The Jerusalem Anaphora

The fifth Mystagogical Catechesis preserves the earliest detailed running commentary on an Eastern Eucharistic Prayer to survive from the Christian world. Walking the newly baptized through the liturgy they had attended on the Paschal night, it describes the anaphora of fourth-century Jerusalem in sequence — from the washing of hands to the reception of communion — and gives a witness of the first importance to the consecratory invocation of the Holy Spirit, the joining of the angelic Sanctus, and the commemoration of the departed at the holy sacrifice. This file walks that ordo and weighs the famous crux of the missing institution narrative.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

The Earliest Detailed Eastern Ordo

Among the documents of the fourth century, none describes the shape of an Eastern Eucharistic Prayer with the connected, step-by-step clarity of the fifth Mystagogical Catechesis (Mystagogical Catechesis 5; hereafter MC). Earlier witnesses exist — the Apostolic Tradition, the Didache, the allusions of Justin Martyr — but none takes a hearer through the celebrant’s prayer in order, naming each movement and supplying its meaning. MC 5 does exactly this, and because it does so from the mother church of the faith, expounded over the very holy places, it stands as the single richest narrative source for the early anaphora in the East (Yarnold, Cyril of Jerusalem, Routledge 2000; Bradshaw, The Search for the Origins of Christian Worship, 2nd ed., SPCK/OUP 2002).

The lecture is mystagogy, not a rubric book: it assumes the rite is already known to its hearers, who had communicated only days before, and explains it from within (see The Five Mystagogies). For that reason its order may be taken as the order actually followed at Jerusalem, and its silences are as instructive as its descriptions. The text is transmitted under Cyril’s name, though whether it is his own or that of his successor John II is a long-standing question treated separately in the repository (see The Authorship Question); this file speaks of “Cyril” while bracketing that debate.

The Lavabo and the Kiss of Peace

The description opens not with the prayer but with the gestures that frame it. First the celebrants wash their hands: “You have seen the deacon give to the priest water to wash, and to the presbyters who stood round God’s altar” (MC 5.2; trans. NPNF II/7). Cyril insists this lavabo is not hygiene but sign — “the washing of hands is a symbol that we ought to be pure from all sinful and unlawful deeds” — reading the rite through Psalm 26, “I will wash my hands in innocency, and so will I compass thine altar.”

There follows the kiss of peace. The deacon’s summons, “Receive ye one another, and let us kiss one another,” is interpreted as the reconciliation that must precede the offering: the kiss “is the sign that our souls are mingled together, and banish all remembrance of wrongs” (MC 5.3). Cyril grounds it in the dominical command to be reconciled with one’s brother before bringing the gift to the altar (Matthew 5.23–24). The peace is thus placed, as in the later Eastern rite, immediately before the anaphora.

“Lift Up Your Hearts”: The Opening Dialogue

The anaphora proper begins with the dialogue that opens every classical Eucharistic Prayer. The priest cries, “Lift up your hearts” (Sursum corda), and the people answer, “We lift them up unto the Lord”; the priest then says, “Let us give thanks unto the Lord,” and the people respond, “It is meet and right” (MC 5.4). Cyril expounds the exchange as a genuine ascent: in that hour “we should have no thought of earth,” but lift up the heart wholly to God, and the people’s assent is no formality but a sworn acknowledgment that the thanksgiving about to be offered is truly meet and right (MC 5.4–5). This is the earliest commentary on the Sursum corda dialogue in the East, and it already carries the developed theology of eucharistic ascent.

The Preface and the Sanctus

From the dialogue the prayer rises into the preface and so to the Sanctus. Cyril describes how, having given thanks for the whole creation, the assembly comes to “make mention of heaven, and earth, and sea; of sun and moon; of stars and all the creation,” and then of the seraphim whom Isaiah beheld, and joins their cry: “Holy, holy, holy, Lord of Sabaoth” (MC 5.6, citing Isaiah 6.3). The point he draws is participatory: “we rehearse this confession of God, delivered down to us from the Seraphim, that we may be partakers with the hosts of the world above in their hymn of praise.” The earthly liturgy is thus understood as an entry into the unceasing worship of heaven — one of the earliest explicit statements of that conviction in a liturgical commentary, and a theme central to all later Orthodox eucharistic theology.

