Folia Theologica 17. (2006)
Uwe Michael Lang: Early Christian Latin as a Liturgical Language
136 U. M. LANG epos. 'Secondary' sacred languages have come to be experienced as such only in the course of time. The languages used in Christian worship would seem to fall under this category: Greek in the Byzantine tradition; Syriac in the Patriarchate of Antioch and the 'Nestorian' Church of the East with its missions reaching to India and China; Old Armenian; Old Georgian; Coptic; Old Ethiopian (Ge'ez); Church Slavonic; even the Elizabethan English of the Book of Common Prayer-, and, of course the Latin of the Roman Rite and other Western liturgical traditions. It is generally agreed today that the text of the Eucharistic prayer was relatively fluid in the first three centuries. Its exact wording was not yet fixed, and the celebrant certainly had some room to improvise. However, as Allan Bouley notes in his study From Freedom to Formula, 'Conventions governing the structure and content of improvised anaphoras are ascertainable in the second century and indicate that extempore prayer was not left merely to the whim of the minister. In the third century, and possibly even before, some anaphoral texts already existed in writing'. Bouley speaks of the 'atmosphere of controlled freedom'.26 Concerns for orthodoxy limited the celebrant's freedom to vary the texts of the prayer, and this need became particularly pressing during the doctrinal struggles of the fourth century. Hence, this era saw the emergence of fixed Eucharistic prayers, such as the Roman Canon, the Liturgy of St John Chrysostom and others. There is another important aspect of this development, which is noted by Mohrmann: 'notably in the West, where free composition remained in vogue for a very long time in certain liturgical prayers, it is precisely this system which leads to a marked traditional prayer style'.27 The freedom to improvise existed only in a framework of fixed elements of content and style, which was, above all, Biblically inspired. A similar phenomenon can be observed in the earliest Greek epos: the freedom of individual singers to improvise on the given material led to a stylised language. In the liturgy, the early tradition of oral improvisation in prayer helped to create a sacred style. 26 A. BOULEY, From Freedom to Formula: The Evolution of the Eucharistic Prayer from Oral Improvisation to Written Texts (Studies in Christian Antiquity, 21), Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1981, p. xv. 27 MORHMANN, Liturgical Latin, p. 24.
