The Foundation of the World: Eucharist as “Source” of the Christian Life
Justin Shaun Coyle, Ph.D.
Let me begin with a confession: I’ve never quite understood what Lumen Gentium means when it teaches that the Eucharist is “the source and summit of the Christian life.”
In truth it’s not the entire turn of phrase that puzzles me. How the Eucharist functions as the summit (Latin: culmen) of the Christian life seems clear enough. The goal or telos or end of Christian living is theosis, or communion with God in Christ by the Spirit. And communion with God in Christ by the Spirit is exactly what the Eucharist offers. So it makes good and obvious sense to call it “the summit” of the Christian life. Not only does Eucharist-as-summit make good sense. It is also threaded deeply into the fabric of Christian tradition. St Ireneaus of Lyons writes that Christians, like wheat, are crushed before they rise and become Christ (haer. 5.2.3). St Ignatius of Antioch described his looming martyrdom as being ground like wheat by the teeth of beasts to become “the true bread.” Recall similar images in other martyrologies—Polycarp’s, Perpetua and Felicity’s, and so on. All of which to say that the Eucharist as “summit” of the Christian life seems clear.
But Eucharist as source? Here ready-to-hand explanations prove more elusive. Don’t Christians engage liturgy and works of mercy and prayer and baptism before they receive the Eucharist? In the Latin Church children are baptized seven or eight years before first communion. How then can the Eucharist be a source? Worse: Lumen Gentium calls the Eucharist not a source among others but rather the source of the Christian life.[1] So to the problem of time the text adds one of exclusion, neither of which are easy to solve. And so the question stands before us, clear and vivid: How should we understand the Eucharist to be the source of the Christian life?
I’d like to explore a few answers to that question. More specifically, I’d like to propose that answers to what it means for the Eucharist to be “the source of the Christian life” lay hidden within the liturgy itself. My comments, then, will parse into two uneven sections. The first will gloss the rite of proskomēdia, the service prescribed directly before every Divine Liturgy in the Byzantine tradition. The second section will advocate three ways in which the proskomēdia rite might help us understand Lumen Gentium’s teaching about the Eucharist as the source of the Christian life.
I
The proskomēdia begins behind the iconostas’ well before the liturgy. After the clergy have finished their vesting prayers, they approach the prothēsis—a table tucked behind the altar. As they do, they bow three times and recite this prayer: “By Thy precious blood thou has redeemed us from the curse of the law. By being nailed to the cross and pierced with a spear, Thou has poured immortality upon men. O our Savior, glory to Thee!” The priest then offers “Blessed is our God always, now and ever and unto ages of ages.
The priest now takes the prosphoron—the bread to be consecrated; one large loaf in the Greek tradition, several smaller loaves in the Slavic—in his left hand. Over it with a small knife called “the spear” in his right hand, he traces the sign of the cross over it three times. Each time he repeats: “In remembrance of our Lord and God and Savior Jesus Christ.”
The priest then sets the prosphoron on the diskos, a platter. Slicing off the right quadrant of the prosphoron along the seal’s edge with the spear, the priest intones: “As a sheep led to the slaughter.” He then cuts off the left quadrant, praying: “or as a blameless lamb before its shearers is silent, so he opens not his mouth.” Next he cuts off the top quadrant, praying: “In his humiliation judgment was taken away.” Last he cuts away the bottom quadrant, saying as he does: “Who shall declare his generation?”
The priest now removes this center square—called now the “lamb”—from the four removed quadrants, praying: “For his life is taken up from the earth.” The deacon then petitions: “sacrifice, master.” And so the priest does, flipping the lamb over to slice into it a cross. As he does, he says: “Sacrificed is the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world, for the life of the world and its salvation.” The priest then flips the lamb back over as the deacon petitions again: “pierce, master.” The priest now pierces the lamb on its right side with the spear, saying: “One of the soldiers pierced His side with a spear, and at once there came out blood and water. He who saw it has borne witness, and his witness is true.” As he does so, the deacon holds water and wine for the priest to pour out into the chalice. The first portion of the service is complete.
The second portion begins when the priest carves out of the remainder of the left quadrant a triangular figure, saying as he does: “In honor and memory of our most blessed Lady the Theotokos and ever-virgin Mary. Through her prayers, O Lord, accept this sacrifice upon Thy heavenly altar.” The priest places the triangular piece of bread representing the Theotokos on the diskos to the right side of the lamb.
He does the same with the other quadrants, which will variously represent and invoke prayers to the ranks of the angels, John the Forerunner, the prophets and patriarchs of Israel, the twelve apostles, Church Fathers, martyrs, saints especially dear to the tradition of the parish (Slavic or Greek saints), the bishop whose anaphora the liturgy will later celebrate (John Chrysostom or Basil the Great), living hierarchs, clergy, and monastics of the Church, and the laity both living and dead as the parish intentions dictate. Each of these ranks get a separate “piece” carved from the initial remnants of the prosphoron whence came the lamb. And each is variously arranged around the lamb on the diskos until this pattern is achieved.
