The fundamental pattern of early Christian worship continued to develop through the fourth and fifth centuries. However, “families” of liturgical practice began to emerge, and styles of worship varied from one Christian region to the other. By this time, one can begin to speak of “Eastern” and “Western” characteristics of Christian liturgy.
With the end of the persecutions and the beginning of the period in which Christianity became the public cultus of the Roman imperial government, the number and variety of liturgical sources multiply, though they still reflect the oral-formal tradition continued in these new circumstances.
It has been common to speak of this period as witnessing the emergency of “families of rites,” results of the growing influence on local practices of the great sees [areas governed by prominent bishops] of the time. It would perhaps be truer to say that our evidence, still scattered and incomplete, suggests a more specific process of consolidation, at least in the East.
Evidence for Eastern Liturgy
The Apostolic Constitutions, coming from Antioch in the late fourth century, are the central body of evidence. Long available, it has been recognized only recently for the compilation of the diverse materials it is. It opens with directions for various aspects of the Christian life (I–VI) containing excerpts of Didascalia, incorporates the blessing prayers of Didachē partially reorganized into a contemporary eucharistic structure (VII, 25–26), and includes a version of the ordination section of the Apostolic Tradition (VIII, 1–5). If Apostolic Constitutions is still a “church order” based on the sort of structure of description found in Didachē, Justin, and the Apostolic Tradition, it has been stretched out of shape by the diverse materials accommodated within it, perhaps in an effort to organize the variety of practices in use in the region of the Syrian capital.
Central to the Apostolic Constitutions, however, are elaborate directions and prayers for baptism (VII, 39–45) and Eucharist (VII, 6–15), generally thought to reflect the practices of the church of Antioch itself. Distinctive features of baptism include a unified taking of the confession of faith separate from the washing itself and a subsequent episcopal anointing with the invocation of the Spirit. Those of the Eucharist includes the dismissal of catechumens and litanic prayers of the faithful led by deacons, and an elaborate anaphora similar in shape to that reflected in the Apostolic Tradition, but including extended Preface and Sanctus and introducing diaconal prayers for the living and dead before the concluding doxology.
Less well known from this period is the recently discovered east Syrian evidence of the use in the church of Edessa of the Anaphora of Addai and Mari, notable for retaining early Jewish Christian blessing forms reminiscent of the type found in Didachē, but set within a structure roughly similar to that elaborated in Apostolic Constitutions. From Egypt as well, light has been shed on the background of the Alexandrian Liturgy of St. Mark by the late nineteenth-century discovery of the “prayer book” (euchologion) of Serapion (d. 360?), bishop of Thmuis and correspondent of Athanasius. This collection may have been preserved because of the intrinsic interest of its prayers at the Scripture readings, homily, dismissal of the catechumens, and common prayers before the Eucharist (1–12) and at the baptismal (19–25) and ordination (26–38) rites. But it also preserves an anaphora different in shape from Apostolic Constitutions and of undoubted Egyptian pedigree (cf. the Der Balizeh and Strasbourg fragments), in which Preface and Sanctus are followed by invocations over the oblation before and after the institution narrative.
For the East in general, however, similarities between the Apostolic Constitutions and the later rite of Constantinople suggest that its central sections contain a version of the rites eventually adopted in the new imperial capital. With additions of its own, notably its use of the anaphora attributed to John Chrysostom (d. 407) and occasionally replaced by those of Basil of Caesarea (d. 379) and the Jerusalem Liturgy of St. James, these latter rites eventually commended themselves widely where imperial influence extended in the East.
Egeria’s Diary of a Pilgrimage, the account of a journey of a Gallo-Hispanic religious woman through Asia Minor, Palestine, and Egypt at the turn of the fifth century, offers graphic descriptions of liturgical life, including the paschal rites at Jerusalem and its environs.
Evidence for Western Liturgy
Comparable Western evidence is restricted to much later books, all showing effects of the promotion of the Roman rites under the Frankish auspices of Pepin IV and Charlemagne in the eighth and ninth centuries. The peculiar features of the north Italian Ambrosian Missal, the Gallo-Hispanic Missale Gothicum and Missale Bobbiense, and the Gallo-Irish Stowe Missal, many of which may reflect the appropriation of Eastern practices throughout Italy, must be studied in the light of such writings as those of Ambrose of Milan (d. 396) and Isidore of Seville (d. 636). Evidence of the rites of Latin Africa, before the Vandal conquest of the fifth and the Justinian reconquest of the sixth century, is entirely in the form of allusions in such writings as those of Augustine (d. 421).
Of the Roman rites themselves, after the fourth-century introduction of Latin as the liturgical language, such evidence as we have comes from similarly later books, though it is here possible to identify the oldest form of the Roman eucharistic prayer or canon, wrongly attributed to Gelasius I (d. 496), and early seasonal materials that may partly derive from the time of Leo I (d. 461), before encountering the work attributed to Gregory I (d. 604), whose name is traditionally attached to the rites adopted by the Frankish liturgical reformers. Apart from a certain restraint in the adoption of Eastern practices, and the formulation of a eucharistic canon different in structure from that of the Apostolic Tradition but perhaps not entirely without contemporary parallels (cf. Ambrose, De Sacramentis), we may think of the earliest Latin rites of the Roman church as similar to those that preceded them.
