Cosmic liturgy

Alexander Schmemann notes in his Introduction to Liturgical Theology that “Liturgical historians have taken insufficient notice of the fact that the persecutions, conflicts, sufferings and isolation of Christians are almost completely unmentioned in the prayers and liturgical texts of early Christianity. The worship of the early Church was not merely more ‘majestic’ and triumphal than later Byzantine worship, it was in some sense even broader in its ‘scope’ and inspiration. It resounds with cosmic thanksgiving and embraces in its vision the whole of creation, the whole of history.”

With Constantine, the church had “an opportunity . . . to express at last what she had hitherto been unable to express fully.” While the change seems revolutionary from the outside, the post-Constantine liturgy was in continuity with “the early Christian cult.”