Divine Liturgy of St Basil

A worshipper who attends the Basil liturgy notices first that it is longer, and that the length lives in the prayers the priest offers at the altar. The visible order of the service, the entrances, the litanies, the Cherubic Hymn, the creed, is shared with the ordinary Chrysostom liturgy, so congregational habit carries smoothly across; what changes is the interior text. The anaphora of Basil is one of the summits of Christian prayer, a sweeping recital of the whole economy of salvation from creation through the fall, the law and the prophets to the incarnation, cross, resurrection and second coming, all addressed to the Father in a single sustained act of thanksgiving before the words of institution and the calling down of the Spirit. Its theology is precise in the Cappadocian manner, and phrases of it read like the Trinitarian debates of the fourth century resolved into doxology.

The Byzantine church assigns this liturgy to the days when such weight is wanted: the Sundays of Great Lent, when the church walks toward Pascha; Holy Thursday, the day of the eucharist's institution; Holy Saturday, the great vigil; the eves of Christmas and Theophany; and the first of January, Basil's own feast. On those ten days the longer prayer slows the whole service down, and the slowing is the point: the church's densest seasons are matched with its deepest text.

Basil of Caesarea is one of the few figures of the patristic age whose liturgical attribution scholars treat with genuine respect rather than polite suspicion. The prayer that bears his name survives in a family of versions: a shorter Egyptian form preserved in Coptic and Greek, and longer forms in Syriac, Armenian and the Byzantine books. Comparative study of these texts, one of the classic problems of liturgical science, has led many scholars to conclude that the shorter Egyptian text represents an older core, and that the expanded Byzantine anaphora is a fourth-century Cappadocian reworking, enriched precisely with the scriptural and Trinitarian language characteristic of Basil's certain writings.

Some are prepared to say the bishop reworked the prayer with his own hand; others stop at his circle and his era. Either way, the tradition that connects the liturgy to Basil is doing more than honouring a famous name, which is what makes this case different from most eponymous liturgies. In the Byzantine Rite the Basil liturgy was once the principal Sunday service, and the manuscripts place it first; over the medieval centuries the shorter Chrysostom liturgy displaced it from ordinary use, leaving Basil's the solemn exception it now is. The Coptic church, meanwhile, still uses its own form of the anaphora of Basil as its ordinary liturgy, so the prayer serves both as an everyday and as a festal text, in two churches that parted ways fifteen centuries ago.