A History of Orthodox Worship

A visitor to an Orthodox Liturgy is usually told afterwards that it is “very ancient”, which is true and unhelpful. The interesting thing is that nearly every part of it can be dated — this phrase from the fourth century, that procession from the shape of a sixth-century building, this hymn written to answer a heresy in 535, that little ritual from a monastery in the Judean desert. The service is not a museum. It is a town that has been continuously inhabited, and you can still see which streets are Roman.

Two rooms

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Christian worship has two parents, and they are both Jewish.

The first is the synagogue. The apostles and the first Christians went on attending it — the book of Acts shows them there constantly — and a synagogue service is made of psalms, readings from the Law and the Prophets, a homily on what was read, and prayers. Every one of those things is the first half of the Divine Liturgy, in the same order, to this day.

The second is the upper room. On the night he was betrayed the Lord took bread, gave thanks, broke it and gave it, and said “do this in remembrance of me”; and the Christians did it, in houses, on the first day of the week, from the beginning. That is the second half.

For a time the two were separate: the first part in the synagogue, the second in somebody’s dining room, often with a meal attached. As the Church and the synagogue drew apart the two halves were joined into one service, and that joining is the basic architecture of every eucharistic liturgy in the world, East and West.

A description from the year 155

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We are not guessing about the early shape, because a Christian philosopher wrote it down for a pagan emperor. St Justin Martyr, explaining to Antoninus Pius that Christians were not criminals, described their Sunday assembly about the year 155. Read it and notice how little explanation a modern Orthodox Christian needs.

Sunday. Everyone in one place. Readings from the apostles and prophets. A sermon on them. The prayers of the faithful. The gifts brought up. The eucharistic prayer offered by the president — the bishop — while the people answer Amen. Communion. And the deacons carrying it to those who could not come. That is a description of a Sunday morning at Saint Nina, written a hundred and twenty years after the Resurrection, in a letter to an emperor who was having Christians killed.

One thing in it has changed and is worth noticing: the president offers the prayer “according to his ability” — that is, in his own words, extempore, within a known pattern. The written anaphoras we use are those improvisations settled into text, which is why the great eucharistic prayers carry the names of particular bishops.

Out of the house and into the basilica

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In 313 the persecutions ended, and within a lifetime the Church moved from dining rooms holding forty people to imperial halls holding thousands. Everything about worship had to grow to fit, and most of what a visitor now finds distinctively Orthodox comes from that adjustment.

A congregation of forty needs no procession; a congregation of two thousand in a building the length of a football pitch needs the Gospel book carried in, and the gifts carried from the place where they are prepared to the altar — which is where the Little and Great Entrances come from. Silence while a bishop prays inaudibly at a distant altar is intolerable, so the deacon’s litanies were composed to give the people something to pray meanwhile. Music grew to fill volume, and incense and lamps and vestments were borrowed frankly from the court ceremonial of the city, because that was the available language of honour.

We also know, from this period, what the services of Jerusalem looked like, because a Spanish nun called Egeria made a pilgrimage there in the 380s and wrote home in detail. She describes Holy Week in Jerusalem — the palms carried down the Mount of Olives, the all-night vigil, the veneration of the Cross on Friday — and it is essentially what Orthodox parishes do this year. Much of what the whole Church does in Holy Week is Jerusalem’s local custom, carried home by pilgrims who could not bear to leave it behind.

The Liturgies, and the men whose names they carry

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By the fourth century the great churches had their own written anaphoras — Jerusalem the Liturgy of St James, Egypt that of St Mark, Antioch and Constantinople their own. Two of these came, over centuries, to be the ones used everywhere in the Byzantine world.

The Liturgy of St Basil the Great has the longer and more theologically dense eucharistic prayer, much of which really is his work; it is served ten times a year — the Sundays of Great Lent, the eves of Nativity and Theophany, Holy Thursday and Holy Saturday, and his own feast on 1 January.

The Liturgy of St John Chrysostom is shorter, and is served on almost every other day of the year. Its connection to Chrysostom is real but looser than the name suggests: he brought the Antiochene usage with him when he became archbishop of Constantinople in 398, and the city’s liturgy took his name as it took his shape.

