The Eucharist and the Latins

In the chapters of his Commentary on the Divine Liturgy devoted to the consecration of the gifts (chapters 27–30), St. Nicholas Cabasilas mounts a careful, measured defence of the necessity of the epiclesis — the invocation of the Holy Spirit upon the bread and wine — against the Latin scholastic view that the dominical words of institution (“This is my Body…”) alone effect the change. His argument is reasoned from the structure of the liturgy itself and, strikingly, from the Latins’ own rite: he points out that the Roman canon continues to pray for the acceptance and blessing of the gifts after the words of institution, which on the Latin theory would be superfluous. This file expounds that argument and the notably irenic, non-polemical manner in which Cabasilas makes it — a manner that gave the passage lasting importance in later Catholic–Orthodox discussion of the moment of consecration.

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

The Question and Its Setting

Among the fifty-three chapters of Cabasilas’s Commentary on the Divine Liturgy, the short sequence that treats the consecration of the gifts — chapters 27 through 30 in the standard division — is the most theologically pointed in the whole work (Cabasilas, Commentary 27–30; Hussey and McNulty 1960). Having walked his reader through the preparation of the gifts, the Liturgy of the Word, and the Great Entrance, Cabasilas reaches the anaphora and pauses on a single question that was, by the fourteenth century, a recognised point of difference between the Greek and Latin churches: at what moment, and by what words, are the bread and wine consecrated and made the Body and Blood of Christ (Hussey and McNulty 1960, introduction; Taft 1992)? The Byzantine answer, embodied in the very shape of the Liturgy of St John Chrysostom, locates the consecration at the epiclesis — the prayer immediately following the institution narrative in which the priest asks the Father to “send down thy Holy Spirit” upon the gifts and to make the bread the precious Body and the cup the precious Blood of Christ (Cabasilas, Commentary 27; Hussey and McNulty 1960; on the rite itself, see The Explanation of the Liturgy).

It is essential to read these chapters within the temper that governs the whole Commentary, which is expository and not controversial. Cabasilas is writing a mystagogy for an audience of clergy and educated laity who already pray the liturgy from within (Hussey and McNulty 1960; Bornert 1966). His treatment of the epiclesis is therefore not framed as a denunciation of the Latins but as a positive account of why the Eastern rite prays as it does, with the Latin position addressed as an objection to be answered rather than an enemy to be defeated (Cabasilas, Commentary 29–30; Hussey and McNulty 1960). The methodological principle of this repository — that polemical framing is to be avoided and positions stated for what they are (METHODOLOGY §4) — is here also a faithful description of Cabasilas’s own manner, which later readers on both sides have noted for its calm and its courtesy (Bornert 1966; Bobrinskoy).

The Latin Position as Cabasilas Reports It

Cabasilas states the view he means to answer fairly. The Latin theologians, he reports, hold that the Lord’s words “This is my Body” and “This is my Blood,” spoken by the priest in the recital of the institution, are themselves the form by which the gifts are consecrated, so that at the utterance of those words the change is complete and nothing further is required for the consecration as such (Cabasilas, Commentary 29; Hussey and McNulty 1960; Salaville, SC 4 bis, 1967). This was, in substance, the position that Latin scholastic theology had been articulating with increasing precision — that the verba Domini, the dominical words, are the “form” of the sacrament in the technical sense, the words that effect what they signify (Taft 1992; Wybrew 1989). Cabasilas does not caricature this teaching; he presents it as a serious account of the consecration which has the weight of the Lord’s own words behind it, and he grants at once that those words are indeed creative and powerful (Cabasilas, Commentary 29; Hussey and McNulty 1960).

His disagreement, then, is not over whether the institution narrative matters — he insists that it does, and that the priest’s recitation of “This is my Body” belongs essentially to the consecratory action — but over whether that narrative by itself, apart from the prayer of invocation that follows, completes the consecration (Cabasilas, Commentary 28–29; Hussey and McNulty 1960). The Byzantine rite, he observes, does not treat the institution narrative as a self-sufficient formula pronounced over the elements but sets it within a continuous prayer of thanksgiving that culminates in the explicit petition of the epiclesis; the question is how to read that prayer as a whole (Cabasilas, Commentary 27–28; Hussey and McNulty 1960; Bobrinskoy).

The Argument from the Structure of the Liturgy

Cabasilas’s first line of reasoning is drawn from the inner logic of the eucharistic prayer itself. The anaphora, he notes, does not consist of the words of institution standing alone; in the recitation of those words the priest is narrating what the Lord did and said at the Supper — he is recalling the institution as the ground and warrant of what the Church now does — and he then proceeds, on the strength of that command and promise, to ask God to accomplish in the present what was then instituted (Cabasilas, Commentary 28–29; Hussey and McNulty 1960). The structure is one of remembrance leading to petition: the Church remembers the Lord’s words and acts, and on that basis prays for the fulfilment of what they promise (Cabasilas, Commentary 28; Hussey and McNulty 1960; Taft 1992).

