A brief dictionary of church words and expressions, Book about the Church

A brief dictionary of church words and expressions

Mace

- one of the accessories of the bishop's vestments. This is a rectangular board in the shape of a diamond on a ribbon, hung at one corner over the shoulder to the right hip. The club represents the spiritual sword. It may be the archpriest's reward.

PanagIa

– bishop’s breastplate image of the Savior or the Mother of God. The bishop wears this image on his chest as a reminder of his duty - to carry the Lord Jesus in his heart and hope for the intercession of His Most Pure Mother.

PanikadIlo

- a lamp with many candles, usually more than twelve. Rising above our heads, it reminds us of a sky illuminated by stars.

Funeral serviceIda

- prayer singing for the departed. The Holy Church serves requiem services for the deceased both before his burial and after - on the 3rd, 9th, 40th days. But in addition to commemorating each deceased individually, the Holy Church has established certain days when all deceased fathers and brothers in faith are remembered. Such memorial services are called parental and universal.

Porch

- a vestibule in front of the church, a pre-temple, a closed or open part of the temple in which the beggars stood.

ParastAs

- a service to God for the departed, including Vespers and Matins.

Paremia

(
Greek
- proverb, parable) - liturgical readings from the Holy Scriptures of the Old (sometimes New) Testament, which contain prophecies about the event remembered on this day.

Flock

– Christians who are under the spiritual guidance of the pastor of the church.

PatriArch

- currently this is the name of the highest clergyman (bishop), to whom not only clergy, deacons and priests, but bishops and metropolitans of a country or district are subordinate.

PelenA

– a cloth cover with a sewn cross for the throne and altar.

ShroudItsa

- a quadrangular board made of linen, silk or velvet material with images on it of the deceased Christ the Savior, the instruments of His suffering.

Compline

- an evening service, which received its name from what was performed after the evening, that is, after dinner. Compline is great and small.

Repentance,

or
Confession
- a Sacrament in which the repentant, receiving forgiveness from the priest, is invisibly absolved from sins by Jesus Christ himself.

Cover

- a cloth that covers the paten or chalice during the liturgy.

PolyelEy

- singing after kathismas at matins of verses from the 134th and 135th psalms “Praise the name of the Lord.” This singing received the name “polyeleos” because during it the lamps with oil and lamps in the temple are lit.

SexUgnitsa

- a church service that gets its name from the time at which it should take place. Her main mood is thoughts about death, the resurrection of the dead and the Second Coming of Christ.

Pop

- priest. This is a corrupted word that came into use instead of the Greek “papa,” that is, father. Recently it has acquired a derogatory meaning.

GUARDS

- one of the details of the vestments of clergy. Put on your hands. They symbolize the power with which Christ defeated His enemies, and at the same time His bonds.

Novitiateship

- preparation for monastic deeds, a state of testing, “test in obedience,” to which, according to ancient church rules, a person who decides to become a monk is subjected. He is tested by the Church in the firmness and sincerity of his desire, and also prepares for monastic feat.

tonsure

- an integral part of following the Sacrament of Baptism: the priest cuts off with scissors part of the hair on the head of a newly baptized baby or adult.

In addition, this is the name of the ritual that is performed on those entering the path of monastic feat.

In ancient times, cutting hair served as a sign of subordination and humility. Therefore, in the Sacrament of Baptism, the newly enlightened person has his hair cut as a sign that he promises to be obedient to God. When entering monasticism, tonsure is performed as a sign that the entrant promises to take up the cross and follow Christ.

Fast

- a time when, according to church rules, Christians should not only eat meat, butter, milk, cheese, eggs, and sometimes fish, but also consume other foods in moderation. In the Orthodox Church, fasts are multi-day and one-day in duration, some of them are of constant duration, while others have a different number of days in different years.

PotIr

- a chalice, a liturgical vessel in which the Holy Gifts are offered during the Divine Liturgy and from which believers receive communion.

Righteous

- this is the name given to saints who, living in the world and fulfilling state, social and family duties, followed the Law of God in their lives and were faithful to the Lord.

Righteous

- this is the name given to saints who, living in the world and fulfilling state, social and family duties, followed the Law of God in their lives and were faithful to the Lord.

Primate

- literally: the one who stands in front, who occupies the first, highest place before others. The Primate of each Church is its bishop.

Presanctified Liturgy

- a liturgy compiled by St. Gregory the Dvoeslov (VI century), during the celebration of which the clergy use the Holy Gifts, already consecrated at the previous full liturgy. It is performed only during Lent.

Reverend

- this is the name given to the saints of New Testament times who devote themselves to the strictest fulfillment of Christ’s commandments. All saints and saints of God who performed their feat away from the world - in deserts, monasteries, etc. are also called venerables.

