emulate the Publican in his
humility.35
In some places, the script does not so much exhort the assembled to assume a
target role as direct the people then and there to assume such a role, such as
that of the Prodigal Son:
As the Prodigal Son I come to you, merciful Lord. I have wasted my whole life in a
foreign land. . . . With the words of the Prodigal I cry aloud: I have sinned,
O Father; like him, receive me now in your embrace.36
Or the righteous thief:
But we, imitating the righteous thief, cry out in faith: Remember us also, O Savior,
in your kingdom.37
And, as we saw earlier with the cases of Joseph of Arimathea and Mary
Theotokos, sometimes the script has the assembled take up something like
the first-person perspective of one or another character in the core narrative,
such as that of Adam:
In my wretchedness I have cast off the robe woven by God, disobeying your
divine command, O Lord, at the counsel of the enemy; and I am clothed now in
fig leaves and in garments of skin.38
33
There are other reasons to resist the suggestion that the liturgical script calls for the activity
of assuming pretense roles, which I canvass in Cuneo (2015a). This essay is included as Chapter 5
in the present volume.
34 35 36
LT, 514. LT, 107, 105. LT, 113, 116.
37 38
LT, 589. LT, 168.
80 Ritualized Faith
And Jesus:
I who am rich in Godhead have come to minister to Adam who is grown poor.
I who fashioned him have of my own will put on his form. I . . . have come to lay
down my life as a ransom for him.39
A good model of liturgical reenactment, I believe, needs to take these texts into
account. It needs, moreover, to recognize that the liturgical script appears to
call for from those assembled a type of imaginative engagement with the core
narrative in which, when engaging in liturgical reenactment, they assume
target roles of various sorts. But—to say it again—it seems to me that the
model ought not to interpret the liturgical script so that it calls for behavior of
such a kind that, when the assembled engage in activities such as the rite of
foot washing, the burial of Jesus, the eucharistic rite, or the uttering of the
words of the Righteous Thief, they thereby pretend to be characters such as
Joseph of Arimathea or pretend to be present as their ordinary selves at the
events that these rites reenact. But if this is so, what other options are
available? What sort of imaginative engagement with the core narrative
could the script be calling for?
Let us look for analogues. A helpful analogue, I believe, is the activity of
reading. More exactly, a helpful analogue is the activity of reading works that
present narratives—what I’ll call “narrative-works.” The reason this makes for
a good analogue is that often narrative-works call for the activity of immersing
oneself in the narrative presented in a work. Or to look at the same phenom-
enon from the opposite angle, they often call for the activity of allowing
oneself to be absorbed by the narrative of a work.40 But the activity called for
needn’t involve anything like pretending to be a character in the work or
pretending to be present in one’s own person at the events described in the
work. The territory we are exploring is imaginative engagement without
pretense.
Let’s call immersion of this sort non-fictive immersion. (I use the modifier
“non-fictive” to distinguish it from fictive immersion, which would be immer-
sing oneself in a work by pretending to be a character of the work or to be
present in one’s own person at the events represented in that work.) And let’s
specify more exactly what is it to engage in non-fictive immersion, at least
when reading narrative-works. In the first place, it means attending to the
content of the narrative of the work—what it is communicating—and prop-
erties of that content—such as how its various elements hang together—while
39
LT, 513.
40
In what follows, I’ve been helped by Liao (n.d.) and Harris (2000), but the view I sketch
differs from theirs in some important ways. Stephen Grimm has pointed out to me that the
philosopher of science Peter Lipton also works with the concept of immersion to explain his own
engagement with the Jewish liturgies. See Lipton (2007).
not attending to features of the presentation of the narrative, such as the
author’s word choice or use of certain grammatical constructions. Or to put
this point about attending somewhat more guardedly: we all have the capacity
to rapidly direct our attention to rather different aspects of any given situation
that we may occupy, first attending to this and then attending to that. The sort
of attention required in non-fictive immersion is that of prioritizing the
content of a narrative in such a way that, when one directs one’s attention
to features of its presentation, it is for the purpose of better attending to the
content of the narrative itself. So, when reading, for example, one can mo-
mentarily marvel at the use of an unusual metaphor, asking oneself why the
author would use it in this context. But the point in doing so is to better engage
with the content of the work in which the metaphor is being used. If this is
right, non-fictive immersion is compatible with one’s attention floating be-
tween the content of a narrative and features of its presentation, provided that
attention to the former assumes a certain kind of priority. Or so I say initially;
in a moment, I will add an important qualification.
If this is so, non-fictive immersion involves “screening off ” certain features
of the presentation of a work. The screening-off might, however, involve more
than simply not attending to these features. Depending on the character of the
narrative, it might also require bracketing or suspending doubts, questions, or
incredulity regarding one or another feature of the narrative itself, these all
being the sorts of considerations that can divert one’s attention from the
content of the narrative presented by the work. Still, non-fictive immersion
is more than just attending to the content of a work in such a way that one
screens off certain features of its presentation and properties of the narrative
itself. It is also to take up a certain kind of vantage point with regard to the
narrative presented by the work.
It is difficult to capture this phenomenon of taking up a vantage point, but
the idea is that when non-fictively immersing oneself in the narrative of a
work, one imaginatively enters the narrative of the work by situating oneself
within it.41 In taking up such a vantage point, one does not take oneself to be a
character in the work or to be present in one’s own person at the events
described in the work; nonetheless there is a sense in which one is “inside” it.
Its characters and events loom large in one’s consciousness, and one becomes
emotionally engaged to some significant degree with these characters and
events. In a wide range of cases, taking up the vantage point of not a spectator
or a critic but of one inside a work who is emotionally engaged with it is called
for by the work itself. For, as Noël Carroll points out, in the typical case, the
characters and events in narratives are not merely described. Rather, the
narratives themselves are typically emotionally colored, as an evaluative stance
41
Harris (2000) offers some interesting empirical data that supports this way of thinking
about immersion.
82 Ritualized Faith
toward their characters and events is built into how they are described.42
When, for example, the Gospels present the event of Mary of Bethany’s
washing Jesus’s feet with her tears, her actions are presented admiringly, in a
way intended to call forth admiration from the audience. To be immersed in
this narrative is to allow one’s emotional response to be shaped by these
features of its presentation. Indeed, it might be that to understand the story
properly, to genuinely grasp its import, more is required than that one allow
one’s emotional response to be shaped by the narrative. For, arguably, under-
standing a narrative such as this one requires that one’s emotions already be
mobilized while immersing oneself in that narrative; it requires that one
positively construe Mary’s action as at once bold, beautiful, and bracing. If
this is right, experiencing the emotions that a narrative calls for would be
constitutive of understanding that narrative itself.
Participating in liturgical reenactment, I realize, is not to engage in the
activity of reading a narrative-work. It is, rather, to insert oneself into a
complex sequence of scripted action performance. In its use of various sensory
modalities and bodily movement, it is more similar to both dramatic perform-
ance and the observation of such performance. (Perhaps it is most similar to
audience-participation dramatic performance.) Still, I trust that the analogy
with reading that I have presented helps us to see the structure of what I am
calling the immersion model of liturgical reenactment.
According to the immersion model, liturgical reenactment involves non-
fictive immersion. When one participates in the rite of washing feet, for
example, the script calls for a great deal of imaginative activity. One does
not approach the rite as an observer or a cultural critic but as a participant.
But—to say it again—the activity called for is not that of pretending to be a
disciple present at the rite or pretending to be present at the rite in one’s own
person. Rather, what the script calls for is that those assembled attend to and
take up a vantage point within the core narrative, screening-off various
features of the presentation of this narrative and sometimes certain features
of the narrative itself. Or, to state the phenomenon from the opposite angle,
what the script calls for is that those assembled allow themselves to be
absorbed by those elements of the core narrative presented by the performance
of liturgical action, taking up a vantage point within them.43 Needless to say,
imaginative engagement of this sort does not come intuitively for many.
42
See Carroll (2001a), 281–4 and (2011a), 376.
43
The view I am presenting, then, differs significantly from “simulationist” proposals in the
aesthetics literature that attempt to understand immersion in terms of taking up the perspective
of the characters in a narrative. In my view, while simulation of this sort might have a limited role
to play—such as when the liturgical script invites us to see things from the perspective of a
character such as Joseph of Arimathea or Mary Theotokos—we ought not to understand the
phenomenon of immersion in terms of it. For a development of the simulationist view, see Currie
(1994).
Participating in liturgical reenactment is as much about training and condi-
tioning as it is about competent engagement.
As I noted a moment ago, the disanalogies between immersing oneself in
liturgical reenactment and immersing oneself in reading narrative-works are
important. Perhaps the most obvious disanalogy is that immersing oneself in
liturgical reenactment typically involves using one’s body in certain ways,
responding to the bodily movements of others, and engaging with symbols
and props of various sorts. One sings, kisses, eats, touches, and bows, and does
so not only when responding to the actions of others but also when engaging
with icons, replicas of the cross, water, candles, and the like. Because of this,
the sort of attention that is required in liturgical reenactment is, I would say, of
a different character than that required in reading narrative-works. Let me
elaborate.
Some cases of liturgical engagement are such that, by the performance of
actions of various sorts, elements of the core narrative are presented to those
assembled. For example, in the eucharistic rite, the celebrant’s actions present
that segment of the core narrative that consists in Jesus’s eating with his
disciples. And, in the rite of foot washing, the celebrant’s actions present
that segment of the core narrative that consists in Jesus’s washing the feet of
his disciples. In other cases, elements of the core narrative are not presented to
those assembled. Rather, the reenactment is simply a matter of engaging in
actions whereby one immerses oneself in the core narrative. So, for example,
when someone kisses the icon of Christ, she does not respond to an element of
the core narrative that is presented to her by the icon or the actions of the
priest. Rather, she simply enacts part of the performance-plan of the liturgy,
which is to engage in act-types that signify elements of the core narrative—in
this case, the actions of Mary of Bethany. The sorts of attention that are
required in the two types of cases are different: in the first case, one has to
attend to a presentation of elements of the core narrative, while in the second
case, one does not. That noted, when engaging in reenactment of the first type,
a certain type of suppleness of attention is required. To perform the actions
called for by the script, one has to be able to negotiate between attending to
features of the presentation of elements of the core narrative—such as the
celebrant’s actions—and the content of what is being presented. It is not as if
one “reads past” the actions of the celebrant. Rather, one responds to them. In
this sense, the actions of the celebrant call attention to themselves in a way that
words often do not.
This last observation requires that we now enter an important qualification
to what I said earlier about what it is to attend to the content of a narrative.
A moment ago, I said that one immerses oneself in a narrative-work by
bracketing certain features of the presentation of the narrative in order to
attend to the content of the narrative itself. But if what we just said is correct, it
would be better to say that sometimes immersion requires attending to certain
84 Ritualized Faith
features of the presentation of the core narrative for the purpose of immersing
oneself in the narrative. Indeed, it shouldn’t escape our attention that, in the
Orthodox liturgies, the vast majority of the content of the liturgical script is
sung. When the script instructs the assembled to repeat the words of the
Publican, the Righteous Thief, or the Prodigal Son, the repetition it calls for is
typically performed in song. In these cases, then, the response that the
liturgical script calls for is not one that ignores or brackets the musical
dimensions of these reenactments. Rather, the response called for is that one
enter into the narrative by way of its musical presentation; one simultaneously
immerses oneself in the musical presentation of the narrative and in the
narrative itself.44
On this occasion, I am going to have to rush past many of the issues raised
by the role of music in the presentation of the core narrative to note two
points. First, if immersion typically consists in allowing oneself to be emo-
tionally engaged by the content of a narrative, the emotional engagement
called for in liturgical reenactment is that of responding not simply to the
content of the narrative but also to features of its presentation. If this is so,
what I have been calling the liturgical sequence is emotionally colored in two
distinct respects: in both its content and its presentation. Both the narrative
description and its musical presentation call for a range of emotional re-
sponses on the part of those assembled. Indeed, one of the more striking
elements of liturgical reenactment is when these two types of colorings come
apart but in complementary ways. For example, in the rite of the burial of
Jesus, the content of the narrative calls for something like sorrow. Its musical
presentation, by contrast, calls for that difficult-to-describe emotional reaction
characteristic of being in the presence of something of great beauty. When
combined, the reenactment calls for something like that state of sorrow in
which we are moved by beauty. In this respect, the musical features of the
presentation of some segment of a narrative may play a crucial role in
understanding the narrative itself. For by presenting an episode of the core
narrative such as Christ’s burial as not only sad but also beautiful, two
disparate elements of the episode—ones that we might not have appreciated
or held together—are fused in one’s experience.
The second point I wish to make is that, when applied to liturgical reenact-
ment, any adequate account of non-fictive immersion must offer a highly
nuanced account of what it is to attend to the content of the core narrative.
For, if the foregoing is along the right lines, what immersion often requires is
44
In this regard, perhaps the closest analogue to what I am describing occurs when watching
an art form such as opera, for the response called for is one in which one enters into the narrative
presented by way of its musical presentation. The crucial difference is that liturgical reenactment
often takes the form of not simply listening to someone present some segment of the core
narrative in song, but also engaging in the reenactment by singing the content of that narrative.
that one attend to features of the presentation of the narrative, such as its
musical form, for the purpose of immersing oneself in the narrative itself. In
some cases, then, the script calls for a type of dual attention that is simultan-
eously focused on both the content of the narrative and certain features of its
presentation, much in the way that we can simultaneously attend to both the
bass lines and the harmonies of a musical work.
In fact, I suspect that the type of immersion called for by the script is even
more complex than this. For, arguably, what the script calls for is not simply
that one simultaneously attend to the musical features of the presentation of
some segment of the core narrative for the purpose of immersing oneself in
that segment but also that one immerse oneself in the music itself—where
musical immersion is a matter of not simply attending to the musical prop-
erties of the performance of some work, but also being absorbed by the
musical properties of the performance of that work, where this consists in
allowing oneself to be emotionally moved by those musical properties. If this is
so, the thing to say is that often the liturgical script calls for not simply dual
attention but dual immersion: immersion in the narrative itself and in certain
features of its presentation as well.
In the last few paragraphs, I have called attention to some salient disanalo-
gies between immersing oneself in a narrative-work, on the one hand, and
liturgical reenactment, on the other, the most important of which being that
liturgical immersion requires an especially nuanced sort of attending. Let me
now call attention to yet another disanalogy. The core narrative with which
one engages in liturgical reenactment is unusual in important respects. While
it is a narrative, it is also studded with metaphors, “uncrystalized” images and
tropes that resist anything like being unpacked in propositional terms without
remainder—images such as wine, water, bread, and blood.45 At one point, for
example, the liturgical script blends the images of blood and water, inviting us
to view the blood that flowed from Jesus’s side as a river of paradise: “As
though from some new river of Paradise, there flows from it the quickening
stream of your blood mingled with water, restoring all to life.”46 Shortly
thereafter, it invites us to view water in a much different light: “I am swimming
in the deep waters of destruction and have come near to drowning. . . . save me
as you saved Peter.”47
Attending to the core narrative, then, often requires not simply that one
keep track of its flow or significance but also that one engage with its
uncrystalized elements, images that can unite disparate things (a river in
Eden, Jesus’s blood) and admit of considerable ambiguity (water as both
45
I borrow the term “uncrystalized” from Wettstein (2012b).
46
LT, 254. In the Orthodox tradition, some of the uncrystalized images to which I refer take a
visual form in its art—the image of Theotokos with Child, for example.
47
LT, 410.
86 Ritualized Faith
life-giving and life-destroying). Here the disanalogy is not so much with
reading as such as with reading narrative-works, as the attention required in
liturgical reenactment is often more similar to that called for by poetry. In
attending to the content of a poem, rather often one does not try so much to
understand or unpack it—such content is frequently too difficult for this!—as
to latch onto metaphors, images, and tropes, allowing them to settle in one’s
mind, resonate, and color one’s experience of the fine details of the world.
Having done this, these elements of the poem are now there, available
to consciousness as the objects of meditation, reflection, and emotional
engagement.48
Let me now come full circle, returning to the topic that I used to introduce
the immersion model, namely, the place of target roles in liturgical reenact-
ment. Although it is easy to overlook the point, reading narrative-works
requires bodily action; one must do such things as focus one’s eyes on the
words of the page, for example. But, unless a narrative-work is also an
instruction manual of an unusual sort, it rarely calls for, while reading, actions
such as kissing, touching, or bowing. Neither, for that matter, does a narrative-
work typically call for, while reading, imitating the actions depicted in the
narrative that it presents. The sort of immersion that the liturgical script calls
for, then, is of a different order, since it calls for precisely these sorts of
activities.
Return, once more, to cases of liturgical reenactment such as the rite of foot
washing, the burial of Jesus, baptism, the repetition of the words of the
Publican, the Prodigal, and the Righteous Thief. In each case, the script
appears to call for participants in the liturgy to immerse themselves in the
core narrative by identifying to some degree or other with its characters and
their situations, assuming what I’ve called target roles. Admittedly, not all
cases of liturgical reenactment call for this sort of response. And some cases of
liturgical reenactment such as the eucharistic rite are fairly difficult to char-
acterize. In this rite, does the liturgical script call for the response that the
assembled are to identify with the disciples? I am not sure. However that may
be, it is worth noting that, in the eucharistic rite, the reenactment lies in large
measure with the actions of the celebrant, as it is the celebrant who repeats the
act-sequence attributed to Jesus in the Gospels. Once we recognize this,
however, the model seems to capture important elements of even this rite.
For while the script seems to call for the celebrant to identify with Jesus’s
actions of sharing food with those close to him, this is compatible with the
celebrant’s acting on behalf of Jesus, as there is no tension between assuming a
target role in which one identifies with a figure and acting on behalf of that
48
Peter Kivy (1997), 134, argues that a “full literary experience” of a work such as Pride and
Prejudice must include some significant “literary afterlife” in which one reflects on the themes
that it raises. A full liturgical experience, I believe, is similar.
figure. In fact, the reenactment that occurs in the eucharistic rite might be a
case in which, in acting on behalf of someone, one identifies with the person
on behalf of whom one is acting by imitating him.
4.4. WHAT REENACTMENT IS FOR
I began this chapter by noting the prominence of liturgical reenactment in the

Orthodox liturgies, noting some of the different forms it can take. Along the
way, I expressed dissatisfaction with various accounts of such reenactment,
eventually identifying what a good model of liturgical reenactment should
accomplish: it should smoothly accommodate the liturgical data, identify the
behaviors the liturgical script calls for, and identify why it is that the liturgical
script calls for these behaviors. When presenting what strikes me as the most
promising model of liturgical reenactment—namely, the immersion model—I
have mostly had my eye on the first two components of a good model, as
I have been interested in illustrating the degree to which the model takes
into account the liturgical data and identifies the behaviors that the liturgical
script calls for. What the script often calls for, I have been claiming, is
assuming target roles of various sorts, imaginatively identifying with char-
acters in the core narrative. The remaining task is to take the next step,
identifying what the purposes might be of immersing oneself in liturgical
reenactment in these ways.
The topic calls for a discussion unto itself. So, let me say only this: by
immersing themselves in the core narrative, participants in the liturgy funda-
mentally alter their relation to that core narrative. They are not outsiders to it,
onlookers, or spectators of its events and characters. Rather, they inhabit the
narrative, engaging with it, perhaps even wrestling with dimensions of the
narrative that call for such a reaction. What might be the purpose of immer-
sing oneself in the core narrative in this way? The short answer, I believe, is
that immersion in liturgical action is in the service of receptivity and appro-
priation. The dominant purpose of immersion is to let participants open
themselves up to and appropriate the riches of the narrative, often by identi-
fying with its characters in such a way that they construct and revise their
narrative identities.49
49
This is a theme I develop in Cuneo (2015a), which is included as Chapter 5 in the present
volume. I thank Tyler Doggett, Jonathan Jacobs, Lori Wilson, and Nick Wolterstorff for their
comments on or discussion of an earlier draft of this chapter.
Liturgy and the Moral Life
If you attend the performance of most Christian liturgies, you will find the
assembled reading and listening to the scriptural depiction of various events
that compose the core Christian narrative. If you attend the performance of a
liturgy of the Eastern Christian churches, however, you will discover that the
assembled do not simply read or listen to the scriptural presentation of the
events that compose the core Christian narrative but also reenact many of
these events by imitating them. During the services of Holy Week, for ex-
ample, the assembled will read and listen to what the Gospels say about the
events surrounding Jesus’s death. Then, at various points, they reenact some of
these events, such as Jesus’s washing of the disciples’ feet and his burial. At
these points, the readers and listeners become performers.
The question that I would like to pursue in this chapter is why this is so.
Why would the scripts of the ancient liturgies direct those assembled for the
liturgy not to merely read and listen to the scriptural presentation of various
events that compose the core narrative but also to perform actions that imitate
them? In raising this question, I am not interested in identifying causal or
historical explanations of why the activity of reenactment figures so promin-
ently in the ancient liturgies, as interesting as such explanations might be.
Instead, I am asking what the activity of liturgical reenactment is for, what its
contribution to the moral and religious life is supposed to be.
The answer that I am going to offer assumes that there is no single
contribution that liturgical reenactment is supposed to make to the moral
and religious life; there are probably multiple ways in which it is supposed to
contribute to the realization of various ethical and religious ideals. Still,
I suggest that we can helpfully speak of the dominant ends or goals of liturgical
reenactment and that among these dominant ends is that of contributing to
the construction of a narrative identity of its participants.
By an agent’s narrative identity, I have in mind a sequence of events, which
has that agent as a subject, to which he or she might refer if he or she were
accurately to tell a story of his or her life. Suppose, for example, I were to ask
you a series of questions such as: “Who are you? What made you who you are?
And what do you value most in your life?” You might answer by telling me
Liturgy and the Moral Life 89

that you are the one whose love of music led to years studying the cello and
whose dedication to the instrument required sacrificing a promising dancing
career. Your having such properties as being a lover of music would be part of
your narrative identity, since it would form part of a story-like sequence of
events, which has you as a subject, to which you might refer were you to tell a
story of your life. (I do not assume that there must be only one such story that
you could offer in response to my questions, or that it would have to fall into
some specific genre, or have any specific content. Such a story simply needs
to be responsive to the types of questions mentioned at the outset of this
paragraph.)
In focusing my discussion on the topic of narrative identity, I realize that
I am joining a much larger conversation about the role of narrative in the
moral life. The contribution I hope to make to this discussion is not, however,
to advance another descriptive claim about the ways in which certain activities
are likely to contribute to the development of one’s narrative identity. So, for
example, I am not going to develop a variant of the thesis that Plato railed
against, namely, that imaginatively identifying with a character in some work
of art, such as a drama, increases the likelihood that one becomes like that
character, thereby undermining self-control. Instead, the view I defend is
thoroughly normative. I am interested in the normative commitments that
agents undertake when engaging in liturgical reenactment and how these
commitments might contribute to the construction of a narrative identity of
a particular sort.
My topic in this chapter is a large one, so I should call attention to several
respects in which my discussion will be selective. Although the activity of
liturgical reenactment is prominent in the ancient liturgies, I am going to focus
not on these liturgies in general but only on those of the Eastern Christian
churches, as these strike me as a particularly rich resource to explore. More-
over, my eye will be on not the totality of the Eastern liturgies, but on the
Lenten liturgies in particular, as it is in these deeply penitential services that
the activity of liturgical reenactment figures most prominently. For ease of
reference, I will often refer to “the” script of the liturgy, but when I do so, it is
the scripts or performance-plans of these liturgies that I will typically have in
mind. Finally, liturgical reenactment comes in different varieties. As will soon
be evident, I will be focusing not on reenactment in all its forms but on those
cases in which the performance of speech acts plays a fundamental role. The
performance of these acts, I’ll claim, plays an important role in the formation
and sustenance of traits of character important to the moral and religious life.
In order to illuminate the way in which participating in the liturgy can
contribute to the formation and sustenance of an agent’s narrative identity, I’ll
need to engage in some stage-setting. I will dedicate the first section of this
chapter to this stage-setting and then draw upon this work in the second and
third sections of the chapter to directly address our topic.
90 Ritualized Faith
5.1. LITURGICAL IMMERSION
The vesperal service of Holy Tuesday begins with a reading from the Gospel of
Matthew that presents the story of the woman whom the tradition often
identifies as a prostitute, Mary of Bethany.1 According to the scriptural
narrative, in the middle of a dinner party, Mary anoints Jesus with “very
precious ointment,” pouring the oil on Jesus’s head and wiping his feet with
her tears and hair (Matt. 26: 7; Luke 7: 37–8; John 12: 3). In the services that
follow on Holy Wednesday, the hymnody embellishes Mary’s story by putting
words in her mouth, at one point having her address Jesus with this request:
“‘Behold me sunk in sin, filled with despair . . . yet not rejected by your love.
Grant me, Lord, remission of my sins and save me . . . O merciful Lord who
loves human kind, deliver me from the filth of my works.’”2 At a different
point, the hymnody then shifts from the perspective of Mary to that of the
assembled, having them sing words attributed to Mary: “Like the Harlot
I fall down before you, Christ my God, seeking to receive forgiveness; and
instead of ointment I offer you the tears of my heart. Take pity on me,
Saviour, as you had on her, and grant me the remission of my sins. For I cry
like her to you: Deliver me from the filth of my deeds.”3 What then occurs in
the service is that the people file forward to venerate the icon of Christ,
kissing it in the way that Mary is said to have kissed Jesus himself on the
occasion of the dinner party. Immediately after venerating the icon, each is
anointed with oil by the priest.
The sequence of liturgical actions just described is interesting on several
levels. Notice, first, that some of the actions performed by the assembled are
ones in which they reenact elements of the embellished scriptural narrative by
both imitating and repeating actions attributed to Mary, such as her cry to be
delivered from her misdeeds. Other liturgical actions—such as when the
people venerate the icon of Jesus—imitate Mary’s actions but do not repeat
them. Instead they reenact these actions by employing props, in this case an
icon of Jesus, to perform actions that are supposed to represent Mary’s action
of kissing Jesus. It is clear, moreover, that the priest’s action of anointing the
people is supposed to connect with Mary’s own anointing of Jesus, although it
is not exactly clear how. One interpretation is that the rite is a commemor-
ation of her action, a fulfillment of Jesus’s words that what she had done “will
be told in memory of her” (Matt. 26: 13). The “telling” in this case would not
simply be an oral or a written presentation of her story, but also a dramatic
1
The identification is contentious. For a discussion, see Stump (2010), ch. 12.
2
Mary and Ware (2002), 539, 537. I have modernized the English used in the translation. In
what follows, I will refer to this work as LT.
3
LT, 695–6.

and creative extension of it, in which the priest anoints the people as she
anointed Jesus.4
Mary is only one of a cast of characters whose actions are reenacted in the
context of the liturgy. On the Sunday of the Publican and the Pharisee, for
example, the people listen to the Gospel story of the Publican and the Pharisee
and sing: “In our prayer let us fall down before God, with tears and fervent
cries of sorrow, emulating the Publican in the humility which lifted him on
high. . . . Let us utter the words of the Publican in the holy temple ‘God be
merciful.’”5 Likewise, on the Sunday of the Prodigal Son, the people listen to
the story of the Prodigal, and sing: “With the words of the Prodigal I cry aloud:
I have sinned, O Father; like him, receive me now in your embrace and reject
me not. . . . Accept me in repentance and make me as one of your hired
servants.”6 In both cases, by performing speech acts of certain sorts, the people
reenact parts of the Gospel story by imitating and repeating actions attributed
to its characters.
I have called figures such as the Publican and the Pharisee “characters”
advisedly, as neither is presented in the scriptures as being an actual historical
figure. Each is instead a fictional character that Jesus employs in his parables.
An interesting feature of these last examples of liturgical reenactment, then, is
that when the people imitate and repeat the words of the Publican and the
Prodigal, they are engaging not with a historical narrative but with a fictional
one. The case of Mary of Bethany is somewhat different, since she is not
presented in the scriptures as a character in a parable. Still, it is worth stressing
that when the assembled imitate and repeat Mary’s words, they repeat not
Mary’s actual words (the scriptures do not present her as saying anything
when she anoints Jesus) but those attributed to her by the church’s hymnody
in its effort to embellish the scriptural narrative. In all the cases we’ve
considered, then, liturgical reenactment involves reenacting either the actions
of fictional characters or act-types attributed to non-fictional characters that
(for all we reasonably believe) they did not perform.
Let me, for ease of reference, call actions of both these sorts fictive actions.
Given our topic, a natural question to raise is how we should understand the
activity of reenacting fictive actions. Are the reenactments themselves best
viewed as a species of make-believe behavior in which the people pretend to be
Mary of Bethany, the Publican, or the Prodigal? Or are they better described as
cases in which the participants pretend to be present in their own person at,
4
Another interpretation suggested by the liturgical script is that the act of being anointed is
answering a call issued by Mary of Bethany: “The Harlot washed your pure and precious feet
with her tears, and she urges all to approach you and receive the remission of their sins. Unto me
also grant her faith, O Saviour, that I may cry to you: Before I perish utterly, save me, O Lord”
(LT, 375).
5 6
LT, 107, 108. LT, 116, 118.
92 Ritualized Faith
say, the event (whether real or fictional) in which Mary anoints and kisses
Jesus or when the Prodigal returns home to his father?
There are powerful trends in both philosophy and theology that would
recommend that we view liturgical reenactments of both sorts as dramatic
performances and, hence, behavior in which we engage in make-believe.7
According to these views, when the assembled engage in liturgical reenact-
ment, they should be understood to pretend that they are characters in the
scriptural narrative or to be present in their own person at the events depicted
by the narrative, much in the way that you or I might pretend to be Mary if we
were to stage a dramatic reenactment of the Gospel of Matthew.
I do not wish to broach any empirical claims about what it is that the
assembled are doing or take themselves to be doing when engaging in litur-
gical reenactment. I do want to claim, however, that like any script or score,
the liturgical script calls for responses of certain types from participants in the
liturgy. Among the responses not ordinarily called for by the liturgical script,
I also want to claim, is that of engaging in make-believe behavior. If I am right
about this, the response called for when the assembled venerate the icon of
Christ is not that of pretending to be Mary of Bethany (or pretending to be
present in one’s own person in Mary’s circumstances). Similarly, the response
called for when the assembled imitate and repeat the behavior of the Prodigal
is not that of pretending to be the Prodigal (or pretending to be present in
one’s own person in the Prodigal’s circumstances). In the next section, I will
offer an argument for this assessment. For now I wish to emphasize two
points.
The first is that engaging with narratives—whether they be fictional or
not—ordinarily requires imaginative activity on the part of those who attempt
to understand or interpret them. Among other things, when we try to under-
stand a narrative, we must fill in its gaps, project possible explanations for
what occurs, creatively interpret its happenings in the light of relevant back-
ground knowledge, and so on. But we should not, I believe, equate imaginative
activity with pretense; to imaginatively extrapolate from a narrative needn’t be
to engage in any sort of make-believe behavior. The second point is that from
the fact that important parts of a narrative are presented as and recognized to
be fictional, we cannot infer that imaginatively engaging with that narrative is
itself a matter of engaging in make-believe. When one finds oneself imagina-
tively engaged by a story—even to the point of being swept away by it—one
needn’t be engaging in any sort of pretense or game of make-believe. To share
in the pain of addiction in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, need not
require us to pretend that we, too, are addicts. There is such a thing as
imaginative engagement with fictional narratives that is not pretense.
7
See Walton (1990) and the references in Wolterstorff (1990), for example.

Let us suppose for present purposes that the assessment just offered is
correct: when the script directs the assembled to reenact the behavior of the
Publican or the Prodigal by imitating or repeating it, it ordinarily calls for the
activity not of pretending to be the Publican or the Prodigal (or pretending to
be present in one’s own person in their circumstances) but of imaginatively
engaging with the stories that involve these characters. How, though, should
we understand the sort of imaginative engagement that the liturgical script
calls for if it is not a species of make-believe?
The issue calls for a discussion unto itself but let me briefly gesture at what
I believe is the correct answer.8 There are, in principle, untold ways in which
one could approach a work, such as a novel, that presents a narrative; one
could approach for the purpose of uncovering the author’s religious views,
political allegiances, sexual preferences, or the like. Here, however, is a way to
approach such a work with which we are familiar and on which many other
approaches are parasitic: one imaginatively immerses oneself in the narrative
presented by the work.
Think of the activity of immersing oneself in a narrative work (that is, a
work that presents a narrative) as having two primary components: first, it
involves attending to the content of the narrative of the work (what it is
communicating) and properties of that content (such as how its various
elements hang together) in such a way that, in engaging with the work, one
prioritizes attending to this content. This means that, while immersing
oneself in a narrative work is compatible with attending to features of the
presentation of its narrative, such as the author’s word choice or use of
certain grammatical constructions, doing so is for the purpose of better
attending to the content of the narrative itself. So, when reading, for
example, one can momentarily marvel at the use of a striking metaphor,
asking oneself why the author would use it in this context. But the point in
doing so is better to engage with the content of the work in which the
metaphor is being used.
Immersing oneself in a narrative work involves more, however, than simply
attending to its content in such a way that one screens off or fails to prioritize
certain features of its presentation, such as the author’s word choice. It is also
to take up a certain kind of vantage point with regard to the narrative
presented by the work. Explicating the phenomenon of taking up a vantage
point is not easy, but the basic idea is that when immersing oneself in a
narrative work, one imaginatively enters its narrative by situating oneself
within it.9 In taking up such a vantage point, then, one does not take up the
8
I have developed the view in considerably more detail in Cuneo (2014a), which is included
as Chapter 4 in the present volume.
9
Harris (2000) offers some interesting empirical data that supports this way of thinking about
immersion.
94 Ritualized Faith
stance of a dispassionate observer or critic. Rather, one attends to its content in
such a way that its characters and events loom large in one’s consciousness,
and one becomes emotionally engaged to some significant degree with these
characters and events. Still, in so immersing oneself in the narrative of the
work, one does not take oneself to be a character in the work (or be present in
one’s own person at the events described in the work). Characters in a work do
not, after all, attend to the ways in which the work of which they are a part is
presented.10
The positive proposal I wish to make is that the liturgical script ordinarily
calls for behavior similar to that in which we engage when we immerse
ourselves in a literary work. When the script of the service of Holy Wednes-
day, for example, calls for the assembled to imitate and repeat the speech acts
attributed to and behavior of Mary of Bethany, they are to immerse themselves
in Mary’s story. Or, to state the phenomenon from the opposite angle, when
the script directs the assembled to imitate and repeat Mary’s behavior and the
speech acts attributed to her, it calls for the activity of allowing the assembled
to be absorbed by Mary’s story, engaging with its content and allowing her
character and actions to loom large in their consciousness and emotional life
when they reenact her behavior.
5. 2 . I D E N T IF I C A T I O N
I started our discussion by raising the question of why the scripts of the
ancient liturgies go beyond directing the assembled to simply read and listen
to segments of the core Christian narrative but also to reenact some of the
events it depicts. In my initial attempt to address this question, I assumed that
it would be helpful to get a clearer sense of what liturgical reenactment is, the
character of the sort of activity that is called for when the liturgical script
directs the assembled to do such things as imitate and repeat the actions of
Mary of Bethany or Jesus. The question on which we need to make progress is
the contribution that liturgical reenactment so understood is supposed to
make to the moral and religious life. Let me take a few more steps toward
that goal by saying something more about the phenomenon of reading
narrative works, canvassing what some philosophers have said about the
ways in which reading literature is supposed to contribute to the moral life
and the formation of character.
10
Cuneo (2014a), which is included as Chapter 4 in the present volume, expands upon these
points, noting that immersion typically requires moving back and forth between attending to the
content of a work and ways in which that work is presented.

In the introduction to her collection of essays Love’s Knowledge, Martha
Nussbaum points out that moral philosophers have virtually ignored the role
of literature in the moral life.11 Nussbaum contends that this oversight is not
trivial, for literature—and Nussbaum has in mind the novel in particular—is
especially well-suited to contribute to the expansion and refinement of moral
understanding. What literature does, Nussbaum suggests, is present us with
rich descriptions of characters, their traits, and their often complicated pre-
dicaments, allowing us to emotionally engage them and thereby expand our
powers of moral judgment, refine our abilities of ethical discernment, deepen
our ethical understanding, and have access to alien points of view. In this
regard, Nussbaum contends, these works are importantly different from those
of philosophy. In a treatment of the virtues, a philosopher such as Aristotle or
Aquinas might offer an accurate analysis of a particular virtue. But given its
abstract nature, such an analysis could (for most of us) gain only limited
traction in the moral life; we would gain very little appreciation for its lived
character. By contrast, “showing” a virtue by means of a narrative that displays
its dynamics over time—so Nussbaum maintains—offers us a much better
sense of what the virtue is and how we might recognize it. In this way, the sorts
of narratives regularly presented in literature make a unique and important
contribution to the moral life; they often accomplish what works from other
genres—and, indeed, ordinary life—cannot.
When all goes well, immersing oneself in liturgical action might expand
and refine our powers of moral understanding in much the same way that
engaging with literature does, at least if philosophers such as Nussbaum are
right. But it would not do so because those segments of the liturgical script
concerned with liturgical reenactment present us with rich and detailed
descriptions of characters and their predicaments. The reason is that although
these segments of the liturgical script engage with the scriptural narrative, they
do so largely by re-presenting and embellishing portions of this narrative.
More exactly, these segments of the script are largely a selective and stylized
appropriation of this narrative that presupposes an intimate familiarity with it.
When, for example, the script for the services of Holy Friday imaginatively
weaves together the stories of Joseph of Arimathea and Mary Theotokos,
presenting these stories from the first-person perspective of its characters, it
does not follow them through an extended period of time, offering rich and
detailed descriptions of these characters and the predicaments they face.
Rather, it offers snapshots of their lives, creatively blending and embellishing
their stories by, among other things, highlighting some of their important
characteristics, such as their courage in conditions that appear to them
11
Nussbaum (1990). Carroll (2001b), Part IV, and Carroll (2011a), Parts IV and V, also have
some of the best discussions of the topic of which I’m aware.
96 Ritualized Faith
hopeless.12 But if the contribution that liturgical reenactment makes to the
moral and religious life is not that of imparting moral understanding by the
presentation of rich and nuanced narratives, how should we understand it?
The answer, I believe, lies in what I will call the self-reflexive character of the
liturgical script. As the passages I have quoted from the liturgical script will
have already indicated, the liturgy has the striking feature of casting much of
its hymnody in the first-person. This technique is employed in three different
although compatible ways.
In some places, the technique is employed to re-cast stories, which in their
scriptural presentation are themselves not narrated from the first-person
perspective, into hymns that are narrated from the first-person perspective
of their characters, such as when the hymnody presents elements of the
Genesis story from the perspective of Adam:
The Lord my Creator took me as dust from the earth and formed me into a living
creature, breathing into me the breath of life and giving me a soul. . . . He
honoured me . . . making me companion of the angels. . . . In my wretchedness
I have cast off the robe woven by God . . . and I am clothed now in fig leaves and
in garments of skin.13
Elsewhere, the script presents hymnody from the perspective of Jesus, the so-
called second Adam:
I who am rich in Godhead have come to minister to Adam who is grown poor.
I who fashioned him have of mine own will put on his form. I . . . have come to lay
down my life as a ransom for him.14
Call the technique employed in this and other passages narrative recasting. If
the point of these particular examples of narrative recasting were simply a
matter of getting the assembled to pretend to be Adam or Jesus, their function
would be more or less transparent. What better way to pretend that one is
Adam or Jesus than to take up their perspectives? I have claimed, however,
that we ought not to understand the liturgical script to call for the assembled
to pretend that they are characters such as Adam or Jesus. If I am right about
this, when the script directs the assembled to sing hymns from Adam’s or
Jesus’s perspective, something else is going on. That something else, I would
say, consists in the assembled playing the role of Adam and Jesus—where
playing the role of these characters consists not in pretending to be them but
(in part) taking up their perspective by speaking in their voices.15
12
Eric Auerbach’s classic work, Mimesis (Auerbach [2003]), contrasts Greek and biblical
narrative on precisely this point: biblical narratives don’t fill in the background in the way that
Greek narratives do.
13 14
LT, 168. LT, 513.
15
It is not easy to specify exactly what it is for an agent to play a role. I say more about the
matter in Cuneo (2014a), which is included as Chapter 4 in the present volume.

