On the Christ-Angel of the Roman Mass

The Ascension of Christ, Mirozhsky Monastery, Pskov

In Fr. Claude Barthe’s remarkable book A Forest of Symbols: The Traditional Mass and Its Meaning (Angelico Press, 2023, reviewed here), we are introduced early on to the allegorical understanding of Christ as an “Angel,” that is, a messenger and mediator, in keeping with the Septuagint’s use of the phrase “Angel of the Great Counsel” in Isaiah 9:6. Speaking of the Asperges, Fr Barthe says:

The aspersion itself, which follows when the ministers have entered the church, is really a combination of blessing and exorcism, almost a domestic rite. It resembles the aspersions seen in monasteries when a tour was made of the cloister, or the individual cells were visited. The final prayer of this ceremony, Exaudi nos, Domine . . . (Hear us, O holy Lord, almighty Father, eternal God: and vouchsafe to send thy holy angel from heaven, to guard, cherish, protect, visit, and defend all that dwell in this house), which is that of the blessing prescribed by the Ritual when the priest blesses a house as he enters it to carry out a ceremony, refers to the habitaculum, the house where one lives, for which one requests a visit from the Angel of God. This is also a first reference to “the Angel of God,” that is, to Christ himself, who is asked to come down to this place… There is a link between this water and the Blood of Christ, since immersion in the waters of baptism represents in reality immersion in the cistern of Christ’s propitiatory Blood. (36)

Later, speaking of the rite of incensation, Fr. Barthe comments:

The humanity of Jesus Christ, consumed (or consummated, as the classical writers used to say) in the sacrifice, lifts his prayer up to the Father, the only prayer that the Father finds acceptable, to which are joined the prayers of the saints, thrown like grains of incense into the burning furnace of love of Christ’s holy soul…. [T]he Angel of the Apocalypse (Rev 8:3–4)…draws near to the altar and offers the incense with the prayers of the saints… This Angel is, of course, Christ himself, and his golden censer (or scoop) is his precious humanity: “Let my prayer be directed as incense in thy sight; the lifting up of my hands, as evening sacrifice” (Ps 140:2). (41)

Concerning the incensation at the offertory, he develops the point further:

Of course, the offering of incense at the altar also symbolizes the Angel who stood beside the altar of the Temple, holding in his hand the censer from which the smoke of the incense rose in the presence of the Lord (Rev 8:3–4). This angel is compared to St Michael, but above all reflects Christ, the Angel of Great Counsel, offering his own immaculate flesh, full of the fire of the Holy Spirit, to the Lord on our behalf on the altar of the Cross, in the odor of sweetness. The smoke of the incense gives material expression, in some way, along with the prayer of Christ, to the prayers of his saints. (91–92)

Then comes the most mysterious angel of all, the one mentioned in the “communion epiklesis” of the Roman Canon, the Supplices te rogamus:

We most humbly beseech thee, almighty God, to command that these things be borne by the hands of thy holy angel to thine altar on high, in the sight of thy divine majesty, that as many of us as, at this altar, shall partake of and receive the most holy Body ✠ and ✠ Blood of thy Son may be filled with every heavenly blessing and grace, through the same Christ our Lord. Amen.

On which Fr. Barthe observes:

There have been many discussions of the identity of the “Angel.” Durandus wrote, “He is the Angel of Great Counsel, the Counsellor on whose advice the Father created and recreated the world,” otherwise known as Christ-Wisdom, the Word incarnate. But he adds that the altar on high in the presence of God is also the crucified Christ sitting in glory at the right hand of the Father. The Angel brings these “sacraments” to this altar, revealing his wounds, and interceding for us who bring the sacraments to fulfilment on earth. Olier and Pierre Lebrun take a similar view. It is worth noting that the De Sacramentis refers to angels in the plural (per manus angelorum tuorum) rather than the singular, which would not contradict the idea of a “communion epiklesis,” but would prevent identification of the angels with Christ. St Thomas Aquinas, who thinks that the Angel can be compared to Christ, derives the following mystical etymology: the Mass, missa, takes its name from the fact that, through the Angel, the priest sends (mittit) his prayers to God, or again because Christ is the approved victim sent (missa) to us. All of which underlines that the meaning of the prayer Supplices te rogamus is at the heart of this oblation of the holy victim, which we know as the Canon, and is therefore also at the heart of the whole celebration. (117–18)

The Christological interpretation is classic and theologically attractive.

