Andreas Moran
06-02-2009, 12:42 PM
As Lent approaches, I was thinking about the liturgy of St Basil the Great. We only use it ten times a year and there is very little commentary on those long prayers in the Anaphora which make this liturgy different from that of St John Chrysostom. I’ve set out what I can but if anyone can offer further insights into the richness and meaning of these prayers (as happened in the thread about ‘Let all mortal flesh keep silence’) then so much the better.
I did find a short but inspiring section in Dr Stephen Thomas’s book, 'Deification in the Eastern Orthodox Tradition' on the Anaphora in the Divine Liturgy of St Basil and with the help of one or two other commentaries I managed to organise some thoughts on it. ‘The most beautiful, concise, and accurate account of the salvation history of the Old Testament of the Bible has already been written’: thus does Dr Thomas describe St. Basil’s Anaphora. The text of the Anaphora prayers is taken from that used at the Monastery of St John the Baptist, Essex, because it is, as Dr Thomas says, ‘recommended to the reader for the beauty of its language, the profundity of its rendering into English of ideas expressed in Byzantine Greek and its references to Scripture-allusions’. Unfortunately, the footnotes with all these scriptural references do not come out here.
The Anaphora begins after the Creed, and opens with these words of the deacon:
‘Let us be upright, let us attend with fear, let us take heed to present the holy offering in peace.’
In a world full of distractions and temptations we must always stand upright and attentively in spirit, watching and praying to avoid temptation; but especially so at this time in church when the mystery of mysteries is about to take place. ‘The soul as well as the body should be in a standing position. The Christian must be careful not to be carried away by worldy, vain thoughts, which throw him down and make his soul drag along when it should be flying in the heights’ as Bishop Augoustinos of Florina puts it. As St Nicholas Cabasilas says, we should also stand firm in our faith which we have just proclaimed in the Creed.
The choir then chants:
‘The mercy of peace, the sacrifice of praise’
This is a reference to the eucharistic sacrifice which is the mercy of Christ in providing us with His precious Body and Blood that we may have life and abide in the peace of God. St Nicholas Cabasilas says that if our soul is untroubled by passion it can then receive God’s mercy and peace. He further points out that we must offer the sacrifice in peace which we cannot do if we are not reconciled with our brother, which reconciliation we have made at the kiss of peace before the Creed.
The priest then bestows the apostolic blessing from 2 Corinthians 13:14:
‘The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God the Father, and the communion of the Holy Spirit, be with you all.’
This prayer ‘procures for us the benefits of the Holy Trinity – every perfect gift [James 1:17]; and it asks from each of the Divine Persons his special gift: from the Son grace, from the Father love, from the Spirit fellowship.’ Note that the priest does not pray for these to be given us but that we may keep them. We pray likewise for the priest:
‘And with thy spirit.’
The priest then turns to face us, lifts up his arms, and exhorts us:
‘Let us lift up our hearts.’
We are to be heavenly-minded and not still bound to earthly things. The heart is ‘not simply the physical organ but the spiritual centre of man’s being, man made in the image of God, his deepest and truest self, or the inner shrine, to be entered only through sacrifice and death, in which the mystery of the union of the divine and the human is consummated’. It is body, soul and spirit and ‘has thus an all-embracing significance’. [From the glossary in the Philokalia.]
In our response, ‘We lift them up unto the Lord’, we affirm this and acknowledge where our true treasure is. There is no greater treasure than the Holy Gifts: ‘For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also’. [Matthew 6:21]
Then the priest says:
‘Let us give thanks unto the Lord.’
The whole Anaphora is a thanksgiving, the meaning, after all, of the word, ‘eucharist’. These words remind us of this before the priest begins his prayers.
The choir then affirms the trinitarian nature of the eucharist:
‘It is meet and right so to worship the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Trinity consubstantial and undivided.’
