Download PDF | (American Essays in Liturgy) Taft SJ, Robert - The Byzantine Rite_ A Short History-Liturgical Press (1992).
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Introduction
Almost forty years ago and a decade before the promulgation of the Vatican II Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy—the ““Magna Charta’’ of modern Catholic liturgy—The Liturgical Press of Collegeville published A Brief History of Liturgy by the late Professor Theodore Klauser (1894-1984) of the University of Bonn. As was customary in those sometimes myopic preVatican II days, the title of this brief pamphlet had it wrong. Klauser’s essay was not about liturgy, but about western liturgy; and not even about all of that, but only about western Catholic liturgy.
To be fair, Dr. Klauser may not have been responsible for that title. His 1953 The Liturgical Press pamphlet was actually a résumé of his book-length study, more accurately entitled A Short History of the Western Liturgy, which first appeared in German in 1943. The enormous success of Klauser’s history—it went through at least five German editions and three English editions (1969, 1973, and 1979)—is sufficient proof of the need it has filled.
Unfortunately, oriental liturgiologists have not yet been able to provide a similar overview of the history of the most important and most studied eastern liturgical tradition, the Byzantine. If a certain number of extremely valuable studies on Byzantine liturgical theology or mystagogy have appeared recently,’ and if there is almost an embarras de richesses on Byzantine architecture and iconography, including church decorative programs,” we are less well provided with reliable attempts to delineate the entire historical evolution of what Alexander Schmemann called ‘‘the Byzantine synthesis.’’?
Schmemann himself attempted such an historical overview in his still popu-lar Introduction to Liturgical Theology. Fresher outlines of this synthesis are now available,‘ and the following pages will present what I think can be said about this question at the present stage of research in a field where much is unknown, a great deal is hypothetical, and an enormous amount of work remains to be done.
It will not be possible to write the full history of Byzantine liturgical ritual until we have: more primary liturgical manuscripts edited critically and accompanied by serious commentaries situating them in their liturgical and historical context; more scholarly studies of the relevant liturgicocanonical material from the synods and councils with the same contextualization; more scholarly studies of Byzantine church music not just as musicology but from the point of view of its place in the history of the liturgy;5 and a taxonomy or typology of the medieval liturgical books of the sort already available for the West.® For a full picture of the Byzantine Rite, however, not even that will suffice. The ‘‘Byzantine synthesis’ comprises much more than just ritual, as we shall see.
In spite of this complexity, we do know something about the origins and evolution of this tradition—indeed, much more than we knew a generation ago. On the basis of the present state of our knowledge, I shall try to follow in the footsteps of Theodore Klauser with my own kleine byzantinische Liturgiegeschichte.
Note, however, that I do not intend to provide here a primer, nor even a description of Byzantine liturgy. Together with my colleagues at the Pontifical Oriental Institute in Rome, Professors Juan Mateos, S.J.,7 and Miguel Arranz, S.J.,8 I have already done that elsewhere, in more or less popular form,’ as well as in numerous particular studies of a far more technical stamp.’ Nor do I intend here a complete history of the Byzantine Rite from its origins up to the present.
My aim, rather, is to trace the origins of this tradition during its period of formation: roughly speaking, from its earliest recorded beginnings until the end of Byzantium. The history of the Byzantine Rite, of course, did not end with the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Nor did Byzantine liturgical creativity come to a halt at that point. But by that time the Byzantine Rite had developed the lineaments it has retained until today, and later developments do not alter this substance.
Rome, Pontifical Oriental Institute 1 January 1992, the Feast of the Circumcision and of St. Basil the Great according to the Byzantine Calendar.
The Byzantine Rite
What liturgists, for want of a more comprehensive and neutral term, call ‘‘the Byzantine Rite,”’ is the liturgical system that developed in the Orthodox Patriarchate of Constantinople and was gradually adopted, in the Middle Ages, by the other Chalcedonian Orthodox Patriarchates of Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem.'
This Byzantine synthesis, by far the most widespread Eastern Christian liturgical heritage, is still used by all the Churches that derive from this Orthodox Pentarchy. The Byzantine liturgical system, renowned for the sumptuousness of its ceremonial and liturgical symbolism, heritage of the imperial splendors of Constantinople before the eighth century, is actually a hybrid of Constantinopolitan and Palestinian rites, gradually synthesized during the ninth to the fourteenth centuries in the monasteries of the Orthodox world, beginning in the period of the struggle with Iconoclasm.2
Its Components
Like other traditional Christian liturgical families, the Byzantine Rite comprises the following: the ‘Divine Liturgy’’ (eucharist); the other ‘‘mysteries’’ (sacraments) of baptism, chrismation (confirmation), crowning (marriage), unction, penance, and ordination; matins, vespers, vigils and the other hours; the liturgical year with its calendar of fixed and movable cycles of feasts and fasts and saints’ days; plus a variety of lesser services or akolouthiai (blessings, the consecration of a church, exorcisms, monastic investiture, etc.). All of these are codified in the standard anthologies or liturgical books of the tradition.
As in other traditions, Byzantine liturgical books are either liturgical texts actually used in the services, or are instructions that regulate how such texts are to be used. The texts themselves contain the customary two levels of elements: the ordinary, or basic, invariable skeleton of the offices; and the proper, that varies according to the feast or day. The Byzantine ordinary is contained in the Euchology or Prayerbook of prayers and litanies for the use of the celebrant and deacon, and the Horologion or Book of Hours.