The final portion of the proskomēdia begins when the priest censes the completed diskos, petitioning God as he does to accept the rising incense onto his heavenly altar and to return for it the gift of the Holy Spirit on the parish altar. The priest then covers the diskos with a small metal device called an asterisk or “star,” saying as he does: “And the star came and stood over the place where the young child was.” The priest then covers the asterisk with a cloth veil, saying: “The Lord reigns… the world is established; it shall never be moved. Thy throne is established from of old; Thou art from everlasting.” There follow prayers about all of creation—water, earth, sky—praising the Lord for so establishing them.
After several other praises for God’s eternal love for humankind, the priest completes the proskomēdia service with a final prayer:
O God, our God, who didst send the Heavenly Bread, the food of the whole world, our Lord and God Jesus Christ, to be our Savior, Redeemer, and Benefactor, blessing and sanctifying us: Bless this offering, and accept it upon Thy heavenly altar. Remember those who offered it and those for whom it was offered, for Thou art good and lovest mankind. Preserve us blameless in the celebration of Thy divine mysteries. For sanctified and glorified is Thy most honorable adn majestic name: of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, now and ever and unto ages of ages. Amen.
And the deacon responds:
In the tomb with the body; in hell with the soul, as God; in paradise with the thief; and on the throne with the Father and the Spirit wast Thou, O Christ, filling all things, Thyself uncircumscribed.
Only after the close of the proskomēdia can the liturgy proper begin with its famous opening refrain: “Blessed be the kingdom of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, now and ever and unto ages of ages. Amen.” The kingdom being blessed is, note, the very one the proskomēdia has already made present.
II
So much, then, for the rite itself. It’s a rich service textured ornately—even garishly—with layers of theological symbol and historical development. Readers interested in its symbols might consult Byzantine commentaries on the service like Nicholas Cabasilas’s or Symeon of Thessaloniki’s. Readers interested in the proskomēdia’s development might consider recent liturgical studies that scrupulously track changes across the rite’s long life from its origins in the simple blessing of the faithful’s gifts in the early Church through its more refined embroidery across the Byzantine period.
But here we’re interested less in the proskomēdia as such. Instead I promised that the service might help us understand the Eucharist as source of the Christian life. So, how does it?
I propose three answers, each of which contains the other rather like nesting dolls.
1. The first way the proskomēdia helps us understand the Eucharist as source concerns the liturgy. Many have noted how the order of the liturgy—Western or Eastern—rehearses the order of salvation history. In most Western rites, there’s an Old Testament reading signifying God’s presence to his people Israel. Then follow hotfoot two New Testament readings disclosing the meaning of those Old Testament scriptures as Christ himself. Only then does the liturgy of the Eucharist begin to extend the salvation God wrought among his people Israel first and to Christ’s disciples next out to us Gentiles last in the Eucharist. And then the faithful are sent forth. Here again, the very order of the liturgy suggests that the Eucharist is the summit. But how is it the source?
As the proskomēdia shows, the liturgy does not in fact begin with the liturgy of the word. Rather it begins with the memory of the cross whence flows “immortality to us,” a memory that the proskomēdia prayers affirm is ”unto the ages of ages” or eternal. What does it mean for this memory to be eternal? Certainly it entails remembering a past—the crucifixion of Jesus Christ in the first-century. But remembering eternally also means, in Metropolitan John Zizioulas’s paradoxical phrase, remembering a future—the Eucharist to come during the liturgy.
So what are we saying, exactly? Does the proskomēdia precede or follow the Eucharist? Our answer will depend entirely on our vantage. From one angle of vision, the proskomēdia prepares the gifts that will later become Eucharist. Thus the proskomēdia precedes the Eucharist—remaining bread with, as Nicholas Cabasilas insists, “no more than the capacity to be offered to God.” Still, it’s not as if the faithful offer bread and wine at the altar wondering what might later become of them. No: the gifts are offered precisely for the Eucharist. Becoming Eucharist, we might say, names the gifts’ final cause. And from this angle of vision, the proskomēdia logically follows the Eucharist.
(Or perhaps—just to test your intellectual patience a little—it’s more than a logical priority. Perhaps it’s rather more like the Church Fathers teaching that the incarnation of Christ causally precedes Old Testament prophecy about it or that Friday’s Golgotha precedes Thursday’s upper room. With apologies to the philosophers present, sometimes the higher science requires that future events cause past effects.)[2]
Anyhow, the point is this: if proskomēdia precedes the Eucharist liturgically, it follows the Eucharist theologically. What does this mean for the Eucharist as source? It means that the liturgy can only occur, as Alexander Schmemann writes, “because the sacrifice of Christ has already been offered.”[3] The otherwise chronological order of the liturgy—from the Old Testament through the New and into Eucharist—finds its place within a Eucharistic horizon. The Eucharist, then, is the source of the Christian life exactly because it is the source of the liturgy.
