Leviticus and Prophecy as Types of Pastoral Care (1)

By Archimandrite Cyprian (Kern)

The task of this article does not include the historical study of the relationship of these two Old Testament institutes: the Levitical and the prophetic. I will refer to the texts of the Old Testament only in so far as they can serve as confirmations of the main ideas in my subject, to illuminate with the light of the Bible what is particularly important for these two concepts. It must be remembered that no place in this article, nor any mention of the Levitical name, should be taken as any diminution of this sacred institution of the Old Testament. We must not forget that in the Old Testament Leviticus was divinely instituted, and to degrade it in relation to its height would be an audacious attempt on the sanctuary.

In connection with this, it is necessary to make one more stipulation in the clarification of our topic. The expressions “Leviticus” and “prophecy” – in the sense and in the mutual relation in which I use them – are not mine. I borrow them from one of the most original minds in Russia in the nineteenth century: the once authoritative scholar of church affairs, Ep. Porphyry (Uspensky). In his conceptions, these expressions have quite special meanings. They are taken not so much in a literal, biblical-historical volume, as institutes for the service of God, as as a particular terminus technicus for the characterization of a certain mood, of a certain tonality in this service. Therefore, when I say “Levite” or “prophet,” I am implying, so to speak, a style of shepherding. Leviticus and its associated prophecy are in this case known categories of spirituality. These are not institutes for religious use, but religious-psychological types.

Pastoral theology talks about the ways of shepherding. We distinguish, for example, the path of the country priest and the path of the city priest, the path of the missionary, the teacher of the seminary or the teacher of the law, etc. Are “Leviticus” and “prophecy” special paths of priestly ministry? No. Leviticus and prophecy—as styles of pastoral ministry—can be manifested in any of the paths mentioned. Furthermore, in pastoralology, good and bad shepherding are distinguished. These are qualities of pastoral ministry. The question arises: Aren’t “Levite” and bad shepherd synonymous? Also no. The Levite can act from very deep, sincere and pure motives. When we say Levite, we don’t just mean the wicked, negligent, greedy, or unworthy shepherd. In his intentions, the Levite may not be “bad” at all, but the style of his ministry will still be synonymous with some spiritual backwardness.

And now it is appropriate to ask the question, what are these types of shepherding? What are their essential differences?

In this specific sense, Leviticus is a priesthood caste, domestic and formal, narrow-national and dead-immobile, non-creative. At one time, in Old Testament times, the Mosaic priesthood was hereditary and hereditary. For which there were sufficiently respectable historical grounds.

The preaching and work of the God-man brought with it something else. A new Vineyard was planted. The Word of God and the Truth were no longer the property of only one people, but were preached throughout the world and to all creatures. The God-man and Chief Shepherd himself has set an example and opened a new way for the priesthood. He does not select His “little flock” from influential tribes and clans, nor does He formally call to apostleship. A new beginning is being made – a priesthood that is no longer caste. Apostles and saints, fathers and teachers of Christianity from all walks of life enter the Church to evangelize about eternal life. A shoemaker and a shepherd become bishops, the refined philosopher and the lawyer become apologists for Christianity, and ordinary laymen become guardians of the holy places and bearers of the Truth. That is why it is no coincidence that the words of St. Ap. Peter, that Christians are a “chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a special people” (1 Pet. 2:9), so often and so much is repeated and commented on by the Holy Fathers. This universal priesthood of Christians – a priesthood which, of course, was not hierarchical, but spiritual – was long remembered during the first centuries of the life of the Church. That is why caste closure is absolutely impossible in Christianity.

Ep. Porphyry said: “… holy fathers and teachers of the Church, Dionysius the Areopagite and Ignatius the God-bearer, Tertullian, John Chrysostom and Basil the Great, Gregory and Augustine did not inherit their altars and chairs from their fathers. Nicholas the Wonderworker, Spyridon of Trimitunt, presbyter and martyr Lucian did not study in academies like ours. There were also priests and bishops in the Russian Church and before the appearance of the seminaries”.[1]

And while the priesthood, by virtue of historical conditions, was not closed in caste, it was free and alive. It has closed, it has already acquired and increasingly increased its inherent defects, narrowed its path, separated from the flock, has involuntarily become a clerical institution, appropriating to itself the exclusive prerogatives of considering itself the Church.

And from this has arisen the erroneous view of the sacred ministry: not as a “model of virtue” – in the words of St. Gregory the Theologian – but as a means of livelihood; not as a ministry subject to responsibility, but as a leadership that is not accountable to anyone.” The pastors, who are Levites in spirit, zealously guard their caste-closure and do not tolerate the appearance of priests who are not of their caste.

