The Epiclesis

The invocation of the Holy Spirit is the pneumatological heart of the Church’s worship: in the anaphora, at the font, over the myron, at every ordination, the Church asks the Father to send his Spirit, and what she asks for is given. This file quotes the Chrysostom and Basil anaphoras, sets out what the epiclesis is and what it is not, and states with precision — because the point is constantly overstated — what the Orthodox position on the “moment of consecration” actually is.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Word and Its Range

Epiklēsis means a calling-upon. In liturgical usage it names the moment at which a prayer turns from thanksgiving and remembrance to petition for the Spirit’s descent upon persons and things.

It is not confined to the Eucharist, and the point is worth making first because the eucharistic controversy has narrowed the word in most readers’ minds. The Church invokes the Spirit at the great blessing of the baptismal water and at the consecration of the myron; the deacon’s exclamation before the ordination prayer is a summons to invoke him; the prayers of Holy Unction ask for him over the oil; the blessing of waters at Theophany asks the Father to “send down thy most Holy Spirit and sanctify this water.” The Church’s whole sacramental practice is a repeated Pentecost, and this is a claim about her structure and not a figure of speech (see Pentecost as the Church’s Birth).

St. Basil, listing the practices that come to the Church by unwritten apostolic tradition, names first among the eucharistic items “the words of the invocation at the showing forth of the bread of the Eucharist and the cup of blessing” (Basil, On the Holy Spirit 27.66; trans. NPNF II/8). The fourth century’s chief witness to Tradition treats the epiclesis as apostolic and as nowhere written — which is exactly the status the Orthodox tradition has continued to accord it (see The Argument from Worship and Baptism).

The Chrysostom Anaphora

In the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom the anaphora moves from thanksgiving to the institution narrative, then to the anamnesis and the offering — “Thine own of thine own we offer unto thee, on behalf of all and for all” — and then to the invocation:

“Again we offer unto thee this reasonable and bloodless service, and we ask thee, and pray thee, and supplicate thee: send down thy Holy Spirit upon us and upon these gifts here set forth.”

And then, with the blessing of each element:

“And make this bread the precious Body of thy Christ. Amen.
And that which is in this cup, the precious Blood of thy Christ. Amen.
Changing them by thy Holy Spirit. Amen. Amen. Amen.”
(Anaphora of St. John Chrysostom; Eng. in Hapgood, Service Book of the Holy Orthodox-Catholic Apostolic Church, 1906.)

The Greek verb in the last clause is μεταβαλών, an aorist participle of μεταβάλλω, “to change.” From it the Byzantine tradition takes its ordinary name for what happens to the gifts — the metabolē, the change — a term preferred to the scholastic “transubstantiation” precisely because it names the reality without committing the Church to a philosophical account of it (see The Mystery of the Body and Blood).

The Basil Anaphora

The Liturgy of St. Basil, used ten times a year, has an older and fuller invocation, and one detail of its wording is theologically load-bearing:

“For this cause, O Master all-holy, we also, thy sinful and unworthy servants, who have been accounted worthy to minister at thy holy altar, not for our righteousness, for we have done nothing good upon the earth, but for thy mercies and thy compassions which thou hast poured out richly upon us — with boldness draw nigh unto thy holy altar; and, setting forth the antitypes (τὰ ἀντίτυπα) of the holy Body and Blood of thy Christ, we pray thee and call upon thee, O Holy of Holies, that by the favour of thy goodness thy Holy Spirit may come upon us and upon these gifts here set forth, and bless them, and sanctify them, and show (ἀναδεῖξαι):
this Bread to be the precious Body of our Lord and God and Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen.
And this Cup to be the precious Blood of our Lord and God and Saviour Jesus Christ, which was shed for the life of the world. Amen. Amen. Amen.
And unite all of us to one another, who become partakers of the one Bread and the Cup, in the communion of the one Holy Spirit…”
(Anaphora of St. Basil the Great; Eng. following Hapgood, Service Book, with the Greek terms noted.)

Two words deserve attention.

