Liturgy as the Work of Christ

At the heart of St. Nicholas Cabasilas’s Commentary on the Divine Liturgy lies the conviction that the Eucharist is the action of Christ himself, who is the true celebrant and the true gift, and that the bread and wine are changed into his Body and Blood by the prayer of the priest invoking the Holy Spirit. This file presents Cabasilas’s positive theology of the consecration and his celebrated treatment of the epiclesis — his reasoning that the whole Eucharistic prayer, culminating in the invocation of the Spirit, is the form of the sacrament, within which the institution narrative is recited — together with his calm engagement with the Latin view that the words of institution alone consecrate. The detailed East–West controversy is reserved for Section 07; here the focus is on his constructive teaching.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (lay theologian; the sacramental life)

The Eucharist as the Action of Christ

For Cabasilas the Divine Liturgy is not first of all something the Church does but something Christ does in and through the Church. The whole movement of the rite is ordered to the consecration of the gifts and the sanctification of the faithful, and at every point the efficacy of the action belongs to Christ, who is both the one who offers and the one who is offered (Cabasilas, Commentary 1, 38; Hussey and McNulty 1960). The priest’s words and gestures are real and necessary, but their power is the power of the Saviour, who works through the prayer of his minister, so that the human act becomes the vehicle of a divine act (Cabasilas, Commentary 28–29; Hussey and McNulty 1960; Bobrinskoy). This is the foundation of Cabasilas’s sacramental realism — the conviction, shared with the whole Eastern tradition, that in the Eucharist the faithful receive not a figure or symbol of Christ but Christ himself, given under the appearances of bread and wine (Cabasilas, Commentary 1, 32; Hussey and McNulty 1960; see Union with Christ).

This realism is the same that governs The Life in Christ, where the Eucharist is presented as the consummation of the Christian’s life in Christ — the Mystery in which the union begun in baptism and chrismation is brought to its fullness, because here Christ is not only present to the faithful but received into them, so that they live by his life (Cabasilas, The Life in Christ IV; deCatanzaro 1974; see The Sacramental Life). For Cabasilas, accordingly, the question of how and when the gifts are consecrated is not a matter of ritual mechanics but a question about how the action of Christ is made present in the action of the Church.

The Consecration of the Gifts

Cabasilas is careful, throughout the Commentary, to mark the difference between the bread and wine as they are offered and the bread and wine as they are consecrated. At the prothesis, the preparation of the gifts before the public liturgy, the bread is set apart, signed, and dedicated to God, but it remains bread: it has been offered but not yet changed (Cabasilas, Commentary 3; Hussey and McNulty 1960). The same holds through the Liturgy of the Word and the Great Entrance: the gifts carried to the altar are still gifts of bread and wine, dedicated and awaiting consecration, and Cabasilas insists on this precisely so that the moment of their change may be seen clearly for what it is (Cabasilas, Commentary 24–26; Hussey and McNulty 1960; Wybrew 1989). Only in the course of the anaphora, the great Eucharistic prayer, are the gifts consecrated — changed into the Body and Blood of Christ (Cabasilas, Commentary 27–30; Hussey and McNulty 1960).

The consecration, for Cabasilas, is a genuine change. He uses the strong language of the tradition: the bread becomes the very Body of the Lord, the wine his very Blood, so that what lies upon the altar after the consecration is no longer bread and wine but Christ (Cabasilas, Commentary 32; Hussey and McNulty 1960; Bobrinskoy). This change is wrought by God, not by any natural power, and it is received by faith; the appearances remain, but the reality is the Body and Blood of the Saviour (Cabasilas, Commentary 32–34; Hussey and McNulty 1960; see The Eucharist). The whole weight of the Commentary’s central chapters falls on identifying how this change is accomplished — and this is where Cabasilas gives his celebrated account of the epiclesis.

The Epiclesis and the Prayer of the Priest

Cabasilas’s distinctive contribution is his account of the epiclesis, the invocation in which the priest asks the Father to send the Holy Spirit upon the gifts and to make the bread the Body of Christ and the wine his Blood. In his teaching, it is by this prayer of invocation that the gifts are consecrated: the bread and wine are changed into the Body and Blood of Christ when the priest, after reciting the words of the Lord’s institution, calls upon the Holy Spirit and prays that the gifts be transformed (Cabasilas, Commentary 27–30; Hussey and McNulty 1960; Salaville, SC 4 bis, 1967). The chapter in which he argues this point — concerned to show that the petition “Make this bread the precious Body of thy Christ” is the consecratory prayer — is the most discussed portion of the whole work (Cabasilas, Commentary 29–30; Hussey and McNulty 1960; Bornert 1966).