In other places, the liturgical script directs the assembled not to recite
stories narrated from the first-person perspective of their characters, but to
quote and appropriate passages from these stories, employing them to per-
form speech acts that express the first-person perspective of those assembled:
let us emulate the groaning of the Publican and, speaking to God with warm tears,
let us cry out: “O you who loves humankind, we have sinned. In your compassion
and pity, be merciful and save.”16
Like the Thief I cry to you “Remember me”; like Peter I weep bitterly; like the
Publican I call out “Forgive me, Saviour”; like the Harlot I shed tears. Like the
woman of Canaan I cry to you, “Have mercy on me, Son of David.” Like
the woman with an issue of blood, I touch the hem of your garment. I weep as
Martha and Mary wept for Lazarus.17
Call this activity that the liturgical script calls for indexical appropriation.
In the cases before us, indexical appropriation consists in embedding various
speech acts, such as requests that incorporate first-person pronouns
(“Remember me” and “Forgive me, Saviour”) in other speech acts, such as
assertions (“Like the Thief I cry to you”) that also incorporate first-person
pronouns. Unlike the examples of narrative recasting offered above, indexical
appropriation consists not in playing the role of a character but in allowing
biblical persona to function as models—these models often functioning as
ideals whose characteristics we try to approximate in our own behavior.
Finally, in other places, the liturgical script employs the first-person
pronouns in what is perhaps an even more unusual way. Under this use,
the pronoun functions not so much as a marker of who is doing the
addressing as an indicator of who is the object of address. When the pronoun
is used in this way, the liturgical script is self-referential in the sense that,
when an individual conforms to it in the context of liturgical performance,
she is herself the object of her own address. What is more, these uses of the
first-person pronouns often figure in a certain type of construction in which
the speaker refers to him or herself comparatively, as being like or identical
with one or another character, such as when the assembled compare them-
selves to the Prodigal Son:
I am become the Prodigal Son, and having wasted my riches I perish now from
hunger. Beneath your protection I seek refuge, O loving Father: accept me as you
have accepted him. Make me a sharer at your table, that I may cry to you: Before
I perish utterly, save me, O Lord.
I am the prodigal: conceived in sin, I dare not look up to the height of
heaven. But trusting in your love for human kind, I cry: God be merciful to me
and save me.18
16 17 18
LT, 108. LT, 245, 263. LT, 375, 668.
98 Ritualized Faith
Call this use of the singular first-person pronoun comparative self-address.
Unlike narrative recasting, comparative self-address is not (in the paradig-
matic case) a matter of playing a role. And unlike indexical appropriation, it is
not (in the paradigmatic case) allowing a character to function as a model.
Rather, I would say it consists in treating a figure function as a type of which
the assembled declare that they are examples. In the passages just quoted, for
example, the Prodigal Son functions in just this way.
The overarching question we are pursuing concerns the contribution that
liturgical reenactment is supposed to make to the moral and religious life. An
important clue to understanding that contribution, I have suggested, is the
liturgical script’s use of the first-person pronouns. Let me now move beyond
noting the various uses to which the script puts these pronouns and hazard a
general suggestion as to what their functions might be in the context of
liturgical performance. Having offered this suggestion, I will qualify it in
some important respects.
Imagine that you and I are very different people: you are a thief and I am
not. Or somewhat differently, suppose that you are a collaborator with an
oppressive foreign power that is occupying our country and I am not. Between
you and me there is likely to be considerable psychological distance. That is,
given our different stations, it is likely that you and I have rather different
histories, temperaments, values, commitments, and the like. Suppose, though,
it is important for me to understand you better, say, because we find ourselves
invested in a joint project whose success matters to both of us. In order to
understand you better, I could engage in at least two activities.
I might attempt, in the first place, to close the psychological distance
between us by taking up your point of view on some matter on which I find
your views puzzling or alien. Or, somewhat differently, I might attempt to
identify with you, locating points of similarity between you and me, where
these points of similarity could be the basis for mutual enjoyed recognition,
lasting social bonds, or unified action, such as when we realize that we share a
deep interest in jazz and make plans to perform some of our favorite pieces
with one another.19 A moment’s reflection reveals that these activities are not
identical. I could close the psychological distance between you and me to some
significant degree by appreciating how you see things without identifying with
you in any appreciable sense, since your ways of seeing the world might still
seem too alien. Similarly, I could identify with you without having to close any
appreciable psychological distance between us, since there might be none to
speak of.
19
A vivid example of this is found in Patrick Leigh-Fermor’s book Abducting a General in
which Fermor tells of the experience of capturing a German general in Crete and reciting an ode
of Horace—in Latin—with his enemy. Thanks to Luke Reinsma for this reference.

I take it that closing the psychological distance between oneself and another
is often for the purpose of identifying with that other person. At any rate, in
what follows I shall understand it to have that function and will speak simply
of the activity of identifying with another—where identifying with another is
understood typically to incorporate the activities of both closing the psycho-
logical distance between and identifying (in the sense specified above) with
that person.
The proposal I want to develop is that the liturgical script’s use of narrative
recasting, indexical appropriation, and comparative self-address is to facilitate
the identification with the array of characters presented in the liturgical script.
To appreciate the point, begin by observing that the liturgical text presents us
with an array of characters whom many of us are likely to find deeply alien in
important respects: criminals (the Thief), collaborators with oppressive for-
eign powers (the Publican), betrayers (Peter), wastrels (the Prodigal), prosti-
tutes (Mary of Bethany), hysterics (the woman of Canaan), and the impure/
sick (the woman with an issue of blood). Notably, however, the script directs
the assembled not to distance themselves from these characters because they
are vivid examples of the unsavory and the unclean but to imitate and repeat
their actions and words to the point of identifying with them, sometimes in the
strongest of terms, such as when it directs the assembled to assert such things
as “I am the Prodigal.”
That such identification is the activity called forth by the liturgical script is,
I think, especially evident in the cases of comparative self-address that we
considered. But it is also evident in the cases of indexical appropriation that we
canvassed, such as this passage:
Like the Thief I cry to you “Remember me”; like Peter I weep bitterly; like the
Publican I call out “Forgive me, Saviour”; like the Harlot I shed tears. Like the
woman of Canaan I cry to you, “Have mercy on me, Son of David.” Like the woman
with an issue of blood, I touch the hem of your garment. I weep as Martha and Mary
wept for Lazarus.20
This passage helps us to see the self-constituting character of liturgical re-
enactment: in performing the speech acts of requesting forgiveness and mercy
by using the words of the Publican and the woman of Canaan, the assembled
do not simply express a desire to emulate these characters; they also bring it
about that in performing these speech acts a range of similarities now hold
between them and these characters—these similarities being of such a kind
that they can contribute to the project of identifying with these characters. To
the question “In what way are you like the Publican?” it could fairly be
responded by the assembled: I am like the Publican in imitating and following
20
LT, 245, 263.
100 Ritualized Faith

his example to the point of even using his words. Imitation, in this case, begets
identification.
The liturgical activity of identifying with the range of characters presented
in the liturgy is intriguing if only because traditional religious traditions are
often intent on carving out and ratifying strict social roles for their adherents.
In many such traditions, men are allowed to perform certain actions but
women are not. The ritually clean are permitted to participate in certain
rites but the ritually unclean are not. In the passages that we have considered,
exactly the opposite dynamic appears to be at work: the script invites men to
identify with characters who are women, women with characters who are men,
the innocent with characters who are criminals, the faithful with characters
who are betrayers, the responsible with characters who are wastrels, the
healthy with characters who are chronically sick, the stoical with characters
who weep, the emotionally stable with characters who are emotionally un-
stable, and so forth.
The intended effect seems (at least in part) to be twofold. On one level, it is
to destabilize the self to some degree, inviting participants in the liturgy to
expand their own self-conceptions in ways that, for many, are hardly going to
seem like second nature. One could, in fact, look at the activity of identifying
with the cast of characters presented in the liturgy as an exercise of autonomy
of a certain kind in which agents revise certain self-understandings of them-
selves or call into question roles into which they have been scripted. On
another level, however, the script seems intent on unifying the self-
conceptions of the participants around certain ethical and religious ideals
that these characters share, such as their willingness to repent of their failures
and their readiness to acknowledge that they do not have it all together. In this
regard, participating in liturgical reenactment of this sort has a pronounced
leveling effect: whoever you might be, and whatever your station—so the script
seems to say—there is considerable common ground between you, me, and
these characters whose actions and behaviors we imitate and repeat. Interest-
ingly, unlike the basis of the sort of friendship that Aristotle lauded, the
common ground does not consist in acknowledging shared virtues or accom-
plishments. Rather, it consists in sharing deep and regrettable flaws—ways in
which we are fragile and fail.
Let me now add a qualification to these points about identification, which
I mentioned in passing a few paragraphs back. To this juncture, I have been
speaking in general terms about the function of the liturgical script’s use of
first-person pronouns, suggesting that they are employed to invite the assem-
bled to identify with these various biblical persona. But speaking in such
general terms risks distortion, since terms such as “I” and “we” are indexicals
and, as such, do not have a unique content that determines their reference. All
else being equal, when I use the term, “I,” it refers to me; when you use it, the
term refers to you. Indexicals, then, have what are commonly called characters,

which are roughly rules or functions from contexts—such as my uttering the
term “I” on some occasion—to contents—in this case me. The character of the
first-person indexical, then, will determine on any given occasion of use whom
it picks out or refers to.
I call attention to this point about the nature of indexicals because it is
important to see that in its ample use of first-person pronouns, the liturgical
script allows for a great deal of flexibility concerning what is said or accom-
plished by the participants’ use of these pronouns. Depending on who you are
and what stage of your life you are in, your uttering sentences in a liturgical
context that repeat those attributed to the Thief or the Prodigal Son might
mean something very different or play very different cognitive roles from my
uttering those same sentences in the same context. Given your history,
uttering the sentence “I am the Prodigal” might function as an invitation to
search for similarities that might not be obvious or to close the psychological
distance between you and the Prodigal, so that you can better understand and
reconcile with those who are like him in obvious respects. In contrast, given
my history, uttering that same sentence might function to acknowledge a past
that I would rather forget but that is important for me to come to terms with.
I would add to this that the activity of identifying with characters in the
context of liturgical performance can be fraught with moral risk, as it can be an
occasion to distort one’s self-conception or trigger tendencies that are on the
whole harmful to oneself, such as engaging in self-abasing behavior when what
is needed most is assurance of one’s worth. We have, then, another reason to
think of the liturgical script as calling for certain types of responses not from
all participants but from only those who stand to make progress in the moral
and religious life by immersing themselves in the activity of liturgical reenact-
ment. It goes without saying that whether one is such a person might require
reflection and good judgment.
To this point, I have been developing the thought that, like engaging with
literature, liturgical reenactment can make important contributions to the
moral and religious life, helping us to realize certain ethical and religious
ideals in the activity of identifying with the array of characters presented in the
liturgical script. Recall, though, that my claim at the outset of this essay was
stronger than this, for I said that a dominant aim of liturgical reenactment is to
contribute to the construction of a narrative identity. And, it could rightly be
observed that identifying with someone in some respect is not perforce to
construct a narrative identity. I could, for example, discover that you and
I have a shared love of jazz, and we might identify with one another because of
this. But when it comes to telling a story of my life, this similarity may not be
important enough to figure in my story. It is not part of my narrative identity.
That noted, it strikes me that attention to the cases of comparative self-
address that we’ve considered, such as when the assembled assert “I am the
Prodigal,” strongly suggests that the liturgical script is calling for more than

simply identifying with characters such as the Prodigal. It is telling, after all, in
the passages I have quoted that the identification is complete; the claim is not
that I am like the Prodigal in some respect or other but that I am the Prodigal.
I am the one who has thrown away his birthright and squandered the gifts
given to him. As such, the identification appears to be of such a kind and
importance that it is an answer to the question “Who are you?” which is
exactly the sort of question that the telling of one’s story is supposed to
address. In fact, I think we should be open to the possibility that what the
liturgical script is calling for, when it directs an agent to reenact the Prodigal’s
actions and engage in comparative self-address, is for that agent to narrate or
construct his or her own story in the context of the liturgy. If that is right, the
activity of liturgical reenactment can be itself a kind of story-telling, a telling of
one’s own narrative. That is, such an activity can consist in articulating who
one is or aspires to become, which would be another striking example of the
self-constituting character of liturgical action, since by engaging in such an
activity one would, in a certain range of cases, bring it about that one’s
narrative identity has a particular contour, which it shares with the Prodigal’s.
I would add that the telling of one’s story in the context of the liturgy needn’t
be de novo. For many, it will be a retelling of one’s story that perhaps amends,
augments, or corrects a narrative that one is prone to tell in other contexts. At
any rate, if these suggestions are along the right lines, we can identify yet
another way in which narrative functions in the context of the liturgy: when
people assemble for the liturgy, they not only read and listen to narratives but
are also called to construct them while engaging in the liturgy.
5.3. COMMITMENT
The overarching question that I have been pursuing is the contribution that
liturgical reenactment is supposed to make to the moral and religious life. The
clue to answering this question, I’ve suggested, lies in the self-reflexive char-
acter of the liturgical script, as it is this feature of the script that helps us to
locate the sorts of activities that the script calls for. Prominent among the
activities called for by the script, I have claimed, is that of identifying with
characters in the core Christian narrative, where this identification should be
understood as contributing to the construction of a narrative identity.
I have, however, stopped short of broaching any empirical claims to the
effect that liturgical reenactment is likely to contribute to the construction of a
narrative identity. For my proposal is unapologetically normative: the con-
struction of a narrative identity is among the activities that the script calls for.
I now want to suggest that the answer to our overarching question is norma-
tive in another distinct sense.

The cases of reenactment in which I’ve been interested involve the
performance of speech acts of various sorts in which one appropriates the
words of characters presented to us in the liturgical script. Fundamental to
the performance of any speech act, however, is that the speaker commits
himself to the world being a certain way. In asserting, I commit myself to
the world being thus and so (and to my believing it to be thus and so). In
promising, I commit myself to acting in a certain way (and believing that
I can act that way). In commanding, I commit myself to having the
authority to direct your actions in certain ways (and believing myself to
have such authority). In my view, it is the normative alteration that occurs
upon committing oneself in these ways that accounts for (at least in part)
why it is that certain sentence utterances count as speech acts such as
asserting, promising, and commanding. Speech, under this approach, ne-
cessarily involves normative transformation of such a kind that a speaker
acquires rights, responsibilities, and obligations vis-à-vis her audience and
vice versa.21
Taking account of the ways in which speech is normative allows us to
address more adequately questions that I have raised earlier in our discussion.
One question—the question that I raised at the outset of our discussion—is
why the scripts of the ancient liturgies go beyond directing the assembled to
read and listen to the presentation of events that compose the core Christian
narrative to reenacting them. The answer is that in reading or listening to a
narrative, one does not thereby commit oneself to anything. But when the
assembled engage in reenactment of the sort called for by the liturgical script,
they perform speech acts of various sorts that commit themselves to their
being certain ways, such as being like (or aspiring to be like) the Thief, the
Publican, or the Prodigal.
A second, closely related question is how liturgical reenactment might make
a distinctive contribution to the moral life, different from reading narrative
works such as novels. The answer is that while reading a novel can be morally
transformative, it is not an activity that as such calls for the activity of
committing oneself to anything. Liturgical reenactment of the sort called for
by the liturgical script is different since it belongs to the essence of this activity
that the assembled commit themselves to ethical and religious ideals of various
sorts, such as being like, say, Mary of Bethany. Of course we have excellent
empirical evidence that in a large range of cases these ethical ideals do not
“take.” But when they do not, the failure is of a distinct kind: it is a failure to
live up to the standards that have been imposed on one not by another but to
21
Cuneo (2014e) defends this position. This view, which I call the normative theory of speech,
takes its inspiration from Searle (1969), Wolterstorff (1995), Brandom (1998), and Alston
(2000).

which an agent has committed herself in the context of liturgical action.22 If
this is so, and liturgical reenactment is as I have described it, then such
reenactment is doubly normative: it is an activity not only called for by the
liturgical script but also one in which the assembled commit themselves to
various moral and religious ideals, including being like (or aspiring to be like)
the characters presented in the liturgical script.
Having noted the ways in which liturgical reenactment is normatively
transformative, we are now better situated to address yet another issue that
I left hanging. The issue is why we should understand liturgical reenactment to
be a species not of make-believe behavior but of immersion in which one
imaginatively enters in the narrative presented by the liturgical script. We are
better situated to address this question because it should be evident that, when
one engages in pretense of a sort in which one pretends to be a character, one
does not thereby commit oneself to the world or oneself being a certain way.
To illustrate, suppose I were to pretend to be Mary of Bethany, repeating the
words attributed to her in the liturgical script: “Behold me sunk in sin, filled
with despair . . . yet not rejected by your love. Grant me, Lord, remission of my
sins and save me . . . O merciful Lord who loves human kind, deliver me from
the filth of my works.” Were I to repeat Mary’s words in the context of the
liturgy while pretending to be her, I would not thereby have committed myself
to being sunk in sin, filled with despair, or anything of the sort. Neither would
I have requested anything of Jesus. I would have merely acted the part of
Mary of Bethany much in the way that I would if I were acting a part in a
theatrical presentation of the book of Matthew. If I am right to suggest that
the heart of liturgical reenactment consists in committing oneself to being
certain ways, however, then I believe that we have decisive reason to reject
an account of liturgical reenactment according to which it consists in make-
believe behavior. For if it did, then liturgical reenactment could not be
normatively transformative—at least in the ways with which we have been
concerned. Its aim would not be to transform the self by way of committing
oneself to certain ethical and religious ideals.
One remaining observation deserves to be voiced, and that is the communal
nature of liturgical reenactment. For, although I have not emphasized the
point, liturgical reenactment is an activity that is performed not in isolation
but in the context of a community dedicated to the realization of certain moral
and religious ideals. When all goes well, one is aware that the liturgical script
22
In the Divine Liturgy, immediately before partaking of eucharist, the assembled pray: “May
the communion of your holy mysteries be neither to my judgment nor my condemnation,
O Lord, but to the healing of soul and body.” One way to understand this prayer is that it
expresses the desire that the partaking of eucharist not be out of step with ideals to which one has
otherwise committed oneself in the context of the liturgy such that partaking of the eucharist
proves to be an exercise of self-condemnation, a failure to live up to these ideals to which one has
committed oneself.

calls one’s fellow participants to commit themselves to the very ideals to which
it calls you to commit yourself. Moreover, your fellow participants are aware
that the script calls you to commit yourself to the ideals to which it calls them
to commit themselves. Mutual recognition, then, is yet another dimension of
liturgical reenactment, and it deserves to be the subject of further reflection. It
is a topic of sufficient richness, however, that exploring its role will have to
await another occasion.23
23
Thanks to Brad Cokelet, Christian Miller, Nick Wolterstorff, members of the University of
Vermont Ethics Reading Group, and an audience at the Character Project conference at Wake
Forest University for their comments on an earlier version of this chapter.
If These Walls Could Only Speak

Icons as Vehicles of Divine Speech
“For the silent painting speaks on these walls, and does much good”
Gregory of Nyssa
In both their private and corporate worship, Eastern Orthodox Christians do

all sorts of things with icons: they adorn them with flowers, process with them
held aloft, bless them with water, prostrate themselves before them, and touch
and kiss them. What is more, Orthodox Christians behave in this way toward a
wide variety of types of icon. They engage in more or less the same behavior
toward icons that depict particular saints, such as Isaac of Syria, and those that
depict particular events, such as Christ’s baptism in the Jordan. In the eyes of
many Western Christians, such behavior appears very strange. What is it
about icons that would make such behavior appropriate? Or to state the
question somewhat more precisely: Given the Christian East’s insistence that
icons play their proper role in the context of the liturgical life of the church,
what is it about the liturgical role of icons that would make such behavior as
touching and kissing them appropriate?
Two rather different proposals have enjoyed currency in the church’s
reflections on this matter. On the one hand, there is the understanding of
the role of icons dominant in the (non-iconoclastic) Christian West. Gregory
the Great articulates this view in a well-known passage, writing that “to adore
a picture is one thing, but to learn through the story of a picture what is to be
adored is another. For what writing presents to readers, this a picture presents
to the unlearned who behold, since in it even the ignorant see what they ought
to follow; in it the illiterate read.”1 Gregory’s claim is that icons primarily serve
a didactic purpose: they are pictorial texts for the illiterate.
On the other hand, there is the rather different understanding of the role of
icons dominant in the Christian East. According to this view, icons are not
1
Quoted in Thiessen (2005), 47.
If Only Walls Could Speak 107

primarily pictorial texts for the illiterate, but quasi-sacramental mediators of
divine presence. To express this mystery, Eastern Christians resort to meta-
phors, claiming that icons are “windows to heaven,” “visible images of mys-
terious and supernatural visions,” as St. Dionysius the Aeropagite puts it.2
Through these windows, that which is depicted is said to become “spiritually
present to us.”3
Neither of these approaches is likely to strike someone interested in the
liturgical ratio of icons as particularly satisfying. The problem with the first
approach is that it is too minimalist in character. Were icons primarily
didactic in purpose, it would be hard to see why for nearly two millennia
Christians have done such things as prostrate themselves before them, touch-
ing and kissing them. More importantly, the Gregorian view (as we might call
it) fails to account for the passionate insistence on the part of the Christian
East that iconoclasm is an attack not merely on a particular mode of Christian
worship, but on the very substance of the Christian faith itself. In his reflec-
tions on images, Luther admitted that icons could function as a memorial or
commemoration. In so doing, he identified one of their liturgical functions,
also identified by John of Damascus in his defense of icons in On the Divine
Images. Still, were the liturgical function of icons primarily one of
commemoration—at least in the sense that Luther appears to have had in
mind—this would not explain why the Christian East has insisted that the very
essence of the faith was at stake in the struggle with the iconoclasts. To destroy
or deny the legitimacy of a memorial is no light matter. But it is difficult to see
why it would be tantamount to eviscerating the content of the Christian faith,
as the East claimed.
But if the Western position is too thin, the Eastern view is likely to strike us
as extravagant. In what way could an image make Isaac of Syria present to us?
In general, the suggestion that a pictorial depiction of a thing makes that thing
present looks like an invocation of magic. Perhaps even more worrisome is the
fact, alluded to earlier, that so many icons depict not particular persons, but
events such as Christ’s crucifixion. Everyone agrees, however, that were events
such as this to have taken place, then they are over with. If so, one wonders
how an icon could in any interesting sense make them present to us. When
used to describe icons that depict events such as Christ’s crucifixion, meta-
phors of being present, being a window to heaven, and being a visible image of
supernatural vision seem inapt. Or if not inapt, these metaphors leave us with
deep questions about how to understand them in a way that their use is both
illuminating and intelligible.
2
Quoted in Florensky (1996), 65.
3
Ibid., 69. The claim is made in nearly every theological treatment of the Eastern view of
icons of which I know. By calling this the dominant view in the East, I do not wish to suggest that
Eastern thinkers have not employed other models regarding the liturgical role of icons.

Texts for the illiterate or mediators of divine presence: neither suggestion
sheds much light on the liturgical role of images. Neither offers a satisfactory
theoretical model for understanding their appropriate role in the liturgical
worship of the church. Can we do better?
I believe so. The key to identifying the liturgical function of icons, or so
I shall suggest, is to understand them as vehicles of divine action, indeed, of
divine speech. Understanding icons as vehicles of divine action, I shall further
suggest, can help make sense of the language of presence so frequently
appealed to by Eastern Christians. Between action and presence we needn’t
choose. Before I lay out my case for this view, however, let me preface what
follows with three remarks.
The first remark concerns the relevance of our topic. I shall assume without
argument that not only religious beliefs, but also many of the practices in
which religious believers engage, including their liturgical practices, deserve
the attention of philosophers. Still, it might be tempting to believe that the
topic of the liturgical role of icons is of interest only to Christians of the East—
or at least only to those interested in the practices of the Christian East.
I believe that this is not so. In his excellent book Worship: Its Theology and
Practice, the Swiss Reformed theologian Jean Jacques Von Allmen notes that
among the great traditions of Christendom, the Reformation traditions alone
have rejected the use of images in worship and, at that, not consistently. It is
time, Von Allmen argues, for those who belong to the traditions of the
Reformation to think hard about how the sense of sight can be redeemed in
Christian worship and whether icons might play some role in this project.4 If
Von Allmen is right about this—and I think he is—the question I wish to
pursue in this chapter is one in which the wider Christian community should
have a stake. It is not one only for those interested in the Eastern church.
The second remark I wish to make concerns the type of model that I shall
present regarding the liturgical role of icons. The model is one that, so far as
I know, has not been explicitly defended by Eastern theologians, but is both
informed by and consonant with the main lines of reflection in the East on the
liturgical role of icons.5 Call it an “expanded” Orthodox view, if you like.
Accordingly, it is a model that takes seriously the East’s insistence that icons
are mediators of divine presence. However, as I’ve already noted, central to my
argument is the claim that we needn’t choose between thinking of icons
primarily as mediators of divine presence, on the one hand, or vehicles of
4
Von Allmen (1965), 276ff. Pelikan (1990), ch. 4, expands upon this theme of the sanctifi-
cation of sight, arguing that the defense of images marks an epistemological shift in Christianity
in which the modality of sight is given a role at least as important as that of hearing.
5
I use the term “theologian” here and elsewhere in a wider sense than that used in the
Christian East.

divine action, on the other. Indeed, thinking of icons as vehicles of action,
I argue, allows us to shed light on the claim that they are vehicles of presence.
The final remark I wish to make concerns talk—talk to this point in which
I have freely engaged—about the liturgical function of icons. Talk of this sort
can suggest that icons have one liturgical function and that our task is to
identify it. I do not, however, believe that icons have a single liturgical
function. Icons have multiple liturgical functions. Still, some of their functions
are arguably more central than others, in part because they unify and make
sense of other liturgical functions that icons play. So, in what follows, when
I speak of the liturgical function of icons, I wish to identify a central liturgical
function of icons that makes good sense of the ways in which Christian
believers interact with them in worship.
6 . 1. SAL V I F I C E V E N T S
In a striking passage from his book Liturgy and Tradition, the Orthodox
theologian Alexander Schmemann writes the following regarding Christian
faith:
the faith which founds the Church and by which she lives is not a mere assent to
“doctrine,” but her living relation to certain events: the Life, Death, and Resur-
rection of Jesus Christ, his ascension into heaven, the descent of the holy Spirit on
the “last and great day” of Pentecost—a relationship which makes her a constant
“witness” and “participant” of these events, of their saving, redeeming, life-giving
and life-transfiguring reality. She has indeed no other experience but the experi-
ence of these events; no other life but the “new life” they always generate and
communicate.6
If Schmemann is right, Christian faith is not mere assent to a class of
propositions or, for that matter, trust in a person. It is also a living relation
to certain events, primarily, says Schmemann, the founding events of the
church, which include the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. It is events
such as these to which the church is called not only to bear witness, but also to
participate in and experience as a source of life-giving reality.
In one sense, what Schmemann says here seems profoundly correct. The
events to which Schmemann refers enjoy a certain type of primacy in the life of
the church. A fundamental role of the writings and hymnody of the church is
to bear witness to them; the church bears a living relation not primarily to the
media that witness to them, such as scripture and hymnody, but to the events
themselves. That said, there is another sense in which what Schmemann says
6

raises questions of its own. Schmemann writes that the church witnesses to
various events in its history, allowing its members to participate in them. If
this is right, then presumably the church does not wish its witness to these
events to consist in mere commemoration. It intends for its members in some
sense to participate in them. But how could we, who are thousands of years
removed from these founding events of the church, become participants in
them, thereby allowing them to communicate to us “new life”?
I shall turn my attention to this question in the last section of this essay. For
the time being, however, let me use Schmemann’s observation regarding the
centrality of events in the faith of the church to throw light on the topic I wish
to explore. Earlier I said it is difficult to miss the fact that so many icons depict
not particular figures, but events fundamental in the history of the church.
Indeed, it is difficult to miss the fact that the so-called festal icons of the church
depict not particular figures, but the very events to which Schmemann refers.
Suppose, to keep our topic manageable, we limit our attention to such event-
depicting icons, as we may call them.7 I want to suggest that Schmemann’s
reflections allow us to reframe the issue we are exploring, bringing it into
sharper focus.
Central to the East’s reflection on the liturgical role of icons, I have noted, is
the claim that they are mediators of divine presence. But if what Schmemann
says is correct, they are not just that. For the art of the church also purports to
bear witness to the founding events of the church, inviting us to become
participants in them. If so, we now have three interlocking ideas about the
liturgical role of icons with which to work. Event-depicting icons are at once
witnesses to divine action in the world, mediators of divine presence, and
occasions for participation in the founding events of the church. My project in
what follows is to unpack these three themes, arguing that they allow us to
make progress with our leading question about the liturgical ratio of icons.
Indeed, I shall suggest that these three themes are more closely connected than
they might seem at first glance. If we understand the ways in which icons are a
witness, then we shall also understand how they are both mediators of divine
presence and invitations to the living relation of which Schmemann speaks.
To this let me add the following observation: if the Christian East is correct,
both scripture and the art of the church bear witness to its founding events.
The Eastern church, however, has never viewed event-depicting icons as mid-
rashic commentary on scripture. The role of these icons is not, as it were, to put
scripture into pictures. Rather, generally speaking, icons of this sort purport to
represent the same content as scripture, albeit in a different medium and with
7
Among the class of event-depicting icons, I shall have my eye exclusively on those that
purport to represent past events and not those that purport to depict future events, such as the
Last Judgment.

different interpretive emphases.8 Scripture and icons are, according to this
view, different ways of expressing or getting at the same thing. If this is right,
icons and scripture do not have fundamentally different purposes. (Indeed, we
should not miss the fact that the Christian East speaks not of painting, but of
writing icons.) This suggests that if we understand how it is that scripture
functions as a witness, then we shall also understand how icons do the same. In
the next section, I shall pursue the parallel between these two instruments of
witness.
6.2. WITNESS
Having spent fifteen chapters exploring the notion of divine speech, Nicholas
Wolterstorff, in the Afterword to his book Divine Discourse, raises the issue of
what reason there is to believe that scripture is actually a medium of divine
discourse.9 Wolterstorff notes that the dominant type of rationale offered for
this claim within the broadly Protestant tradition, found in both Calvin and
Barth, is a-historical. Scripture, according to such views, is self-authenticating
or authenticated by the internal testimony of the Holy Spirit. On its own,
Wolterstorff contends that this type of approach will not work. Any plausible
justification of the claim that scripture is an instrument of divine speech will
have to proceed historically, taking into account the historical pedigree of the
text. However, when one does proceed historically, Wolterstorff suggests, a
pattern of justification emerges. The pattern is one that proceeds from divine
authorization to divine appropriation.
The divine authorization consists in a chain of authorization-conferring
events. The initial event is one in which the apostles are deputized by God the
Father through Christ to be witnesses to and representatives of Christ and his
salvific work. What emerges from this commission is a body of apostolic
teaching and practice, which incorporates what Jesus taught them and what
they remember of Jesus’s ministry, all of which is formulated under the
guidance of the Holy Spirit. Substantial parts of this body of teaching is,
over a period of time, then incorporated not only into the church’s worship,
but also into a series of books and letters composed by the apostles or their
close associates—the apostolicity of these texts lying in the fact that they
express the mind of those commissioned to be witnesses to Christ. The final
8
The exception to the identity-in-content claim is those icons that depict events not recorded
in scripture, such as the dormition of the Theotokos. The identity-in-content-claim is, I believe,
best understood to be a claim about what Wolterstorff (1995) calls designative content. Two
claims that purport to represent some event have the same designative content just in case they
designate or refer to the same event.
9
Wolterstorff (1995), ch. 16.

link in the chain of authorization is the process of canonization, wherein the
church designates that a single text, Holy Scripture, is divinely authorized.
The book that emerges from this process of canonization is, in the mind of
the church, the word of God. But how is it that the writings of Luke, John, and
Paul have this status? How can it be that scripture is an instrument of divine
speech? The answer that Wolterstorff offers is this: it cannot simply be because
their writings are inspired by God. Nor can it merely lie in the fact that in these
writings God reveals God’s will to humanity. For it is perfectly possible for
something to be inspired by someone and yet not count as his word. Likewise,
it is possible for something to reveal something about someone without its
being the case that that thing is a case of that person’s speech. So what brings it
about that the scriptural texts are God’s word, God’s speech to humanity?
Simplified somewhat, Wolterstorff ’s suggestion is that the writings of Luke,
John, and Paul count as divine speech because God appropriates their writings
as God’s own.10 An analogy might help to understand the proposal: suppose
you and I serve together on a school board. And suppose, in the context of a
meeting, you enter a motion. I agree heartily with the content of this motion
and second it. In so doing, I have made your speech act my own. I have
appropriated your speech. In much the same way, Wolterstorff contends, God
appropriates the discourse of those God has commissioned to speak, thereby
making their discourse God’s own. Scripture is a case in which one person
speaks by way of the speech acts performed by another. To use Wolterstorff ’s
terminology, it is a case of double-agency discourse.
The position just articulated is a blend of the old and the new. By insisting
that the books that belong to the scriptural canon must be apostolic, the position
is identical with that defended by the ancient church, including the church of
the East. By offering a model of what brings it about that the apostolic
writings count as divine speech, however, the position goes beyond anything
explicitly said by the Church Fathers. Nonetheless, as I shall suggest in a
moment, I believe it to be a natural extension of what the Fathers say and,
perhaps, what they would’ve said had they reflected on the matter using the
conceptuality of speech acts.
At any rate, according to the view we’re exploring, scripture is a witness to
the founding events of the church. The witness, if Schmemann is correct, is the
church’s. But it is not only the church’s. It is also God’s. In a large range
of cases, by both authorizing and appropriating the speech of the apostles, God
vouches for the historicity of these events, calls attention to their centrality
in salvation history, and communicates God’s present intentions toward
10
Wolterstorff himself distinguishes between deputized discourse, cases in which one person
is authorized to speak for another, and appropriated discourse, cases in which one person
appropriates the discourse of another. Here I emphasize the latter sort of double-agency
discourse.

humanity. In this double-agency witness, one sees a theme deep in the
theological reflection of the East rising to the surface. For fundamental to the
Eastern view is the conviction that, at its best, the divine-human interaction is a
synergos or a synergy between God’s will and work and ours. The synergy
between the divine will and the human, according to the church, is present
most explicitly in the person of Christ. It is also present in that process that the
church calls salvation, the aim of which is to become participants in the divine
life. Finally, if the model that Wolterstorff proposes is correct, the synergy is also
present in the message of the scriptural texts, as it is also the joint product of
human and divine speech. Synergoi of the word, both incarnate and written.
The witness of scripture, according to the model that we’ve been exploring,
consists (at least in part) in the fact that it is a text both authorized and
appropriated by God. Let me now move to the second part of the parallel I am
pursuing, which concerns the art of the church. Over and again, in their
struggle with the iconoclasts, the Church Fathers speak of icons as witnesses
to God’s salvific work. What is the character of their witness? The Seventh
Ecumenical Council states the matter thus:
To make our confession short, we keep unchanged all the ecclesiastical traditions
handed down to us, whether in writing or verbally, one of which is the making of
pictorial representations, agreeable to the history of the preaching of the Gospel, a
tradition useful in many respects, but especially in this, that so the incarnation of
the Word of God is shown forth as real and not merely fantastic. . . .
We, therefore, following . . . the authority of our Holy Fathers and the. . . . Holy
Spirit . . . define with all certitude and accuracy that just as the figure of the
precious and life-giving Cross, so also the venerable and holy images, as well in
painting and mosaic of other fit materials should be set forth in the holy churches
of God. . . . For by so much more frequently as they are seen in artistic represen-
tation, by so much more readily are men lifted up to the memory of their
prototypes, and to a longing after them; and to these should be given due
salutation and honourable reverence, not indeed that true worship of faith
which pertains alone to the divine nature; but to these, as to the figure of the
precious and life-giving Cross and to the Book of the Gospels . . . .
Thus we follow Paul, who spake in Christ, and the whole divine Apostolic
company and the holy Fathers, holding fast to the traditions which we have
received.11
The argument of this passage comes in two layers. In the first layer, the authors
of the council maintain that the icons of the church are, first and foremost,
vehicles by which the church witnesses to the incarnation. What makes them
legitimate vehicles of witness? They are apostolic; they express the mind of the
church and, in particular, of “Paul, who spake in Christ.” But why think that
11
Seventh Ecumenical Council. I quote from the translation in the Christian Classics Ethereal
Library. Available at <www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf214.toc.html> (accessed August 21, 2015).

the icons genuinely have this status of being legitimate apostolic witnesses to
the incarnation? Here we come to the second layer of the argument, which is
an argument from the liturgical practices of the church. No Christian, the
authors of the council claim, denies the legitimacy of displaying both the cross
and the Gospels. And no Christian denies that it is appropriate to show great
reverence toward them by, among other things, touching and kissing them.
These practices also express the mind of the apostles; if not explicitly taught by
the apostles, they are actions that the apostles would have instructed us to
perform were they aware of our situation. But if so, how could one legitimately
treat objects such as the cross and the Gospels with great reverence and not the
images of Christ and his salvific work? “Why do you worship the book and spit
upon the picture?” asked John of Damascus. Since the content of the icons and
scripture is identical, John continues, “if the one is worthy of honor, the other
is worthy of honor also.”12
By pressing these points about the practices of the church, the authors of the
council took themselves to be on firm polemical ground. For they were well
aware that arguments similar to these had won the day in the first council of
Nicea over four hundred years earlier. When unable to settle the issue of
Christ’s divinity by appeal to the writings of the apostles alone, the response
was to look at how the apostles had taught the followers of Christ to pray. The
followers of Christ, the architects of the first Nicean council pointed out, are
to pray in the name of the Trinity. Were Christ not divine, the argument
continued, this practice would be bizarre. Why would we pray in the name of
the one true God and also in the name of two other created sub-deities? Were
Christ a creature, to pray as the apostles had taught would be idolatrous. Such
idolatry would be unacceptable, however, especially were it to come from the
mouths of the apostles. The best explanation of why the apostles instructed us
to pray in this way—so the argument continues—is that they assumed that
Christ himself is divine in the same manner as the Father.
Let us now take the argument a further step. John of Damascus writes that
the icons are “not our gods, but are like books which lie open in the churches
in the sight of all.” These visual books are helpful, for “all of us alike, whether
learned or uneducated, benefit from what is painted in the icons. What the
written word proclaims through letters, iconography proclaims and presents
through colors.” Lightly admonishing his readers, John continues, “now use
your mind with precision. It is not I who am speaking, but the Holy Spirit who
declares plainly through the holy apostle Paul, ‘God spoke of old in various
12
Quoted in Pelikan (1974), 131. Later, I’ll indicate why John’s argument goes through only if
one adds several other assumptions, including the claim that the content of both types of text is
presented with the same illocutionary force. Perhaps it is also worth adding that I do not
interpret John to claim that because icons and scripture share the same content, they thereby
have the same authoritative status in the church.

ways to our fathers by the prophets.’” To which John then adds this point of
emphasis: “note that God spoke in many and various ways.”13 The implication
that John wishes his readers to appreciate is clear: do not be surprised by the
fact that God speaks in many and various ways. Do not, furthermore, be
surprised that God speaks through the art of the church as well as through the
Gospels themselves. For, once again, if these two media genuinely express the
same content, it is difficult to see how one could at once maintain that God
speaks through the one but not the other.
Had we not explored how it might be that the scriptural texts are instru-
ments of divine speech, John’s suggestion that icons are also media of divine
discourse might have seemed baffling. How could a work of art count as a case
of divine speech? But at this point, we can see how to expand upon John’s
observation. Suppose that agents can perform speech acts not only by writing
and speaking sentences, but also by composing works of visual art. Suppose,
further, that the church’s use of icons, like the writing and the canonization of
scripture, has been not only guided by the work of the Holy Spirit, but also
divinely authorized in virtue of its apostolicity. Suppose, finally, that by both
authorizing and guiding the composition of the icons these works of art have
been appropriated by God as a vehicle by which God expresses God’s inten-
tions with respect to humanity. (We might think of the Spirit’s act of guidance
functioning like a divine signature, appropriating a speech act that has been
divinely authorized.) By appropriating these works, God does such things as
vouch for the historicity of the events they depict, draw attention to their
centrality in salvation history, and communicate God’s present intentions
toward humanity. If we assume these things, then the parallel between the
Gospels and icons that both the authors of the seventh ecumenical council and
John of Damascus wish to emphasize is close. Both media function as wit-
nesses to divine action in the world—and this in a twofold sense: both media
are the product of those authorized to witness or testify to Christ’s salvific
work. Moreover, both media themselves represent events central to the life of
the church as having certain features, thereby testifying to their occurrence. If
the model that we have been exploring is correct, then God appropriates what
is said by way of the composition of these works. This is what renders them the
book and the art of the church.
6.3. PRESENCE
Few of us communicate by hand-written letters these days. For better or worse,

electronic media have won the day. But most of us know what it is like to receive
13
John of Damascus (2003), 44, 54.

a hand-written letter from a friend, spouse, or loved one. The shapes of the
letters on the page, the phrases and idioms used, as well as what is said all bear
the marks of the author. They express his or her person. Art is often similar.
The materials and colors used, the use of space and, more broadly, the choice of
what to present in a work of art also bear the mark of the artist. They, too,
express his or her person. When the author or artist is no longer alive, often his
or her writings or works of art are the closest thing we have to being with that
person. Such is the degree to which these media can express who we are.
Several times now I have drawn attention to the Christian East’s claim that
icons are mediators of divine presence, raising the question of what this claim
could amount to. I would like to suggest that the answer to this question is
now before us. The key is to understand the ways in which icons mediate
divine presence along the lines of how a letter communicates the intentions of
its author.
Letters are vehicles of communication. By performing the action of writing
a series of sentences, an author thereby performs speech acts of various kinds
such as asserting that one thing is the case, asking about something else, and
promising to act in a certain way. These speech or illocutionary acts are not
produced haphazardly. It is in virtue of having illocutionary act intentions of
various kinds that an author performs them. Of course we are all familiar with
cases in which an agent’s illocutionary act intentions fail to correspond to the
speech act performed. Jane means to praise another’s work but inadvertently
voices criticism. We are also familiar with cases in which an author’s illocut-
ionary act intentions no longer represent her considered opinion, as when a
person changes her mind about what she said earlier about someone else’s
work. Still, when all goes well, the two correspond. In these cases, when an
author intends to assert that the Rocky Mountains are magnificent, she
succeeds in asserting this about the Rocky Mountains. When all goes well,
then, there is a perfectly straightforward sense in which a letter expresses the
intentions of its author. For by authoring this letter she thereby expresses her
illocutionary act intentions with regard to her audience. And when all goes
well, these intentions are manifest to her audience. They are, to use an
equivalent idiom, present to her audience. The letter, in this way, is a vehicle
of presence.
Let us return once again to the claim that icons are mediators of divine
presence, keeping in mind the appropriation model of speech with which we
have been working. By composing an icon according to the conventions of
icon writing, what does its creator wish to communicate? The question raises
complexities. Consider the person who composes (or “writes”) a particular
copy of Christ’s baptism in the Jordan. In so composing this icon, that person
may have no illocutionary act intentions whatsoever. She may be simply
engaging in an exercise of copying one thing from another, thereby honing
some of her artistic skills. Or she may compose the icon simply because she

enjoys creating fairly abstract art. And indeed something similar may be true
of the person who composed the original icon from which this particular icon
is copied. It is possible that in depicting, say, Christ’s baptism in the Jordan, he
did not intend to claim that Christ was baptized at all. And yet I’ve claimed
that it’s the church’s view that icons are vehicles of speech. If so, then
illocutionary act intentions must somehow be operative if an icon is to testify
to this event. But whose intentions?
Well, suppose that over time a system of composing icons emerged that had
many features similar to that of a natural language: certain colors are used to
represent particular attributes of persons represented, particular artistic tropes
are used to help the viewer recognize where the event depicted took place,
certain symbols are used to communicate that a depicted person who bears
them has a particular standing such as being a martyr, certain acronyms and
monograms are used to identify particular figures, and so forth. Call this the
communication system of icons. Suppose, furthermore, that this communica-
tion system is a component of the wider social practice of writing icons, a
social practice in which only certain people are appointed to write icons, only
certain materials are used to compose them, and only certain media are
employed to display them. This social practice evolves and is fluid. For
example, some who work within the practice add new emphases to established
patterns of using the communication system; others introduce entirely new
elements to the communication system. Although there is a tight connection
between elements of the communication system and that which they com-
municate, there is, however, nothing like a one-to-one correspondence
between them. The system can be employed by competent participants in
the social practice in various and creative ways to communicate different
things. The same thing can be represented in different ways and the same
elements of the system can communicate different things. Given this fluidity,
when we examine an icon, how are we to determine how the communication
system is being used?
In principle, there are several available answers to this question. Without
arguing for the position here, let me simply remark that appeal to something
akin to authorial or speech act intentions appears unavoidable at this point.14
To determine how an element of the communication system is employed in
the composition of a given icon, we need to know something about how the
person employing it intended it to be used. But this leads us back to our initial
question: Whose intentions?
The answer, I suggest, lies in distinguishing the composer of an icon from
its author. Those who compose icons are the practitioners of iconography,
those who engage in the social practice of composing icons, employing what
14
A fuller defense of the issue in play can be found in Carroll (1992), and Wolterstorff (1995),
ch. 11.