The Epiclesis: The Spirit Upon the Gifts

The heart of the lecture, and its single most consequential paragraph for the history of doctrine, is the epiclesis — the invocation of the Holy Spirit upon the gifts. “After this,” Cyril continues, “we call upon 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 sanctified and changed” (MC 5.7; trans. NPNF II/7). The verbs are decisive: the Spirit is asked to make (Greek poiēsē) the elements the Body and Blood, and what He touches is “sanctified and changed” (hēgiastai kai metabeblētai).

This is a crucial early witness to a consecratory Spirit-epiclesis — a prayer that the change of the gifts is effected by the descent of the Holy Spirit invoked upon them. The conviction is of a piece with Cyril’s eucharistic realism, where the same invocation marks the moment the elements are “no longer bread and wine” (see Eucharistic Realism), and with his pneumatology: the Spirit who sanctifies the chrism, the font, and the communicant is the same Spirit who sanctifies the gifts (see Pneumatology). The Jerusalem epiclesis is among the earliest and clearest patristic anchors for the Eastern conviction that the Holy Spirit consummates the consecration — a conviction that would shape the developed anaphoras of Saint Basil and Saint John Chrysostom (see Divine Liturgy).

The Intercessions and the Commemoration of the Dead

With the gifts sanctified, “this spiritual sacrifice, this bloodless service,” is offered, and over it the Church prays for the whole world: for kings and armies, for the sick and afflicted, “and in a word, for all who stand in need of succour we all pray and offer this sacrifice” (MC 5.8). Cyril then turns, with unusual deliberateness, to the commemoration of the departed. The assembly makes mention “of those who have fallen asleep before us, first patriarchs, prophets, apostles, martyrs,” and then of “the holy fathers and bishops, and all who have fallen asleep before us, believing that it will be a very great benefit to the souls for whom the supplication is put up, while that holy and most awful sacrifice is set forth” (MC 5.9).

Cyril knows the objection and answers it. To the question “what profit it is to the soul” to be named at the sacrifice, he replies with the image of a crown of intercession offered for the departed, “while we offer to Him our supplications for them that are fallen asleep, though they be sinners,” entreating “the propitiation” for them through the sacrifice that lies upon the altar (MC 5.10). The passage is one of the earliest detailed defenses of prayer for the dead set explicitly within the eucharistic offering, and a foundational text for the Orthodox practice of commemorating the departed at the Liturgy.

The Lord’s Prayer

After the intercessions comes the Lord’s Prayer, which Cyril expounds clause by clause across the longest single stretch of the lecture (MC 5.11–18). He treats “Our Father” as the boon of adoption by which the baptized may name God their Father; “Thy kingdom come” as the longing of the pure soul; and reaches “Give us this day our supersubstantial bread” (ton arton ton epiousion), which he reads of the eucharistic Bread “appointed for the substance of the soul,” set apart for the body of Christ rather than for ordinary nourishment (MC 5.15). The petitions “forgive us our debts” and “deliver us from evil” round out an exposition that makes the prayer the immediate preparation for communion.

“Holy Things for the Holy” and the Reception of Communion

The prayer concludes and the priest lifts the gifts with the cry “Holy things for the holy” (ta hagia tois hagiois / Sancta sanctis) — the summons of the sanctified gifts to the sanctified people, to which the assembly answers, “One is Holy, One is the Lord, Jesus Christ” (MC 5.19). Cyril then guides the neophytes in the reverent reception of communion. Approaching for the Body, “make thy left hand a throne for thy right, as for that which is to receive a King,” hollowing the palm, answering “Amen,” and partaking with care that no fragment be lost, “for tell me, if any one gave thee grains of gold, wouldest thou not hold them with all carefulness?” (MC 5.21). Coming to the chalice, the communicant bows “in the posture of worship and reverence,” says “Amen,” and is hallowed by partaking of the Blood of Christ; while the moisture is yet on the lips he is to touch it and sanctify eyes, brow, and the other senses (MC 5.22). These directions, overlapping the reverence urged in the realism lecture (MC 4.6), close the description of the rite.

