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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 March 2011
More than one comprehensive theory of liturgical history has made much of the difference between the eucharistic prayer in the Apostolic Tradition of St. Hippolytus and that described in the Catecheses of St. Cyril of Jerusalem. The former consists of a thanksgiving for creation and redemption through Christ, leading to an institution narrative, and followed by an anamnesis and an epiclesis, in which, however, the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the oblation is asked for, not to convert it, but to join the Church in one. The latter consists of a ‘preface’ (which is not a thanksgiving, although the opening dialogue suggests that it will be) and sanctus, followed at once by a fully consecratory epiclesis, and intercessions. It is true that scholars of former generations thought that the prayer described by St. Cyril was, in fact, a fully developed prayer of the Syro-Byzantine type, and that St. Cyril only commented on certain paragraphs of it. It was natural to think so when it was believed that the liturgy of Apostolic Constitutions VIII, which contains the oldest known prayer of this type, was the work of St. Clement of Rome and a true description of apostolic practice; but it will hardly do to-day, when we know that Apostolic Constitutions was written several years later than St. Cyril's Catecheses. Besides, St. Cyril describes the prayer in considerable verbal detail, a procedure which is not easy to reconcile with the omission of whole paragraphs. Nor will it do to say that he comments upon the institution narrative elsewhere; he could scarcely explain the Eucharist to catechumens without doing so, but that hardly explains how, after mentioning and explaining the various choirs of angels who sing the sanctus, he could pass over the thanksgiving for creation and redemption, institution narrative, and anamnesis without a word, and expect an audience of people who were new to Christian worship to be able to follow the prayer as a result. And it would be a strange coincidence if the parts omitted by St. Cyril were just those which are in the Apostolic Tradition.
page 1 note 1 If the intention of the earliest epicleses was to pray for the communicants, other prayers for the living and the dead would easily attach themselves to it, and this would explain this sequence here and elsewhere.
page 2 note 1 Κύριε τῶν δυνάμεων πλήρωσον κα τν θυσίαν ταύτην τῆς σῆς δυνάμεως κα τῆς σῆς μεταλήψεως (ed. Brightman, F. E., J.T.S., I (1899), 105).Google Scholar
page 2 note 2 This will hardly now be disputed, but the matter is clearly set out by E. Bishop in Appendix VI to Connolly, R. H., The Liturgical Homilies of Narsai, Texts and Studies VIII, 1, Cambridge 1909.Google Scholar
page 2 note 3 See Ratcliff, E. C., ‘The Sanctus and the Pattern of the Early Anaphora’ in this Journal (I (1950) 29–36, 125–134).Google Scholar
page 2 note 4 This view is not materially affected by the fact that the ‘preface’ includes a summary of Old Testament history as far as Joshua's crossing of the Jordan, or by the fact that the epiclesis is less developed than that of St. Cyril. It is quite possible for a prayer to combine a ‘Cyrilline’ structure with an older theory of consecration, and the Constitutor may have tried to make sense of his two thanksgivings by making the first typical of the other. (Old and new creation, old and new covenant and people of God, Joshua-Jesus). The view here put forward is confirmed, for the rite as a whole, by the fact that there are two series of intercessions, one in what was probably the old place, before the Offertory, and one in the Cyrilline place, after the epiclesis.
page 3 note 1 L.E.W., 20 11. 6 ff.; 21 11. 3, 5–6 and (?) 11.
page 3 note 2 G. Dix, The Apostolic Tradition, 8.
page 3 note 3 The same is true of the Apostolic Tradition, which, in the anamnesis, thanks God for a new thing, the priesthood of the people of God: see A. H. Couratin in Theology (October 1955), also G. A. Michell, Eucharistic Consecration in the Primitive Church, 12 n. 12, where it is suggested that in an earlier form of Hippolytus's prayer, the celebrant said εὐχαριστοῦμεν not εὐχαριστοῦντες.
page 3 note 4 The Shape of the Liturgy, 181.
page 4 note 1 Cf. the similar passage in St. Basil, in L.E.W., 327 1. 23 (ντολς) leads straight to p. 329,1. 12, the intervening passage being an insertion from James.
page 5 note 1 L.E.W., 20 11. 15–26.
page 5 note 2 Testament of Our Lord, I. 23, Eng. Cooper, Tr. J. and Maclean, A. J., Edinburgh 1902, 73.Google Scholar
page 6 note 1 This is not a new idea, but was put forward by Ratcliffin, E. C.The Study of Theology, ed. K. E. Kirk, London 1939, 424. But see his remarks in J.E.H., loc. cit.Google Scholar
page 7 note 1 If there was formerly such a reference at Jerusalem, it had gone, with the thanksgiving, before St. Cyril's time.
page 7 note 2 Sarapion's prayer reads more easily if we omit the institution narrative (with the passage from the Didache) and read ‘To thee we offer this living sacrifice, this bloodless oblation. To thee we offer this bread, the likeness of the body of the only begotten, and this cup, the likeness of the blood’. This, perhaps, suggests that the institution narrative was worked in not long before Sarapion's time.