I’ve called the practice’s communication system. The author of an icon, by
contrast, is the one to whose intentions we must appeal in order to determine
how the composer’s employment of the communication system should be
interpreted (on the assumption, of course, that it admits of a determinate
interpretation). According to the Christian East, the church is the author of its
icons. If this is right, the intentions of the church have not only formed and
informed the social practice of iconography; they also determine how these
texts should be read. Obviously, we touch here upon deep and controversial
issues about whether there can be collective intentions and how we should
understand them. But suppose for argument’s sake that there can be.15 Then
the position of the East is evident: when the East claims that icons are the art of
the church, at least part of what is meant is that the church is the author of
these pictorial texts.
What should now be added is that, if the appropriation model is correct, the
church is not the only author of these texts. For fundamental to a position such
as that defended by John of Damascus is that icons are vehicles of divine
speech. If so, God uses them as instruments of speech. The appropriation
model tells us how this might be so: God appropriates the intentions of their
author—in this case, those of the church—to communicate various things to
humanity. If so, then the icons of the church also express God’s communica-
tive intentions toward us. Here we have double-agency discourse once again.
Indeed, we have dual authorship as well. The icons have dual authors, both
human and divine.16
Let me now tie this together. At the outset of this section, I suggested that
there is a perfectly intelligible sense in which a letter makes its author present to
us. Inasmuch as that letter is a vehicle of that author’s illocutionary act inten-
tions, it not only informs us about them, it also expresses these intentions,
making them (when all goes well) manifest to us. It is in this sense that a letter is
a vehicle or mediator of presence. The Eastern Church’s puzzling claim that
icons are mediators of divine presence, I am now suggesting, should be under-
stood along similar lines. For suppose the appropriation model is correct, and
15
For a defense, see Gregory Mellema (1997).
16
The dual authorship of icons and scripture opens up various possibilities regarding the
nature of divine speech, among which are these: suppose we distinguish an agent’s intention to
perform an illocutionary action of a given type, such as asserting, from her intention to perform
an illocutionary act of a certain type that has a particular meaning or noematic content, such as
that the Rocky Mountains are magnificent. According to the appropriation model, when God
appropriates human speech, at least two things could occur. First, God could appropriate both
the human author’s intention to perform an illocutionary act of a particular type and the
noematic content that that agent intended to express by the performance of that act. Second,
God could appropriate the intention to perform an illocutionary act type, but not the noematic
content that that agent intended to express by the performance of that act. In this case, by
appropriating illocutionary act intentions, God performs an illocutionary act of the same type
performed by its human author, but endows it with a new meaning.

icons are vehicles of their author’s illocutionary act intentions. Their primary
author, if I have interpreted the main line of thought in the Christian East
correctly, is the church. Still, God appropriates what the church says via its art,
thereby also becoming its author. If so, the art of the church expresses God’s
illocutionary act intentions to us, their audience. Icons are mediators of divine
presence, then, in the sense that they mediate God’s illocutionary act intentions
toward humanity. Or more exactly, in some cases, they are the mediators of
God’s present standing illocutionary act intentions with respect to humanity.
The presence in question also has a temporal dimension.
To this line of argument let me add a caveat. I have said that we ought to
think of the way in which icons communicate divine presence along the model
of the way in which a letter communicates the intentions of its author. By
saying this, however, I do not mean to offer a view that provides an exhaustive
account of the manner in which an icon communicates divine presence.
I mean only to draw attention to one, albeit a central, way in which an icon
might do this. For all that I’ve argued, there are other ways in which icons
communicate modes of divine presence that prove to be much more difficult
to elucidate in any sort of philosophically articulate way. That said, I do
understand the dimension of presence on which I’ve had my eye to be robust.
Sometimes—think once again about cases in which one is separated from
another whom one loves—a vehicle of another’s intentions, such as a letter, is
the most vivid way by which he or she can be present to one.
6.4. PARTICIPATION
At the outset of his defense of images, John of Damascus writes that “things
which have already taken place are remembered by means of images. . . . These
images are of two kinds: either they are words written in books . . . or else they
are material images, such as the jar of manna, or Aaron’s staff, which were to
be kept in the ark as a memorial.”17 Icons, John continues, belong to the
second category. They are memorials. But they are memorials of a curious
sort. For their role is not merely to testify to what has occurred, but also to
gesture toward what is to come. Odd as it may sound, because they depict what
has occurred in certain ways, icons are memorials that point in multiple
temporal directions. Paying attention to this feature of iconography, I now
want to suggest, will help us to unpack the last of the three themes I wish to
explore, which is the claim that icons are means by which one can participate
in the events they depict.
17
John of Damascus (2003), 21.

To get our bearings with respect to this issue, let us return once more to the
idea that event-depicting icons function as a witness. The witness consists in
the fact that icons of this sort accurately represent events central in the life and
history of the church. But it does not wholly consist in this. One can, after all,
accurately represent an actual event but not thereby intend to testify to its
historicity. In books of historical fiction, for example, authors often depict
actual events but make no claims about whether they actually occurred.
Rather, by representing these events, an author invites his audience to consider
or imagine them as part of a larger fictional world that is projected by the text.
If the East is correct, however, icons do not function like the propositions
presented in a text of historical fiction (although, as I shall point out in a
moment, there are similarities to appreciate). Rather, in a large range of cases,
in depicting an event in a certain way, the author of an icon wishes to vouch
for the fact that the event depicted actually occurred. To employ the idiom of
speech acts, in depicting an event in a certain way, the author of an icon
thereby intends to assert or testify that that event has actually occurred and has
many of the properties that it is depicted as having.
Suppose, then, we pair the commemorative function of icons with assertive
illocutionary act intentions: by pictorially depicting an event, the (human)
author of an icon thereby asserts, testifies, or witnesses to the fact that that
event has actually occurred and has properties of various sorts. If the appro-
priation model of speech is correct, these assertoric speech intentions are also
ones that God expresses toward us by appropriating the art of the church.
A moment ago, however, I pointed out that icons have the distinction of at
once pointing in multiple temporal directions. Their function is not simply to
testify to what has occurred, but also to gesture toward what shall occur.
Consider, in this regard, an icon of the Last Supper that depicts Christ
surrounded by his apostles. In one sense, this icon is supposed to be histor-
ically accurate, for it purports to depict an event that actually occurred. But, in
another, it takes considerable liberties with the history, for this icon does not
endeavor to depict Christ and the apostles at the Last Supper as they actually
appeared. Rather, faces are elongated, mouths are closed, eyes are enlarged,
nimbuses are introduced, and perspective is inverted. And yet this icon is not
badly executed realist art! Rather, the emphases and distortions are used to
present the figures depicted in the icon as transfigured. The icon depicts Christ
as he appeared to the apostles later in the upper room and the apostles as they
appeared to each other on Pentecost, brimming with light. Echoing a theme
deep in the liturgical life of the East, the commemoration of a past event
contains within itself anticipations of a future one.18
18
Dozens of examples could be given from the church’s hymnody. Here is the Troparian
from Lazarus Saturday, which is also sung on the Sunday of Palms: “O Christ God, when you
raised Lazarus from the dead before Your passion, You confirmed the universal resurrection.

So, there is a sense in which event-depicting icons testify not only to what
has occurred, but also to what shall occur. But here the significance of the
Christian church’s claim that we are all called to be disciples of Christ should
not be lost from view. The depiction of the disciples not as they were but as
they would become is both an invitation and a promise. The invitation is to
become as the disciples were to become: bearers of the divine light who are
transfigured by their interactions with Christ. Icons invite us to imagine what
this might be like. The promise is that transformation indeed shall occur if the
invitation is accepted. If icons do indeed point in multiple temporal directions,
we can render the idea that they are vehicles of divine presence still more
concretely. In the art of the church, what are made present to us are God’s
illocutionary act intentions. These are intentions whereby God not only
testifies to what has occurred, but also invites us to be transformed, promising
that the transformation shall take place. By pairing the broadly eschatological
dimension of icons with those illocutionary act intentions expressed by invi-
tations and promises, we can come to a fuller view of the presence that icons
are intended to communicate.
But what has any of this to do with our final task, which is to make sense of
the idea that icons allow us to participate here and now in the events they
depict? Well, suppose that icons do function to express a divine invitation and
promise. Then there is certainly a sense in which by recognizing this invitation
and promise, we can thereby presently participate in the reality of the events
depicted. When reflecting on the church’s frequent use of the “liturgical
present”—its use of the indexical term “today” in its hymnody—Schmemann
puts the matter like this:
To be sure, the Virgin does not give birth today, no one “factually” stands before
Pilate, and as facts these events belong to the past. But today we can remember
these facts and the Church is primarily the gift and the power of that remem-
brance which transforms facts of the past into eternally meaningful events.
Liturgical celebration is thus a re-entrance of the Church into the event, and
this means not merely its “idea,” but its joy or sadness, its living and concrete
reality. . . . We were not there in Bethany at the grave [of Lazarus] with the crying
sisters. From the Gospel we only know about it. But it is in the Church’s
celebration today that an historical fact becomes an event for us, for me, a
power in my life, a memory, a joy.19
Distinguish, Schmemann suggests, between an event and its significance. An
event itself is a dated happening that, unlike a property or state of affairs, does
not admit of multiple instantiations. There is no intelligible sense in which an
Like the children with palms of victory, we cry to You: O Destroyer of Death, Hosanna in the
Highest! Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord!”
19
Schmemann (1969), 82–3.

event such as Christ’s baptism in the Jordan can reoccur. Nor is there any
sense in which one can today literally be a participant in this event, for it has
already occurred. By contrast, the significance of an event is a property that
that event has. Roughly speaking, the significance of an event for a person is
the import it has or should have for that person given his commitments,
interests, or values. While there is no literal sense in which we can participate
in a past event, we can presently “participate” in it inasmuch as we can
presently allow its significance to shape our lives. To use language often
appealed to by contemporary theologians, we can participate in an event
inasmuch as we allow it to shape our narrative identity.
The point is worth expanding upon. Consider what Augustine does in his
Confessions. An unmistakable feature of Augustine’s telling of his life-
narrative is that it is couched in the language of the scriptures. Indeed, at
various points, Augustine invites his audience to view events in his own life,
such as his anguishing in the garden, as ones that parallel those in the Gospels.
In doing so, Augustine makes the Gospel narrative his story; the Gospels
provide the framework in which he understands the significance of the events
that compose his life. There is also, however, an unmistakable sense in which
by appropriating aspects of the Gospel narrative, Augustine thereby expands
this narrative itself, presenting his own life-story as an extension of it. This
allows Augustine to situate his own life-narrative within a larger, more cosmic
narrative of redemption that highlights the scope and power of the Gospel
narrative itself. We could think of these two ways in which Augustine connects
his life to the events of the Gospels as an inward and an outward movement:
the inward movement is one in which Augustine appropriates the Gospel
narrative to illuminate events in his own life, while the outward movement is
one in which Augustine situates his own story within a larger, more cosmic
narrative. The point that is important for my purposes is that these two
different ways in which Augustine connects his life with the Gospel narrative
are ways in which he participates in the events depicted by the Gospels. To use
the language from the passage quoted from Schmemann earlier, they are two
ways in which Augustine comes into a living relationship with these events.
In any case, if Schmemann is correct, to participate in the founding events
of the church is not, as some Orthodox theologians have suggested, to enter
into a liturgical time machine in which the past mystically becomes present.20
Rather, it is to do something very much like what Augustine does in writing
20
For example, in his book Time and Man, the Greek theologian Georgios Mantzaridis
maintains that there is a unique dimension of time, which he calls liturgical time. In this
dimension, we are “freed from the restraints of time.” Whatever is repeated in time is “not
confined to time but extends into eternity.” “Liturgical time” not only “transcends time,” but also
“transfigures physical time and transports us from symbol to truth, from the transient to the
eternal.” So, in some sense that lies beyond understanding, in liturgical time, these events become
present to us here and now, allowing us to participate in them (Mantzaridis [1996]).

his Confessions. It is to order one’s life around the founding events of the
church, taking stock today of the full significance of these events for us here
and now. But it is also to view one’s life as a part of a larger narrative, which
includes the founding events of the church. It is to come into living relation-
ship with these events by doing such things as celebrating them in the
liturgical life of the church, living in expectation of further events they
anticipate, and comporting one’s life in recognition that they have trans-
formed human history.
Understood thus, there is nothing particularly mysterious about the claim
that icons are vehicles by which we participate in the founding events of the
church. They are the visual means by which the church invites us to shape
our narrative identities by connecting them in various ways with the found-
ing events of the church. It may bear emphasizing that, if the appropriation
model is correct, the invitation is issued not merely by the church, but also
by God.
Let me add to this a final observation. In his reflections on faith, Schme-
mann speaks both of participating in the founding events of the church and
coming into living relation with them. I have offered an account of what he
means by the first claim, thereby also dropping clues about what it would be to
come into living relation with these events. What should now be added is that
the art of the church can also be an occasion for coming into living relation not
simply with the events they depict, but also with their author. As philosophers
of art such as Noël Carroll have emphasized, when we engage with a work of
art such as an icon, there is a sense in which we enter into a relationship with
its author.21 For to genuinely engage with a piece of art is not simply to arrive
at clever construals of its significance. Rather, it is to attempt to understand
its author, discerning what he is trying to say by way of the creation or
presentation of that work of art. This is surely a natural extension of what
Schmemann himself had in mind when he speaks of coming into living
relation with the events that the art of the church depicts.
6.5. CONCLUSION
If you were to walk into a traditional service in the Dutch Reformed tradition
you might find that immediately after the sermon, there is a long period of
intentional silence. If you were to ask about the significance of this practice,
someone knowledgeable would tell you that the people view the sermon as
an occasion in which God speaks to the congregation. The silence is an
21
Carroll (1992), 118ff.

expression of grateful acceptance of what has been proclaimed.22 To my
knowledge, there is no similar practice in the Eastern church. Rather, at
various points in the liturgy, Eastern Christians do such things as kiss a
copy of the Gospel itself and prostrate themselves before icons. At the outset
of our discussion I asked about such behavior: What is it about the liturgical
role of icons that would render such behavior fitting or appropriate?
The answer I have offered to this question falls into two parts. The first part,
which has occupied most of my attention, has been to identify the liturgical
function of icons. Only if we understand this, I have assumed, can we begin to
understand the behavior in which Orthodox Christians engage. Admittedly,
the account of the liturgical role of icons I have offered is not general in
character; it pertains only to the role of event-depicting icons.23 Still, its main
lines should be clear enough. According to this answer, icons are best viewed
as vehicles of both divine action and presence. By appropriating the speech
actions performed by the human authors of these texts, God does such things
as vouch for the historicity and importance of the events these texts depict,
invite us to be transformed by them, and promise that we shall see both
redemption and transformation.
If this is right, however, the second part of the answer more or less falls out
of the first. Eastern Christians prostrate themselves before icons, touching and
kissing them for much the same reason that the Dutch Reformed keep silent
after the sermon. It is their way—demonstrative by Western European
standards—of expressing gratitude toward the divine witness, invitation, and
promise they communicate. To say this, admittedly, is not to settle the issue of
whether such behavior is fitting. We are all aware of cases in which gratitude
and affection are expressed in mawkish or inappropriate ways. That said, one
needn’t cast far to discover parallels to the ways in which Eastern Christians
comport themselves with respect to icons. Visit a work of art such as Maya
Lin’s Vietnam War Memorial and you will find people doing such things as
touching and kissing the names of fallen soldiers, etched in marble. Evidently,
the touching and kissing are organic—indeed, uniquely human—responses
that these people find that this work of art calls forth. Why should it be any
22
In saying this, I don’t wish to hazard a brutely empirical generalization. Rather, I wish to
proffer what Gadamer would call a descriptive account of understanding. The behavior in
question is what takes place when participants in the practice have grasped its ratio, conforming
their behavior to it.
23
I believe, however, that the account can be naturally extended to apply to icons of other
sorts. Very briefly, I would say this: first, many icons that we might not initially categorize as
event-depicting actually are—think here of icons in which Christ raises his hand in blessing or
judgment or when the Theotokos holds the Christ child. Second, as Orthodox thinkers such as
Leonid Oupensky point out, icons of the saints are ones in which these individuals are presented
as transfigured. What is presented in these images, then, is something like a point in a narrative:
among other things, icons of this variety invite us to explore the details of that person’s life that
either led to or have been the result of such a transformation. See Oupensky (1992).

different with the icons? By touching and kissing them, Eastern Christians find
themselves expressing, in as fitting a way they know how, gratitude toward the
extraordinary witness, invitation, and promise that the icons communicate. In
doing so, they express gratitude, love, and laud toward the One who, if the
church is correct, is their author.24
24
I thank Sarah Coakley, Jamie Smith, Reinhardt Hütter, Peter Ochs, and Nicholas Wolter-
storff for their feedback on the ideas that eventually made their way into this chapter. (Those
familiar with Wolterstorff ’s work in both aesthetics and hermeneutics will recognize its influence
on the line of argument developed here.) Tom Flint, Jonathan Jacobs, Luke Reinsma, two
anonymous referees, the philosophy department at Calvin College, and an audience at the
conference “Philosophy and Liturgy: Ritual, Practice, and Embodied Wisdom,” Calvin College,
May 2008, also offered helpful input on a version of this essay. Finally, I owe special thanks to
both Matt Halteman and Anne Poortenga for puzzling through these issues with me.
The Significance of Liturgical Singing
It is a striking feature of the Eastern Christian liturgies that they are almost
entirely sung.1 With the exception of the homily, almost nothing in these
liturgies is merely spoken. Moreover, aside from the occasional gesture, such
as when the priest bows to the assembled, virtually none of their actions are
performed in silence. Instead, singing accompanies nearly all the actions that
constitute these liturgies, including the action around which they revolve,
namely, eating the eucharistic meal.
To my knowledge, the Eastern liturgies are unique among the Christian
liturgies in this regard; none of the other Christian liturgies incorporates
singing to the extent to which the Eastern liturgies do. Why is that?
A satisfactory reply to this question would be complex, but let me gesture
toward the beginnings of an answer. All the liturgies in the Christian tradition
exhibit an orientation, emphasizing certain activities rather than others. Many
of the liturgies that belong to the Reformed traditions, for example, emphasize
proclamation, placing the sermon at the center of the service; any singing that
occurs in these liturgies is supposed to complement the sermon. Other
liturgies, such as those of the Eastern churches, are oriented not toward
proclamation but worship, moving through multiple episodes of petitioning,
praising, and thanksgiving. Of course proclamation is not absent from the
Eastern liturgies (any more than worship is absent from the Reformed litur-
gies). Nevertheless, proclamation does not lie at the heart of these liturgies;
worship does.2
Once one appreciates the orientation of the Eastern liturgies, however, then
it’s apparent why singing figures so prominently in them. There is no more
fitting way to express worship than in song. Yet it is one thing to say that
singing in the liturgy fits its structure and orientation; it is another to identify
1
Unless I indicate otherwise, when I speak of the Eastern liturgies, I’ll have the eucharistic
liturgies in mind. I should also note that I am, to a certain extent, working with a semi-idealized
type of these liturgies in which many portions of the liturgical script are sung by the congregation
(and not simply the choir, chanters, or celebrant).
2
Here I echo von Allmen (1965) and Wolterstorff (1983), both of whom locate themselves
within the Reformed tradition.
The Significance of Liturgical Singing 127

what it is about singing that makes it so fitting. In this chapter, I would like to
address this last issue, exploring the topic of what (at least in part) the
fittingness of liturgical singing consists in. By focusing on this issue, I realize
that I am wandering far off the beaten path of topics standardly addressed by
philosophers. Topics such as liturgy and ritualized activity—let alone the role
that singing plays in such activities—are hardly the stuff on which philo-
sophers cut their teeth! Be that as it may, I hope to show that the topic can bear
philosophical fruit.
My discussion divides into four sections. In the first (Section 7.1), I engage
with recent work in the philosophy of literature, exploring the theme that the
form of a work is not incidental to its content but deeply shapes the sorts of
information that it can express or that we can assimilate. I then turn in
Section 7.2 to the Eastern liturgies themselves, paying special attention to
several themes that figure prominently in their content. Section 7.3 engages
with work in collective action, highlighting what is distinctive about the action
of group singing. The last section (7.4) of the chapter ties together the topics
introduced earlier in the discussion, arguing that singing the text of the
Eastern liturgies is an activity of such a kind that its form guarantees that
those who engage in it instantiate important elements of its content. Some-
what more specifically, in this section, I’ll suggest that the fittingness of
liturgical singing consists (at least in part) in the way that it exemplifies the
understanding of shalom/eirene that the liturgical text itself calls for its
participants to enact. I should stress at the outset that while my attention is
focused on the fit between the form and the content of important and
pervasive elements in the Eastern liturgies, I believe that the points I make
here can be applied to other liturgies that I do not discuss.
7 . 1 . F O R M A N D CO N T EN T
The overarching theme of Martha Nussbaum’s collection of essays Love’s

Knowledge is that, while moral philosophy has largely ignored the role of
literature in achieving moral understanding, it can no longer afford to do so.3
The reason, Nussbaum claims, is not that those who write literature tend to
explore important topics that moral philosophers ignore but that literary
forms—in particular, the novel—can communicate truths about how we
should live in ways that the academic journal article or monograph cannot.
In the Introduction to Love’s Knowledge, Nussbaum specifies more clearly
3
Nussbaum (1990). I will insert page references to Nussbaum’s book parenthetically in
the text.

what she means by these claims, identifying two theses about form or “style”
that she wishes to defend:
My first claim insists that any style makes, itself, a statement: that an abstract
theoretical style makes, like any other style, a statement about what is important
and what is not, about what faculties of a reader are important for knowing and
what are not. There may then be certain plausible views about the nature of the
relevant portions of human life that cannot be housed within that form without
generating a peculiar implicit contradiction. The second claim is, then, that for an
interesting family of such views, a literary narrative of a certain sort is the only
type of text that can state them fully and fittingly, without contradiction. (7)
Anglo-American analytic philosophy, Nussbaum continues, has rejected these

claims, since it has either ignored “the relation between form and content
altogether, or, when not ignoring it, to deny the first of our two claims, treating
style as largely decorative—as irrelevant to the stating of content, and neutral
among the contents that might be conveyed” (8).
As an illustration of what Nussbaum is driving at, consider the topic of
friendship. If one wanted to better understand the nature of friendship, there
are any number of philosophical texts to which one could turn, including
Aristotle’s discussion in book VIII of the Nichomachean Ethics. There one
would find Aristotle distinguishing different types of friendship and specifying
the conditions that any genuine friendship must satisfy, such as that friends be
virtuous, have wealth to share, and so forth. Reading Wallace Stegner’s
depiction of friendship between two couples in his novel Crossing to Safety,
in contrast, would be a very different experience. Stegner’s text presents not
only a rather different understanding of friendship—one in which good but
less than virtuous characters are genuinely friends—but also a narrative in
which we witness friendships, with their imperfections and limits, develop
over time. Crossing to Safety, like other excellent novels, doesn’t defend any
sweeping claims about the nature of friendship; instead, it presents in rich
detail a particular set of friendships in a context in which its characters must
navigate illness, strong personalities, lack of ambition, jealousy, and the like.
Of course Stegner doesn’t simply present the everyday details of these friend-
ships; his presentation is thoroughly stylized, selecting from the lives of his
characters those details that contribute to his story.
In Nussbaum’s view, books such as Stegner’s make rather different de-
mands of their readers than do (most) philosophical texts. Readers of a
contemporary philosophical essay, says Nussbaum, are called upon to exer-
cise their intellectual powers, to critically analyze whatever claims or lines of
argument the author might be presenting. In contrast, readers of Stegner’s
book are supposed to immerse themselves in its narrative in such a way as to
better appreciate the various forms that friendship might take, to calibrate
their expectations regarding friendship, to deepen their understanding of

friendship, and so forth. It’s on the basis of this contrast that Nussbaum
defends an additional pair of claims, which are considerably more ambitious.
The first is that literary forms such as the novel are particularly hospitable to
Aristotelian conceptions of ethics that emphasize the particularity, open-
endedness, complexity, and emotionally laden character of the ethical life.
The second claim, which is an application of a thesis that Nussbaum voices in
the passage quoted at the outset of this section, is that there is a kind of
“contradiction” inherent in attempts to address topics such as friendship in
the prose of Anglo-American analytic philosophy. The “contradiction,” in
Nussbaum’s view, is that, on the one hand, philosophical prose calls readers
to exercise their critical powers by analyzing whatever claims or arguments
that an author may be presenting; this typically requires putting one’s emo-
tions at bay. But, on the other, such prose is employed to examine topics such
as friendship, which are such that to understand them, readers need to exercise
their ethical imagination and allow their emotions to be engaged. Thus, the
“contradiction” between the form of the genre and its content.
By calling these claims of Nussbaum’s “ambitious,” I have already signaled
some hesitation about them. To be acceptable, I believe that they would have
to be heavily qualified. However that may be, I want to take very seriously
Nussbaum’s thesis that the form of a work can shape what it communicates to
such an extent that there are types of understanding that it would be very
difficult and perhaps impossible to impart by employing some other form.
And, while I doubt there is any contradiction between the form of contem-
porary philosophical discourse and much of its content, Nussbaum seems to
me clearly right to point out that the form of a work can have better or worse
types of fit with its content. The question to pursue—as I mentioned earlier—
is to locate what such fittingness might consist in.
To that end, let me introduce some terminology that will prove useful. In
her discussion, Nussbaum has her eye exclusively on texts and the relations
between their content and form. Rather than focus exclusively on texts,
I would like to broaden the discussion and focus on works, whose examples
include not only texts but also symphonies, operas, plays, dances, and the like.4
A particularly important feature of works, given my purposes, is that agents
can perform illocutionary acts of various sorts by the selection or creation of a
work. By composing Crossing to Safety, for example, Stegner performed
various illocutionary acts such as asserting, questioning, and praising, many
of them in the fictive-mood. Given that works such as Crossing to Safety are
used to perform illocutionary acts, they have content, where the content of an
illocutionary act is simply what its speaker seeks to communicate in perform-
ing that act—anything that its audience must grasp in order to understand
4
The locus classicus regarding works is Wolterstorff (1980).

what the speaker is saying. This is, admittedly, a broad understanding of
content, incorporating the illocutionary force of a speech act, what is prag-
matically conveyed by the performance of a speech act, and its propositional
content. Although broad, this is the understanding of content that will be most
suitable for our purposes.
With the notions of a work and its content in hand, we can now distinguish
different types of form that a work can have. In the first place, works have what
I’ll call primary form. The primary form of a work is what is often called its
genre. A text, for example, can be a case of a novel, an epic poem, or a
philosophical essay—these all being different literary genres. Works that
exhibit some primary form, however, can be presented in various ways. An
epic poem can be sung, a short story can receive a dramatic reading, a
symphony performance can be presented in film. These ways of presenting
works are what I’ll call their secondary form. A thesis for which I’ll be arguing
is that in addition to there being fittingness relations between the primary
form of a work and its content, there are fittingness relations between the
secondary form of the performance or occurrence of a work and its content.
To lay out the case for this claim, however, we’ll first need to explore
important dimensions of the content of the Eastern liturgies.
7.2. THE VISION I N THE LITURGY
I started our discussion by noting that the Eastern Christian liturgies have the
striking feature of being almost entirely sung. That is, in addition to having a
primary form—which is an amalgamation of, among other things, poetry,
prayer, narrative, and creedal declarations—the liturgy has the secondary form
of being sung. In this section, I want to take a closer look at some prominent
themes expressed in its content. Before I do so, I should acknowledge that the
content of the liturgy is not exhausted by what the assembled verbalize in the
performance of the liturgy, since the assembled perform illocutionary acts
such as thanking by performing non-linguistic acts, such as eating. That noted,
my attention in what follows will be focused primarily on the contents of the
linguistic acts performed in the liturgy, although I’ll also draw attention at
various points to non-linguistic acts in which the assembled perform
illocutionary acts.
Those familiar with the liturgy of St. John Chrysostom know that, after the
priest declares the kingdom of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit blessed, it
begins with a series of petitions, the Great Litany. These petitions have the
curious feature of not only presenting requests to God but also instructing the
assembled how they are to perform these requests. The assembled are to pray
not only “for the peace of the whole world,” but also “in peace” and “with one

accord.”Later in the liturgy, the assembled receive similar instructions. In the
Anaphora (“the lifting up”), for example, the deacon directs the assembled to
not only offer the “holy oblation” or the eucharistic gift but also to do so in
peace. And at the liturgy’s conclusion, the priest directs the people not only to
depart from the liturgy but also to do so in the same way that they began the
liturgy, namely, “in peace.”
If this is right, phrases such as “In peace, let us pray to the Lord,” which are
used repeatedly in the liturgy, function as exhortatory directives, both
instructing and exhorting the assembled to perform liturgical actions, such
as praying, in a certain way. There is evidence in the liturgical script,
however, that phrases such as this are not simply directives but also play
additional illocutionary roles. A clue that they do lies in a line that the
deacon recites during the Litany before the Lord’s Prayer, where he
comments on what the assembled have accomplished thus far in the
liturgy: “Having asked for the unity of the Faith, and the communion of
the Holy Spirit, let us commend ourselves and each other, and all our life
unto Christ our God.” When read in conjunction with the text from the
Great Litany, in which the assembled ask for such things as unity, this
comment suggests that phrases such as “In peace, let us pray to the Lord”
function not simply as instructions directed toward the assembled, but also
as requests that the assembled direct toward God—among these being that
the assembled present their petitions in peace and in unity. The suggestion
seems to be that fulfilling the directives voiced by the deacon is not
something that is entirely in the power of the assembled. Rather, their
fulfilment is a corporate endeavor between the people and God, something
that is accomplished by (and only by) joint divine and human activity. In a
moment, I’ll have more to say about the general phenomenon of corporate
or collective action. For now, let me also note that the deacon’s comment
also suggests that the peace requested is not a state that pertains to the
assembled alone. What has been requested, according to the deacon, is also
“communion with the Holy Spirit.”
Before reflecting on these features of the liturgy, there is another dimension
of what the deacon says that deserves mention. For note that, in addition to
commenting on what has been accomplished in the liturgy, the deacon exhorts
the assembled with these words: “let us commend ourselves and each other,
and all our life unto Christ our God.” In English, this sentence is striking. By
pairing the singular noun “life” with a verbal phrase that incorporates the
first-person plural pronoun, this sentence communicates the idea that the
assembled enjoy a common, unified life. And this phrase is not an isolated
case. Later in the liturgy, the assembled recite other lines that employ the same
construction: “let us all say with all our soul and all our mind, Lord have
mercy” and “Unto you we commend our whole life and our hope, O Master
who loves humankind.”

As it happens, what is striking in the English translation of the liturgy is not
so striking in the original Greek. Idiomatic Greek often pairs singular nouns
such as “life” with verbal phrases that incorporate the first-person plural
pronoun; the English translation of the liturgy simply preserves this gram-
matical construction, which is idiosyncratic by the standards of ordinary
English. A closer look at the liturgical script, however, reveals that the use of
images of unity is not merely an artifact of an unusual Greek grammatical
construction. For, in addition to the phrases just quoted, there are phrases that
express the idea that the assembled are, in the liturgy, to be united in their
action: “Let us love one another that with one mind we may confess Father,
Son, and Holy Spirit” and “Grant that with one mouth and one heart we may
praise your all-honorable and majestic name.” (Later, I’ll comment on the
aptness of the phrase “with one heart.”)
Interspersed throughout the liturgy, then, are exhortatory directives that the
assembled perform the actions that compose the liturgy in peace and in a state
of unity. These directives, I believe, are best understood as expressing ad-
equacy conditions for the performance of the liturgy: a performance of the
liturgy is adequate only to the extent that the assembled actually perform
actions that satisfy these directives, such as the action of requesting peace of
the world and doing so in unity. Under this interpretation, were some
performance of the liturgy not to satisfy these conditions, then it would
thereby be defective. For example, if the assembled were to recite the words
of the liturgy but not thereby engage in the activity of requesting such things as
peace for the world, then their performance of the liturgy would be defective.
At this point, fascinating and difficult questions bubble to the surface. For, if
what I’ve said is correct, the liturgy, like a symphony, admits of adequate and
defective performances. But the conditions of adequacy for the performance of
a symphony differ markedly from those for the performance of the liturgy. In
one sense, the conditions for the adequate performance of a symphony are
considerably more stringent than those for the adequate performance of the
liturgy. If a performance of a symphony is to be adequate, after all, each of its
members must follow the symphonic score rather closely; only minor devi-
ations are allowed. In contrast, if a performance of the liturgy is to be
adequate, it needn’t be the case that each of the assembled follow the liturgical
script rather closely, for a performance of the liturgy can be adequate when
some of the assembled do not or cannot perform such actions as requesting
peace for the world. Rather, what renders a performance of the liturgy
adequate is that the assembled make such requests, where the assembled
cannot be identified with the totality of people assembled.
But in other ways, the conditions for the adequate performance of a
symphony are considerably less stringent than those for the adequate per-
formance of the liturgy. The conditions of adequacy for the performance of a
symphony do not dictate that the members of the symphony be at peace with

one another (or anything of the sort). All they need do is follow the symphonic
score. In contrast, the conditions of adequacy for the performance of the
liturgy require that the members of the assembled bear relations to one
another such as being at peace and being in unity.
On this occasion, let me bracket the question of what brings it about that the
assembled (as opposed to those assembled) perform such actions as request-
ing, focusing on the issue of what the frequent directives to pray in peace could
mean. None of us, I imagine, is tempted to interpret the directive that the
assembled pray in peace to mean that the assembled are to enact a truce among
themselves; even if this were something that the assembled needed to achieve,
its achievement wouldn’t imply that the assembled are in any interesting sense
unified. Given, however, other directives voiced in the liturgy—such as the
exhortatory directive voiced in the Cherubic Hymn “to cast aside all earthly
cares” and Jesus’s directives not to worry about what tomorrow may bring—it
would not be implausible to understand these directives as instructing the
assembled to offer their petitions from a state of inner-peace or tranquility. It
would, after all, be a rare case in which none of the assembled attend the
liturgy with troubled hearts.
While not implausible, I think that this understanding of the directive to
perform liturgical actions in peace could be only partially correct. Let me
explain why.
A central contention of Nicholas Wolterstorff ’s Until Justice and Peace
Embrace is that a comprehensive vision animates the Hebrew and Christian
scriptures, one according to which the ideal for which we are to strive is
shalom or eirene—translated in English as “peace.”5 As Wolterstorff under-
stands it, shalom/eirene is not a state of individual agents—a state of inner-
tranquility—but a state that supervenes on normative relations that agents
bear to themselves and other things, including other agents. Specifically,
shalom/eirene is a state that supervenes on agents being rightly related to
themselves, others, the natural world, and God. A theme that Wolterstorff
stresses in his presentation is that when the scriptures offer us images of
shalom/eirene—such as in passages from the Hebrew prophets—these images
are ethically infused; they include images in which the downtrodden are lifted
up, the oppressed are treated with dignity, and the weak receive just treatment.
According to the scriptural presentation, the effect of agents standing in these
ethically infused relations is twofold. In the first place, when agents stand in
these normative relations, states of harmony and unity take hold—harmony
among the animals, harmony among human beings, harmony between nature
and human beings, harmony between human beings and God, and so forth.
Second, when agents stand in these right relations, there is no fissure between
5
Wolterstorff (1983), especially ch. 6.

duty and delight. Rather, the people delight in standing in these ethically
infused right relations and the harmony in which they result. An implication
of this last point is that to delight in shalom/eirene is itself also a component of
shalom/eirene.
When viewed against the comprehensive vision of shalom/eirene, litur-
gical actions take on new significance; they are not empty gestures but ways
in which the assembled enact the vision of shalom/eirene. Think, for ex-
ample, of the various actions of the liturgy in which the people interact with
elements of (or products of) the natural world, such as when the priest
blesses the people with water or the assembled kiss a cross of wood at the
conclusion of the liturgy. When they perform these actions, these natural
elements are treated not with indifference but with reverence. As the Orthodox
theologian Alexander Schmemann has repeatedly pointed out, when they are
so treated, these natural elements function as points of contact, means of
communion with God.6
On this occasion, I am going to have to postpone a fuller discussion of the
various ways in which the variety of liturgical actions enact the vision of
shalom/eirene, settling instead for voicing a general proposal, which is that
we understand the liturgy’s frequent directives that the assembled perform
actions in peace as speech acts that direct the assembled to perform these
actions in such a way that they enact and enhance shalom/eirene. If this
proposal is correct, the injunction to pray in peace is not, in the first instance,
a directive to pray for peace or to be at peace with oneself when one prays. Nor,
for that matter, is it a directive to pray from a state of peace. Rather, it is a
directive that the assembled pray in a shalom-enacting and enhancing way—a
way such that their praying contributes to the realization of important elem-
ents of shalom/eirene, such as being rightly related to one another and God. In
what remains, the question that I want to pursue is why corporate singing in
the liturgy would be a shalom-enacting and enhancing action. To do that, we
need to explore the character of group singing.
7.3. MUSICAL UNITY
Reading texts such as novels is for most of us a solitary activity. Although these
texts are communal in the sense that they are the subject of joint exploration
and discussion, the activity of reading is itself not something we typically
perform together. The same is not true of singing, however. We often sing
6
Schmemann (1969) develops this theme.