However, if we take the other interpretation, namely, that the angel who is tasked with bringing our offering before God is a reference to the created angel depicted in the book of Revelation as bringing the prayers of the saints before God, we can see some neat things about the Canon.

Note, first, how differently the Canon handles angels and saints. We ask to be admitted to the saints’ company, and we offer the Mass to their honor and remembrance, and we ask that they pray for us, but we never explicitly ask them to do the one thing the angel does: offer the Mass to God. In fact, the saints are never described as worshipping God (of course they do worship God—I’m just talking about what the text explicitly says). But the one other time angels are mentioned in the Canon lines up perfectly with the task of this angel of Revelation: the Preface describes the angels—above all, the cherubim and the seraphim—as ceaselessly worshipping God.

All of this suggests to me that, as the angels are by their very nature the mediators between God and men, so are they by their very nature the ones who would mediate even our prayers to God. The saints have joined the angels by grace, to be sure, but grace has not simply abolished the difference in nature between human souls and angelic choirs. The Mass seems to nod to this difference by a selectivity of description: saints do worship God ceaselessly, but that is not the role assigned them in the text of the Canon; angels do pray for us, but that is not the role assigned to them in the Canon. Rather, the angels are the primordial divine attendants; the saints are those who have joined the angels; and we hope to join the saints.

Because we are speaking of the Canon, allow me to mention one last beautiful subtlety: the sudden shift in prayer after the consecration. Up to that point, all prayer is directed to the Father through the Son in the Holy Spirit; but after that point, prayer is consistently directed to the Son directly—and naturally enough, because THERE HE IS. Before the consecration, all prayer is shaped by the mystery of the Trinity; after the consecration, prayer is shaped by the Incarnation. In this way, the form of the prayer reflects the great mystery of God’s inner life piercing into our world of space and time through the Son taking on flesh.

Leaf from a Beatus manuscript: the Opening of the Fifth Seal (1180), Spanish, from the Met collections

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The Errors of Fr. Fortescue’s “The Mass: A Study of the Roman Liturgy” (Part 2)

In the previous article in this series, I discussed the influence of evolutionary theory on the intellectual climate of the 19th century, in reference to the liturgical writings of Fr Adrian Fortescue. Of course, I did not say that solely because he lived in a period in which certain ideas held sway, we can be sure that the forma mentis of that period must have influenced him and his writings on the liturgy. Correlation is not causation. Therefore, I propose in this article to give two examples which I think convincingly demonstrate that he was influenced by the dominant evolutionary mindset of his time. I have chosen these two partly because they pertain to matters in which historically erroneous scholarship was particularly important in the post-Conciliar reform, and partly because these errors are now generally recognized to be in fact errors.

Fr Fortescue in cope among the servers at his church, St Hugh’s, in Letchworth, England. Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.

The first is the matter of the epiclesis, to which he devotes a special appendix. He correctly notes that that it is “not primitive”, unattested before the mid-4th century (St Cyril of Jerusalem). He also notes that although its standard position is immediately after the consecration, there are many examples of prayers that similarly invoke the Holy Spirit in other places in various liturgies: in the Coptic liturgy of St Mark at the beginning, in the ancient rite of Jerusalem, at the Great Entrance, etc. He furthermore points out that some secrets of the so-called Leonine Sacramentary are “true Invocations”. (E.g. the secret of the 30th “daily Mass” placed in the month of July: “Send, o Lord, we ask, the Holy Spirit, that He may make these our present gifts Thy sacrament, and purify our hearts to receive it.” [1])

