In the last issue of this article, I introduced the Mystagogical Catechesis attributed to St. Cyril and indicated that the last two lectures, given to new converts after their initiation into the Church, dealt with the Eucharist. In these two lectures Cyril presents a new way of speaking of the presence of Christ in the Eucharist. The Church of the first three centuries was clear that Christ was present at its celebration, as the active, invisible celebrant. For Cyril he is present rather also as the passive victim. Christians in the early centuries did not doubt that in Communion they received the Body and Blood of Christ, the bread of eternal life and the cup of everlasting salvation. But Cyril speaks of the consecration of the elements as bringing about a change of an almost chemical kind: he cites the changing of water into wine at Cana in Galilee as an example of the kind of change effected in the Eucharist. The East anticipated the medieval Western doctrine of the real presence by many hundreds of years.

It must be remembered that just as it took time for the Church to sort out her thoughts about who Jesus is, it took time for her to find the words to express her belief about the Eucharist. Because we have always lived in a church that had already found a way to express her belief in the Eucharist, we sometimes think that her ideas about it were clear right from the very beginning.

This change in thinking about the Eucharist was brought about by the Holy Spirit. Cyril’s ideas reflect the fully-developed theology of the Third Person of the Trinity (i.e., Holy Spirity) which emerged in the fourth century in the course of theological argument and was proclaimed as the true doctrine of the church at the Council of Constantinople in 381 CE. Cyril is quite clear that ‘whatsoever the Holy Spirit touches is sanctified and changed’. In the Eucharist this doctrine received expression in the invocation, or epiclesis, of the Holy Spirit in the eucharistic prayer (one of the reasons why I take the epiclesis out loud). Cyril is the first witness to this fully-developed epiclesis which became characteristic of Eastern eucharistic prayers. The West, by contrast, did not adopt the new fashion and the eucharistic prayer of the Roman Mass continued to pray for consecration in an older way, by asking God to accept the gifts at his heavenly altar. Nicholas Cabasilas, in the fourteenth century, was to point to the Roman prayer as equivalent in function to the Eastern epiclesis: but it reflected an older and rather different view of the Eucharist.

Different but equally Catholic!