The key to his reasoning is that he does not isolate a single formula. Cabasilas understands the whole Eucharistic prayer as the form of the sacrament — the thanksgiving, the narrative of the institution, the anamnesis, and the invocation of the Spirit together making one continuous priestly prayer, whose movement culminates in the petition that the gifts be changed (Cabasilas, Commentary 27–30; Hussey and McNulty 1960; Bobrinskoy). On this view the recitation of the Lord’s words “This is my Body… This is my Blood” is not a detached consecratory formula pronounced over the gifts as if to effect the change on its own; it is recited within the prayer, as the priest’s grateful narration of what the Lord did and said and commanded, the ground and warrant on which the Church then prays for the Spirit to accomplish what the Lord instituted (Cabasilas, Commentary 29; Hussey and McNulty 1960; Salaville, SC 4 bis, 1967). The institution narrative is thus essential — it is the basis of the whole action — but its place is to be spoken as part of the consecratory prayer, not in separation from the invocation that completes it (Cabasilas, Commentary 29–30; Hussey and McNulty 1960).

For Cabasilas, then, the epiclesis is not an optional or merely declaratory addition to a consecration already accomplished by the Lord’s words; it is the point at which the priest’s whole prayer reaches its purpose. The priest narrates the institution and then, on the strength of the Lord’s own command and promise, prays for the descent of the Holy Spirit to change the gifts — and it is in answer to this prayer that the change is wrought (Cabasilas, Commentary 29–30; Hussey and McNulty 1960; Bobrinskoy). The consecration is therefore the act of the Holy Trinity: the Father, to whom the prayer is addressed, sends the Spirit, whom the priest invokes, to make present the Body and Blood of the Son (Cabasilas, Commentary 28–30; Hussey and McNulty 1960; Bobrinskoy; on the Spirit’s role see Grace and the Sacraments).

Why the Invocation Is Necessary

Cabasilas offers reasons, drawn from the nature of the liturgy itself, for holding that the consecration is accomplished through the invocation. The first is that the form of every Christian prayer of blessing is to ask God to do what is sought: the Church does not command the change of the gifts but prays for it, and the proper shape of that prayer is petition addressed to the Father for the working of the Spirit (Cabasilas, Commentary 29–30; Hussey and McNulty 1960). The Eucharistic prayer is, in its whole structure, a thanksgiving that rises to a petition, and the petition is the request that the Spirit consecrate the gifts; to locate the consecration there is simply to read the prayer according to its own grammar (Cabasilas, Commentary 27–30; Hussey and McNulty 1960; Bobrinskoy).

The second reason is that this is what the liturgy actually does. The Liturgy of St John Chrysostom, like that of St Basil, contains after the institution narrative an explicit invocation of the Holy Spirit upon the gifts, asking the Father to “make” the bread and the cup the Body and Blood of Christ; the rite itself, that is, continues to pray for the change after the Lord’s words have been recited (Cabasilas, Commentary 27, 30; Hussey and McNulty 1960; Wybrew 1989; on the rite see The Divine Liturgy). Cabasilas takes this structure as decisive evidence of the Church’s own understanding: the presence of the invocation shows that the Church did not regard the change as already complete at the recitation of the institution but looked for it in answer to the petition that follows (Cabasilas, Commentary 30; Hussey and McNulty 1960; Bornert 1966). The argument is liturgical before it is theoretical: he reads the meaning of the rite out of the rite as it stands.

The Engagement with the Latin Position

Cabasilas wrote with awareness that the Latin Church located the consecration at the recitation of the Lord’s words of institution — “This is my Body… This is my Blood” — and held that these words alone effect the change, the words of Christ himself being the form of the sacrament (Cabasilas, Commentary 29–30; Hussey and McNulty 1960; Bornert 1966; Taft). His treatment of this position is notably calm and argumentative rather than polemical (METHODOLOGY §4). He does not deny that the Lord’s words are spoken in the consecration, nor that they are the foundation of the whole mystery; he insists, on the contrary, that they are essential and that the Church recites them precisely because the Eucharist exists by the Lord’s institution and command (Cabasilas, Commentary 29; Hussey and McNulty 1960). His disagreement is not over whether the institution narrative belongs to the consecration but over how it functions within it: for Cabasilas the words are recited as part of the priest’s prayer, and the consummation of that prayer is the invocation of the Spirit, so that the words and the invocation are not rivals but successive moments of a single consecratory action (Cabasilas, Commentary 29–30; Hussey and McNulty 1960; Bobrinskoy).

Cabasilas meets the Latin view chiefly by exposition rather than refutation. He sets out why, on the Eastern reading of the rite, the consecration is to be located in the invocation, and he answers the natural objection — that the Lord’s words must surely accomplish what they declare — by his account of the words as the narrated ground on which the Church then prays (Cabasilas, Commentary 29–30; Hussey and McNulty 1960). The tone is that of a theologian commending the coherence of his own tradition’s practice, and his treatment was later valued in the East as a measured statement of the Orthodox position that did not descend into invective (Bornert 1966; Taft). The fuller history of how Cabasilas’s account entered the East–West controversy over the moment of consecration is treated separately (see The Eucharist and the Latins).