together. Indeed, we intentionally form and participate in groups such as
choirs precisely because we enjoy it so much.
As it happens, the phenomenon of group singing has recently caught the
attention of a group of diverse thinkers interested in musical cognition.7 In a
discussion of Stacy Horn’s book on group singing, Imperfect Harmony, the
neuroscientist Daniel Levitin comments that he finds two aspects of group
singing particularly striking. The first is that when we engage in group singing,
“it brings us outside ourselves. It forces us to think about what another person
is doing. . . . We have to pay attention to what someone else is doing” and
“coordinate our actions with theirs.” This, says, Levitin, pulls us “out of
ourselves” to see how we “fit into a larger whole.” For to competently engage
in group singing, “you’re not just . . . executing your part. You’re trying to
make it merge with the parts of others.”8 The second thing that Levitin notes is
that group singing has profound physiological effects on those who participate
in it; we have evidence, for example, that when people sing together, it not only
releases oxytocin—the so-called “social bonding hormone”—but also (among
other things) increases the production of immunoglobulins that enhance our
immune system.9
In calling attention to the first aspect of group singing, Levitin seems to
suggest that while group singing is a collective action, it is also a collective
action of a distinctive sort. Since Levitin’s observations directly bear upon the
thesis that I would like to defend, I suggest that we pursue the issue of whether
Levitin is right about this, beginning with the notion of a collective action.
Common to all accounts of collective action is the thesis that, if the behavior
of some group of people counts as a collective action, it is not enough that
members of that group perform the same act-type.10 To use John Searle’s well-
known example, suppose a group of people is sitting on the grass when a storm
rolls through. If each member of the group performs the action of running for
cover to a nearby gazebo, theirs is not a collective action. It would count as
such only if the members of the group had shared intentions of a particular
sort: in this case, the intention that we, who belong to this group, perform the
action of running to the gazebo together (say, because we are engaged in a
piece of performance art).
But even sharing a “we intention” of this sort is not enough for some action
that expresses such an intention to count as collective, since collective action
requires that our intentions fit together in the right way. To see why, suppose
7
See, in particular, Levitin (2006), Horn (2013), and the BodyScore project run by Gothen-
berg University.
8
Available at <http://www.npr.org/2013/06/03/188355968/imperfect-harmony-how-
chorale-singing-changes-lives> (accessed August 21, 2015).
9
Horn (2013), 147. In her discussion, Horn specifies other physical and psychological effects
of group singing.
10
In what follows, I borrow primarily from Searle (1990) and Bratman (2009).

that you and I share the intention to travel to New York City together. If you
intend to go there with me “mafia style” by throwing me in the trunk of your
car and I intend to go there with you “mafia style” by throwing you in the
trunk of my car, then our shared intentions don’t fit together in the right way
for us to perform a collective action. For our action to be genuinely collective,
we both need to take into account each other’s relevant intentions, taking each
other to be intentional co-participants in the performance of the action. I must
intend to get to the city (in part) by way of the execution of your intention and
you must intend to get to the city (in part) by way of the execution of my
intention. What is more, if we intend to go to New York City together by
taking into account each other’s relevant intentions, then we must intend to do
so in a way that our sub-plans mesh in this further sense: our intentions must
be co-realizable. If we are to perform the collective action of travelling to the
city together, I cannot plan to get there with you by car and you cannot intend
to get there with me by train. This last point highlights the fact that, in order
for ours to be a collective action, we must not only share intentions of the
relevant sort (related in the right ways), but must also be aware that we do.
Return, now, to the passages in which Levitin claims that group singing is a
type of collective action. Recall that, when he does, Levitin says that group
singing is a type of collective action that pulls us “out of ourselves” in a way
that we “fit into a larger whole,” “merging with the parts of others.” Suppose,
for the moment, that we understand well enough the phenomena to which
Levitin gestures when he uses these phrases. With the preceding sketch of
collective action in hand, the question to raise—it seems to me—is whether
Levitin is correct to suggest that group singing is a distinctive sort of collective
action, which has features that other collective actions lack, or whether the
features to which Levitin adverts are simply implications of performing a
collective action. Painting a house together and collectively producing a
hollandaise sauce, for example, are collective actions. Are they also the sorts
of actions that, in virtue of being collective, pull us out of ourselves, forcing us
to merge with the actions of others simply in virtue of being collective?
Let me address this question by engaging with a book that I mentioned a
moment ago, namely, Horn’s Imperfect Harmony, since it complements what
Levitin says in some instructive ways. In her discussion of the dynamics of
group singing, Horn includes some fascinating reflections on the character of
group singing offered by members of a choir of which she is a member. One
fellow choir member tells Horn that singing harmonies together is
like going from two dimensions to three. What is flat takes shape. And when the
harmonies are just right, it’s like you’ve created a hologram out of thin air. But it’s
ephemeral, so you have to keep infusing it with energy for it to stay alive.
Physically, the sensation is of connection . . . [it’s] a buzz. You make a contribu-
tion of sound waves and air-waves, and something more complex, something you
couldn’t possibly produce on your own, comes back to you. You constantly adjust

your contribution. And it’s focusing—or getting lost—in this feedback loop of
producing sound and enjoying your labor at the same time. It requires more
concentration than if you were producing sound or singing on your own . . . and
thus you really do get lost—in the sense that you can’t worry about anything else
in your life at that moment.11
Using a different series of metaphors, another choir member explains the
experience as one in which “physically it feels like there is a space above my
head that we all meld into, that is the purest form of together, a spiritual
unworldly space.”12
Admittedly, it would be unusual for a philosopher to use many of these
images (“a space above my head that we all meld into”) when describing the
character of group singing. Still, I want to suggest that, when combined with
what Levitin says, these passages give us a better sense of why group singing is
a collective action of a distinctive sort.
Before I explain why, however, let me narrow our focus, so as to bring out
more clearly what these passages communicate. Group singing is something
that can be done poorly or well. Clearly, the passages just cited concern the
activity when it’s performed competently. I’ll follow them in this respect,
focusing on the competent performance of group singing. Moreover, group
singing can take various forms; it can be improvised or scripted, can take a
call-and-response form or that of singing in harmony simultaneously. The
passages cited above clearly concern scripted group singing in which partici-
pants sing in harmony. I’ll also follow them in this regard, focusing on singing
of this sort.13 In addition, group singing can take more or less paradigmatic
forms, ranging from singing along with the radio, to singing along with a
recording of a live performance of group singing, to actually singing along
with others in a live setting. I’ll have cases of the last sort in mind, which I take
to be paradigmatic. Finally, when engaging in group singing, we can rehearse
some musical work, which might require that we frequently stop to fine tune
our singing by discussing or experimenting with our parts, or we could
perform it, which would require that (all else being equal) we not do this. In
what follows, I’ll have not rehearsing but performing in mind. These points
noted, let’s turn to that which these passages are drawing our attention.
Group singing clearly seems to satisfy the criteria for collective action
specified above: it requires the requisite “we intentions,” that these intentions
fit together in the right ways, and awareness of one another’s intentions.
Specifically, it requires that the members of a group follow some musical
score for the sake of performing some musical work. The question that I’m
interested in pursuing is whether there is more to it than this. As a first step
11 12
Horn (2013), 120. Horn (2013), 121.
13
This last assumption, I should add, is compatible with a musical score being such that it
calls for various sections to be improvised.

toward addressing this question, begin by noting that you and I can paint a
house together or execute a football play together and, while we do so, pay
virtually no attention to one another’s activities: while painting, I can be on
one side of the house and you on the other; while executing the play, I can be
on one side of the field, and you on the other. What matters for the competent
performance of these actions is that we execute our intentions and that these
intentions mesh in the right way. Group singing is much different, since it
requires not only this but also that, while I sing, I pay attention to your
singing, and while you sing, you pay attention to my singing. Call this
activity that is required in order to engage in group singing full divided
attention—“full” because one’s attention is entirely devoted to the singing
that is occurring and “divided” because one’s attention is simultaneously
directed at one’s own singing and others’ singing. Although the point may
seem obvious, the way by which we engage in full divided attention is
crucial: we do so by listening to the sequences of sounds that each of us is
producing while we produce them. In a moment, I’ll have more to say about
the role of listening in group singing.
As the passages quoted earlier indicate, however, to engage in group singing
also requires that I adjust my singing to yours and that you adjust your singing
to mine in “real time,” often in ways that are not dictated by the score that we
are following. You may, for example, hold a note longer than I anticipated or
syncopate a phrase in an unusual way; if we are singing together, then, all else
being equal, I will try to match the length for which you hold the note or blend
the rhythm of my singing with yours. In contrast, suppose that you and I are
making a hollandaise sauce together side-by-side in the kitchen. Doing so will
require that we respond to each other’s actions but it doesn’t require that we
do so more or less simultaneously. What this highlights is that while there are
important diachronic elements in group singing—we must, for example,
anticipate what each other is going to do—the sort of responsiveness that is
required in group singing is fundamentally synchronic: what I sing right now
must fit with what you are singing right now by being responsive to it. For ease
of reference, let’s call this characteristic of group singing coordinated real-time
responsiveness—or simply real-time responsiveness. Importantly, real-time
responsiveness needn’t involve the meshing of intentions in the sense that
when I respond to the way in which you sing something, I intend to match the
way that you intend to sing it. But it must involve a meshing of actions. You
might, for example, unintentionally sing a sequence of notes more loudly than
usual; for my singing to fit with yours, I need to respond to what you do and
not to what you intend to do.
When we combine these two points about attention and responsiveness, the
importance of the sensory modality primarily at work in group singing—
namely, hearing—comes to the fore. Engaging in some comparisons can help
us to see the point.

Imagine, once again, that you and I are engaged in the shared activity of
producing a hollandaise sauce together. In principle, we could both simultan-
eously attend to the flavors, texture, and aroma of the sauce. But, given the
nature of these sensory modalities, there’s no way for (i) me to respond to your
action of adding some ingredient at time t by my tasting, feeling, or smelling
the sauce at t while (ii) you respond to my adding some ingredient at t by your
tasting, feeling, or smelling the sauce at t. We cannot, that is, attentively taste,
feel, or smell together in the sense that what I do at some time is more or less
simultaneously responsive to what you’re doing at that time simply by each of
us employing one or another of these sensory modalities. Rather, if we’re using
the modality of taste, I must first taste the sauce and then respond to what I’ve
tasted. You must too. In this imagined scenario, in which we are both
attending to the flavors of the hollandaise sauce and responding to changes
in the flavors, the closest analogue to singing would be a call-and-response
format in which one person at one time responds to what another person does
at another time. The same would be true if we were introducing new ingre-
dients to our sauce by both attentively smelling or touching the sauce.
I suppose the closest we could come to a case in which we exercise full
divided attention and real-time responsiveness by the use of another sensory
modality would be a case involving vision. Imagine, then, that we are painters
who decide to paint some work together—say, a still life—by reference to
some agreed upon performance-plan. Could there be times at which, when
we’re side by side at an easel, when my painting proceeds by my attending to
and responding to what you paint at (more or less) those same times? And
could the same be true of you? Could my painting with a particular stroke
and color at a time be something that I accomplish by paying full attention to
what you are painting at that time? I suppose so—although the case is
difficult to imagine because of the motor skills and skills of attention that it
would require. Indeed, even if there were times in which we could execute
our plan, the primary difficulty would be whether we could sustain it for any
length of time, since the coordination of our actions would be incredibly
difficult.
In contrast, attending to and responding to some sequence of sounds you
produce by listening to them at more or less the same time as you sing them
while I also attend to the sequence of sounds I am singing is something that,
with a minimal amount of training, we find relatively easy to do. What I want
to further suggest is that it’s this ability of ours to at once exercise full divided
attention and real-time responsiveness to each other when singing that ac-
counts (at least in part) for the experience, in group singing, of “connected-
ness,” “merging,” and “melding,” to which figures such as Levitin and Horn
call our attention. The modality of hearing allows us to exercise these capaci-
ties when singing, rendering it possible to synchronize our efforts in ways that
would be very difficult using other sensory modalities. I would stress that this

ability of ours to exercise full divided attention and real-time responsiveness
would only partially account for the phenomenology characteristic of group
singing. The fact that those who participate in group singing are aware of their
shared intention to perform a work by their mutual contribution is also
important. And, as Levitin points out, the fact that our bodies release oxytocin
when engaging in group singing and that the heart rates of those who sing
together almost immediately synchronize are probably also part of the ex-
planation.14 Fascinatingly, and important for my purposes, when the heart
rates of singers are synchronized, this effect is most pronounced when they
sing slower music, such as hymns.
Is there, then, something about the character of group singing that renders
it a distinctive sort of collective action, distinguishing it from the many sorts
of other collective actions that we perform? I’ve claimed that there is. While
it is a paradigmatic case of a collective action, group singing also requires the
exercise of capacities such as full divided attention and real-time responsive-
ness. It is the exercise of these capacities, I further claimed, that explain (in
part) the phenomenology of group singing, which is characterized by an
experience of connectedness or unity so often adverted to by those who engage
in the activity.
7.4. PULLING THINGS TOGETHER
Our discussion opened with the observation that none of the Christian
liturgies incorporates singing to the extent that the Eastern Orthodox liturgies
do. We noted that while singing is a particularly fitting way to express worship,
it would be worthwhile to pursue the question of what this fittingness consists
in. Using Nussbaum’s discussion as a guide, we observed that the form of a
work can bear fittingness relations of various kinds to its content. A closer look
at the Eastern liturgies revealed that themes of shalom/eirene figure heavily in
their content—where shalom/eirene is a state that supervenes on agents
bearing normative relations of various kinds to one another and the natural
world. Specifically, the liturgical script repeatedly directs and exhorts the
assembled to perform liturgical actions, such as praying, in peace (shalom/
eirene) and unity. In this regard, the liturgy, or so its text indicates, is to be a
shalom-enacting and enhancing activity. Having taken account of these
themes, we then turned to the topic of singing, interacting with literature on
the nature of collective action. While group singing is a paradigmatic collective
action, it is also distinctive in various respects, requiring attention and
14
NPR. Available at <http://www.ckh.gu.se/english/research/bodyscore/more-about-bodyscore>
(accessed August 21, 2015).

responsiveness of special sorts on the part of its participants. The types of
attention and responsiveness that group singing requires, I conjectured, ac-
count (at least in part) for the pronounced phenomenology that so often
attends group singing, which is that of being united or merging with others.
Let me pull these various strands of our discussion together by engaging
once again with Nussbaum, who, you’ll recall, defends the thesis that, when it
comes to literary works, there are various sorts of fittingness relations that
hold between their content and what I’ve called their primary form. The
primary form of works in academic moral philosophy, says Nussbaum, fails
to fit much of their contents, at least when those works concern how we should
live. A philosophical article, for example, might argue that “the emotions are
essential and central in our efforts to gain understanding of any important
ethical matter; and yet it is written in a style that expresses only intellectual
activity and strongly suggests that only this activity matters for the reader in
his or her attempts to understand” (21). The primary form of literary works,
such as the novel, in contrast, fits remarkably well with their content. When
Stegner presents a narrative regarding two pairs of friends in Crossing to
Safety—to return to an earlier example—his discussion calls forth from the
reader an engagement with the text that is directed toward the particulars of
these relationships. The text raises questions about these relationships and
leaves them unresolved; by the employment of both imagination and senti-
ment, the reader is presented with the task of trying to work through the
complexities of these relationships, assessing where they fall short, why they
are so resilient, and so forth.
In my view, the liturgy can function in ways similar to the ways in which
Nussbaum holds that literature functions, calling forth from its participants
such activities as imaginatively identifying with characters presented in the
liturgical script that are alien in important respects.15 While the similarities
between literature and liturgy are important, I want here to focus on some
prominent differences.
Call an activity content-engaging if it is such that by performing it one
engages that content by doing such things as presenting it, trying to under-
stand it, evaluating it, or the like. Reading is a content-engaging activity; in the
ordinary case, we read texts in order to understand them, be edified by them,
be entertained by them, and the like. But, in the ordinary case, reading is not
an activity such that by engaging in it one instantiates important properties
expressed by the content with which one engages. In the ordinary case, when
reading about friendship, one does not thereby instantiate friendship. In the
ordinary case, by reading about a character’s foibles, one does not thereby
instantiate those foibles. In contrast, participating in liturgical singing is,
15
See Cuneo (2015a), included as Chapter 5 in the present volume.

I want to suggest, a content-engaging activity such that, in the paradigmatic
case, one instantiates important elements of the content with which one is
engaging. Such participation is, I shall say, content-instantiating.
For, at various junctures of the liturgy, I’ve pointed out, the assembled do
such things as pray for the shalom/eirene of the world, are enjoined to be at
shalom/eirene with one another, ask for “one heart and mind,” and so forth.
They perform these activities by singing together. A theme that emerged in
our discussion is that group singing is not only a paradigmatic collective action
that requires its participants to have shared intentions of the right sort that
bear the right sorts of relationships to one another; it also requires that its
participants carefully attend to each other’s actions, responding to them in
“real time” in such a way that they fit together for the sake of contributing to
the performance of a work.
If this is right, when the assembled engage in group singing, they thereby
instantiate important elements of shalom/eirene—elements that form import-
ant and pervasive elements of the content of the work that they are singing.
Shalom/eirene, after all, does not descend upon us from out of the blue; it is
something that is achieved by doing such things as being attentive to the
actions of the other, responding in appropriate ways to these actions, and
acting together for the purpose of actualizing something commonly recog-
nized to be of worth. If this is true of shalom/eirene, then singing the liturgical
script together is content-instantiating, as these are the very qualities that
those who engage in singing the liturgy instantiate. It may also be worth
remembering that, according to the scriptural presentation of shalom/eirene,
it is a state that is characterized by delight; those who stand in these right
relations delight in being so related. In the paradigmatic case, group singing
has the additional feature of being something in which its participants delight.
To the extent to which shalom/eirene is characterized by delight in these right
normative relations, then this is another, extended sense in which the per-
formance of the liturgy is content-instantiating. Nor should we overlook the
fact that when the assembled ask to pray with “one heart,” their heart rates are,
in the paradigmatic case, actually synchronized!
When Levitin and Horn write about singing, they repeatedly draw attention
to its phenomenology—what it’s like to engage in the activity. Indeed, they
often do so in quasi-religious terms; such singing, they point out, has the effect
of effacing differences that might otherwise divide those who sing together,
whether political, racial, or socio-economic. And here, perhaps, we touch on
one of the more important dimensions of liturgical singing. The liturgical
script does not present the assembled with an abstract description of shalom/
eirene. It presents them with images of shalom/eirene—such as those in the
Psalms—and directs them to enact important elements of it. Most importantly
for my purposes, it affords the assembled the experience—a taste—of what it’s
like to be in a state of shalom/eirene. When all goes well, to engage in liturgical

singing is not simply to instantiate important elements of the content of the
liturgical text but also to experience what one is singing about.
The sort of experiential understanding of shalom/eirene that participation
in the liturgy affords is not only unique but, I believe, also significant to the
religious life. Let me close by suggesting why.
In our day-to-day lives, we commonly distinguish different ways in which
we can understand something. It is one thing, we say, to understand that child-
rearing involves various tasks and responsibilities; it is another thing al-
together to experience having and raising a child, carrying out these tasks
and being subject to these responsibilities. Articulating the difference between
these two types of understanding in anything but the most abstract terms
proves, moreover, extremely difficult; there is something what it’s like to have
and raise a child that is difficult to communicate to others. Among other
things, there is the experience of what it’s like to have someone else’s well-
being more or less completely depend on you. Those committed to the
religious life have been telling us something similar for millennia. According
to these people, it is one thing to understand that this life involves devotion to
God and the biblical vision of shalom/eirene; it is another thing altogether to
experience this way of life “from the inside,” to have experiential acquaintance
with elements of the vision of shalom/eirene that animates it. Articulating the
difference between the two types of understanding in anything but the most
abstract terms is, moreover, extremely challenging; it proves to be no easy task
to communicate to another who lacks the experience what it’s like to engage in
this way of life.
Although articulating the difference between these two types of understand-
ing is difficult, we can perhaps say this much: when we talk of experience
providing understanding, we sometimes mean that it has provided greater
depth of insight into some topic, person, relation, or event—perhaps because
this experience has expanded our conceptual repertoire or refined our con-
ceptual expertise. At other times, when we speak of experience providing
understanding, we mean to draw attention to the fact that this experience
has expanded our vision; we now see what we had failed to see, or see better
how things hang together than we did previously—once again, perhaps be-
cause we have expanded our conceptual repertoire or refined the employment
of our concepts.
Experiencing what it’s like to be in a state of shalom/eirene, I want to
suggest, is precisely the sort of state that affords understanding of both
types. We can know in the abstract that standing in right relations with
ourselves, others, the natural world, and God is valuable, something worth
pursuing. But understanding what it’s like to stand in these relations can offer
a unique sort of experiential acquaintance with their worth, offering us
experiential insight into why such relations are worth cherishing and
pursuing—although, once again, articulating this depth of insight can be

very difficult. Correlatively, we can know in the abstract that standing in right
relations with ourselves, others, the natural world, and God are interrelated in
various ways. But actually experiencing a state in which one simultaneously
enjoys such states can help us be acquainted with what it’s like for these states
to mesh, helping us to appreciate that often there is no sharp division between
being in unity with one another, the natural world, and God.
In drawing attention to the experiential dimensions of liturgical singing,
I have entered into the territory occupied by discussions of religious experi-
ence. Philosophers of religion have not ignored religious experience. On the
contrary, some of the most probing discussions in the contemporary literature
concern it. But almost always these discussions concern mystical or “uncanny”
religious experience. In contrast, the experience of being in a state of shalom/
eirene, which I am suggesting so often accompanies liturgical singing, is not
(in the ordinary case) mystical or unusual but fairly common. It is religious
nonetheless, belonging to the unduly neglected category of ordinary religious
experience.16
16
My thanks to David J. Clark, Randall Harp, Eleonore Stump, Nick Wolterstorff, and an
anonymous referee for their comments.
Ritual Knowledge
Christian belief has faced and continues to face no shortage of challenges.

Some challenges are broadly internal, generated by the Christian tradition
itself. An example of such a challenge would be the controversy that
animated the fourth-century discussion regarding what to believe of the
person of Jesus. Other challenges, by contrast, are broadly external, typically
generated not by the Christian tradition itself, but by those who stand
outside of it. An example of such a challenge would be the charge that
death cannot be due to human sin, as the Christian scriptures teach, since
long before there were human beings who could sin, other animals suffered
and died, often at remarkable rates.
The contemporary discussion of the epistemology of religious belief is
driven by not an internal but an external challenge. While the challenge
takes a variety of forms, each of its versions accuses religious belief of being
epistemically defective in some way: irrational, unjustified, unwarranted, or
the like. Over the last twenty-five years, this challenge has met stiff resist-
ance. According to the resisters, it is not religious belief that is defective but
the challenge itself. For nearly always, the resisters maintain, the challenge
incorporates a commitment to inflated or otherwise unacceptable accounts
of what epistemically meritorious beliefs would be. Given a more nearly
adequate account of what such beliefs would be—so the resisters continue—
we can see that religious beliefs can and often do exhibit epistemic merits
such as being entitled, justified, warranted, and the like.1
The project of responding to this external challenge strikes me as eminently
worthwhile. We have learned a great deal about what it is for beliefs to exhibit
epistemic merits from it. But the project also carries risks. One such risk is
that, in focusing almost exclusively on this external challenge to religious
belief, philosophers have paid insufficient attention to both the variety and
the roles of the religious attitudes, neglecting to ask questions about their
1
The most prominent work of the resisters includes Plantinga and Wolterstorff (1983),
Wolterstorff (1984) and (2010b), Alston (1992), Plantinga (2000), and Swinburne (2005).

character and purpose in the religious life. The result is often a lopsided
picture of religious life “on the ground.”
Let me illustrate what I mean. In his book Warranted Christian Belief, Alvin
Plantinga develops an account of religious belief-formation that he calls the
Aquinas/Calvin or “A/C” model. According to the A/C model, we human
beings are endowed with an array of epistemic faculties, among which is the
sensus divinitatis or “sense of the divine.” Like our other indigenous epistemic
faculties, the sensus divinitatis operates according to a design plan, which is
itself calibrated to form true beliefs in congenial circumstances. When the
sensus divinitatis operates according to its design plan in such circumstances,
it yields warranted religious beliefs and, indeed, religious knowledge.
How does the sensus divinitatis yield such beliefs? According to the A/C
model, it does so when various types of experiences occasion beliefs with
theistic content. For example, when you or I contemplate the starry skies
above, we might find ourselves forming the belief that God is the designer of the
universe. Or, to enrich the model somewhat, when you or I hear the Gospel
proclaimed, we might find ourselves forming the belief that Christ has atoned
for the sins of humanity. What distinguishes beliefs of this last kind from
beliefs of the former kind is not simply their distinctively Christian content. If
Plantinga is right, these specifically Christian beliefs can also be viewed as
having been evoked by divine action, what Plantinga calls (following Aquinas)
the “internal instigation of the Holy Spirit.” 2 Plantinga is quick to emphasize
that all this is merely a model of religious-belief formation in the paradigmatic
case. Still, he also maintains that were Christian theism true, it would be
unsurprising if something close to the A/C model (in both its generic theistic
and expanded Christian form) were to capture the way in which things
actually go for many religious believers.3
Two features of the A/C model leap to the eye. The first is that human
agency seems to play almost no role in the formation of warranted religious
belief. When, for example, Plantinga presents cases in which ordinary people
might form religious beliefs, these people hardly do anything. For their beliefs
to be formed, they need do only such things as look up into the starry sky
above or hear the Gospel proclaimed, at least in congenial circumstances. At
no point does the A/C model hint at the fact that, in the paradigmatic case,
religious beliefs might be the fruit of extended effort, including engaging in
those activities that are so often central to religious life, such as prayer,
meditation, fasting, and what the Eastern Fathers call “watchfulness.”4 Nor,
for that matter, does the model hint at the fact that these practical activities
might play a crucial role in determining whether religious beliefs enjoy
2 3
Plantinga (2000), chs. 8–9. Ibid., 285.
4
See the section attributed to St. Hesychios the Priest (ca. eighth–ninth century) in Palmer,
Sherrard, and Ware (1979), 162.
Ritual Knowledge 147

warrant. Warranted Christian Belief includes an entire chapter dedicated to
the topic of the cognitive consequences of sin. Still, it never broaches the topic
of whether engaging in the religious disciplines might be the very sort of
activity that removes various impediments to (or abets) the proper working of
the sensus divinitatis. As the A/C model presents things, these activities seem
merely to be that which occasion the formation of warranted religious beliefs
but not that which determine (even partially) whether these beliefs are
warranted.
The second striking feature of the A/C model is that it presents the outputs
of the sensus divinitatis as beliefs whose objects are propositions concerning
God (or God’s activity), such as that God is the designer of the universe or that
Christ has atoned for the sins of humanity. Plantinga develops the idea that, in
the paradigmatic case, when these beliefs constitute religious faith, they are
accompanied by conative states of various sorts such as desiring and enjoying
God’s presence. The paradigm case of religious faith, says Plantinga, is “sure
and certain knowledge” of God that is “sealed to the heart . . . in the having of
the right sorts of affections.”5 Taken at face value, this formulation tells us that
the role of the affections in faith is to cement or more deeply entrench the state
of knowing various propositions about God.
I think we should find this striking. When, for example, the writer of
Hebrews presents to the reader what it is to have faith, he presents what are
not primarily reports regarding the mental lives of persons of faith but action
narratives, stories of what these people have done. These narratives suggest
that paradigmatic religious faith consists not merely or even primarily in a
person’s being certain of propositions regarding God (or having certain
affections that seal this knowledge) but rather in his being practically oriented
toward the world in certain ways, such as being disposed to engage in acts of
gratitude toward God.6
My purpose in making these observations is, as I say, not to pour cold water
on the contemporary discussion of the religious attitudes. Nor is it to suggest
that the A/C model could not be amended to accommodate these observa-
tions. It is rather to illustrate the point that, by largely omitting the practical
dimensions of the religious life, the contemporary discussion threatens to offer
a distorted picture of the religious attitudes and, more generally, what it is to
be a religious believer. Given the character of Christianity, it could not be
otherwise. Christianity is not a body of propositions. Its fundamental aim is
not to produce agents that form warranted beliefs about God. Nor is its aim to
5
See Plantinga (2000), 291, 323.
6
Although Plantinga comes close to entertaining a more expansive account of faith on p. 293,
it’s clear that his eye is on not the role of acting, but the role of the affections in faith: the
“difference between believer and devil . . . lies in the area of affections” (ibid.). For reasons that
will emerge later in this discussion, this seems to me incorrect.

increase the likelihood that its adherents will have mystical experiences of
God. Christianity is, rather, a way of life that is thoroughly practical. It is
dedicated to engaging God in various ways by doing such things as blessing,
petitioning, and thanking God—activities about which, I should add, philo-
sophers have said virtually nothing.
Although the aim of the Christian way of life is practical, there is neverthe-
less a perfectly good sense in which it aims to provide knowledge of God. But
the knowledge in question, I suggest, is often not knowledge that one or
another proposition regarding God is true but knowledge how to engage and
live in communion with God. “If you wish to behold and commune with Him
who is beyond sense perception and concept,” writes the fourth-century
monastic Evagrios of Pontikos, then you must engage in such activities as
prayer, singing the Psalms, giving alms, and engaging in the rites of the
church.7 Under the approach that Evagrios advocates, knowing God is fun-
damentally a practical activity.
Appreciating this point about the practical aim of the Christian way of life,
I believe, opens up new vistas in the epistemology of the religious attitudes. For
it helps to bring together two sides of the Christian tradition that do not often
meet in contemporary philosophical discussion. On the one hand is the
insistence, which lies deep in the Christian tradition, that the Christian way
of life includes as one of its central components ritualized activity, such as
participating in the liturgical actions of the church. Gregory of Nyssa voices
this conviction when he writes that the power of Christianity resides not in its
philosophical sophistication but in the “power of regeneration by faith” and
the “participation in mystical symbols and rites.”8 On the other hand is the
conviction that a central aim of the Christian life is not to theorize about
God but to know God. Were we to view knowing God as (in part) a species
of practical knowledge, this would—or so I suggest—help us to see how
these two sides of the Christian tradition fit together. It would allow us to
see that knowing how to engage in ritualized activity is, when all goes well, a
way in which we know God.
This last claim does not wear its meaning on its face, so let me unpack it.
When I speak of knowing God, I have in mind a considerably broader notion
of knowing than that employed by most epistemologists, who tend to think of
knowledge as a species of knowing that or having acquaintance with an object.
The sense of knowing that I have in mind is not easy to articulate, but it is
probably best described as being in rapport with someone. When one is in
rapport with another, one does not simply enjoy some sort of privileged
epistemic contact with that person. One also knows how to engage that person
and, often, what that person cares about. In this respect, the concept of
7 8
Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware (1979), 57. Gregory of Nyssa (1979), 18.

knowing with which I am working belongs more nearly to a cluster of virtue-
theoretic notions according to which knowing someone is not only a mode of
understanding but also an achievement, typically accomplished only with
time, familiarity, effort, and discernment. It goes without saying that knowing
of this sort is often implicit—one needn’t be able to articulate one’s know-how—
and acquired by osmosis when participating in practices in which such know-
how is modeled by others. Under this understanding, then, the dictum that
knowing God is a species of practical knowledge is the claim that knowing
God (in the sense just specified) consists in (although is not exhausted by)
knowing how to engage God.9
My project in this chapter is to explore the contribution that knowing how
to engage in ritualized activity plays in knowing God (in the sense just
specified). Specifically, it is to explore the contribution that knowing how to
engage in ritualized liturgical activity makes to knowing God (in the sense just
specified). Engaging in this project will, however, require laying some concep-
tual groundwork. I’ll begin by discussing the notion of knowing how, staking
out a position on this issue that seems to me plausible. I’ll then turn to the
ancient Christian liturgies, developing the idea that it is by participating in
these activities that we acquire and exercise ritual knowledge, which is a type
of knowing how. In my judgment, it is not helpful to discuss Christian
liturgical practices in the abstract. So, I shall focus on a liturgical tradition in
which the theme of practical knowledge of God is especially prominent,
namely, the Eastern Christian tradition in which figures such as Evagrios
and Nyssa developed their own views. However, much of what I say about
the Eastern liturgies can, I believe, be applied to other liturgical traditions in
which ritualized forms of action are prominent.
It might be worth adding a final observation before diving into our topic.
When compared to mainline philosophy of religion, my discussion will be
thoroughly unorthodox. I will have almost nothing (more) to say, for example,
about the rationality of religious belief. And I will have a good deal to say
about various elements of Christian ritual. In these respects, my discussion has
something in common with the approach taken by so-called Wittgensteinian
philosophers of religion, who have chided philosophers for paying insufficient
attention to the fact that the religious attitudes are embedded in and have their
distinctive roles in religious ways of life. Still, unlike the Wittgensteinians,
I have no interest in defending a noncognitivist account of the religious
attitudes, according to which the religious attitudes fail to express full-fledged
9
A word about how I am using the phrase “to engage God.” We engage those around us in all
manner of ways: by catching their attention, addressing them, and embracing them, for example.
What these various activities have in common is that, when all goes well, they effect mutual
recognition. I am using the phrase “to engage God” in a way that analogically extends our
ordinary understanding of what it is to engage another. It is, when all goes well, to effect a state of
divine-human mutual recognition.

beliefs about God.10 In my view, the religious attitudes come in a great variety
of forms, including full-fledged religious belief. It is also my view that full-
fledged belief needn’t be a component of knowing how to dwell in communion
with God, but this is a topic that I will broach only at the end of this chapter.
8 . 1 . K N O W I N G HO W
Suppose Christianity is a way of life, incorporating activities such as prayer,

fasting, and ritualized activity. If it is, then the thesis that some religious
knowledge is (to some significant degree) a species of knowing how should
have immediate appeal. For to engage in a way of life is to have a certain kind
of competence or know-how. But what is it to know how to do something, to
engage in those activities that constitute a way of life?
In this section, I sketch what seems to me a promising account of what it is
to know how to do something. For reasons that will become apparent soon,
I will call this position the moderate view. Roughly stated, the moderate view
tells us that to know how to perform some activity Φing is to stand in a
knowing or understanding relation to a way of Φing.11
In the next few sections, I will conduct my discussion as if something close
to the moderate view is correct. Nonetheless, I do not want the general project
in which I engage—namely, to explore the contribution that knowing how to
engage in ritualized liturgical activity makes to knowing God—to depend on
the particularities of the moderate position. So, those unsympathetic with the
moderate position—say, those who identify knowing how with a special sort of
knowing that—should feel free to attempt to translate what I say into the
idioms that belong to their favored version of knowing how. Let me also add
that, although I will speak as if I am unpacking the concept of knowing how, it
might be that there are multiple conceptions of knowing how. Some might be
very thin, expressing the idea that knowing how to perform an activity is
simply a matter of being able to perform it. Others might be thicker, express-
ing the idea that knowing how to perform an activity requires a lot more than
this, such as understanding what one is doing. As will become evident, the
moderate view expresses a thicker notion of knowing how (although there are
accounts that are still thicker). If you prefer to work with a thinner concept of
knowing how, then think of the moderate view as one that articulates a fairly
advanced state of knowing how. Finally, I should emphasize that my aim is
10
The most thorough engagement with the Wittgensteinians of which I am aware is
Wolterstorff (2010a).
11
This is the view defended in John Bengson and Moffett (2011). In what follows, I borrow
liberally from their fine paper. I have also been helped by Noë (2011).

simply to sketch the main features of the moderate view so as to have an
account of knowing how with which to work. A full presentation of the view
would introduce nuances and refinements that I am going to ignore.
The Moderate View
The best way to understand the moderate view is to begin with the notion of a
way of acting. A way of acting is a sequence of act-types that an agent can
perform. Performing a work of music, swimming the crawl stroke, and
offering thanks are all ways of acting. If, for example, an agent knows how
to perform a work of music or offer thanks to God, that agent grasps a way of
acting that is a way of performing that work of music or thanking God. If this
is right, knowing how to perform an action is a species of objectual knowledge,
having as its object not a proposition but a way of acting.
The thesis that knowing how is not a species of propositional knowledge or
knowing that is controversial. Here, however, are several considerations in its
favor. First, note that when an agent knows a proposition, this relation can be
“upgraded” in certain ways. If you are in excellent epistemic position with
regard to the proposition that your mother’s maiden name is “Smith,” for
example, you might say, “I not only know that her maiden name is ‘Smith,’ but
I’m also certain of it.” Knowing how, by contrast, cannot be upgraded in this
way. When you know how to engage in an activity such as performing John
Coltrane’s “Giant Steps,” you wouldn’t say, “I not only know how to perform
‘Giant Steps,’ I am also certain of it.” This is because when knowing how gets
upgraded, it is often upgraded to the level of not certainty but mastery. When
you are in excellent position with regard to performing an activity such that
you know how to perform it, you would say, “I not only know how to perform
‘Giant Steps,’ but I’ve also mastered it.”12
A second consideration in favor of the claim that knowing how is objectual
is that states of knowing how are not susceptible to Gettier-style cases in the
way that states of knowing that are. Suppose, for example, I am a pianist who
wishes to perform “Giant Steps.” I consult a written score that I recently
purchased, thereby grasping how to play the piece. Suppose, though, that
I were extraordinarily lucky to consult this particular score, since all other
12
See Bengson and Moffett (2011), 184. I say that knowing how is “often” upgraded in this
way because one could distinguish between excellence in knowing how and mastery in knowing
how. As I understand this distinction, one has excellence in knowing how to act in some way
when one has understood to a sufficiently high degree how to act in that way. This is compatible,
however, with not being able to act in that way. I could, for example, have excellence in knowing
how to swim the crawl stroke, since I know all its ins and outs, but be too uncoordinated to
perform it well. By contrast, one has mastery in knowing how when one has excellence in
knowing how to act in some way and can perform that activity well.

available written scores are defective on account of including badly incorrect
information regarding how to play the piece, such as including the wrong time
signature and melody. Although I am very lucky to have the correct score,
I know how to perform “Giant Steps” nonetheless. The fact that I was lucky
enough to hit upon the correct score seems irrelevant to whether I have come
to know how to perform the piece. This is in sharp contrast to the standard
way in which philosophers think of knowing that. When an agent knows that
something is the case, most philosophers believe, it cannot be due to a fluke,
but must have been the upshot of a reliable belief-forming process operating in
a congenial environment.13
These are, I believe, important considerations in favor of the moderate
view’s thesis that knowing how is not a species of knowing that. Still, knowing
how to perform some action, such as performing Coltrane’s “Giant Steps,”
requires more than merely grasping or apprehending that way of acting, as an
agent’s grasp or understanding of a way of acting can be deficient in several
important respects.
Consider the following pair of cases. Imagine, first, a case in which I have
not previously performed “Giant Steps,” but gotten my hands on a score of
this piece. If my copy of this score is incomplete in important respects, leaving
out vital information about how to perform this piece, such as how to play its
head, then I do not know how to perform it. Although there are actions that
constitute performing this piece of music, they are unavailable to me. Alter-
natively, imagine a case in which I know how to perform some activity, such as
playing a chord progression that consists in a progression of minor thirds, but
I am unaware that performing that very activity is a way to perform the chord
progression of “Giant Steps.” If so, while I grasp a way of acting that is in fact a
way to perform this work, I do not know how to perform it.
Not all deficiencies, however, are ones in which an agent’s understanding of
a way of acting is incomplete, as an agent’s grasp of a way of acting can be
deficient when it incorporates a mistaken understanding of how to perform
that action. To stay with our example, suppose that I have been instructed to
perform “Giant Steps” in 6/8 time and in the key of C#. Imagine, furthermore,
that while I take myself to be doing exactly what I have been taught when
I perform the piece, I in fact perform it in 4/4 time and visit several different
tonal centers, which is the correct way to perform the piece. Do I know how to
perform the piece? Arguably not. I have a mistaken understanding of how to
perform it, since I am confused about its time signature and key. While I might
in fact perform the piece correctly, I do not know how to perform it.
If this is right, for an agent to know how to perform some action, that
agent’s understanding of it must satisfy some threshold of completeness and
13
The case is borrowed from Cath (2011).

