Damaskinos Olkinuora: Byzantine Liturgical Commentaries and the Notion of Performance

Much scholarly attention has been devoted to the most important Byzantine commentaries of the Divine Liturgy, especially after René Bonert’s influential work Les Commentaires Byzantins de la Divine Liturgie du VIIe au Xve Siècle in 1966. Three of these have been dealt broadly with in scholarship, namely those authored by Pseudo-Dionysios the Areopagite, Maximos the Confessor, and Germanos of Constantinople.
The aim present paper is to provide a new reading of these source texts. It explores the above-mentioned liturgical commentaries through the notion of performance, aiming at a ’reconciliation’ between the fathers’ allegorical understanding of the liturgy and the definitions of performance theory for the roles required for a performance (author, performer, persona, and audience). As the commentaries suggest, the Divine Liturgy is a dramatic narrative, a performative reiteration of salvation history. But it is also an ahistorical performance, where the heavenly hierarchy manifests itself through the iconic imitation, and this manifestation, in its turn, is returned as a performance to the heavenly spheres.
As the author argues, based on the reading of the source texts, the performative roles and even the functions of performance become intertwined and overlapping in the liturgical context. The uplifting of the spirit through aesthetics becomes ’metaesthetic’ mystagogy; the performative space is embodied by the audience and performers; and the ’author’ – God – is simultaneously also ’audience’ and persona. This examination will help us articulate the directionality of the Divine Liturgy and the different ways of experiencing it.