Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The Byzantine rite is a family of Christian liturgical usages that evolved in the Byzantine Orthodox patriarchate of constantinople . Its history went through five phases. (1) During the palaeo-Byzantine or pre-Constantinian era, the liturgy of Byzantium was a typical late antique, Antiochene-type rite with no especially ‘Byzantine’ distinguishing traits. But in the last two decades of the fourth century it began to acquire the stational character and theological lineaments that were to mark its later history. (2) In its ‘imperial phase’ of development, especially from the reign of Justinian I (527–65), the Akolouthia Asmatike (Sung Office) evolved, a system of cathedral liturgy that lasted until some time after the Latin conquest (1204–61). (3) Meanwhile, the ‘Dark Ages’ from 610 to c. 850, and especially the struggle against iconoclasm (726–843), had culminated in the Studite reform. (4) The Studite era (c.800–1204) is dominated, liturgically, by the progress of the Studite synthesis, a monastic rite of quite different dimensions from the cathedral rite of the Great Church. This monastic rite, basically a synthesis of Byzantine monastic usages with those of the LAVRA of St Sabas in Palestine, was codified in a new type of monastic rule, the Studite Typika, which would supplant the cathedral rite of the typikon of the Great Church in the restoration following the Latin occupation ... log in or subscribe to read full text