accuracy. What is that threshold? It may be impossible to say. Indeed, the issue
may be context sensitive, as so-called contextualists about knowledge claim.
However that may be, let me now make several observations about the
moderate view.
First, if knowing how to perform an action requires having a sufficiently
complete and accurate understanding of a way of acting, knowing how to do
something is not simply a matter of being reliably disposed to do it, as
philosophers such as Gilbert Ryle claimed.14 The moderate view, then, is
aptly titled, as it implies that knowing how is neither a species of knowing
that nor a matter of being reliably disposed to act in a certain way. For, to say it
once again, the moderate view implies that knowing how to do something
implies having a sufficient degree of understanding concerning how to do
something. Second, while the moderate view tells us that knowing how to
perform an activity implies having a certain type and degree of understanding
of that activity, the view does not imply that knowing how to perform an
activity implies that one can actually perform it. It may be that one can know
how to perform “Giant Steps” even when one has suffered paralysis. Nor,
finally, does the moderate view imply that knowing how to perform some
activity implies that one is able to articulate how to perform it. Knowing how
to do something can be implicit.
To this point, I have spoken of knowing how to perform relatively discrete
actions such as performing the musical work “Giant Steps.” Often, however,
these ways of acting are embedded in complex social practices, such as the
social practice of playing jazz piano, which have their own histories, standards
of excellence, and methods of evaluation. And, often, knowing how to perform
some activity is part of the larger endeavor of learning how to engage in and
navigate these social practices. Take, for example, the social practice just
mentioned, namely, performing jazz piano. To be inducted into this practice
involves learning not simply how to perform various musical works, such as
works by Coltrane, but also learning how to listen to them—noticing their
nuances and differences from one another. It involves, moreover, knowing
how to interpret musical scores, motifs, chord progressions, and rhythmic
patterns in such a way that one develops a certain degree of facility with
performing musical works in the genre. Importantly, for my purposes, know-
ing how to engage in the practice of performing jazz piano involves knowing
not only how to evaluate compositions and performances, but also how to
engage with works of music in such a way that one cares about how they are
interpreted and performed. All this suggests that the best way to talk about the
complex phenomenon that I am describing is probably not to speak of it as
knowing how to navigate a social practice, so much as knowing how to
14
See Ryle (1949).

navigate and inhabit a certain life-world—the world of jazz piano. For the
latter way of talking has the advantage of conveying the idea that there is a
musical reality with which one engages when one navigates a social practice.
Let me summarize: knowing how to perform some activity is, according to
the moderate view, to stand in an understanding relation to a way of per-
forming that activity. Knowing how is thus neither a species of knowing that
nor merely a disposition to perform some action correctly. While understand-
ing is crucial to knowing how, it is exceedingly difficult to identify some
threshold of completeness and correctness that an agent’s grasp of a way of
acting must satisfy to count as a case of knowing how. Finally, the ways of
acting that we grasp when we know how to perform them are often embedded
in complex social practices. Because they are, the aim of knowing how is often
not simply knowing how to perform relatively discrete activities but knowing
how to navigate and inhabit a certain life-world of which these activities are a
part. This last point will be important to the discussion of the Christian liturgy,
which is my topic in the next section.
8.2. LITURGY
To the untrained eye, the ancient liturgies of the Christian East are a jumble of
disconnected actions. Were you to observe one for the first time, you would
see people doing such things as kissing, standing, bowing, prostrating, chant-
ing, singing, anointing, processing, praying, kneeling, sensing, reading, listen-
ing, eating, washing, vesting, crossing themselves, and even spitting. With
increased exposure, you would also recognize that, in many cases, these are not
impromptu or improvised but scripted actions.
Call a repeatable sequence of actions that has a narrative structure—
roughly, a proper beginning, middle, and end bound together in certain
identifiable ways—a narrative event.15 Everything from family dinners to
works of music are, according to this understanding, narrative events. Narra-
tive events often have performance-plans or scripts. And when they do, these
scripts can issue two rather different types of directives. They can prescribe,
first, that some narrative event-type is to be performed on some regular basis,
such as once a year, once a week, or once a day. Second, they can prescribe
when, during the performance of that narrative event-type, which actions are
to be performed, by whom, and in what manner. For example, a script might
15
Thus understood, the concept of a narrative event is normative. It has appropriate
beginnings and endings bound together in the right ways. While I will have to leave discussion
of the senses of “appropriate” to some other occasion, Carroll (2011b) is a good place to start.

prescribe that bells are to be rung at the outset of the performance of a
musical work.
Call a script that issues both sorts of directives a ritual script. In the sense
I understand it, a ritualized action is one that is prescribed by a ritual script.
The actions that constitute the liturgies of the Eastern Christian church are,
under this account, ritualized. For not only are these liturgies repeatable
narrative event-types; the scripts that govern them also issue both sorts of
directives, indicating when these narrative events are to be performed and
when, during their performance, which actions are to be performed, by whom,
and in what manner. The script that governs the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom,
for example, prescribes that it is to be performed every Sunday (and at most
once per day by some assembly). It also prescribes that when this liturgy is
performed, it begins with a Trinitarian blessing. Both the performance of the
liturgy itself and the various actions that constitute it are, under the account
offered, ritualized actions.
The Christian tradition has long stressed the importance of ritualized
actions. I noted earlier that, at one point, Gregory of Nyssa writes that the
power of Christianity resides not in its philosophical sophistication but in the
“participation in mystical symbols and rites.” I have also suggested that there is
an important sense in which knowing how to perform ritualized activities
contributes to knowing God. But how could that be so? It is easy enough to see
that knowing how to play a certain chord progression could positively con-
tribute to knowing how to play a musical work, since playing that chord
progression might count as playing that musical work. But how could know-
ing how to perform ritualized actions such as kissing, prostrating, and eating
contribute to knowing God in any similar way?
The answer that I will develop comes in several stages. In outline, it tells us
that the liturgy furnishes both a strikingly wide array of ritual actions and ways
of understanding them such that, when all goes well, knowing how to perform
these actions under these ways of understanding contributes in important
ways to knowing God. Since the first stage concerns the performance of
ritualized actions, let us start with these. I will then go on to discuss concep-
tions of God as they are presented in the liturgy.
Liturgical Actions
At one level of description, the actions that constitute the liturgy, such as
prostrating, kissing, chanting, and eating, are diverse enough that one would
be hard-pressed to discern what unites them; they look like a rag-bag of
different activities. At another level, however, these actions are not discon-
nected but unified in a certain way, being the constituents of an identifiable
pattern. This pattern, which is primarily constituted by the activities of

blessing, petitioning, and offering thanks to God, is what I will refer to as the
central pattern of the liturgy. Since the central pattern is especially apparent in
the eucharistic liturgies of the Eastern church, especially those of St. Mark, St.
Basil, and St. Chrysostom, let us take a closer look at the way it takes shape
in them.
Each of these liturgies begins with the declaration that the Kingdom of the
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is blessed. After the celebrant declares this, the
deacon, priest, and people engage in a pattern of call and response. In the
liturgies of St. Basil and St. Chrysostom, for example, a Deacon offers a series
of petitions for peace and safety:
For the peace from on high and for the salvation of our souls, let us pray to
the Lord.
For the peace of the whole world, for the welfare of the holy churches of God,
and for the union of all, let us pray to the Lord. . . .
For travelers by land, by sea, and by air; for the sick and the suffering, for
captives and their safety and salvation, let us pray to the Lord.16
To each of these petitions, the people answer “kyrie eleison” or “Lord, Have
Mercy.” Having completed this initial series of petitions, the congregation
sings Psalm 103 (“Bless the Lord, O my Soul”), which is followed by a petition
for deliverance. This, in turn, is followed by the singing of Psalm 143 (“Praise
the Lord, O my Soul”). Although punctuated by the reading of the scriptures,
the commemoration of the saints, and various prayers of repentance, this
pattern of petitioning and blessing continues throughout the liturgy, segueing
into a sequence of actions in which the people offer thanks to God, which itself
culminates in the action of eating together. In its structure, the analogue that
comes to mind is that of a work of music, such as a rondo. Much like a rondo,
the liturgy introduces themes—and variations on themes—in an alternating
structure, punctuating them at certain points with still other themes. (Perhaps
there is another sense in which the liturgy is the work of the people!)
It is tempting for philosophers to think of activities such as blessing,
petitioning, and offering thanks to God as things that we primarily do with
words. But in this case the temptation must be resisted. While the liturgical
script prescribes the performance of linguistic acts that count as blessing,
petitioning, and thanking, it also prescribes actions such as kissing, prostrat-
ing, and eating. Actions of these latter sorts do not merely accompany the
linguistic acts prescribed by the liturgical script, as if their function were
merely to add emphasis to these linguistic acts. Rather, in the context of the
liturgy, the kissing, prostrating, and eating also count as cases of engaging God
by blessing, petitioning, and thanking God. In fact, these bodily actions are
16
I am using the translation of the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom found in Thyateira
(1995).

vivid cases of act-types by which a person can simultaneously perform mul-
tiple actions with expressive import without saying a thing. In the context of
the liturgy, for example, prostrating is often simultaneously an act of petition-
ing, repenting, blessing, and offering thanks. Likewise, in the context of the
liturgy, kissing is often simultaneously an act of greeting, blessing, adoring,
and thanking. I should add that the act of eating, which stands at the center of
all the eucharistic liturgies, is understood to be not simply one expression of
thanksgiving among others. Rather, it is understood to be the paradigmic case
of expressing thanks to God.
The central pattern of the liturgy, I have said, is constituted by acts of
blessing, petitioning, and thanking God. Actions such as these have expressive
import, since their function is not to state propositions but to express respect,
affection, gratitude, and the like. Let me make a pair of observations about
actions with expressive import.
The first is that there is no type of mental state such that for an agent to
successfully perform an action with expressive import, that agent must be in
that mental state. Thanking, when all goes well, expresses gratitude. But to
thank someone at some time, one needn’t be feeling gratitude at that time.
Honoring, when all goes well, expresses respect. But to honor another at some
time, one needn’t have any thoughts to the effect that the recipient of one’s
action has worth of one or another sort.17
Call that which is expressed by the competent performance of an action
with expressive import, its expressive content.18 The second point I would like
to make is that the expressive content of an action can be evaluated along
different dimensions of fittingness. Consider thanking, for example. Suppose
I write you a note thanking you for a gift that you have given me. If the writing
of this note is accompanied by feelings of gratitude toward you, the expressive
content of my action perfectly fits the mental state I am in when I write the
note. As such, the performance of my action is especially apt.
Things might be otherwise, however. I might write the note while being
deeply resentful toward you. If I do, then my action’s expressive content fails
to fit the mental state I am in when I write the note. It is thus an especially
inapt or defective case of thanking. Between the two extremes of feeling
gratitude and resentment are, of course, various other grades of aptness.
Thanking can be done absent-mindedly, mechanically, reluctantly, indiffer-
ently, or with one’s focus entirely on performing the action well, such as when
17
What about the state of intending to perform an action of that sort? Isn’t that a mental state
one must be in to perform an act of the relevant kind? Perhaps, but I doubt it. I hint at why at the
outset of the next section.
18
Philosophers often distinguish between the semantic content of the performance of a
speech act (roughly, what is said, its propositional content) and what is pragmatically conveyed
(information not contained in what is said but conveyed nonetheless). I use the phrase “expres-
sive content” to capture both sorts of content.

one focuses on what words to say because choosing them carefully matters a
great deal. When agents are in these mental states, these actions can be more
or less apt. Especially important for my purposes is the observation that
actions with expressive import can enjoy high degrees of fittingness even
when the expressive content of those actions fails to fit the mental states of
the agents who perform them. I might, for example, form and reliably execute
the resolution to write your family a thank you note every year because of
some great kindness they performed toward my family before I was alive. But
I may often fail to feel gratitude when I write them; their actions may seem so
remote in time that they fail to engage me emotionally. Still, arguably, my
actions of thanking are highly apt. They are not apt because their expressive
content fits the mental state I am in when I write these notes. Rather, they are
apt because they are appropriate responses to what you have done on my
family’s behalf, which flows from a state of being resolved to express my
family’s gratitude.
The first thing to notice about the eucharistic liturgies, then, is that they
make available a vast array of actions by which—and a context in which—we
can do such things as bless, petition, and offer thanks to God—actions that can
be assessed along various dimensions of fittingness.
Liturgical Images
It is one thing to perform an action that counts as expressing thanks; it is

another to know how to do so. In the context of the Eastern liturgies, small
children perform actions such as kissing a copy of the Gospels and eating the
eucharistic meal. Arguably, in that context, their actions count as cases of
offering thanks to God. But these children do not know how to thank God by
doing such things as kissing a copy of the Gospels. It is noteworthy, then, that
the actions that constitute the liturgy do not stand alone. The liturgical script
furnishes an equally wide array of images for thinking about or conceiving of
God and God’s activity that are connected with these actions—images that
often pull against one another in puzzling and striking ways. Here is a sample.
Just prior to the Trinitarian blessing that begins the eucharistic liturgies,
the celebrant offers the Trisagion prayers. These prayers, which are a rare
instance of a prayer whose primary addressee is the Holy Spirit, begin with the
invocation:
O heavenly King, the Comforter, the Spirit of Truth, who is everywhere, filling all
things; Treasury of Good and Giver of Life, come and dwell in us, cleanse us from
every stain, and save us, O Good One
This fairly abstract presentation of God as the One Who Fills All Things is
given an even more pronounced expression in the Anaphora (“the lifting up”),

which occurs immediately prior to the eucharistic meal. In the Anaphora, the
assembled address God in the following way:
It is right and fitting to hymn you, to bless you, to praise you, to give thanks to
you, and to worship you in every place of your dominion: for you are God
ineffable, inconceivable, invisible, incomprehensible, ever existing and eternally
the same.
This is apophaticism in high gear. God is addressed as the utterly Tran-

scendent One. Yet the liturgical script repeatedly juxtaposes these descrip-
tions with a very different set of images that presents God as the Immanent
One, “the lover of humankind” who has acted in history. For example, soon
after addressing God using the description just quoted, the assembled
address God as the “Helper of the helpless, the Hope of the hopeless, the
Saviour of the storm-tossed, the Haven of the voyager, the Healer of the
sick.” The One who “did not turn away” from Creation, Ruler of Heaven and
Earth, Author of Life, Conqueror of Death, the One Who Holds All Things
Together—the list of images of God in the liturgical script continues on
and on.
A moment ago, I noted that the liturgies make available a vast array of
actions by which (and a context in which) we can do such things as petition,
bless, and express thanks to God. I now want to emphasize that they furnish
not only these act-types and contexts, but also a rich array of conceptions
regarding God and God’s activity that agents can incorporate into a “mental
file”—this being, roughly, a system of conceptions that an agent has with
respect to an object, a repository of information that an agent takes to be about
it, some items of which play a dominant role in an agent’s thinking about it.
These informational components allow agents not simply to think of God and
God’s activity in various ways, but also to perform liturgical actions such as
chanting the Psalms, kissing a copy of the Gospels, or eating the eucharistic
meal under these conceptions. Think of things this way: these conceptions
provide specific ways of thinking about God and God’s activity such as the
One Who Delivers, the One Who Fills All Things, and the One who “did not
cease to do all things on our behalf ” (Liturgy of St. Basil). When all goes well,
these conceptions of God are incorporated into complex action-conceptions.
When they are, agents conceptualize act-types such as prostrating before an
icon of Christ as a case of petitioning the One Who Delivers, blessing the One
Who Fills All Things, and thanking the One who “did not cease to do all things
on our behalf.” In this way, the grasp and employment of these complex-
action conceptions guides liturgical action.
There is a great deal of controversy over how to think about how the term
“God” functions in religious discourse in the monotheistic traditions—
whether, for example, it functions as a proper name or a cluster of definite
descriptions. One view, which is defended by Mark Johnston, is that the name

functions as an abbreviated title: The One from Whom Our Salvation Flows.19
If Johnston is right about this, then one could think of the various conceptions
of God presented by the liturgical script as specifications of this title or name,
indicating ways in which God is the highest one or ways in which God has
acted as the agent of salvation. Under this way of thinking, the conceptions of
God presented in the liturgy, while incredibly diverse, are united (in part) by
the fact that they are specifications of or variations on this title—the title itself
being an abbreviated way of thinking about God’s role in the Christian
salvation narrative.
Let me summarize the line of thought that I have developed in this section.
The Eastern eucharistic liturgies, I have claimed, are constituted by a vast array
of scripted or ritualized actions, such as chanting Psalms, kissing a copy of the
Gospels, and eating together. Is there anything that unifies them? Yes, these
ritualized actions, I have claimed, are all ways in which participants in the
liturgy engage God by actualizing the central pattern of the liturgy of blessing,
petitioning, and offering thanks to God. In addition to prescribing actions
such as these, the liturgical script presents a vast array of ways of thinking
about God and God’s activity, which appear no more unified than the actions
that constitute the liturgy. Is there anything that unifies them? Yes, these
images are the components of an overarching narrative regarding God and
God’s salvific activity, which is itself presented in the liturgies and perhaps
encapsulated in the title “God.” When competently employed, these concep-
tions allow an agent to perform actions such as prostrating, kissing, and eating
as ways of intentionally enacting the central pattern of blessing, petitioning,
and thanking God as the One Who Has Acted on Our Behalf.
The fundamental contribution of the liturgy, then, is to provide act-types
and conceptions of God such that by performing those act-types under those
conceptions one can engage God by doing such things as blessing, petitioning,
and thanking God. In a moment, I will explain why this is important for
knowing God. For now, let me return to a point made earlier, namely that
learning how to perform certain actions is often not simply to gain facility at
performing them. Rather, it is to learn how to navigate and inhabit a certain
life-world in which those actions have their home. This is no less true of
19
See Johnston (2009), ch. 1. I should add that I find Johnston’s case that “God” does not
function as a proper name unconvincing. Johnston writes: “In the scriptures, no one actually
turns up and says anything like ‘I am to be called by the name “God.” ’ No one says anything like
‘I hereby introduce the name “God” as the name of THIS very impressive being.’ There is no
original dubbing someone or something as ‘God,’ a dubbing we can hope to fall back on” (6). But
it is highly controversial that such dubbings are necessary for a term to function as a proper
name. Moreover, one would have to have an extraordinarily pinched understanding of how the
scriptures function in the theistic traditions to infer from the fact that since the scriptures do not
contain a record of any such episode, the best way to understand the scriptural talk of God is that
there has been no such episode.

performing those ritualized actions that constitute the liturgy than it is of
performing those actions that are cases of performing works of music. It is
worth elaborating upon this observation, since to fail to do so would be to fail
to take us to the heart of liturgical action.
At various points, I have drawn attention to the fact that liturgical action is
not primarily a series of mental actions such as thinking certain thoughts or
manufacturing certain feelings at certain times. Rather it is thoroughly bodily,
involving actions such as bowing, kissing, and eating, which are oriented
toward one’s physical surroundings. In many cases, these physical surround-
ings are utterly ordinary: they include metal, wood, bread, wine, and water.
Why, then, in the context of worship, would the liturgical script direct those
who participate in the liturgy to orient themselves toward these materials by
doing such things as kissing them?
Here the liturgical scripts themselves are instructive. Consider the following
bit of Byzantine theological poetry, which the celebrant recites during the
Theophany or the blessing of the waters:
Today the grace of the Holy Spirit has descended on the waters in the likeness of
a dove.
Today has shone the sun that does not set, and the world is lighted by the light
of the Lord.
Today the moon shines with the world in its radiating beams.
Today the shining stars adorn the universe with the splendor of their radiance.
Today the clouds of heaven moisten humankind with showers of justice.
Today the waters of the Jordan are changed to healing by the presence of
the Lord.
This series of proclamations is remarkable if only because it forcefully presents
the idea that, although we may in the context of the liturgy regularly engage
with ordinary matter such as water, this matter is really not so ordinary. And,
so, in the liturgical context, it is not treated as ordinary stuff but is the object of
blessing, the vehicle of blessing, and the subject of poetry. (In the rite of the
Theophany, the people not only bless, but are also blessed with the water by
the celebrant.) In effect, the liturgical script of the Theophany prods those
assembled to understand the salvation narrative that lies at the core of
Christianity expansively. Not only is humankind being restored by the actions
of God in time, but so also is matter, inasmuch as it too has become a means of
God’s presence, a source or point of contact with God. Indeed, as the Trisagion
prayers illustrate, a prominent theme in Eastern Christianity is the omnipres-
ence of God. God is the One Who Fills All Things, permeating the world with
the divine energies. Because of this, some have described the tradition as
advocating a version of panentheism.20 However that may be, the tradition
20
Ware (2004), 157–68, discusses the issue.

maintains that the relation between God and matter is intimate—so intimate,
in fact, that to engage with matter is to engage with God.
The upshot is that ritualized activity such as the blessing of the waters has
the effect, when things go moderately well, of honing one’s sensibilities in such
a way that one begins to view, experience, and treat matter differently than one
would in one’s day-to-day life. The analogue with music with which I have
been working is, I believe, helpful in this respect. Being introduced to the
performance of a musical work often has the effect of expanding one’s ears,
allowing one to hear things differently than one did in the past. Often,
moreover, the expansion does not come easily to the listener; only with
significant and repeated exposure on the listener’s part does she begin to
hear sounds differently, make connections with music with which she is
familiar, and value these new types and sequences of sounds. Indeed, such
exposure is often not enough. Sometimes the expansion occurs only with
significant work on the listener’s part, which might include intently focusing
on the sounds and seeking ways to understand them, such as trying to
understand their mathematical relations. These activities are part of immer-
sing oneself in the life-world of musical performance and listening. The
parallel with engaging in liturgical action and immersing oneself in the life-
world of the Christian narrative, I trust, is obvious. A central aim of immersing
oneself in liturgical action is often to alter one’s sensibilities. Often, moreover,
this process requires repeated exposure and effort; it can be difficult to achieve.
8 . 3 . R I T U A L K N O W LE D G E
There is a famous passage in the Pensées in which Pascal offers advice to those
who have been persuaded that it is prudentially rational to accept that God
exists. If you want to believe, says Pascal, then go do things. In particular,
engage in liturgical actions such as taking holy water and attending mass. The
natural interpretation of Pascal’s advice is that engaging in these activities is
the sort of thing that will increase the likelihood of coming to believe that God
exists; the activities are simply the means to achieve this desirable cognitive
state. But another interpretation of Pascal’s advice is available, which is that
engaging in the liturgical activities he mentions is not primarily a means to
forming beliefs about God but that knowing God (in something like the
virtue-theoretic sense identified earlier) consists in engaging in them.
This interpretation approximates the thesis that I have been interested in
developing. But now it is time to pull together the strands of our discussion. To
that end, let us begin with the conviction that has animated our discussion,
which is that our thinking about the religious attitudes should be guided by the
observation that Christianity is a way of life. This observation has not in fact

guided the contemporary discussion of the epistemology of the religious
attitudes. And because it has not, I have suggested, this discussion has
threatened to produce a distorted picture of the nature and roles of the
religious attitudes and, more generally, religious life “on the ground”—a
picture in which the practical dimensions of religious life drop out. If, how-
ever, the Christian way of life is fundamentally practical in its orientation, it is
natural to inquire: What would it be to engage in this way of life, to know how
to engage in its central activities, such as thanking God?
The moderate view of knowing how can help to answer this question. It
helps us to understand what it is to know how to do something—knowing
how, if the view is correct, consisting in the understanding of not propositions
but ways of acting. Still, the moderate view gives us only an abstract account of
what it is to know how to do something. We also want to know what it is to
know how to perform those actions that are central to the Christian way of life,
such as engaging God by doing such things as blessing, petitioning, and
thanking God.
To address these questions, I have suggested, we should look more closely at
Christian liturgical practice, which is a central component of the Christian way
of life. Using the Eastern Christian liturgies as our focal point, we saw that the
contribution of the liturgy to engaging God is twofold. First, the liturgy makes
available act-types of a certain range such as chanting, kissing, prostrating, and
eating that count in the context of a liturgical performance as cases of blessing,
petitioning, and thanking God—these last act-types constituting what I have
called the central pattern of the liturgy. And, second, the liturgy furnishes an
array of conceptions of God and God’s activity under which to perform
actions such as chanting, kissing, prostrating, and eating. When all goes
well, these conceptions guide one’s performance of these actions by being
the components of complex action-conceptions in which the assembled do
such things as petition God as The One Who Delivers, bless God as the One
Who Fills All Things, and thank God as the One who “did not cease to do all
things on our behalf.”
If this is correct, the liturgy provides the materials for not only engaging but
also knowing how to engage God. Or more precisely: the liturgy provides the
materials by which a person can acquire such knowledge and a context in
which she can exercise or enact it. For if one grasps these ways of acting in
such a way that one understands them to be ways of blessing, petitioning, and
thanking God, then one knows how to engage God by performing actions such
as blessing, petitioning, and thanking God. Or more precisely yet: to the extent
that one grasps and sufficiently understands these ways of acting, one knows
how to bless, petition, and thank God in their ritualized forms. One has ritual
knowledge.
A further nuance is worth noting. There are, I have claimed, many ways to
do such things as bless, petition, and thank. Suppose I ask you to pass the salt

when eating dinner together. I could do that by writing a formal request. Or
suppose I thank you for writing a letter of recommendation. I could do that by
slapping you hard on the back, despite your suffering from a degenerative back
condition. These actions could even be expressions of practical knowledge,
since I can understand them to be ways of petitioning and thanking. But they
are egregiously inapt ways of acting. The liturgical script, interestingly, repeat-
edly draws attention to the fact that the ways of acting that it prescribes are not
inapt. Mostly this is done by noting that the sacrifice offered to God in the
liturgy consists not in shedding blood but rather in praising God and that the
bowing that occurs is not to “flesh and blood” but to God, the Ruler of All
(Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom). If the liturgical script’s assessment of the
very actions it prescribes is correct, the liturgy furnishes not simply ways of
acting that are ways of engaging God, but also ways of acting that are apt ways
of engaging God. Ritual knowledge, when all goes well, is knowing how to
engage God in ways that are fitting.
Let me now draw out some implications of our discussion. One implication
is that the conditions for knowing how to engage God are, in one regard,
demanding, as an agent’s knowing how to perform an action such as thanking
God requires that there be a way of acting such that (i) that agent can engage
in that way of acting with respect to the being who is God (if any such being
exists) (ii) that way of acting counts as thanking God and (iii) that agent has a
sufficiently complete and accurate understanding of that way of acting. Given
the ontological distance between us and God to which the liturgy draws our
attention, achieving this sort of know-how would not be a trivial matter.
But, as I indicated earlier in this chapter, there are also respects in which the
conditions for knowing how to perform such actions as thanking God are
considerably less demanding than the conditions for knowing various pro-
positions about God. One such respect concerns the role of belief. Imagine that
you are a high-level theoretical physicist who suspects that there is a type of
subatomic particle—hitherto undiscovered—that is responsible for various
happenings in the quantum world. You devise various types of experiments
to determine whether there is such a particle. The evidence that there is such a
particle is promising but not decisive; consequently, you do not find yourself
believing that such a particle exists. Still, when you devise and conduct your
experiments, you act on the assumption that it does exist and proceed with
your work on this assumption. Suppose, for argument’s sake, that the particle
does exist and has many of the properties that you suppose it has. Do you
know how to do such things as discover it, manipulate it in various ways, and
make evident its properties? Presumably, yes. For to have the relevant sort of
know-how, you must have a sufficiently comprehensive and accurate under-
standing of how to manipulate the relevant particle. And, by hypothesis, you
have that. To have the relevant sort of know-how, though, you do not have to
believe (and, hence, know) that the object of your actions exists. In this regard,

there is a crucial difference between knowing that and knowing how. If this is
so, then one can understand why certain strains of Christianity have placed
emphasis on knowing how to engage God by doing such things as blessing and
thanking God rather than being in or trying to manufacture certain doxastic
states. The relevant sort of knowledge how does not require being in these
doxastic states.
Still, under the standard interpretation, figures such as Pascal have been
especially concerned that their interlocutors form religious beliefs. The con-
temporary discussion of the religious attitudes, likewise, has been almost
exclusively focused on the epistemic status of these beliefs, as if being in this
type of state holds a special prominence in the Christian way of life. I have
been suggesting that this tendency threatens to offer a distorted picture of the
religious life, as this way of life is fundamentally concerned not so much with
being in this type of doxastic state with respect to propositions about God as
with conducting oneself in certain ways with respect to God that count as
engaging God, and knowing how to conduct oneself in those ways.
Suppose that one were to grant the point. A satisfactory account of the
religious attitudes, you agree, would have to pay considerably more attention
to their practical dimensions. It is still natural to wonder what is so special
about those actions on which I have focused—those that constitute the central
pattern of the liturgy. Why does their performance deserve a type of priority in
the religious life, as the Eastern tradition holds?
The narrative that lies at the heart of the Christian way of life, I believe,
points toward an answer to this question. At the heart of this narrative is a
story of falling away, one that is wrapped in images of dust, fruit, reptiles, and
nakedness. The story of falling away describes how it is that human beings
have come to be at such deep variance with God and each other. In the
Christian tradition, both the origin and the nature of this state are often
presented in terms of disobedience—specifically, being in a state of disobedi-
ence with regard to God. In the narrative of salvation history in St. Basil’s
liturgy, for example, it is described along these lines.
But this is not the only or arguably the most penetrating way to understand
the nature of the rupture. In his book For the Life of the World, the Orthodox
theologian Alexander Schmemann writes that the falling away is not so much
the result of disobedience as the consequence of living a “noneucharistic life in
a noneucharistic world.”21 “Not giving thanks,” writes Schmemann is the
“‘vital essence’ of evil . . . the sin that tore” human beings “from God.”22 If
Schmemann’s diagnosis is correct, it holds the key to understanding why it is
that enacting the central pattern of the liturgy enjoys such prominence in the
Christian way of life: it is how we repair the rupture. For in knowing how to do
21 22
Schmemann (1969), 18. Schmemann (1987), 187.

such things as bless, petition, and thank God, one thereby knows how to
engage God in such a way that one can know God in the sense of knowing how
to live in communion or be in rapport with God. That, I believe, is where the
importance of ritual knowledge lies.23
23
My thanks to David Manley, Mike Rea, Luke Reinsma, Lori Wilson, Lindsay Whittaker,
Nick Wolterstorff, Tom Flint, and two anonymous referees for their comments.
Transforming the Self

On the Baptismal Rite
It is easy to see why philosophers find the eucharistic rite of such great interest.
Not only is the rite (for many) central to the Christian life, it also generates
exactly the sort of puzzle into which philosophers can sink their teeth. For, by
all accounts, there is a time such that the bread and the wine placed on the
altar during the eucharistic rite are ordinary bread and wine. And yet the
ancient Christian tradition has unanimously affirmed that there is some other
time during the rite in which this bread and wine are the body and blood of
Christ. Hence the puzzle: How could that be so?
In contrast to the eucharistic rite, philosophers have paid almost no
attention to the baptismal rite. Indeed, one would be hard-pressed to
identify a single article written on the topic by a philosopher in the last
fifty years.1 Why this is so, I am not sure. The answer cannot be that the
baptismal rite has fallen into disuse or is peripheral to the Christian life. For
the rite has not fallen into disuse; to the contrary, many Christians consider
baptism a sacrament, the rite by which one is received into the church. Nor
can the answer be that the rite is not complex or puzzling enough to be of
philosophical interest. For the rite, especially in its ancient forms, is extra-
ordinarily rich, complex, and puzzling.
Consider, for example, the rite as it is practiced by Eastern Orthodox
Christians. To those unfamiliar with it, the text and actions of this rite can
seem baffling. I say this not simply because the rite incorporates activities such
as exorcisms, which strike many as the vestiges of a primitive worldview. Nor
is the rite puzzling simply because it seems to skirt close to magic, appearing to
express the conviction that words can endow material things such as oil and
1
I have been surprised to discover that, even among theologians, the issue is under-theorized.
See K. T. Ware’s opening remarks in his “The Sacrament of Baptism and Ascetic Life in the
Teaching of Mark the Monk” (1972).

water with supernatural powers. The rite is especially puzzling because it
seems to make audacious claims about what its performance accomplishes.
What I am calling the audacity of the Orthodox baptismal rite manifests
itself in various passages, such as the following prayer of thanksgiving offered
toward the end of the rite:
Blessed are You, O Lord God Almighty, Source of all good things . . . who has
given to us, unworthy though we be, blessed purification through hallowed water,
and divine sanctification, through life-giving Chrismation; who now, also, has
been pleased to regenerate your servant that has newly received illumination by
water and the Spirit, and granted unto him/her remission of sins, whether
voluntary or involuntary. (159)2
In the space of a sentence, the text ascribes to the one baptized an impressive
array of states: purification, sanctification, regeneration, illumination, and
remission of sins—what I’ll call, for ease of reference, the regenerate states.
These states, this passage makes evident, are acquired upon and by the
performance of the baptismal rite—“by water and the Spirit.” But how could
that be? How could a person be illumined or enlightened as a result of being
baptized? And isn’t there good empirical evidence that the imposition of the
regenerate states is not in fact accomplished in the vast majority of cases? After
all, more often than not, those who are baptized tend not to behave much
differently from those who are not baptized; those belonging to the former
group seem no more illumined or enlightened than those belonging to the
latter. Moreover, when one considers the further fact that the regenerate states
are typically predicated of infants and young children who are baptized, the
predications are paradoxical, even unintelligible. In what sense could an infant
be sanctified, illumined, or enjoy remission of her sins? On a straightforward
reading, the text appears to make a series of serious category mistakes.
Call this cluster of concerns regarding the baptismal rite the Intelligibility
Puzzle. My main project in this chapter is to propose a way of understanding
the baptismal rite that helps to dissolve this puzzle. As will already have been
evident, my focus will be on the Eastern Orthodox baptismal rite, not simply
because it is the most ancient of the baptismal rites presently used by Chris-
tians, but also because it is the most lush and audacious baptismal rite of which
I am aware. If we could make sense of this rite, then we will have taken
important steps toward understanding the baptismal rite in what is perhaps its
most provocative and puzzling form.
2
I am using the English translation of the rite as it is found in Service Book of the Holy Eastern
Orthodox Catholic and Apostolic Church according to the use of the Antiochian Orthodox
Christian Archdiocese of North America (2002). I have modernized the language used. Page
references to this text are inserted in the body of this chapter.
Transforming the Self: On the Baptismal Rite 169
9.1. THE TWOFOLD TRANSFORMATION
The structure of the Orthodox baptismal rite can hardly be considered com-
mon knowledge, so let me start by saying something about it. As it is presently
practiced, the rite is actually composed of three separate sub-rites: the recep-
tion of the catechumens, the baptism itself, and the chrismation (the confirm-
ation by anointing with oil) of the one(s) baptized. For ease of reference, I will
refer to this constellation of rites as the baptismal rite.3 Given that the
components of the baptismal rite were historically performed at different
times and on different occasions, one has to be cautious about simply assum-
ing that there is some way to characterize the point of the rite in a general and
illuminating way. We have to look and see if the rite itself provides us with any
such characterization.
Thankfully, the text of the rite provides such a characterization. In a passage
that echoes the one quoted earlier, the celebrant addresses God with the
following words:
Master of all, show this water to be the water of redemption, the water of
sanctification, the purification of flesh and spirit, the loosing of bonds, the
remission of sins, the illumination of the soul, the laver of regeneration, the
renewal of the spirit, the gift of adoption to sonship, the garment of incorruption,
the fountain of life. For you have said, O Lord: Wash and be clean; and put away
evil things from your souls. You have bestowed upon us from on high a new birth
through water and the Spirit. Therefore, O Lord, manifest yourself in this water,
and grant that he/she who is baptized therein may be transformed. (155)
It is the last line to which I want to draw attention: the point of the baptismal
rite is to transform the person who is baptized. In the eucharistic rite, the
emphasis falls on the transformation of the bread and wine—the imposition
on them of a new function. In the baptismal rite, by contrast, the emphasis
falls on the transformation of the one baptized. The task that faces the one who
wants to understand this rite is to get a better picture of the nature of the
transformation that is supposed to occur.
To that end, let’s start at the beginning of the rite and work our way
forward. During the reception of the catechumens, the liturgical script in-
structs the celebrant to pray as follows: “And make” the one to be baptized “a
reason-endowed sheep in the holy flock of your Christ, an honorable member
of your Church, a child of the light, and an heir of your Kingdom” (148).
During the litanies, in the middle of the rite, the priest asks that the one to be
baptized “may prove him/herself a child of the Light, and an heir of eternal
good things” (153). Finally, during the last section of the rite, just prior to
3
For the history of the rite, see Schmemann (1974), 158, and the essays in Shaughnessy
(1976).

marking the newly baptized with chrismation oil, the priest addresses God,
asking that the newly baptized would “please you in every deed and word, and
may be a child and heir of your heavenly kingdom” (159).
The progression of the text seems to be this: there are three separate
requests that, through baptism and chrismation, the one baptized be made a
member of the church, a child of the light, and an heir of the kingdom. Then,
at some point—presumably by the very acts of baptizing and anointing—the
complex status of being a member of the church, a child of the light, and an
heir to the kingdom is conferred on the one baptized.
The text of the baptismal rite is not a theological treatise. Phrases such as
“child of the light” and “heir to the kingdom” do not have some specific
technical sense that the text communicates. Rather, they are phrases that have
multiple connotations which, in the context of the baptismal rite, express the
idea that the one to be baptized will undergo a specific and significant type of
normative alteration. Although the alteration to which the text draws our
attention is remarkable in its own way, there is nothing deeply mysterious
about it, as we are familiar with dozens of analogues. Imagine, for example,
that at an early age, you had been orphaned and that I, through the standard
legal processes, adopted you as my child and heir. When you became my child
and heir, a profound normative transformation occurred. Prior to being
adopted, you had no rights against me that I care and provide for you on a
day-to-day basis and that all my worldly belongings would pass into your
hands at the appointed time. But with the adoption—effected, in this case, by
the act of signing legal documents—you acquired all these rights against me
and a good many more besides. Correlatively, with the signing of these papers,
my normative standing was altered as well. Prior to signing these papers, I did
not have an obligation to provide and care for you on a day-to-day basis and to
give you all that is mine at the appointed time. But with the signing of these
papers, I acquired these obligations and a good many more besides.
A consequence of this alteration is that if I were to fail to care and provide
for you out of negligence, then I would wrong you and you would have a right
against me to seek reparation.
Many would balk at the idea that we have any rights against God, let alone
rights conferred at baptism. It seems impious! And it should be admitted that
many contemporary Orthodox writers seem set against using “juridical”
concepts to understand our relation to God.4 But I think the language of the
baptismal rite gives us powerful reason to believe that the early church was
comfortable with the idea that the normative transformation that occurs
during baptism consists in the acquisition of a series of new rights vis-à-vis
God, some of these being privileges of various sorts, such as the right to
4
Schmemann (1974), 43, is a notable exception in this regard.

address God in certain ways and to act on behalf of God by speaking and
acting in God’s name.5
Of course the normative alteration that occurs does not simply consist in
the acquisition of rights; it also consists in the acquisition of new responsibil-
ities and obligations to God, including responsibilities and obligations to care
for the well-being of the subjects of God’s concerns, such as the poor. And,
given some plausible assumptions, it may be that some of these normative
features are acquired gradually with maturation and time. When baptized, an
infant may, for example, acquire only conditional obligations—obligations of
such a kind that when she is of the age of maturity, she has various actual
obligations and responsibilities to the church. To which it is worth adding that
the rights, responsibilities, and obligations acquired do not have only God as
their direct object; in baptism, the one baptized also acquires rights, respon-
sibilities, and obligations vis-à-vis the church and vice versa. Indeed, the
Orthodox are alone in their insistence that anyone baptized has a right to all
the ministrations of the church, including partaking of eucharist.6 This is why
if you were to go to an Orthodox baptismal liturgy, you will see not only
infants and young children being baptized but also taking eucharist, for they
are deemed full members of the church in virtue of being baptized. Were the
church to refuse to commune these members on account of their age, it would
(by its own lights) wrong them.
I have said that we should understand the baptismal rite as one in which the
one baptized is understood to undergo a transformation. We have identified
the first element of that transformation, which is an alteration in the norma-
tive standing of the one baptized (and, correlatively, of those who baptize). But
as intimated earlier, there is a second element of the transformation that is
more difficult to puzzle through.
In several places, I have quoted passages from the text of the baptismal rite
in which seemingly audacious things are said about the baptized. Given our
purposes, it is instructive to pay close attention to the language used in these
passages. Consider, first, the text of the litany that immediately precedes the
instruction to perform the baptismal event. In this text, a series of requests
have as their object the water and oil used in the baptismal rite, such as the
request that the water be “sanctified with the power (energeia) of the Holy
Spirit.” The text then turns its attention to the one to be baptized, saying:
For him/her who is now come unto holy Baptism, and for his/her salvation, let us
pray to the Lord.
5
“As a friend talking with a friend,” writes St. Symeon the New Theologian, “we speak with
God, and with boldness we stand before the face of Him who dwells in light unapproachable”
(quoted in Ware [2000], 59–60).
6
The Roman church, apparently, discontinued this practice in the Middle Ages, around the
thirteenth century.