A characteristic feature of “Levity” is its everyday imprint. It was created and grew up in this caste environment. To us, Russians, this everyday hue is especially close and familiar. The healthy, unchanging centuries-old orientation of Russian social life has contributed to the ubiquitous everyday life in all social strata. It has penetrated and strengthened especially deeply in the priestly environment. We all remember – or at least have heard about – this dense, very fragrant and well-mixed everyday life of our clergy. So who is not fond of these past and irretrievable pictures, which are not known either in the West, or in the Balkans – among our fellow believers, or in the Middle East?… This heart-warming, peaceful everyday order has gone. We can regret it, we can remember it, but we should not and do not need to recreate it artificially – as if it were some necessary attribute of priestly life and activity. Life testifies to the degree of embodiment and growth in life of a certain spirit, but a spirit that has been lost cannot be recreated through artificially created life. And that is why life is barren – it is afraid of novelty and is able to lull the true impulse and replace the essence with the form.

Therefore, to presuppose any narrow-life structure as a necessary property of the priestly ministry means to sin against the very essence of the evangelical understanding of pastoral care, it means to mix living pastoral care with formal Levitical service.

Personal life was created within the framework of general social life and is closely connected with it. And it is here that another characteristic feature of Levitical service is hidden. This is the submission to certain forms of life, one might say the service of a certain order, conformism in relation to a certain social evil. Many bitter words of denunciation have been spoken against this weakness of the shepherds since the prophets of the Old Testament. In contrast to this, the most striking example of irreconcilability with the injustice of a given social order is, of course, in the person of Elijah the Tishbite – the prophet, “fed with fire and wrapped in flames”,[2] “all covered with hair and girded about the waist with a leather belt” (2 Kings 1:8), as well as John the Baptist. Such were also the generations of the first successors of the apostles, indifferent to earthly goods and to the honors of this world – those of whom the monuments of ancient Christianity say that: “… They inhabit their own homeland, but as strangers. They participate in everything as citizens, but suffer as foreigners: every foreign homeland is theirs and every homeland is foreign… They walk on earth, but are citizens in heaven. They obey the established laws, but with their personal life they conquer the laws”.[3] These were those whom St. John Chrysostom called “angelic society” and “newborns” – to such an extent did the purity and fervor of the evangelical worldview still remain in them. The Christian Church has left great, wonderful examples of the struggle of its pastors against social evil and those forms of state life which, by virtue of their authority and power, encroached upon the inviolable sanctity of the Church. The names of the courageous defenders of the Church from these attempts have adorned the Church’s martyrology. From the days of the apostles to the present day they have served us as a consolation and an example – people like St. Ambrose of Milan, St. John Chrysostom, St. Philip of Moscow, Arseny (Matseevich), Metropolitan Benjamin, etc. At the same time, however, many other altar servers, who placed themselves at the service of the system and bowed before social injustice, testify to the sad weakness of Leviticalism. In part, this aberration is created by many enemies of the Church: today’s Christianity has placed itself at the service of certain forms of state government, of the capitalist system, the Church has almost entered into an alliance with the rich. The poverty of the apostolic times, the lack of privileges of the first Christian Church, the “holy poverty” of Francis of Assisi and St. Sergius – all this has been forgotten. We will also find quite a few hints and reproaches against this shortcoming in our secular writers. And we cannot but admit their correctness, and the pastoral conscience has nothing to object to them with. It is also interesting that this weak feature can be very subtly and imperceptibly combined with wonderful and truly pastoral virtues.

Great and notable ascetics, in their personal monastic, clerical and pastoral path of whom no one can find a single reproach, at the same time justified much of the socially imperfect system, excused the unacceptable, canonized evil and in this way served this injustice. Personal ascetic life was often mixed with service or a “political” attitude towards the power of social evil. Which darkened the purity of the pastoral path, distorted this path, subordinated the Kingdom of God to the kingdom of Caesar.

According to the Holy Fathers, the priestly ministry is incomparably higher than the royal ministry.[4] They say: “the dignity of the priesthood is immeasurable”.[5] At the same time, to our great regret, in historical reality it has often been degraded to the level of serving the low interests of police services. Often also the Levitical priesthood, in its resignation to the forms of state life, for the sake of maintaining its shaky authority, has sought the protection of this statehood and thereby has pleased it, but has humiliated its own authority even more.

