Mystical Supper

The weekend Divine Liturgy during the Great Fast is that of St, Basil the Great. It is the older of the two main liturgies we use during the year. That St. Basil composed a Liturgy, or rather reformed an existing Liturgy, is beyond doubt. The constant tradition of the Byzantine Church testifies to this fact. In a fifth century treatise on the liturgy attributed to St. Proclus, one of the Archbishops of Constantinople, it is stated that when St. Basil noticed that those who attended the Liturgy became wearied because of its length, he shortened it (it is now the longer of the liturgies that we use).

More testimony to the existence of a liturgical text which went under the name of St. Basil is given in a letter of Peter the Deacon, one of the Scythian monks sent to Rome to settle certain dogmatic questions. Writing about the year 520 to the African bishops in exile in Sardinia, Peter, an Oriental, mentions a Liturgy of St. Basil, which was known and used throughout the entire East, and even quotes a passage from it.

Leontius of Byzantium, writing   about the middle of the sixth century, censures Theodore of Mopsuestia because he was not content with the liturgies handed down by the Fathers to the churches, but composed a Liturgy of his own, showing thereby no reverence either for that of the Apostles or for that composed in the same spirit by St. Basil. The Quinisext Council, or “Council In Trullo” (692), in its thirty-second canon, draws an argument from the written Liturgy of the Archbishop of the church of the Cæsareans, St. Basil, whose glory has spread through the whole world[. Finally, in the Barberini library there is a manuscript of the latter part of the eighth, or the early part of the ninth, century which contains a Greek Liturgy entitled the Liturgy of St. Basil.

It is not known precisely just what the nature of Basil’s reform was, nor what liturgy served as the basis of his work. Very probably he shortened and changed somewhat the liturgy of his own eparchy, which would have been akin to the Liturgy of St. James. In later times it underwent further development, so that with our present knowledge of its history it would be almost impossible to reconstruct it as it came from the pen of the Bishop of Cæsarea.

Although our typicon (book which outlines how to take services) prescribes its use during special times during the year, it is THE EUCHARISTIC LITURGY of the Great Fast.
(More to come)