After the foregoing exchanges between priest and choir (and people), the priest says the prayer before the thrice-holy hymn:
‘O THOU WHO ART, O Master and Lord, God the Father, Almighty and proper to be worshipped: It is very meet, right and befitting the majesty of thy holiness that we should praise thee, bless and adore thee, give thanks and glorify thee, of certainty the one true God; that we should bring unto thee this our reasonable service from a contrite heart and an humble spirit. For it is thou who hast vouchsafed unto us the knowledge of thy truth. And who can utter thy mighty acts? Who can shew forth all thy praise or tell of all thy wondrous works at all times? O sovereign Lord of heaven and earth and of all creation, visible and invisible; Thou sittest in the throne of glory and dost behold the depths; Who art from everlasting, invisible, searchless, uncircumscribed, immutable, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, our great God and Saviour which is our hope, which is the image of thy goodness, equal mould of thy likeness, shewing thee the Father in Himself, the living Word, true God, pre-eternal wisdom, life, sanctification, power, the true light through whom was manifest the Holy Spirit: the Spirit of truth, the grace of the adoption of sons, the earnest of our inheritance to come, the first-fruits of everlasting good, the quickening power, the fountain of holiness that enableth every creature having reason, and having understanding to serve thee and pour forth an unceasing hymn of glory, for all are thy servants: angels and archangels, thrones, dominions, principalities, powers and virtues, and the many-eyed cherubim praise thee; about thee stand the seraphim, six wings hath the one and six wings hath the other: with twain they cover their faces, and with twain they cover their feet, and with twain they do fly, crying one unto another, with continuing voice unstilled songs of praise.’
The opening words [from Exodus 3:14] are a reference to the untranslatable words of the Greek Septuagint, ‘εγω ειμαι ο ων’. The Hebrew is, ‘Ehyeh asher ehyeh’. In the Slavonic Bible, it is, ‘Я есмь Сущий'. In English, it becomes, 'I am the One who is', 'I am Who I am', or 'I am that I am'. Speaking from out of the burning bush to Moses, this is God’s revelation to him and all mankind that God is a person and not an abstract entity. ‘The Name of God is I AM THAT I AM. For man, the image of the All-Highest, this word I is one of the most precious of all, since it expresses the principle of the persona in us.’ We ‘live in a state of decline and ineludible tragedy. The cult of decline leads to alienation from God – man is reduced when the Divine image is obscured in him. Contrariwise, an assembly of personae is ‘the salt of the earth, the light of the world’ [cf. Matt. 5:13-14]. This is realised in Christ’s Church and with particular force in the liturgical act – precisely where the true image of the Holy Trinity is made manifest. The whole content of the Divine Liturgy calls upon the priest to bring to God the ministry proper to the persona in the spirit of Christ’s prayer in Gethsemane’. Our prayers and our liturgical offering exist in the ‘I-THOU’ relationship between us and God because He is a personal Being and we are made in His image: ‘Absolute First-Being is Hypostatic; and man, the likeness of the Absolute, is hypostasis’. The Divine Being is, however, not one person but three persons, Father, Son and Word, and Holy Spirit, each person or hypostasis bearing the fulness of the Divine Being. As God uttered words to Moses, God the Word it was Who spoke to him. [So says Archimandrite Zacharias] We may recall that it is ‘ο ων’ that is written on the three parts of the cross often shown in the nimbus in icons of Christ. [Quotes from 'We shall see him as he is', Elder Sophrony]
In the Greek text of the Anaphora, however, we do not find ‘εγω ειμαι ο ων’ but only ‘ο ων’. Dr Thomas writes, ‘The Greek philosophical term for ultimate truth was similar, using the participle of the verb, “to be” but in the neuter to ontos on, “that which really is”. However, the biblical Greek refers to the Ultimate Reality using the masculine participle ho on, “the one, the person who really is.” But this personal being is also the object of an address by the priest; God is a being with whom one may have an I-Thou relationship. The Anaphora of St. Basil, then, starts with this striking affirmation of the hypostatic or personal nature of the Trinitarian God in relation to us, “O Thou who art.”’ (English uses ‘O’ because it has no vocative case.) This is a prayer to God but He does not need the priest to tell Him what He already knows; rather, it is, to borrow Dr Thomas’s expression, an affirmation of what He has revealed to us about Himself. The prayer has three sections: the first related to the Father Whose sovereignty is affirmed, the source of the Godhead. The second, from the words ‘the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ’, concerns ‘our great God and Saviour’ and affirms His begottenness of the Father. The third, from the words ‘the Holy Spirit’, concerns the ‘the Spirit of truth’ Who is sent forth to seal us with the promise of ‘the earnest of our inheritance’ which is the promise of the blessedness of the kingdom of heaven, in part now as a foretaste and some day in its fulness. Thanks and praise are being given to the Triune God.
Singing the triumphal hymn, exclaiming, crying aloud and saying
Choir
Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord of Sabaoth: heaven and earth are full of thy glory. Hosanna in the highest. Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord: Hosanna in the highest.