Instructional and Homiletical Material
Of unique significance for this period are the bodies of catechetical and homiletic material, which are themselves liturgical in character as well as in contents, which reflect the newly public position of the church, and provide a wealth of detail about liturgical practice.
While we have references to catechetical instruction before baptism in Justin and the Apostolic Tradition, and in Tertullian, Origen (d. 254?), and other earlier writers, it is from the fourth century onward that we have evidence of two types of formal episcopal addresses: the first delivered at and after the formal acceptance of candidates for the paschal baptism, devoted to the exposition of the teachings of the baptismal confession of faith, and occasionally the Lord’s Prayer; the second consisting of post-baptismal (“mystagogical”) addresses devoted to the meaning of baptism and Eucharist for those who had now participated in them.
Of such addresses, we have a series, not always complete or given in the same years, by Cyril, Bishop of Jerusalem (d. 386), Theodore of Mopsuestia (d. 428), and John Chrysostom (d. 407), the last as presbyter of Antioch. We also have two post-baptismal catecheses of Ambrose of Milan, De Mysteriis, and (now widely accepted) De Sacramentis. Among other evidence, Augustine, De Catechizandis Rudibus, provides advice and a model narration to a Carthaginian deacon charged with the initial address to those seeking admission as catechumens, while his De Fide et Symbolo purports to be based on his catechetical instructions as presbyter of Hippo. Maximus the Confessor’s (d. 663) Mystogogia is a mystical interpretation of the Constantinopolitan eucharistic liturgy of his time, and an important source for its instruction.
Such earlier homilies as survive include that of Melito, bishop of Sardis (d. 190), On the Passover, and the great collections of the scriptural homilies of Origen. From the fourth century onward, however, comes a profusion of homilies too great to be enumerated, including series by Gregory of Nazianzus (d. 390), Gregory of Nyssa (d. 395), John Chrysostom, and Cyril of Alexandria (d. 444), as well as of Ambrose, Augustine, Leo I, and Gregory I. With respect to all of these, it can only be noticed in general that the public liturgical assemblies of this period allowed and even required new forms of homiletic address, having in view non-Christians as well as Christians, and larger physical spaces than had before been the case. Several writings of the period, most notably Chrysostom, On Priesthood, but also Gregory of Nazianzus, On His Flight, and even Ambrose, On the Duties of Ministers, are of interest as addressing or reflecting the challenge of preaching in these circumstances.
Such catechetical lectures and homilies were, in this period as distinct from ours, regarded as integral parts of the liturgy itself rather than as attachments or additions to it. Initially taken down in shorthand in the course of delivery, they often reflect another stage in the appropriation of classical styles of public oratory for Christian purposes.
Later Theological Issues
Liturgical theology in this period turns on the theological significance of liturgical practice. Thus, both Athanasius (Ad Serapion I.14, 30) and the “homoisousian” [holding that the Son is “of like substance,” rather than of “the same substance,” with the Father] Basil of Ancyra (Epiphanius, Panarion 73.3) argue for their different ways of stating the equality of the persons of the Godhead against the Arians on the ground that Father, Son, and Spirit are together at work in baptism, while the enhanced specificity of the invocation (epiklēsis) of the Spirit on the oblation in the various forms of anaphora in the Constantinopolitan rite emphasizes what seemed the orthodox Trinitarian implications of earlier liturgical prayers. While the Carolingian theologians Ratramnus and Radbertus developed their several views of the relation of the body and blood of Christ to the eucharistic bread and wine with references to a variety of early Christian writers, it is doubtful if the latter would have understood the terms of the debate, prone as they were to proceed by reference to the theology inherent in liturgical language rather than to raise questions on the basis of it.
Conclusion
The erosion of the oral-formal tradition of liturgical practice is not easily traced in our sources themselves. The consolidation of rites in the East may well have impelled a new concern for precision in liturgical language, though the ninth-century Constantinopolitan euchologion (Barberini manuscript) is the first surviving document to appear to assume the actual use of liturgical books. For the West, it may be assumed that inroads upon the classical tradition required the use of such books at a much earlier date, perhaps particularly in Spain and Gaul; though the late date of our actual sources, which generally assume their use, makes it hard to say when this occurred. It is only in Carolingian ivory book covers that liturgical books appear on altars in tandem with books of the Gospels, though these may reflect a practice long-familiar at the time.
The issue here is not a small one. Much that is central to the character of early liturgical practice hinged on the continuation of the oral-formal tradition and was obscured when the cultural decline of the later centuries necessitated its abandonment. At that point, whenever and by what stages it occurred, different notions of the nature of Christian liturgical gatherings began to make their influence felt.