Father Pavlos Koumarianos, "Symbol and Reality in the Divine Liturgy" (Sourozh, May 2000). Until roughly the iconoclast period, people understood the Liturgy as an act of Communion of all the Faithful with each other and with God, and a foretaste of the God's ultimate Kingdom: it did not ‘symbolize’ something; it was something. However, an allegorical or symbolic approach later developed, in which the Liturgy became a kind of drama where the faithful watch a "symbolic representation" of the life of Christ performed by the clergy. Although such interpretations seem to have fallen out of favor in recent years, at least in America, attitudes and practices based on them still very much persist, especially in more 'conservative' circles. Koumarianos comments on the distortions that have crept in to the way the Liturgy is served and understood in many churches, due to this allegorical understanding, and his remarks are also very helpful for getting an idea of what the Liturgy itself envisions about what it is doing.
Khaled Anatolios, "Heaven and Earth in Byzantine Liturgy": Antiphon, Volume 5, Number 3. Prince Vladimir's envoys to Constantinople are often quoted as saying of their first experience of the Divine Litury, "We felt we were no longer on earth, but in heaven." But what they actually said was, "We knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth." The actual remark is a classic expression of the notion of the mutual transparency between earth and heaven which is the authentic and pervasive understanding of Byzantine liturgy. The misinterpretation (and often misquotation), on the other hand, belies a view of Byzantine liturgy as belonging to "another realm"— as simply staged (as it were) in heaven, away from earth— and this masks the liturgy's insight into the christological synergy of heaven and earth with the idea of a magical replacement of earth by heaven. This is not the view of the Byzantine liturgical tradition itself.
Robert Taft SJ, "How Liturgies Grow: The Evolution of the Byzantine “Divine Liturgy”. Orientalia Christiana Periodica XLIII, Roma 1977, p. 8-30. A very convenient summary of the development of the Byzantine Liturgy used by the Orthodox Church.
