The Universal Orthodox Rosary

Part I: The History of the Rosary

First of all, this week we released a new Liturgy EP, titled Immortal Life II.

You can listen to it here, and here’s a list of our upcoming tourdates. In the spirit of sacred gesamtkunstwerk, I wanted to take the moment to also introduce a new approach to praying the Rosary I’ve been drawn to, as well as some thoughts about Christian faith generally, which can be compiled under the phrase “Universal Orthodox”¹.

Background

As you likely know if you follow me online, I’ve been practicing Orthodox Christianity for about a year and a half, following a meaningful encounter with the theology of Sergei Bulgakov a few years ago. After stumbling upon a particular parish in New York that drew me in for a variety of reasons, I’ve also been practicing, rather than just reading the tradition (and it is a tradition which self-consciously foregrounds that it must be practiced for its theology to be understood). This entire past lent season I’ve been singing in the choir, which has honestly been a transformative experience².

You probably also know that the porous boundary between sacred and secular art has been a lifelong concern for me. I.e. my band ‘Liturgy’ plays rock shows, but I mean for them to function as a sacred rite, a ‘liturgy’, which, in an unavowed way, any rock show kind of already is, but usually of a more pagan or gnostic variety - I seek to turn rock shows into a specifically “Christian” liturgy³. What I offer here is like that too - kind of an artwork, but meant more for sacred use, yet taking care to avoid heresy.

A big part of why I’ve fallen for Orthodoxy is that the liturgical aspect of its worship is far more pronounced than that of other Christian denominations. Also, its aesthetics are simultaneously more gilded and gleaming yet also more earthy and rugged - something about it just feels real to me. But I’ve also, somewhat to my surprise, as a result of my ongoing education as a catechumen, found that the entire lineage of Orthodox theology, spanning from the Cappadocian Fathers through Gregory Palamas and finally to the Russian sophiologists (and even up to David Bentley Hart in the present day) is a hidden treasure of world history, which really deserves more of a place in the wider history of philosophy.⁴

This is in large part due to the notion of “divine energies” crystallized by Palamas, which was rejected by Western Christianity, and which I won’t get into now except to say that I believe it contains the key to the dialectic between immanence and transcendence that is needed in our time. It is also due to the Orthodox attitude towards Mary, which I’ve posted about already.⁵

The Essence of the Rosary

What concerns us here is the practice of the Rosary, which, I’m sure you know, is a prayer practice involving the ‘Hail Mary’ and a beaded crucifix necklace widely associated with Catholicism. In short, the Orthodox Church doesn’t particularly recognize the practice⁶, and Orthodox theology isn’t compatible with the Catholic version, so an Orthodox version is needed⁷. Since the theology of Orthodoxy seems to be the correct one, and the Rosary is such a wonderful and beloved prayer technology, it seems like there ought to be a version that reflects Orthodoxy. This is what I humbly offer here, as a lowly laywoman.

It is a “Universal Orthodox” rosary, rather than say, “Eastern Orthodox”, because I’d like for it to be available to Christians of all denominations, and really to people of all faiths. Generally speaking, my view is that if Christendom aspires to unity, it should be centralized under the yoke of Orthodoxy, while at the same time it should enrich Orthodoxy with varieties that come from other traditions. The nuances of this deserve a post of of their own - or really a whole book - but in short what is needed is a faith that avoids both fantasmatic traditionalism and diluting ecumenism. So in the structure I propose I as a rule have tried not to introduce any dogmas which directly contradict those of other denominations, restricting myself to removing dogmas that contradict Orthodoxy, and otherwise shifting the emphasis in its direction regarding certain cloudier (but not directly schismatic) themes when it felt appropriate.

The History of the Rosary

But first a short history of the Rosary is in order, since I’ve noticed that many people who turn to more stylized versions of Christianity do so with a reactionary intent, fantasizing that there’s an ‘old way’ of doing things which is correct, frequently unaware of how much variety and evolution there has been in Christianity⁸. The point can hardly be emphasized enough: there is no such thing as ‘trad’, the closest thing to what people associate with that term comes from a short moment in Europe right before the scientific revolution. The Rosary itself is fully a modern practice, not an ancient one - native to modern Europe, developed first in France. The ‘Hail Mary’ prayer dates from the early 1500s, at which point the Rosary prayer structure was roughly sketched out. The earliest developments were consolidated during the Council of Trent, which was of course called together in the wake of the Protestant reformation, i.e. the beginning of Catholicism’s decline. The first known text to outline its full-fledged form is from 1716, well after Newton’s discoveries of gravity, the laws of motion and calculus in 1666⁹.

Obviously it did not come from nowhere, however: the Rosary evolved out of the much more ancient practice of saying the Jesus Prayer (“Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me”) while counting on a prayer rope. These ropes, with ‘beads’ made of knots, had a variety of forms, sometimes 33 or 150 knots, sometimes any smaller number of knots, say ten, marked by actual beads in between to help with memory. I believe this practice itself evolved from the ancient Israelite practice of using prayer ropes to count the 150 psalms (use of knots or beads to count repeated prayer is common in many traditions all over the world). This format is still practiced in the East, though more among monastics than laypeople; nowhere near as important as the Rosary is in the West.

