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St. Basil the Great

The long anaphora — the liturgy of the fasts and the great nights

“Holy indeed You are, and all-holy, and magnificent is Your glory.”
The Anaphora of St. Basil
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The Liturgy

Outwardly, the Liturgy of St. Basil the Great is nearly indistinguishable from the everyday Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom — the same twofold shape, the same litanies and antiphons, the same Little and Great Entrances, the same hymns in the same order. The difference lives almost entirely in the anaphora, the great Eucharistic prayer at the rite’s heart — and there the difference is vast. Basil’s anaphora runs roughly three times the length of Chrysostom’s: a prayed theology that sweeps from the life of the Trinity through creation, the fall, the covenants and the prophets, the incarnation, the cross and the tomb, the resurrection, and on to the age to come — the whole economy of salvation recited back to God as thanksgiving.

Most of that immense prayer is offered while the choir sings, so the congregation knows Basil’s liturgy less by what it hears than by its longer silences — and by one unmistakable signal: at the point where the church ordinarily sings “It is truly right” to the Theotokos, Basil’s liturgy sings instead the great hymn “All of creation rejoices in you, O full of grace.” It is served exactly ten times a year: the five Sundays of Great Lent; Holy Thursday and Holy Saturday, both joined to vespers; January 1, his own feast; and the eves of Nativity and Theophany — and when those eves fall on a Saturday or Sunday, the two liturgies swap places with the feast’s own.

Unusually for an ancient attribution, the name on this liturgy largely holds. Scholars widely accept that the core of the anaphora is genuinely Basil’s, shaped in his Caesarea in the 370s: a shorter, earlier form survives in Egyptian use as the Coptic St. Basil, and the Byzantine text reads as Basil’s own theological expansion of that older prayer — the bishop revising the church’s thanksgiving with his own pen.

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The History

The prayer of a Cappadocian bishop became the Sunday norm of an empire — and then withdrew, undiminished, to the church’s most solemn days.

c. 330–379
Basil of Caesarea — monastic legislator, builder of hospitals, defender of Nicaea against the Arian empire — dies a scant two years before the Council of Constantinople (381) vindicates the faith he had spent himself defending.
c. 370s
The anaphora takes shape in his Cappadocia. The shorter Egyptian Basil preserves the older core; the Byzantine form bears the marks of Basil’s own expansion — the same theological voice heard in his treatise On the Holy Spirit.
5th–8th c.
Basil’s becomes the principal liturgy of Constantinople — the ordinary Sunday worship of the imperial church, with Chrysostom’s shorter rite beside it for lesser days.
c. 790s
The Barberini Euchologion, the oldest surviving Byzantine service book, lists Basil’s liturgy first — before Chrysostom’s — a fossil of the age when Basil’s was the norm.
c. 1000–1200
The reversal: the shorter Chrysostom liturgy takes over the ordinary Sundays of the year, and Basil’s withdraws to the ten solemn days it has kept ever since — the fasts, the vigils, and his own feast.
Since
The liturgy of Lent and the great nights. When the church’s year turns most serious — the Sundays of the fast, the night the Supper was given, the night before the tomb broke open — the whole Christian East (and, in its own older form, Coptic Christianity) still prays through Basil’s words.