Divine Liturgy, Orthodox

JOHN A. MCGUCKIN

The divine liturgy of the Orthodox Church is its spiritual heart and soul. A closer and more revealing knowledge can be had of Orthodoxy by an observer from the study of the rituals and prayers than of any other external thing related to the church. The word “liturgy” (leitourgia) derives from the ancient Greek (pre-Christian) term for “public works” and grew in significance to mean a work conducted for the benefit of the state or community by a benefactor. It was with some of these residual associations that the term was then taken over by the writers of the Greek Septuagint Bible, and used by them to signify the Temple rituals of ancient Israel. It thus became, for the early Chris­tians, the chief word to signify the divine “worship and sacrifice” of the church, a term which would distinguish it from the pagan sacrificial cults around them. The divine liturgy predominantly means the Eucharistic service of the Orthodox Church (often simply referred to as “the liturgy”) and the other mysteries (what the western churches generally call the “sacramental” services). Orthodoxy’s preferred term is mysterion. The latter word means “thing to be silent about” and was used by the apos­tles and fathers with deliberate analogous reference to the pre-Christian mysteries, or mystery religions, where the element of the arcana (refusing to divulge the contents of the initiation) became a very important identifying mark of the adherent. The mysteries are experiences of Christian initiation that are not easily explicable, and each one of them is deeply resonant with the grace of the Lord who has empowered them by his Holy Spirit, so as to use them as primary ways of manifesting his life-giving presence and energy within the earthly church until the Eschaton.

As Sergei Bulgakov once described it, the mysteries are the continuing signs that Pentecost is still occurring within the heart of Christ’s church, and their youthful, unfailing freshness is a sure sign of the authenticity and truth of the church (Bulgakov 1988: 110–11). All the Christian mysteries are eschatological in essence. They stand, as does the earthly church itself, poised between the two ages: this age of conflicted loyalty to God, the expectation of the kingdom, and the next Aeon where the Kingdom of God will be revealed as all in all. (Each of the greater mysteries – baptism, chrismation, Eucharist, confession [metanoia or exomologesis], ordination, marriage, and anointing of the sick – has a separate entry in this encyclopedia and can be further studied there.)

Sometimes the term “liturgy” is extended so as to designate the Services of the Hours. This is not an entirely accurate use of the term, and is certainly a misuse of the term “divine liturgy,” but can be explained as a common usage whereby the Orthodox faithful denote all church prayer services. The latter ceremonies are the daily round of prayers, built out of the way monastic services developed the ancient Christian weekday prayer practices. Chief among the Hours are Vespers, Orthros (Matins), and the other prayer services of First, Third, Sixth, and Ninth Hours, along with Compline and Midnight Office. (These, too, have detailed entries under their respective headings in the encyclopedia.) This present article, therefore, will restrict itself to looking mainly at the ritual aspects of the Eucharistic liturgy.

The celebration of the Eucharist in the churches is the repeated entrance of the Orthodox into the one great act of Christ’s self-sacrifice in his Passion. It is not the death and resurrection of the Lord happening time after time, for this mystery was once and for all andcannotever berepeated(cf. St. John Chry­sostom, Homily 17on Hebrews 3; Theodoret of Cyrus, Interpretation of the 14 Epistles of St. Paul, on Hebrews 8.4); rather, it is the recurring entrance of time-bound creatures into the “once-for-all-ness” of the supreme eschatological mystery of the Lord’s redemption. The church experiences the Eucharist, therefore, as truly the sacrifice of the Lord’s body and blood, his sacred and redeeming Passion, but it is a joyful experience; for this death and sacrifice are at one and the same moment the glorious resurrection, and the effusion of the light and energy of the resurrection on the worshipping church in the gift of the Spirit.

