Volume 1

A dictionary of Christian antiquities : being a continuation of the 'Dictionary of the Bible' / edited by William Smith and Samuel Cheetham ; illustrated by engravings on wood.

Date:
[between 1890 and 1899?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A dictionary of Christian antiquities : being a continuation of the 'Dictionary of the Bible' / edited by William Smith and Samuel Cheetham ; illustrated by engravings on wood. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    1043/1096 (page 1023)
    [utercessory prayers now follow, and the com- memoration of tne saints departed: the diptychs are read, and another appeal to Jesus Christ. The Lord’s Prayer follows, and after a while the thanksgiving after Communion ; but here both the Coptic and the Arabic fail us, so that the prayers in the Greek which follow appear to be late. (24 ) It remains only to speak of the Ethiopic canon, which commences (Renaudot, vol. i. 472) with some beautiful passages from Holy Scripture. From p. 476 we have much in common with the Coptic St. Basil. The canon proper begins on p. 486, but it is strange that we have nothing corresponding to the “ Lift up your hearts” of almost all the other liturgies. The intercessory prayers precede the words of institu- tion, and then follows the appeal, “ We are set- ting forth Thy death, 0 Lord. We believe Thy resurrection, ascension, and second advent, and keeping the memorial of Thy death and resurrec- tion we offer to Thee this bread and this cup.” The epiclesis follows : the prayer for pardon for the living, the prayer for rest for the dea 1. The Sancta sanctis with the confession as we found it in St. Basil, the Communion of the people, the thanksgiving after Communion and the Lord’s Prayer—the only instance that yet we have met with of such position. We need not discuss the other Ethiopic ferms; they are seven in number, but five have never been published (Neale, i. 325). (25.) Some question has arisen as to the rela- tive claims of these liturgies of St. Basil and St. Mark to be the primitive liturgy of the Egyptian church. Renaudot gives the place to St. Basil,” Palmer to “St. Mark.” The latter founds his judgment in part on the comparison of both with the Universal Canon of the Ethiopians, which he considers to “ agree exactly in order and substance with the liturgies of Cyril and Mark, and no others ” (i. p. 9U). An entirely independent collation leads the writer to reject this statement, and to regard the Alexandrine St. Basil, and the Ethiopian Canon as intimately connected with each other. A comparison of the liturgies with quotations by any of the Alexandrine Fathers, may facilitate our judg- ment. (26.) We shall receive but little assistance from the general tone of Origen’s treatise on prayer, except by noting that when he expresses (as he seems to do) his wish that prayer should be ad- dressed mainly to the Father through the Son, his language would seem to intimate that in his time the general custom of his church was to ad- dress their prayers to Christ. His reference to the thousand thousands and myriads of myriads (against Celsus, viii. 34) may be paralleled out of all the liturgies. Cyril ofAlexandria (we take these references from Palmer, i. U»2-3) refers to the Seraphin (not Cherubin as Palmer has it) veil- ing their faces ; this is not mentioned in “ Basil,” but it is mentioned in the others. The same father says (Epist. ad Johan. A di cli.), “ We are taught also to say in our prayers, ‘ 0 Lord our God, give us peace: for Thou hast given us all things,”’—words to which we find the nearest resemblance in the .SasiVian Coptic and Greek. St. Mark has only “0 king of peace, give thy peace to us in harmony and love.” Origen on Jere- miah (xiv. § 14) remarks, “ We often say in our prayers, Give me a portion with the prophets, give me a portion with the apostles.” A petition resembling this is found both in the Coptic St. Basil and St. Cyril, ami the Greek St. Mai k. It would be scarcely fair to draw from this the conclusion that wnat is called St. Basil’s Liturgy was used at Alexandria in the time of Cyril, rather than that which we call St. Mark’s; but it would seem that when St. Cyril wrote the words I have quoted, the liturgy which bears his name had not been amended. Other refer- ences have been noticed in Dionysius of Alexan- dria, Isidore of Pelusium, and Athanasius, but they do not throw any light on the point before us. It is worthy however of remark that Isidore states distinctly that the sacerdos or bishop uttered the words “ Peace be with you,” from the extremity or highest point of the church, “ imitating the Lord assuming His chair when He gave His peace to His disciples.” (27.) Liturgy of Caesarea.—There can be no doubt that St. Basil, who was bishop of Caesarea iu Cappadocia during the years 370-379, com- mitted to writing, and delivered to the order of monks which he established, a liturgy. And when we look at the well-known w. rds which have been often quoted from his treatise on the Holy Spirit [Canon, I. 269], we can scarcely doubt that this liturgy preserved (at least in its chief features) that form and order which had been tra- ditionally used within the diocese or (possibly) the patriarchate of Cae.sarea. Our difficulty is to recover the service as it came from the hands of Basil. We have the form which passes by his name and now in the East shares with the so-called liturgy of St. Chrysostom the rever- ence of the chui ches. It is used, we are told, on all Sundays in Lent but Palm Sunday, on Maundy Thursday and Easter Eve, on the festival of St. Basil himself, and on the vigils of Christ- mas and of the Epiphany. Dr. Neale and Dr. Littledale (Greek Liturgies) have printed this from two recent editions, published the one at Venice, the other at Constantinople; whilst Daniel has given it in a form presenting con- siderable variations from both. The Alexandrine liturgy assigned to Basil we have already noticed. With the exceptions mentioned below (§29), it differs entirely from the Greek St. Basil. Besides this there is a Syriac liturgy which goes by the name of Basil, a Latin translation of which Renaudot gives from Masius in his second volume. But most, important for our jmrposes is the Greek copy, found in a manuscript of the end of the 9th century which belonged once to the library of St. Mark at Florence (introduced probably at the time of the council), but is now in the Bar- berini collection at Rome. This was printed foi the first time in Bunsen’s Bippulytus and /ns Age (vol. iv.), and again in his Analecta Ante- Nicaena (vol iii. pp. 201-236), and it is strange that it has not attracted the attention it de- serves. (28.) This liturgy commences with the prayer which the priest offered in the sacristy, when he placed the bread upon the disc: this is fol- lowed by the prayers of the three antiphons. These are all found in the liturgy as published by Daniel, but we must exclude here, as through- out, almost all the rubrical directions relating to the action and language of the deacon. The