EPIGLESIS. — According to its etymology, the word e. (in Greek: ἐπὶ χάλκιμα, from ἐπὶ χάλκιμα, I call, in-voice) means “invocation, prayer”; generally: “deprecatory formula.”
I. CONCEPT OF THE E
In the ritual of all Churches, especially in the Ritual of the Sacraments, many e. or invocations are found. Thus, there are baptismal, eucharistic, penitential e., etc. From the 16th century to the present day, however, when one speaks of e., or rather of the e., one means a specific eucharistic e. which, in the Ordinary of the Mass of almost all Eastern rites and several Western rites (Mozarabic, Gallican, etc.), comes immediately after the narration of the institution of the Eucharist: by means of which the celebrant begs God the Father to send the Holy Spirit upon those present and upon the offerings on the altar so that He may transform the bread into the Body and the wine into the Blood of Christ and render the sacrifice salutary for the faithful and for the Church in general. In short: the e., as understood by theologians for several centuries, is the supplication that the Holy Spirit may intervene to effect the transubstantiation and the sanctification of the faithful, a supplication made after the words of the Lord: “This is my Body, this is my Blood.”It is significant that in almost all liturgies and Masses, the prayer for the sanctification of the faithful is joined to that for transubstantiation, in the same way that the Father is asked to send His Spirit first upon the faithful and then upon the offerings. Many authors indeed do not pay attention to this double object of the e. and focus solely on the prayer for transubstantiation. The e. thus expressed is commonly called the e. of the Holy Spirit, a very improper way of speaking 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 an e. directed to the entire Trinity.
As an example, the following e. is transcribed from the Byzantine Mass attributed to St. John Chrysostom. The celebrant, bowing his head, says softly: “We beg Thee, we pray Thee, we supplicate Thee: send Thy Holy Spirit upon us and upon the offerings here present, and make this bread the precious Body of Thy Christ,” and what is in the Chalice “the precious Blood of Thy Christ,” transforming them by Thy Spirit, so that they may become for the faithful who receive them purification of the soul, remission of sins, the realization of the Kingdom of Heaven, a pledge of confidence before Thee, 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 specification, ἐπὶ χάλκιμα, indicates the eucharistic prayer in general, that is, the one we call the Canon of the Mass (including the Preface) and the Greeks the Anaphora. In the Canon and the Anaphora, as parts in the whole, both the words of the Lord and the modern e. are included. Hence all the confusion and misunderstandings into which many authors fall.
II. THE ARBITRARY USE OF THE TERM E
It is a truly arbitrary usage established in modern times to use the term e. to indicate exclusively the consecratory and impetratory invocation spoken of above. The origin of this abuse is to be traced to the controversy that flared up between Greeks and Latins in the 14th century over the form of the Eucharist. The Latins were surprised that the Greeks asked in their liturgy for the consecration of the offerings after the words of the Lord. CABASILAS, NICOLA (v.), first, then Simon of Thessalonica (d. 1439) and Mark of Ephesus (d. 1444), in order to argue against the Latins, devised an unheard-of theory on the form of the Eucharist, according to which the Consecration does not take place at the moment when the priest says in the person of Christ: “This is my Body, this is my Blood,” but when he asks the Father to send the Holy Spirit upon the faithful and the offerings to accomplish the transubstantiation.The words of the Lord, however, are not useless: they are the condition sine qua non because the e. that follows has its efficacy. Neither the Greeks nor the Latins noticed that in their liturgies as well as in other Eastern and Western Masses, there were not one, but several invocations. Considered in their object, such e. can be divided into two categories: strictly impetratory e. — with which graces for sanctification are asked — and consecratory e. — with which the conversion of the offerings into the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ is asked. If one looks at the place they occupy in the liturgical text, they can be called antecedent and subsequent, according as they come before or after the words of the Lord. Now, reviewing the various liturgies, one realizes that in the same Mass there are not only many impetratory e., antecedent or subsequent, but also many consecratory e., likewise antecedent and subsequent. Why, then, use the word e. to indicate exclusively the consecratory e., subsequent? Consider, for example, the Byzantine Mass of John Chrysostom, as it was used until the end of the centuries, according to the Codex Barberini 330. Already at the beginning of the Mass, the following consecratory e. directed to Jesus Christ was read: “Our Lord and God, who hast offered Thyself as a spotless lamb for the salvation of the world, look upon us, this bread and this chalice, and make them Thy immaculate Body and Thy precious Blood for the nourishment of souls and bodies” (cf. E. Brightman, Eastern Liturgies, I, Oxford 1896, p. 309). This e. no longer appears after the 8th century.
