EPICLESIS. - According to its etymology, the word e. (in Greek: ἐπίκλησις, from ἐπι-καλῶ, I call upon) means "invocation, prayer"; generically: "deprecatory formula".
I. NOTION OF THE EPICLESIS
In the ritual of all the Churches, especially in the Rituale Sacramentorum, there are many e. or invocations. Thus there are baptismal, eucharistic, penitential e., etc. From the 16th century, however, down to our own day, when one speaks of an e., or rather of the e., what is meant is a specific eucharistic e. which in the Ordinary of the Mass of almost all the Eastern rites and of several Western rites (Mozarabic, Gallican, etc.) comes immediately after the narrative of the institution of the Eucharist: by means of it, the celebrant beseeches God the Father to send the Holy Spirit upon those present and upon the offerings that lie upon the altar, so that He may transform the bread into the Body and the wine into the Blood of Christ and make the sacrifice salutary for the faithful and for the Church in general. In short: the e., as it has been understood by theologians for several centuries, is the petition that the Holy Spirit intervene to accomplish the transubstantiation and the sanctification of the faithful, a petition made after the words of the Lord: "This is my Body, this is my Blood."
It is significant that in almost all the liturgies of the Mass, the prayer for the sanctification of the faithful is joined to that for the transubstantiation, just as the Father is besought to send His Spirit first upon the faithful and then upon the offerings. Many authors, indeed, pay no attention to this double object of the e. and stop solely at the prayer for the transubstantiation. The e. thus expressed is commonly called the e. of the Holy Spirit, a way of speaking that is quite improper, because the celebrant's prayer is not directed to the Holy Spirit, but to the Father. It would therefore be more logical to call it the e. of the Father. On the other hand, in many Eastern Masses, the e. is directed not to the Father but to the Son, that is, to the Word. To find an e. directed to the Holy Spirit, one must turn to the Mozarabic Liber Sacramentorum, which also contains e. directed to the whole Trinity.
There is transcribed here, as an example, the e. taken from the Byzantine Mass that goes under the name of St. John Chrysostom. The celebrant, bowing his head, says in a low voice: "We ask You, we pray You, we beseech You: send Your Holy Spirit upon us and upon the offerings here present, and make this bread the precious Body of your Christ and what is in the Chalice the precious Blood of your Christ, transforming them by your Spirit, so that they may become for the faithful who receive them purification of the soul, remission of sins, the bringing about of the Kingdom of heaven, a pledge of confidence before you, and not judgment or condemnation."
The modern meaning of the term e., used with the definite article (= the e.), does not correspond to the e. to which the Greek Fathers commonly refer. For them, the e. without further qualification, ἐκλένησις, indicates the eucharistic prayer in general, that is, the one we call the Canon of the Mass (including the Preface) and the Greeks call the Anaphora. In the Canon and in the Anaphora there are included, as parts within the whole, both the words of the Lord and the e. of the moderns. Hence all the confusions and misunderstandings into which many authors fall.
II. LA E. E LE S
It is a truly arbitrary usage that which was established in modern times of using the term e. to indicate exclusively the consecratory and impetratory invocation at the same time, of which mention has just been made. The origin of this abuse must be sought in that controversy which flared up between Greeks and Latins in the 14th century over the form of the Eucharist. The Latins were astonished because the Greeks asked in their liturgy for the consecration of the oblations after the words of the Lord. Nicholas Cabasilas (v.), first, Symeon of Thessalonica (d. 1429) and Mark of Ephesus (d. 1444) afterward, in order to argue against the Latins, devised an unheard-of theory about the form of the Eucharist, according to which the Consecration takes place not at the instant in which the priest says in persona Christi: "This is my Body, this is my Blood," but when he asks the Father to send the Holy Spirit upon the faithful and upon the oblations to accomplish the transubstantiation.
