Position · 155

Orthodox Eucharistic Mystery

The teaching that the bread and wine truly become the body and blood of Christ through the invocation of the Holy Spirit in the liturgy, while the manner of the change is left a mystery.

History

Roots

The Orthodox churches see no starting date for this teaching. They hold that they are simply repeating what the Early Church said. Ignatius of Antioch (c. 110) complained of heretics who “confess not the Eucharist to be the flesh of our Saviour Jesus Christ” (To the Smyrnaeans 7, New Advent). Justin Martyr, writing to the emperor around 155, explained that the food “blessed by the prayer of His word” is “the flesh and blood of that Jesus who was made flesh” (First Apology 66, New Advent; CCEL). Irenaeus (c. 180) argued against the Gnostics that the cup and bread receive the Word of God and become “the Eucharist of the blood and the body of Christ,” and that this proves the body will rise (Against Heresies 5.2, New Advent).

These writers affirm the reality without explaining it. None offers a theory of how ordinary food becomes Christ’s body. That restraint became the Orthodox position.

Causes

Two things gave the teaching its distinctive shape: the liturgy, and later the argument with the West.

The liturgy came first. By the fourth century the great Eastern eucharistic prayers (those of St James, St Basil and St John Chrysostom) all asked the Father, after recalling the Last Supper, to send the Holy Spirit on the gifts and make them Christ’s body and blood. This prayer is the epiclesis (“calling down”). Cyril of Jerusalem (c. 350) described it to the newly baptized: “we beseech 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 Ghost has touched, is surely sanctified and changed” (Mystagogical Catechesis 5.7, New Advent). The Liturgy of St James carries the same petition (New Advent).

John of Damascus (8th century) gave the teaching its classic summary. Asked how bread becomes Christ’s body, he answered: “The Holy Spirit is present and does those things which surpass reason and thought.” He compared the change to the Spirit overshadowing Mary, and said “the manner of this cannot be searched out” (Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith 4.13, New Advent). He also ruled that the bread and wine are not mere “antitypes” (figures) of the body after the consecration. Basil had used that word, he said, only of the gifts before it. The Second Council of Nicaea (787) took the same line against the iconoclasts, who had called the Eucharist the one true image of Christ: it is not an image, the council said, but the body itself.

The argument with the West came later. After the Great Schism, Latin theology settled on two things the East had not: that the words of institution (“This is my body”) alone effect the change, and that the change is best described as Transubstantiation, a change of substance with the accidents remaining, as Thomas Aquinas set it out. Nicholas Cabasilas, a fourteenth-century Byzantine lay theologian, wrote the main Orthodox reply in his Commentary on the Divine Liturgy (Archive.org, 1960 translation). He argued that the Lord’s words give the prayer its power, but the church must still ask, and the change happens when the priest invokes the Spirit. At the Council of Florence (1439) the Greek delegates, led on this point by Mark of Ephesus, defended the same view: the change does not take place until the epiclesis (Catholic Encyclopedia, “Epiklesis”, secondary).

Influence

In the seventeenth century the Orthodox had to define themselves against Protestants as well. Cyril Lucaris, Patriarch of Constantinople, published a confession in Geneva (1629) with a Calvinist account of the Lord’s Supper, close to Spiritual Presence. Orthodox synods condemned it. Peter Mogila’s Orthodox Confession (1640, approved at Iași in 1642) and the Synod of Jerusalem (1672) answered him. The Jerusalem synod’s Confession of Dositheus (decree 17) adopted the Greek word metousiosis, a translation of transubstantiation, but added at once that the word does not explain “the manner … by which the bread and wine are changed into the Body and Blood of the Lord, for that is altogether incomprehensible” (text). That double move, Western vocabulary with a refusal of Western explanation, still marks Orthodox teaching.

In the twentieth century the stress shifted from the moment of change to the whole liturgy. Alexander Schmemann, in For the Life of the World (1963, Archive.org) and The Eucharist: Sacrament of the Kingdom (1988 in English), argued that both Latin and later Orthodox manuals had narrowed the sacrament into a question about when and how the elements change. He presented the Eucharist instead as the church’s ascent into the kingdom, with the epiclesis as the climax of a single action. His work shaped Orthodox renewal and, through ecumenical dialogue, Western liturgical reform. Most Western churches that revised their eucharistic prayers after the 1960s added an explicit epiclesis.