That he/she may prove himself/herself a child of the Light, and an heir of
eternal good things, let us pray to the Lord.
That he/she may be a member and partaker of the death and resurrection of
Christ our God, let us pray to the Lord.
It is difficult to simply read off the illocutionary force of the speech acts
performed by the utterance of these sentences in the context of the perform-
ance of the baptismal rite. In principle, in this context, these sentences could
be used to perform multiple speech act types. Under the most obvious
interpretation, by the utterance of these sentences, the assembled perform a
series of petitions directed toward God: “Grant the one to be baptized salva-
tion. Grant that he or she may be a child of the light. Grant that he or she may
be made worthy of the kingdom.” (In the Greek, the grammatical mood of
these sentences is, interestingly enough, that of an hortatory or a polite
command.) Under a somewhat less obvious interpretation, by the utterance
of these sentences, the assembled also performs blessings directed toward the
one to be baptized: “May you (who are to be baptized) have salvation. May you
(who are to be baptized) be a child of the light. May you (who are to be
baptized) be worthy of the kingdom.” Under yet another interpretation, the
speech acts performed by the utterance of these sentences are so-called
exercitives akin to nominating or adjourning whereby those who perform
them confer a status on someone or other: “Let it be that you (who are to be
baptized) be saved. Let it be that you (who are to be baptized) are a child of the
light. Let it be that you (who are to be baptized) are worthy of the kingdom.”
This last reading of the text might strike some as far-fetched. How could the
assembled impose what I earlier referred to as the regenerate states on the
baptized? Drawing upon Nicholas Wolterstorff ’s work, I’ve suggested else-
where that we have models to help us to make sense of how they might do
this.7 For it may be that by the performance of these (and other) speech acts,
God confers the regenerate states on the baptized. This would be a case of what
Wolterstorff calls double-agency action—action in which one agent acts by the
actions of another. If this were correct, the church would be intimately
implicated in God’s creative activity, as it would be the agent whereby God
imposes the regenerate states on the one baptized. I would add that this
reading gains some plausibility—and this is the second point I wish to
make—from a passage later in the text that I’ve already quoted.
The passage I have in mind is this:
7
In Cuneo (2015b), included as Chapter 10 in the present volume. See Wolterstorff (1995),
ch. 3.

water and the Spirit, and grants unto him/her remission of sins, whether volun-
tary or involuntary. (159)
When I quoted this passage earlier, I did not draw attention to the verb tenses
of the sentences that compose it. But now take another look at the tenses used.
Whereas earlier in the rite, the text uses a combination of the subjunctive and
indicative moods when speaking of the regenerate states, in this passage, it
uses the (present) perfect tense. Addressing God, it says you have given the one
baptized purification, sanctification, regeneration, and the like, presumably
through the actions of the assembled. A straightforward explanation of this
confident affirmation that the one baptized has been transformed is that the
activity of transforming consists (at least in part) in the activity of baptizing,
much in the way that acquiring the status of being legally adopted consists in
the activity of signing the relevant legal documents.
The text of the baptismal rite does not itself answer the question as to
whether the one baptized acquires the regenerate states simply as an answer to
the assembled’s request that God confer these states or as the result of the
performance of a divine/human exercitive speech act in which these states are
imposed on the baptized. Nonetheless, while the answer to this question
would, I believe, have important implications for how we understand the
nature of the baptismal rite, the more important point for present purposes
is that we have identified a second element of the transformation that is
supposed to occur by the performance of the baptismal rite, which is the
imposition on the baptized of the regenerate states.
Two alterations, then, appear to lie at the heart of the baptismal rite. One
alteration consists in the imposition of a normative standing, the other in the
imposition of the regenerate states. If the first alteration is familiar and
intelligible in its basic structure, the second—as I noted earlier—is baffling.
It generates what I earlier called the Intelligibility Puzzle, this puzzle consisting
not simply in the concern that it is difficult to see how the regenerate states
could be conferred on someone, as opposed to acquired over time with effort.
It also has an empirical dimension, since the behavior of those who are
baptized rather often strongly indicates that they have not had these states
conferred on them. The problem only gets worse, moreover, when we consider
the fact that it is often infants and small children who are baptized. In this case,
it just doesn’t seem to make any sense to predicate the regenerate states of
infants and small children, as the language of the rite licenses.
In what follows, I am going to develop an interpretation of the baptismal
rite that addresses the Intelligibility Puzzle in a way that is, I believe, close to
satisfactory. I say that this strategy is “close to satisfactory” because it is
incomplete and raises questions of its own—questions that will have to be
tackled on another day. Let me add that I am aware that there are strategies for

addressing this puzzle that fall short of anything like a solution to it. For
example, one might point out that the baptismal rites were originally com-
posed for inducting adult converts into the church. The church, it might be
said, has seen fit not to alter the rite or compose an alternate rite when infants
and children are baptized. But, it might be continued, this may simply be
because it has assumed that there is no harm done when, in the baptismal rite,
we operate with an analogue to a legal fiction. That is, it might be that the
church has assumed that there is no harm done when it says of infants and
children things that are false in the context of the baptismal rite for the
purpose of expediency, or of edifying the faithful, or of expressing hopeful
expectation.
In my judgment, the appeal to harmless fictions deserves to be taken
seriously when interpreting parts of the baptismal rite. For example, at the
very outset of the rite, when the celebrant prays that Christ “remove from him/
her his/her former delusion and fill him/her with the faith, hope and love
which are in you” (146), it is clear that these words could not truly apply to an
infant. Yet the church has chosen not to omit the utterance of these sentences
when baptizing infants. One explanation of this practice is that the utterance
of these sentences functions as a harmless fiction.8 Still, even if this were
correct, the appeal to such a fiction would only be a partial solution to the
Intelligibility Puzzle, for it offers no answers to how we could truthfully say of
adults that they enjoy the regenerate states by way of the performance of the
baptismal rite.
9.2. ADDRESSING INTELLIGIBILITY
In his book Of Water and the Spirit, the Orthodox theologian Alexander
Schmemann contends that there are important differences between the way
that Patristic theology conceived of the baptismal rite, on the one hand, and
the way that post-Patristic thought has construed it, on the other. In virtually
every manual of post-Patristic systematic theology, Schmemann writes:
the two essential references in explaining Baptism are original sin and grace.
Baptism, we are told, removes from man and liberates him from the original sin,
8
This is not, however, the only available explanation. Another explanation is that, in these
utterances, nothing is said of (or even taken to be said of) the infant baptized. An analogue: at a
certain point in the Orthodox Divine Liturgy, the deacon utters the sentence “Catechumens
depart!” Were you to attend this service, however, you would see that any catechumens present
do not in fact depart. Nor are they expected to. In the context of the liturgy, the utterance of the
imperatival sentence “Catechumens depart!” no longer has (or is taken to have) the force of a
command.

and it also bestows upon him the grace necessary for his Christian life. As all
other sacraments, Baptism thus is defined as a “means of grace,” as a “visible sign
of an invisible grace.” It is absolutely essential, to be sure, for our salvation; but in
these definitions and explanations, it is no longer presented as being truly—in
essence and not only in external symbolism—death and resurrection.9
By contrast, says Schmemann, when explicating the baptismal Mystery, the
Patristics tended to employ as their central categories not original sin and
grace but death and resurrection. And indeed the text of the baptismal rite
seems to confirm Schmemann’s point: there are no allusions—let alone
references to—original sin in the text.10 And while references to grace abound,
it is clear that when the concept of grace is employed, the dominant theme of
the text is that of the passage from the old to the new via baptism:
You have bestowed on us from on high a new birth through water and the spirit.
For this reason, O Lord, manifest yourself in this water, and grant that he/she who
is baptized therein may be transformed; that he/she may put away from him/
herself the old man/woman . . . and may be clothed upon with the new man/
woman, and renewed after the image of Him who created him/her; that being
buried, after the pattern of your death, in baptism, he/she may, in like manner, be
a partaker of your Resurrection and having preserved the gift of your Holy Spirit,
and increased the measure of grace committed to him/her, he/she may receive the
prize of his/her high calling. (155–6)
Passages such as this present the themes of newness, regeneration, and
resurrection as being at the heart of the Baptismal Mystery. But they also
raise puzzles of their own—ones similar to those that constitute the Intelligi-
bility Puzzle. For clearly, the one baptized does not, in virtue of the perform-
ance of the baptismal rite, die a physical or (what the tradition terms) a
spiritual death, entering into a state of deep alienation from God. Nor is the
one baptized, in virtue of the performance of the baptismal rite, resurrected in
any identifiable sense. But if not, just what is the text trying to communicate
with this imagery of death and resurrection?
Strictly speaking, the text that I have just quoted says not that the one
baptized dies and is resurrected. Rather, it says that, in baptism, the one
baptized is buried and resurrected after the pattern of Christ’s death and
resurrection. What does this mean? For his part, Schmemann wants nothing
to do with a deflationary approach according to which, when the one baptized
is lowered into and emerges from the water, this merely symbolically repre-
sents Christ’s death and resurrection. Schmemann’s suggestion is, instead, that
the pattern of Christ’s death consists in this: Christ went voluntarily to his
9
10
Schmemann may overstate his point, however. Ware (1972) makes it plain that some
Patristic commentators, such as St. Mark the Monk, one of the few Patristics to write extensively
on the baptismal rite, thought of it in terms of the dynamic between original sin and grace.

death in obedience to God the Father. Christ, says Schmemann, desired to die
out of love, “to destroy the solitude, the separation from life, the darkness and
the despair of death,” by which Schmemann means not the death of the body
but spiritual death.11 The way in which baptism is a pattern of Christ’s death,
then, is that the action of baptizing (or, perhaps, the state of undergoing
baptism) expresses the same type of desire as Christ’s: the action (or state)
expresses a desire to obey, love, and overcome alienation from God.12
I have pursued Schmemann’s discussion of this issue not simply to highlight
important ways in which the Orthodox understanding of the baptismal rite is
different from other understandings of the rite prominent in Western Chris-
tendom. I have pursued it also because Schmemann employs a strategy for
handling attributions made in the context of the baptismal rite that are deeply
puzzling, such as the claim that in baptism, the one baptized is “a partaker of
the death” of Christ (153). The strategy is roughly this: when faced with an
attribution concerning the one baptized that looks literally false, look for an
interpretation of that attribution which comes out true because there is an
agent active in the baptismal event and a state of that agent such that that
agent’s being in that state accounts for the truth of that attribution under that
interpretation.
In his discussion of the issue of the imagery of death and resurrection, it is
true that there are passages in which Schmemann seems to say that the one
baptized must desire to die to self. But this is not Schmemann’s considered
view. For Schmemann is keenly aware that, in the case of infant baptism,
there is no sense in which the infant has the relevant desire. And, though
Schmemann doesn’t mention the point, something similar holds true of those
performing the baptismal rite itself. Aside from intending to follow the script
of the baptismal rite, they needn’t be in any particular mental state when
performing the baptismal rite; they could be simply going through the mo-
tions. (One could, of course, maintain that baptisms of this sort are “invalid.”
Schmemann, however, has no interest in trying to distinguish “valid” from
“invalid” baptismal rites.)13 Instead, in a move that prefigures some of
N. T. Wright’s work on the topic of justification, Schmemann proposes a
different answer: the agent in question is Christ and the relevant state of Christ
11
Schmemann (1974), 64. “In baptism, man wants to die as a sinful man and he is given that
death, and in baptism man wants the newness of life as forgiveness, and he is given it”
(Schmemann [1973], 78).
12
13
Schmemann (1974), 67. Consider, though, what Gregory of Nyssa writes: “If, when the
washing of baptism is applied to the body, the soul does not cleanse itself from the stains of the
passions, but our life after initiation continues to be the same as it was before—then, though it
may be a bold thing to say, yet I will say it without shrinking: in such cases the water remains
water, since the gift of the Holy Spirit is nowhere manifested in what has taken place.” Quoted in
Ware (1972), 448.

is Christ’s faith. It is Christ’s faith, says Schmemann, on which baptism
“totally and exclusively” depends—by which Schmemann means Christ’s
faithfulness as it is expressed in the life of the church.14
It is difficult to see, however, how this proposal makes any headway on the
issue before us. The issue before us, recall, is in what sense the one baptized
could “partake” in the death of Christ or her baptism be “after the pattern” of
Christ’s death. Telling us that Christ’s faithfulness is manifested in the actions
of the church during the baptismal rite does not shed any light on how, in the
baptismal rite, the one baptized partakes in the death of Christ. Presumably, it
is something about Christ’s faith and the relationship that the one baptized
bears to it that renders the activity of baptism “after the pattern” of Christ’s
death and resurrection. To make progress on the issue before us, however, we
need to have a better sense of what that something is and what relation the one
baptized bears to it.15 I would add that an appeal to Christ’s faith also fails to
illuminate the more general issue of how, in the baptismal rite, the regenerate
states are imposed on the one baptized.
We need to strike out in a different direction.
9.3. A DIFFERENT APPROACH
We are looking for a way to understand the predications of the regenerate

states of the one baptized that does not imply that these predications are
clearly false and captures the church’s conviction that in baptism the one
baptized undergoes a fundamental transformation. The way forward on this
matter, I believe, is to attend to an ambiguity in the language of the baptismal
rite. To that end, return to the passage I quoted at the outset of our discussion
in which, I said, the baptismal liturgy seems at its most audacious:
water and the Spirit, and granted unto him/her remission of sins, whether
voluntary or involuntary. (159)
14
Schmemann (1974), 67–9, 31.
15
I find what the Orthodox theologian Georges Florovsky writes no more satisfactory. In his
short article “Baptismal Symbolism and Redemptive Reality” (n.d.), Florovsky writes that the one
baptized “is transformed through following and imitating; and thus what was foreshown by the
Lord is realized.” Without being told more, I fail to see in what sense imitating Christ’s death
would be to partake in the death of Christ. Although I have reservations about his interpretations
of the Church Fathers, Finn (1976) canvasses views of various Church Fathers on the matter.

This passage, and others like it, appears to predicate of the one baptized the
regenerate states of being purified, being sanctified, being regenerated, being
illumined, and having remission of sins. This, I have emphasized, is puzzling
in multiple respects, not the least of which is that it is difficult to see how
infants and small children could be in any of these states. Another look at the
passage, however, reveals that each of these states admits of a process/product
ambiguity, which the English translation masks to a certain degree. In the
English translation, in fact, we are naturally drawn to the “product” interpret-
ation of these states: as a result of the performance of the baptismal rite—we
read the text as affirming—the one baptized is now purified, sanctified,
regenerated, illumined, and released from sin. But the text admits of a different
“process” reading: as a result of the performance of the baptismal rite, the one
baptized, is now being purified, being sanctified, being regenerated, being
illumined, and being released from sin. Under this reading, which receives
qualified support from the writings of figures such as Mark the Monk and
Gregory of Nyssa, the fundamental alteration that occurs in the baptismal rite
is that the performance of the rite has instigated these processes in the one
baptized.16
While I doubt that this reading can be vindicated on linguistic grounds
alone, it might be worth emphasizing that the Greek text indicates that
something like a process interpretation is along the right lines. Take, for
example, petitions that figure in the rite’s text such as:
That this water may be sanctified with the power, and effectual operation and
indwelling of the Holy Spirit, let us pray to the Lord.
In the Greek, the object of the preposition “with” is the so-called articular
infinitive, “verbal nouns” that communicate verbal action or movement. So,
literally rendered, the first words of the prayer quoted above ask “that this
holy-making water would . . . ” The idea, then, is that there is a process,
namely, “holy-making,” that is underway in the context of the baptismal
rite. When the text switches to the (present) perfect tense, using phrases
such as “Blessed are you, O Lord God . . . who has given us . . . blessed purifi-
cation” (158–9), it is natural to read it as claiming not that the process of
purifying has been completed but that it has been initiated.
Let’s take a moment to sharpen this “process” reading of the text. Suppose
we say that a state of an agent is a non-episodic state that can be predicated of
an agent insofar as that agent exemplifies—or is essentially disposed to
exemplify—qualities of personal agency, such as being able to act under
16
While the interpretation I have offered builds upon the idea, expressed by some of the
Church Fathers, that the “seed” of virtue is planted in baptism, it is nonetheless considerably
more modest than the views advanced by figures such as Mark the Monk, who maintain that
once baptized, there is no “residue” from the “sin of Adam.” See Ware (1972).

goals and entertain thoughts by employing concepts. Let’s say, furthermore,
that a process-state is a state of an agent that, when exemplified in an agent,
consists in the unfolding of a process that is initiated at some point and is
oriented toward the achievement of some end(s) or goal(s) at which that agent
can intentionally aim. An example of such a state would be the process of
forgiving. The process of forgiving is a state of an agent such that when it is
exemplified it is, first, initiated in an agent, second, oriented toward a goal—in
this case, achieving the state of being such as to have forgiven—and, third, this
goal is one whose achievement at which the agent can intentionally aim.
For our purposes here, it is worth stressing that a process-state could be
initiated in multiple ways, such as by one’s own volition, by being struck by a
realization, or by another’s agency. Indeed, in principle, the process-state of
forgiving another could be instigated by something as “external” as receiving a
chemical injection. And it is also worth mentioning that a process-state can
have multiple, complex goals. In the case of forgiving, it may be that the
immediate aim of the process is to achieve the goal of being such as to have
forgiven, while the mediate goal of the process is to achieve the goal of being
reconciled with the one forgiven. When initiated, of course, a process-state can
take a lifetime to reach fruition; sometimes this is true of forgiving, for
example. And the process needn’t proceed inexorably; it can be interrupted,
short-circuited, subverted, or the like due to one’s own agency, another’s
agency, or inhospitable circumstances.
Suppose, then, we think of the second alteration that is understood to occur
by the performance of the baptismal rite as the initiation of a cluster of
process-states in the one baptized. The processes in question are initiated by
the activity of multiple agents. In some cases, they are initiated by the activity
of the one baptized, such as when she enacts the decision to be baptized; in
other cases, such as in the case of infant baptism, they are not. In all cases,
these processes are initiated by both the activity of the ones baptizing and—as
the baptismal rite makes evident—God.
What should we say about the character of these process-states? The text of
the baptismal rite presents them not as quasi-mechanistic processes similar to
the process of digesting food but as the exercise of personal agency, the
energeia of the Holy Spirit. If this is right, the process-states in question are
not simply initiated by divine activity but also consist in the exercise of divine
agency. Admittedly, finding analogues to this sort of activity is not easy. We
are familiar with cases in which one agent instigates a process-state in another,
such as when my doctor injects me with antibiotics. But when my doctor
instigates this state, the state itself does not consist in the exercise of my
doctor’s own personal agency. Rather, it consists in the antibiotics fighting off
infection in my body. We are also familiar with cases in which an agent
instigates a process-state in himself that consists in the exercise of his own
personal agency. I might, for example, instigate the process of my reflecting on

a philosophical issue, where the process of reflecting is very much an exercise
of my own personal agency. What is much more difficult to identify is a case in
which one agent instigates in another a process-state such that that process-
state consists in the exercise of the first agent’s personal agency. And yet, if
I understand the text of the baptismal rite correctly, this is exactly how it
presents the types of process-states instigated at baptism.
The best we can do to understand this, I think, is to imagine a case in which
the normal barriers between persons break down, such as one in which by a
neural wiring hookup, some of my reactions, feelings, thoughts, and attitudes
become operative in you, initiating a process-state. In this case, you might
become aware of reactions or tendencies in yourself that are the exercise of my
personal agency, although you do not recognize them as mine. With time,
however, you could become aware that these feelings, thoughts, and attitudes
are indeed mine, and, if all goes well, they would be available to you in much
the way that they are ordinarily available to me. Indeed, if all goes especially
well, you might even identify with them, taking them, for all intents and
purposes, as your own. The neural wiring hook up we are imagining, of
course, might involve reciprocity. In that case, your reactions, feelings,
thoughts, and attitudes would become available to me in much the way they
are normally available to you. This would eventuate in a fusion of personal
agency, which, I think, approximates the fusion between divine and human
agency that is supposed to be instigated at baptism.17
When trying to capture the character of the transformation that this divine
activity effects, the text of the Orthodox baptismal rite uses a remarkably wide
array of phrases and images—a range that is a good deal wider than I have thus
far indicated. Bring to mind, for example, a passage quoted earlier, in which
the celebrant prays:
Master of all, show this water to be the water of redemption, the water of
sanctification, the purification of flesh and spirit, the loosing of bonds, the
remission of sins, the illumination of the soul, the laver of regeneration, the
renewal of the spirit, the gift of adoption to sonship, the garment of incorruption,
the fountain of life. (155)
While these images are evocative, I do not read the text of the baptismal rite in
such a way that, in the case of each image, there is some highly specific way to
understand it and the state of the baptized that would correspond to it. Nor do
I detect any attempt in the text of the baptismal rite to illustrate how the
various regenerate states are related to one another. We are in the presence
of something closer to poetry than systematic theology! Still, the text does
17
I am here drawing upon William Alston’s wonderful essay “The Indwelling of the Holy
Spirit” (Alston [1989], 246).

provide clues about how to understand some of the process-states initiated by
the baptismal rite.
Some of these states are epistemic. Take the state of being illumined, for
example, which is predicated numerous times of the one baptized.18 That this
is an epistemic state is indicated by the text of the baptismal rite in various
places: “Open the eyes of his/her understanding, that the light of your Gospel
may shine brightly in him/her . . . that we may be illumined by the light of
understanding by the outpouring of the Holy Spirit” (148, 152). This petition,
in turn, echoes the prayer recited in the Divine Liturgy immediately before the
reading of the Gospel: “Illumine our hearts, O Master who loves humankind
with the pure light of your divine knowledge, and open the eyes of our minds
to the understanding of your Gospel teachings . . . for you are the illumination
of our souls and bodies, O Christ our God” (Liturgy of St. James). Understood
as a process-state, being illumined seems to have as its immediate goal a trait-
like state, a state of understanding and being disposed to understand the
teachings of the Gospel. If this is right, baptism would have the function of
instilling not character traits themselves but the processes that, when all goes
well, eventuate in the formation of character traits.
In contrast, other images used in the text seem to stand for processes that
produce not trait-like states but status-states, such as the status of being freed
or loosed from the bonds of the sin-disorder. In some ways, we are now at a
disadvantage when it comes to understanding the imagery used in some of the
prayers of the baptismal rite, such as the prayer just quoted. For given the
distance between ours and the ancient world, some of these images are not
easily absorbed. This is probably true of the image and theme that is, in many
ways, central to the rite, which is that of being made pure or clean. The
presuppositions about ritual purity and impurity that seem to lie behind the
imagery and which themselves have an ambiguous status in the New Testa-
ment are, for many of us, dark, alien, puzzling. What can be said, however, is
that the imagery clearly has aesthetic overtones and that we continue to
recognize the aesthetic dimensions of personal character. We speak, for
example, of the ugliness of evil and the beauty of goodness and their tendency
to both evoke and merit reactive states such as revulsion and awe in us. When
viewed in this light, perhaps the thing to say about the images of purity is that
they help us to understand the broadly aesthetic dimensions of the twofold
transformation that is supposed to occur in baptism, a beauty that consists (in
part) in the absence of a certain type of disorder.
While there is much more to say about the various regenerate states that are
predicated of the one baptized, let me summarize the upshot of our discussion:
the Intelligibility Puzzle raises pressing questions about the intelligibility of the
18
Gregory of Nazianzus and others sometimes use the term “illumination” simply to mean
“baptism.” See his Festal Orations (2008), 100.

baptismal rite, specifically concerning the attribution of the regenerate states
to the one baptized. But the puzzle has bite only when the regenerate states are
understood to be product rather than process-states. When understood as
process-states that are instigated by the performance of the baptismal rite,
however, there is no deep puzzle, as there is nothing unintelligible about
understanding these states as processes that are instigated in the one baptized
by joint human and divine activity. Moreover, this understanding of what is
accomplished at the baptismal rite is compatible with the empirical data, as the
process-states instigated may fail to take root for various reasons. For the
process-states to achieve—or even approximate—their ends, a lot needs to fall
into place, including hard effort on the part of the one baptized.
Finally, the interpretation under consideration offers a pleasingly unified
account of what occurs by the performance of the baptismal rite in two
respects. For one thing, if the process interpretation is correct, the same
dynamic is at work in the cases of both infant and adult baptism, namely,
the instigation of an array of process-states. Since nothing depends on the one
baptized being in one or another mental state for these process-states to be
instigated, we have an explanation of why the church has seen fit to use the
same baptismal rite when baptizing infants and adults. When interpreting the
rite as it applies to infants, there is no need, then, to resort to the analogue of
legal fictions, at least when it comes to the attribution of these states.
Moreover, the process interpretation allows us to see better how the two
alterations that are understood to occur by the performance of the baptismal
rite are related. The regenerate states initiated by the baptismal rite are neither
initiated nor develop on their own. To come to fruition, these process-states
require a community that conforms to its responsibilities, providing the
conditions in which they can develop. Moreover, to the extent that these
process-states do develop, it is through the one baptized and the community
exercising their rights and conforming to their respective responsibilities. If
the tradition is correct, it is (in part) by the one baptized exercising her
privilege to partake fully in the eucharistic rite that the regenerate states
conferred on her by baptism grow. And it is (in part) by the community
conforming to its responsibility to enact this rite that this development occurs.
In a way, though, this is a misleading way of trying to capture the way in
which the two alterations are related. It is not as if there were some process
that, in the one baptized, develops more or less independently of the activity of
the community in the sense that it is merely the community’s job to help it
develop, as a gardener helps a tomato plant to grow. The better way to view the
matter, arguably, is that the process instigated by the baptismal rite consists, in
part, in the community’s conforming to its responsibilities. The process—
which consists in the exercise of the energeia of the Holy Spirit—is extended in
the sense of being “in” both the person and the activity of the community.
Suppose, for example, that the process of being illumined consists in being

exposed to the church’s understanding of the Gospels. If that understanding
and its presentation were the product of the exercise if the energeia of the Holy
Spirit, then we could begin to see how the process in question might be present
in both the community and the one baptized, moving from the former to
the latter.
There are, then, multiple reasons to sympathize with the process interpret-
ation of the baptismal rite. Toward the middle of our discussion, however,
I mentioned that I find the process interpretation close to but not entirely
satisfactory. Let me close by indicating why.
First, the view leaves important questions unaddressed. For example,
although I raised questions about how to understand claims that the one
baptized “partakes” in the death and resurrection of Christ, I offered no
answer to them. It is not apparent to me that the process interpretation itself
sheds light on this issue, although this interpretation might put us in a better
position to address it.
Second, the process interpretation will strike some as overly modest and,
thus, falling outside the arc of the church’s understanding of the baptismal rite.
Listen, for example, to what St. John Chyrostomos says in a homily to the
newly baptized:
You are not only free, but also holy; not only holy, but also just; not only just, but
also sons; not only sons, but also heirs; not only heirs, but also brothers of Christ;
not only brothers of Christ, but also joint heirs; not only joint heirs, but also
members; not only members, but also the temple; not only the temple, but also
instruments of the Spirit. Blessed be God, who alone does wonderful things!19
Some of these words could, I suppose, be interpreted as being hyperbolic. But
if they are not so interpreted, then I can understand why someone might feel
dissatisfied with the process interpretation of the baptismal rite, for it is
compatible with the one baptized enjoying rather few of the states that
Chrysostomos mentions. In reply, I can only say that those who feel this
dissatisfaction face a challenge, which is to interpret what Chrysostomos says
in such a way that it fits with the reality of what does and could occur by the
performance of the baptismal rite.20
Third, there are attributions of the regenerate states made in the context of
the performance of the baptismal rite that do not easily admit of the process
interpretation. At the end of the rite, for example, the celebrant addresses the
newly baptized one, proclaiming: “You are justified. You are illumined. You
are sanctified. You are washed in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and
19
Quoted in Kavanagh (1991), 143. Cf. Gregory of Nazianzus (2008).
20
There was, in fact, a controversy—the so-called Messalian Controversy—over this very
issue in fourth century Syria. See Ferguson (2010).

of the Holy Spirit” (160–1).21 Unlike their Western counterparts, Eastern
Christians have had very little to say about the topic of justification; it fails
to figure prominently in their theological reflections. However that may be,
given the major options for understanding the concept of justification—the
best of which, I believe, is that although we have wronged God and each other,
the charges against us have been dropped— I do not see a way to understand
the concept of justification along process lines.22 It is a status-state, and it
would take some work to explain how it might coherently apply to infants and
small children. Similar observations hold regarding claims that infants are
forgiven of their sin.
A final concern about the baptismal rite is that it involves the imposition of
a variety of states by the performance of speech acts. But in the paradigmatic
case, speech acts are intentional: you assert a proposition in virtue of intending
to do so. You issue a command because you intend to do so, and so on. But it is
perfectly possible for those performing the baptismal rite not to intend to
request of God that God impose on the one baptized the regenerative states, or
bless the one baptized, or anything of the sort. The celebrant and the people
could, in principle, be simply following the script of the rite, going through the
liturgical motions. And yet it would seem that the one baptized is indeed
baptized, inducted into the community. This raises the issue of what to make
of deviant performances of the baptismal rite.
There are several ways of trying to handle this issue. One would be to appeal
to the “ossification of intentions.” In this case, the suggestion would be that
what matters is that the script in some way expresses the intentions of its
composers (or those of the church, which appropriated the rite from its
composers) to petition God, bless the one baptized, and the like, and that
these intentions are actualized by the performance of the rite. Another
approach would be to emphasize the centrality of God’s intentions in the
performance of the baptismal rite, holding that they are sufficient for the
locutionary acts performed to count as petitioning, blessing, and so on. I am
not sure that either of these approaches, when worked out, is wholly satisfac-
tory. But at least we see better where more needs to be said about the nature of
the baptismal rite.23
21
The proclamation lightly embellishes 1 Cor. 6: 11.
22
For a defense of this understanding, see Wolterstorff (2011b), part IV.
23
For their feedback on an earlier version of this chapter, I thank an anonymous referee,
Robin Le Poidevin, David O’Hara, Luke Reinsma, Mark Usher, Nick Wolterstorff, and Phil
Woodward.
10
Rites of Remission
The starting point of my reflections in this chapter is a prayer found in the

script of the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostomos. In the Litany before the
Lord’s Prayer, the liturgical script instructs the celebrant to pray:
To You Master, Lover of humankind, we entrust our whole life and hope and we
entreat, pray, and implore you: count us worthy to partake of your heavenly and
awesome Mysteries . . . for remission of sins, for forgiveness of transgressions, for
the communion of the Holy Spirit, for the inheritance of the Kingdom of Heaven,
for boldness towards You, but not for judgment or condemnation.1
The line that interests me—and which is repeated no less than five times in the
liturgy—is the one in which the celebrant requests of God that the eating of the
eucharist be for the “remission of sins.” What interests me about this line, at
least initially, is that it does not simply echo Jesus’s words in the New
Testament. Although the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke all present
accounts of Jesus’s words at the Last Supper, only Matthew reports Jesus as
saying anything at the Last Supper about the remission of sin. What Matthew
reports Jesus as saying, however, is not that the partaking of the bread and
wine is for the remission of sin, but that his death is for the remission of sin.2
Likewise, when Paul reports Jesus’s words at the Last Supper, Jesus says
nothing about sin, let alone that partaking of the eucharist is for remission
of sin (I Cor. 11: 23). By all appearances, then, when the liturgical script says
1
I am using the Thyateira (1995) translation of The Divine Liturgy of Our Father among
the Saints John Chrysostom. This translation is also available at <http://www.cappellaromana.
org/DL_in_English_Booklet_Web.pdf> (accessed August 21, 2015). In what follows, I operate
with a distinction between the liturgical script, which is a set of guidelines addressed to a
group of people who might participate in the liturgy, and the liturgy itself, which is a sequence
of act-types.
2
This passage from Matthew is quoted in the Anaphora of The Divine Liturgy of St. John
Chrysostom. The Gospel of John has no account of the Last Supper. Still, after the feeding of the
five thousand, Jesus says that he is the bread of life and that only those who partake of him have
eternal life (John 6: 55–8). While most Christians would affirm that there are interesting and
intimate connections between having eternal life and the remission of sin, the two states are not
identical.

that partaking of the eucharist is for the remission of sin, it goes beyond
anything that is explicitly stated in the Gospels or the epistolary literature.
There might be an explanation for this. When blessing the waters during the
baptismal rite, the celebrant prays several times that the water would be for
“the remission of sins, the remedy of infirmities.”3 The content of this prayer,
unlike the prayer quoted above, draws directly from scripture, echoing Peter’s
injunction in Acts to “Repent, and let every one of you be baptized in the name
of Jesus Christ for the remission of sin” (Acts 2: 38). And yet, in the context of
the liturgy, Peter’s words about the function of baptism are understood in such
a way that they apply equally to other liturgical rites, such as partaking of
eucharist and anointing with oil. Why is that?
Perhaps a comparison will help. In American jurisprudence, certain consti-
tutional provisions are understood to “incorporate” others, the most famous
example being that in which portions of the Bill of Rights are understood to
apply to the individual states, even though, when drafted, these sections were
not so intended. In the case of baptism, a natural suggestion is that the liturgy
articulates the church’s understanding that, when Peter claims that baptism is
for the remission of sin, his claim about baptism’s function also applies to other
liturgical rites, even though Peter’s words make no explicit reference to these
other rites. The idea is that, much in the way that the Supreme Court has held
that certain constitutional provisions incorporate others, so also Peter’s pro-
nouncement regarding the purpose of baptism “incorporates” other liturgical
activities, such as participating in the eucharist.4 Under this understanding, a
central aim of all these liturgical activities is to effect the remission of sin, even if
the scriptures explicitly designate only baptizing and anointing for this purpose.
There appears, then, to be a way to explain why the liturgical script would
go beyond the scriptural texts, denominating certain activities such as partici-
pating in the eucharist as being for the remission of sin. What puzzles me most
about these liturgical pronouncements, however, is not the way in which they
creatively extend the scriptural text, but what is said about the effects of these
liturgical activities themselves. For it is difficult to see what the connection
could be between the activities of participating in the eucharist, baptizing, and
anointing with oil, on the one hand, and the state of enjoying remission of sin,
on the other. When it comes to the remission of sin, wouldn’t repenting be the
relevant activity? Moreover, the effect that these liturgical activities are said
3
Service Book of the Holy Eastern Orthodox Catholic and Apostolic Church according to the
use of the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America (2002), 155. I will refer to
this work as Service Book (2002).
4
As for anointing the sick, see Jas. 5: 14–15. In the rite of the anointing of the sick, the
celebrant entreats God to “send down your Holy Spirit and sanctify this oil; and grant that it may
bring full pardon from sin to your servant who is anointed” (Meyendorff [2009], 136). The verb
used in this prayer is ἀπολύτρωσιν, often translated as “release” or “redemption.” In Col. 1: 14, it
is used as a near synonym for the Greek verb that is translated as “remission.”
Rites of Remission 187

to have—namely, the remission of sin—does not appear to hinge on whether
the one who eats, is baptized, or is anointed understands what is being done.
In the Eastern tradition, after all, babies and small children are both baptized
and participate in the eucharist; those in advanced states of dementia and
comas are anointed. If these activities do effect the remission of sin, they
appear to do so (at least in part) at a sub-doxastic level. How they accomplish
this, however, is something that is not easy to understand.
Those who wish to understand the underlying ratio of the various actions
that constitute the liturgy face a task. The task is to try to uncover the rationale
or justification for why the liturgy takes the shape it does—why certain things
are said, certain actions are performed and are understood to have one or
another type of significance. In the case at hand, the task is to understand how
there could be a close link between taking eucharist, baptizing, and anointing,
on the one hand, and enjoying remission of sin, on the other. My project in
this chapter is to try to make headway on this task. I am going to suggest that
the text and actions of the liturgy make sense given a certain understanding of
our condition, an understanding that is controversial but deeply embedded in
the Eastern Christian tradition. While I have no pretensions of dispelling the
mystery of how rites such as taking eucharist, baptizing, and anointing could
contribute to the remission of sin, I think some helpful things can be said on
this score too. The key to making sense of these activities, or so I will suggest, is
to work with a particular model of human and divine action.
Before diving into our topic, let me first enter a pair of caveats. Like biblical
exegesis, interpreting liturgical texts and actions quickly plunges one into a set
of complicated issues, in which philological, theological, historical, and philo-
sophical questions intertwine with one another. Since my aims are broadly
philosophical, I am not going to pause to explore or defend in detail claims
that many of those with broadly philological, theological, or historical interests
would, since doing so would often be beyond my competence and distract
from my central project, which is to try to make sense of certain aspects of the
liturgy. Sometimes it is best to present the model first and then return to
defend its more controversial elements! In addition to not giving the full range
of issues before us the attention they might deserve, I do not aspire to give
anything like the complete story of how liturgical rites could plausibly be
understood to have the effects that the liturgy seems to ascribe to them. I wish
to present only the main lines of a certain understanding that could be
supplemented, modified, and enriched in various ways.
1 0 .1 . D I A G N O S I S
What is being presupposed about our human condition such that it is intel-
ligible to hold that eating, baptizing, and anointing are for the remission

of sin? Let me begin with an observation about the phrase “remission of
sin” itself. This phrase is an English translation of a Greek phrase (ἄφεσις
ἁμαρτιῶν/afesin amartion) that belongs to a cluster of Greek terms and
phrases that can have importantly different meanings and nuances in meaning,
many of which are obscured (or even lost) in their English translations. When
used in both the scriptures and the liturgy, the Greek terms that are translated
as “life” and “death,” for example, often communicate much more—and some-
times something entirely different from—physical life and death. Similarly for
the Greek counterparts to other English terms such as “salvation,” “flesh,”
“word,” “world,” and the like.5 As I say, my aim here is not primarily philo-
logical; it is not to comb biblical scholarship for the purpose of uncovering and
comparing the variety of meanings expressed by the phrase “remission of sin,”
but to make several observations that will guide our discussion.
Begin with the term “remission.” The first observation is that, on linguistic
grounds alone, when the liturgical text uses the phrase “remission of sin,” this
phrase is probably best understood not to mean “forgiveness of sin.” That it
should not is apparent from the prayer quoted in the opening paragraph. In
this prayer, recall, the celebrant addresses God, asking that those present be:
worthy to partake of your heavenly and awesome Mysteries . . . for remission
[ἄφεσις] of sins, for forgiveness [συγχώρησις] of transgressions, for the commu-
nion of the Holy Spirit, for the inheritance of the Kingdom of Heaven, for
boldness towards You, but not for judgment or condemnation.
Note that when this prayer lists the hoped-for results of partaking of the
Mysteries—the Mysteries being the Eastern church’s counterpart to the
sacraments—it does not offer a list of states and activities that are simply
slight variants or subspecies of the other. Instead, it lists a series of states—
such as forgiveness of transgressions, communion of the Holy Spirit, inherit-
ance of the kingdom, and boldness toward God—that are related in a variety
of interesting but importantly different ways. Given that this is so, we should
probably not interpret “remission” and “forgiveness,” in this context, to be
mere notational variants of one another, as some translators of biblical
passages do.6 These terms, after all, are the English translations of different
Greek terms, which in this context appear to designate different states. To treat
them otherwise would be to ignore the differences to which the liturgical script
seems to be drawing our attention.
But if “remission of sin” does not mean “forgiveness of sin” in this context,
how should we understand this phrase? In colloquial English, “remit” has
5
When, for example, the prayers of the church address God as the “salvation of both humans
and beasts,” it’s clear that they incorporate an understanding of the meaning of the term
“salvation” that is much broader than is often thought. See McGuckin (2011), 118.
6
The New Zondervan Parallel New Testament in Greek and English (1975), for example,
repeatedly translates ἄφεσις as “forgiveness.”

strong economic or legal connotations; we speak, for example, of being
required to remit payment for a service provided. While present, these con-
notations are not nearly as pronounced in the biblical and Patristic use of the
Greek ἄφεσις, the term that is translated as “remission.” In fact, my Greek-
English lexicons tell me that the Greek term ἄφεσις admits of a broad range of
uses, many of which are captured by a cluster of English phrases such as
“letting go,” “release,” and “leaving.”7 Given this and a broader theological
framework about which I shall have more to say in a moment, let me offer the
following proposal: when used in the liturgy, the phrase “remission of sin” is
best rendered as something along the lines of being released or liberated from
the grip of sin. The phrase probably communicates a good deal more than this,
but its focal meaning, I want to suggest, lies in this vicinity. I would immedi-
ately add that whether this is the best understanding of the phrase is not
something that can be settled simply by consulting Greek-English lexicons. It
will only be vindicated by how well it comports with and makes sense of the
rest of the liturgical script and the liturgical actions that accompany it. Holism,
in this case, is the right approach.
The second observation I would like to make concerns the use, not of the
term “remission,” but “sin” (ἁμαρτία/amartia). Surprisingly often, sin is
understood simply to be a derelict moral condition, something akin to state
of moral guilt. In his book Responsibility and Atonement, for example, Richard
Swinburne identifies sin with a “failure of duty to God.”8 George Hunsinger
maintains that “sin is basically a matter of guilt and of the will's bondage
consequent upon this guilt.”9 And in one of the most perceptive treatments of
sin of which I’m aware, Cornelius Plantinga writes of sin “as . . . the power in
human beings that has the effect . . . of corrupting human thought, word, and
deed so that they displease God and make their authors guilty.”10
I am not making a novel contribution by noting that these passages express
an extraordinarily pinched understanding of what sin is. In the Eastern
Christian tradition, the state is ordinarily understood much more broadly to
be a state of deep disorder, which has moral, legal, aesthetic, and therapeutic
dimensions, some of these dimensions being such that they needn’t imply that
an agent who suffers from them is morally guilty in virtue of suffering from
them. The agent who suffers from this deep disorder might, for example, view
the world in deeply distorted ways or desire what would be his destruction
(even though he does not act on this desire). But that he views the world in
these ways or is in the grip of these desires needn’t imply that he is morally
7
See, for example, Thayer (1996), Liddell and Scott (1996), and Lampe (1969). I thank Mark
Montague for his help on these matters of translation.
8 9
Swinburne (1989), 124. Hunsinger (2000), 250.
10
Plantinga (1995), 13, n. 10.

derelict in virtue of viewing the world in these ways or being in the grip of
these desires. Not all disorder is morally culpable.
A helpful way to appreciate these non-moral dimensions of sin is to bring to
mind the positive counterpart of sin, which I take to be not innocence or
goodness but holiness—a state that the liturgy repeatedly ascribes to God,
which also has moral, legal, aesthetic, and therapeutic dimensions. As the
Christian tradition describes God, God is the Holy One. The Holy One, in
turn, is the one without guile, taint, or disorder—the one who is characterized
by perfection that transcends all blemish, taint, disorder, and defilement.11
Although some theologians have been keen to moralize holiness, viewing it
simply as a moral quality, this tendency has not been strong; most have
understood holiness to be a state with multiple normative dimensions. Why
has the tendency to moralize its negative counterpart, sin, been so prominent
in the Western Christian tradition? Nice question!
Suppose we pull together our reflections on the liturgical use of the term
“remission” with those of the liturgical use of “sin.” The conclusion to which
we’re led is that when the people pray that activities such as eating, baptizing,
participating in and anointing be for the remission of sin, this should be
understood as requesting that these activities be for the release from the sin-
disorder in its various manifestations, including its broadly therapeutic di-
mensions. The petition, to say it again, is not a request to be forgiven for being
in the grip of this disorder. It is rather a plea to be delivered from its grip.
That this is a helpful way to understand these prayers emerges, I believe,
when one digs deeper into the liturgical texts themselves. For it is a striking
feature of these texts that they highlight the broadly therapeutic dimensions of
sin by repeatedly coupling the theme of sin with those of health and whole-
ness. For example, the text of the Trisagion Prayers, which are used extensively
in the Eastern church, runs:
All-Holy Trinity, have mercy on us. Lord, forgive us our sins. Master, pardon
our transgressions. Holy One, visit and heal our infirmities for your name’s
sake.12
That these infirmities are not merely bodily is manifest when one consults
other texts, such as the pre-communion prayers, in which participants in the
liturgy pray that the Mysteries be for both “the remission of sin” and for “the
healing of soul and body.”13 These prayers are, in turn, followed by the post-
communion prayers, in which, once again, the themes of remission of sin and
healing of the self are conjoined:
11 12
This is the gloss offered by Wolterstorff (2015), 36. McGuckin (2011), 8.
13
The same words are used in the baptismal rite; see Service Book (2002), 157, and the rite of
anointing with oil; cf. Meyendorff (2009), 127.

