Part One covered the features of Orthodox worship and the connection between the primacy of the liturgical life and the theological flowering that blooms thereafter like the true vine. Part two now outlines the structure of daily worship cycles in the Church. Three chapters included are: Formation of the Daily Liturgical Cycle, the Hours, and the Divine Liturgy. As we discussed before, it’s human nature to sing and offer sacrifice to God.
Chapter one begins with the Mystical Supper. Oral history and experience of the divine through the relationship of prayer preceded the written word in the Old Testament. Christians did not write down the form of worship first, then put into practice what they conceived. They did not use the Scriptures to discover what Christ meant by His words and actions. They first followed, listened, and ate and drank of the mystical and paschal meal; then later, for generations, they wrote down what they knew was the right practice. The Holy Scriptures are a type of written medium that relies on revealed practice. Tradition gives worship a structure and content that conforms not to man’s imaginations or “old world” cultural norms, but to the revelation of Christ in the Mystical Supper. There is a great cycle of traditional practices from the old Hebrew righteous, prophets, and the Holy Scriptures that link to the Gospels that link to other forms of Orthodox worship: the eucharist, the liturgy or anaphora, hymnography and other prayers dedicated to saints, to unbelievers, to the Theotokos, and to guardian angels.
The Jewish tradition of keeping the Passover, in remembrance of the Exodus, was linked to Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection. Remembrance begins in the heart and mind. The only time God gave his people a written form to be included in worship was Moses’ Ten Commandments. The New Commandment was given at the Mystical Supper, and nothing was written until much later in chronological order. When the Holy Spirit descended on the Apostles, the gifts helped order, structure and form worship. Similarly, the Holy Spirit inspired the prophets and poets in the Old Testament, for example, King David and his Psalms. Love was the new commandment, which is best expressed through a poetical medium like the Psalter and the hymnography composed by the members of the Church instead of making conformity and philosophical consistency the highest regulation. Love is the rule and structure of Orthodox tradition.
There were common organizing elements among early Christian communities, even though there wasn’t a uniform worship service in the 1st and 2nd c. St. Justin the Philosopher notes that universally there were readings, a presider, prayers, thanksgiving, eucharist, and a gathering into one place among Christians. The wording and phrases, the duration, the number of prayers, the style and where they met were allowable variables.
The major liturgical rites of the East, as well as some rites in the West not mentioned by Metropolitan Hilarion (Mozarabic, Gallican, Ambrosian) grew out of the Roman Empire in the East where St. Basil the Great, St. John Chrysostom, and St. James the Apostle gave us liturgical worship. All of them have Anaphora (offering, liturgy) Prayers, but the exact wording and length of singing differ between them. Holy Tradition produced the New Testament and those writings produced more systematic and poetic hymns and songs to be incorporated into rules for how to follow them. For example, there was a liturgical enrichment during the 4th c. where public services and ceremony increased after persecutions became less common. There is a freedom to “incarnate the heavenly ideal” on earth during liturgical worship because the Mystical Supper set up a form of prayer that exists outside of time; it exists in aeonian time approaching the eschaton, all which rests on Christ’s incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection from the dead. That enriching the prayers of the Church is tainted by the encroaching syncretism of pagan Greco-Roman ceremonies is a prejudice of late European Protestant revolution in the 1500s. Secularism would be the equivalent of syncretism in modern Western forms of worship services.
Two main parts of the liturgy exist. The liturgy of the catechumens and the liturgy of the faithful. This form of worship isn’t scholarly just because it has been organized by Byzantine and Syrian Christians during imperial history. But its prayers are full of a perspective that watches the world and the heavens with an eschaton-oriented view. Ancient and modern people have tried to track time by using solar, lunar, and other forms of lighting. For God a day is like a thousand years and a thousand years like a day. Likewise, for Orthodox Christians, the cycle of services and the liturgy on Sunday is a condensed form of a day and in turn a day of prayers arranged orderly by the Church is like the whole span of created time. The Holy Trinity is described as The Light, both “all-consuming” and gently “gladsome,” many times in Orthodox services and in all the scriptures. St. Cyril of Jerusalem teaches that “for whatsoever the Holy Spirit has touched, is sanctified and changed.” That holy teaching from tradition explains almost all forms of Orthodox worship and the mysteries that make us so different from the kinds of services offered especially by Protestants and sometimes Roman Catholics. If the Holy Spirit has touched water, it is holy. If the Holy Spirit has touched a bishop, he is holy. If the Holy Spirit has touched a hymn for praise, it is holy and can be put into our services on Sunday or any day of the week. Theology doesn’t start with an abstracted understanding of beauty, truth, knowledge, or goodness. The Holy Spirit at Pentecost touched the disciples and began the transformation and procession of transfiguration of all through them. The liturgy isn’t considered daily worship because it symbolizes the end of the age and the age to come. Orthodox Christianity begins with Light. A mockery of that liturgy is the so-called Enlightenment, which has influenced nearly all traditions of Western Christian denominations.