The Evolution of Mary Worship

Veneration for Mary herself was not so widespread in the early centuries of Christianity, but in both Greek and Latin worlds it began to significantly increase after the Empire decreed in the 431 Ephesus council that she was literally the mother of God. As for the Rosary, gradually the Lord’s Prayer was added to be prayed while touching the beads separating the knots, and the amount of knots in between was standardized to ten, and then those ten knots became beads too, and the Hail Mary replaced the Jesus Prayer. Catholics call these ‘decades’.

In the Latin west, Mary worship has greatly intensified in ways it has not during the same time in the east. In the 16th, 19th and 20th centuries there have been Papal decrees that Mary was personally without sin, that her birth involved no sin, and that she was assumed bodily into heaven. The idea that she is a co-reedemer of humanity along with Christ is intermittenty considered as an additional new dogma, though whether this comes to pass remains to be seen. Orthodox churches have no real official position on these topics, but tend to lean more into the idea that Mary was an exceptional human, more like a bodhisattva, rather than a divine being.

In Louis de Montforte’s 1716 book The Secret of the Rosary, the practice described involves contemplating a particular moment in Christ’s life while praying the Hail Mary ten times, counting a decade. So there are two layers to the practice - repeating set prayers aloud, ten times in a row, while for the duration of that decade in the mind’s eye contemplating a single episode in Christ’s life. Montforte’s book offers three sets of five “mysteries” of the faith, so fifteen altogether: the Joyful mysteries, surrounding Jesus’s birth and early life, the Sorrowful mysteries, surrounding his crucifixion, and the Luminous mysteries, surrounding several miraculous occurences in the wake of his crucifixion. One can pray just one set of mysteries over one lap around the rosary, or, if especially pious, one can pray all fifteen mysteries over three laps, which takes about an hour.

The Rosary practice has continued to evolve in the past century, and even the past few decades (no pun intended). In 1917 Our Lady of Fatima told three Portuguese shepherd children to append the “Fatima prayer” that she gave Sister Lucia to the end of each decade, so that World War I would end¹⁰. This revision became widespread. And as recently as 2002, Pope John Paul II officially added a new set of five mysteries, the Luminous Mysteries, which are devoted to Jesus’s actual teaching, which were somewhat bizarrely missing from the earlier version.

As I said, in the eastern Church no such practice has developed in any widespread way, although in Russia there has been some energy in this direction. I’ll talk more about the Eastern pre-history of the Universal Orthodox Rosary, and begin to define the actual structure of the new version, in the next post.

1. I wouldn’t exactly say I’ve coined this phrase, but I will note that it is not very common. I hope it becomes more common and is filled in with theological and liturgical content that perhaps some churches lose sight of when they are too attached to the identity of their country of origin.

2. I’ve been meaning to post more on here during that time, but in all honesty the process of soaking in the music and structure of the Lenten Trisagion has been so consuming and transformative that it hasn’t felt appropriate to make any statements until the process was complete (Pascha was sunday before last, last week was Bright Week, now I’m back). This is in part because it has made me need to adapt and revise some of my own ideas about philosophy and religion.

3. It is perhaps worth specifying that what I am most concerned with is generating a feeling of joy, awe, humility and compassion than with communicating an particular moral norms or dogmas, but that this is still opposed to rock shows that convey a predominantly sexual or violent energy, which, I’ll further specify, I in no way condemn, it just isn’t what I’m trying to do. These latter energies are in fact the subject of many pagan forms of religion, the are the de facto energy of any spontaneous sacred rite, from techno parties to drum circles.

4. To avoid anyone getting the wrong idea - I hate Alexander Dugin and see his philosophy of history and political philosophy as a complete scam and a cancer in the world. He’s not a true Christian at all, and is actually a more or less avowed Pagan despite claiming to represent the “Old Believers”.

5. Without getting into any details, as a rule it generally seems to be that most of the shortcomings of the Protestantisms I grew up around were reactions against excesses and mistakes of the Catholic Church, while meanwhile the Eastern and Oriental Orthodox traditions maintained the true faith, and thus had no need of Prostantism.

6. But doesn’t prohibit it

7. I have never been Catholic, though I’ve had a fair amount of contact with a few different Catholic congregations and have had a pretty regular practicing of praying it especially since the pandemic.

8. To say nothing of the profound interpenetration and mutual influence between Christianity and many other faiths over the course of its history - Zoroastrianism, Islam, obviously Judaism and even Buddhism and Vedanta. The idea that these traditions evolved separately in different parts of the world is a complete fiction, mostly invented during the 19th century (to some of you this is obvious, to others, perhaps not).

9. Though as we’ll see, even this form has been updated more recently.

10. The prayer, which I’ve replaced with a different one for Universal Orthodoxy, goes: “O My Jesus, forgive us our sins, save us from the fires of hell, lead all souls to Heaven, especially those in most need of Thy mercy. Amen”