The seasonal propers of the mobile cycle that revolves around Easter are found in three books: the Triodion for Lent, the Pentekostarion for the Easter/Pentecost season, and the Oktoechos used on Sundays and weekdays throughout the year (except when it is replaced by the other two seasonal anthologies). The fixed cycle of propers for the sanctoral commemorations and feasts that fall on the 365 dates of the calendar year are found, one volume per month, in the twelve-volume Menaion or ‘‘monthly.’’ The New Testament readings proper to both cycles are found in two lectionaries: the Apostle and the Gospel. The lections from the Old Testament, now read only in the Divine Office, have been incorporated into the other books of the proper. The Typikon, or book of rules, is the ‘‘“customary”’ that regulates the use of these books according to the feasts and seasons of the Church year.
This dry, material description of the Byzantine Rite fails to manifest its poetic richness, its intensity, or its tightly-woven unity of ritual celebration, ritual setting, and ritual interpretation. Byzantine liturgy and its theology—within the native context of Byzantine church architecture, church decoration, and liturgical disposition which enfold the ritual like its natural womb-—join to forge what H.-J. Schulz has felicitously called a peculiar Symbolgestalt or symbolic matrix.? The impact of this Symbolgestalt is forever enshrined in the legend of the delegation sent to Constantinople in 987 by Prince Vladimir of Kiev ‘to examine the Greek faith.’’ The emissaries were led to Hagia Sophia for the liturgy, ‘‘so that the Russes might behold the glory of the God of the Greeks.’’ On returning home they reported what they had experienced in terms that have become emblematic for the Erscheinungsbild,‘ or unique impact created by the sensible splendors of the Byzantine Rite:
We knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth. For on earth there is no such splendor or such beauty, and we are at a loss how to describe it. We know only that God dwells there among men, and their service is fairer than the ceremonies of other nations. For we cannot forget that beauty.
“Heaven on earth.’’ This classic phrase, repeated so often it has become a topos, actually derives from the opening chapter of the earlier liturgical commentary (ca. 730) of Patriarch St. Germanus I of Constantinople: ‘The church is heaven on earth, where the God of heaven dwells and moves.’”6
Less easily discernable than the provenance of the topos, however, is the exceedingly intricate history of what provoked this classic reaction in the first place: not just the Byzantine liturgical system, but the architectural and decorative system devised to enclose it, as well as the mystagogy that explains it.
insist on all three, for the Byzantine synthesis is not just the first element, ritual celebration in a vacuum. As H.-J. Schulz has demonstrated in his excellent study of the Byzantine eucharist, one of the distinguishing characteristics of the Byzantine Rite is precisely its intimate symbiosis of liturgical symbolism (ritual celebration), liturgical setting (architecture/iconography), and liturgical interpretation (mystagogy).” Any true history of the Byzantine Rite must account for their interaction in the evolution of the tradition.
Historical Phases
I divide the history of this Byzantine liturgical synthesis into five, sometimes overlapping phases:®
1. the paleo-Byzantine or pre-Constantinian era, about which we know little;
2. the ‘‘imperial phase’’ during the Late Antique or patristic period, especially from the reign of Justinian I (527-565) and his immediate successors, creating a system of cathedral liturgy that lasted until some time after the Latin Conquest (1204-1261), thus overlapping with phases 3-4;
3. the ‘Dark Ages’’ from 610 to ca. 850, and especially the struggle against Iconoclasm (726-843), culminating in the Studite reform;
4. the Studite era itself, from ca. 800-1204;
5. the final, neo-Sabaitic synthesis after the Latin conquest (1204-1261).
Phases 2-3, the most important for our purposes, will be the main focus of our interest here. During Phase 1, the liturgy of Byzantium was a typical Late Antique, Antiochenetype rite with no especially distinguishing traits. The same was apparently the case with the early churches of Constantinople: neither the shape nor the symbolism of the rite or its buildings were distinguishably ‘‘Byzantine.’’ But in the last two decades of the fourth century, especially from the reign of Theodosius I (379-395), the rite of Constantinople began to acquire the stational character and theological lineaments that will mark its later history.
Phase 4, covering (if not exactly coterminous with) the entire Middle-Byzantine Period, was dominated liturgically by the progress of the Studite synthesis—a monastic rite of quite different dimensions from the Asmatike Akolouthia or ‘‘Sung Office’’ of the cathedral rite of the Great Church. This monastic rite found its ultimate codification in the Studite Typika, which supplanted the cathedral rite of the Typikon of the Great Church in the restoration following 1261. As for Phase 5, though critical for the final neo-Sabaitic synthesis that gradually modified and ultimately supplanted the Studite Rite (itself an earlier generation “Sabaitic’’ rite) everywhere during the hesychast ascendancy,’ it represents, basically, more of the same as far as the liturgy/church dynamic is concerned. I shall deal with this phase only ad complementum doctrinae.
I consider Phases 2-3 formative, not only of the Byzantine liturgy, but of the Byzantine liturgical vision, when the basis of what Schulz calls its Erscheinungsbild and Symbolgestalt emerged. This period was a time of formation, climax, breakdown, realignment, and new synthesis. It was a time in which changes in the shape and perception of the liturgy would, in the next, Middle-Byzantine Period" (our Phase 4), be mirrored by accompanying shifts in its architectural and iconographic setting. All these together are but a reflection of developments in church life and in the theology which itself is a meditation on that life. That, at least, is what I think the Byzantines themselves tell us in the extant sources.
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