ἀντίτυπα. Before the invocation, and after the institution narrative and the anamnesis, the Basil anaphora calls what lies on the altar the antitypes of the Body and Blood. The word is not a denial of the real presence; it belongs to the older patristic vocabulary in which antitypon names a thing that participates in what it represents. But its placement is a plain datum: the received text of the anaphora, in the mouth of the priest, uses that word after the verba and before the epiclesis, and does not use it after.

ἀναδεῖξαι. Basil’s verb is “to show forth,” “to declare,” “to manifest” — the same verb used in the Church’s Greek for the manifestation of a thing as what it is. Chrysostom’s metabalōn is stronger and later. That the two received anaphoras of the Byzantine rite use different verbs at exactly this point is itself a caution against any account of the Eucharist that depends on the precise force of a single word.

And the epiclesis asks for two things at once. “Upon us and upon these gifts.” The Spirit is invoked over the assembly and over the bread and wine in one petition, and the Basil text spells out the consequence — that those who partake may be united to one another “in the communion of the one Holy Spirit.” The consecration of the gifts and the constitution of the communicants as one body are a single act. Fr. Alexander Schmemann made this the centre of his eucharistic theology and called the chapter on it “The Sacrament of the Holy Spirit” (Schmemann, The Eucharist: Sacrament of the Kingdom, Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1988, ch. 11).

The Ancient Witness

The epiclesis is not a Byzantine development. St. Cyril of Jerusalem, catechizing the newly baptized in the later fourth century, describes it as the ordinary practice of the Church:

“We beseech the merciful God to send forth his Holy Spirit upon the gifts lying before him; that he may make the Bread the Body of Christ, and the Wine the Blood of Christ; for whatsoever the Holy Spirit has touched, is surely sanctified and changed.”
(Cyril of Jerusalem, Mystagogical Catechesis 5.7; trans. NPNF II/7.)

The same structure appears across the ancient anaphoral families — Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, East Syrian — which is one reason the Orthodox tradition regards the invocation as belonging to the shape of the eucharistic prayer as such and not to one rite’s local piety.

The “Moment of Consecration”: What Is and Is Not Claimed

This is the point at which Orthodox writing most often goes wrong, and the error is worth naming before the position is stated.

The Orthodox position is that the whole anaphora consecrates, and that the epiclesis is its consummation and seal. The eucharistic prayer is one act: thanksgiving for creation and redemption, the Sanctus, the institution narrative, the anamnesis and offering, the invocation, and the intercessions form a single unbroken movement of the Church, and it is by this whole prayer that the gifts are what they become. Within that unity the epiclesis is the point at which the Church explicitly asks, and receives, the Spirit’s act. St. Nicholas Cabasilas, whose fourteenth-century Commentary is the classic defence of the invocation, argues precisely that the consecration is effected by the Church’s prayer, and that the institution narrative and the epiclesis belong together to one consecratory whole rather than to a single isolable instant (Cabasilas, A Commentary on the Divine Liturgy 27–30; trans. Hussey and McNulty, London: SPCK, 1960).

What the Orthodox position is not. It is not the claim that a Latin Mass fails to consecrate. The Orthodox Church has never defined a moment of consecration, has never conciliarly pronounced the Roman rite void for want of an epiclesis, and has no dogmatic definition on the point at all. No Ecumenical Council addressed the question. The polemical form of the claim — that the words of institution without an invocation produce nothing — is a piece of controversial theology of the second millennium, not the Church’s teaching, and stating it as the Church’s teaching misrepresents her.

Two further facts belong to the honest statement.

Cabasilas himself, arguing against the Latin objection that the epiclesis is superfluous once the Lord’s words have been said, does not argue that the Latin rite lacks an invocation. He points out that the Roman canon has a prayer after the institution narrative — the Supplices te rogamus, asking that the offering be borne to the altar on high — and treats it as functionally the Latin equivalent of what the Greeks do explicitly (Cabasilas, Commentary 30). The classic Orthodox defence of the epiclesis is thus, at its own decisive moment, an argument that the Latins do the same thing less clearly, not that they do not do it.

