Eucharistic Consecration and Eucharsitic Sacrifice in East and West

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Eucharistic Consecration and Eucharistic Sacrifice in East and West

Walter D. Ray
St. Paul Seminary School of Divinity

In keeping with the theme of this session of the CTRF, I will begin by discussing three writers who use Romans 12:1 in connection with Eucharist, two from the West and one from the East.

In book 10, chapter 6, of his City of God Augustine uses Romans 12 extensively in his discussion of the true and perfect sacrifice. The "reasonable service" consists of the acts of mercy of the faithful offered in and through Church and joined to Christ's sacrifice.

Eight and a half centuries after Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, in his treatise on the Eucharist in his Summa Theologiae (III.83.1 ad 2), uses the "living sacrifice" of Rom 12:1 to refer to the deeds of the laity in order to distinguish this spiritual sacrifice from the sacramental sacrifice of the altar offered by the priests. The layperson is united to Christ spiritually, and therefore can perform spiritual sacrifices, but the priest is united to Christ by sacramental power for the sacramental sacrifice.

A century later, in the East, Nicholas Cabasilas also uses "logike latreia" in connection with the Eucharist in his Commentary on the Divine Liturgy, but here it is precisely the sacrifice of the altar that he has in mind. This reasonable worship is one that no human, not even priests can offer, but only Christ.

Unlike Augustine and Aquinas, Cabasilas is not quoting directly from Romans 12, but from the eucharistic prayer of St. John Chrysostom, which at its invocation of the Holy Spirit calls the offering "reasonable and bloodless worship." If we examine the use of this term in eucharistic prayers, we discover still another understanding of the relationship of "reasonable worship" and the Eucharist. The phrase in question first enters eucharistic prayers in Alexandria or Jerusalem and is used to refer to Christ's heavenly worship of the Father in which we participate. It is quickly assimilated to Romans 12:1. It merges with a tradition that understands both the Eucharist and Christ's sacrifice as an offering of first-fruits at the heavenly altar. The offering that is made is humanity itself, as Irenaeus says, in the person of Christ, the first fruits of humanity. In this tradition "we" offer to the Creator Christ, and with Christ, ourselves. This is close to Augustine's understanding of Romans 12.

We have, then, three or four different uses of "logike latreia." For Augustine and the early Alexandrian prayers "logike latreia" unites the activity of the faithful to the eucharistic sacrifice. For Aquinas, it separates the activity of the laity from the activity of the priests and from the eucharistic sacrifice. For Cabasilas, it unites priest and laity, but only by separating both from the divine activity in the Eucharist, which alone accomplishes the eucharistic sacrifice. Neither Thomas nor Cabasilas say, with Augustine, that the whole Church is the sacrifice that is offered. They both separate the sacrifice of the altar from the offering of the faithful, though for different reasons.

What has happened between the time of Augustine and the early prayers and the writers of the Middle Ages that can account for the differences in understanding? There are no doubt many factors to which one can point. Certainly the shift in focus from the eschatological and ecclesiological to the historical and christological that we find even in eucharistic prayers plays a role. A more significant factor is the change in cultural environment, especially in the West after the center of theological thought shifts to the Germanic North. But I would like to focus on a related factor.

Partly as a result of this cultural separation, the West did not assimilate the developments in Chalcedonian christology that occurred in the Eastern Empire. As a consequence, the Byzantine East is, in a sense, more Alexandrian in christology and the West, more Antiochene. Specifically, the West has focused on the union of humanity and divinity in the man Jesus, and the East on the person of the Word of God becoming human as the man Jesus.

This difference has consequences for the Eucharist. In Roman Catholic theology the Body of Christ in the Eucharist refers primarily to the particular humanity of the man Jesus, a particularity that implies discontinuity with each of our particular humanities. This discontinuity between Christ's Body in the Eucharist and the human constituents of the ecclesial Body of Christ has obvious consequences for the ordering of the ecclesial body. It also has significance for notions of consecration, since in becoming the Body of Christ the elements become something unique and other than us.

In the Byzantine East, by contrast, the Body of Christ is understood as the humanity assumed by the divine person of the Word of God. Since the hypostasis of Christ is divine, the humanity assumed is the whole human nature, as Leontius of Jerusalem says, following Cyril of Alexandria. The stress is on the continuity between Jesus's humanity and the rest of humanity. The particular humanity of the Word is, says Leontius, "the leaven in the dough" of the whole of humanity. We see here continuity with the "first fruits" of the early Alexandrian eucharistic prayers. Here in consecration the bread and wine, which are already us in our createdness, become us as assumed by the Word. We offer them--ourselves--in, through and as Christ, the first-fruits of humanity and indeed of all creation.

There is in principle no theological reason why Cabasilas does not identify the Church with the sacrifice of the altar. That he does not do so is partly because the model of liturgical commentary that he and the Byzantine church in general follow is thoroughly Antiochene, but even more because the liturgical forms have been Antiochenized, asking for transformation of the Eucharistic elements. Ironically, the Latin West, which theologically requires distinction between us and the consecrated bread and wine, long retained liturgical forms which are more Alexandrian in character, with prayer for the simple reception at the heavenly altar of what we offer from God's own gifts.