Communion and the Life of the Church

The Eucharist is not only consecrated but received, and its reception shapes the whole rhythm of Christian life: the frequency of communion and its long history of decline and recovery, the preparation of fasting, prayer, and confession, the communion of infants from their baptism, and above all the truth that the Eucharist makes the Church — that the Body of Christ on the altar constitutes the Body of Christ that is the assembled people of God.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Church as Eucharistic Community

The deepest thing the Orthodox tradition says about communion is that the Eucharist makes the Church. The many who partake of the one bread become one body (1 Corinthians 10:17); the assembly gathered around the one table is constituted, by that partaking, as the Body of Christ. Fr. Alexander Schmemann built his whole eucharistic theology on this recovery: the Liturgy is not a service performed for individuals who happen to be present but the self-realization of the Church, the passage of the gathered people into the Kingdom, in which they offer, are offered, and receive back their offering transfigured (Schmemann, The Eucharist: Sacrament of the Kingdom, SVS Press, 1988, on the Liturgy as the sacrament of the assembly, of the offering, and of the Kingdom). This is the ancient meaning of the word synaxis, “gathering,” which Dionysius used as his name for the Eucharist: the mystery that gathers the many into one and lifts them toward God (Dionysius, Ecclesiastical Hierarchy 3, trans. Luibheid, Paulist Press, 1987).

From this it follows that communion is normal, not exceptional. The early Church communed at every Liturgy as a matter of course; the very structure of the rite, with its dismissal of the catechumens before the offering, presupposes that all who remain will partake (Schmemann, The Eucharist, on the assembly’s communion as the norm; see Orthodoxy: The Divine Liturgy). To be present at the Liturgy and not to commune was, in the ancient understanding, an anomaly requiring explanation, not the reverse.

Frequency: Decline and Recovery

Over the centuries, however, the frequency of lay communion declined severely across much of the Orthodox world. By late Byzantine and especially post-Byzantine times, under the combined weight of an exalted sense of the awesomeness of the mystery, an increasing stress on unworthiness, and elaborate preparatory requirements, many of the faithful communed only a few times a year, or once, at Pascha (Ware, The Orthodox Church, Penguin, 1993, Part II, on the historic infrequency of lay communion and its recovery). The eighteenth-century movement of the Kollyvades on Mount Athos — associated with St. Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain and St. Macarius of Corinth, whose treatise Concerning Frequent Communion argued for regular reception — pressed for a recovery of frequent communion against this decline (the Kollyvades and the treatise on frequent communion; Ware, The Orthodox Church, Part II). In the twentieth century the eucharistic ecclesiology of the Russian émigré theologians, above all Schmemann and Afanasiev, and the parallel renewal on Athos and in Greece, brought a widespread return to more frequent communion — though the older penitential discipline and the practice of infrequent reception persist in places, and the right frequency remains a matter of pastoral judgment and some debate (Schmemann, The Eucharist, on the recovery; Ware, The Orthodox Church, Part II).

Preparation

Because the gift is the Body and Blood of the Lord, the Orthodox tradition surrounds communion with serious preparation, understood not as the earning of a worthiness the communicant can never possess but as the honest readying of a sinner to receive his salvation. St. Paul’s warning against eating “unworthily” and his charge to “examine himself” (1 Corinthians 11:27–28) stand behind the whole discipline. Preparation ordinarily includes fasting — a total fast from food and drink from the previous midnight before the Liturgy, together with the observance of the Church’s fasting seasons; prayer — the appointed pre-communion canon and prayers, and the keeping of one’s rule; reconciliation with one’s neighbor; and, in much Orthodox practice, confession, so that the mysteries of repentance and of communion are closely joined (Ware, The Orthodox Church, Part II, on preparation, fasting, and confession before communion; see Confession and the Spiritual Father). The precise relation of confession to each communion varies by tradition — some require confession before every reception, others periodically — and this too is a matter of pastoral discernment rather than uniform rule (Ware, The Orthodox Church, Part II). The pre-communion prayers themselves hold the balance the tradition intends: the communicant approaches naming himself “the chief of sinners” and yet approaches, trusting not his worthiness but the Lord’s mercy — “of Thy Mystical Supper, O Son of God, accept me today as a communicant.”

The Communion of Infants

One practice sets the Orthodox East apart with particular clarity: infants and small children commune. Because baptism and chrismation make even an infant a full member of the Body of Christ, the infant is admitted at once to the Church’s central mystery and is communed at every Liturgy thereafter, receiving from the spoon a portion of the consecrated gifts (Ware, The Orthodox Church, Part II, on infant communion; Schmemann, Of Water and the Spirit, SVS Press, 1974, on the unity of initiation completed in communion). This is the visible consequence of the unbroken sequence of initiation (see Chrismation and Reception into the Church): where the West postponed both confirmation and first communion to the years of reason, the East never severed communion from baptism, holding that membership in Christ is not graded by age and that the child, being fully a Christian, is fully to be fed. The practice is also a standing witness to the Orthodox theology of the mystery: one does not first understand and then commune; one communes and so comes to understand, for the Eucharist is food for the whole person given by grace, not a reward for comprehension (Schmemann, The Eucharist, on communion as gift rather than achievement).

The Fruit of Communion

The end of the mystery is union with Christ and, through Him, the deification of the communicant. “He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him” (John 6:56): communion is the most intimate of the mysteries, the actual reception of the Lord into the body and soul of the believer, the “medicine of immortality” of which St. Ignatius of Antioch wrote (Ignatius, To the Ephesians 20, on the Eucharist as the medicine of immortality; in Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1). Cabasilas makes the Eucharist the culmination of his account of the life in Christ precisely because it does what the other mysteries prepare: the others give birth and set the powers in motion, but the Eucharist alone gives Christ Himself as food, so that the communicant lives no longer by his own life but by the life of Christ within him (Cabasilas, The Life in Christ, Book 4, on the Eucharist as the perfection of the mysteries). The frequency, the preparation, and the reverence that surround communion all serve this single end: that the faithful, receiving the Body and Blood, may be transformed into what they receive and grow toward the full stature of Christ (see The Mysteries and Theosis).

References

Schmemann, Alexander. The Eucharist: Sacrament of the Kingdom. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1988.
Schmemann, Alexander. Of Water and the Spirit. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1974.
Cabasilas, Nicholas. The Life in Christ, Book 4. Trans. Carmino J. deCatanzaro. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1974.
Dionysius the Areopagite. The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy 3 (the synaxis). Trans. Colm Luibheid. New York: Paulist Press, 1987.
Ware, Kallistos. The Orthodox Church. New ed. London: Penguin, 1993.
Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain and Macarius of Corinth. Concerning Frequent Communion (18th c.) — the Kollyvades argument for frequent communion.
Ignatius of Antioch. To the Ephesians 20. In Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1.
Scripture: 1 Corinthians 10:17, 11:27–28; John 6:51–56.