The words of the Lord, however, are not useless: they are the conditio sine qua non for the e. that comes afterward to have its efficacy. Neither the Greeks nor the Latins took notice that both in their liturgies and in the other Eastern and Western Masses there were found not one, but several e. and invocations. Considered in their object, such e. can be divided into two categories: strictly impetratory e. - with which graces are asked for sanctification - and consecratory e., with which the conversion of the oblations into the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ is asked. If one looks at the place in which they are found in the liturgical text, the e. can be called antecedent and subsequent, according as they come before or after the words of the Lord. Now, passing in review the different liturgies, one notices precisely that in one and the same Mass there are found not only many impetratory e., antecedent or subsequent, but also many consecratory e., these too antecedent and subsequent. Why, then, use the word e. to indicate exclusively the subsequent consecratory e.? Let one observe, for example, the Byzantine Mass of St. John Chrysostom, as it was used until the end of the 8th century, according to the Codex Burbertii 336. Already at the beginning of the Mass, the following consecratory e. directed to Jesus Christ was read: "Lord our God, who offered yourself as a lamb without blemish for the salvation of the world, look upon us, this bread and this chalice, and make them your immaculate Body and your precious Blood as nourishment for souls and bodies" (cf. E. Brightmann, Eastern Liturgies, I, Oxford 1896, p. 309). This e. no longer appears after the 8th century.
In the Coptic Masses of St. Basil and of St. Cyril, in the Greek-Alexandrian liturgy of St. Gregory, in the Greek one of St. Mark, in the other Greek liturgy of the papyrus of Dér Balizeh, there is found a very explicit antecedent consecratory e. besides the subsequent consecratory e.
Several authors have maintained that the presence of a subsequent consecratory e. was a primitive and universal fact. It is not true because the oldest liturgical texts currently known, such as the Traditio apostolica of St. Hippolytus and the Testamentum Domini, have a single subsequent impetratory e. in which the descent of the Holy Spirit is invoked to obtain graces of sanctification.
III. DOGMATIC DIFFICULTY AND ITS SOLUTION
A question of a dogmatic nature undoubtedly arises from the consecratory epiclesis that follows, which is found in the liturgies. In fact, according to Catholic doctrine, not yet solemnly defined but clearly proposed by the ordinary magisterium, the true form of the Eucharist is the words of the Lord: "This is my Body, this is my Blood." It is at the instant in which the priest pronounces them over the bread and the wine, in nomine et persona Christi, that transubstantiation takes place. No other formula, before or after, is required to accomplish the mystery. At the Council of Florence, Eugene IV wished to insert this doctrine into the Decree of union with the Greeks and renounced doing so only following the public declaration that they made on 5 July 1439 through Bessarion, according to which they said they followed the teaching, on this point quite clear, of their great doctor St. John Chrysostom. The same doctrine is found explicitly in the Decretum pro Armenis, is presupposed by the Council of Trent (sess. XIII, can. 3) and by the rubrics of the Roman Missal, and is upheld by many popes and by many decrees of the Roman Sacred Congregations against the denials of the dissident Orientals. The last declaration on the matter was made by Pius X in the letter Ex quo nono labente saeculo of 26 Dec. 1910 (AAS, 3 [1911], p. 119), in which the opinion of Prince Maximilian of Saxony is condemned, formulated as follows: "in the Eastern Church and according to its intentions, the epiclesis that comes after the words of the Lord is the most important part of the Consecration, the words of Christ produce their effect through the epiclesis, and the real presence occurs only when it is finished." Other Catholic theologians before Maximilian had upheld an identical or nearly identical theory. Mentioned are: Ambrogio Catarino and Cristoforo de Cheffontaines, of the 16th century; the liturgist Lebrun, Eusèbe Renaudot, of the 18th century; H. Schell and G. Rauschen of the 19th century.
Undoubtedly, if one considers only the consecratory epiclesis that follows, one finds it difficult to reconcile such a formula with Catholic doctrine, all the more so since, in the text of several liturgies, the words of the Lord appear in the simple unfolding of the narrative. The difficulty ceases, or at least acquires less weight, if attention is paid to the two following liturgical facts:
1) many liturgies contain consecratory epicleses that precede as well as the consecratory epiclesis that follows; sometimes the preceding epiclesis is even found right at the beginning of the liturgical text, as in the ancient Byzantine Mass of St. John Chrysostom.