And the “moment” framing is itself late on both sides. Twentieth-century liturgical scholarship, Eastern and Western, has generally concluded that the question as posed — at which second do the gifts change? — is a scholastic framing of the second millennium projected backward onto anaphoras that were not composed to answer it (Taft, The Byzantine Rite: A Short History, Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1992; Schmemann, The Eucharist, ch. 11). The most telling single datum is the Anaphora of Addai and Mari, still used by the Assyrian Church of the East, which in its traditional form contains no institution narrative at all — a case treated in the liturgical collection, where the ritual and historical detail belongs (see The Epiclesis and the Consecration).

[Disputed: the location of the consecration within the eucharistic prayer. (a) The Latin scholastic position, classically in Thomas Aquinas (*Summa Theologiae* III, q. 78), is that the consecration is effected by Christ's words of institution spoken by the priest, and is complete at the *verba*. (b) The Byzantine position, argued at length by Cabasilas against that objection, is that the whole anaphora consecrates and that the epiclesis is its consummation, so that the invocation is not superfluous (Cabasilas, *Commentary* 29–30). No Ecumenical Council has defined the question; the twentieth-century recovery of the anaphora as a single prayer, and the Roman restoration of an explicit epiclesis in the reformed eucharistic prayers, have narrowed the practical distance. This collection states the Orthodox position and does not extend it into a judgment on the validity of the Latin rite, which the Orthodox Church has not made on this ground.]

Why It Matters Pneumatologically

Three consequences follow, and they are the reason this file is the centre of the collection.

The Eucharist is a Trinitarian act. The anaphora is addressed to the Father; it offers the Son’s own sacrifice; it asks for the Spirit. Nothing in it is a formula operating by its own force. The priest does not effect the change; he asks, and the Church asks with him, and the Father sends. Cabasilas’ whole argument turns on this: the consecration is a prayer, and a prayer has someone to answer it (Commentary 29).

The epiclesis is the standing refusal of a Christological shortcut. If the Spirit’s coming were the automatic consequence of a rightly pronounced Christological formula, then the Spirit would indeed be the effect of the Son’s work rather than a person sent by the Father — which is precisely the pneumatological cost identified in section 03 (see The Spirit of Christ and What the Filioque Costs). The Church asks, every time, because he is someone who comes.

And the gifts and the people are consecrated together. “Upon us and upon these gifts.” What the epiclesis makes is not only the Body on the altar but the Body in the nave; the Church prays for herself in the same breath in which she prays for the bread. This is why the eucharistic epiclesis cannot be treated as a technical liturgical question. It is the Church asking to be made what she is.

An Honest Concession

Orthodox eucharistic theology has not been immune from the framing it criticizes. The seventeenth-century Orthodox confessions written under Latin and Reformed pressure — the Orthodox Confession of Peter Mogila (approved in revised form at Iaşi, 1642) and the Confession of Dositheus adopted at the Synod of Jerusalem (1672) — adopt the term μετουσίωσις, transubstantiation, and argue the moment-of-consecration question in scholastic terms while insisting on the epiclesis. These texts are part of the record, were widely used as catechetical standards, and represent a period of Western captivity in Orthodox theological language that later Orthodox writers, from the Kollyvades onward, worked to undo. Reporting the epiclesis as the East’s untroubled possession, over against a West that lost it, is a story tidier than the sources.

References

Anaphora of St. John Chrysostom; Anaphora of St. Basil the Great. Eng. in Isabel F. Hapgood, Service Book of the Holy Orthodox-Catholic Apostolic Church. New York, 1906; Greek in the Hieratikon.
Basil the Great. On the Holy Spirit 27.66. Trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 8.
Cyril of Jerusalem. Mystagogical Catechesis 5.7. Trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 7.
Cabasilas, Nicholas. A Commentary on the Divine Liturgy 27–30. Trans. J. M. Hussey and P. A. McNulty. London: SPCK, 1960.
Schmemann, Alexander. The Eucharist: Sacrament of the Kingdom. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1988, ch. 11.
Taft, Robert F. The Byzantine Rite: A Short History. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1992.
Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologiae III, q. 78.
The Orthodox Confession of Peter Mogila (Iaşi, 1642); Confession of Dositheus (Synod of Jerusalem, 1672).
Ware, Kallistos. The Orthodox Church. New ed. London: Penguin, 1993.