In the course of the divine liturgy all the elements of the Lord’s saving ministry are recapitulated and reexperienced by his faithful and have been throughout the his­tory of the church. The Eucharistic liturgy begins with prayers, moves on to the record of the earthly ministry through the reading of the Scriptures and the gospel, recalls the high-priestly prayer of the Lord, and his Mystical Supper, witnesses the descent of the Spirit, and shares the Eucharistic gifts to the sound of hymns of the resurrection. All the prayerful oblation of the church runs to the Father, but only with and through the Spirit, and with and in the Word who became flesh for this very purpose, to bring all the world back to the knowledge of the One God. This is why the ancient prayers are so fundamentally trinitarian in all their structure and conception; some­thing that is especially seen in the constantly reiterated trinitarian doxologies that punc­tuate every moment of the divine liturgy.

All the liturgy moves in a solemn unfurling that resists being split up into discrete divisions, for it is all a seamless union of parts. The Passion is thus made one with the resurrection and ascension. At the Epiclesis the Supper of the Lord is mystically perceived as one with the descent of the Holy Spirit also; for in the Lord’s economy of salvation there is neither disruption of chronological time, nor sepa­ration of spatial dimension. This economy has the character of the Eschaton. The Person of the Savior is the church’s gate to the glory of the Father, but only through the spiritual deification conferred on his Eucharistic community through the Holy Spirit. In fact, it is in the course of the liturgy that the church is most clearly revealed to be (and constituted as) the com­munion of praise that lives out of the doxology of its God, and finds within this glad thanksgiving (Eucharistia) the power of its communion of love with one another. As St. John of Damascus put it:

We describe the Eucharist as participation [metousia] since through it we partake of the divinity of Jesus. We also call it Commu­nion [koinonia], and it is an actual com­munion, because through it we have communion with Christ and share in his flesh and his divinity. Indeed, we also have communion, and are united, with one another through it. For since we partake of one bread, we all become one body of Christ and one blood, and members one of another, being of one body with the Christ. (On the Orthodox Faith 4.13)

Every moment of the liturgy tends towards a holistic in-gathering of the church into the seamless unity of Christ’s own person (his divine and human condition theandrically united), as well as the deepening unity of the trinitarian oneness of hypostases, of which the church is also the living icon on earth.

The literary forms of the divine liturgies that were used in the ancient church were originally varied and diverse, but slowly came to a standardized set of fewer forms as the local churches more and more adopted the rituals and practices that were in use among the greater metropolitan churches, whose rites and ceremonies had become more universally known, and which generally excited admiration. So it was, for example, that ceremonies from the Church of the Anastasis in Jerusalem, and the various forms of ritual observed there, always had a very wide circulation among all the churches of the Christian world from an early time. The church of Rome used a vernacular Greek liturgy in its first four hundred years of life, only adopting a Latin-language liturgy in the time of Pope Damasus. Its practices, as the leading Chris­tian city of the Latin-speaking world, then eventually displaced several other rival rites, such as the Gallican, Mozarabic, Ambrosian, or Sarum, to become a common and very widely diffused liturgical inheritance in the West. In the Eastern, Greek-speaking prov­inces of the early church, the ritual forms of the Antiochene, Syriac-speaking churches were very influential. The Byzantine rite is, at its heart, a form of the West Syrian liturgy, but by the later 4th century the new capital of the Christian Roman Empire at Constanti­nople had begun to serve as a central vortex, influencing all the other Greek Christian sees in its large ambit, and it spread out among them the Syro-Byzantine rite as a common syntax of international liturgy in the Eastern Christian world.

