The “Great Church” of Constantinople.

The famous temple built by Justinian and dedicated to Christ, “the Wisdom of God,” or “Hagia Sophia,” remained for centuries the greatest religious edifice in Christendom. Serving as a cathedral for the “archbishop of New Rome,” the “ecumenical” patriarch, it provoked amazement in the whole world and had a great aesthetic and, therefore, missionary impact. When the ambassadors of the Russian prince Vladimir of Kiev visited it in 988, they confessed that they wondered whether “they were still on earth or in heaven,” and the Russian Chronicle interprets the adoption of Byzantine Christianity by the Russians as an effect of their report.¹ But the influence of the “Great Church” was felt not only by the “barbarians;” other Christian communities, possessing a tradition of their own, accepted it as well. During the Byzantine occupation of Italy (sixth-seventh centuries), the Roman Church adopted a great number of Byzantine hymns.² The Syrian Jacobites, in spite of their separation from Orthodoxy on the Christological issue, translated and adopted much of Byzantine hymnography, mostly during the Byzantine reconquest of the Middle East under the Macedonian dynasty (867-1056).³ A similar influence on Armenia is well known.

This prestige accorded Constantinople is particularly remarkable since there is no evidence of any ecclesiastical or imperial policy of imposing its usages by law or by administrative measures. In the Orthodox world itself, which was directly in the orbit of Constantinople and which became even more liturgically centralized than the Roman world, liturgical diversity persisted until the fifteenth century (cf. Symeon of Thessalonica). But this liturgical centralization resulted, not from the deliberate policy of a central power but from the extraordinary cultural prestige of Constantinople, the imperial capital. The adoption of a liturgical practice or tradition by the “Great Church” meant a final sanction and ultimately a quasi-guarantee of universal acceptance.

With the exception of the few, rather superficial, elements which were borrowed from imperial court ceremonial, the liturgy of the “Great Church” was a synthesis of disparate elements, rather than an original creation.⁴ This synthetic and “catholic” character reflects faithfully the role of Byzantium in politics and in theology. As an empire, Byzantium had to integrate the various cultural traditions, which composed it; and as the centre of the imperial Church, it continually attempted to maintain a balance between the various local theological trends, which divided Christendom after the fourth century.

The form of the Byzantine liturgy — and hence its theology — was determined by the following main elements:

a. The early Christian, pre-Constantinian nucleus to which the Byzantine Church (as well as all the other major traditions of the Christian East) remained very closely faithful in the celebration of the two mysteries, which “recapitulate” all the others: baptism and the Eucharist.⁵ In spite of the totally different conditions of Christian life and of the adoption of infant baptism as a universal pattern, the rite of baptism retained the wording and the essential forms shaped in the second and third centuries. Performed by full immersion, it remained an elaborate and solemn representation of the paschal mystery and of the “passage” from the old life to the new, of the renunciation of Satan and the union with Christ. The rite remained virtually free of later forms of symbolism and unaffected by extra-sacramental theological developments. Confirmation, performed by a priest with “holy chrism” blessed by a bishop, was never separated from baptism; the neophyte, even if only a child, was then admitted immediately to the Eucharist.

The pre-Constantinian nucleus is less in evidence in the developed Byzantine Eucharist, whose peripheral parts have been embellished with symbolism and interpreted as a sacramental re-enactment of the life of Christ. Its central part — i.e., the Eucharistic canon itself — retains very faithfully however the original form and the Jewish root of the Eucharist. This is true for both Eucharistic liturgies, which replaced in the Byzantine world the more ancient Palestinian liturgy of “St. James” — the liturgies of Basil and of John Chrysostom. Both date essentially from the fourth and fifth century with the direct authorship by Basil of Caesarea († 379) are almost certain in the case of the canon bearing his name. But Basil used a more ancient tradition which he attributed to the apostles themselves.⁶ His Eucharistic prayer “is assuredly one of the most beautiful and most harmonious formulas of this type bequeathed to us by Christian antiquity..., very close to the most ancient wording of the Christian prayer with expressions that is still very near to the Jewish prayer itself.”⁷

According to the Medieval Byzantine ordo reflected by the twelfth-century canonist Balsamon,⁸ the liturgy of John Chrysostom is the usual Eucharistic form celebrated throughout the year, except during Lent; Basil’s is used only on ten solemn occasions. The ancient liturgy of “St. James” however was not entirely forgotten in Jerusalem and a few other local communities. Of ecclesiological importance was the fact that the Eucharist remained a solemn, festal celebration in Byzantium and presupposed in principle the gathering around the Lord’s table by the entire local Christian community. The contrast with Western Medieval developments is, in this respect, quite striking. Not only does the Byzantine Church ignore “low Masses,” or Masses of intention; it does not consider the daily celebration of the Eucharist as a norm, except in monasteries. Moreover, a priest is not allowed to celebrate more than once on the same day; nor can a single altar serve each day for more than one Eucharist. These rules place the ecclesiological reality of the one Church realized in the one Eucharist above all pastoral conveniences or practical considerations. As in the early Church, the Eucharist is never the action of a particular group of faithful, nor does it serve any partial or accidental purpose; it is always offered “on behalf of all and for all” by the entire Church.