From this Cabasilas draws his central point. If the gifts were already fully consecrated at the utterance of “This is my Body,” then the prayer of invocation that the Church goes on to make — the petition that God send the Holy Spirit and make the bread the Body and the cup the Blood — would be asking for something already accomplished, and would be a prayer for a thing already possessed (Cabasilas, Commentary 29–30; Hussey and McNulty 1960). The Church, however, does not pray for what it already holds in hand; the very fact that the liturgy, after the institution narrative, still petitions God to effect the change shows that the rite itself does not regard the consecration as complete at the narrative alone (Cabasilas, Commentary 30; Hussey and McNulty 1960; Bobrinskoy). The shape of the prayer, in other words, is itself a theological statement: the Church asks because the gift is being given in the asking.

Cabasilas reinforces this with the consideration that the whole eucharistic action is the work of the Holy Spirit, who in the economy of salvation brings to fulfilment what the Son has instituted (Cabasilas, Commentary 27, 30; Hussey and McNulty 1960). The epiclesis, on his reading, is not a clumsy duplication added to the Lord’s words but the proper completion of a single movement — the recital of the institution and the invocation of the Spirit together constituting the one consecratory prayer, in which the Church does what Christ commanded by asking the Father to accomplish it through the Spirit (Cabasilas, Commentary 30; Hussey and McNulty 1960; Bobrinskoy; on the Spirit’s role in the Mysteries see Grace and the Sacraments).

The Argument from the Latin Rite Itself

The most celebrated and characteristic part of Cabasilas’s case is his second argument, which turns not against the Latin rite but to it — for support. He observes that the Roman canon of the Mass does not in fact end with the words of institution; after the recitation of “This is my Body” and “This is my Blood,” the Latin priest continues to pray, and among the prayers that follow is a petition asking God to receive the offering, to bless it, and to command that the gifts be borne to the heavenly altar (Cabasilas, Commentary 30; Hussey and McNulty 1960; Salaville, SC 4 bis, 1967). Cabasilas points to this continuation of the Latin canon as decisive for his argument: the Latin rite, he reasons, by continuing after the institution narrative to ask God to accept and bless the gifts, itself implies that something remains to be done after the dominical words — for if the consecration were already complete, this prayer for the acceptance and blessing of the offering would be superfluous (Cabasilas, Commentary 30; Hussey and McNulty 1960; Bornert 1966).

The force of the observation lies in its appeal to the Latins’ own practice rather than to a contested principle. Cabasilas does not say that the Latins teach the epiclesis; he says that their rite prays in a way that is hard to reconcile with the claim that the consecration is finished at the words of institution, the structure of their own canon witnessing, against the scholastic theory, to a consecration not yet complete at the narrative alone (Cabasilas, Commentary 30; Hussey and McNulty 1960; Salaville, SC 4 bis, 1967). The prayers of the Roman canon that follow the institution — known by their opening words, the Supra quae and the Supplices te rogamus, asking God to look with favour upon the gifts and to command them to be borne by the hand of His holy angel to the altar on high — are precisely the petitions Cabasilas has in view, and modern liturgical scholarship has recognised that these do function, in the structure of the canon, as a kind of petition over the consecrated gifts (Taft 1992; Wybrew 1989). His point is that a rite which still asks in this way has not, by its own logic, treated the institution narrative as the sole and sufficient consecratory formula (Cabasilas, Commentary 30; Hussey and McNulty 1960).

[Disputed: the precise import Cabasilas draws from the Roman canon has been read in more than one way. Salaville and Bornert read the passage, with the bulk of liturgical scholarship, as a genuine and perceptive observation that the post-institution prayers of the Roman canon imply a consecration not complete at the verba Domini alone (Salaville, SC 4 bis, 1967; Bornert 1966); some Latin theologians have replied that the Supplices is a prayer for the fruitful reception of an already-consecrated offering rather than for the consecration itself, so that the inference does not follow on Latin premises (cf. Taft 1992, who sets out both the Eastern and the Western readings of the Roman canon’s structure). Cabasilas’s text is reported here as making the liturgical-structural observation; the adjudication of its full theological weight belongs to the continuing discussion noted below.]

The Manner of the Argument: Irenic, Not Polemical

What has most struck the readers of these chapters is not only what Cabasilas argues but how. He writes about the Latins without rancour and without the rhetoric of accusation that marked much of the anti-Latin literature of his century (Bornert 1966; Bobrinskoy). He grants the power and dignity of the Lord’s words; he reports the Latin teaching as a reasoned position; he appeals to the Latin rite as a witness on a shared question rather than as evidence of error; and he frames the whole as an explanation of why the Church prays as it does, not as a charge to be pressed (Cabasilas, Commentary 29–30; Hussey and McNulty 1960; Bornert 1966). The result is a model of theological disagreement conducted as reasoning rather than denunciation — a case made calmly, on grounds that both traditions could in principle examine together (Bobrinskoy; Louth 2015).

