A Quarrel Between Greeks and Latins, and How It Cooled

From the fourteenth century the epiclesis became a weapon. Greek writers argued that the Latins, by treating the words of Christ as the form that effects the change, had made the priest a magician working with a formula and had left no room for the church to ask anything of God. Latin writers replied that praying for the Spirit to change gifts already changed is incoherent, and that the Greek position amounts to asking God to do what he has already done. Both sides were defending something real. The Greek concern was that the eucharist is answered prayer and not an operation; the Latin concern was that the promise attached to the words of Christ is unconditional and does not wait on the church's petition.

The Council of Florence took the matter up in the fifteenth century and produced no settlement that either practice reflected, and the argument continued in the theological manuals of both communions into the twentieth century. What cooled it was scholarship rather than negotiation. Liturgical historians working on the earliest texts found prayers that do not divide neatly into a consecrating moment and the rest, and the view that the anaphora consecrates as a whole gained ground in both communions, which leaves the placing of the epiclesis a difference of structure rather than a difference about what God does.

The practical results are visible. The Roman Missal of 1969 restored an explicit invocation of the Spirit, Anglican, Lutheran, Methodist and Reformed revisions of the same decades did the same, and the ecumenical convergence text of 1982 treats the invocation as a normal part of a eucharistic prayer. None of that settles the older question, and neither church has withdrawn its position.