However, he runs his ship aground when he tackles the question of the formal epiclesis in the Roman Rite. “It is, I think, certain that the Roman rite too once had an Epiklesis of the Holy Ghost. Apart from the fact that otherwise it would be unique in Christendom, we have direct evidence of it.” Note that his first argument is that the Roman Rite must have had an epiclesis, because it would be unique among Christian rites if it didn’t. This can only be justified by broadly, perhaps even unconsciously, accepting the notion that all liturgies start from a common source, that which he describes in his first chapter as the substantial liturgical uniformity of the early Church. But in point of fact, every rite has features unique to itself, and one of the most distinctive features of the Roman is that it is the only one that has only one Eucharistic prayer. This being the case, it is easy to suppose that that Eucharistic prayer should itself have unique characteristics, such as, for example, the absence of a formal epiclesis.

He then adduces what he calls “direct evidence” of it in the Roman Rite, two citations of Pope St Gelasius I (492-96). The first of these says that “the sacraments of the body and blood of the Lord pass over into the divine substance, the Holy Spirit working this.” Fortescue understates the case when he writes that this one is “perhaps less certain” as evidence of the epiclesis. There is no reason to assume that this refers to a prayer at all, much less one that was part of the Canon.

The second is closer to the mark (although also not without significant problems), and of it he says that it “leaves surely no doubt that Gelasius knew the Epiklesis. ‘How shall the heavenly Spirit, being invoked, come to the consecration of the divine mystery, if the priest who prays him to be present is condemned as being full of evil deeds?’ (literally, “criminous actions”) We may then surely conclude that in the Vth century Rome had an Invocation of the Holy Ghost.”

An illuminated folio of a sacramentary made ca. 870 for the Holy Roman Emperor Charles the Bald, grandson of Charlemagne, which shows him between the putative papal authors of the two version of the Roman Sacramentary, Ss Gelasius I and Gregory the Great. Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.

This is cited to a collection of “Authentic Letters of the Roman Pontiffs” made by a German scholar, A. Thiel [2], which includes the Latin version of this text, and the footnote acknowledges that it is a fragment. But since so much is being hung on this one, very thin thread, this would have been the place to mention a few other pertinent facts. The first is that the full fragment consists of only one other sentence before this. “The sacrosanct religion which holds the Catholic discipline, demands for itself such great reverence that no one may dare to come to it without a pure conscience.” [3] The full context is lacking, and the connection between the two sentences is not wholly clear.

Far more importantly, this fragment is preserved as part of a collection of disciplinary canons. However, there is a considerable amount of such material that passes under Gelasius’ name, but is not authentically his. The introductory note under which this same text appears in Migne’s Patrologia Latina (LIX 141 B) states that there is no Pope apart from Ss Leo the Great and Gregory the Great under whose name there circulate more such decrees, but the editor makes it clear that he does not intend to take a position on the authenticity of any given one of them by including them with Gelasius’ works.

Furthermore, this statement is prima facie dangerously close to the Donatist heresy which St Augustine so strenuously opposed, and which the See of Rome also thoroughly rejected. [4] The so-called Gelasian Decree, which is not his, but is certainly Roman and not much later than his time, condemns Donatus by name. We may therefore reasonably surmise that the canon may not be authentically Gelasian, and hence, not a witness to the liturgy of Rome at all.