St. John Chrysostom, the archbishop of Constantinople at the very end of the 4th century, arranged slight changes to the prayers comprising the liturgy, and after his time the whole liturgical rite of Byzan­tium has been commonly attributed to him as its author. He thus became the symbolic father of all the liturgy which had existed (long) before his time, and would adapt after his time. The same is true for the other liturgies, of Saints Basil and Gregory. Both of these fathers of the church were responsible for liturgical developments and improvements in their own lifetimes, but became the symbolic authors of the whole liturgies that attached to them, even though these continued to adapt and change for centuries later, and had existed in substance long before them. The Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom shows many elements in it that date from the 6th century, and some later from the 9th. Both historically and theologically, there is a running and living line of tradition, from the institution of liturgy by Jesus among the apostles, to the present era of the Orthodox Church. Orthodoxy has rarely found its liturgy a controversial mat­ter (excepting some divisive issues over the Old Believer schism in Russia), and its atti­tude to it has long been one of familiarity and loving protection. It has to be admitted, however, that the earlier centuries of the church were much more creative in terms of their different liturgical traditions. (For synoptic studies of the Orthodox Liturgy, see Oakley 1958; Wybrew 1989; Taft 1992.) If St. John Chrysostom was not the sole author of the liturgy that bears his name, the true story was one of more complex change and absorption of different liturgi­cal “families” and customs that tended, as the centuries moved on, towards greater conformity of types in the East, rather than to greater diversity. The Byzantine liturgical rite did not assume its general (and more or less contemporary) shape until after the 9th century, but it has its roots in very ancient soil, with a direct continuity back to the Lord’s own mystical supper, and his own command to “Do this in memory of me.” The final shaping of the Byzantine liturgical rite was the result of several changes in the make up of the Eastern Christian world as it was facing the expanse of Islamic power. After Islam had cut off Palestine from ready communi­cation with the other parts of the Roman Christian world, Mar Saba monastery, near Bethlehem, started to excel as an important center of monastic liturgical life and development. This, the so-called monastic ritual of the Eastern Church, laid out patterns of prayer services, monastic offices, and so on, that were heavily scrip­tural in form. The prayers of the desert ascetics were rooted in the Scriptures, and the recitation of the Psalter played a large part in them. Jerusalem liturgical traditions were also predominant, of course. The general character of these monastically designed services was significantly peniten­tial in tone. The services were often long, meant in some cases to last the whole night through, and were very sober in style. The churches of the desert monks were usually small and poor buildings, designed for the use of single-sex communities of ascetics, devoted to the word of God in a common life of great simplicity and focus.

In the capital city, however, the liturgy was designed to revolve around the state buildings. It was a liturgical style that was built around many state processions, in which the emperor and patriarch played central parts with all their magnificent ret­inue of attendant clergy, and aristocrats. There were numerous stational liturgies (visits to significant city churches and holy shrines where relics were kept, each with their own local traditions). In the capital the very liturgical architecture played a significant part, too. Justinian’s magnificent church of Hagia Sophia was a stage for awe-inspiring ceremonial, far removed from the tiny intimacy of the monastic chapels of the provinces. Profes­sional choirs were brought together, employing some of the finest singers in the known world, and putting to work some of the most famous poets and hymn writers of the era, who composed extensive paraphrastic songs (Kontakia, Troparia, Canons), based on the scriptural narratives, but full of detail and rhetorical coloration. Accordingly, two types of ritual style grew up in the Eastern Church of the Byzantine era, known now as the Monastic and the Cathedral Typika. The liturgical process in general use, after the 9th century, was a form of synthesis of these two types. The different characters can now be seen juxtaposed in Orthodox liturgy, which is a rich weave of Syrian, Palestinian, Imperial Greek, and Monastic observances. It can be seen in the standard Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom: a splendid ceremonial sense of style, allied with a very sober use of a scriptural skeleton of supporting prayers, as it were, and profound patristic theologi­cal invocations shaped around the ancient liturgical kernel of the reading of the Word of God, followed by the celebration of “Thanksgiving” (Greek: Eucharistia) for God’s wonderful creation, and redemption, as culminating in the Lord’s gift of himself for his church.