These lines from both Old and New Testaments [Isa. 6:2-2; Mark 11:9-10] combine references to praises to God; the first from immaterial beings, and the second from the people who greeted Christ as He entered into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. This latter reference clearly looks forward to the Lord’s institution of the Eucharist before His Passion, the Eucharist which is about to be made present in the Divine Liturgy being celebrated according to His commandment.
There follows the second prayer of the priest which leads into the consecration of the bread and the wine. This prayer, as Dr Thomas says, is an inspired synopsis of the history of salvation. Dr Thomas says that in calling God friend of man, philanthrope, ‘St. Basil balances God’s incommunicable holiness and infinite majesty, which have no measure, in other words, God’s incomprehensible essence, on the one hand, with, on the other hand, his energies’. We read here of how God made all things and they were good. He made man in His own image and prepared much for him. And though the Fall occurred and man was separated from Paradise, God in His love and mercy sought to redeem man. We read of the progress of the Divine plan – what Dr Thomas describes as ‘God’s initiatives’ - for redemption through the Old Testament and then the culmination of this plan in the Incarnation from the Virgin Mary by which Jesus Christ in the form of a servant became the pioneer of our salvation. Finally, we read of the institution of the Eucharist, the consummation of God’s plan for our reconciliation with Him and His dwelling in us and our dwelling in Him. Christ has overcome death by death and them in the grave of sin He ‘quickens’, that is, makes alive. We experience St Basil’s liturgy through Great Lent right up to the morning of Great and Holy Saturday and in the final words of this prayer we see the Paschal dimension. The prayer is as follows:
Priest
And with these blessed Powers, O sovereign Lord and friend of man, we sinners also cry aloud and say: Holy indeed and most holy art thou, and no bounds are there to the majesty of thy holiness; and just art thou in all thy works, for in righteousness and true judgment hast thou ordered all things for us. For after thou hadst formed man of the dust of the ground, and honoured him, O God, with thine own image, thou didst set him in the garden of Eden, and didst promise unto him immortal life and the joy of everlasting good in the keeping of thy commandments. But man disobeyed thee, his true God which created him, and was allured by the deceit of the serpent, and slain by his own trespasses; and thou, O Lord, in righteous judgment didst turn him away from paradise into this world, into the ground from whence he was taken: establishing for him salvation by regeneration, which is in thy Christ himself. For thou, good Master, didst not wholly forsake thy creature which thou hadst made, neither didst thou forget the works of thy hands but because of thy tender mercy in divers manners didst visit him. Prophets didst thou send, might works hast thou performed through thy saints which have been wellpleasing unto thee in every generation: thou hast spoken unto us by the mouth of thy servants the prophets, foretelling unto us the salvation to come. Thou gavest the law for an help. Thou didst appoint angels over us to guard us. And when the fulness of the time was come thou didst speak unto us by thy Son himself, by whom also thou madest the worlds. Who, being the brightness of thy glory, and the express image of thy person, and upholding all things by the word of his power, thought it not robbery to be equal with thee, God and Father. But being God pre-eternal did he yet shew himself upon earth, and conversed with men: and being incarnate of the holy Virgin he emptied himself and took upon himself the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of our vile body that he might fashion us like unto the image of his glory: For inasmuch as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin, so it seemed good unto thine only-begotten Son, which is in the bosom of thee, O God and Father, made of woman, the holy Mother of God and ever-Virgin Mary, made under the law, to condemn sin in his flesh, that they who die in Adam may be quickened in thy Christ himself: Who dwelling in this world gave saving commandments and having turned us from the deceits of idols, hath brought us unto knowledge of thee, the true God and Father, having possessed us unto himself for a peculiar people, a royal priesthood, an holy nation: Who hath cleansed us with water and sanctified us by the Holy Spirit, giving himself a ransom unto death, wherein we were held, sold under sin: and by the cross having descended into hell, that he might fill all things with himself, he loosed the pains of death: and being risen again the third day he made a way for all flesh unto the resurrection of the dead, because it was not possible that the author of life should be holden of corruption. So is he become the first-fruits of them that slept, the firstborn from the dead: that in all things he might have the pre-eminence. And ascending into heaven he sat down on the right hand of thy Majesty on high, from whence he shall come again to render to every man according to his deeds. Who also hath left unto us for a remembrance of his saving passion these things which we here set forth according to his commandents. Who being about to go forth to his voluntary and ever-memorable and life-giving death, in the night that he gave himself for the life of the world, took bread in his sacred and most pure hands and shewing it unto thee, O God and Father, when he had given thanks, and blessed and hallowed it, he brake it
And gave it to his holy disciples and apostles, saying, [and the rest of the Anaphora follows.]
