COMMENTARIES, LITURGICAL

COMMENTARIES, LITURGICAL. These are commentaries on the public worship of the Church, particularly the sacraments and, of the latter, especially the Divine Liturgy or Eucharist (qq.v.). An important genre of theological writing during the Byzantine era (q.v.) and even subsequently, these commentaries properly begin with the catechetical homilies, explanatory sermons delivered to the newly baptized just prior to and following their initiation, given in the 4th and 5th c. by Cyril of Jerusalem, Ambrose of Milan, John Chrysostom, and Theodore of Mopsuestia (qq.v.)-to name those whose homilies are still extant. Thus, they appear prominently after the Christianization of the Byzantine Empire.

Later, with Dionysius the Areopagite’s (q.v.) Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, we find a simultaneously theological and metaphysical meditation on the sacraments employing significant themes taken from Neoplatonism (q.v.). Maximus the Confessor (q.v.) carries on Dionysius’s metaphysical strain in his Mystagogy (7th c.), while Germanos of Constantinople (8th-9th c.) seeks to combine the Dionysian elements with the motif of the liturgy as meditation on Christ’s life found earlier in Theodore of Mopsuestia. Nicholas Cabasilas (14th c.) and Symeon of Thessalonica (15th c.) round out the important commentaries of the Byzantine period (qq.v.). Popular commentaries of this type, however, such as Nikolai Gogol’s (q.v.) Meditation in the 19th c., have continued to appear to the present.