Presbyter

(
Greek
– elder) – in the New Testament this is what priests are called.

Throne

- a square table installed and fixed in the altar opposite the Royal Doors, on which the great Sacrifice of the Body and Blood of Christ is offered.

Aisle

- this is the name of the altars, separated from the main one.

Coming

- a church community belonging to one temple.

Communion

- a sacrament in which the believer, under the guise of bread, partakes of the true Body of Christ, and under the guise of wine, the true Blood of Christ, and thus unites with Christ.

Prophet

- predictor, messenger of God's will. The prophets were holy men, enlightened by the Spirit of God. They predicted the future, prepared people for the Kingdom of Christ, cultivated faith and piety among the people, led civil rulers, performed miracles, and wrote sacred books.

Litany of Petition

- this is the name of the litany in which, instead of the usual refrain
“Lord, have mercy,”

“Give, Lord!”
is sung ProskomIdia

(
Greek
- offering) - this is the name of that part of the Divine Liturgy in which the priest prepares bread and wine for the Sacrament of the Eucharist. During the Liturgy, the Lord will mysteriously create them with His Body and Blood.

Prosfora

(
Greek
- offering) - bread that is used to celebrate the Sacrament of the Eucharist. It should consist of two parts, depicting the two natures of Jesus Christ: divine and human. Prosphora is baked from the best wheat flour with yeast, prepared carefully and reverently. On the top of the prosphora, a special seal is used to make imprints of images of the cross, the Mother of God or saints.

ProtodiAcon

- senior deacon.

Archpriest

- senior priest.

ProtopresbIter

- senior priest at the cathedral.

Psalm

- song, chant; In the Church, only those sacred songs that are collected in the psalter are called psalms, while others are simply sacred songs or hymns.

Church aphorisms

***

Our intellectuals are insane and pathetic. Through their frivolity and thoughtlessness, they lost the faith of their fathers, faith, this solid support of our life in all sorrows and troubles, this solid and faithful anchor on which our life and our Fatherland unshakably rests among the storms of life.

***

Every kingdom divided against itself will be desolate, says the Lord, and every city or house divided against itself will not stand (Matthew 15:55). If things go like this in Russia, both atheists and anarchists - madmen will not be subject to the righteous punishment of the law, and if Russia is not cleansed of many tares, then it will be desolate, like the ancient kingdoms and cities, wiped off the face of the earth by the justice of God for their atheism and for their iniquities (Babylonian, Assyrian, Egyptian, Greek-Macedonian).

***

Hold fast, Russia, to your faith, and to the Church, and to the Orthodox Tsar, if you want to be unshakable among people of unbelief, anarchy, and do not want to lose the kingdom and the Orthodox Tsar. And if you depart from your faith, as many intellectuals have already fallen away from it, then you will no longer be Russia or Holy Russia, but a rabble of all sorts of infidels seeking to destroy each other. And if there is no repentance among the Russian people, the end of the world is near. God will take away the pious King from him and send a scourge in the person of wicked, cruel, self-proclaimed rulers who will flood the whole earth with blood and tears...

***

You read novels, magazines, newspapers, and in them you read a lot of empty speeches. Are you with God at this time or not? Of course, not with God, for God does not exist in earthly vanity; it means you are against God, and this is a sin. Are you gathering God's grace by reading (or listening to) empty ranting? No, but you squander the grace that you have acquired, if you have only acquired it, in prayer, in contemplation of God, or in reading the word of God and soul-saving books, or in pious conversation, or in good deeds. And this is a sin, Metropolitan SERAPHIM (Chichagov).

All who desire to live godly in Christ Jesus will be persecuted, says the holy Apostle (2 Tim. 3:12). Consequently, all true Christians will be persecuted until the end of the age, they will suffer from sorrows, sadness, temptations, slander and disasters. Therefore, let no one who is in struggle seek peace or indulge in pleasures. The present time is a time of struggle, battle, sorrow, sighing; it is a field of exploits. There will be a time of peace later, and now a time of effort and labor.

Treasury of the Church Word

Nowadays, complaints are increasingly heard that the liturgical language of the Russian Orthodox Church is “incomprehensible” for modern people. Proposals are being made to somehow “correct” it, “modernize” it, or even even translate it into the Russian literary language. But few people today mention that disputes about the “incomprehensibility” of the Church Slavonic language have been going on for more than two centuries. During this time, many hierarchs of our Church, many great Russian writers, Slavic scholars and public figures (M.V. Lomonosov, A.S. Shishkov, St. Philaret (Amphiteatrov), I.V. Kireevsky, K.P. Pobedonostsev and others), defending the Slavic language from such encroachments, answered all the questions of the reformers . And one cannot help but admit that in our time the defenders of the Church Slavonic language are inferior to them both in the persuasiveness of their arguments and in the strength and vividness of their presentation.

