On Liturgical English
The article reproduced below is from the introduction to The Pentecostarion (Boston: Holy Transfiguration Monastery, 1990), and explains the monastery’s use of traditional liturgical English in its translations of the services.
For a related discussion, see Fr. John Whiteford’s King James English and Orthodox Worship, in which the author places traditional English within the Orthodox practice of using a language of worship distinct from everyday speech while still remaining accessible to the faithful. Fr. John also notes the precision afforded by distinguishing singular and plural forms of address.
Fr. Pachomius of Holy Transfiguration Monastery addresses the same question in a discussion of biblical translation (beginning at 2:34:50), in which he argues that the language of the services should invite people into the life of the Church, conveying its holiness without preventing understanding:
This is a very important translation question. They say, “We want something in modern English that everybody can understand,” and Father Arsenius would say to that, “But what you know is street English. People aren’t educated these days.”
And the question is, what impression are we supposed to give people in the language that we use in the church services? Do we bring the Church to where people are on the street, or do we give them the message: you’ve got to come to something that you don’t know. This is a world that you have not entered into. And it’s not to make a barrier so that they can’t understand what’s going on, but it’s giving a message: this is not of this world. And the King James vehicle of language has been used for liturgical English for four hundred years with no real competitor. All they do is take it apart and modernize it. They don’t make it better. The English language was at its height, Shakespeare wrote at the same time the King James translators were translating.
So, I mean, what’s difficult with “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”? It’s very straightforward English. Get used to the thees and the thous and the haths and so forth. And it’s a matter of exercising the brain a little, but you get used to it. People can get used to it if they want to. The problem is they want a Bible that’s going to tell them, “You’re okay as you are.” That’s not what the Church has ever said.
As in our other liturgical publications, we have chosen to render the entire Pentecostarion using traditional liturgical English. In this we are not alone, for a number of other recent translations of Orthodox texts have been published that employ this same style. The conscious use of an idiom that differs from everyday speech has a long history in the Orthodox world; Byzantines, Slavs, Arabs, Georgians, as well as the Latin Fathers, all composed their liturgical texts in a language that differed significantly from what was spoken in the market places. It might be pointed out that the differences between liturgical and demotic Greek, or between Church Slavonic and modern Russian, are much greater than the differences between Jacobean English and modern English. This decision, however, might be questioned by those who favor the use of the modern vernacular for liturgical texts and for translations of the Holy Scriptures.
What linguistic style is worthy to be used for the hymns of the Church, a body of writings that, for the Orthodox Christian, forms part of Sacred Scripture itself? What fitting medium will we employ to express the loftiest mysteries of the Faith? What vehicle will we provide for hymns that are not so much compositions, as revelations of the Holy Spirit? As with every other offering made to God, only the best will do. The Elizabethan and Jacobean era witnessed the finest flowering of the English language, during which it reached a height it had not known before, and has not known since.
It is required of a language that it be capable of the breadth of expression demanded by the text, which in our case consists of the Divine Services. Traditional liturgical English is strikingly capable in this respect, since in many instances the characteristic words and phrases were developed specifically to render, in English, Christian writings that were composed in Koiné Greek, a task very similar to ours. These words and phrases have been used for centuries now with a Christian import. Thus they have a distinct use and are well suited to represent Greek theological concepts in English.
Another desirable characteristic of a liturgical language is fixity of form. This has the practical advantage of enabling a newly translated text to incorporate vocabulary and phraseology that conform to texts written or translated over a long period of time. By translating in the English of the Authorized Version, we make the scriptural allusions in the text instantly recognizable, and the wealth of associated meanings such allusion carries is immediately accessible. This same style has also been used in translations of the writings of the Fathers, and the valuable textual similarities here would likewise be lost had we used modern English idiom.
We have not, however, adopted the vocabulary of the Authorized Version uncritically. Some words have become obsolete or have changed in meaning, such as “to let,” meaning “to restrain”; others have acquired heterodox theological connotations that are unacceptable in an Orthodox text, such as “propitiation” and “atonement.” In place of such words we have evolved a terminology that is unencumbered by the misconceptions of Western religious thought.
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An expressly liturgical language is intended not only to function as a suitably dignified medium, however, but also to cultivate an awareness of the division between the sacred and the profane. This division is evident in every material manifestation of the Church—in her architecture, her vestments, her music, her iconography. In each of these the Church has her own mode of expression which is quite different from that of this world.
Many object to such a distinction, maintaining that it is a false dichotomy that lessens the immediacy of God in the world. On the contrary, Orthodoxy’s assumption of material forms that differ from those of this world is an assertion of the two central realities of man’s relationship to God, namely, that man has fallen away from God, and that God has come to man to restore him. Man’s fall is apparent in the secular arts, material expressions of a fallen mind, products of a nature tainted by sin; God’s presence in creation takes perceptible form in the Church, which manifests God’s deifying grace and the transformation thereby of created substance.
If the Church’s art were identical with that of fallen man, then there would be no material expression of our sanctification, and the Church would have surrendered its witness to man’s redemption, since our redemption is made possible by the assumption of materiality (specifically, of our human nature) by the Immaterial. Man’s mode of expression is influenced by man’s sinfulness, while the Church’s mode of expression is divinely inspired, and they cannot be identical. Thus, the existence of an expression unique to the Church is evidence not of God’s distance from man but of His presence in our midst.
Man is a fallen creature, and the purpose of the Church in the world is the deification of man, not the humanization of God. The Church—that is, Christ—achieves man’s deification through participation in created human nature, and man appropriates this deification by participation in the Divine, in the life of the Church. This meeting of the Divine and the human occurs not only on an intellectual plane, but in everything that pertains to man, including his physical senses. The influence that even the secular arts (such as painting, literature, and music) have on the soul is very great, because of the integral unity of man’s body and soul. In the Church, sanctified creation generates spiritualized arts that adorn, express, and elucidate the Mysteries (sacraments) of the Church, and so are a means of man’s sanctification and deification; hence iconography and chant and the literary corpus of the Church are Mysteries in their own right. These spiritualized arts exert on a man’s soul a perceptible influence that contends with that wielded by the secular arts, and they finally surpass the latter in influence by virtue of their capacity to deify. For this reason, it is important that the iconography and the chant used in church adhere strictly to the norms established by the Fathers, for exposure to the pure expression of the Church’s Mysteries immerses one in their deifying influence. In the words of Saint Paul, “Be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Romans 12:2).
—Holy Transfiguration Monastery, Season of the Triodion, 1990