Two centuries later, however, on May 29, 1453, the unthinkable happened: the center of Christendom and the eternal city of Constantinople fell to the Ottomans, when a 21-year-old Sultan Mehmed II breached the unreachable city walls and entered the city by force.

By this cataclysmic event, all significant development in Byzantine Liturgy and theology seems to have stoped in the East, on one hand, while in the West the churches begin to be engulfed in a turmoil, starting with Martin Luther’s declaration of the 95 theses at Wittenberg in 1517 that ushered in the Protestant Reformation—less than a century after the fall of Constantinople.

Seventeen years later, in November 1534, Henry VIII broke from Rome and became the head of the Church of England. As part of the new reign he ordered eradication of all remnants of St. Thomas Becket, erasing all images of the Saint and smashing all statues of him, thus institutionalizing iconoclasm.

Thomas Becket instantly became a saint after he was murdered in Canterbury Cathedral in December 1170 for excommunicating the supports of King Henry II and refusing to annul the excommunication. Canterbury thereafter became the third most visited pilgrimage site after Rome and Jerusalem until Henry VIII’s erasure of the Saint in 1534. Geoffrey Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales between approximately 1387 and 1400.

Henry VIII introduced Protestantism in 1532. Under Edward VI (1547-1553) England became fully Protestant. Under Elizabeth I (1558-1603) the country became solidified as a Protestant nation, during which time almost all icons and stained glass windows were destroyed.

Gutenberg Printing Press

Notwithstanding these historic events, there was also a notable technological advancement that altered the history in equal significance, namely, the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg that occurred between 1440 and 1450.

While the printing press enabled the Protestant Reformation to spread like a wildfire, it however put a stop to any significant development in the texts of the Divine Liturgy and of the other rites, including the rite of unction, as Gorodenchuk notes with respect to the latter.

This is so because the printing press enabled mass production and wide circulation of the Bible translation and pamphlets, on one hand, while it imposed an extra burden on revising the already existing texts in circulation, including the text of the Divine Liturgy and the rubrics. Once a text is circulated in mass production, any changes therein are difficult to implement. In short, the so called textus receptus (‘the received text’) became solidified largely because numerous copies are already in circulation. The longer the version is in circulation, the more authority it assumed.

The Iconoclasm Controversy and the Turn to the Historical

Some more historical factors must be considered that eventually caused a radical shift in theological thinking toward the rise of individualism and the salvation of the individual. This development also accompanied the rise of historical realism.

In 692 the Quinisext Council in Trullo issued a canon (the Canon 82) that ordained that Christ be portrayed henceforth in human form and not symbolically as the Lamb of God (Taft, 1980/1981: 72). This decision largely eliminated the icons depicting Christ as the Lamb of God.

Thirty four years later the iconoclasm controversy broke out (726-787) to be followed by another iconoclasm controversy (815-843).

By the 13th-century—during the Nicene Empire, when the Byzantine Church was recovering from the Latin conquest of Constantinople—the  Church had already suffered the major controversy regarding the icons. The victory over iconoclasm, however, lead to unforeseen consequences, one of which was the over-reaction by the Church in affirming the materiality of icons and the correlative turn toward realism and the historical Jesus. The focus turned toward the historical events of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. The Christ-Event is understood less in terms of the realized eschatology that happens now at the moment of the Eucharist but largely in terms of the historical events at Golgotha.

It was during this period (circa 730) when the development of the rite of Proskomidi occurred—the preparation rite in which the bread and wine is prepared on the prothesis before the Divine Liturgy begins. The text of proskomidi is highly representational of the historical events of Jesus in His Passion, accentuating realism thereby.

The Eucharistic rite did not escape the impact of the shift in theological thinking towards the historical Jesus and the realism surrounding the Christ-Event. The shift occurred in the understanding the Communion from being the heavenly sacrifice that Christ offers perpetually (as described in Heb 1.13, 4.14, 7.3, 11-25, 8.1-5), in which the faithful participates here and now, to the understanding of it as a  representation or (representational) re-enactment of the historical event of Jesus’ Crucifixion as described in the synoptic Gospel narratives. In short, the shift is from the present reality of Christ’s sacrifice to the past event of His sacrifice at Golgotha. The shift towards the historical realism is sometimes referred to as the shift from the Alexandrian approach to the Antiochene approach. We will return to shift shortly below.

Recovering Jesus’ Relics and the Holy Places in Jerusalem

But even before the iconoclasm, there was a shift toward realism already taking place in early 4th-century, as a strong interest grew in discovering and recovering the historical sites and relics associated with Jesus’ life and death. The Edict of Milan (aka Peace of Constantine) issued in 313 produced the movement to hallow the holy places such as the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem (326-335) and the Church of Nativity in Bethlehem (326-330). Once Christianity became official, the interest in recovering relics associated with Jesus’ life and death became intense. Thus, the seeds to turn towards what Taft calls the “incarnation realism” (1980/1981: 59, 65) had already been planted centuries before the iconoclasm controversy. Christ-Event became real as historical events in theological consciousness—the fact which had been assumed all along but did not surface to the forefront of theological debates until that time.