I did find a short but inspiring section in Dr Stephen Thomas’s book, 'Deification in the Eastern Orthodox Tradition' on the Anaphora in the Divine Liturgy of St Basil and with the help of one or two other commentaries I managed to organise some thoughts on it. ‘The most beautiful, concise, and accurate account of the salvation history of the Old Testament of the Bible has already been written’: thus does Dr Thomas describe St. Basil’s Anaphora. The text of the Anaphora prayers is taken from that used at the Monastery of St John the Baptist, Essex, because it is, as Dr Thomas says, ‘recommended to the reader for the beauty of its language, the profundity of its rendering into English of ideas expressed in Byzantine Greek and its references to Scripture-allusions’. Unfortunately, the footnotes with all these scriptural references do not come out here.
The Anaphora begins after the Creed, and opens with these words of the deacon:
‘Let us be upright, let us attend with fear, let us take heed to present the holy offering in peace.’
In a world full of distractions and temptations we must always stand upright and attentively in spirit, watching and praying to avoid temptation; but especially so at this time in church when the mystery of mysteries is about to take place. ‘The soul as well as the body should be in a standing position. The Christian must be careful not to be carried away by worldy, vain thoughts, which throw him down and make his soul drag along when it should be flying in the heights’ as Bishop Augoustinos of Florina puts it. As St Nicholas Cabasilas says, we should also stand firm in our faith which we have just proclaimed in the Creed.
The choir then chants:
‘The mercy of peace, the sacrifice of praise’
This is a reference to the eucharistic sacrifice which is the mercy of Christ in providing us with His precious Body and Blood that we may have life and abide in the peace of God. St Nicholas Cabasilas says that if our soul is untroubled by passion it can then receive God’s mercy and peace. He further points out that we must offer the sacrifice in peace which we cannot do if we are not reconciled with our brother, which reconciliation we have made at the kiss of peace before the Creed.
The priest then bestows the apostolic blessing from 2 Corinthians 13:14:
‘The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God the Father, and the communion of the Holy Spirit, be with you all.’
This prayer ‘procures for us the benefits of the Holy Trinity – every perfect gift [James 1:17]; and it asks from each of the Divine Persons his special gift: from the Son grace, from the Father love, from the Spirit fellowship.’ Note that the priest does not pray for these to be given us but that we may keep them. We pray likewise for the priest:
‘And with thy spirit.’
The priest then turns to face us, lifts up his arms, and exhorts us:
‘Let us lift up our hearts.’
We are to be heavenly-minded and not still bound to earthly things. The heart is ‘not simply the physical organ but the spiritual centre of man’s being, man made in the image of God, his deepest and truest self, or the inner shrine, to be entered only through sacrifice and death, in which the mystery of the union of the divine and the human is consummated’. It is body, soul and spirit and ‘has thus an all-embracing significance’. [From the glossary in the Philokalia.]
In our response, ‘We lift them up unto the Lord’, we affirm this and acknowledge where our true treasure is. There is no greater treasure than the Holy Gifts: ‘For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also’. [Matthew 6:21]
Then the priest says:
‘Let us give thanks unto the Lord.’
The whole Anaphora is a thanksgiving, the meaning, after all, of the word, ‘eucharist’. These words remind us of this before the priest begins his prayers.
The choir then affirms the trinitarian nature of the eucharist:
‘It is meet and right so to worship the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Trinity consubstantial and undivided.’
After the foregoing exchanges between priest and choir (and people), the priest says the prayer before the thrice-holy hymn:
‘O THOU WHO ART, O Master and Lord, God the Father, Almighty and proper to be worshipped: It is very meet, right and befitting the majesty of thy holiness that we should praise thee, bless and adore thee, give thanks and glorify thee, of certainty the one true God; that we should bring unto thee this our reasonable service from a contrite heart and an humble spirit. For it is thou who hast vouchsafed unto us the knowledge of thy truth. And who can utter thy mighty acts? Who can shew forth all thy praise or tell of all thy wondrous works at all times? O sovereign Lord of heaven and earth and of all creation, visible and invisible; Thou sittest in the throne of glory and dost behold the depths; Who art from everlasting, invisible, searchless, uncircumscribed, immutable, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, our great God and Saviour which is our hope, which is the image of thy goodness, equal mould of thy likeness, shewing thee the Father in Himself, the living Word, true God, pre-eternal wisdom, life, sanctification, power, the true light through whom was manifest the Holy Spirit: the Spirit of truth, the grace of the adoption of sons, the earnest of our inheritance to come, the first-fruits of everlasting good, the quickening power, the fountain of holiness that enableth every creature having reason, and having understanding to serve thee and pour forth an unceasing hymn of glory, for all are thy servants: angels and archangels, thrones, dominions, principalities, powers and virtues, and the many-eyed cherubim praise thee; about thee stand the seraphim, six wings hath the one and six wings hath the other: with twain they cover their faces, and with twain they cover their feet, and with twain they do fly, crying one unto another, with continuing voice unstilled songs of praise.’
