The Liturgy of St. Basil

The Divine Liturgy of St. Basil the Great is, with the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, one of the two normal Eucharistic liturgies of the Byzantine rite. Once the ordinary Eucharist of Constantinople, it is now served only ten times a year; it is identical in outward shape to the Chrysostom Liturgy but has markedly longer priestly prayers. This file treats the ten occasions on which it is served, the much-studied question of its attribution to Basil, and its displacement by the shorter Chrysostom Liturgy as the Constantinopolitan default.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

When It Is Served: The Ten Annual Occasions

In current Byzantine practice the Liturgy of St. Basil is celebrated exactly ten times a year (The Lenten Triodion, trans. Mother Mary and Ware, introduction; Taft, The Byzantine Rite). Its occasions cluster in the penitential and paschal seasons, where its longer, more contrite prayers suit the Church’s preparation for the great feasts:

The eve of the Nativity of Christ (the Nativity paramony) — transferred to the feast itself when 25 December falls on a Sunday or Monday.
The eve of Theophany (the Theophany paramony) — likewise transferred to the feast when 6 January falls on a Sunday or Monday.
The Feast of St. Basil the Great, 1 January (14 January on the Julian calendar) — the saint’s own day.
4–8. The five Sundays of Great Lent — the first five Sundays of the Fast; Palm Sunday is excepted (it keeps the Chrysostom Liturgy).
Holy Thursday — commemorating the institution of the Eucharist at the Last Supper.
Holy Saturday — the vesperal Liturgy of the Great Sabbath, on the threshold of Pascha.

This is ten celebrations in all (two eves, the January feast, five Lenten Sundays, and the two days of Holy Week). The count and list are kept consistent with the pan-Orthodox treatment of the Eucharist in the Orthodoxy guide (see The Divine Liturgy). One liturgical signature of these days is audible to the congregation: where the Chrysostom Liturgy sings “It is truly meet” after the consecration, the Basil Liturgy sings the hymn “All of creation rejoices in thee” (O Tebe raduyetsya).

The Attribution Question

The simple superscription “the Liturgy of St. Basil” conceals one of the most carefully studied problems in liturgical scholarship — and one of its cleaner results. Unlike many liturgies traditionally ascribed to a Father, the Basilian Liturgy contains a genuine, recoverable Basilian core; the task of scholarship has been to distinguish that core from later growth.

The Egyptian Basil and the Byzantine Expansion

The decisive insight came from Hieronymus Engberding in 1931 and was refined by Anton Baumstark, Alphonse Raes, John Fenwick, and Achim Budde. The Anaphora of St. Basil survives in a family of versions across several language traditions — Egyptian (Sahidic Coptic, Bohairic, and Greek), Syriac, Armenian, and Byzantine. Engberding showed that the shorter Egyptian version (Ω-BAS / the “Egyptian Basil”) represents an earlier stage of the text, and that the longer Byzantine version is an expansion of it — its additions marked by a taste for theological and especially Christological precision drawn from biblical and credal language (Engberding, Das eucharistische Hochgebet der Basileiosliturgie, 1931; Fenwick, The Anaphoras of St Basil and St James; Budde, Die ägyptische Basilios-Anaphora, 2004).

The historical reconstruction that follows is striking. The shorter Egyptian form points back toward an original associated with Basil; the longer Byzantine form is plausibly Basil’s own revision and enrichment of that core — the kind of theological expansion one would expect from the architect of the Cappadocian Trinitarian settlement, writing in the aftermath of the controversies over the Son and the Spirit. On this reading the attribution to Basil is neither naive nor false: a real Basilian text underlies the liturgy, and the Byzantine anaphora may preserve Basil’s hand at two stages of its growth (Fenwick, The Anaphoras of St Basil and St James; and see The Theology of the Anaphora).

The Basil Liturgy is thus a model case of liturgical attribution done responsibly: it neither credulously assigns every word to the saint nor cynically severs his name from a text whose core demonstrably bears his stamp. The honest statement is that the anaphora has a Basilian core recoverable through the comparison of its versions, with later expansion layered over it.

Displacement by the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom

For some centuries the Liturgy of St. Basil was the ordinary Sunday and festal Eucharist of Constantinople; it was the shorter Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom that gradually displaced it into its present occasional use. Robert Taft traces this reversal as part of the broader Byzantine liturgical synthesis (Taft, The Byzantine Rite, chs. 3–5).

Two factors drove the change. The first was length: Basil’s priestly prayers, above all the Anaphora, are markedly longer than Chrysostom’s, and a shorter rite was the more practical instrument for frequent and daily celebration. The second was the influence of monastic practice — the Studite reform of the ninth century, with its emphasis on frequent communion and a fuller daily cycle, favored the briefer liturgy for ordinary days. Over the same period the relative frequency inverted: by roughly the tenth to eleventh centuries the Chrysostom Liturgy had become the default Eucharist of the Great Church, and the Basil Liturgy had contracted to its small number of privileged occasions (Taft, The Byzantine Rite, chs. 4–5). The penitential cast of Basil’s prayers, fittingly, kept it precisely on the days of preparation — Lent and the eves of the great feasts — where the Church most needs a fuller and more contrite Eucharistic prayer.

The result is the arrangement still in force: Chrysostom for the ordinary year, Basil ten times, and the Presanctified Liturgy on the aliturgical weekdays of Lent (see The Divine Liturgy).

References

Taft, Robert F. The Byzantine Rite: A Short History. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1992.
Fenwick, John R. K. The Anaphoras of St Basil and St James: An Investigation into their Common Origin. Orientalia Christiana Analecta 240. Rome: Pontifical Oriental Institute, 1992.
Engberding, Hieronymus. Das eucharistische Hochgebet der Basileiosliturgie. Theologie des christlichen Ostens 1. Münster: Aschendorff, 1931.
Budde, Achim. Die ägyptische Basilios-Anaphora: Text — Kommentar — Geschichte. Jerusalemer Theologisches Forum 7. Münster: Aschendorff, 2004.
The Lenten Triodion. Trans. Mother Mary and Kallistos Ware. London: Faber and Faber, 1978.