Key ideas and contributors

A real change. The bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ. They are not signs of an absent body or a spiritual presence alongside the bread. Orthodox writers point to John 6:51–56 and the words of institution (Matthew 26:26–28) read plainly, and to Paul’s warning that whoever eats unworthily is “guilty concerning the body and blood of the Lord” (1 Corinthians 11:27–29).

The Spirit makes the change. The Father acts through the Spirit, at the church’s request, as he did at the incarnation. John of Damascus’s parallel with the annunciation is the standard one. The epiclesis is therefore not a decoration but the prayer the whole action turns on.

The manner is a mystery. The Greek word for sacrament is mysterion. Orthodox writers from John of Damascus to Dositheus decline to say how the change happens. They will use “change” (metabole) and sometimes metousiosis, but they do not commit to Aristotle’s categories of substance and accident.

Communion and deification. The point of the change is participation. Receiving Christ’s body unites the believer to him and is one of the main ways of Theosis. Cabasilas built a whole account of the Christian life around this in The Life in Christ. This is also why the Orthodox give communion to baptized infants, as they did in the early church.

The same in the Oriental churches. The Oriental Orthodox churches, including the Coptic Orthodox with its liturgies of St Basil and St Cyril, hold the same teaching and also pray an epiclesis. The Christological split of the fifth century did not divide them on the Eucharist.

Other contributors: Cyril of Alexandria, whose stress on Christ’s flesh as “life-giving” shaped Eastern eucharistic theology; Mark of Ephesus, for his defense of the epiclesis at Florence; and in modern times Kallistos Ware, whose The Orthodox Church (1963) gave English readers the standard short account of the Orthodox view.

Key controversies

When does the change happen? This is the oldest dispute with Rome. The Latin view, fixed by the scholastics and assumed by the Council of Trent, is that Christ’s words spoken by the priest consecrate. The Orthodox view is that the change is completed at the epiclesis. Latin writers pointed out that the Roman canon has no clear epiclesis after the words of institution, and that the Eastern liturgies themselves treat the Lord’s words with great solemnity. Pius X’s letter Ex quo (26 December 1910) to the apostolic delegates in the East listed among “grave errors” the view that “the words of consecration do not produce an effect unless preceded by that prayer which they call epiclesis” (Latin text; Denzinger 2147a, English). Modern theologians on both sides often argue that it is a mistake to look for a single instant, and that the prayer consecrates as a whole. The Faith and Order document Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry (1982) took that line and urged all churches to restore the epiclesis.

Is “transubstantiation” an Orthodox word? The Synod of Jerusalem used metousiosis, and some Orthodox writers since then have treated it as the proper term. Others, especially in Russian theology of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, saw it as a Latin borrowing from a period when Orthodox teaching was written in Western categories, and preferred the older metabole. Both sides agree that the word, if used, names the fact of the change and not a philosophical account of it. The quarrel is about how far the seventeenth-century confessions speak for the church.

Protestant objections. For Huldrych Zwingli and the memorialist tradition, the Orthodox teaching is the same error as the Roman one: it takes figurative words literally. John Calvin and the Reformed tradition held that Christ’s body is in heaven and believers are lifted to him by the Spirit, which shares the Orthodox stress on the Spirit but denies any change in the elements. Lutherans affirm the real presence but teach Sacramental Union, not a change of the bread. The Lucaris affair showed how sharply the Orthodox rejected the Reformed view when it appeared inside their own church.

Leavened or unleavened bread. The Byzantine churches use leavened bread and the West unleavened. In the eleventh century the Greek patriarch Michael Cerularius attacked the Latin use of unleavened bread (azymes), and the issue fed into the events of 1054. The Council of Florence accepted both as valid, but many Orthodox still regard the question as more than a matter of custom.

What remains unresolved

The Orthodox, Roman Catholic and Oriental churches agree on the main point: the bread and wine truly become Christ’s body and blood. What divides them is narrower. One question is whether the church should try to say how and when the change happens. The other is whether an explanation like transubstantiation, once given, binds everyone. The Orthodox answer that the faith was complete before the explanation existed. Their critics answer that refusing to explain can also leave the question open to drift, as the Lucaris affair showed.