In the Coptic Masses of St. Basil and St. Cyril, in the Greek-Alexandrian liturgy of St. Gregory, in the Greek liturgy of St. Mark, and in the other Greek liturgy of the Papyrus of Dêr Balizêh, there is an antecedent consecratory e., while there is a very explicit subsequent consecratory e.
Various authors have maintained that the presence of a subsequent consecratory e. was a primitive and universal fact. This is not true because the most ancient liturgical texts currently known, such as the Apostolic Tradition of St. Hippolytus and the Testamentum Domini, have only one 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 dogmatic question of a certain nature arises doubtless from the *è*, *consecraturi* that follows 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 consists in the words of the Lord: “This is my Body, this is my Blood.” It is at the moment when the priest pronounces them over the bread and wine, *in nomine et persona Christi*, that transubstantiation takes place. No other formula, neither before nor after, is required to effect the mystery. At the Council of Florence, Eugenius IV sought to insert this doctrine into the Decree of Union with the Greeks, but he abandoned the attempt only after their public declaration on 5 July 1439, made through Bessarion, to the effect that they followed the teaching, on this point quite clear, of their great doctor St. John Chrysostom. The same doctrine is explicitly found in the *Decretum pro Armenis*; it is presupposed by the Council of Trent (Session XIII, canon 3) and by the rubrics of the Roman Missal; it is upheld by many popes and by many decrees of the Sacred Roman Congregations against the dissident Eastern nations. The most recent declaration on the subject was made by Pius X in the letter *Ex quo nono labente saeculo* of 26 December 1910 (AAS, 3 [1911], p. 219), in which he condemned the opinion of Prince Maximilian of Saxony, formulated as follows: “In the Eastern Church and according to its intention, the *è* 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 *è*, and real presence occurs only when it is completed.” Other Catholic theologians before Maximilian had held an identical or nearly identical theory. Among them are recalled: Ambrose Catarino and Christopher de Cheffontaines, of the 16th century; the liturgist Lebrun, Eusebius Renaudot, of the 18th century; H. Schell and G. Rauschen of the 19th century.
Undoubtedly, if one considers only the *è*, *consecraturi* that follows, difficulty is encountered in reconciling this formula with Catholic doctrine, all the more so since in the text of several liturgies the words of the Lord appear in the simple narrative sequence. The difficulty ceases, or at least is considerably diminished, if attention is paid to the following two liturgical facts:
1) Many liturgies contain the *et consecraturi* antecedent to the *è*, *consecraturi* that follows; sometimes even the *è* antecedent is found right at the beginning of the liturgical text, as in the ancient Byzantine Mass of St. John Chrysostom.
2) In every liturgy, even when expressed in a purely narrative tone, the words of the Lord are accompanied by gestures or rhythms that undoubtedly express the intention of applying these words to the matter present.
The first fact is explained by this: that the Church is accustomed, in sacramental ritual, to express repeatedly, both before and after the essential act, the petition for the effect or effects of the sacred action. Bossuet writes: “The Church, in order to render the sacred action more perceptible, speaks at each stage of it as if it were being accomplished at that very moment, without too much concern for whether it has already taken place or is yet to come, so that all may be seen in the integrity of the action and, in the end, the mystery may have the fullest, most vivid, and most perceptible explanation possible... The Church does not hesitate to explain in many ways the great reality that has been accomplished, praying God to accomplish it still.” (Explication de quelques difficultés sur les prières de la Messe, 45). The second fact is no less worthy of note, for it forms part of the purely narrative context and highlights the explicit intention of attributing an actual significance to a past reality that is being commemorated.
