Byzantine Rite

The Byzantine Rite is the liturgy of a city before it is the liturgy of an empire. Constantinople inherited the liturgical family of Antioch, and from the fourth century onward reworked it under the pressures of an imperial capital: processions through the streets, a cathedral of unprecedented scale in Hagia Sophia, and a court whose ceremonial and whose theology both flowed into worship. The rite that resulted is built on a few great structures.

The Divine Liturgy, in the redactions bearing the names of John Chrysostom and Basil, is its eucharist. Around it runs the daily cycle of services, vespers, compline, midnight office, matins and the hours, and around the week runs the octoechos, the cycle of eight tones that rotates the church's hymnography. The year interlocks two calendars, the fixed feasts and the movable paschal cycle, and the whole is regulated by the Typikon, the book of rubrics that tells the singer and celebrant how the overlapping cycles combine on any given day.

Historians of the rite describe a long synthesis: the cathedral usage of the Great Church, with its sung offices, gradually merged with the monastic usages of Palestine and of the Studios monastery in the capital, so that what the Orthodox world now celebrates is a monastic-cathedral hybrid completed in the late Byzantine centuries and spread wherever the church of Constantinople had daughters.

The Byzantine Rite travelled by mission and by translation. The ninth-century work associated with Cyril and Methodius and their disciples carried it into the Slavic lands in a new liturgical language, Church Slavonic, and the conversion of Rus in 988 made that translation the worship of the largest Orthodox nation. The rite thus became the shared possession of churches that are administratively independent of one another: the Greek-speaking patriarchates, the Slavic churches, the Romanian, Georgian, Arabic-speaking and missionary churches, each celebrating the same services in its own tongue and with its own musical tradition, from Byzantine chant to Slavic polyphony. It is also the rite of the Eastern Catholic churches of Byzantine heritage, communities in communion with Rome that keep the Orthodox liturgical books, a situation that has made the rite a crossing point of church politics for four centuries.

For all its variety of language and music, the rite's furniture is everywhere recognisable: the iconostasis screening the sanctuary, the antidoron and the leavened bread, censing at the appointed moments, and a liturgical ethos that treats the service as an entry into heavenly worship rather than an instruction hour. Its calendar begins the church year on the first of September, and its paschal reckoning still follows the Julian calculation in most of the Orthodox world, which is why Orthodox Easter usually falls after the Western feast.