The Mystery of the Body and Blood

In the Eucharist the bread and wine truly become the Body and Blood of Christ — the real presence, confessed by the Orthodox Church without reserve. Yet the Orthodox tradition holds this confession with a characteristic reticence about mechanism: it prefers to speak of the “change” (metabole) of the gifts rather than to make the scholastic term “transubstantiation” a dogma, and it locates the accomplishing of the mystery in the epiclesis, the invocation of the Holy Spirit, rather than in the words of institution alone. This file treats all three points, flagging the two live East–West disputes.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Real Presence

The Orthodox Church confesses, without hesitation or qualification, that in the Eucharist the bread and wine become the true Body and Blood of Christ, and that in communing the faithful truly receive Him. This is the plain sense of the Lord’s own words: “Take, eat; this is my body… this is my blood of the new testament” (Matthew 26:26–28), and of His discourse in John 6: “my flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him” (John 6:55–56). St. Paul draws the same realism into a warning: “whosoever shall eat this bread, and drink this cup of the Lord, unworthily, shall be guilty of the body and blood of the Lord… not discerning the Lord’s body” (1 Corinthians 11:27–29). The gifts are not, for the Orthodox, signs of an absent Christ received only by faith; they are the Body and Blood themselves (Ware, The Orthodox Church, Penguin, 1993, Part II, on the real presence; see Orthodoxy: The Holy Eucharist).

The Fathers speak with the same directness. St. Cyril of Jerusalem tells the newly-illumined: “Since then He Himself has declared and said of the bread, This is My Body, who shall dare to doubt any longer? … Contemplate therefore the Bread and Wine not as bare elements, for they are, according to the Lord’s declaration, the Body and Blood of Christ” (Cyril of Jerusalem, Mystagogical Catechesis 4.1, 4.6, trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 7). Cabasilas, four centuries into the Byzantine tradition, is equally emphatic that the gifts are no mere figure: after the consecration “the precious gifts are not merely a figure or type of the Lord’s body but the all-holy Body itself of the Master” (Cabasilas, Commentary on the Divine Liturgy 27, trans. Hussey and McNulty, SPCK, 1960; cf. The Life in Christ, Book 4). The reality of the presence is not in dispute within Orthodoxy; what the tradition guards is how that reality is spoken of.

The Change (Metabole) and Transubstantiation

The Orthodox liturgy names what happens to the gifts with a family of Greek verbs of change: at the epiclesis the priest asks the Spirit to “make” (poiēson) the bread the Body and the cup the Blood, “changing them” (metabalōn) by the Holy Spirit (the epiclesis of the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom). The noun the Fathers most naturally use is metabolē, “change” or “conversion.” Cyril already says that “whatsoever the Holy Spirit has touched is sanctified and changed” (Mystagogical Catechesis 5.7). The point of this vocabulary is to affirm the reality of the change while leaving its manner in the hiddenness proper to a mystery: the Church knows that the bread becomes the Body; she does not claim to explain the metaphysics of how (Ware, The Orthodox Church, Part II; Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology, Fordham, 1974, ch. 15).

The Latin West, by contrast, developed a specific philosophical account: transubstantiation (transsubstantiatio), the doctrine, framed in Aristotelian terms, that the substance of the bread and wine is converted into the substance of the Body and Blood while the accidents (the appearances — taste, color, extension) remain. The term was used at the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) and made dogma at the Council of Trent (Session 13, 1551) (for the Western definition, see Ware, The Orthodox Church, Part II, and Orthodoxy: The Holy Eucharist).

[Disputed: whether "transubstantiation" (Greek *metousiōsis*) is a proper term for the Orthodox confession of the eucharistic change, or a scholastic intrusion to be avoided as a dogma. The dispute is internal to the Orthodox tradition as well as between East and West. (a) The term did enter authoritative Orthodox texts: the *Confession of Dositheus*, ratified by the Synod of Jerusalem in 1672 in answer to Calvinism, explicitly uses *metousiōsis* (transubstantiation) and speaks of the change of the substance of the bread and wine — so a strand of Orthodox "symbolic" theology positively affirmed the word (Ware, *The Orthodox Church*, Part II, noting the Synod of Jerusalem's use of the term). (b) The dominant judgment of the modern Orthodox and the patristic revival — Florovsky, Schmemann, Meyendorff, Ware — is that while transubstantiation may be used as a strong affirmation of the reality of the change, it must not be elevated into a required dogmatic *explanation*: the substance/accidents analysis is a particular scholastic philosophy, not the faith of the Church, and the Orthodox properly confess the change (*metabolē*) as a mystery without committing to the Aristotelian account of its mechanism (Ware, *The Orthodox Church*, Part II; Meyendorff, *Byzantine Theology*, ch. 15). The disagreement is thus not over the reality of the presence, which all affirm, but over whether the Western *explanation* is binding. This collection follows Ware and Meyendorff in confessing the real change while treating "transubstantiation" as a defensible but non-obligatory term and not as Orthodox dogma.]