The opening words [from Exodus 3:14] are a reference to the untranslatable words of the Greek Septuagint, ‘εγω ειμαι ο ων’. The Hebrew is, ‘Ehyeh asher ehyeh’. In the Slavonic Bible, it is, ‘Я есмь Сущий'. In English, it becomes, 'I am the One who is', 'I am Who I am', or 'I am that I am'. Speaking from out of the burning bush to Moses, this is God’s revelation to him and all mankind that God is a person and not an abstract entity. ‘The Name of God is I AM THAT I AM. For man, the image of the All-Highest, this word I is one of the most precious of all, since it expresses the principle of the persona in us.’ We ‘live in a state of decline and ineludible tragedy. The cult of decline leads to alienation from God – man is reduced when the Divine image is obscured in him. Contrariwise, an assembly of personae is ‘the salt of the earth, the light of the world’ [cf. Matt. 5:13-14]. This is realised in Christ’s Church and with particular force in the liturgical act – precisely where the true image of the Holy Trinity is made manifest. The whole content of the Divine Liturgy calls upon the priest to bring to God the ministry proper to the persona in the spirit of Christ’s prayer in Gethsemane’. Our prayers and our liturgical offering exist in the ‘I-THOU’ relationship between us and God because He is a personal Being and we are made in His image: ‘Absolute First-Being is Hypostatic; and man, the likeness of the Absolute, is hypostasis’. The Divine Being is, however, not one person but three persons, Father, Son and Word, and Holy Spirit, each person or hypostasis bearing the fulness of the Divine Being. As God uttered words to Moses, God the Word it was Who spoke to him. [So says Archimandrite Zacharias] We may recall that it is ‘ο ων’ that is written on the three parts of the cross often shown in the nimbus in icons of Christ. [Quotes from 'We shall see him as he is', Elder Sophrony]
In the Greek text of the Anaphora, however, we do not find ‘εγω ειμαι ο ων’ but only ‘ο ων’. Dr Thomas writes, ‘The Greek philosophical term for ultimate truth was similar, using the participle of the verb, “to be” but in the neuter to ontos on, “that which really is”. However, the biblical Greek refers to the Ultimate Reality using the masculine participle ho on, “the one, the person who really is.” But this personal being is also the object of an address by the priest; God is a being with whom one may have an I-Thou relationship. The Anaphora of St. Basil, then, starts with this striking affirmation of the hypostatic or personal nature of the Trinitarian God in relation to us, “O Thou who art.”’ (English uses ‘O’ because it has no vocative case.) This is a prayer to God but He does not need the priest to tell Him what He already knows; rather, it is, to borrow Dr Thomas’s expression, an affirmation of what He has revealed to us about Himself. The prayer has three sections: the first related to the Father Whose sovereignty is affirmed, the source of the Godhead. The second, from the words ‘the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ’, concerns ‘our great God and Saviour’ and affirms His begottenness of the Father. The third, from the words ‘the Holy Spirit’, concerns the ‘the Spirit of truth’ Who is sent forth to seal us with the promise of ‘the earnest of our inheritance’ which is the promise of the blessedness of the kingdom of heaven, in part now as a foretaste and some day in its fulness. Thanks and praise are being given to the Triune God.
Singing the triumphal hymn, exclaiming, crying aloud and saying
Choir
Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord of Sabaoth: heaven and earth are full of thy glory. Hosanna in the highest. Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord: Hosanna in the highest.
These lines from both Old and New Testaments [Isa. 6:2-2; Mark 11:9-10] combine references to praises to God; the first from immaterial beings, and the second from the people who greeted Christ as He entered into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. This latter reference clearly looks forward to the Lord’s institution of the Eucharist before His Passion, the Eucharist which is about to be made present in the Divine Liturgy being celebrated according to His commandment.