O Lord Jesus Christ, my God, let your holy body be my eternal life, and your
precious blood, the remission of my sins. May this eucharist be my joy, my health,
and my gladness.14
And to quote more fully a passage cited earlier from the baptismal rite, the
celebrant prays that the baptismal water would be “the water of redemption,
the water of sanctification, the purification of flesh and spirit, the loosing of
bonds, the remission of sins, the remedy of infirmities.”15 Finally, the prayers
that compose the Lenten liturgies repeatedly and vividly employ therapeutic
imagery. These prayers refer to the church as a “house of healing,” speak of
repentance as being like oil and wine for a soul that is sick, and present the sin-
disorder as a type of wound or injury: “Bind up, O Jesus, the wounds of my
soul, as the Samaritan bound up the wounds of him that fell among thieves,
and heal me from my pain, I pray O Christ.”16
The liturgical texts, then, repeatedly associate the sin-disorder with sickness
and associate deliverance from the disorder with health.17 In traditions in
which participating in the eucharist and the practice of fasting are still alive,
such as the Eastern tradition, these associations would be natural, especially in
the context of the eucharistic prayers. For it is common in these traditions to
understand the state of disorder from which human beings suffer in terms of a
narrative in which food figures prominently. The falling away of human
beings is presented as a matter of disordered eating, the refusal to fast,
hungering for something other than God. Redemption, in turn, is achieved
(in part) by “ordered eating,” in which followers of Christ participate in the
eucharist. It is no accident, then, that the eucharistic prayers are replete with
imagery of sin, health, and food. For, according to the church’s salvation
narrative, it is by food that we have fallen and by food that we’re redeemed.
The associations that one finds in the liturgy between the sin-disorder,
health, and food, I believe, are rich and suggestive, so let me continue to
explore them, as I believe they can help to shed light on our original question
of how participation in liturgical rites could be for the remission of sin. When
the tradition has addressed the issue of disordered eating, it has typically done
14
McGuckin (2011), 160.
15
Service Book (2002), 155. This rite contains various prayers of exorcism, including: “O Lord
Sabaoth, the God of Israel, who heals every malady and every infirmity: Look upon your servant;
prove him/her and search him/her; and root out every operation of the Devil” (147). As one
might imagine, similar themes run throughout the rite of the anointing of the sick; cf.
Meyendorff (2009), especially p. 123.
16
Mary and Ware (2002), 360, 180, 408, and 691. Cf. also pp. 399 and 480.
17
As do prominent figures in the tradition. To pick just one example, St. Cyril of Alexandria
writes: “After Adam fell by sin and sank into corruption . . . nature became sick with sin. . . .
Human nature in Adam became sick through the corruption of disobedience.” Quoted in
Hierotheos (2005), 37. In his homilies, John Chrysostomos airs similar themes, describing the
church as a hospital. The word, says Chrysostomos, is like medicine to the soul. Hierotheos also
(1996) addresses the theme of sin as sickness.

so by associating it with gluttony, which is often understood in the Eastern
tradition as one of the “passions” and in the Western tradition as a deadly
vice.18 In the first chapter of his book For the Life of the World, the Orthodox
theologian Alexander Schmemann also explores the connections between food
and deliverance from sin, but approaches the discussion from a different
direction. Schmemann writes that the scriptures begin with a portrayal of
the human being “as a hungry being, with the man who is that which he
eats. . . . In the Bible the good that man eats, the world of which he must
partake in order to live, is given to him by God, and it is given as communion
with God.”19 Continuing this thought, Schmemann says that “the ‘original’ sin
is not primarily that man has ‘disobeyed’ God; the sin is that he ceased to be
hungry for Him and for Him alone, ceased to see his whole life depending on
the whole world as a sacrament of communion with God.”20 In these passages,
Schmemann suggests that while the falling away is the manifestation of an
eating disorder, the disorder is not so much a manifestation of gluttony as a
failure to hunger—specifically, a failure to hunger for God.
The liturgical texts make bold and puzzling claims about the link between
participating in liturgical rites and being released from the grip of the sin-
disorder. What we’re looking for is a way of understanding this disorder that
sheds light on how it could be that we are delivered from its grip, as the
liturgical texts claim, by participating in liturgical activities such as eating.
Moreover, we are looking for a way of understanding these rites so that they
could plausibly be understood to contribute to our deliverance even when
those who eat, are baptized, or are anointed fail to understand their signifi-
cance. Although Schmemann himself never developed the idea, there is,
I believe, a way of understanding the disorder in question that might help us
to answer our questions. And that is to take seriously the idea that the sin-
disorder is akin to disordered eating in which we fail to hunger. The approach
I want to explore, then, is one that flips on its head the traditional under-
standing between food and the sin-disorder. Rather than view the sin-disorder
as manifested in the indulgence of appetite, view it instead as manifested in a
lack of appetite.
A theme that repeatedly surfaces in Harriet Brown’s riveting book Brave
Girl Eating, which chronicles her daughter’s struggle with anorexia, is that
most of us operate with deep misunderstandings about disordered eating. It is
commonly assumed that those who suffer from such a disorder choose, for
various reasons, to suffer from them. Brown provides a powerful corrective to
these misunderstandings. Those who suffer from disorders such as anorexia
18
See Staniloe (2002), part I, for example. In Paradise Lost, Milton describes the Fall as the
manifestation of gluttony.
19 20
Schmemann (1973), 14. Ibid., 18.

do not choose them; rather, these disorders choose them.21 Moreover, these
disorders seem to be no respecter of persons; while those who suffer from
anorexia in particular are often highly intelligent, curious, and perceptive,
these qualities do not insulate them from the disorder. Those in its grip—and
that is exactly how Brown describes anorexia, a power that grips—suffer from
a baffling confluence of self-destructive behavior, loss of personal autonomy,
and ruthless self-loathing, laced with the tendencies to isolate oneself from
others, engage in deceptive behavior, and radically misperceive one’s own
state.22 In one place, Brown quotes a therapist who describes the condition
as a kind of “encapsulated psychosis”: someone with anorexia suffers from a
set of delusions just as powerful as those of the schizophrenic, but only with
respect to food, eating, and body image.23
To illustrate the power of this disorder, Brown cites a researcher who
describes a case in which he invited two anorexic women to his class and
asked one of them to describe how much she weighed and how she looked.
The woman said that she weighed seventy pounds and looked fat. When asked
to describe her companion, she said that the other woman looked terrible, as if
she were going to die. When the researcher pointed out that both women were
the same weight and height, the first woman had no answer as to why she
perceived herself as fat and the other as emaciated.24 Apparently, suffering
from the disorder is strongly correlated with not realizing that one suffers
from the disorder or its effects. Distorted perception of this variety, as Brown
herself stresses, has an important social component, for social feedback mech-
anisms, in countless and sometimes unintentional ways, reinforce it, present-
ing the bodies of anorexics as healthy, desirable, or attractive. In a passage
intended to make readers wince, Brown describes a case in which a nurse
inadvertently complimented her daughter for being so slim, even when her
daughter’s health was in grave danger.25
A moment ago I stated the obvious by describing eating disorders such as
anorexia as being accompanied by self-destructive behavior. In truth, however,
the tendency toward self-destruction among those who suffer from the con-
dition is breathtaking. More people die from it than any other mental disorder,
21
Brown (2010), 4.
22
Although Brown describes herself as not religious, she often refers to the condition from
which her daughter suffered as a power, indeed, a “demon.” She even documents one case in
which her daughter, who was in a trance-like state at the nadir of her condition, spoke with an
unrecognizable voice while her tongue flicked like “a snake’s forked tongue” (64).
23
Ibid., 52–3. Describing her daughter, Brown writes: “On the subjects of food and eating and
fat, Kitty’s delusional. Obviously. On every other subject, though, she’s the same girl she’s always
been, sharp-witted, insightful, quick” (62).
24
Ibid., 52–3.
25
Ibid., 28. During the course of her discussion, Brown cites Bynum (1987), which explores
the ways in which the Christian tradition has failed to recognize anorexia as a disease, lauding it
as the manifestation of the virtue of abstinence.

many from committing suicide. Only a third of those diagnosed recover from
it. Particularly striking is that rational persuasion and therapy—on their own,
at least—have almost no positive impact, despite the considerable intelligence
of a large percentage of those who suffer from the disorder. In fact, on its own,
therapy can be harmful. According to one expert whom Brown cites, what you
end up with when you do intensive psychotherapy with someone with anor-
exia is “an insightful corpse,” someone good at rationalizing but unable to alter
her perception of food, eating, and the body.26 But if rational persuasion,
therapy—and for that matter, pharmaceuticals—tend not to help, at least on
their own, where does the road to recovery lie?
Anorexics typically feel no hunger—indeed, the Greek word “anorexia”
simply means “loss of appetite”—and appear to experience less pleasure
from eating than others.27 Still, the road to recovery lies in getting them to
eat, the most effective environments for eating being ones in which they eat in
community with those whom they trust, such as family. Reflecting on her
daughter’s case, Brown writes that it was not pharmaceuticals but food that
acted as her daughter’s “medicine,” the cure for her “body and mind.”28 Still,
Brown notes, the medicine works very slowly. Her daughter’s recovery
stretched out over months and years; there were no shortcuts. And, indeed,
her daughter relapsed, as many who suffer from the disorder do. (The relapse
rate among anorexics is staggeringly high.)
The parallels between the disorder that Brown describes in her book and the
Christian understanding of the sin-disorder are telling. In both cases, we find
ourselves describing the disorders in active terms, as powers to whose influ-
ence we do not choose to submit ourselves, but in some sense find ourselves
under. Their manifestations are, moreover, baffling, often unintelligible, even
to those in its grip. (“I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do, I do
not do, but what I hate I do” [Rom. 7: 15]). Although their behavior is
unintelligible in certain respects, those in the grip of these disorders are
often highly intelligent; paradoxically, in the case of anorexia, the unintelligi-
bility and the intelligence go hand in hand, although the latter often proves to
be not particularly helpful in the recovery process. Moreover, the associations
with death, self-destruction, self-condemnation, deceit, division, and misper-
ception of oneself and others, which I only touched upon, are unmistakable.
St. Paul’s claim in Romans that death came into the world through sin
(Rom. 7: 12) takes on a very different color when the latter is understood to
be a disorder whose grip often drives us to self-destructive behavior.29 Finally,
26 27
Brown (2010), 179. Ibid., 130.
28
Ibid., 194–5. Elsewhere, Brown describes her methods for helping her daughter as “expos-
ure therapy” in which she slowly desensitized her daughter to the thing she feared most, namely,
food (104).
29
I realize that there is controversy regarding the correct translation of this passage from
Romans.

to hearken back to Schmemann’s observation, there is in both cases the failure
to hunger. Taking Schmemann’s original observation into account, both
disorders manifest themselves as a failure to hunger—baffling from the per-
spective of the healthy—for that which we need most to live.
I began this section with a question, asking: What is being presupposed
about our human condition such that it is intelligible to hold that liturgical
activities such as eating, baptizing, and anointing are for the remission of sin?
I suggested that we understand the phrase “remission of sin” to mean being
released from the grip of sin, where the latter is understood to be a disorder of
the self with multiple dimensions, including broadly therapeutic ones. To help
us understand the character of this disorder, I worked with Schmemann’s
observation that it manifests itself as a failure to hunger, a condition that
strikingly parallels the disordered eating that Brown describes in her book.
What most interests me, however, is not simply the ways in which these
disorders are similar but also the ways in which they are addressed. In the case
of Brown’s daughter, recovery did not consist primarily in persuasion, ther-
apy, argument, or the like. In fact, such efforts were typically futile and, at a
certain stage, potentially counterproductive. Rather, recovery lay in the realm
of the sub-doxastic, with eating; other modalities, such as therapy, which
proved to be important, could take effect only when Brown’s daughter had
been “re-fed.” The suggestion I wish to make is not that liturgical activities
such as partaking of eucharist, being baptized, or being anointed with oil are to
the person in the grip of the sin-disorder as ingesting a sufficient amount of
calories is to the person with an eating disorder—at least not in the sense that
there are some identifiable mechanisms for recovery that we could identify in
each case. Rather, the line I wish to pursue is that deeply embedded in the
liturgy is the conviction that deliverance from the grip of the disorder that
afflicts us does not come exclusively—and perhaps not even primarily—
through persuasion, argument, or hearing. Rather, deliverance comes in the
form of participating in activities that operate on us on a sub-doxastic level.
Stated more broadly, the idea is that important elements that contribute to
the loosening of the grip of the disorder do not consist in the presentation or
acceptance of propositions about God or God’s activity or experiences that
aim to evoke beliefs about God or God’s activity. The presupposition of the
liturgy seems to be, instead, that there are important elements that contribute
to the loosening of the grip of the sin-disorder that operate—at least in large
measure—at a sub-doxastic level, below the level of understanding or belief.
To the extent that it occurs, the presupposition seems to be that release from
the disorder comes through doing bodily things in communion with others,
such as eating, being baptized, and being anointed. Moreover, it may be that,
for many, the temporal directionality of the process of being released parallels
that described by Brown. First, one must do bodily things such as eat; only
afterward are there shifts in perception, the ability to recognize one’s illness

and its effects, to hear what one could not previously understand, and so forth.
At the very least, the conviction of the church seems to be that engaging in
these liturgical activities must occur in tandem with actions that we would
naturally identify as redemptive, such as praying or engaging with the texts of
the Gospels.
I do not find it easy to articulate or understand this presupposition about
the role of bodily actions that seems to be built into the liturgy. Most of us who
identify with the Christian tradition are unaccustomed to thinking of that
which contributes to the relaxation of the grip of the sin-disorder as bodily
action that often operates, over time and gradually, on the sub-doxastic level,
below the level of understanding or belief. We are much more accustomed to
thinking about the cognitive dimensions of the sin-disorder and about the
contributions that cognitive states, such as changes in beliefs and intentions,
make to the loosening of the disorder’s grip. Indeed, the liturgical life of huge
swaths of Christians seems to be built on such “cognitivist” suppositions.
However that may be, what we were looking for is an analogue—a model—
of a deep disorder of the self whose grip is relaxed not, in the first instance at
least, at the level of changing the beliefs or views of the person who is in the
grip of the disorder, but in some other way, through bodily actions such as
eating. And we have done that, even if we have little understanding at this
point of how the relaxation of the grip occurs in the case of the sin-disorder.
The thought is simply that, with the example of disordered eating and its
treatment before us, we can point to them, noting that the sin-disorder and its
treatment seem to be importantly like that.
10.2. MODELS OF RITES
When one consults the liturgical texts, a certain model of how the Mysteries or
sacraments operate seems to emerge. Take, to begin with, texts from the rite of
baptism in which the celebrant prays:
That this water may be sanctified with the power, and effectual operation, and
indwelling of the Holy Spirit, let us pray to the Lord.
That there may come upon this water the purifying operation of the super-
substantial Trinity, let us pray to the Lord.30
In the same rite (as well as the rite of anointing the sick), similar things are
asked of the oil with which the baptized is to be anointed:
30
Service Book (2002), 152.

Bless also this holy oil with the power, and operation, and indwelling of your Holy
Spirit.31
And in considerably more poetic language, one of the post-communion
prayers runs:
O You who willingly does give your flesh to me as food, You who are a fire,
consuming the unworthy. . . . Pass through all my body parts . . . burn the thorns
of all my transgressions.32
Under a fairly natural reading, these texts seem to express two related ideas:
first, that in the rites of baptism, anointing, and eucharist, ordinary physical
elements are endowed with new powers—powers to contribute to the remis-
sion of sin, among other things. And, second, that it is by coming into physical
contact with these physical elements that we benefit from these powers.
For ease of reference, call this way of thinking of the Mysteries or sacra-
ments the contact model.33 Given a certain understanding of the Christian
tradition, it is easy to see how the view might be attractive. It takes the role of
matter very seriously, viewing it as a point of contact with the divine. It is,
moreover, consistent with the traditional claim that the eucharistic elements
are the body and blood of Christ. Finally, the model is well-situated to make
good on the claim that liturgical activities can contribute to the remission of
sin on a sub-doxastic level, as we could be entirely unaware of the powers of
the water, the oil, or the bread and wine that operate on us.
That said, it is difficult to shake the impression—or, at least, I find it difficult
to shake the impression—that this model traffics in magic. I make this
observation not because I think it expresses a decisive objection to the contact
model; perhaps there are ways to understand the model so that it looks much
less as if it were describing something occult in which ordinary material stuff is
endowed with supernatural powers. But I do think that the model is worri-
some enough to encourage us to look for other models of how liturgical rites
could contribute to the remission of sin. Are there any?
I believe so. In what remains, I would like to sketch an alternative model that
captures what is attractive in the contact model, not—let me emphasize—for the
31
Service Book (2002), 129. And elsewhere: “we beg you, O our God, to direct your mercy
upon this oil, and upon all who shall be anointed with it in your Name, that it may be for the
healing of their souls and bodies, for purification, and for the removal of every passion, every
disease and infirmity, and every defilement of body and spirit” (148); cf. p. 152. Other transla-
tions, it is worth noting, run: “Bless also this holy oil through the power, and operation and
indwelling of your Holy Spirit” rather than “with the power.”
32
Service Book (2002), 129.
33
This is, arguably, the model with which the Council of Trent operated and that was
attacked by Reformers, such as Calvin. As will become evident shortly, while I believe one can
read the passages I have quoted as presupposing something like the contact model, I do not think
that this is the best reading.

purpose of developing it in the detail that it deserves, but rather to try to
make better sense of how liturgical rites could contribute to the remission of
sin, when this is understood along the lines proposed earlier.
Like the contact model, the model I wish to develop has two primary
components. The best way to present the first component is to remind
ourselves that the Eastern tradition has tended not to think of the Mysteries
or sacraments as “visible signs of an invisible grace,” as the Western tradition
has. Rather, the Eastern tradition has tended to think of the Mysteries as
points of contact, means of communion with God. Schmemann articulates
this understanding when he says that a sacrament is “a revelation of the
genuine nature of creation.”34 As such, a “sacrament . . . is always a passage,
a transformation.” “Yet,” Schmemann continues,
it is not a “passage” into “supernature,” but into the Kingdom of God, the world
to come, into the very reality of this world and its life as redeemed and restored by
Christ. It is the transformation not of “nature” into “supernature,” but of the old
into the new. A sacrament therefore is not a “miracle” by which God breaks, so to
speak, the “laws of nature,” but the manifestation of the ultimate Truth about the
world and life.35
According to this way of seeing things, in rites such as baptism, eucharist, and
anointing, matter is indeed changed. But the change is not that of endowing
material stuff with supernatural powers, as the contact model would have it.
Rather, the change is one of function. The new function is one in which matter
becomes a means of communion with God. Schmemann puts this last point
in various ways. Echoing the passage cited above, he writes that “Christ
came . . . to restore . . . matter . . . and to fulfill it as the means of communion
with God,” which is its “original function.”36 And again: “such is the meaning
of the baptismal blessing of water. It is the re-creation of matter, and thus of
the world, in Christ. . . . It is the gift of the world as communion with God.”37
In a moment, I will have something more to say about what it would be for
something to be a means of communion with God. In the meanwhile, the point to
stress, is that under this model, liturgical activities such as baptizing, participating
in eucharist, and anointing incorporate a normative understanding of matter, an
34
35
Schmemann (1973), 102. Schmemann continues: “Thus, for example, to bless water,
making it ‘holy water,’ may have two entirely different meanings. It may mean, on the one
hand, the transformation of something profane, and thus religiously void or neutral, into
something sacred, in which the main religious meaning of ‘holy water’ is precisely that it is no
longer ‘mere’ water, and it is in fact opposed to it—as the sacred is to the profane. Here the act of
blessing reveals nothing about water, and thus about matter or world, but on the contrary makes
them irrelevant to the new function of water as ‘holy water’ . . . ‘sacramentality’ has been replaced
everywhere by ‘sacrality,’ epiphany’ by an almost magical inrcrustation into time and matter (the
‘natural’), by the ‘supernatural’ ” (132). Cf. Schmemann (1987), 61.
36 37
Schmemann (1974), 49, 42. Ibid., 51.

understanding not so much of what it is as what it is supposed to be, how it is
supposed to function in our life together. As Schmemann himself indicates, this
understanding of the liturgical rites in question and the role of matter look both
backward and forward. They look backward insofar as, according to the Christian
narrative, the original calling of human beings was to transform the world,
including its material stuff, by transforming it into a means of communion with
God. There is a sense, then, in which in the liturgical rites incorporate not simply a
normative understanding of matter but also of human beings, inasmuch as by
engaging in these rites, human beings return to their intended calling or vocation
as the ones who are to transform the world—as Schmemann sometimes writes, the
vocation of being the priest, offering back to God in thanks that which was given
for our use.38 These rites also look forward, however, having an unmistakable
eschatological dimension. They anticipate—hence, Schmemann’s use of the im-
agery of entering into the “kingdom”—and to some extent realize, what God is
working toward, which is the restoration of creation.39
Liturgical rites of certain kinds, I have suggested, are helpfully understood
as actions in which elements of matter acquire a normative function. While
material things can acquire functions in various ways—we can, for example,
construct or design artifacts in certain ways—often they do so by our
imposing these functions on them: by treating pieces of paper in certain
ways, we impose on them the function of being a dollar bill; by treating the
rock on my desk in certain ways, I impose on it the function of being a
paperweight, and so on.40
According to the first part of the model that I wish to develop, something
similar is true of liturgical activities such as baptizing, eating the eucharist, and
anointing; they, too, are activities in which we impose normative functions on
matter. For when the assembled engage in activities such as baptizing, eating
the eucharist, and anointing, they treat material things as points of commu-
nion with God; their following the liturgical script guarantees that they treat
them in this way. If the model is correct, these scripted activities thereby
impose a new function on these things: in virtue of treating these elements as
points of contact, means of communion with God, they thereby become points
of contact, means of communion with God. To be sure, these liturgical
activities are also attempts on the church’s part to fulfill commandments,
issued by Jesus or by his followers, to baptize, to eat together in remembrance,
and to anoint the sick. But that is not in tension with the model we’re
considering. For if what I am saying is correct, these injunctions would be
38
Schmemann (1973), ch. 1 and p. 100.
39
The “kingdom of God,” Schmemann (1987) writes, “is the content of the Christian
faith . . . unity with God, the source of life” (40–1).
40
The most developed account of this phenomenon of which I’m aware is Searle (1995).

directives to impose normative functions on ordinary things such as bread,
water, wine, and oil.
The first commitment of the model I am proposing, then, is to understand
certain liturgical rites as ones that involve the imposition of normative
functions. In this respect, I’ve suggested, these rites are similar to activities
in which we impose monetary value on pieces of paper or metal. So, without
too much distortion we can say that it is a social fact that elements such as
bread, water, wine, and oil have the function of being a means of commu-
nion with God. That said, there is a crucial difference between the two cases.
In the case of ordinary social facts, we can (all else being equal) impose a
function on a piece of paper simply by treating it in a certain way. In the
liturgical case, it is not that simple. For deep in the church is the conviction
that if bread, water, wine, and oil are to become points of contact with
God—means for liberation from the disorder that afflicts us—this is not
simply up to us. God’s activity is crucial.
The second commitment of the model that I am developing is to the claim
that the normative function that is imposed on matter by way of liturgical
activity is determined not simply by human but also by divine activity; that
matter has such a function is a human-divine social fact, the result of a
human-divine cooperative endeavor. In fact, I would say that the cooperative
endeavor is a case of collective agency in which both God and the assembly
share certain “we intentions” that have as their content the performance of
certain joint activities—in this case, the activity of treating various material
elements as points of contact with God.41 In various places, Nicholas Wolterstorff
has proposed that we can helpfully think of this sort of cooperation by employing
the concept of double-agency action.42
Take a case in which I perform some action, such as promising to care for
your children should you happen not to be able to care for them. Suppose the
context determines that in promising this I speak for my entire family. In this
case, not only have I promised you something but so also have the other
members of my family. By one person doing something (in this case, promis-
ing), another person does something (in this case, an action of the same sort). In
double-agency action, then, one agent acts by the actions of another such that
the actions of the one count as actions of the other. In the case of liturgical rites,
the thought is, when the assembled treat elements such as bread, water, wine,
and oil as means of communion with God by following the liturgical script, God
also treats these elements as means of communion, for God intends to act and
acts by the actions of the assembled. Viewed from this angle, liturgical rites of
41
Cuneo (2010) develops this theme. This essay is included as Chapter 6 in the present
volume.
42
Most prominently in his Divine Discourse (1995), ch. 3.

this sort would be a paradigmatic case of human-divine cooperative action in
which human beings and God together impose normative functions on matter.
Under this understanding, liturgical activity is genuinely creative action; it
involves the creation of human-divine social facts.43
In the context of our discussion, this point strikes me as important for the
following reason. Our overarching concern has been to determine in what
sense liturgical activities, such as engaging in the eucharist, baptizing, and
anointing, could be for the remission of sin—where this last phrase means
being released from the grip of the sin-disorder. When one consults the
liturgical texts themselves, however, it can seem as if they operate with the
contact model: in the context of the liturgy, God endows material elements
with powers such that, when a person comes into physical contact with these
elements, they contribute to the loosening of the grip of the sin-disorder of
that person. Given the almost occult features of the contact model, it would
be good to have an alternative, one that helps us see how liturgical activity
might contribute to the remission of sin. There is, I have suggested, an
attractive alternative according to which certain liturgical rites impose on
material stuff the normative function of being means of communion with
God. And, although I haven’t emphasized the point, this model seems to be
consistent with the liturgical texts, sharing whatever virtues the contact
model may have, such as being compatible with various understandings of
the eucharistic elements as the body of Christ. The issue that remains to be
explored is the way in which this model might account for how liturgical
activities could contribute to the remission of sin, understood in the way
suggested earlier.
Although I find myself with less to say about this matter than I’d like, let me
make a few initial observations. In the first place, it would be a mistake,
I believe, to attempt to identify a one-size-fits-all way in which liturgical
activity contributes to the loosening of the sin-disorder; the disorder has
multiple dimensions and, in principle, participating in liturgical rites could
address its various dimensions and in various ways. Second, while the church
has understood liturgical activity as a locus of divine action, it has not
maintained that activities such as participating in the eucharist—to pick one
example—are sufficient for the remission of sin. The best way to understand
43
Richard Swinburne has called to my attention the similarities between this model and that
developed by Dummett (1987). The primary difference between our views are these: first,
Dummett wishes to offer a model for understanding how the eucharistic elements could truly
be said to be the body and blood of Christ, whereas the model I develop endeavors to throw light
on the nature of the Mysteries more generally. Second, Dummett maintains that divine action is
implicated in the imposition of a new status on the eucharistic elements insofar as God has
granted some agent the relevant authority to declare the eucharistic elements the body and blood
of Christ. My view is consistent with but does not require this approach.

the liturgical script, I believe, is that, when all goes well, these activities
contribute over time to the release of the grip of the sin-disorder—presumably
in concert with other activities such as prayer and almsgiving. And, finally, it
would, I think, be a mistake to think that the primary way in which these
liturgical activities function as a point of contact with God is by evoking
mystical experiences or beliefs about God’s activity. A central task of the
Christian life is, after all, to alter not so much our beliefs but our perception
of—our “take” on—our environment, viewing it through eyes that see the
extraordinary in the ordinary.
These points noted, let me call attention to the locution “means of
communion” that I’ve borrowed from Schmemann to describe both litur-
gical rites themselves and the material stuff with which they work. The
phrase is fecund. When thinking about human relationships, the means in
question seem almost limitless: a spoken word, a letter, play, work, or an
embrace can all be means of communion, ways of bonding. Moreover, the
bonding between persons that occurs can range from coming to see some-
thing as someone else does, coming to appreciate something that someone
else does, or learning to love something someone else does, on the one hand,
to enjoying a sub-doxastic connection with another, such as that difficult-to-
describe connection that parents share with their infants, or owners, with
their pets, on the other. When it comes to speaking of something as being a
means of communion with God, the best we can do is to start with these
phenomena and extend our understanding of them analogically to God. We
can speak, then, of an activity that contributes to our appreciating what God
appreciates or of sensing the goodness of the Holy One, an experience that is
no easier to describe than the experience of bonding that occurs between a
parent and a child.
Suppose, then, we work with this fairly open-ended understanding of
what it would mean for something to be a means of communion—a point
of contact—with God. The next point to make is that to the extent that
some activity is a means of communion with God—a way of bonding or
joining together—it is thereby the sort of thing that can contribute to the
loosening of the sin-disorder. The dynamic is familiar: union with one
thing contributes to the release from another. Joining one alliance means
releasing oneself from the other. If this is right, there is no need to think of
liturgical rites or matter as having some special function of loosening the
grip of the sin-disorder. They accomplish this simply by bringing us into
communion with God in one or another way—this communion being the
upshot, in part, of our treating certain acts and objects as points of contact
with God. The point that I have been eager to press is that this communion
is not exhausted by cognition. It has important—if difficult to understand—
sub-doxastic dimensions, similar perhaps to that effected by the touch of
another human being.
10.3. CONCLUSION
Not long ago, I listened to a radio program in which the respected poet
Christian Wiman spoke of the role of poetry during a time in which he was
suffering from an extremely rare form of cancer and was near death. Wiman
found that the experience re-kindled a faith that he had abandoned decades
earlier. In a state that he describes as one in which he could feel death
“sniffing” him over, he found abstract poetry and descriptions of God
empty, even “poisonous.” Only poetry full of concrete images and descrip-
tions, such as the vivid description of peeling a grapefruit, resonated with him.
Wiman’s experience isn’t universal; some find comfort in abstractions. It
should be conceded, moreover, that the liturgical script is full of fairly abstract
depictions of God. Still, what Wiman’s experience points to is the power and
importance that the particular can have. And, in the liturgy, the particular
abounds. For the liturgy is not a series of propositions or a philosophical
meditation on God’s greatness. It is rather a sequence of actions composed of
particular bodily rites—rites such as baptizing, participating in the eucharist,
and anointing—that engage with material stuff. Even when we are children,
these rites often shape our sensibilities without our realizing it, helping us to
associate God and God’s activity with the concrete, the particular, the material,
the communal. This is not a capitulation to our failures of imagination; on the
contrary, it is a testament to divine immanence, to the “One who fills all
things.” And to the extent that these rites do this—so the assumption of the
tradition seems to be—these actions could be the sort of thing that brings us
into communion with God in ways that are difficult to articulate and that we
sometimes do not understand.44
44
Thanks to David O’Hara, Mark Montague, Luke Reinsma, Gregory Tucker, Nick Wolter-
storff, and an anonymous referee for their help with this chapter.
11
Entering through Death,

Living with Doubt
I remember well the moment I decided to become Orthodox. I was standing in

front of the kitchen sink washing dishes, turning over in my mind the recent
experience of attending Orthodox services. I had a lot to think about. I was at a
point in my life in which I had attended Orthodox services for some years.
There were elements of the tradition that I found extremely attractive, such
as the beauty of its liturgy. But there were other elements of the tradition
with which I struggled, such as its radical apophaticism about God. At that
moment, however, I was not doing a mental cost–benefit analysis, trying to
determine whether it made sense to become Orthodox. Rather, as I stood
there, I found myself struck by the following realization: I wanted to die
Orthodox. I wanted to die not as an outsider but in the arms of the church.
Although I wouldn’t officially be received into the church until years later, it
was on the basis of this realization that I decided to become Orthodox. It is
probably worth emphasizing that, in my case, the experience was that of
resolving to become part of the church. Mine was not an experience of being
overwhelmed by a realization, but of deciding to act on the basis of one.
To this day, I am not sure why this thought about death made such a strong
impression upon me. In one of his essays, Metropolitan Antony Bloom
recounts his experience of being at a soldier’s deathbed and asking the dying
soldier whether he was afraid of death. The soldier’s response to Bloom was to
say that he was afraid not of death but of dying alone. I suspect that something
like this fear was operative in me that day while washing dishes. I had been
part of many groups and social organizations: universities, philosophy depart-
ments, ski clubs, rock bands. I knew that none would be of any help in
preparing for death. None was equipped to lead a person through the process
of dying. None, in all likelihood, would keep alive the memory of a person who
had died.
The Orthodox Church, I recognized, was different. It did not counsel
avoidance of the subject of death. To the contrary, built into the very fabric
of its daily prayers were prayers for a good death—“painless, blameless, and
Entering through Death, Living with Doubt 205

peaceful.” In its prayers and rites, the church offered the means by which one
could keep death in mind as something the preparation for which needed to be
worked out on a daily basis. It was, moreover, in its various ministries,
equipped to help a person face the ambiguity and suffering that so often
accompany death, offering whatever strength and comfort it had to give to
the dying. Finally, it was difficult not to be impressed by the church’s memory.
Unlike nearly all the other branches of Christendom with which I was familiar,
the Orthodox did not forget the dead but kept the memory of them alive in
their daily prayers and regular commemorations, especially on Sunday, the
day of resurrection. Years later, when my father died, I found great comfort in
this. Not only did the church provide the words and actions to remember him,
the memory of him was also kept alive in a public way. In its words and
actions, the church was telling me that his life mattered. Commemoration is
honoring; in its paradigmatic forms, it is the remembrance of a person’s worth.
The church seemed to understand this.
In some implicit way, then, I knew that to die in the arms of the church was
to die in the midst of a community that understood the significance of death
and whose purpose is, in part, to help us die. Yet the full explanation of why
the subject of death played such a prominent role in my decision to become
Orthodox is more complicated than I have indicated. To present the fuller
explanation, however, I need to turn back the clock and fill in some autobio-
graphical details.
I was baptized Roman Catholic. When I was very young, however, my
parents became acutely disaffected with the church and, consequently, I do not
remember attending mass with them. So, although nearly our entire extended
family was Catholic, I was raised Protestant. From my fifth to my tenth year,
our family attended a local Evangelical Free Church. While I have some fond
memories of these years, they were tumultuous; it was during this time that
our family was more or less blown apart by my parents’ divorce. I do not
exaggerate when I say that both the divorce process and its fruit were ex-
tremely bitter. It resulted in brothers being pitted against brothers and chil-
dren being pitted against their parents. For eleven years I had limited or no
contact with my father, sadly, of my own volition. I am extraordinarily grateful
that he was so patient with me.
Having my world fractured as a young boy did not result in a loss of
religious faith. If anything, it intensified it. The intensification was, in large
measure, a result of being immersed in the charismatic movement in Prot-
estant Christianity, which heavily emphasized the centrality of a personal
experience of God. Initially I found this electrifying, but as I grew older,
disillusionment crept in. What I saw and heard in church made less and less
sense. A typical service seemed to me semi-chaotic. I had, moreover, questions
about God and the world around me that no one in or outside the church
seemed either willing or able to address. And, perhaps most importantly, I was

struck by the dark side of religion as I knew it: my parents had divorced (at least
in part) because of their very different religious sensibilities and the Assembly of
God Church of which we’d been a part had split because of scandal. The net
result was that, by the time I went to college, I had almost entirely checked out of
Christianity. Nearly twenty-five years after having been part of the broadly
charismatic tradition, it is very difficult for me to assess it with any degree of
objectivity. I know I owe a debt to it. But I also find myself shrinking from it in
nearly all its manifestations.
This period of non-religiosity as a young adult, however, did not last very
long, for during my second year of college I made a twofold discovery. The
first was of philosophy. It is difficult for me today to convey properly the
exhilaration I felt of having discovered a whole new world, one in which
people were asking and addressing questions that were both fascinating and
important. When I took my first philosophy course, I didn’t know whether
I would be any good at it, but I was completely smitten nonetheless. The
second discovery was realizing that philosophy did not avoid questions of
religion. It asked hard questions about God, evil, and the nature of faith—
questions about which I was intensely curious. Nor was philosophy, as such,
hostile to religion. (It wasn’t until much later that I encountered how deep the
hostility toward religion can run among contemporary philosophers.) In fact,
I soon discovered that several of my professors were Christians who engaged
in the discipline as Christians; they were asking questions about God and the
religious life without pretending to be neutral observers. This deeply im-
pressed me. My Christian formation had been so deeply anti-intellectual
that I had never dreamt of engaging in the life of the mind and also being a
Christian. I now saw this was possible and I pursued it with eagerness. I know
that for many studying philosophy has been the occasion to reject religion. It
had the opposite effect on me. Philosophy reinvigorated my interest in
Christianity.
Ironically, the branch of Christianity that I found most impressive was
Roman Catholicism. I say “ironically” for two reasons. In the first place, my
primary exposure to Christian philosophy was through my teacher, Nicholas
Wolterstorff. Nick, however, identified himself with not the Catholic but the
Reformed tradition. While I couldn’t help but feel the tug of the Reformed
tradition because of Nick’s influence, my primary interests were in ethics. And
in comparison to the Catholic tradition, it seemed to me that the Reformed
tradition had contributed relatively little to ethical theorizing. (Those who
know Nick’s work also know that he has written extensively on the Christian
liturgy. These writings—which are the most perceptive of any I know—later
proved to be enormously influential in my journey toward Orthodoxy. This
remains a source of amusement to us both.) Second, I had grown up in a
household that was deeply hostile to Catholicism. It was a complete epiphany
to me to learn that the tradition had so much to offer. The more I learned

about its intellectual richness, the more I felt its allure. So, I went to graduate
school with the purpose of seriously exploring Catholicism and studying
philosophy in the Catholic tradition.
For various reasons, however, things did not go to plan. On paper, I found
important aspects of the Catholic tradition attractive. And I tried my best to
immerse myself in Catholic life by doing such things as attending mass
regularly. But something seemed to be missing; Catholicism just didn’t take.
This was frustrating to me because I admired many of the Catholics I knew
enormously. While they could be very critical of their tradition, they none-
theless seemed to have a deep sense of belonging to it. And this I envied. When
I compared my situation to theirs, I felt displaced. I felt so displaced, in fact,
that I stopped attending church altogether. The average Sunday during the
first years of graduate school consisted in my listening to tapes of sermons
from Protestant pastors whose preaching I thought was particularly good.
It was during this period of feeling displaced that I first encountered (in any
sustained way) the Christian East. Unlike my encounters with Catholicism as
an adult, which were largely through the study of texts, my first exposure to
the East was through its liturgical life. Two events leap to mind.
A few paragraphs back, I mentioned that, while I was raised Protestant,
most of my extended family was Catholic. But not all of it was. My mother’s
family primarily consisted of Russian immigrants, many of whom, including
my grandfather, were Russian Orthodox. Immediately prior to starting gradu-
ate school, my grandfather died. Although he was not what I would describe as
a religious man, he was, naturally enough, given an Orthodox funeral. There
are details of that funeral service that I vividly remember. I remember, for
example, not knowing what to do upon seeing a throng of people at the funeral
forming a line to kiss my grandfather’s body to say their final goodbye. What
has remained with me, however, is not so much the details of the service as its
ambience: it was a swirl of smoke, candlelight, and chant. The air was raw with
emotion. The emotional tone, moreover, was that of thick, heavy grief. But the
grief, I discerned, was not despair. The emotional tonality of the service was
deep lament, deep sadness, shot through with hope.
Like most my age, I have attended my fair share of funeral services. But very
rarely have I attended a service that seemed to me to be a fitting response to
death. Some of the services I have attended have been little more than
extended eulogies in which photographs of the person who had died were
projected on screens while music played. Other services have been muted,
even flat in their tone; there were hardly any words on which to hang grief, any
actions to perform to express it, even when the death in question was tragic.
These services were the liturgical equivalent to what psychologists call flat
affect. Still other services attempted to strike a tone of optimism, intentionally
focusing on the fact that the person who had died was now with Jesus. (I often
would wonder whether the Christian tradition really gives license for such