The monastic style is predominant in the services of the Offices of the Hours, as might be expected. In the celebration of the mysteries, however, and in the public services of blessing, and the observance of the Feasts, especially Pascha, there is a sense of restrained magnificence and awesome ceremony. Today, even the humblest of Orthodox parish churches in the poorest of areas, glimmers with lights and incense, and the twinkle of golden vestments, and church vessels wrapped in precious cloths, and a sea of candles burning around the icons and altar. The fine synthesis of the sober monastic style of Typikon together with the ceremony inherent in the Cathedral rite gives the Orthodox liturgy a distinct flavor. At first it might appear to someone who is not familiar with it as perhaps unapproachable or even forbidding (especially if it is being celebrated in a lan­guage one does not know, such as Greek, Slavonic, or Romanian), but a closer famil­iarity, such as the Orthodox themselves develop over many years of attending church services, leads one to a deep level of “belonging” to the rhythms and nuances contained in this most rich of all languages. The ceremonies themselves are profoundly biblical in form and content, and the inces­sant use of scripture and intercession makes for a seamless weave between the activity of the clergy and the prayers and chanting of the people, something that is true even when a permanent choir is used to lead the people’s prayers.

Today, there are four liturgies still serv­ing as the common forms of Orthodox ritual. The first is the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, which is the com­monly used rite on Sundays and weekdays. The Liturgy of St. Basil the Great is also used ten times in the course of the church’s year, mainly during the course of Great Lent. It is a more sober liturgy with much extended prayers. Most of the different ele­ments of the service, however, are in those parts which the priest often says quietly behind the Iconostasis, and so most of the faithful would not normally recognize much difference between the two liturgies. In those places where the Anaphora is said aloud, however, there would be a significant difference observable in the great prayer of thanksgiving. The Liturgy of St. James, the brother of the Lord, was once the standard Eucharistic Typikon of the church of Jerusalem. Formerly, it was used only there and on the Greek island of Zante. Nowadays it has witnessed a revival among more of the Orthodox Churches. It is used once a year on St. James’ feast day, October 23. The fourth is known as the Liturgy of the Pre-sanctified Gifts of St. Gregory the Dialogist. This is strictly speaking a liturgical service of Holy Communion, with several elements of Vesperal evening prayer, but without the consecration of the mysteries. The gifts that are received, therefore, are consecrated on the previous Sunday’s Lenten liturgy of St. Basil, for use in the Presanctified liturgy of the weekdays following.

The Presanctified liturgy is used on the Wednesdays and Fridays of Great Lent, and on the first three days of Great Week, leading up to Pascha.

The structure of the Orthodox liturgy follows the ancient pattern of the early Jewish-Christian communities, which used the forms of the synagogue meeting: reading and reflecting upon the Word of God and then giving God blessings (Berakha) for his salvific care for his chosen people. From the very beginning, this read­ing of the Word was conducted in the light of the great covenant-making they knew that God had contracted with them as the New People, in the mystery of the Lord’s Passion, death, and resurrection. This is one of the reasons that the Passion account of the gospels was among the first long, through-written, narratives of the evangeli­cal story. From earliest times also, the Passion story was read in the light of the New Passover of the Lord. Jesus’ gift of the Eucharist to his church was the cove- nantal moment in which the scriptural types of Passover and Liberation reached their consummation. This is why, for exam­ple, the liturgy of the Word takes place on the road to Emmaus, when Jesus explains all the passages in Scripture that referred to his New Covenant, and why the veil is lifted from their eyes only as the Eucharist is given to them, and they realized his meaning retrospectively from the “burning” of their hearts (Lk. 24.25–32). To this day the liturgy of the Word, the service of Scripture readings and reflection (including the homily which ought to be a “breaking of the word of Scripture” to the people), takes place as the prelude, preparation for, and commentary on, the Eucharistic celebration which follows after it.

