[John Chrysostom] transcends any putative
division or tension between the words of consecration and the Epiclesis of the
Spirit, considering them both necessary for the Eucharist. (Kenneth J. Howell, John
Chrysostom: Theologian of the Eucharist [Washington. D. C.: The Catholic University
of America Press, 2024], 118)
There has long been a perception that the
East and the West differ over the relation of the Epiclesis to the words of
consecration inasmuch as the West has emphasized the consecratory words of Christ
at the moment of the transformation while the East has placed greater emphasis
on the Epiclesis without any further specification as to the moment of transformation.
This seemed to be crystallized in the medieval dogmatic definition at the
Council of Florence (1431-49). That council defined the words of the Savior as
the “form of the sacrament,” but the later Catechism of the Catholic Church (1994)
distinguished between the words as a formal cause and the Holy Spirit as a kind
of efficient cause without using that exact term. (CCC §1353) I suggest that there
is an underlying unity in the differences between the East and West in the theology
of the Epiclesis. It seems to me unnecessarily narrow to insist on either the words
of institution or the Epiclesis as the sole or even primary means of transformation.
My appreciation for the work of Alexander Schmemann is enormous, but he seems
to have downplayed the role of the words of consecration when stating that “the
Orthodox Church has always insisted that the transformation (metabole)
of the eucharistic elements is performed by the epiclesis—the invocation of the
Holy Spirit—and not by the words of institution.” In the West, Frans van der
Pavard seems to have adopted the same attitude about the East, even to the
point of denying any consecratory value in the words of institution. (Kenneth
J. Howell, John Chrysostom: Theologian of the Eucharist [Washington. D.
C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2024], 137)
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