But even if it is from Gelasius, Fortescue himself has stated earlier in the same appendix of his book that invocations of the Holy Spirit are found in various parts of the liturgy in different rites. There is nothing about the wording of this canon which positively requires that the prayer that the Spirit be present come immediately after the Consecration, and cannot refer rather to some other part of the consecratory rite, e.g., some kind of private prayer of preparation. [5]

The appendix on the epiclesis concludes with a supposition that it was then removed from the Roman Canon “because of the growing Western insistence on the words of institution as the Consecration form”, and therefore a later invocation of the Holy Spirit seemed “unnecessary and misleading.” The most obvious problem with this statement is that it has never seemed so to the Eastern churches, which have the epiclesis after the words of institution. Fortescue cites various Fathers who emphasize the importance of the words of institution, but he cites nothing to indicate that anyone between Gelasius and Gregory the Great thought that their importance was compromised by the presence of the putative epiclesis. (It is Gregory to whom the removal of the epiclesis was often attributed in Fortescue’s own time, as he notes.)

The relevant portion of the Canon in the Gellone Sacramentary, ca 780 AD. 

But most importantly, this theory flies in the face of all the witnesses to the actual text of the Roman Canon, none of which has any evidence of the supposedly lost epiclesis. The theory therefore requires us to believe that when someone, presumably a Pope, decided to remove the epiclesis from the Canon, it somehow managed to disappear from every single manuscript of the Canon in exactly the same way, leaving no trace of itself, no trace of the decree that expunged it, and no trace of the ideas leading up to the decree.

Of course, I am far from the first person to observe these difficulties with the theory, which is why it is now generally abandoned. Fr Hunwicke cites the late Fr Robert Taft SJ to this effect: “The decidedly Christological stamp of the old Roman Canon is a sign of great antiquity. This eucharistic prayer, obviously formulated before the impact of the late fourth century pneumatological resolution at Constantinople I (381 AD) reflects a primitive euchological theology much older than almost any extant eastern anaphora… The old Roman Canon of the Mass has a weak pneumatology not because it is defective but because it is old, so old that it was composed before the divine personhood of the Holy Spirit became a problem to be resolved.”

The second question is that of the Old Testament reading before the Epistle which supposedly dropped out of the Roman Rite. Fortescue covers this topic in the sixth chapter of his first part, on “The Lessons.”

He begins with St Justin Martyr’s First Apology, noting that he says nothing about either the number or order of the readings. “(T)hese were then reduced to three, Prophetia, Epistola, Evangelium. … Since the VIIth century there have been normally only two, the prophetic lesson having dropped out.” (p. 257) Speaking of the original order of things, he says, “The Gradual was sung after the Prophecy, the Alleluia before the Gospel.” (p. 267)

The reason why I attribute this hypothesis to a forma mentis molded by evolutionary theory is that in Fortescue’s time, many scholars believed that the Ambrosian Rite was an archaic form of the Roman Rite. Fortescue himself certainly knew this, since he cites the work of the two principal proponents of this idea, Ceriani and Magistretti. And the Ambrosian is the only rite that actually attests to the putative original Roman order of readings and chants: Prophecy, Gradual, Epistle, Alleluia, Gospel.

But elsewhere, Fortescue explicitly rejects Ceriani and Magistretti’s idea, stating that “The Gallican, Ambrosian and Mozarabic liturgies are really independent, with no more connection with Rome than there is always between any Christian services.” This means that for him, the Ambrosian Rite is not itself the missing link that connects Justin Martyr to the earliest Roman lectionaries. These two ideas together can only make sense, on the author’s own terms, if he is taking for granted that an original common form (the “substantial liturgical uniformity” of the early Church posited by his first chapter) began to evolve, stopping at an intermediate stage in Milan, but continuing to evolve at Rome.

Once again, the problem with this is simply that there is no evidence in any liturgical book of the Roman Rite, or in the writings of any Roman Church Father, that any of this ever happened. Fortescue and others posit a similar evolution for the Byzantine Rite, with a similar lack of either patristic or liturgical evidence. While it is prima facie difficult to believe that such a feature could totally vanish from the rite of one patriarchal see, leaving no trace of itself behind, it is absurd to posit that this could happen in two such rites. This theory is therefore now also largely abandoned.