All adherents of Russian literature of the past agree that the Church Slavonic language at the lexical level is quite understandable to Russian people, because it is not a foreign language, but our native language - Russian. K. P. Pobedonostsev wrote about it this way: “Our Church Slavonic language is the great treasure of our spirit, the precious source and inspirer of our folk speech. Its strength, expressiveness, depth of thought reflected in it, the harmony of its consonance and structure of the entire speech create its inimitable beauty. <...> After all, it is native from time immemorial, native to our people, the normal, classical structure of the Russian language was formed on it, and the further the language of literature departs from this root, the more it deteriorates, loses its definiteness and clarity, and the less it becomes native and understandable to the people "[1]. And further: “The native Slavic language is understandable to every Russian person. The darkness of some lyrical chants depends not on the language, but on the heavy construction of the Greek phrase, expressing enthusiastic prayerful praise or having a mysterious meaning. To express it in Russian would mean to make it even less understandable”[2].

It is difficult to overestimate the meaning of these words - that Church Slavonic is a native language for Russian people. Then all the arguments of the old and new renovationists, who again and again try to impress upon us that the Church Slavonic language for us is incomprehensible, foreign, alien, and so on and so forth, immediately collapse. This is, perhaps, one of the many techniques of the information war that is being waged against us on all spiritual and physical fronts. After all, it is one thing when a person is convinced that the Church Slavonic language is some kind of terrible and strange, and foreign, and completely incomprehensible, and quite another thing when a person, starting to study the liturgical language of our Church, knows that he is native and close, the one in which they prayed and which their pious ancestors loved, a language in which a sensitive heart will recognize the incomparable fragrance of antiquity, a language in which Russian roots are in the literal and figurative sense! It is quite obvious that the initial attitude with which a person approaches the study of the Church Slavonic language will be decisive for the further success of this study.

No matter how different at first glance the language of our Church today may be from the modern Russian language, no matter how outdated and archaic it may seem to us, but by looking more closely at its vocabulary , at the roots of its words, we will be convinced that many words of the Russian language are of origin Church Slavonic, and, in turn, many Slavic sayings are completely clear to us. Difficulties in understanding the meaning of words often arise as a result of the general decline of culture and impoverishment of the Russian language, as well as due to its deliberate damage by the media. Modern man has lost knowledge of his native language, and our common task is to fill this gap. For example, words such as path, food, pasture, etc., should return to the vocabulary of modern Russian people if they are lost. After all, they are all an integral part of our culture, our classical literature and especially the poetry of the 19th century. It is also important to remember that the Church Slavonic language is the high style of the Russian literary language, and it is this high style that is now being so persistently reduced and deliberately destroyed.

Every honest person who loves his Fatherland must first of all carefully monitor his own speech . It depends on each of us that our native language is free from unnecessary foreign words, from jargon, and even more so from abuse, and, on the contrary, that it is enriched with ancient Slavic roots. The repository of Slavic roots is the Church Slavonic language. It is in our power to make sure that this treasure, to which for decades now daring hands hostile to Orthodoxy and the Russian people have been reaching out, wanting to plunder it, remains inviolable.

We are now talking specifically about the lexical composition of the Church Slavonic language, and not about its syntax (more precisely, not about the syntax of hymnographic and liturgical texts). For Slavic syntax, as K.P. Pobedonostsev wrote, can indeed be complex. But at the same time, we must not forget that liturgical texts are not prosaic, but poetic texts, and it is precisely in this - in the strictly established and centuries-verified rhetorical techniques of Byzantine-Slavic poetry - that there is the main difficulty of their perception [3]. Is it really easy to “understand” poetry in general, even secular poetry? Is its “understanding” rational and reduced only to the understanding of all its constituent lexemes? Of course not! Poetry never appeals to the mind, but always to the heartfelt feeling of a person, and spiritual poetry with all its rhetorical means and techniques is designed to purify and elevate these feelings and thereby bring us closer to mental standing before God. The trouble is that to the modern rational “computer” consciousness, brought up on the word-information code, the form of which is entirely equal to the information contained in it, this metaphorical, associative-poetic, and finally mystical - logos - nature of the word is alien and incomprehensible. And this applies not only to spiritual poetry, but also to secular poetry, which in its best classical examples remains completely beyond the understanding (and even attention!) of modern man, although it is written “understandably” - in Russian.

There is also another reason for the difficulty of understanding a Slavic word - when it, although similar to modern Russian in sound, differs from it in meaning. However, these words, called “paronyms” in linguistics, are a completely surmountable difficulty, because the ways of forming a paronym are easily explained, and the process of this explanation itself is extremely fascinating and interesting.