2) In any liturgy, even if set out in a purely narrative tone, the words of the Lord are accompanied by gestures or rites that express without any doubt the intention of applying these words to the matter present.
The first fact finds its explanation in this: that the Church is accustomed, in sacramental euchology, to express several times, both before and after the essential act, the petition for the effect or the effects of the sacred action. Bossuet writes: "The Church, in order to make the sacred action more perceptible, speaks at each point of it as if she were then and there realizing it herself and without worrying too much whether instead it has already occurred or must perhaps still occur. She rejoices that everything is found in the integrity of the action and that, in the end, one has the most complete, most vivid and perceptible explanation of the mystery that can be imagined... The Church never tires of explaining in many ways the great reality that has been accomplished, praying God to accomplish it still" (Explicitation de quelques difficultés sur les prières de la Messe, 45). The second fact is no less worthy of being noted, because it comes to form part of the purely narrative context and gives prominence to the explicit intention of attributing a present meaning to a past reality that is being commemorated.
It must be added that the clear demonstration of Catholic doctrine on the form of the Eucharist must be sought from patristic tradition. Even if rather rare, the explicit testimonies of this tradition are sufficiently numerous to establish that, from the beginning, the words of the Lord were everywhere considered as the form of the Consecration. See Justin, Irenaeus, Ambrose, Gregory of Nyssa, John Chrysostom, Augustine, Hesychius of Jerusalem, Faustus of Riez, Severus of Antioch, Isidore of Seville. Of openly contrary testimonies there are found in all antiquity that of the Nestorian Babai the Great (d. around 648) and the others of certain Orthodox polemicists of the iconoclast period: the author of the Confutation of the Iconoclast Synod of 733, St. Nicephorus of Constantinople, Theodore Abou-Qurra (d. in 820). The thought of St. John Damascene is not clear.
After the patristic period, Catholic doctrine is taught in the dissident Eastern Churches by many theologians, especially among the Monophysites. Discordant voices begin to make themselves heard only on the occasion of the attempt at union with the Latins. Thus it is that in the 13th century the Armenian Vartan the Great, an opponent of the union, maintains that the form of the Consecration is the epiclesis that follows. In the 14th century, Nicholas Cabasilas adduces in defense of this opinion several theological reasons. In our own day, the majority of the dissident Orientals, despite the teaching of their ancient doctors and theologians, have commonly resumed upholding it. Notable nuances are nevertheless observed among them. Russian theologians, for example, maintain that the words of the Lord form part of the total form, in the sense that they condition the consecratory efficacy of the epiclesis that comes after, whereas for the Greeks they have a purely narrative value.
The Church's use, in sacramental euchology, of asking several times in succession for the effect of the sacred action, both before and after the principal rite, is enough to explain all the forms of epiclesis. If the consecratory epiclesis in the form of a petition to the Father to send the Holy Spirit has become the most widespread, especially in the East, this is undoubtedly due to the fact that such a formula has the double advantage of expressing the cooperation of the Father and of the Holy Spirit in the mystery of transubstantiation and of highlighting the office of sanctifier and consecrator attributed by the Fathers to the third person of the Most Holy Trinity. It has been seen, in fact, that the form of the epiclesis in question does not ask solely for the conversion of the bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ, but asks it with a specific purpose: that of the sanctification of the faithful and of their union in charity. And this petition is most fittingly in its place, that is, in the immediate vicinity of Holy Communion.
Other explanations of the epiclesis, more or less ingenious, have been given by theologians. Among the simplest is that of George Scholarios (d. after 1472), an explicit defender of Catholic doctrine, an explanation that was later taken up by Bossuet: this prayer, like other analogous formulas, has the purpose of expressing the intention that the celebrant has of consecrating the Eucharist. There is also a so-called dramatic explanation, according to which the Mass is the synthetic expression of the whole work of salvation and marks its principal stages. The consecratory epiclesis that follows would correspond to the mystery of the Resurrection, according to Theodore of Mopsuestia and the Nestorian liturgists; to the mystery of Pentecost, instead, according to many Ethiopian liturgies and according to the dialogue between the priest and the deacon as it is found interpolated in the current Byzantine Masses.