optimism.) As a whole, these services either gave the impression of not
knowing exactly how to respond to death or of having a ready response, but
getting the emotional tonality all wrong.
This issue gnawed at me over the years. It gnawed at me not simply when
I attended the funerals of friends, acquaintances, and relatives but also upon
the death of one of my own children. Early in our marriage, my wife and
I found ourselves faced with what seemed like an impossible situation. My wife
was pregnant with twins, we discovered, but the pregnancy was extraordinar-
ily complicated. The complications meant that the probability of even one
baby surviving was very low. In the end, after extensive medical intervention,
one child did survive, while the other died. This experience, as you might
imagine, was heartrending; both my wife and I found ourselves having to
navigate that strange experience of simultaneously feeling both intense joy and
grief, sometimes being overcome by one and then the other. The image that
comes to mind of that period is that of being on a moving train: at one
moment, you are plunged into complete darkness as you head underground;
the next moment, you are brought again into the light. Whether in darkness or
light, you are at the whims of forces over which you have no control.
There was no funeral for our baby daughter. In principle, my wife and
I could have planned one. But our strength was gone, so we dedicated our
remaining energies to caring for our surviving daughter who was born two
months premature. The (non-Orthodox) church community of which we
were a part, while incredibly supportive during this time, seemed uncertain
about what to do upon the death of a baby. My sense was that there was no
expectation that there should be a funeral. (That, I say, is how it seemed to me.
It may be that what seemed to me like uncertainty on their part was simply a
desire to “give us space.”) And, so, my wife and I grieved privately. There were
no words, no communal rites for us collectively to express our grief. In the
subsequent years, we had no available rites, beyond those we manufactured
ourselves, to commemorate the little one who we had lost.
After this experience, questions that I had previously not considered began
to press themselves upon me. Christians, it struck me, were prone to evaluate
their own confessional tradition and that of others by asking a set of stock
questions: How do we (or does that other tradition) interpret the scriptures?
What is the role of the eucharist and how do we (or they) understand it? And
what sort of ecclesiastical authority structure does our tradition (or that other
tradition) incorporate? These are worthwhile questions to ask. I have asked
them myself. But in addition to these commonly raised questions there are,
I came to believe, other important questions to ask, among which is this: How
does a given tradition, in its liturgical practices and theology, understand and
respond to death? I had learned that the Orthodox response to death is not a
eulogy for the deceased, a giving of thanks for the life lived, or a celebration of
the fact that the deceased is in heaven. It is a prayer, a cry for mercy, a lament

in the face of the awfulness of death, mixed with hope. And this response
seemed to me not only strikingly different from those with which I was
familiar, but also profoundly correct.
A moment ago, I noted being struck by how fitting the tone of my
grandfather’s funeral service seemed, even though my liturgical sensibilities
had not in any sense been shaped by the Orthodox tradition. Years later,
when I consulted the text of the service, I saw there was also a beautiful fit
between its tone and its words. The text, written in large measure by John of
Damascus, consists (in part) of sections in which a reader voices themes
from Ecclesiastes while the people respond with the Beatitudes. Here is a
taste of the service’s text:
I mourn and weep when I ponder death and see our beauty made in the image of
God laid in the grave, disfigured, dishonored, and lacking form. O wonder! What
is this mystery that comes to pass for us? Why should we be given over to
corruption? And why should we be wedded to death? . . .
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be
filled . . .
I remembered the prophet who said: I am earth and ashes. And I thought of
those in the tombs and saw their bones laid bare. Then I said: “Who is the king or
the soldier? Who is the rich man or the beggar? Who is the just man or the
sinner?” But give rest to Your servant with the Saints, O Lord.
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God . . .
With what may we compare this life? A flower, a vapor, an early morning mist?
Come, O people, let us look at the grave! Where is the beauty of youth? Where are
the eyes that we knew? Where are the hands that we clasped? So soon we perish
like the grass of the fields. Let us therefore bathe the feet of Christ with our tears!
O Christ, in the sweetness of Your beauty, give rest to him whom You have
chosen, for as much as You love humankind.
What I find so striking about these passages is not so much the tension the text
creates by juxtaposing Ecclesiastes with the Beatitudes, pressing the hard
actuality of death against the promise of that which is not yet. It is rather
the emphasis the text places on the beauty of the body. The awfulness of death
consists, in part, in the destruction of beauty—eyes that we knew, hands that
we clasped. And yet in the last line quoted above, the destruction of beauty is
answered with redemption by beauty. In this case, it is the beauty of Christ, the
one whose feet we bathe with our tears. The sheer physicality expressed in
these passages—not to mention the physicality of the actions expressed in the
funeral service itself—resonated deeply with me.
My decision to become Orthodox, I wrote earlier, was driven by the
recognition that I wished to die in the arms of the church. I noted that this
desire itself was rooted in the desire to die as part of a community, one that
equips us to cope with death’s grim reality. Evidently, however, there was more
lying behind the decision than these desires. In that moment before the

kitchen sink, I was not simply recognizing a deep-seated desire. When it came
to death, I had also come to believe, the church had got things right. It fully
recognized just how much is lost in death. And it gave us the words and
actions, both beautiful and fitting, to express this.
In many ways, attending my grandfather’s funeral is the prehistory to that
period in which I seriously engaged Orthodoxy. That period began in graduate
school when I considered myself a Christian but had stopped attending church
altogether. It was during this time that my roommate, without saying a word
to me about it, converted from Anglicanism to Orthodoxy. He probably
recognized that it would be better if I did something to celebrate Easter rather
than listen to cassette tapes of sermons. So, he invited me to attend a Paschal
liturgy with him at St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Seminary. Although I knew
nothing about how the Orthodox celebrate Pascha, I accepted.
To this point in my life, I had more or less despised the Easter services that
I had attended; they all seemed to me anticlimactic, strangely out of kilter with
the significance of what was being commemorated. Indeed, in some traditions
with which I was familiar, Easter seemed almost an afterthought. When I later
taught at Christian colleges, you could tell immediately if it was the Christmas
season. There in the public space were the Christmas trees and the gifts. But
when Easter rolled around, you would almost not know it. Almost nothing
changed in the space in which we worked. There were no parties, no exchan-
ging of gifts. There was nothing particularly festal about it. The idea that the
Easter season might extend beyond Easter Sunday was, apparently, totally
foreign. Easter left as stealthily as it had come.
There really was no way for me to prepare for what I saw and heard that
night during my first Paschal liturgy. The Orthodox call Pascha the Feast of
Feasts. It is an apt title: the liturgy I attended was if nothing else a feast for the
senses—the eyes, the ears, the hands, the nose and, when it was all over, (to
switch to a non-sensory modality) the stomach too. The post-liturgical feast—
you have to picture it being accompanied by a great deal of singing and
vodka—extended into the early morning hours, until everyone was too
exhausted to carry on anymore. When that time came, everyone went home
to sleep only to return later to reconvene the celebration.
While standing during the Paschal liturgy, I sensed, for the first time ever, a
fit between the actions being performed in an Easter service and the signifi-
cance of that which was being celebrated. The service itself was highly scripted;
but it was not at all stiff. I suppose the best analogue would be to a group of
musicians or dancers who are following a score but are so comfortable in
doing so that their performance is nothing less than structured fluidity.
Interestingly, like my grandfather’s funeral, the theme of death was all around;
but, unlike that service, the Paschal service was not a lament. It was a
celebration, a proclamation of a great living hope that death—and here it
helps to recognize that the term “death” is multivalent in the mouth of the

church, also signifying despair, emptiness, and darkness—does not have the
final word. The message of the liturgy was clear: death is the enemy. Its
bitterness should not be underestimated. But God has been actively at work
in the world. The creation has not been abandoned but is being rescued,
redeemed through the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. Not Ecclesiastes
but the Beatitudes have the last word. The trope used throughout the liturgical
texts is that death has been defeated by death. Perhaps putting the phrase in
the continuous present —“death is being defeated”—more nearly captures the
sense of the liturgical text, as the use of the liturgical present is ubiquitous in
the Paschal liturgy. The liturgy announces that today Christ is risen. Appar-
ently, the Paschal liturgy is not supposed to be simply the commemoration of
an historical event, but the occasion for us here and now to absorb the life-
altering significance of the resurrection.
Jubilant and reverential, serious and beautiful: that first Paschal liturgy
made quite an impression on me. Still, it would be misleading to describe
my first serious encounter with Orthodoxy as love at first sight. It would take
years until I felt as if I’d “lived into” and reconciled myself with various aspects
of the tradition, for there were dimensions of Orthodoxy that struck me as
dark, exotic, alien, and problematic. Indeed, a central part of becoming
Orthodox was learning to accept the fact that there would be elements of the
tradition with which I would simply have to live. It was far from perfect.
(When I married my wife, I recognized something similar: while remarkable,
she was not perfect. That, however, did not seem to me a sufficient reason not
to marry. Why should it be different here?) Despite all this, something kept
pulling me back. I was magnetized.
The magnetism of Orthodoxy consisted, at least in part, in the effect that
participating in the liturgical life of the church had on me. While I often found
the services very long, I noticed that I found myself praying during them.
Prayer had never come easily to me. The recipe I had been given growing up
was that it took place primarily in “quiet times,” when one would lock oneself
away in a private space with a Bible. That had never worked for me. I found
huge stretches of the scriptures absolutely baffling. And left to my own devices,
I’d sooner fall asleep than pray. But somehow being in the space of an
Orthodox Church and participating in the liturgy enabled me to pray. Not
only was I able to pray, I found the prayers and hymns of the liturgy reaching
me at a level of my being that none other had. They spoke to me.
I do not know how to explain this. The best I can say is that I was slowly
experiencing something like a gestalt switch. The comparison that comes to
mind is that of a person who has, throughout most of his adult life, been fed a
literary diet that almost exclusively consists in such things as novels, news-
paper articles, and academic essays. Then, at some point, he is introduced to
very good poetry. At first, the nuances and even the meanings expressed by
this poetry tend to escape him. With increased exposure, however, he latches

on. He finds that the poetry speaks to him in ways rather different from prose;
there is something about the poetic use of images that has an entirely different
effect on him. The images themselves, he has to admit, are in many ways
elusive; they often resist any sort of systematic unpacking or formulation, as
the tensions and ambiguities they introduce remain unresolved. And were he
not to exercise care, this person would attribute to the poets silly and incom-
patible views, blurring over important distinctions such as what the poets are
saying and what they are showing him. Eventually, however, he finds that not
only does the poetry have a different effect on him than prose, but also that the
poetry speaks to him—and allows him to speak—in ways that prose cannot.
The two are not, for all intents and purposes, interchangeable. He has a new
window to the world.
Something like the transition I have just described is how it has felt to enter
into the liturgical life of the church. The experience has been that of being
presented with a new set of images—images tumbling over one another in
ways that were sometimes baffling, resisting in many cases any sort of sys-
tematic unpacking—that speak to me in ways that are difficult to articulate.
Most importantly, I have often sensed that the icons, bodily movements, and
hymnody were showing to me things about God and the world that are not
easily said. The task has been to look where they are pointing.
Anyone who has studied poetry knows that it is often very hard work to
interpret it well. One of the more startling discoveries upon immersing myself
in Orthodox life was learning that the Christian life is similar inasmuch as it
too is a difficult road. In his book Great Lent, Alexander Schmemann writes
that “Christianity is above everything else expectation and preparation.”1 My
earlier exposure to Christianity had taught me virtually nothing about prep-
aration. I knew nothing about the role of such things as fasting and confession,
for example, in the Christian life. I soon learned, however, these two things:
first, that for the Orthodox all these broadly preparatory activities are oriented
toward Pascha. Pascha is both the highlight and center of the entire liturgical
calendar; everything done during the church year revolves around it. How
different this was from the Christianity I knew according to which Easter was
more or less an afterthought! And, second, I learned that the Pascha is itself as
much about preparation as it is about celebration. Repentance, confession, and
fasting are the entryways into the feast. Moreover, they are, for different
reasons, activities that are demanding and difficult. The athletic images that
St. Paul employs in his letters to the early Christians are not idle!
Appreciating this dimension of Orthodox life has taken time. There are days
in which I do not feel up to the challenge. And, frankly, I often struggle to
immerse myself into the flow of Orthodox life. I find it helpful to bring to
1

mind, however, that while the Orthodox emphasize that we work out our own
redemption and that of the world, the model is that of a divine-human
cooperative endeavor. God and human beings together work for the redemp-
tion of human beings and the world together. Although Orthodox spiritual life
requires that we learn to discipline ourselves by doing such things as engaging
in regular prayer and fasting, these activities are not particularly self-
concerned. The idea is not that each of us is to undertake certain disciplines
to achieve enlightenment or personal holiness. Rather, the idea is that, by
engaging in the disciplines, we become the types of agents that can, to use
Schmemann’s imagery, play the part of the priest: offering back to God in
thanksgiving and gratitude that which God has given to us. The goal is not
self-realization but being in right relation with God, each other, oneself, and
the rest of creation.
My grandfather’s funeral had impressed upon me that the Orthodox
understood death’s bitterness. The Paschal liturgy (and engaging in its pre-
paratory activities) impressed upon me something different, a different vision
of death. As I wrote earlier, I do not understand why that thought about death
by the kitchen sink years ago struck me with such force. I suspect, however,
that it was because (in part) I had come to view the Orthodox vision of death
as not only attractive but correct. Christianity is nothing if not a defiant
expression of hope.
My theme has been death and the ways in which it has been the entryway
for me into the Orthodox Church. My relation to this topic is, however, more
complicated than I’ve indicated. Let me elaborate.
I know people—some whom I deeply admire—who have a vivid sense that
our lives extend beyond the grave. I recently listened to an interview with an
Athonite monk in which he explained that he was not troubled about not
having been with his father before his father’s death; he was certain that they
would meet again. I, by contrast, have never had a vivid sense of there being an
afterlife. In fact, I am fairly confident that whatever attitude I hold toward the
Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the dead, it is not belief, at least as
contemporary philosophers tend to think of it. It is not that I disbelieve this
component of Christian doctrine. It is rather that I find myself not believing it.
And, were I to speak with complete candor, I think something similar is true of
how I view nearly all the central claims of Christianity itself. I find myself
neither believing nor disbelieving them—although at different points of my
adult life I have found myself decidedly leaning one way and then the other
concerning them. Having said this, I can imagine being pressed about it in the
following way: “You identify yourself as a Christian. Surely, then, you believe
that Jesus is the Christ? And, surely, you believe in the resurrection of the
dead?” My answer to these questions would probably be this.
I do not think that what Christianity teaches is false (or even probably false).
I believe, moreover, that there are plausible considerations in favor of the

central claims of Christianity, perhaps on balance rendering them more
plausible than their alternatives (although perhaps not more so than the
disjunction of all their alternatives). While I feel the force of considerations
that call the central Christian claims into question, I continue to be impressed
by the degree of cohesiveness that these claims exhibit: the central claims of
Christianity seem to me to hang together fairly well, on the whole. Perhaps
more importantly, I find myself deeply impressed by the tradition’s ethical
vision, its understanding of justice, love, and forgiveness and the particular
way in which these ethical values mesh. Unlike most other ethical visions with
which I am acquainted—such as those articulated by Aristotelians, conse-
quentialists, and Kantians—the Christian ethical vision is one that commands
my allegiance, my devotion. Were someone to tell me that I could extricate the
true kernel of this ethical vision from its theistic context, I wouldn’t know how
to begin. I have no idea how to extricate what the Christian tradition teaches
about justice, love, and forgiveness from its theistic commitments.
Yet on most days I find myself not believing many of Christianity’s core
claims. This is not because I fail to hold beliefs. I believe countless propositions
about mundane matters. I believe, for example, that jazz is one of the finest
musical genres invented and that grapefruits have fiber. I also believe certain
philosophical positions, such as metaphysical realism or the view that there is
a ready-made external world. A good sign that I believe these things is that
I would be very surprised were I to learn that they are not so. The attitudes
I hold toward many of the central claims of Christianity seem different,
though. I would not be overcome with surprise were I to discover that the
central claims of Christianity are false, that there is no resurrection of the dead.
At least I wouldn’t be surprised in the way that I would be were I to discover
that grapefruits do not contain fiber or that metaphysical realism is false.
I would, however, be dismayed if the central claims of Christianity were
false. For I want these claims to be true with all my heart. I find the Christian
vision of the world, especially as it is expressed in the Orthodox tradition,
incredibly attractive: here there is beauty, forgiveness, redemption, and mean-
ing. I hope, then, with all my being that what the tradition says is true.
Moreover, and perhaps most importantly, I am committed to the central
components of Christianity, as they are understood in the Orthodox tradition.
These components play a central part—arguably, the most central part—in
how I view the world and what sort of practical structure my life takes in its
rhythm of prayer, fasting, and celebration. The tradition structures my
intellectual and practical world. I do not rule out for a moment that this
non-doxastic commitment might be transformed into belief. I would wel-
come that. But, I have become convinced, there is little to recommend a view
according to which a certain high level of credence is a prerequisite for
authentic Christian commitment. Admittedly, I have often been tempted to
engage in a type of internal monitoring wherein I check to see whether

I hold such and such level of credence in Christianity’s central claims, as if
maintaining such a level were a prerequisite of genuine faith. But, I have
learned, monitoring of this sort bears no fruit.
I suppose, then, that when it comes to religious matters I am a doubter (in
one ordinary sense of the word), but not a skeptic (in another, darker sense of
this word). Although I have often found this stance uncomfortable, my adult
years have been ones in which I have learned not to take my doubts too
seriously. For I realize that it would be pure fantasy to hold that, on the whole,
my doubts accurately track the evidence. More often than not, they track such
things as my own unhealthy tendencies to fixate on certain issues to the
exclusion of others, my tendency to be moved by certain events and not
others, my social environments (which at present is highly secularized), and
my own inability to see how things fit together. How often I have been wrong
in my assessment of others, misinterpreting their words and actions! It would
be entirely unsurprising to me if the same were true of my assessment of God.
In my darkest moments of doubt, when I have worried that what I hold dear is
false, I have often asked myself whether there is anything better on the
other side.
As best I can tell, the answer is no. I do not see how a life in which I drink
coffee on Sunday mornings instead of participating in the liturgy is better. I do
not see how a life that has no rhythm of fasting and feasting, no structure in
which one can communally express grief and hope is better than one that does
have such a rhythm and structure. I do not see how a life in which on Easter
I do little more than collect chocolate-filled plastic eggs with my children is
better than one in which I sing the hymns of the church with my children,
expressing defiant hope in the face of death. On this matter, I wish not to be
misunderstood: the secular life does not seem to me meaningless. But the
secular life does seem to me considerably less rich than that offered by
Orthodox Christianity; in comparison to what I know, it looks to me empty.
When I have “tried on” the secular life that is how it has felt at least.
At this point, however, I can imagine being pressed further: “But you do
recite the Nicene Creed during every liturgy, don’t you? You do say that you
believe in God the Father, maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible
and invisible? Given what you’ve said above, wouldn’t it be bad faith on your
part to say during the liturgy that you believe these things?”
I do not think so. It is, first of all, not at all apparent that the word “believe”
as it appears in the Creed expresses the same concept as that on which
contemporary epistemologists have their eye. Arguably, “belief” is plausibly
rendered as something more similar to what I called above “commitment.”2
2
On this matter, William Alston’s comments on the biblical use of pisteuo are instructive.
Alston notes that biblical translators often render this Greek term as “believe,” arguably because
there is in English no verb cognate of “faith.” But, Alston suggests, pisteuo is probably more

But even if the concept of belief expressed in the Creed were more robust than
mere commitment, my response would be to say that the Creed functions for
me as something like a regulative ideal. It is what I aspire to live into, even if at
present I do not: “Lord I believe. Help, thou, my unbelief.”
And this brings me to the final observation I would like to make about the
Orthodox tradition. The intuitive picture that many people have of Orthodoxy
is that it is fossilized, stiff, and archaic: it is a world of black robes, long beards,
and elaborate rites. The tradition appears redolent of a bygone age. For the
most part, I myself find these idiosyncrasies charming. (I do not find all the
traditional Orthodox practices charming. The tradition’s resistance to healthy
change can be frustrating. Still, by contrast, I find the tendency of other
Christian traditions to appropriate the trappings and tendencies of twenty-
first century American life totally off-putting.) What I have found, however, is
that there is little correlation between Orthodoxy’s being deeply committed to
traditional Christian practice, on the one hand, and its being a tradition in
which there is limited freedom, on the other. To the contrary, my experience
has been that the opposite is true. The tradition has provided space to breathe.
Let me explain what I mean. Consider the issue of how Christians interpret
the scriptures. I know many intelligent Christians who bend over backwards
trying to square fairly literal readings of Genesis, Job, the New Testament
genealogies, and the like with what we know about the world (such as what
evolutionary theory tells us). As a result of this approach to the text, tensions
arise, strained readings are advocated. Early on, I learned that the Orthodox
tend to approach and read the scriptures in ways very different from this.
Certain questions are closed, to be sure. The main theological issues, for
example, regarding the triune nature of God and the nature of Christ are
settled. Because the church’s understanding of these issues is settled, it pro-
vides the boundaries within which we interpret the scriptures, the hermeneutic
playing field. On the playing field itself, however, the interpretations available
are not only various but often highly creative, even playful. There are some
who have told me that the ways in which the Orthodox approach the scrip-
tures remind them of the ways in which liberal Protestants approach the
scriptures. There is some truth to that. Neither is shy of emphasizing the
accurately translated as “have faith that.” See Alston (1996), 22. Fr. Andrew Cuneo has pointed
out to me that even this rendering may not be entirely felicitous. In the Creed, pisteuo is part of
an accusative case construction implying motion: “pisteuo eis” is literally rendered as “I believe
into one God.” Arguably, the phrase “committed to” better captures the motion and continuity of
the Greek in a way that locutions such as “having faith” or “believe” often do not. I should note,
finally, that what I have referred to as commitment is a fairly close analogue to what Alston calls
acceptance. Alston says that to accept a proposition is to “take it on board” as true, even when it
does not seem clearly correct. Commitment, as I understand it, is different. To commit oneself to
a proposition needn’t be to take it on board as true. One can commit oneself to a proposition
even when one views it as only modestly more likely than its denial.

metaphorical, or in the Orthodox case, the typological meanings of the text.
The crucial difference, of course, lies in the fact that, for the Orthodox, not
everything is up for interpretation. The parameters within which these inter-
pretations play out are, well, thoroughly Orthodox.
Then there is the issue of how to understand fundamental theological issues
in the Christian tradition, such as the atonement. Long before I was Orthodox,
I would wince at broadly Augustinian understandings of original sin, the
atonement, hell, and God’s providence. I felt trapped. I found these under-
standings so deeply problematic that I increasingly felt myself pushed toward
the outer boundaries of traditional Christianity, even though I found the work
of the figures that occupied that space, such as Barth and Tillich, generally
unappealing. Eventually, however, the shape of the Orthodox understanding
of doctrines such as the atonement came into focus for me. It became clear to
me that, although the church is happy to operate with various models of the
atonement, the fundamental model is one according to which the atonement
has nothing to do with the appeasement of divine wrath or the punishment of
a scapegoat. Rather, the atonement is achieved via God’s full identification
with humanity in the life of Christ. It is through this process that the major
impediments that mar the divine-human relation are removed, including the
fear of death. More breathing room!
As a practical matter, however, the most important realization for me has
been that the church’s emphasis is not on the issue of whether its members
mentally assent to certain propositions. Rather, it is on the practice of becom-
ing a follower of Christ. The fact that a person harbors doubts makes no
difference to his status within the church. He is not on that account a second-
class citizen. For, if the church is to be believed, it is by authentically engaging
in the practices of prayer, fasting, and giving that a person is transformed,
redeemed. It is no accident, I believe, that the Sunday after Pascha in the
Orthodox calendar is St. Thomas Sunday. In this service, the church celebrates
a doubter. Thomas is not chastised or vilified or held up as second best. To the
contrary, on Thomas Sunday we sing:
As the disciples were in doubt, the Savior came on the eighth day to where they
were gathered and granted them peace, and cried unto Thomas: Come,
O Apostle, and feel the palms in which they fastened the nails. O good unbelief
of Thomas, which has led the hearts of the faithful to knowledge! Hence, he cried
out with fear: O my Lord and my God, glory be to You.
“O good unbelief of Thomas”! The church is perfectly clear that Thomas’s

unbelief is good; it is what ultimately leads his heart and those of others into
knowledge. (In fact, it is often noted that Thomas is deeply committed to
Christ. He is the one disciple who is willing to go with Jesus to Lazarus’s tomb,
even though he knows that Jesus will probably receive a violent welcome.) If
one has been to an Orthodox liturgy, one cannot help but be struck by the

degree to which the modality of touch is employed: those attending do such
things as kiss the icons, kiss the Gospel, and take the eucharist into their
mouths. According to the Gospel, it is by Thomas’s touching something—the
wounds of Christ—that he comes to knowledge; the employment of the body
is the means to knowledge of God. Some of us find ourselves in something like
Thomas’s predicament—committed to Christ but also with doubts (cf. Matt.
28: 17). The church invites us to follow Thomas’s example. We are invited into
the richness of the church, to touch, taste, and see.3
Friday, Bright Week, 2011
3
In one way or another, Fr. Andrew Cuneo, Tyler Doggett, Matt Halteman, Dan Howard-
Snyder, Rico Vitz, and Lori Wilson helped me with this chapter. I am grateful for their help.
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Index
abandonment Christian belief

as a scriptural theme, 32 external challenges to, 145
action internal challenges to, 145
bodily, 12, 161 v. commitment, 215–16
collective, 49, 127, 131, 135, 137–40 v. faith, 215
divine, 63, 108–10, 124, 146 Christianity
double-agency, 172, 200 as a way of life, 5–9, 18, 148, 150,
expressive content of, 157 163, 165
expressive import of, 157 compared with Judaism and Islam, 7, 8
fictive, 91 Catholic, 205–8
non-verbal, 75 core narrative of, 65, 83
one counting as another, 53–4, Eastern, 1, 2, 8–11, 15, 17, 20, 25, 27, 28,
62, 158 29, 50, 57 n3, 58, 63, 66, 88, 89, 106,
ritualized, 155, 160–1 107, 108, 113, 118, 124, 125, 126, 130,
scripted, 154, 160 140, 149, 155, 160–1, 163, 165, 167,
-sequence universal, 10 184, 187, 188–92, 198
symbolic, 29, 40–1 liturgies of Western, 28
see also liturgical, action Reformed tradition of, 15, 108, 123–4,
Adams, Robert M., 39–41, 49–51 126, 206
Alston, William P., 180 n17, 215–16 n2 varieties of, 8
anamnesis, 70 n16, 72 commitment
anointing, 90, 154, 169–70, 186–7, 190–1, as an attitude, 215–16; see also Christian
195, 196–9, 201, 203 belief
Apostolic Constitutions, 30, 47 via speech acts, 102–3
Auerbach, Eric, 96 n12 comparative self-address, 98
Augustine, 122–3 consciousness constraint, 59, 61; see also
authority, 39, 50, 103 divine hiddenness
authorization, 115 Cyril of Alexandria, 191 n17
divine, 111–13 Cyril of Jerusalem, 74–5
baptism Didache, 46–7

and forgiveness, 179 divine energies, 58, 63, 161; see also energeia
and illumination, 181 divine hiddenness, 15, 55–65
and Intelligibility Puzzle, 168, 173–7 and Case from Love, 58–60
and regenerate states, 168, 172–4, 178–80, and consciousness constraint, 59, 61
182–3 and parental analogy, 62–3
and rights, 171 Dix, Dom Gregory, 42
process model of, 18, 178, 182–3 Dummett, Michael, 201 n43
two-fold transformation of, 169–74
beatitudes, 32–3 Eliade, Mircea, 70–2
Bell, Catherine, 7–8, 17 energeia, 182–3
Bengson, John, 150 n11, 151 n12 ethic of outwardness, 25, 30–1, 33
blessing, 31, 47–8 ethic of proximity, 25, 28
Bloom, Anthony, 204 Eucharist, 1 n1, 2 n3, 9, 18, 26, 27 n10, 35,
Brown, Harriet, 192–5 39, 42–50, 66, 69, 73–5, 78, 80, 83,
86–7, 104 n22, 126, 131, 157–9, 160,
Cabasilas, Nicholas, 2 165, 167, 169, 186–7, 191, 195, 197–201,
Carroll, Noël, 81–2, 123 208, 218
226 Index
Evagrios of Pontikos, 148 communication system of, 117
events Eastern view of, 107
v. significance of, 121–2 event-depicting, 110, 120–1, 123 n24
evil, 16, 29, 40, 42–51, 70, 165, 169, 181, 206 Western view of, 107
problem of, 4 n5 witness of, 11–15
illocutionary
Fagerberg, David, 1 n1 acts, 12–13, 17, 129, 120–31
feeding of the five thousand, 38–9, 46 force, 114 n12, 130, 172
Florovsky, Georges, 9 n13, 177 n14 intentions, 116–21
forgiveness, 97, 99, 176 n11, 179, 184, 188, indexical appropriation, 97
190, 214 indexicals, 100–1
forgiving, 14 Isaac of Syria, 107
contrasted with repenting, 14
Johnston, Mark, 159, 160 n19
Germanos, 2, 3 n3, 68 Joyce, James, 63
God Jesus, 17, 23, 24, 25, 28, 30, 31, 32, 33, 35, 42–3,
apophaticism regarding, 204 45, 49, 68–9, 86, 88, 90, 91, 92, 96, 109,
cooperative action with, 131, 213 145, 185–6, 191, 199, 207, 217
communion with via natural world, 198–202 on the second love commandment, 22–3
engaging, 148–9, 163–5 regarding John the Baptizer, 37–9
immanence of, 62–3, 159, 162 teaching on Sermon on the Mount, 46
knowledge of, 148–9, 155 teaching regarding the Day of Judgment, 52–5
knowing how to engage, 150–66 John Chyrosostom, 183, 191 n17
priestly role with regard to, 9 John of Damascus, 107, 114–15, 118, 119, 209
propositions concerning, 147 John the Baptizer, 37–9, 42
relationship with, 57–60, 133–4, 143–4; Joseph of Arimathea, 17, 68, 79, 80, 82 n43
see also shalom/Eirene
rights against, 170 Kavanagh, Aiden, 27 n10
terms used for, 159–60 Kivy, Peter, 86 n48
thanking, 156–8 knowing how, 150–4, 164
transcendence of, 159
worship of, 3; see also worship Last Supper, 42, 46, 66, 69, 72, 78, 120, 185
wronging of, 12, 53, 184 Leigh-Fermor, Patrick, 98 n19
see also action, divine; action, double- Letter to Diognetus, 47
agency; authorization, divine Levitin, Daniel, 135–7, 139–40, 142
Good Samaritan, 23–4 Lin, Maya, 124
Great Litany, 26–7, 43–4, 130–1 Lipton, Peter, 80 n40
Gregory of Nazianzus, 99 n9, 71, 72, 73, liturgical
181 n18 action, 66–7, 155–8
Gregory of Nyssa, 106, 148–9, 155, interpretations of, 2
176 n13, 178 commentary, 2
Gregory the Great, 106 images, 158–62
Guroian, Vigen, 21 n2 present, 121
props, 11
Harrison, Verna, 72–3 reenactment, 16
Herod, 38 anamnetic theory of, 70–5
holiness, 190 contrasted with reading, 103
Holy Week, 16, 63, 68, 79, 88 contribution of to moral and religious
Horn, Stacy, 135–7, 139, 142 life, 98–102
Hunsinger, George, 189 dramatic representation theory of, 71–6
examples of, 67–70
icons, 17 immersion model of, 16, 76–87, 90
and divine presence, 115–19 imitation/repetition theory of, 76 n29
author of, 117–19, 120, 123, 125 purpose of, 87, 92
author v. composer of, 117–19 roles, 78–9, 96
Index 227
script, 12, 13, 15, 16–17, 27, 29 n13, 33, 35, narrative, 84, 122–3, 128, 130, 141, 191
44, 49, 50, 66, 68, 73, 78–80, 82–7, 89, action, 147
92–4, 95, 97, 100–5, 131–2, 140–2, 156, biblical (scriptural), 68, 31–3, 38–9, 42,
159–61, 164, 169, 176, 184–5, 188, 189, 91–2, 95, 130
199, 202 Christian, 16, 94, 162, 165, 199
characters of, 91, 99 content theory of core Christian, 66 n1
distinguished from liturgy, 10–11 core Christian, 66, 68, 70–1, 73 n23, 74, 77,
identifying with characters of, 94–102 79–80, 83–5, 87, 102–3
sequence, 66 events, 154–5
v. narrative sequence, 66 Greek v. biblical, 96 n12
text, 11, 13, 15, 17–18, 29, 33, 45, 47, 99, identity, 17, 87–90, 101–2, 122–3
127, 143, 187, 188, 191, 192, object theory of core Christian, 66 n1
201, 211 of a work, 80–2
liturgy recasting, 96, 97–9
and evil, 42–9; see also evil salvation-, 160–1
and social roles, 100 sequence, 66, 70, 71, 74, 77
apophaticism within, 159 within liturgy, 130
as first-theology, 15 works, 80–3, 86, 94
as enactment of teaching of Sermon on the immersion in, 93–4, 104
Mount, 47 neo-Platonism, 2
central pattern of, 25–7, 156–7 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 47
Christian, 20 Nussbaum, Martha, 95, 141
contrasted with liturgical script, 10 on form and content, 127–30
cyclical character of, 27
Eucharistic, 2 n3, 39, 42, 46–50; see also opera, 84 n44
Eucharist Oupensky, Leonid, 124 n23
funeral, 209
images of, 158–62 Pascal, Blaise, 162, 165
moral value of, 15 Pelikan, Jaroslav, 108 n4
of St. Basil, 30, 31, 43, 147, 156, petitioning, 12, 26–31, 33–6, 43–50, 71, 126,
159, 165 130–1, 133, 148, 156–60, 163–4, 166, 172,
of St. James, 43, 44 178, 181, 184, 190
of St. John Chrysostom, 26, 43, 130, Pharisee, 70, 79
155–6, 185 philosophy of religion
of St. Mark, 30, 44 limitations of, 3–8
role of pretense within, 92–3, 104–5 renaissance of, 3–4
role playing within, 74–5 Plantinga, Cornelius, 189
vision of, 130–4 Plantinga, Alvin, 146–7
love commandments, 20–5, 31, 33–4; see also prayer of St. Ephrem, 12–13, 29–30
Jesus Prodigal Son, 13, 17, 29 n13, 62, 79, 84, 86, 89,
91–4, 97–9, 101–3
Mahler, Gustav, 63 prostration, 12; see also metanoia
Mantzaridis, Georgios, 122 n20 Publican, 13, 17, 29 n13, 62, 70, 79, 84, 86,
Mark the Monk, 178 91–4, 97–9, 101–3
Mary of Bethany, 17, 69, 78, 82, 83, 90–4, 99, Prostitute who washes Jesus’s feet, 13; see also
103–4 Mary of Bethany
Mary Theotokos, 32, 68, 79, 82 n43, 95
Maximos the Confessor, 2, 68 Ramsey, Paul, 21 n2
Messalian Controversy, 183 n20 reading
Messiaen, Olivier, 41 of narrative works, 92–4
metanoia, 12; see also prostration reciprocity code, 23, 45
Meyendorff, Paul, 3 n3, 44 n6 religious experience
Moffat, Marc, 150 n11, ordinary, 144
151 n12 repentance 11–14, 156, 186, 191, 212
musical unity, 134–40 relation to illocutionary act of repenting, 13
228 Index
repentance (cont.) solidarity, 29–33
role in liturgy, 33–6 Stegner, Wallace, 128–9, 141
Righteous Thief, 84, 86 symbolic value, 39–42
Rischin, Rebecca, 41 synergy
Rorty, Richard, 34 divine/human, 113
Ryle, Gilbert, 153 Swinburne, Richard, 189
Saliers, Don, 21, 35 n24 Theodore of Mopsusestia, 68, 71, 74–5, 78

Schellenberg, John, 53–65 Theophany, 161
Schmemann, Alexander, v, 2–3, 9–10, 28–9, Torah, 21
30 n15, 36, 86, 109, 110, 123, 121–3, Trisagion Prayers, 158, 161, 190
134, 165, 169–70, 174–7, 192, 195, 198–9,
202, 212 Von Allmen, J.-J., 108, 126 n2
script, 154–5
ritual, 155 Waldron, Jeremy, 22
see also liturgical script Wallace, David Foster, 92
Searle, John, 135 Ware, Kallistos, 167 n1
Sermon on the Mount, 23–4, 46–7 Wettstein, Howie, 15, 21 n2
Seventh Ecumenical Council, 113 Wiman, Christian, 203
shalom/eirene, 127, 133–4, 140, 142–4 Wolterstorff, Nicholas, v–vi, 1 n1, 3, 6 n7,
Simeon the New Theologian, 171 n5 14 n19, 15, 22–4, 34–6, 70–6, 78,
sin 111–13, 125 n24, 133–4, 172,
and eating, 191–6 200, 206
original, 174, 217 work
remission of v. forgiveness of, 18, 188–9 primary form of, 130, 141
singing, 17, 84 n44 secondary form of, 130
and full-divided attention, 138 see also narrative
and real-time responsiveness, 138–40 worship, 3, 5, 8, 10, 106–9, 111, 126,
as content-engaging, 141 140, 161
as content-instantiating, 141–2 Wright, N. T., 176
group, 137–40 wronging, 48, 55, 60, 170–1
Smith, J. K. A., 1 n1 God, 53, 184

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OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 2/1/2016, SPi

OXFORD STUDIES IN ANALYTIC THEOLOGY

OXFORD STUDIES IN ANALYTIC THEOLOGY

Titles in the series include:

I can trace my interest in liturgy directly to Nick Wolterstorff ’s inﬂuence.

We philosophers are accustomed to having an audience in mind for whom we

Love and Liturgy

Love and Liturgy 21

1.1. THE S ECOND LOVE COMMAN DMENT

Love and Liturgy 23

Love and Liturgy 25

Love and Liturgy 27

Love and Liturgy 29

Love and Liturgy 31

Love and Liturgy 33

My topic has been how participating in the liturgy is an important way in

Love and Liturgy 35

Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death

2.1. SYMBOLIC VALUE

2.2. IN THE FACE OF EVIL

2.3. ON THE NEED TO BE FOR THE GOOD

My aim in this discussion has been to arrive at self-understanding of a certain

Another Look at Divine Hiddenness

In a passage appealed to frequently by homilists but rarely by philosophers, the

Another Look at Divine Hiddenness 53

Another Look at Divine Hiddenness 55

3.2. D IVINE HIDDENNESS

Another Look at Divine Hiddenness 57

Perhaps that time will be at the Great Day of Judgment, as Matthew 25

But theists are also committed to:

Another Look at Divine Hiddenness 59

3.3. ANOTHER L INE OF THOUG HT

Another Look at Divine Hiddenness 61

Another Look at Divine Hiddenness 63

Another Look at Divine Hiddenness 65

4.1. LITURGICAL REENACTMENT

4.2. HOW S HOULD W E UNDERSTAND

In the last section, we considered two theories of liturgical reenactment: the

4.4. WHAT REENACTMENT IS FOR

I began this chapter by noting the prominence of liturgical reenactment in the

Liturgy and the Moral Life

Liturgy and the Moral Life 89

5.1. LITURGICAL IMMERSION

Liturgy and the Moral Life 91

Liturgy and the Moral Life 93

Liturgy and the Moral Life 95

Liturgy and the Moral Life 97

Liturgy and the Moral Life 99

100 Ritualized Faith

Liturgy and the Moral Life 101

102 Ritualized Faith

Liturgy and the Moral Life 103

104 Ritualized Faith

Liturgy and the Moral Life 105

If These Walls Could Only Speak

In both their private and corporate worship, Eastern Orthodox Christians do

If Only Walls Could Speak 107

108 Ritualized Faith

If Only Walls Could Speak 109