ПЕРФОРМАТИВНОТО ЕСТЕСТВО НА ДВА ЛИТУРГИЧЕСКИ ЧИНА. ИЗСЛЕДОВАТЕЛСКИ ПАРАДИГМИ
THE PERFORMATIVE NATURE OF TWO LITURGICAL RITES. RESEARCH PARADIGMS

Summary/Abstract: The liturgical culture, like any culture, has a dynamic history, one that attests to changes of attitude and transient preoccupations of ecclesiastical authorities. The Middle Ages were the time when liturgical events became the focus of performative life in both Western and Eastern Europe. In their pomp, ecclesiastical rites sometimes rivaled the theatrical events of the preceding and subsequent eras, leading late nineteenth- and first-half twentieth-century scholars to suggest certain theatricality in the New European sense of the term. And whereas in the West evolutionism and teleological genre identification have long since been overcome and replaced by new research paradigms, in the East articulate. Nevertheless, movements of some sorts are discernible in scholarly circles, although these movements are mostly aimed at distinguishing Eastern performative liturgical forms from Western ones and reducing the former to their strictly liturgical and devotional function. Scholarly attention has been drawn for instance to such liturgical events as the out-of-use rites of the „Washing of the Feet” and the „Procession on an Ass,” which in one form or another passed from the Greek-speaking liturgical region into that of the Russian, eventually undergoing local modifications. We learn about them from various sources. Liturgical books, travelers‘ testimonies and historical chronicles. And while the first rite managed to survive through the centuries, albeit devoid of its pompousness and obligatory status, the second – the riding of the bishop (or patriarch) on a donkey on the feast day of Palm Sunday – disappeared completely, and the reasons for this were mostly political. The task of this paper is to briefly trace the two liturgical rites in question through the most vivid testimonies on record and to map the changes in academic attitudes before and after the political marginalization of the subject during the Soviet period.

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