The Jerusalem Liturgy

The Church of Jerusalem under Saint Cyril developed a distinctive worship bound to the topography of salvation: a stational liturgy in which the services moved among the holy places — the Anastasis, the Martyrium basilica, Golgotha, the Mount of Olives, Bethlehem — celebrating each mystery of Christ at the very site where it was believed to have occurred. Cyril’s Catechetical Lectures and Mystagogical Catecheses presuppose this setting and cannot be rightly read apart from it. This file describes that “liturgy on the holy places” and sets it beside the fuller, slightly later witness of the pilgrim Egeria.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

A Liturgy Bound to the Holy Places

What set fourth-century Jerusalem apart from every other church was that its worship was celebrated on the ground of the Gospel. Constantine’s building program had enclosed the rock of Golgotha and the tomb of Christ within a single great complex, and dotted the surrounding landscape with churches at the sites of the saving events. Around these the church of Jerusalem evolved a stational liturgy: rather than keeping all its services in one building, the community processed from holy place to holy place across the liturgical year, reading at each station the Scripture proper to it and commemorating the event there enacted. The principle was mimetic and topographical — to worship where the thing happened, at the hour and on the day it happened (Baldovin, The Urban Character of Christian Worship, Pont. Inst. Stud. Orient. 1987; Drijvers, Cyril of Jerusalem: Bishop and City, Brill 2004).

The chief stations were few and famous. The Anastasis (the Resurrection rotunda) rose over the empty tomb; the Martyrium, the great Constantinian basilica, stood adjacent to it on the east; between and about them lay the rock of Golgotha with its cross-shaped reliquary court; on the ridge to the east stood the Eleona church on the Mount of Olives, marking the Ascension and the teaching of the Lord; and southward at Bethlehem stood the church of the Nativity. To move among these was to walk the Gospel itself, and the city’s calendar of feasts and its Holy Week in particular were laid out as a pilgrimage in place.

The Catecheses Presuppose the Setting

Cyril’s own works are unintelligible apart from this stational world; they were delivered within it. The eighteen Catechetical Lectures were preached during Lent to the candidates for paschal baptism, and the setting was the Martyrium, the basilica of the Cross, where the catechumens assembled for their daily instruction (see The Procatechesis and the Eighteen Lectures). The lectures repeatedly turn to the holy places around the preacher, appealing to Golgotha and the wood of the Cross as standing witnesses within sight of his hearers (Catechetical Lecture 4.10; 10.19; 13.4; see The True Cross and Relics). The teaching is anchored to its location: Cyril preaches the crucifixion at the place of the crucifixion, the burial by the tomb, the resurrection at the Anastasis.

The five Mystagogical Catecheses, delivered in the week after Easter to the newly baptized, belong to a different station: they were given in the Anastasis, the rotunda of the Resurrection, where the neophytes now gathered to have the mysteries they had just received unfolded to them (see The Five Mystagogies). The very architecture is part of the catechesis: the candidates had been baptized, chrismated, and admitted to the Eucharist within this complex of holy places, and the mystagogy interprets those rites as enacted there, at the tomb of the risen Lord. The anaphora Cyril expounds in the fifth mystagogy is the eucharistic prayer of this very church (see The Jerusalem Anaphora), the ancestor of the later Liturgy of Saint James. The stational setting is thus not background to the catecheses but their living frame.

The Stations of Salvation

The genius of the Jerusalem rite was to distribute the mysteries of Christ across the calendar and the map at once. At Bethlehem the Nativity was kept where it was believed to have occurred; at the Eleona on the Mount of Olives the community gathered for the Ascension and, in Holy Week, for the commemoration of the Lord’s teaching and of the night of Gethsemane; at Golgotha the Passion was kept at the place of the Passion; at the Anastasis the Resurrection was proclaimed at the empty tomb. The hours of the day were observed at the Anastasis with morning and evening offices, so that the rotunda of the Resurrection became the daily heart of the city’s prayer.