From the self-enclosed and ossified Old Testament Levitical institute was born the spirit of the scribal “tradition of the elders”, and from there Talmudism. And it would be in vain to think that Talmudism is the property of the Jewish people only. Alas! It has also entered and spread widely in Christian religious psychology. Here we should remember that against no other human sin, shortcoming or weakness did Christ the Savior rise up so hotly and sharply, and He did not look at anything else with such anger, as precisely Talmudism, the scribe-legalistic attitude towards God. Even the lowest falls and distortions of the human soul have found justification, but the Talmudic ossification of the Living Truth has met only with bitter reproach and cruel denunciation. Why? Because this is a sign of slavery, of spiritual cowardice and little faith. The Talmudist believes that it is the form that saves – the long prayer, one or another medicine, the number of olives, figs or dates, and not the mercy of God. This is precisely what kills the life of the Spirit. True worship of the Holy Spirit in spirit and truth turns into a dead, formal service, into a creed, into a legalistic system. And this is perhaps one of the most frightening features of the Levitical style.

As in every religious life, so in Christianity there are elements of both eternity and temporality. The mixing of these two concepts, the canonization of transient forms, the proclamation of what was in ancient times as eternal, and therefore unchangeable – all this testifies precisely to this Levitical inclination, to a Christian Talmudism. In the life of every individual religion – at least, of course, until it finally dies out – there has been and will be a clash and struggle of two currents and two moods: the protective and the creative, the Old Believer-Levitic and the bold-prophetic.

Everything that is being said now is not, of course, in the slightest degree an attempt on the sanctity of tradition and on the heritage of antiquity, because Christianity, which is alive, not doctrinaire, not cabinet, is alive only in the Church – only where there is grace, where there is preservation of the Tradition. Without fidelity to Tradition, there is no integrity of Christianity. And that is why, by the way, the desire to return to absolute primitive Christianity, along with the rejection of the entire centuries-old and living experience of the Church, is so tasteless and fundamentally wrong. The Church and its life are not simply early Christianity, no matter how attractive it may be to us – it means the fullness of the entire divine-human life in all centuries. And yet there is no contradiction between reverent love and fidelity to Tradition and the experience of the Church and the denial of the Talmudic, i.e., formal approach to this Tradition and this experience. In the grace-filled life of the Church, the formal-Talmudic approach kills precisely the living Tradition. Talmudism, which upholds the primacy of form, thereby stifles the creative impulse, does not accept the eternally revealing truth, i.e., to put it simply, it forbids the Church to live. And this Talmudism is manifested not only in life – say, in the temple, in the liturgical life or in the forms of the church organization. It goes even further. It does not think, does not live in the spirit, does not want to know about theological creativity – it is like the Old Testament people, saying to the prophets: “Do not prophesy” (Amos 11:12) or “Cease to foresee” (Isa. 30:9). For such, revelation is something that has been terminated. “The truth that is necessary for our salvation,” they say, “has already been fully revealed. The Church can live with the already accumulated wealth of its centuries-old spiritual capital. Everything is given in the Gospel and in the fathers. And everything else – it is from the evil one and is unnecessary.”

Here it is forgotten that thought cannot but think and the mind of man – in the words of St. Gregory the Theologian – cannot but move towards the Great Mind, that man was created not only as a passive receiver of the ready-made truths given by heaven, but also participates in revelation and himself desires, and himself creates. Creativity is one of the godlike properties of the human spirit. New life is being created in the Church and will continue to do so.

The Levite shepherd is afraid of these things in the Church. He wants to stop the living spring in it. He himself does not think, he is afraid to think, and he forbids thought to others. He is immersed in a calm, deep winter sleep. He is a stranger to all the blatant questions of modernity, to the tormenting, dangerous questions that dangerously shake sick humanity. In his spiritual lethargy, he hears nothing of what is happening around him and wants only one thing: to somehow remain longer in this sleep and inaction, justifying himself by saying that he is supposedly “protecting” something.

The Levite shepherd also wants to stop at the ossified forms of expounding the faith. He speaks in a falsely classical preaching language, cluttered with Church Slavonic turns of speech, which remain poorly understood by the believers. He is afraid of the living, literary, commonly understood language. The Levitical school and the textbook on church ecclesiastical virtuosity in the spirit of the Philaret-Innocentian homilies have forbidden him to speak otherwise.

