West Syriac Rite

At the core of the West Syriac Rite stands the Liturgy of St James, the eucharist of the church of Jerusalem, attributed by tradition to James the brother of the Lord and first bishop of that city. Its Greek form is one of the oldest complete liturgies to survive, and the mystagogical lectures given in fourth-century Jerusalem already describe worship of its shape.

The Syriac-speaking church of Antioch adopted it, translated it, and made it the fixed frame of its eucharist: the order of the service, the great intercessions and the structure of the anaphora remain those of James wherever the rite is celebrated. What the tradition then did with that frame is its glory. Syriac Christianity composed anaphoras the way other churches composed hymns, and the manuscripts preserve more than seventy alternative eucharistic prayers, ascribed to apostles, fathers and Syriac doctors from Ignatius to Bar Hebraeus, all built to fit into the fixed Jacobite order. The rite's hymnography is equally vast, resting on the meters of Ephrem the Syrian, and its music lives in the system of eight modes sung unaccompanied.

The liturgical language is Syriac, the Edessene dialect of Aramaic, kept alongside Arabic in the Middle East and Malayalam in India; the tradition treasures it as the closest liturgical tongue to the speech of Jesus himself, and its survival in worship from Turkey and Syria to Kerala is one of the quiet continuities of Christian history.

The West Syriac Rite is the liturgy of a communion that history scattered and worship held together. After the Council of Chalcedon in 451 the church of the Syriac-speaking East divided over the council's definition, and the party that rejected it, given hierarchy and endurance by the tireless sixth-century bishop Jacob Baradaeus, became the Syriac Orthodox Church, with the West Syriac liturgy as its bond.

Under Islamic rule the community persisted as a people of its rite, its patriarch of Antioch residing in a succession of Mesopotamian monasteries, its scholarship flowering in figures such as Bar Hebraeus, and its liturgy absorbing Arabic alongside Syriac while never surrendering the older tongue. The rite's most remarkable journey was eastward.

The ancient Christians of Kerala, who traced their foundation to the apostle Thomas, entered communion with the Syriac Orthodox patriarchate in the seventeenth century after their revolt against Portuguese Latinisation, and the West Syriac liturgy became the worship of the Malankara churches, celebrated today by millions of Indians in Syriac and Malayalam.

A separate branch, the Maronite Church of Lebanon, kept its own form of the same Antiochene-Syriac inheritance in communion with Rome, with Latin borrowings layered over the Syriac base. One rite therefore serves churches in five communions across three continents, a liturgical family tree whose trunk is the prayer of ancient Jerusalem and Antioch.