To sum up, then: in both cases, Fortescue is assuming gradual changes that lead from an earlier common form to later diversified ones, even though he has no evidence of the intermediate stage that the theory itself requires (the “missing links”), and cannot really demonstrate any motive or agent for the putative change. This is exactly the problem that evolutionary theory has been wrestling with in the field of biology since the days of Darwin.

NOTES:

[1] In Mohlberg’s critical edition, 578: “Mitte, Domine, quaesumus, Spiritum Sanctum, qui et haec munera praesentia nostra tuum nobis efficiat sacramentum, et ad hoc percipiendum nostra corda purificet.”

[2] Epistolae Romanorum Pontificum genuinae (Braunsberg, 1868)

[3] “Sacrosancta religio, quæ catholicam tenet disciplinam, tantam sibi reverentiam vindicat, ut ad eam quilibet nisi pura conscientia non audeat pervenire.”

[4] In Gratian’s Decretalia, the great collection of canons which formed the basis of medieval ecclesiastical law from the 11th century on, this canon appears under the header, “Non adest Spiritus sanctus sacramentis, que per criminosos ministrantur – the Holy Spirit is not present to sacraments which are administered by the criminous.”

[5] There is a further difficulty that the Latin text of this canon has the word “et” added after “priest”: “the priest, and he who prays (the Spirit) to be present.” Prima facie, this means that someone other than the priest prays for the Spirit to be present, a problem which Fr Fortescue solves by treating the “et” as a mistaken addition.

East-West Disagreements about the Epiclesis and Transubstantiation

Back in February, Hieromonk Enoch published an article entitled “Pre-Schism West Against the Scholastic View of Eucharistic Consecration.” The author weaves together a fabric of half-digested quotations from Western and Eastern authors to argue his claim that it was not the words of institution (Hoc est enim Corpus meum, Hic est enim calix sanguinis mei, etc.) but the Supplices te rogamus prayer that was seen by “pre-Schism” Latins as the prayer that effected the mystery of transubstantiation.

It is certainly true that the Eucharistic Prayer was understood in a more holistic sense by our predecessors who were not yet in the grips of what can be called “neoscholastic reductionism,” but it is certainly going too far to claim that granting a special status to the words of Christ spoken over the elements was a medieval scholastic development.

Ludwig Ott’s ever helpful Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma (I shall be referring to the revised edition from Baronius Press, with a corrected translation newly typeset) qualifies the following proposition as sententia certa: “The form of the Eucharist consists in Christ’s Words of institution, uttered at the Consecration” (416). He continues:

While the Greek-Orthodox Church wrongly placed the power of change either in the Epiclesis alone, following after the narrative of the institution, or in the connection of the words of institution with the Epiclesis (Confessio orth. I 107), the Catholic Church adheres firmly to the view that the priest consummates the transubstantiation solely by the uttering of the words of institution.

Ott then cites the Decretum pro Armenis of Florence and the parallel passage of Trent, and makes an argument from the Gospel narrative. He then cites testimonies from Tertullian (“He took bread…and made it into His Body, by speaking: ‘This is my Body,’” Adv. Marc. IV 40), St. Ambrose (“The words of Christ bring about this Sacrament,” De sacr. IV 4,14), and St. John Chrysostom (“The priest stands there and sets up the outward sign, while speaking these words; but the power and the grace are of God. ‘This is my body,’ he says. These words transmute the gifts,” De proditione Judae, Hom. I 6). Implicit testimonies are cited from St. Justin Martyr, St. Irenaeus, and Origen; St. John Damascene metnions both the words of institution and the Epiclesis (De fide orth. IV 13).

So, then, what are we to make of the Epiclesis? I find the next bit in Ott especially interesting:

In agreement with Cardinal Bessarion, the words of the Epiclesis are to be taken as referring to the time to which they are related, and not to the time at which they are spoken. That which happens in one single moment in the consecration is liturgically developed and explained in the subsequent words of the Epiclesis. It has only a declaratory, and no consecratory, significance. The view of H. Schell that the Greeks consecrate by the Epiclesis alone, and the Latins by the words of institution alone, must be rejected, since the substance of the Sacraments is not within the disposition of the Church. DH 3556. (417)

Cardinal Basilios Bessarion (1403-1472)

An enlightening discussion of this issue is found in Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange’s grand commentary on the Summa theologiae, much of which, sadly, has never been translated. For my students in Gaming, Austria, some time ago I produced a translation (available here) of interesting passages in De Eucharistia et Poenitentia. On Tertia Pars, question 78, we find this commentary:

It is clear that the questions that have arisen between Catholics and schismatics concerning the form of consecration and the epiclesis may only now be treated, the questions of the Real Presence and of transubstantiation being presupposed.
       To begin with, we have before our eyes definitions of the Church. The Church has declared that the form of this sacrament are the words of Christ, not the epiclesis (the subsequent prayer, as the Greeks call it). Cf. Denz. 414, 698, 715, 876, 938, 3043, 3035. [1] The Council of Florence (D. 698) says: “The form of this sacrament are the Savior’s words, with which he confected this sacrament; the priest then speaking in persona Christi, confects this sacrament. For by the power of those words the substance of bread is converted into the body of Christ, and the substance of wine into His blood.” ... The Council of Trent (D. 876) says: “By the force of the words [of consecration], the body of Christ is under the appearance of bread and the blood under the appearance of wine.” [See also D. 938 and 949.]
       Innocent IV, in the year 1254, concerning the Greek rite, declares: “The Greeks should be permitted to celebrate Masses at the hour which is according to their own custom, provided that they observe, in the confection or consecration, the very words expressed and handed down by the Lord” (D. 3043). In fact, Pius X, in the year 1910 (D. 3035), condemning doctrine recently defended, declares against certain errors of the Orientals: [in brief, consecration is effected by the words of consecration, not by the epiclesis, which is not strictly necessary]. Denziger notes here that many earlier popes have declared that the epiclesis is not required for consecration, namely Benedict XII (D. 532), Clement VI, Benedict XIII, Benedict XIV and Pius VII.
       From the fourteenth century on, schismatic Greeks say that the Eucharist is confected by the prayers which are poured out after the words “This is my body, This is my blood” have been pronounced, according to their liturgical prayers as follows: “We beseech you, Father, that you send Your spirit over us and over these gifts set before us, and make this bread the precious body of your Son and that which is in the chalice the precious blood of your Son.” To say that this prayer is necessary for consecration is to affirm that the Masses celebrated in the Roman Church are invalid and is, moreover, contrary to the declaration of the Council of Florence (D. 698 and 715). The chief proponents of this error were Cabasilas, Mark of Ephesus, and Simeon of Thessalonica, who were refuted by Cardinal Bessarion in his work De Eucharistia, as well as by Allatius and Arcudius. (Cf. Dict. Théol. Cath., s. v. «Epiclèse», P. Salaville.)

Then Garrigou-Lagrange proceeds to give an account of the liturgical meaning of the epiclesis:

There is a twofold explanation of the meaning of the epiclesis after the words of consecration.
       (1) One explanation is: When it is read after the consecration, as it now is [in the Greek rite], the epiclesis invokes the Holy Spirit, not to effect transubstantiation, which is already accomplished, that is, not so that the bread become the body of Christ, but that it may become this for us, namely, that it may profit the priest and the faithful, especially those who are going to receive communion. In this way speak Vasquez, Bellarmine, Suárez, de Lugo, Billuart, and among the recent authors, Billot. But this explanation does not seem literal enough [i.e., it doesn’t account for the seemingly obvious meaning of the prayer].
       (2) The second explanation, which is more common, was proposed by Cardinal Bessarion. The epiclesis invokes the Holy Spirit exactly inasmuch as the consecration, being a work ad extra, is common to the three divine Persons, and accordingly the Holy Spirit is invoked, so that, with the Father and the Son already having been invoked, He Himself [in unity with them] may bring about transubstantiation. Indeed, this transubstantiation is accomplished in an instant, by the words of consecration already pronounced; but because, by our human speech, all these things cannot be expressed in one and the same instant, “things which are completed in an instant are declared one after another.” In this way speak Bessarion, Bossuet, Ferraris, Cagin, Franzelin, Salaville.

Later, Garrigou notes that a similar principle is at work in the narrative of the Last Supper, where Jesus takes bread, blesses it, breaks it, and speaks the words: “narration is successive and announces words after facts, when really the words spoken are simultaneous with the facts.” [2]

These two theories, in spite of their superficial disagreement, help us to understand the “moment of consecration” in a non-reductionist sense. Even if there must be a moment after which the real Body or Blood of Our Lord is present and thus deserving of the worship of latreia, as we can extrapolate from the behavior of clergy in every traditional Eucharistic rite [3], nevertheless beings like ourselves, who live, think, and speak in time, must pray in such a way that our anaphoras (and our liturgies as a whole) draw out, step by step as it were, the meaning of mysteries that occur timelessly.

The reason why this kind of temporal disjunction happens is not hard to see. We humans can only speak of an instantaneous coming-to-be in language of change and therefore of measurable duration (consider all the troubles theologians have had to face when speaking of “creation ex nihilo”). Thus, every orthodox Christian liturgy speaks at length of the conversion of the gifts—it calls down the Spirit, recalls or repeats the institution, offers up the gifts to the heavenly Father, and so on (in different sequences for different rites)—but really, these things are occurring simultaneously. This we cannot express with our time-bound language.

This explains why traditional rites grow, over time, in their textual witness to the substance of what is happening: they grow in doctrinal precision, spiritual amplitude, poetic grandeur, and ascetical demands. It would be unworthy of the magnitude of the moment of consecration to treat it cheaply and to think that, having said “the magic words,” we’re pretty close to being done with what we have come to do. The attitude of a true believer is quite the opposite: so great is this moment that it must be surrounded by wall after wall of language, silence, chant, incense, gesture; it must be placed like a mighty jewel in the most exquisite setting; it must be approached by many steps, and these not always audaciously forward-moving, but sometimes circular, hesitant, reiterative.

Thus, so far from supporting a reductionist view of consecration, the position summarized by Garrigou-Lagrange works against it, and in favor of the fullness of expression one finds in the Greek tradition as well as in the undeformed Latin tradition.


NOTES

[1] These are not the most up-to-date Denzinger numbers; they would reflect the edition nearest 1948.

[2] We need not linger here over the issue of whether or not the traditional Roman Rite has or ever had an epiclesis, and whether its absence is anything of a defect. The debate has gone back and forth for a long time. Readers today are likely to encounter it in two authors: Martin Mosebach and Fr. John Hunwicke. Mosebach claims that the Veni Sanctificator of the Offertory is an epiclesis. Hunwicke, having noted that the Roman Canon predates the Macedonian controversy through which the epiclesis entered the Greek liturgy, argues that the Roman Canon rests on a theology of the Father’s omnipotent good pleasure sufficient to account for the transformation of the gifts when He is asked to do so in the Name of His beloved Son (see here for an NLM round-up).

[3] I defend this position in my article “On ‘Pinpointing’ Consecration: A Letter for the Feast of St. Thomas Aquinas.” I also defended this position in the hardest possible case, namely, for an anaphora that seems to lack the words of institution. See my article “Doing and Speaking in the Person of Christ: Eucharistic Form in the Anaphora of Addai and Mari,” Nova et Vetera 4 (2006): 313–79. Br. Ansgar Santogrossi has subjected my arguments to a welcome critique; some portions of this may be found here and here. I am not particularly wedded to a defense of this anaphora. My stated goal was simply to see if any way could be found, on the basis of principles of Thomistic sacramental theology, to explain how transubstantiation might be efficaciously signified and recognized without the words of institution.

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