It should be added that the question of the precise moment of consecration has its own complexity within the Orthodox tradition itself, and Cabasilas’s emphasis on the prayer as a whole rather than on any isolated instant is part of why his treatment has remained influential: by locating the consecration in the entire movement of the anaphora culminating in the epiclesis, rather than in a single pronounced formula, he offers an account that honours both the Lord’s institution and the Spirit’s action without making them compete (Cabasilas, Commentary 27–30; Hussey and McNulty 1960; Bobrinskoy; Bornert 1966). [Disputed: scholars differ on how far Cabasilas means to fix a single instant of consecration at all; Bornert (1966) and others read him as deliberately locating the change in the whole consecratory prayer culminating in the epiclesis rather than in a precise moment, while some later expositors have pressed his text toward a more pointed "moment of the epiclesis" reading — the *Commentary*'s own language emphasizes the prayer as a whole.]

The Fruit of the Consecration

The purpose of the consecration, for Cabasilas, is communion — that the faithful may receive the Body and Blood of Christ and be united to him (Cabasilas, Commentary 32, 38, 43–44; Hussey and McNulty 1960). The change of the gifts is never an end in itself but the means by which Christ gives himself to his people; the whole liturgy moves toward the moment when the consecrated Gifts are received, and the sanctification of the faithful is accomplished (Cabasilas, Commentary 38, 43–44; Hussey and McNulty 1960; Bobrinskoy). In this Cabasilas’s Eucharistic theology rejoins the central theme of all his work: that the life of the Christian is life in Christ, given through the Mysteries, and that the Eucharist is the summit of that life because in it Christ himself is received (Cabasilas, The Life in Christ IV; deCatanzaro 1974; see Union with Christ; Grace and the Sacraments).

His account of the consecration thus belongs to a larger vision of deification through participation in Christ — the same vision that connects him to the hesychast theology of his age, in which God is truly communicated to the creature through his uncreated grace (Russell 2019; Bobrinskoy; see The Hesychast Synthesis). The epiclesis, in this light, is not a liturgical technicality but the point at which the Holy Spirit is invoked to do what the whole economy of salvation aims at: to give Christ to his people, that they may live by him. It is for the clarity and depth of this account that Cabasilas’s treatment of the consecration has remained, for the Orthodox tradition, a classic statement of the theology of the Eucharist (Bornert 1966; Wybrew 1989; see The Explanation of the Liturgy).

See Also

References

  • Cabasilas, Nicholas. A Commentary on the Divine Liturgy. Trans. J. M. Hussey and P. A. McNulty. London: SPCK, 1960. (English translation, cited by chapter; the liturgy as the action of Christ at chapters 1 and 38; the gifts still unconsecrated at the prothesis at chapter 3; the change of the gifts at chapter 32; the anaphora, institution narrative, and epiclesis at chapters 27–30; the argument that the petition “Make this bread…” is the consecratory prayer at chapters 29–30; communion and its fruits at chapters 38, 43–44.)
  • Salaville, Sévérien, ed. and trans. Explication de la Divine Liturgie. 2nd ed., revised by René Bornert, Jean Gouillard, and Pierre Périchon. Sources Chrétiennes 4 bis. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1967. (The critical Greek text and French translation; the chapters on the consecration and the epiclesis.)
  • Cabasilas, Nicholas. The Life in Christ. Trans. Carmino J. deCatanzaro. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974. (Book IV on the Eucharist as the summit of the life in Christ.)
  • Bornert, René. Les commentaires byzantins de la Divine Liturgie du VIIe au XVe siècle. Archives de l’Orient chrétien 9. Paris: Institut Français d’Études Byzantines, 1966. (On Cabasilas’s account of the consecration and the epiclesis and its place in the Byzantine commentary tradition and the East–West discussion; the reading of the consecration as located in the whole prayer.)
  • Taft, Robert F. The Byzantine Rite: A Short History. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1992. (On the Byzantine anaphora, the epiclesis, and the East–West question of the moment of consecration.)
  • Wybrew, Hugh. The Orthodox Liturgy: The Development of the Eucharistic Liturgy in the Byzantine Rite. London: SPCK, 1989. (On the structure of the anaphora and the place of the epiclesis in the rite.)
  • Bobrinskoy, Boris. Studies on Cabasilas’s sacramental and Eucharistic theology and on the pneumatological dimension of the liturgy. (On the consecration as the work of the Holy Trinity and the role of the Spirit in the epiclesis.)
  • Russell, Norman. Gregory Palamas and the Making of Palamism in the Modern Age. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019. (On the Palamite theology of participation in the fourteenth century, the context of Cabasilas’s sacramental realism.)