2. The second way the proskomēdia helps us understand the Eucharist as source concerns salvation history as such. The proskomēdia does not, that is, overture Eucharistic themes for merely aesthetic reasons. Rather the liturgy instructs us on a theological point: that, namely, God’s acts of salvation in history precede the Eucharist temporally but follow it theologically.
What do I mean? Sometimes we imagine the story of salvation history beginning with an abstract deity who, due to divine boredom, decides to make a cosmos. After creating that cosmos God’s falls again into boredom and so elects Abraham and then, again arbitrarily, decides to favor among all peoples the tribes of Israel. Frustrated with their misadventures, God next develops plan B. He becomes incarnate, saving humanity from their sin—though he might just as well not have done either.
But as the proskomēdia interprets it, this isn’t exactly the salvation history scripture narrates. Instead, the proskomēdia reads scripture to relay the revelation of God in Christ as the “lamb slain before the foundations of the world,” the “mystery hidden from the ages but revealed now to the saints,” “he who is before all things, and by whom all things consist,” the “high priest forever” who enters “into a Holy of Holies not made by hand but in heaven itself.” This is not a God who has decided after some deliberation to take flesh only after having liberated Israel from Egypt and before that having called Abraham. Rather scripture depicts a God who is always already Jesus Christ and only now in time has revealed himself as such. Thus St Paul can teach the Galatians that Sarah and Hagar, who preceded Christ’s advent in time, were in fact an allegory of his Church (Gal. 4:24). As the Lord himself says: “before Abraham was, I am” (Jn. 8:58).
What does all this have to do with the Eucharist as source? Well, if Christ is high priest forever as Hebrews 9 says, then he was never not offering sacrifice to the Father in the Spirit in the heavenly temple that is the very life of God the Trinity. Which means that Eucharist is less something God decides to do than it is an aspect of who God is. Or better: it’s something God does exactly because it’s who God is. “The Eucharist accomplished on earth,” as Sergei Bulgakov has it, “is eternally accomplished in heaven.”[4] It was as the eucharistic Lord that God revealed himself in scripture—first among the people Israel in their temple cult, second among the twelve as the crucified, and last to all nations as the one revealed principally in the breaking of the bread (Lk. 24:31). That our understanding of God changes does not (and cannot) mean that God himself does. The truth is, the God revealed in Christ by the power of the Spirit was never not eucharistic.
All of which the proskomēdia recognizes even in its opening prayer. The God invoked before the liturgy is always already eucharistically the same one who was “nailed to the cross and pierced with a spear… pouring immortality upon men.” And so if God’s acts in salvation history precede the Eucharist temporally, they follow from the Eucharist theologically. So construed, the Eucharist is the source not only of liturgy but also of salvation itself.
Let me hazard a third way in which the proskomēdia helps us understand the Eucharist. 3. This way has to do with humanity in general, that is, what we all—at least those among us who self-identify as human—take ourselves to be.
Suppose I polled Christians about what it means to be human. Some of their definitions are invariably scientific: to be human is to be a member of the species homo sapiens sapiens, bipedal mammals with overly large brains and overly dependent offspring. Other definitions are more philosophical: to be human is to be a rational animal, the Aristotelians would say (ruling out, I note, my three children). Some Cartesians might prefer the human as res cogitans—maybe there’s an exotic Pascalian who likes “thinking reed, weakest in nature” for a definition. But most Christians, I find, prefer the classical theological definition of the human as imago dei. All of which are, so far as they go, surely correct.
Consider for a moment, though, the human as imago dei. We all know without checking our Bibles that the language comes to us from Genesis 1:26. But maybe we should check, because—as Fr John Behr often notes—that’s not really what the text says. It doesn’t say humans are the image. It says humans are made kat’ eikona or ad imaginem—in or even unto the image. If humans are in or unto the imago dei, then who is the imago dei? Colossians 1:15 teaches there’s only one “image of the invisible God.” And it’s the very same person about whom Pilate exclaims ecce homo, “behold, the human!” If to be human is to be imago dei, then, then Christ defines what it is to be human. “Adam,” St Paul writes to the Romans, “is but a type of the one to come.” So St Ignatius of Antioch can claim that only upon his martyrdom in Christ will he truly “become a human being” (Ad rom. 6).
