История богослужебного устава. А. Богослужебный устав – до появления полных списков его (I-VIII вв.)

Since our liturgical charter has as its task the adaptation of church services to the sacred memories of the day, its compilation - of course, mental at first, and not written - had to begin with the very emergence of sacred memories in Christianity. The appearance of the first sacred memories dates back to the apostolic time, when there was undoubtedly already a liturgical celebration of at least Sunday. So, it is not an exaggeration to say that the first lines of our church charter, setting out precisely the order of Sunday worship, were conceived by the saints themselves. apostles. It is not surprising, therefore, that the old Russian scribes called the Typikon a divinely inspired book 1 . It began to be compiled at a time when Christianity had a height of spiritual life that made the appearance of divinely inspired writings possible. The formation of our worship, which began in the apostolic age, ended, one might say, only in the 16th century, when its charter received its completely current form. And of course, the value of this charter cannot be reduced by the fact that it took one and a half millennia to create it. Quite the contrary. Thanks to such a long period of development of our liturgical charter, the church of different eras could take part in this development, and each of these eras had its own strength and beauty and reflected them on our centuries-old Typikon. And not only the church of different times created the current charter, but also the church of different localities and countries; Consequently, it was developed by a church that was not only apostolic, but also Catholic, both in place and in time. From the pages of the charter one breathes the touching spirit of ancient church life, either of pious Constantinople, or of ascetic Egypt and Thebaid. If we take into account the multitude of Old Testament material that has come into our worship, then in these moments we spiritually experience sacred biblical antiquity, “walking with one mind” in the church of the patriarchs and prophets. Being a conciliar creation of the church, the liturgical charter, however, was developed primarily only by its most worthy sons. Its immediate authors were people who had no other life than prayer and fasting, to whom the sweetness of “divine services” allowed them to eat food once every 5 days and sleep only standing or sitting, who completed their all-night vigils in churches set on fire, locked from the outside by pagans, people whose martyr’s blood was sometimes mixed with the Eucharistic Blood. The pages of the charter they compiled could not help but be watered with tears of tenderness and the sacrificial blood of confession, which cannot but be felt from there and not impart to the book a spirit of special holiness and purity. This is the secret of the deep effect on the soul of Orthodox worship, that those who participate in it perceive the influence of the church of all times in the person of its best forces and live the life of the entire church, and this influence comes not only from the poetry and music of the service, but also from its very architectonics, from these 40-fold “Lord have mercy,” silent bows, interfering with a long pause in singing and reading, from the antiphonal way of singing, and etc. The typikon deals with the actual architectonics and aesthetics of worship. In particular, from a number of ascetics, the current charter adopts its composition by St. Savva, more precisely - “even in Jerusalem the holy monastery of our reverend and God-bearing father Savva.” This is a monastery near Jerusalem in the harsh Judean desert, founded in the 5th century. St. Savva the Consecrated. What share of participation belongs to this reverend in the development of the current charter cannot yet be decided given the current state of scientific sources. But, in any case, the birthplace of the current charter is Palestine and its cultivated deserts through the labors of fasting. The creators of our church charter were, therefore, the education of that wilderness that raised Elijah and John the Baptist and prepared the Savior himself for His public ministry. Here the very air was filled with sacred memories. Nearby were the greatest shrines of the Christian world - Jerusalem with the Holy Sepulcher and the Church of the Resurrection, where prayer itself became ardent and where, according to the testimony of one Western traveler of the 4th century. (Sylvia of Aquitaine), when the Gospels of the Passion were read, “the whole people raised such a cry and groan that there was no one who would not be moved to tears at that hour” 2. This is how the first printed Charters call themselves in the output sheets, ending with those published under the Patr. Joseph, and the current Old Believer (edimentalist edition) charter. Peregrinatio ad loca sancta, 34 // Orthodox. Palest. Collection, Vol. 20, p. 54. You might be interested in: