Sacramental Theology: Mysterion, the Church, and the Spirit

The Orthodox tradition speaks of “mysteries” (mysteria) where the Latin West speaks of “sacraments,” and the difference of word marks a difference of emphasis: the mystery is the hidden action of God made present in visible things, not primarily a validly-confected sign. This file treats the vocabulary of mysterion and sacramentum, the sense in which the Church is herself the first and greatest mystery, and the Orthodox preference for the whole prayer of the Church and the invocation of the Holy Spirit over the scholastic isolation of matter, form, and a consecratory moment.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

Mysterion against Sacramentum

The Greek word the Orthodox Church uses for her sacred rites is mysterion. In the New Testament the word does not first denote a rite at all but the whole hidden plan of God for the salvation of the world, now revealed in Christ: “the mystery which hath been hid from ages and from generations, but now is made manifest to his saints… which is Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Colossians 1:26–27; cf. Ephesians 1:9, 3:3–9; 1 Timothy 3:16, “great is the mystery of godliness”). The mysteries of the Church are so called because they are the concentrated, ritual enactments of that one great Mystery — the union of God and man in Christ — carried into the life of each believer (Ware, The Orthodox Church, Penguin, 1993, Part II, on the sacraments; Schmemann, For the Life of the World, SVS Press, 1973, ch. 1–2).

The Latin sacramentum comes from a different world of associations. In classical usage it named the soldier’s oath of allegiance and the sum of money deposited in a lawsuit — a binding, juridical pledge. Tertullian, writing in Latin at the turn of the third century, drew baptism into precisely that field, describing it as the Christian’s sacramentum, his oath of enlistment under Christ the commander (Tertullian, On Baptism and To the Martyrs, on the military metaphor). The Vulgate then used sacramentum to translate mysterion — most consequentially at Ephesians 5:32, where Paul calls marriage a “great mystery,” sacramentum magnum, referring it to Christ and the Church. The two words thus came to name the same realities, but the Greek keeps to the fore the hiddenness of a divine action revealed in a visible sign, while the Latin, over the long Western development, lent itself more readily to the language of validity, obligation, and legal effect (Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology, Fordham, 1974, ch. 14–15; Ware, The Orthodox Church, Part II).

This is a difference of accent, not of contradiction: the Orthodox use mysterion precisely to insist that a sacrament is not a thing the Church possesses and dispenses but an act of the living God, hidden in its cause and manifest in its effect. As Metropolitan Kallistos Ware puts it, a mystery is “a holy action through which the divine grace is imparted to us… but at the same time it always retains something secret and beyond our understanding” (Ware, The Orthodox Church, Part II).

The Church as the Primordial Mystery

Because mysterion first names the whole economy of salvation and only then the several rites, Orthodox theology does not begin from a list of sacraments and ask what they have in common; it begins from the Church, the Body of Christ, as the one great mystery of which the particular mysteries are the acts. “The first, the basic definition of man is that he is the priest,” writes Schmemann; the world itself was made as the matter of one all-embracing eucharist, and the Church is the place where that priestly offering is restored in Christ (Schmemann, For the Life of the World, 1973, ch. 1). On this account a mystery is never an isolated ritual transaction between an individual and God through a clerical dispenser; it is an event of the Church, in which the whole Body acts. It is the Church that baptizes, that gives thanks, that ordains, that crowns; the celebrant acts not in his own person and power but as the minister of Christ in the midst of the assembled people of God (Schmemann, The Eucharist, SVS Press, 1988, ch. 1–2; see Orthodoxy: The Holy Mysteries).

This ecclesial vision has a long patristic root. St. Cyril of Jerusalem’s post-baptismal instructions are addressed to the newly-illumined as those just brought into “the fellowship of the divine mysteries,” made members of Christ and partakers of the Holy Spirit within the one Church (Cyril of Jerusalem, Mystagogical Catecheses 1–5; trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 7; cf. F. L. Cross, ed., St Cyril of Jerusalem’s Lectures on the Christian Sacraments, SPCK, 1951). Dionysius the Areopagite, in the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, orders the whole life of the Church as a single hierarchy of illumination, in which the sacred rites are the means by which the divine light is handed down and the human person raised toward union with God (Dionysius, Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, trans. Luibheid, Paulist Press, 1987). St. Nicholas Cabasilas gathers the same conviction into a single governing image: the mysteries are the means by which “the life in Christ” is engendered, nourished, and brought to maturity in the believer — Baptism gives birth, Chrismation moves and quickens, the Eucharist sustains and completes (Cabasilas, The Life in Christ, trans. deCatanzaro, SVS Press, 1974, Books 1–4).

Matter, Form, and the Holy Spirit

Latin scholastic theology, systematizing an older intuition, came to analyze each sacrament into matter (materia) — the material element or gesture, the water, the bread and wine, the oil, the laying-on of hands — and form (forma), the words that determine the matter to its sacramental meaning; the sacrament is confected when the right matter and form are joined by a duly ordained minister with the right intention (a framework classically stated by Thomas Aquinas and made normative for the Roman Church; see the summary in Ware, The Orthodox Church, Part II, and Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology, ch. 15). Orthodox theology does not simply deny that mysteries have a visible element and accompanying words — its own rites plainly do — but it resists the isolation of matter and form as the mechanism of grace, and it resists still more the search for a single instant of consecration that can be pinpointed with legal precision (Schmemann, For the Life of the World, ch. 3; Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology, ch. 15).

The Orthodox emphasis falls instead on three things. First, it is the whole prayer of the Church — the entire rite, gathered up in its thanksgiving and petition — that effects the mystery, not a detachable formula. Second, and decisively, it is the invocation of the Holy Spirit, the epiclesis, that stands at the center: the Church does not command grace by pronouncing correct words but asks the Father to send down the Spirit to accomplish what she cannot accomplish of herself. Third, the mystery is understood as an act of Christ Himself working through the Spirit in His Body, not as an effect produced by the minister’s own power (see Orthodoxy: The Holy Mysteries, on these three points; Schmemann, The Eucharist, ch. 1, 8).

The centrality of the epiclesis is not a modern construction but the plain shape of the ancient Eastern rites. In the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom the priest, after the words of the Lord’s Supper, prays the Father to “send down thy Holy Spirit upon us and upon these gifts here spread forth” and to “make” the bread the precious Body and the cup the precious Blood of Christ, “changing them by thy Holy Spirit” (the epiclesis of the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom; see Orthodoxy: The Divine Liturgy). Cyril of Jerusalem already describes the same movement in the fourth century: “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” (Cyril of Jerusalem, Mystagogical Catechesis 5.7; trans. NPNF II/7). The same logic runs through the other mysteries — the blessing of the baptismal font and the consecration of the chrism are equally epicletic acts, prayers for the descent of the Spirit upon water and oil (Schmemann, Of Water and the Spirit, SVS Press, 1974, on the blessing of the water; Cabasilas, The Life in Christ, Book 3, on the chrism). The material element is real and necessary, but it is sanctified by the Spirit invoked, not by a formula that works of itself.

Sign, Symbol, and Real Participation

A last distinction guards the Orthodox understanding from two opposite reductions. Against a purely symbolic or memorialist view — the view that the water, bread, and oil are signs pointing to a grace received elsewhere, by faith alone — the Orthodox tradition insists that the mysteries truly convey what they signify: the water regenerates, the bread and wine become the Body and Blood, the oil heals (Ware, The Orthodox Church, Part II; Cabasilas, The Life in Christ, Book 4, on the reality of the eucharistic gift). But against a mechanistic or magical view — the view that grace is produced by the correct performance of a rite irrespective of the Spirit and of faith — it insists just as firmly that the mysteries are personal encounters with the living Christ, given in answer to the prayer of the Church and received in the freedom of faith and repentance (Schmemann, For the Life of the World, ch. 3). The word symbolon itself, in the patristic sense, names not a bare sign standing in for an absent reality but a sign that bears and joins the reality it signifies; the eucharistic gifts are “symbols” precisely in that they make present what they represent (Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology, ch. 15, on the patristic sense of symbol against the later opposition of symbol and reality). To call the mysteries symbols in this ancient sense is not to weaken but to state the claim: in them the hidden God gives Himself in visible things.

References

Cyril of Jerusalem. The Mystagogical Catecheses 1–5. Trans. in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. 7. Also F. L. Cross, ed., St Cyril of Jerusalem’s Lectures on the Christian Sacraments. London: SPCK, 1951.
Dionysius the Areopagite. The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy. Trans. Colm Luibheid, in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works. New York: Paulist Press, 1987.
Cabasilas, Nicholas. The Life in Christ. Trans. Carmino J. deCatanzaro. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974.
Schmemann, Alexander. For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1973.
Schmemann, Alexander. The Eucharist: Sacrament of the Kingdom. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1988.
Schmemann, Alexander. Of Water and the Spirit: A Liturgical Study of Baptism. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1974.
Meyendorff, John. Byzantine Theology: Historical Trends and Doctrinal Themes. New York: Fordham University Press, 1974.
Ware, Kallistos. The Orthodox Church. New ed. London: Penguin, 1993.
Tertullian. On Baptism; To the Martyrs. In Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 3.
Scripture: Colossians 1:26–27; Ephesians 1:9, 3:3–9, 5:32; 1 Timothy 3:16.