It must be added that clear demonstration of the Catholic doctrine on the form of the Eucharist must be sought in patristic tradition. Although rather rare, explicit testimonies of this tradition are sufficiently numerous to establish that from the beginning the words of the Lord were everywhere regarded as the form of consecration. See Justin, Irenaeus, Ambrose, Gregory of Nyssa, John Chrysostom, Augustine, Hesychius of Jerusalem, Faustus of Riez, Severus of Antioch, Isidore of Seville. Of testimonies openly opposed to this, there are in all antiquity those of the Nestorian Babai the Great (d. c. 628) and others by certain Orthodox polemicists of the iconoclast period: the author of the Refutation of the Iconoclast Synod of 753, St. Nicephorus of Constantinople, Theodore Abu Qurra (d. 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 be heard only in the context of attempts at union with the Latins. Thus, in the 13th century, the Armenian Vartan the Great, an opponent of union, maintained that the form of consecration is the *è* that follows. In the 14th century, Nicholas Cabasilas adduced various theological arguments in defence of this opinion. In our own day, most Eastern dissidents, despite the teaching of their ancient doctors and theologians, have commonly reverted to this theory. Notable nuances, however, are to be found 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 *è* that follows, whereas for the Greeks they have a purely narrative value.
The practice of the Church, in sacramental ritual, of repeatedly petitioning for the effect of the sacred action both before and after the principal rite serves to explain all forms of the *è*. If the consecratory *è* 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 doubtless due to the fact that this form has the double advantage of expressing the cooperation of the Father and the Holy Spirit in the mystery of transubstantiation and of emphasizing the office of sanctifier and consecrator attributed by the Father to the third Person of the Most Holy Trinity. It has been seen, in fact, that the form of the *è* in question does not merely petition for the conversion of the bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ, but does so with a specific end in view: the sanctification of the faithful and their union in charity. This petition is most appropriately placed, namely, in the immediate proximity of Holy Communion.
Other explanations of the *è*, more or less ingenious, have been proposed by theologians. Among the simplest is that of George Scholarius (d. after 1472), an explicit defender of Catholic doctrine, an explanation later taken up by Bossuet: such a prayer, like other analogous formulas, has the purpose of expressing the intention of the celebrant to consecrate 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 *è* that follows would correspond to the mystery of the Resurrection, according to Theodore of Mopsuestia and the Nestorian liturgists; to the mystery of Pentecost, on the other hand, according to many Ethiopian liturgies and according to the dialogue between the celebrant and the deacon as interpolated in the present Byzantine Masses.
BIBL. Many are the dissensions and articles on the e. written by theologians and liturgists, especially in the West, from the 16th century. More than sufficient indications can be found in the lengthy article by S. Salaville, s. V. in D'THC, V. cols. 194-200, in the biography compiled by T. Spacili, Dottrina theologica Orientis separati de sanctissima Eucharistia, in Orientalia Christiana, 13 (1928), pp. 190-208 and f., and F. Cabrol, s. V. in DACL, V. cols. 142-184. Here we indicate only some of the most recent monographs: F. Varaine, L'épiscope eucharistique, Lyon 1910; J. Brinkhine, De episcopis eucharisticae origine, Rome 1923; N. Rusnski, Episcopi (in Russian), Presto 1920; J. Popovici, Épiscope eucharistique, Sibiu 1933; M. Jugic, Theologia dogmatica Christianorum orientalium, III, Paris 1930, pp. 256-301; V. ibid. 1935, pp. 308-316, 694-716; id., De forma Eucharistiae, De episcopis eucharisticis, Rome 1943, where attention is drawn to the multiplicity and diversity of eucharistic e.