WORSHIP IN THE 4TH AND 5TH CENTURIES

(Faith : Worship)
Early Church Worship,

WORSHIP During the 4th and 5th  CENTURIES

The fundamental pattern of early Christian worship continued to develop through the 4th and 5th centuries. However, "families" of liturgical practice began to emerge, and styles of worship varied from one Christian region to the other. By this time, one can begin to speak of "eastern" and "Western" characteristics of Christian liturgy.

With the end of the persecutions and the beginning of the period in which Christianity became the public cultus of the Roman imperial government, the number and variety of liturgical sources multiply, though they still reflect the oral-formal tradition continued in these new circumstances,

It has been common to speak of this period as witnessing the emergency of "families of rites," results of the growing influence on local practices of the great sees (areas governed by prominent bishops) of the time. It would perhaps be truer to say that our evidence, still scattered and incomplete, suggests a more specific process of consolidation, at least in the East.

Evidence for Eastern Liturgy------

The Apostolic Constitutions, coming from Antioch in the late 4th century, is the central body of evidence. Long available, it has been recognized only recently for the compilation of the diverse materials it is. It opens with directions for various aspects of Christian life containing excerpts of Didascalia, incorporates the blessing prayers of Didache partially reorganized into a contemporary eucharistic structure, and includes a version of the ordination section of the Apostolic Tradition.
Central to the Apostolic Constitutions, however, are elaborate directions and prayers for baptism and Eucharist, generally thought to reflect the practices of the church of Antioch itself.  
Less well known from this period is the recently discovered east Syrian evidence of the use in the church of Edessa of the Anaphora of Addai and Mari, notable for retaining early Jewish Christian blessing forms reminiscent of the type found in Didache, but set within a structure roughly similar to that elaborated in Apostolic Constitutions,  From Egypt as well, light has been shed on the background of the Alexandrian Liturgy of St. Mark by the late 19th century discovery of the "prayer book" (euchologion) of Serapion, bishop of Thmuis and correspondent of Athanasius. 

For the East in general, however, similarities between the Apostolic Constitutions and the later rite of Constantinople suggest that its central sections contain a version of the rites eventually adopted in the new imperial capital. With additions of its own, notably its use of the anaphora attributed to John Chrysostom and occasionally replaced by those of Basil of Caesarea and the Jeruslem Liturgy of St. James, these latter rites eventually commended themselves widely where imperial influence extended in the East.
Egeria's Diary of a Pilgrimage, the account of a journey of a Gallo-Hispanic religious woman through Asia Minor, Palestine, and Egypt at the turn of the 5th century, offers graphic descriptions of liturgical life, including the paschal rites at Jerusalem and its environs.

Evidence for Western Liturgy ---

Comparable Western evidence is restricted to much later books, all showing effects of the promotion of the Roman rites under the Frankish auspices of Pepin IV and Charlemagne in the 8th and 9th centuries. The peculiar features of the north Italian Ambrosian Missal, the Gallo-Hispanic Missale Gothicum and Missale Bobbiense, and the Gallo-Irish Stowe Missal, many of which may reflect the appropriation of Eastern practices throughout Italy, must be studied in the light of such writings as those of Ambrose of Milan and Isidore of Seville. Evidence of the rites of Latin Africa, before the Vandal conquest of the 5th and the Justinian reconquest of the 6th century, is entirely in the form of allusions in such writings as those of Augustine.

Of the Roman rites themselves, after the 4th century introduction of Latin as the liturgical language, such evidence as we have comes from similarly later books, through it is here possible to identify the oldest form of the Roman eucharistic prater or canon, wrongly attributed to Gregory I, whose name is traditionally attached to the rites adopted by the Frankish liturgical reformers. Apart from a certain restraint in the adoption of Eastern practices, and the formulation of a eucharistic canon different in structure from that of the Apostolic Tradition but perhaps not entirely without contemporary parallels, we may think of the earliest Latin rites of the Roman church as similar to those that preceded them

Conclusion ---

The erosion of the oral-formal tradition of liturgical practice is not easily traced in our sources themselves. The conslidation of rites in the Easy may well have impelled a new concern for precision in liturgical language, though the 9th century constantinopolitan euchologion is the first surviving document to appear to assume the actual use of liturgical books. For the West, it may be assumed that inroads upon the classical tradition required the use of such books at a much earlier date, perhaps particularly in Spain and Gaul; though the late date of our actual sources, which generally assume their use, makes it hard to say when this occurred. It is only in Carolingian ivory book covers that liturgical books appear on altars in tandem with books of the Gospels, though these may reflect a practice long-familiar at the time. 

The issue here is not a small one. Much that is central to the character of early liturgical practice hinged on the continuation of the oral-formal tradition and was obscured when the cultural decline of the later centuries necessitated its abandonment. At that point, whenever and by what stages it occurred, different notions of the nature of Christian liturgical gatherings began to make their influence felt.