b. The liturgical evolution of the so-called “cathedral” rite, a designation applied by A. Baumstark to the practice of the major city-churches as distinct from the monastic communities.⁹ A manuscript preserves a description of this rite as it was practiced at Hagia Sophia from 802 to 806,¹⁰ and Symeon of Thessalonica († 1429) describes a “chanted vigil” belonging to the same tradition, although he recognizes that, in his times, it was no longer practiced in its pure form even at Hagia Sophia.¹¹

Devoting comparatively little time to scriptural reading, or psalmody, this rite had favoured the mushrooming of hymnography and the development of the liturgy as a “mystery,” or “drama.” It was indeed difficult to preserve the communal concept of Christian worship, or the notion that the Eucharist is a communion meal, when the liturgy began to be celebrated in huge basilicas holding several thousand worshippers. But since the early Christian community was now transformed into a crowd of nominal Christians (a transformation described as a real tragedy by Chrysostom in his famous sermons at Constantinople), it was necessary for the Church to emphasize the sacred character of the Christian sacraments to protect them from secular profanation, and to surround them with veils and barriers thus practically excluding the mass of the laity from active participation in their celebration, except through the singing of hymns.

This was an evolution, which could have been a purely practical and pastoral; and thus, justifiable development acquired a not altogether healthy theological expression of which the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy of pseudo-Dionysius was the most explicit witness. We described earlier the way in which the “earthly” liturgy was explained by Dionysius as a symbolic — and only symbolic — representation of an unchangeable hierarchy of beingawho stand between the individual Christian and his God. After Dionysius, the liturgy began to play the role of a Gnostic initiation, and the notion of common life in Christ was often lost. But sacramental realism and a more traditional view of the liturgy were preserved in the rite itself, and theologians like Nicholas Cabasilas in their writings about the liturgy were able to overcome the ambiguous tradition of individualism and Gnostic symbolism which Dionysius had introduced in the sixth century.

c. Monasticism. From the beginning of the Constantinian era, a monastic type of worship existed concurrently with the emerging “cathedral” type and soon entered into competition with it. It was characterized by a number of autonomous units of common worship (vespers, compline, midnight prayer, matins, and the four canonical hours, completed in Jerusalem with “mid-hours”), by its almost exclusive use of psalmody, and by its original opposition to hymnography.¹² A monastic office could be practically continuous through day and night as it was, for example, in the monastery of the “Non-sleepers” in Constantinople. The monastic communities also developed the penitential aspects of the later Byzantine synthesis: Lenten cycle, prostrations, fasting.

The earliest available descriptions of the Typikon of the monastery of Studion in Constantinople and of the Palestinian Typikon of St. Sabbas preserve the liturgical orders of these two major monastic centres around the tenth century. At that time, both had already lost the original sobriety of monastic worship: not only they dropped opposition to hymnography, but both became major centres of hymn-writing (Theodore at the Studion, John of Damascus at St. Sabbas). On the other hand, the symbolic Gnosticism of pseudo-Dionysius had by then widely influenced monastic circles: if the goal of the earthly Church was to imitate the “celestial hierarchies,” the monks considered themselves as fulfilling a fortiori the purpose of the “angelic life.” Actually, a common acceptance of the Dionysian understanding of the liturgy must have brought the “monastic” and the “cathedral” type closer together.

But their initial integration did not occur in Constantinople. There the Typikon of the “Great Church” and that of the Studion were still clearly distinct in the tenth century (when the Studite rule, as modified by Patriarch Alexis, was brought to Kiev and adopted by Theodosius of the Caves). Integration occurred in Jerusalem where monastic practices were accepted within the original “cathedral” rite around the eleventh century. The Latin occupation of Constantinople (1204-1261) and the subsequent decadence of the Studion may have contributed to the adoption of the integrated Typikon of Jerusalem by the “Great Church” of Constantinople and its generalization in the Byzantine world.¹³ The great Hesychast patriarchs of the fourteenth century, especially Philotheos Kokkinos, were the main agents of this liturgical unification.

The adoption of a single system of liturgy for both secular and monastic churches facilitated liturgical unification throughout the Church. Byzantine dominance in the Christian East led, in fact, to an even greater liturgical centralization than Rome could ever achieve in the West. The difference however was that no particular ecclesiological significance was attached to this centralization, which was due only to the inimitable cultural prestige of the “Great Church.” Actually, the Byzantine rite was not Constantinopolitan by origin but Syrian in its first version and Palestinian — in the second. Yet the opportunity presented to newly converted peoples to translate the liturgy into their respective tongues counterbalanced the disadvantages of centralization and constituted a powerful tool for missionary activity. In any case, the liturgy remained, in the Orthodox Church, a major expression of unity.

Equally important was the adoption of a monastic Typikon by the Byzantine Church to regulate the liturgical life of the entire Christian community. Actually, on this point, the other Eastern Christian spiritual families — the Copts, the Jacobites, the Armenians — were in the same predicament. By accepting monastic spirituality as a general pattern for its worship, the Christian East as a whole expressed the eschatological meaning of the Christian message. The very magnitude of the liturgical requirements described in the Typikon, the impossibility for an average community to fulfil them integrally, and the severity of penitential discipline implied in the liturgical books always served as a safeguard against any attempt to identify the Church too closely with the present aion and as a signpost of the Kingdom to come. If properly understood, the Eastern liturgy places the Church in a state of permanent eschatological tension.

Date: 2016-01-14; view: 563