The services that are not offering the eucharist have their own cycle that relate to the aeonian and eschatological time, the ages of ages. St. John Chrysostom teaches that “the light of [the Bible’s] teaching is burning on our tongue,” and he wasn’t speaking figuratively about that experience. The Scriptures can only be ‘’lighting the fire” through prayers, ceremonies, eucharist, readings, and composed hymns by saints because the Holy Spirit is fire, the Holy Trinity is the Light. From the scriptures and tradition, we find that there were certain times of the day with Christological and symbolic meaning. From this, Orthodox Christians developed praying at specific hours of the day and evening: 3rd hour, 6th hour, and 9th hour. For example, the third hour, about daybreak, is when the Holy Spirit descended on the disciples. Other divisions and hours were added later to make up seven discrete times to prayer so that the symbolic concept of completeness is followed. Praying the hours took different forms because monasticism and the laity led different lifestyles and had different circumstances. When the Byzantine Empire fell, most of the monastic practices survived while many parish rules fell out of use. The Typikon has preserved many of the monastic rules for prayer in parishes today. This chapter also explains the common terms troparion, kontakion, stichera, and canon. The Typikon underwent changes due to major historical events. The sack of Constantinople in 1204 by the Crusaders and then the sack of Constantinople in 1453 by the Turks halted further liturgical development.
Christian hymnography grew out of these traditions. Historically, monasticism from the 4th to the 5th c. flourished in the writing of hymns and the arrangement of singing the psalms. Although the laity are more involved in the dealings of world, there wasn’t an idea that Christians had to live two separate lives, one at the job and the other on Sunday. Metropolitan Hilarion omits any distinction of this kind between unceasing prayer for laity and monastics since both are ascetic in their own ways. For example, St. Basil the Great teaches in Long Rules that “when the day’s work is ended, thanksgiving should be offered for what has been granted us or for what we have done rightly therein and confession of our omissions, willingly or unwillingly …” There doesn’t seem to be any concept of having other pursuits that would obstruct lay Christians from completing a full day of prayer. Although the Greek and Russian Church have adapted monastic practices to fit modern parish life, there isn’t any major discrepancy between filling up the day with prayer and working with our normal duties as much as our ability allows us.
Yet monasteries became places where it was conducive to write rich liturgical poetry and many compositions. St. Ephraim the Syrian lived in the Persian Empire in the 4th c. He influenced the Greeks in Constantinople, especially St. Romanos the Melodist, and the blending of Syriac and Greek hymnography began and lasted into our current compositions. St. Ephraim is unique because, unlike the Greeks as well as the tendency among the Latins, he didn’t rely on definitions to teach the faith, but he used the poetic medium. The American academic, Marshall McLuhan, famously wrote that “the medium is the message.” He concisely worded that to describe the consequences of using certain technologies, such as writing, TV, radio, but that could include poetry versus prose styles of texts. The use of a technology has a broader effect than the message. In this case, poetry broadens the effect of the theological message than if it were written plainly, legally, or philosophically. Plato understood this consequential effect. He wrote his philosophy by using dialogues that could be compared to that of St. Ephraim and others who used liturgical dialogues to explain and arouse in us an understanding, a desire for prayer, and an effort to seek the transformation of our souls. Poetry is the noetic language of mankind. It connects to mystical truths. It works on people differently than rhetoric or prose. The incarnation makes poetry possible to help us transform into Christ’s image. Orthodoxy structures how Christians spend our time, and it works toward repentance and asceticism in pursuit of The Light of day and evening.