The Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom

The Divine Liturgy that bears St. John Chrysostom’s name is, by the scholarly account associated above all with Robert Taft, a Constantinopolitan redaction of an older Antiochene anaphora — the Anaphora of the Twelve Apostles — which John, formed in Antioch, brought to his new see and revised. The whole liturgy was named for him only centuries after his death, and it rose from a secondary place to become the everyday default Eucharist of the Byzantine rite, displacing the Liturgy of St. Basil into its present occasional use.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

What the Attribution Means

The Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom is the most frequently celebrated Eucharist in the Orthodox Church (see Orthodoxy Guide: The Divine Liturgy). Its name, however, makes a claim that must be stated carefully. As the pan-Orthodox treatment already affirms, the liturgy “in its current form, took shape between the 4th and 8th centuries,” and the attribution to John “reflects the tradition that he gave the liturgy its definitive form, though the text has undergone subsequent development” (see Orthodoxy Guide: The Divine Liturgy). The scholarship sharpens this without contradicting it.

The heart of the matter is the anaphora, the great Eucharistic prayer. The anaphora of the Chrysostom liturgy (abbreviated CHR in the scholarly literature) is not a free composition by John. It is a Constantinopolitan redaction of an older Antiochene anaphora, the Greek Anaphora of the Twelve Apostles (the “Anaphora of the Apostles”). The reconstruction, established by Hieronymus Engberding and adopted by Robert Taft, is that John — formed and ordained a presbyter at Antioch before becoming bishop of Constantinople in 398 — brought a redaction of this Antiochene prayer with him and lightly revised it for use in his new see. Taft puts it directly: John Chrysostom “brought from his native Antioch and revised for use in his new episcopal see the ancient Antiochene Anaphora of the Apostles, a prayer still used in the Byzantine Rite today as the Anaphora of St. Chrysostom” (Taft, The Byzantine Rite: A Short History, p. 18; cf. Taft, A History of the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, 6 vols.).

The dominant view — Engberding’s and Taft’s — holds that the Anaphora of the Twelve Apostles preserves the earlier, fuller stratum of the prayer family, and that CHR is the later, shorter Greek redaction of it; the relationship remains debated, with a minority regarding the Twelve Apostles anaphora as itself a later abbreviation. What can plausibly be credited to John himself is therefore a redaction — selection and light reworking, perhaps the composition of certain prayers within the inherited Antiochene formulary — not the body of the prayer, which is pre-Chrysostomic, and still less the surrounding rites (litanies, entrances, communion rites) that accreted over the following centuries. This is precisely what “he gave the liturgy its definitive form” responsibly means.

The method by which scholars reach this conclusion is worth naming, because it is the same one that yields the parallel result for the Liturgy of St. Basil (see St. Basil the Great: The Liturgy of St. Basil). Engberding’s procedure was comparative and philological: by setting the various recensions of a prayer family side by side, one can identify which features are primitive and which are later expansions or contractions, and so reconstruct the direction of dependence. Applied to CHR and the Anaphora of the Twelve Apostles, this comparison locates the Apostles text as the prior stratum and CHR as its Constantinopolitan descendant. The result is the opposite of a debunking. It does not sever the liturgy from Chrysostom; it specifies, with unusual precision for a fourth-century prayer, the historical channel — Antioch to Constantinople, in the person of a bishop trained in the one city and ruling in the other — through which a genuine Antiochene anaphora entered the worship of the capital and became the prayer the Church now offers under his name.

When the Attribution First Appears

The liturgy was not called “of Chrysostom” in his lifetime or for a long time after. The crucial witness is Barberini Gr. 336, the oldest surviving Byzantine euchologion (c. 750–800), which contains the prayers but does not title the whole liturgy with John’s name; in it only two prayers — the Prayer of the Catechumens and the Prayer Behind the Ambo — are ascribed to him personally. The naming of specific prayers begins to crystallize in the window between roughly the mid-sixth and eighth centuries, long after John’s death in 407; the ascription of the entire liturgy to him becomes the manuscript norm only from about the eleventh century onward (Taft, Byzantine Rite; St Andrews Encyclopaedia of Theology, “Liturgy of the Byzantine Rite,” citing Taft and S. Parenti). The attribution is thus genuinely traditional and genuinely late — which is no embarrassment, but the ordinary pattern by which the Church attached the name of a great father to the worship he had shaped.