The liturgy thus falls into two major parts: Liturgy of the Word and Liturgy of the Eucharist (Synaxis and Anaphora), both of them being commentary upon the other. In the earliest times of the church the Synaxis was a separate service to the Eucha­ristic rite, but from the 4th century onwards they have been fused together. The climactic part of the Synaxis is always the chanting of the Holy Gospel by the deacon or priest. Similarly, the climax of the Anaphora is the consecration of the mysteries, as summed up in the Epiclesis. It is not possible, how­ever, to single out the “single significant moment” when the whole structure of both the Synaxis and Anaphora is clearly designed to be an ongoing seamless doxo- logy of consecration and thanksgiving. In later times this twofold simplicity of arrangement into these fundamental parts was extended into five sections. Two pre­liminary, and preparatory, rituals were added to the beginning of the Liturgy of the Word, namely the Proskomedie (or Prothesis) rite and the Enarxis rite. And then a short ritual of thanksgiving and dis­missal was added on to the end of the Eucharistic prayer. This gave the – Eucharistic service its complete, and pre­sent-day, form as follows in four major sections:

1 The Proskomedie (the Offering), which is the short service of preparation.

2 The Synaxis (the Gathering) which is com­posed of four episodes: (a) the Enarxis (opening rites) of the initial blessing, the first litanies and antiphons; (b) the Little Entrance with the gospel, the Introits and the singing of the Trisagion hymn (in ancient times this was actually the start of the divine liturgy in church); (c) the readings from sacred Scripture and the homily; and (d) the Great Litanies of Intercession ending with the Litany of the Catechumens.

3 The Holy Eucharist itself, which sectioned into nine separate movements of which the Anaphora is the core: (a) two Litanies of the Faithful; (b) the Great Entrance of the gifts; (c) the Litany of Supplication; (d) the Kiss of Peace (now normally exchanged only among the concelebrating clergy); (e) the Common recitation of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed; (f) the Anaphora (the Great Eucharist Prayer, or Holy Oblation) extending from the “Holy Holy Holy” to the consecration Epiclesis and Great Commemoration of all the saints; (g) the Litany of Supplication and the Lord’s Prayer; (h) the Elevation of the Mysteries (“holy things for the holy”) and the Fraction (division) of the Lamb; and (i) the communion of the clergy and people.

4 The final section of the complete liturgy consists of the rites of Apolysis (Dismissal), comprising communion hymns and prayers of dismissal, thanksgiving, final blessing, and distribution of the Antidoron bread.

The Eucharistic liturgies of the Orthodox Church contain a wealth of the most pro­found prayers, hymns, and intercessions, and are universally regarded by believers as a major deposit of the highest level of theological wisdom that the Orthodox Church possesses. They came to their lit­erary maturity in a time of high patristic inspiration, and they bear a character of venerable profundity, steeped in a rich conception of prayer as a trinitarian mys­tery which the entire church (heavenly and earthly) concelebrates together as a fore­taste of the kingdom’s arrival. The old rule of Lex orandi lex credendi (“the pattern of worship reveals the essence of the church’s faith”) is nowhere seen more aptly than here.

SEE ALSO: Anointing of the Sick; Baptism; Chrismation; Confession; Epiclesis; Escha­tology; Eucharist; Incense; Liturgical Books; Marriage; Mystery (Sacrament); Ordination; Orthros (Matins); Vespers (Hesperinos)

REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS

Bulgakov, S. (1988) The Orthodox Church. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press.

Florovsky, G. (1978) “The Elements of Liturgy,” in C. G. Patelos (ed.) The Orthodox Church in the Ecumenical Movement: Documents and Statements 1902–1975. Geneva: World Council of Churches, pp. 172–82.

Janin, R. (1955) Les Eglises orientales et les rites orientaux. Paris: Letouzey.

McGuckin, J. A. (2008) The Orthodox Church: An Introduction to Its History, Theology and Spiritual Culture. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

Oakley, A. (1958) The Orthodox Liturgy. London: Mowbray.

Schmemann, A. (1966) Introduction to Liturgical Theology. London: Faith Press.

Taft, R. (1992) The Byzantine Rite: A Short History.

Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press.

Wybrew, H. (1989) Orthodox Liturgy: The Development of the Eucharistic Liturgy in the Byzantine Rite. London: SPCK.