Alexander Schmemann

3. The Age Of The Ecumenical Councils (50 pages)

From Schmemann's A History of the Orthodox Church

Page 45

Development of the Liturgy.

From this point of view, nothing expresses the spirit of the age better than the Byzantine Church services, which began to be arranged just at this time into a sort of system, a structured world of forms and modes, which has remained the permanent and unsurpassed pinnacle of Eastern Orthodoxy. Many varied factors affected its development and establishment in the services of the Orthodox Church, and even today we may distinguish the strata of various periods, each of which had its own liturgical key. The first was the synagogue and the Old Testament foundation of the early Christian cult, which the Sacrament crowned and filled with new meaning. Second, there was the development of a daily cycle in which the features of monastic psalmody were reflected.
Later came the swift growth of the cult of saints and the influence of dogmatic disputes, expressed mainly in the increased number of Church feasts. Finally, the characteristic features of the Church’s new position in the state and in society caused various aspects of human life to be sanctified by the Church. We shall see some of these details in the next chapter.

After the evolution of ecclesiastical structure noted earlier came that of other forms of Church life, primarily the liturgy.
Here also the triumph of a specifically Byzantine tradition, that of Constantinople, is visible and gradually grew in strength. The early Church had a number of local liturgical traditions. In the Acts of the Apostles the Eucharist was defined as an assembly “of all together for one and the same purpose” — for the eternal realization of the sole and unique Supper — but each Church expressed this fundamental uniform content in its own form, which was the fruit of genuine liturgical creativity.

Almost a hundred anaphoras, or eucharistic prayers, have come down to us from ancient times, ascribed to different names, but each essentially expressing long liturgical experience and revealing the basic and unalterable meaning of the Eucharist in human words. Thus modern liturgical scholarship distinguishes types of eucharistic prayers — the Jerusalem, the Alexandrian, the Roman, the Syrian, the Persian, and so on — each of which combines in turn a whole group of liturgies having their own characteristics.
Even more forcefully than purely theological literature, here each Christian tradition expresses its spirit, its ethos, its interpretation of the universal truth of the Church.

The Church of Constantinople, however, not being an ancient one, had no such clearly expressed tradition as Egypt or Syria. For a long period there was a struggle between various influences — that of Antioch, expressed by St. John Chrysostom and Nestorius, and that of Alexandria, expressed by Anatolius, who was elected patriarch at the Synod of Robbers — and each was naturally reflected in the development of the liturgy. We know, for example, that Chrysostom brought into Constantinople much of Antiochene liturgical practice, and Nestorius protested against the use of the term “Mother of God” in the liturgy.

 

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