This pattern is the rule rather than the exception for the great liturgical formularies, and it matters for how the attribution should be heard. A title such as “the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom” is, in the manuscript tradition, less a statement of authorship in the modern sense than a marker of authority and lineage — the Church’s way of binding a body of prayer to the father whose teaching and practice had stamped it and under whose patronage it was handed down. The provenance is therefore a topic rather than a difficulty: the prayers were celebrated in Constantinople before they bore John’s name; his name was attached to particular prayers within a century or two of his death; and the comprehensive title settled on the whole rite only as the medieval Byzantine synthesis took its final shape. None of this unsettles the tradition that John gave the liturgy its definitive form; it specifies what that form was — chiefly the anaphora — and when the Church’s memory came to express the debt in the liturgy’s very title.

The Rise to Default Status

For centuries the relationship between the two Byzantine liturgies was the reverse of today’s. The longer, more solemn Liturgy of St. Basil was the more prominent, and the shorter Chrysostom liturgy the more “ordinary” one; the two then changed places, leaving Basil restricted to about ten days a year and Chrysostom the everyday default (see St. Basil the Great: The Liturgy of St. Basil).

Taft ties the shift to the Studite reform at Constantinople. Theodore the Studite (d. 826) and his monks favored the shorter Chrysostom anaphora for frequent and daily use, relegating the longer Basil to a secondary place; the monastic preference spread to the whole Constantinopolitan church. By the eleventh century CHR had come to dominate — celebrated effectively daily, while Basil was reduced to roughly the ten annual occasions still observed (the eves of Nativity and Theophany, St. Basil’s feast on January 1, the five Sundays of Great Lent, Holy Thursday, and Holy Saturday). The reversal is materially visible in the euchologia, where over this period the order of the two liturgies flips, Basil-first yielding to Chrysostom-first — the manuscript trace of the change in which liturgy was reckoned ordinary (Taft, Byzantine Rite, on the Middle-Byzantine synthesis and the Studite role).

The Structure as Celebrated Today

In its present shape the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom is identical in outward structure to the Liturgy of St. Basil, differing chiefly in the length of the priestly prayers, above all the anaphora. It comprises the Proskomedia (the preparation of the gifts), the Liturgy of the Catechumens (the liturgy of the Word, with its antiphons, Small Entrance, Trisagion, and Scripture readings), and the Liturgy of the Faithful (the Cherubic Hymn, Great Entrance, the Creed, the anaphora with its institution narrative and epiclesis, the Lord’s Prayer, and Communion). The full order, with the variations between Greek and Russian usage, is set out in the pan-Orthodox treatment and is kept consistent with it here (see Orthodoxy Guide: The Divine Liturgy; for the parallel and its longer prayers, see St. Basil the Great: The Liturgy of St. Basil). What the saint’s name finally marks is less a question of authorship than of fidelity: a prayer carried from Antioch, revised at Constantinople, and received by the whole Church as the ordinary form in which it gives thanks.

See Also

• Orthodoxy Guide: The Divine Liturgy — the full pan-Orthodox treatment of the structure, with which this file is kept consistent
• St. Basil the Great: The Liturgy of St. Basil — the parallel liturgy this one displaced from daily use
• Eucharistic Teaching — the theology of the mysteries the liturgy serves
• The Reforming Archbishop — John as bishop of the see whose worship bears his name

References

• Taft, Robert F. The Byzantine Rite: A Short History. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1992.
• Taft, Robert F. A History of the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom. 6 vols. Orientalia Christiana Analecta. Rome: Pontifical Oriental Institute, 1975–2008.
• Engberding, Hieronymus. On the Anaphora of the Twelve Apostles and its relation to the Anaphora of St. John Chrysostom (foundational comparative studies).
• Parenti, Stefano. Studies on the Byzantine euchologia and the history of the two liturgies (as developed from Taft).
• St Andrews Encyclopaedia of Theology, “The Liturgy of the Byzantine Rite” (citing Taft 1992 and Parenti 2021).
• Schmemann, Alexander. The Eucharist: Sacrament of the Kingdom. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1988.