The Levite shepherd also brings the Talmudic spirit into giving direction to the divine service. Form and letter are more precious to him than the living mood coming from a praying heart. He is afraid to make the service more understandable and accessible to the feelings of the believer. He is a slave to the prejudices rooted in the sacred ritual – for example, to the reading of the Word of God in the well-known, stereotypical manner, with roulades[6] and nuances of voice, which should amaze the amateur with their monstrous low and high tones, but are completely impossible for the believers to understand. He loves the pomp and theatricality of the service and places in them the meaning and essence of Orthodox temple prayer. On this point the spirit of Talmudism tries to justify itself with a love for established traditions, but this love does not go further than empty formalism: from the statute for the sake of the statute, from external aestheticism – to the detriment of the meaning and content of the prayer. New Testament Talmudism is mistaken if it thinks that the form and the statute can revive the spirit of prayer, if it has been lost. If the spirit of prayer is absent, if the priest does not pray with inner prayer, then the statutes will not create a prayerful atmosphere in it. In this the statute resembles the life. Just like the life, it shows the degree of embodiment in life of a certain mood, but just like the life it is in itself fruitless. It is simply a monument of prayerful pathos and creativity and a regulative symbol of liturgical life, but by itself it cannot create anything and will not ignite the extinguished flame.

The spirit of Leviticalism also closes itself within the narrow-national framework. It forgets that salvation is proclaimed to all, that in the Gospel there is neither a Greek nor a Jew, that there is no place for chauvinism in the Church. By enslaving the forms of the social order, by canonizing and justifying human superstructures and dividing walls, it also enslaves the fetishism of the national. The idea of ​​the universal, truly catholic Church of all tribes and peoples is alien to it. In the fiery miracle of Pentecost, it did not hear clearly how “everyone began to speak with strange words, strange teachings, strange commandments of the Holy Trinity,”[7] how in the divine symphony of tongues all peoples bring a powerful chord of praise to the name of God. It does not rise above its national, provincial interests and tastes; it continues to crawl within the boundaries of Old Testament concepts and cannot fly above the world. This spirit of pagan love for his people and language prevents the Levite from praying in the temple if they sing there not according to our usual motifs and not in our language. This same narrow-national spirit once pushed the Greeks to burn Arabic church books and Bulgarian antiminses, and the Slavs – Greek ones. The idea of ​​the universal unity of the Church is alien to the Levite – and he is fine with it. He does not strive to understand the life and faith of his fellow believers, to pray with them with one mouth and one heart, even if it is in different languages, nor is he tormented by the lack of communion between Christians or the fragmentation of the flock. The problem of reuniting the fragments of Christianity is alien to him and does not need him. He remains indifferent when he sees today’s tearing of Christ’s tunic. He is not tormented by the fact that in the face of triumphant atheism the Church remains shattered into pieces and fragments. Divided both by dogmatic questions and by tribes and peoples, by calendar styles and rites, by jurisdictions and names of hierarchs, the Church in our days serves as a fair lesson for everyone and especially for pastors. This division of the seamless tunic of Christ is observed with emphasis, sorrow and pain, where it seems to us that there should be no place for it at all – at the holy places of Jerusalem, at the tomb of Christ and at the foot of the trembling Golgotha, where once even Roman soldiers did not dare to tear the tunic of Christ. A shepherd who is indifferent to that, whose soul does not ache and who does not pray sincerely for the unity of all, has not yet overcome the selfish Levitical spirit in himself, has not grown to the level of the High Priestly prayer (John 17:20). In a word, the priesthood of the Levitical tradition sleeps a deep sleep – sleeps as in the time before the descent of the Logos of God to earth, and has not awakened, nor has it heard how this Logos, having become flesh, proclaimed the new Truth and the new commandment – ​​for all people, and, of course, first of all for the bearers of this commandment, for the shepherds.

Notes:

[1] The Book of My Life: Diaries and Autobiographical Notes of Bishop Porphyry of the Assumption, ed. [Polychronius] A. Syrku, vol. 3: “Years 1846, 1847, 1848 and Part 1850”, St. Petersburg: Typography of the Imperial Academy of Sciences, 1896, p. 95 (in Russian).

[2] According to tradition, the father of St. Prophet Elijah once saw how handsome men talked with his child, nursed him with fire and swaddled him with a fiery flame.

[3] Epistle to Diognetus 5, 5-10.

 [4] St. John Chrysostom, Words for the Priesthood 3.

[5] “Word for the Priesthood” – In: The Works of Our Holy Father Ephraim the Syrian, vol. 2, p. 605. – The author does not explicitly indicate the edition from which he quotes; in Russian translation the works of St. Ephraim the Syrian were printed in Sergiev Posad in the period 1895-1914, after which they underwent various reprints.

[6] In vocal art, the “roulade” is a passage with a rapid transition of low and high tones.

[7] Praise Stichera on Pentecost, ch. 4.

Source in Russian: Cyprian (Kern), archim. “Leviticus and Prophecy as Types of Pastoral Care” – In: Vestnik RSHD, 3, 1938, pp. 10-24.

(to be continued)

Illustrative photo: Torah (The_S.S._Teacher_s_Edition-The_Holy_Bible_-_Plate_X)