There is a third, and it is one of the most beautiful things the Church does: the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts, served on Lenten weekdays. Because the Eucharist is a feast and the weekdays of Lent are days of mourning, no Liturgy is celebrated on them — so the Gifts are consecrated on Sunday, reserved, and given in the evening at the end of a fasting day, in a service made of vespers and communion, sung in the dark.

What the monks added

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The other half of Orthodox worship — the daily cycle of vespers, compline, midnight office, matins and the hours — was shaped in the monasteries, and above all in the monastery of St Sabbas in the Judean desert and the monastery of Studios in Constantinople. When the two traditions met, Constantinople largely adopted the Palestinian monastic usage, and the book that governs Orthodox services today — the Typikon — is substantially the usage of St Sabbas.

This is why parish services are monastic in shape and why, if they were served in full, they would take most of the night. It is a real tension and the Church has never resolved it tidily: parishes abbreviate, and the books go on assuming monks.

The monasteries also wrote most of the hymns, and Orthodox hymns are not decoration — they are where most of the Church’s teaching is actually kept. St Romanos the Melodist, a Syrian deacon of the sixth century, wrote the great narrative hymns called kontakia, of which the Church now sings mostly the first stanza. St Andrew of Crete wrote the Great Canon, two hundred and fifty stanzas walking through the whole Bible as a confession of sins, read in Lent. St John of Damascus and St Cosmas gave the Church the Paschal canon and much of the Octoechos, the eight-week cycle of tones on which the whole musical year turns.

Why it is sung, and why there is no organ

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Two things surprise nearly every first-time visitor, and both have histories.

The first is that almost nothing is spoken. The readings are chanted, the prayers are chanted, the litanies are sung, and even the sermon sits in a service otherwise entirely sung. Partly this is practical and ancient — a chanted text carries across a stone building where a spoken one does not, which is why the psalms were chanted in the Temple too. But the reason the Church kept it after acoustics stopped requiring it is that singing is what you do with words you did not write and are not arguing about. A read text sounds like information; a sung one sounds like what it is.

The second is that there are no instruments. This is not a rule against music — the Orthodox Church has one of the richest musical traditions in the world — but a preference, inherited from the early Church, for the human voice alone. The fathers associated instrumental music with the theatre and the pagan temple, and they held that the offering should be made with the body God gave rather than with something bought. The organ went west with the Byzantine court as an imperial instrument and was never brought into an eastern church. A thousand years later the consequence is that every voice in the building is part of the instrument, and there is no machine to hide behind.

And then it mostly stopped changing

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By roughly the fourteenth century the Byzantine rite had settled into the form it now has, and the striking thing about the six centuries since is how little has been altered. There have been translations — into Slavonic from 863, and since into Romanian, Georgian, Arabic, Finnish, Japanese, Swahili, English — and there have been corrections of texts, one of which, the Russian revision of the 1650s, caused a schism that has never healed. There has been no reform of the rite of the kind the West has twice undertaken.

That conservatism is deliberate, and the reason is not aesthetic. Orthodox theology is not chiefly kept in a catechism; it is kept in what is sung. Change the hymns and you change the faith, quietly and without a debate — which is precisely how the Filioque entered the West. So the services are treated as something received rather than something managed, and a priest has far less freedom to alter them than a visitor expects.

Standing in the river

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What this means in practice on a Sunday morning is worth saying plainly. The psalms you hear were sung in the Temple before Christ. The shape of the first half is the synagogue’s. The account of the Supper is St Paul’s, written down about the year 55. The order of the whole is what Justin described to an emperor in 155. The Trisagion has been sung since the fifth century, the Cherubic Hymn since the sixth, the hymn “Only-begotten Son” since about 535. The Creed is the council’s of 381, without addition. The Paschal canon is St John of Damascus’, from the eighth century.

Nobody in the building composed any of it, and that is the point. You are not at a service that a community devised to express itself; you are standing in a river that has been running for a very long time, and on Sunday you step into it. The oldest thing in the room is also the thing being done right now.