What the Divine Liturgy Is

The Divine Liturgy is the Eucharistic synaxis of the Church — the “common work” (leitourgia) in which the gathered people are constituted as the Body of Christ and lifted, in Christ and by the Spirit, into the Kingdom of God. This file sets out the meaning of the word, the sense in which the Liturgy is “heaven on earth,” and Fr. Alexander Schmemann’s central claim that the Eucharist is the Church’s self-realization — the act in which the Church becomes what she is.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

“The Work of the People”

The word liturgy comes from the Greek leitourgia (from laos, “people,” and ergon, “work”). In classical usage it named a public work undertaken on behalf of the whole community — the sponsoring of a warship, a festival, a civic burden borne by one for the benefit of all. The Septuagint took the word up for the service of the Temple, and the New Testament for the ministry of Christ and the worship of the Church (e.g., Hebrews 8:6, of Christ’s “more excellent leitourgia”; Acts 13:2, of the church at Antioch “worshipping [leitourgountōn] the Lord”). Fr. Alexander Schmemann drew from the word a definition that has shaped modern Orthodox self-understanding: a leitourgia is “an action by which a group of people become something corporately which they had not been as a mere collection of individuals — a whole greater than the sum of its parts” (Schmemann, For the Life of the World, SVS Press, 1973, ch. 2). The Divine Liturgy is thus not a service the clergy perform for the laity, nor a private devotion multiplied by attendance, but the common act of the whole assembled Church — an act in which the people are the celebrants together with the bishop or priest who presides among them (Schmemann, The Eucharist: Sacrament of the Kingdom, SVS Press, 1988, ch. 1).

This is why, in Orthodox usage, “the Liturgy” without qualification means the Eucharist and nothing else. Vespers, Matins, and the Hours are “services,” but the Liturgy is the work — the one action in which the Church does what she exists to do (Schmemann, The Eucharist, 1988, ch. 1; cf. Divine Liturgy, hub essay). St. Nicholas Cabasilas begins his classic fourteenth-century commentary by naming the aim of the whole rite: “the work of the Liturgy is the change of the gifts into the divine Body and Blood; its aim is the sanctification of the faithful” (Cabasilas, A Commentary on the Divine Liturgy, trans. Hussey and McNulty, SPCK, 1960, ch. 1). The two ends — the consecration of the gifts and the sanctification of the communicants — are inseparable: the gifts are changed so that the people may be changed by receiving them.

Heaven on Earth

Orthodox tradition has always spoken of the Liturgy as a participation in the worship of heaven — the earthly assembly joined to the angelic liturgy around the throne of God (cf. Isaiah 6:1–3; Revelation 4–5). The Cherubic Hymn makes the claim explicit: the faithful “mystically represent the Cherubim” and “sing the thrice-holy hymn to the life-creating Trinity,” so that the Sanctus of the anaphora is the Church’s entry into the unceasing song of the seraphim (the Cherubic Hymn and the Great Entrance; the Eucharistic prayer). The eighth-century mystagogy of St. Germanus of Constantinople reads the whole church building and rite in these terms: “The church is heaven on earth, where the God of heaven dwells and moves” (Germanus, On the Divine Liturgy, trans. Paul Meyendorff, SVS Press, 1984, §1). The famous account of the envoys of Prince Vladimir of Kiev, who at Hagia Sophia “knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth,” is the Primary Chronicle‘s dramatization of the same conviction (The Russian Primary Chronicle, s.a. 987, trans. Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor, 1953) — offered here not as a documentary record of the embassy but as the tradition’s own witness to how the Byzantine Liturgy was understood to disclose heaven.

Schmemann insisted, however, that “heaven on earth” is not a matter of aesthetic transport or of leaving the world behind. The Liturgy is the manifestation of the world as it is meant to be — creation restored to its purpose as thanksgiving and communion with God. Its opening words, “Blessed is the Kingdom of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,” announce that the assembly’s destination is the Kingdom, and the whole Liturgy is an ascent toward it and a foretaste of it (Schmemann, The Eucharist, 1988, ch. 2, “The Sacrament of the Kingdom”; For the Life of the World, 1973, ch. 2). The Liturgy is eschatological — it makes present now the age to come — and precisely so it sends the faithful back into the world as its salt and light (Matthew 5:13–16; Schmemann, For the Life of the World, 1973, ch. 2).

