On May 29, 1453, the unthinkable event 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 walls Constantinople and entered the city.

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

Seventeen years later, in November 1534, in England 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. This event institutionalized 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 subsequently refusing to annul the excommunication. Thereafter Canterbury became the third most visited pilgrimage site after Rome and Jerusalem, until Henry VIII’s erasure of the Saint in 1534 put a stop to the pilgrimage. Sometime between 1387 and 1400 Geoffrey Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales.

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 in England. The King James Version of the Bible was first printed in 1611.

Gutenberg Printing Press

Notwithstanding these historic events in Constantinople and in modern Europe, there was also a significant technological advancement that altered the course of history, namely, the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg sometime between 1440 and 1450.

While the printing press enabled the Protestant Reformation to spread like a wildfire, on one hand; it however put a stop to any significant development in the texts of the Divine Liturgy and of the other rites, on the other, including, as Gorodenchuk notes, the text and the rubrics for the rite of unction.

This is understandably 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, any changes therein are difficult to implement. Because the existing copies must be updated, which is more difficult with mass produced copies. In short, the so called textus receptus (‘the received text’) became solidified largely because numerous copies were already in circulation in mass quantity. The longer the version was in circulation, the more authority it assumed.

The Iconoclasm Controversy and the Turn to the Historical

Another significant development occurred around the same time: the ideological shift toward the individuals and the rise of historical realism. The turn toward historical realism in the Church had already occurred a few centuries ago; while the Renaissance promoted individualism. The two ideological development, however, enforced each other, even further solidifying each other as modernity dawned.

In 692 the Quinisext Council in Trullo, for example, 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 in the Orthodox churches.

Shortly thereafter, thirty four years later to be precise, 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 undergone the iconoclastic controversy. The hard won 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 historical realism, including historicity of Jesus. Accordingly, the historical events of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection received new focus. Henceforth, the Christ-Event is understood less in terms of the realized eschatology (that happens now at the time of the Eucharist) but largely in terms of the historical events of Jesus at Golgotha. The Eucharist now represents and refers to the historical events of Jesus in Palestine.

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 largely refers to the historical events of Jesus, citing from the Passion narrative in the Gospels. The historical realism entered into the Divine Liturgy.

Accordingly, 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 occurs from the present reality of Christ’s sacrifice to the past event of Jesus events in history. This shift towards the historical realism is sometimes anochronistically 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

If the iconoclasm controversy resulted in the turn toward the historical Jesus, there was a prior shift toward historical realism already having taken place in early 4th-century. It was the movement, initiated by Empress Helena (d. 330), to recover the historical sites and relics associated with Jesus in Palestine.

More specifically, 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. Accordingly, 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. Pseudo-Dionysius (b/d. ~500) belongs to the time period when historical realism had not yet entered theological imaginations. For this reason, he could be placed in the Alexandrian camp, on one hand, while his emphasis and reliance on the sacred Symbols as God’s revelation and presence puts him at adds in that camp.

Another major influence that accounts for historical realism and individualism is St Anselm’s substitutional theory of atonement. See Anselm and Byzantine Synthesis.