This mimetic, place-bound worship is the seed from which much later Christian liturgy would grow. The Holy Week and Paschal observances of Jerusalem — with their processions, their movement from station to station, their dramatic re-enactment of the days of the Passion at the proper sites — would be carried by pilgrims across the Christian world and shape the developed Holy Week of both East and West (Baldovin, The Urban Character of Christian Worship, 1987). The Jerusalem liturgy is thus not a local curiosity but a fountainhead, and Cyril’s catecheses are our principal fourth-century window into its catechetical and sacramental core.

The Witness of Egeria

For the fullest description of the Jerusalem stational liturgy we must turn from Cyril to the pilgrim Egeria, a woman from the West — perhaps from Gaul or Spain — whose Itinerarium (Travels) records her long pilgrimage to the holy places. Her account of Jerusalem worship is the single richest source we possess for the city’s liturgy: she describes the daily offices at the Anastasis; the Lenten catechesis of the candidates, including the bishop’s exposition of Scripture and of the creed; and above all the Holy Week services — the Palm Sunday procession down from the Mount of Olives with the people carrying branches, the night vigils at the several stations, the Good Friday veneration of the wood of the Cross (with the deacons standing guard over the relic), and the great Paschal vigil (Egeria, Itinerarium 24–49; trans. Wilkinson, Egeria’s Travels). Egeria confirms and fills out, in concrete liturgical detail, the very world that Cyril’s catecheses presuppose: where Cyril expounds the meaning of rites his hearers already knew, Egeria narrates their performance from station to station.

A point of honesty about dates must be kept in view. Egeria wrote about 381–384, a generation after Cyril’s catechetical preaching of around 350, and during the episcopate not of Cyril himself but of his successor John II (Wilkinson, Egeria’s Travels; Baldovin, The Urban Character of Christian Worship, 1987). Her testimony is therefore near-contemporary rather than strictly contemporary with Cyril, and the liturgy she describes had had thirty years to develop. Used with that caution, Egeria is an indispensable complement: she shows the mature form of the stational system whose catechetical and eucharistic heart Cyril gives us from a slightly earlier moment, and the two witnesses together — the bishop’s mystagogy and the pilgrim’s diary — let us reconstruct the worship of the holy places with a fullness available for no other early church.

The Legacy of the Holy-Places Liturgy

The Jerusalem stational liturgy left a deep and lasting mark on Christian worship. Its Holy Week — the Palm Sunday procession, the services of the Passion, the veneration of the Cross, the Paschal vigil — spread outward through returning pilgrims and was absorbed, in adapted forms, into the rites of the wider Church, so that the developed Holy Week of the Byzantine and Roman traditions alike owes a debt to the practice of fourth-century Jerusalem (Baldovin, The Urban Character of Christian Worship, 1987; see Divine Liturgy). The eucharistic prayer of the city, expounded by Cyril, matured into the Liturgy of Saint James that remained the proper rite of Jerusalem and Antioch. And the very idea of a worship keyed to sacred topography — of celebrating each mystery at its place — became part of the permanent inheritance of the Church (see Pre-Schism Church). Cyril of Jerusalem stands at the head of that tradition: not its inventor, but its earliest great catechist and the first to leave us, in his Lenten and paschal lectures, a sustained exposition of what it meant to be initiated into Christ upon the ground where Christ had died and risen (see Liturgical and Historical Importance).

References

Cyril of Jerusalem. Catechetical Lectures (Catecheses ad illuminandos) and Mystagogical Catecheses (Catecheses mystagogicae). PG 33.331–1181. English: The Catechetical Lectures of S. Cyril, trans. Edwin Hamilton Gifford, NPNF Series 2, Vol. 7 (NPNF II/7).
McCauley, Leo P., and Anthony A. Stephenson. The Works of Saint Cyril of Jerusalem, Vols. 1–2. Fathers of the Church 61 and 64. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1969–1970.
Egeria. Itinerarium (Travels). Trans. John Wilkinson, Egeria’s Travels. 3rd ed. Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1999.
Baldovin, John F. The Urban Character of Christian Worship: The Origins, Development, and Meaning of Stational Liturgy. Orientalia Christiana Analecta 228. Rome: Pontificio Istituto Orientale, 1987.
Drijvers, Jan Willem. Cyril of Jerusalem: Bishop and City. Leiden: Brill, 2004.
Yarnold, Edward. Cyril of Jerusalem. The Early Church Fathers. London: Routledge, 2000.