[Disputed: the missing institution narrative]

A celebrated crux hangs over this ordo. In walking through the anaphora, Cyril nowhere describes a Words of Institution or Last-Supper narrative — no recitation of “On the night He was betrayed… This is my Body… This is my Blood” within the prayer. He moves directly from the Sanctus (5.6) to the epiclesis (5.7), with no institution narrative named between them. Because MC 5 is otherwise so circumstantial, this silence has provoked a long scholarly debate.

[Disputed: whether the fourth-century Jerusalem anaphora actually lacked an institution narrative, or whether Cyril merely passed over it in his commentary.] One position holds that the omission reflects the rite itself: that the early Jerusalem anaphora — an ancestor of the later Liturgy of Saint James — either lacked an institution narrative or did not yet give it the consecratory weight the later text would, the consecration being carried instead by the Spirit-epiclesis (Bradshaw, The Search for the Origins of Christian Worship, 2nd ed., SPCK/OUP 2002; cf. Bradshaw and Johnson, The Origins of Feasts, Fasts and Seasons, 2011). A second position holds that Cyril simply did not mention what his hearers had heard: he may have passed over the narrative under the disciplina arcani, the discipline of secrecy that veiled the most sacred words, or because his expository purpose was to foreground the epiclesis rather than to be exhaustive, having already cited “This is my Body / This is my Blood” prominently in the preceding lecture (MC 4.1; Day, The Baptismal Liturgy of Jerusalem, Ashgate 2007). The repository does not adjudicate; the silence is real, its cause uncertain, and the passage remains one of the live problems of comparative liturgy.

Relation to the Liturgy of Saint James

Whatever the resolution of that crux, MC 5 is universally read as a witness to the prehistory of the Liturgy of Saint James, the developed Eucharistic rite of Jerusalem and Antioch transmitted under the name of the brother of the Lord. The sequence Cyril describes — peace, Sursum corda, preface, Sanctus, epiclesis, intercessions including the dead, Lord’s Prayer, Sancta sanctis, communion — corresponds in its bones to the structure of Saint James, even where the wording differs and even granting the disputed status of the institution narrative (Day, The Baptismal Liturgy of Jerusalem, Ashgate 2007; see The Jerusalem Liturgy). For the genealogy of the Eastern anaphora — and so for the Liturgies of Basil and Chrysostom that became the Byzantine norm — the Jerusalem mystagogy is the earliest fixed point we possess (see the eponymous liturgy and eucharistic preaching of Saint John Chrysostom).

References

Cyril of Jerusalem (attrib.). Mystagogical Catecheses (Catecheses mystagogicae) 5. PG 33; critical edition Auguste Piédagnel, ed., Catéchèses mystagogiques, Sources Chrétiennes 126. Paris: Cerf, 1966.
The Catechetical Lectures of S. Cyril, trans. Edwin Hamilton Gifford. NPNF Series 2, Vol. 7 (NPNF II/7).
McCauley, Leo P., and Anthony A. Stephenson. The Works of Saint Cyril of Jerusalem, Vol. 2. Fathers of the Church 64. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1970.
Yarnold, Edward. Cyril of Jerusalem. The Early Church Fathers. London: Routledge, 2000.
Mazza, Enrico. Mystagogy: A Theology of Liturgy in the Patristic Age. New York: Pueblo, 1989.
Day, Juliette. The Baptismal Liturgy of Jerusalem: Fourth- and Fifth-Century Evidence from Palestine, Syria and Egypt. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007.
Bradshaw, Paul F. The Search for the Origins of Christian Worship. 2nd ed. London/New York: SPCK/Oxford University Press, 2002.
Bradshaw, Paul F., and Maxwell E. Johnson. The Origins of Feasts, Fasts and Seasons in Early Christianity. Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2011.