The Eucharist Makes the Church

The deepest claim of Orthodox eucharistic theology is that the Liturgy does not merely express a Church that already exists independently of it; the Liturgy makes the Church. St. Paul’s account of the one bread grounds this: “The bread which we break, is it not the communion of the body of Christ? For we being many are one bread, and one body: for we are all partakers of that one bread” (1 Corinthians 10:16–17). The many become one Body precisely by partaking of the one eucharistic Body. St. Augustine put the mystery in a phrase the East equally owns — that in receiving “the Body of Christ” the faithful become what they receive (Augustine, Sermon 272, on the Eucharist). Modern Orthodox theology has made this the axis of its ecclesiology: Fr. Nicholas Afanasiev’s “eucharistic ecclesiology” and, in a critical development, Metropolitan John Zizioulas’ Being as Communion argue that the Church is fully realized in each local eucharistic assembly gathered around its bishop, because it is in the Eucharist that the Body of Christ is constituted (Zizioulas, Being as Communion, SVS Press, 1985, esp. ch. 4; on Afanasiev, see the discussion in Zizioulas and in Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology, Fordham, 1979).

Schmemann’s formulation is the most quoted: the Eucharist is “the sacrament of the Church,” the act in which the Church “becomes what she is” — not one sacrament among others performed within the Church, but the sacrament in which the Church herself is realized as the Body of Christ (Schmemann, The Eucharist, 1988, ch. 1; cf. For the Life of the World, 1973, ch. 2). This is why the Liturgy is not repeatable at will by an individual and cannot be a private Mass in the Orthodox understanding: it requires the gathered ekklesia, the “assembly” that is the Church’s first and constitutive name (Schmemann, The Eucharist, 1988, ch. 1, “The Sacrament of the Assembly”). St. Ignatius of Antioch had already, at the beginning of the second century, tied the Church’s unity to the one Eucharist under the one bishop: “Take care, then, to partake of one Eucharist; for there is one flesh of our Lord Jesus Christ, and one cup to unite us with his blood, one altar, as there is one bishop” (Ignatius, To the Philadelphians 4; trans. in The Apostolic Fathers, ed. Holmes).

Sacrifice, Thanksgiving, and Communion

The Liturgy holds together several aspects that Western theology has sometimes divided. It is a thanksgiving — the very word eucharistia means “thanksgiving,” and the great prayer begins by giving thanks to God for creation and redemption (the Eucharistic prayer). It is a sacrifice — but the one sacrifice of Christ, offered once for all (Hebrews 10:10–14), made present and offered by the Church in the words “Thine own of Thine own we offer unto Thee, on behalf of all and for all”; the Church does not repeat Calvary but enters the one eternal offering of Christ, who is at once “the offerer and the offered, the receiver and the distributed,” as the priest’s prayer of the Cherubikon confesses (prayer of the Cherubic Hymn, Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom; cf. Cabasilas, Commentary, ch. 32). And it is a communion — the reception of the Body and Blood that unites the communicants to Christ and to one another. These are not three rites but three faces of one act, and the Orthodox tradition has resisted isolating any one of them from the others (Schmemann, The Eucharist, 1988, chs. 9–11; see The Holy Mysteries: The Eucharist).

To understand the Divine Liturgy, then, is not primarily to decode a series of symbols but to enter an action: the ascent of the whole Church, in Christ and by the Holy Spirit, to the Father, and the descent of the Kingdom into the midst of the assembly. Everything that follows in this collection — the preparation of the gifts, the readings, the entrances, the great prayer, the communion — is a movement of that single action, which the Church calls, simply, the Liturgy (Schmemann, The Eucharist, 1988, throughout).

References

Schmemann, Alexander. The Eucharist: Sacrament of the Kingdom. Trans. Paul Kachur. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1988. (The Eucharist as the sacrament of the assembly, of the Kingdom, and of the Church’s self-realization.)
Schmemann, Alexander. For the Life of the World. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1973. (The definition of leitourgia; the Liturgy as the manifestation of the world’s true meaning.)
Cabasilas, Nicholas. A Commentary on the Divine Liturgy. Trans. J. M. Hussey and P. A. McNulty. London: SPCK, 1960. (The aim of the Liturgy: the change of the gifts and the sanctification of the faithful.)
Germanus of Constantinople. On the Divine Liturgy. Trans. Paul Meyendorff. Popular Patristics Series. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1984. (The church as “heaven on earth.”)
Zizioulas, John D. Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1985. (Eucharistic ecclesiology; the Church realized in the eucharistic assembly.)
Meyendorff, John. Byzantine Theology: Historical Trends and Doctrinal Themes. New York: Fordham University Press, 1979. (Afanasiev’s eucharistic ecclesiology in context.)
The Apostolic Fathers: Greek Texts and English Translations. Ed. and trans. Michael W. Holmes. 3rd ed. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007. (Ignatius, To the Philadelphians 4.)
The Russian Primary Chronicle: Laurentian Text. Trans. Samuel H. Cross and Olgerd P. Sherbowitz-Wetzor. Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1953. (The envoys of Prince Vladimir at Hagia Sophia, s.a. 987 — reported as tradition, not documentary record.)
Scripture: Acts 13:2; Hebrews 8:6; 10:10–14; 1 Corinthians 10:16–17; Isaiah 6:1–3; Revelation 4–5; Matthew 5:13–16.