There follows the second prayer of the priest which leads into the consecration of the bread and the wine. This prayer, as Dr Thomas says, is an inspired synopsis of the history of salvation. Dr Thomas says that in calling God friend of man, philanthrope, ‘St. Basil balances God’s incommunicable holiness and infinite majesty, which have no measure, in other words, God’s incomprehensible essence, on the one hand, with, on the other hand, his energies’. We read here of how God made all things and they were good. He made man in His own image and prepared much for him. And though the Fall occurred and man was separated from Paradise, God in His love and mercy sought to redeem man. We read of the progress of the Divine plan – what Dr Thomas describes as ‘God’s initiatives’ - for redemption through the Old Testament and then the culmination of this plan in the Incarnation from the Virgin Mary by which Jesus Christ in the form of a servant became the pioneer of our salvation. Finally, we read of the institution of the Eucharist, the consummation of God’s plan for our reconciliation with Him and His dwelling in us and our dwelling in Him. Christ has overcome death by death and them in the grave of sin He ‘quickens’, that is, makes alive. We experience St Basil’s liturgy through Great Lent right up to the morning of Great and Holy Saturday and in the final words of this prayer we see the Paschal dimension. The prayer is as follows:
Priest
And with these blessed Powers, O sovereign Lord and friend of man, we sinners also cry aloud and say: Holy indeed and most holy art thou, and no bounds are there to the majesty of thy holiness; and just art thou in all thy works, for in righteousness and true judgment hast thou ordered all things for us. For after thou hadst formed man of the dust of the ground, and honoured him, O God, with thine own image, thou didst set him in the garden of Eden, and didst promise unto him immortal life and the joy of everlasting good in the keeping of thy commandments. But man disobeyed thee, his true God which created him, and was allured by the deceit of the serpent, and slain by his own trespasses; and thou, O Lord, in righteous judgment didst turn him away from paradise into this world, into the ground from whence he was taken: establishing for him salvation by regeneration, which is in thy Christ himself. For thou, good Master, didst not wholly forsake thy creature which thou hadst made, neither didst thou forget the works of thy hands but because of thy tender mercy in divers manners didst visit him. Prophets didst thou send, might works hast thou performed through thy saints which have been wellpleasing unto thee in every generation: thou hast spoken unto us by the mouth of thy servants the prophets, foretelling unto us the salvation to come. Thou gavest the law for an help. Thou didst appoint angels over us to guard us. And when the fulness of the time was come thou didst speak unto us by thy Son himself, by whom also thou madest the worlds. Who, being the brightness of thy glory, and the express image of thy person, and upholding all things by the word of his power, thought it not robbery to be equal with thee, God and Father. But being God pre-eternal did he yet shew himself upon earth, and conversed with men: and being incarnate of the holy Virgin he emptied himself and took upon himself the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of our vile body that he might fashion us like unto the image of his glory: For inasmuch as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin, so it seemed good unto thine only-begotten Son, which is in the bosom of thee, O God and Father, made of woman, the holy Mother of God and ever-Virgin Mary, made under the law, to condemn sin in his flesh, that they who die in Adam may be quickened in thy Christ himself: Who dwelling in this world gave saving commandments and having turned us from the deceits of idols, hath brought us unto knowledge of thee, the true God and Father, having possessed us unto himself for a peculiar people, a royal priesthood, an holy nation: Who hath cleansed us with water and sanctified us by the Holy Spirit, giving himself a ransom unto death, wherein we were held, sold under sin: and by the cross having descended into hell, that he might fill all things with himself, he loosed the pains of death: and being risen again the third day he made a way for all flesh unto the resurrection of the dead, because it was not possible that the author of life should be holden of corruption. So is he become the first-fruits of them that slept, the firstborn from the dead: that in all things he might have the pre-eminence. And ascending into heaven he sat down on the right hand of thy Majesty on high, from whence he shall come again to render to every man according to his deeds. Who also hath left unto us for a remembrance of his saving passion these things which we here set forth according to his commandents. Who being about to go forth to his voluntary and ever-memorable and life-giving death, in the night that he gave himself for the life of the world, took bread in his sacred and most pure hands and shewing it unto thee, O God and Father, when he had given thanks, and blessed and hallowed it, he brake it
And gave it to his holy disciples and apostles, saying, [and the rest of the Anaphora follows.]