That humanity is somehow made both in and unto the imago dei, that is, Christ, the proskomēdia seems already to know. In the service humanity is “formed” only when the prosphoron is cut with the spear from the lamb representing Christ. Humanity, then, is made in Christ. True, the priest then removes the lamb from the remainder to “sacrifice” it. Yet gradually across the service bits of that remainder are carved and prayed over and arranged around the crucified lamb on the diskos. And it’s the fully completed diskos, notice—with the lamb at the center surrounded by pieces representing the entire cosmos—that is veiled before the liturgy begins. Humanity, then, is made unto Christ. The eschatological Church is complete in eternity, as it were, before the liturgy of the Church in time even begins.
Again, it’s easy to lose one’s way among the thicket of symbols—the liturgy is not called “Byzantine” for nothing. But really, the idea that humanity is formed in and unto Christ is deeply scriptural. As to our formation in Christ: John’s prologue says that “”; 1 Corinthians 8:6 that in Jesus Christ through whom are all things and through whom we exist”; Ephesians that we were “chosen in [Christ Jesus] before the creation of the world” (1:4), even that “we were created”—not re-created, mind, but created—”in Christ Jesus” (2:10). As to our formation unto Christ: 2 Corinthians 3:18 teaches that we are “we are being transformed into the same image”; Romans 12 that “we, though many, are one body in Christ”; 1 Corinthians “we are all members of the body of Christ” (12:12) and that when God is “all in all” we “shall bear the image of the man of heaven” (15:28, 49).
If these verses are familiar to us, we often struggle to interpret them. What the proskomēdia helps us discern is their eucharistic meaning. Just as in the service the prosphoron pieces representing humanity are carved in the crucified lamb and then returned unto him in the diskos, so too is humanity formed in Christ only to be returned unto him in salvation. If that’s so, then the proskomēdia challenges assumptions about who we take ourselves to be. Perhaps humanity is not an indeterminate set of rational animals some of whom wake up early on Sundays and drag themselves to Church. Perhaps instead to be truly human is to arrange ourselves around the lamb in and unto his very body that the Church is. Perhaps the Church is not merely an elective organization of like-minded individuals like the rotary club or a scrapbooking group. Perhaps instead the Church just is the world’s hidden truth. Perhaps, as the Shepherd of Hermas has it, the “world was made for the sake of the Church” (2.4.1).
What then is the third way in which the proskomēdia helps us to understand the Eucharist as source? It shows us that though humanity precedes Christ’s advent temporally, it is already formed in and unto Christ theologically. In this way, we might say that humanity—true humanity, anyhow—finds its source in the Eucharistic self-gift of Christ’s own humanity. As then-Cardinal Ratzinger once wrote in his essay “Eucharist, Communion, and Solidarity,” to be rendered in the Eucharist “one sole thing in [Christ]” is also to become “members of one another.”[5] This “vertical” dimension of the Eucharist—how its arrival on our earthly altars from the heavenly altar shows us who we are in Christ—also has “horizontal” implications for the way we imagine life together, though exploring the Eucharist’s social or political implications here would take us too far afield.
So, anyhow, my three answers: the proskomēdia shows us that the Eucharist is the source of the liturgy, the source of salvation history, and the source of true humanity.
III
In his “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon,” the poet Wallace Stevens writes: “there I found myself more truly, and more strange.” Where is this “there” where Stevens finds himself “more truly, and more strange”? Forget the poet’s own intentions—Plato taught us to suspect those anyhow. Ask instead where us Christians find ourselves more truly and more strange. Scripture suggests that we locate this “there” in the space-time of the eschaton. After all, it’s there that we’re “hidden in christ.” But scripture also suggests that we don’t have immediate epistemic access to this future. “What we will be is not yet known,” says 1 John 3:2. We know only that “when Christ appears, we will be like him.” For now, we see only “as in a mirror darkly” (1 Cor. 13:12).
And yet see we still do, since, as it happens, Christ does appear to us. That “there,” the time-place of Christ’s revelation of both himself and of ourselves, is the Eucharist. This revelation explains in part why Christians practice and revere and darling the Eucharist as we do. The Eucharist is not only something we do; it is something we are—or else what God is making us into. If we wish to find ourselves more truly and more strange, then we ought to look to the Eucharist: the source and summit of Christian life.
[1] The Latin text lacks a definite article, obviously, reading only fons.
[2] Philosophy too knows complications concerning chronological time. A famous example is J.E. McTaggart’s “The Unreality of Time” (1908). Modern physics, too, trouble tidy thought-pictures of linear chronology. On this point, see Carlo Rovelli’s The Order of Time (New York: Penguin Publishers, 2018).
[3] Alexander Schmemann, The Eucharist: Sacrament of the Kingdom (Yonkers: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003), 110.
[4] Bulgakov, The Eucharistic Sacrifice, 19.
[5] Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, “Lecture at the Bishop’s Conference of the Region of Campania in Benevento on the Topic: ‘Eucharist, Communion, and Solidarity,” 2 June 2002 <https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20020602_ratzinger-eucharistic-congress_en.html>.