Preface

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The Preface is the prayer of thanksgiving that opens the Eucharistic Prayer in the Western Christian Mass — the passage that carries the rite from the offering of bread and wine into the central act of consecration. It takes its name from the Latin praefatio, a word that in this setting means less an introduction than a proclamation made aloud before God, a public giving of thanks.

In structure it is fixed at the edges and variable in the middle. It begins with an ancient exchange between priest and people: Dominus vobiscum — “The Lord be with you” — answered, then Sursum corda, “Lift up your hearts,” to which the assembly replies that they have lifted them to the Lord; and a final summons to give thanks, met with the response that it is right and just to do so. This dialogue is among the oldest fixed elements of the liturgy, attested in the early third century. From it the priest moves into the body of the Preface, a declaration that it is indeed “truly right and just” to give thanks to God, which then names some particular ground for thanksgiving. That middle portion is the part that changes: the Roman rite holds many proper Prefaces, assigned to the seasons and feasts, so that the reason for thanks shifts with the day — Incarnation at Christmas, resurrection at Easter, the descent of the Spirit at Pentecost. The prayer closes by joining the worshippers’ voices to those of the angels, and that joining flows directly into the Sanctus, the cry of “Holy, Holy, Holy” drawn from the prophet Isaiah’s vision of the heavenly throne.

Historians of the liturgy read the Preface as a survival of a once larger and more improvised act. In the earliest Christian centuries the one presiding seems to have given thanks over the bread and cup in his own words, on a recognised pattern inherited in part from Jewish blessings; only gradually did the texts harden into set forms. What is now a brief, formal paragraph is, on this reading, the remaining hinge of that older extended thanksgiving — the place where the freedom to praise in fresh words longest persisted, preserved in the system of seasonal propers.

For those who pray it, the Preface is not chiefly a historical artifact but an ascent. The dialogue that opens it is understood as a lifting of the congregation out of ordinary attention and into the company of heaven; the turn to the angels at its close is held to mean that the earthly assembly is, for that moment, singing with the unseen host before the throne. The Eastern churches order their anaphoras differently and do not isolate a “Preface” by that name, though the same movement — thanksgiving rising into the Sanctus — runs through their liturgies as well. The word itself stays Western, and stays exact: the speech made before the act, in which thanks is the act’s whole substance.

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