This temper is of a piece with Cabasilas’s whole theological character. He was a layman whose lifework was the exposition of the sacramental life, not a controversialist (Hussey and McNulty 1960; see The Layman Theologian). Even where he is most firmly Byzantine — as he is in his defence of the epiclesis — his instinct is to explain and to persuade, to set out the meaning of the rite so that its rightness appears, rather than to condemn the other side (Bornert 1966; Bobrinskoy). His handling of the epiclesis question thus stands as an early and notably civil instance of the kind of liturgical-theological argument that the modern ecumenical dialogue would later take up, and it is for this reason that the passage has been so often cited in the twentieth- and twenty-first-century discussion of the moment of consecration (Taft 1992; Bobrinskoy; on his modern recovery see The Modern Rediscovery).

The Epiclesis Question in Later Discussion

The question Cabasilas addressed had a long history before him and a longer one after. In the Byzantine East the consecratory force of the epiclesis was the settled understanding, expressed in the shape of the liturgy and defended by commentators in the line in which Cabasilas stood; in the Latin West the teaching that the words of institution are the form of the sacrament became standard scholastic doctrine (Taft 1992; Wybrew 1989). The two positions came into direct contact at the reunion councils of the later Middle Ages, and the “moment of consecration” — whether at the institution narrative or at the epiclesis — became one of the recognised topics of East–West difference, discussed at the Council of Florence in the fifteenth century and in the controversies that followed (Taft 1992; Wybrew 1989).

Cabasilas’s chapters became a standard reference point in this longer conversation. Because he had argued the Eastern case so clearly and temperately, and grounded it in the structure of the rite and in the Latins’ own canon rather than in confessional assertion, his treatment was repeatedly drawn upon by later theologians and liturgists who returned to the question (Salaville, SC 4 bis, 1967; Bornert 1966; Taft 1992). As modern liturgical scholarship recovered the antiquity and wide diffusion of epicletic prayers across the early eucharistic liturgies — including in the West — Cabasilas’s appeal to the shape of the Roman canon came to look less like a debating point and more like an early recognition of a feature of the evidence that scholarship would later study in detail (Taft 1992; Wybrew 1989). The contemporary Orthodox–Catholic dialogue, while it has not resolved the question, has generally moved toward seeing the institution narrative and the epiclesis as together constituting the one consecratory prayer rather than as rival “moments” — a framing close in spirit to the unity of remembrance-and-petition that Cabasilas himself urged (Bobrinskoy; Taft 1992; on the theology of the Eucharist see The Eucharist).

For the Orthodox reader the value of these chapters is twofold. They give the classic and authoritative Byzantine exposition of why the epiclesis is integral to the consecration, set out by the Church’s foremost lay theologian of the Mysteries; and they show that this case could be, and was, made without polemic — as an explanation of the Church’s prayer offered in the confidence that the rite, rightly understood, speaks for itself (Cabasilas, Commentary 27–30; Hussey and McNulty 1960; Bobrinskoy). The whole stands within Cabasilas’s conviction that the liturgy is the work of Christ accomplished through the Spirit, of which the consecration of the gifts is the heart (see Liturgy as the Work of Christ and, for the rite as a whole, The Divine Liturgy).

References

Cabasilas, Nicholas. A Commentary on the Divine Liturgy. Trans. J. M. Hussey and P. A. McNulty. London: SPCK, 1960. (English translation with introduction; cited by chapter; the anaphora and the consecration of the gifts at chapters 27–30; the statement of the Latin position and the reply at chapters 29–30; the argument from the post-institution prayers of the Roman canon at chapter 30.)
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 standard critical edition of the Greek text with French translation and notes; the apparatus and notes on chapters 29–30 and the epiclesis question.)
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. (The standard history of the Byzantine liturgical commentaries; Cabasilas’s place in the tradition and the temper of his treatment of the Latins.)
Taft, Robert F. The Byzantine Rite: A Short History. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1992. (On the development of the Byzantine liturgy and the history of the epiclesis question, including the structure of the Roman canon and the East–West discussion 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 history of the rite, the place of the epiclesis, and the medieval East–West discussion of consecration.)
Bobrinskoy, Boris. The Mystery of the Church: A Course in Orthodox Dogmatic Theology and related studies on Cabasilas’s sacramental theology. (On the Holy Spirit’s role in the consecration and the unity of the eucharistic prayer in Cabasilas.)
Louth, Andrew. Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present. London: SPCK, 2015. (On Cabasilas’s liturgical theology and its modern reception.)