The Church Slavonic language has a fairly large stock of words that are no longer part of the active lexical fund of the Russian language. However, these words only seem outdated to us , belonging entirely to the Church Slavonic vocabulary and having nothing in common with the Russian language. Let's look at this using just one example, a very typical one.

Let's open the Psalter. Psalm 3, the first psalm of the Six Psalms, which we constantly hear during worship, begins with the words: “ Lord, why have you multiplied the cold? "The Russian translation reads like this: Lord, how my persecutors have multiplied[4]! Literally translated: “Lord, why have those who insulted (oppressed) me multiplied?”

This is said in the enemies of the human race - about demons that approach a person, rise up against him, tempting him and trying to shake his faith in God and hope for salvation. But what does the word cold mean , at first glance so ancient and incomprehensible? After all, it is no longer used in Russian! Of course, this verb can no longer be found in modern Russian, but its root - albeit in a different guise - is alive and well and is used quite often.

The Church Slavonic “ stuzh á ti ” is related to the Old Russian and Church Slavonic word “ tuga ”, the main meaning of which is sadness, sorrow . Let us remember “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign”, in which the word “tough” appears more than once: “The black earth was sown with bones under the hooves, and the glade was cleared with blood: with a heavy sigh it rose through the Russian land.” Or: “The grass was stricken with pity, and the tree bowed down to the ground.” Or: “Already, prince, my mind is filled with tension”[5].

The word “ tuga ” is akin to the Russian “ to grieve ” - to grieve, to grieve. How often can you find this word in Russian folk songs, in epics, fairy tales, as well as in literary language, especially in the 19th century! For example, in Pushkin’s “Ruslan and Lyudmila”: “In the dungeon there the princess is grieving, And the brown wolf serves her faithfully”...

The etymology of this word has the literal meaning of squeezing, constraining, oppressing, hence the cognate adjective tight. It also has a connection with the semantics (i.e., with the meaning) of heaviness - in a rearrangement (with the root tyazh -), the adjectives heavy and heavy were formed from this root.

In the Church Slavonic language, in translated texts from the Greek language, the word “ cold á ti ” usually corresponds to the Greek θλίβω - to squeeze, squeeze, oppress, torment, oppress, insult. The Greek noun θλίψις means sorrow, tightness, compression, pressure and is often translated into Church Slavonic with the word “ sorrow ”. “ Joy to all who mourn... ” Πάντων θλιβομένων η χαρά, - this is how the Most Holy Theotokos is magnified in the stichera of the Prayer Canon. inherent in the word “ sorrow ” (especially in its Greek original) is embodied in poetic images, when consolation in sorrow is compared with expansion and space, as if a person’s cramped heart has gained spaciousness and free breathing:

“ Once upon a time, when the God of my Truth heard me, call me: you have spread me out in tribulation .” εν θλίψει επλάτυνάς με (Ps 4.2.)

“Like a wall of refuge, an all-perfect salvation for souls, and space in sorrows, the Young Lady ...” καì πλατυσμòν εν ταις θλίψεσι, Κόρη (Canon of prayer to the Most Holy Theotokos P.6).

The Slavic “ stuzháti ” as a translation of the Greek θλίβω can also have the literal meaning of “to crowd.” For example, in the Gospel of Mark it is said about Christ the Savior: “ And He said to His disciples, Let Him have a ship for the sake of His people, so that they may not suffer Him .” ίνα μη θλίβωσιν Αυτόν. (Mk 3.9). In the Synodal Translation it reads like this: And he said to his disciples that a boat should be ready for him because of the crowd, so that they would not crowd him.

Thus, the Church Slavonic word “ stuzháti ”, both in its Slavic root and in its Greek prototype, expressing the concepts of squeezing, constraining, oppressing, and akin to the Russian tight and heavy, becomes completely understandable and close to us . And as often happens in the language, especially in Church Slavonic, this word accurately expresses the spiritual and psychological state of a person who is in grief and pain, cold from temptations and demons - a state of extreme and almost physical constraint. And it’s as if a weight has been lifted from our shoulders when, by His great mercy, the Lord sends us consolation!

One of such consolations of the Lord is the Church Slavonic language!

[1] Pobedonostsev K.P. On reforms in our worship. In the book: Liturgical language of the Russian Church. M.: Sretensky convent, 1999. P. 80.

[2] Ibid. P. 81.

[3] The poetics of Slavic-Byzantine hymnography has still been little studied, but it is quite obvious that any intrusion into its poetic “fabric” will be destructive for the worship of the Russian Orthodox Church.

[4] Quoted. from the book: “The Psalter in Russian translation from the Greek text LXX. With introduction and notes. P. Yungerova. Holy Trinity Serg. Lavra, 1997.

[5] Quoted. based on the book: Zaliznyak A. A. “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign”: A linguist’s view. M., 2008. S. 465, 466, 467.