East Syriac Rite

The Anaphora of Addai and Mari, named for the two apostles whom tradition credits with evangelising Edessa, is the ordinary eucharistic prayer of the East Syriac Rite, and liturgical scholarship converges on a remarkable judgment about it: in structure and core text it is the oldest anaphora in continuous liturgical use in the world, with many scholars placing its origins as early as the third century in the Aramaic-speaking church of Mesopotamia. Its antiquity shows in its shape.

The prayer addresses much of its course to Christ directly, a primitive trait, and, most famously, it contains no connected narrative of the Last Supper; the words of institution, held in Western sacramental theology to be the essential formula of consecration, are simply not there as a quoted story. For centuries Catholic theology regarded this as a defect that must have been corrected in practice. In 2001 the question was settled the other way: the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, with the approval of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, formally recognised the Anaphora of Addai and Mari as a true and valid eucharistic prayer as the Assyrian Church celebrates it, judging the words of institution present in a dispersed and euchological way rather than as narrative. The ruling, issued to allow shared communion between Chaldean Catholics and Assyrians in need, is one of the most significant liturgical decisions of the modern papacy, an acknowledgment that the ancient East kept a form of the church's central prayer older than the categories later used to judge it.

The East Syriac Rite is the worship of a church that built Christendom's first great missionary web. Centred in Persian Mesopotamia, beyond Rome's border, the Church of the East ordered its liturgy from the school traditions of Edessa and Nisibis and carried it astonishing distances: metropolitans in Central Asia, communities in India from at least the early centuries, and a mission in Tang China attested by the Xi'an stele of 781. The rite these travellers carried is sober and scriptural.

The Holy Qurbana proceeds from the liturgy of the word, with its ancient responsorial psalmody, to an anaphora served at a bare altar behind a sanctuary veil; the church building traditionally sets the bema, a raised platform for the readings, in the nave. Besides Addai and Mari the rite keeps two further anaphoras for seasons of the year, ascribed to Theodore of Mopsuestia and to Nestorius, the Antiochene teachers the Church of the East honours where the Roman world condemned, a difference of veneration that hardened the church's isolation and preserved its rite from outside revision. The modern communities of the rite are divided among the Assyrian Church of the East, the Chaldean Catholic Church in communion with Rome since the sixteenth century, and the Syro-Malabar Church of Kerala, together some millions of faithful; war and emigration have scattered the Mesopotamian heartland, and the rite now lives as much in Chicago, Melbourne and Kochi as in the villages of northern Iraq where its Aramaic was a mother tongue.