The Epiclesis and the Words of Institution

The second East–West dispute concerns the moment and the agent of the consecration. The Eastern liturgies place the accomplishing of the mystery in the epiclesis — the invocation, after the words of the Lord’s Supper, in which the Church asks the Father to “send down thy Holy Spirit upon us and upon these gifts” and to change them into the Body and Blood (the epiclesis of St. John Chrysostom; see Sacramental Theology, on the epiclesis). The Latin tradition, developing its own theology, came to hold that the gifts are consecrated by the priest’s recitation of the words of institution — “This is my Body… This is my Blood” — spoken in the person of Christ, the epiclesis (weaker in the Roman canon) being read as a distinct petition (for the Latin doctrine of consecration by the words of institution, see Ware, The Orthodox Church, Part II, and Orthodoxy: The Holy Eucharist).

Nicholas Cabasilas gave the classic Byzantine defense of the epiclesis. Against the Latin position he argued that the words of institution are historical narrative — Christ’s own report of what He did and commanded — and that the Church, in obedience to that command, then prays for the Spirit to accomplish what the words announce; it is the prayer of the Church, answered by the Spirit, that effects the change, just as in baptism and every mystery the sanctification comes not from a formula pronounced but from the Spirit invoked (Cabasilas, Commentary on the Divine Liturgy 29–30, on the epiclesis as the consecratory prayer against the Latin claim for the institution narrative). This remains the standard Orthodox understanding: the whole eucharistic prayer, culminating in the epiclesis, consecrates, and the Holy Spirit, not the priest’s pronouncement of correct words, is the agent (Ware, The Orthodox Church, Part II; Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology, ch. 15).

[Disputed: whether the eucharistic gifts are consecrated by the epiclesis (the Eastern position) or by the words of institution (the classical Latin position). The Orthodox tradition, with Cabasilas, locates the change at the epiclesis and refuses to isolate a "moment of consecration" in the recitation of "This is my Body"; the medieval and Tridentine West located it in the words of institution spoken by the priest in persona Christi. Some Orthodox writers, wary of pinpointing any single instant, prefer to say the *whole* anaphora consecrates and warn against merely inverting the Latin error by fixing the moment at the epiclesis instead (a caution voiced within the patristic revival; see Meyendorff, *Byzantine Theology*, ch. 15, and Ware, *The Orthodox Church*, Part II). The collection reports the Eastern insistence on the epiclesis and the Spirit as decisive, while noting the further Orthodox reserve against isolating any single consecratory instant; it does not adjudicate the East–West question.]

The Sacrifice and the Communion

Two further affirmations complete the mystery. The Eucharist is a true sacrifice — not a repetition of Calvary, for Christ “was once offered to bear the sins of many” (Hebrews 9:28), but the one sacrifice of Christ made present and offered by the Church, who pleads before the Father the Body broken and the Blood shed “for the life of the world” (John 6:51; the anaphora offers “Thine own of Thine own”). And the Eucharist is communion: the end of the mystery is not the presence of Christ on the altar but the union of the faithful with Him and, in Him, with one another — “we, being many, are one bread, and one body: for we are all partakers of that one bread” (1 Corinthians 10:17). This is why the Eucharist is the sacrament of the Church herself, the mystery in which the Body of Christ on the altar makes the Body of Christ that is the Church (Schmemann, The Eucharist: Sacrament of the Kingdom, SVS Press, 1988, on the Eucharist as the sacrament of the assembly and of the Church; see Communion and the Life of the Church).

References

Cyril of Jerusalem. Mystagogical Catecheses 4–5. Trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 7; F. L. Cross, ed., St Cyril of Jerusalem’s Lectures on the Christian Sacraments. London: SPCK, 1951.
Cabasilas, Nicholas. A Commentary on the Divine Liturgy, chs. 27–30. Trans. J. M. Hussey and P. A. McNulty. London: SPCK, 1960. And The Life in Christ, Book 4, trans. deCatanzaro, SVS Press, 1974.
Schmemann, Alexander. The Eucharist: Sacrament of the Kingdom. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1988.
Ware, Kallistos. The Orthodox Church. New ed. London: Penguin, 1993.
Meyendorff, John. Byzantine Theology. New York: Fordham University Press, 1974.
Dositheus of Jerusalem. Confession of Dositheus (Synod of Jerusalem, 1672) — the use of metousiōsis.
Councils of Lateran IV (1215) and Trent (Session 13, 1551) — the Western definition of transubstantiation.
Scripture: Matthew 26:26–28; John 6:51–56; 1 Corinthians 10:17, 11:27–29; Hebrews 9:28.