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. The root is praefari, to speak before: not a foreword set in front of a more important text, but a speaking in the presence of — words said aloud, in the open, with God as the one addressed and the assembly as witness. The whole weight of the prayer falls on a single verb. To make the Preface is to give thanks; the thanks is not the warm-up to the act but the act itself.

A priest celebrating Mass, in a historiated initial by the Master of the Brussels Initials, c. 1389–1400 — the setting in which the Preface is sung. — J. Paul Getty Museum, Ms. Ludwig XIV 6, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

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, Gratias agamus Domino Deo nostro, met with the response that it is right and just to do so, Dignum et iustum est. This dialogue is among the oldest fixed elements of the liturgy, attested in the early third century. The Apostolic Tradition — a church order written in or near Rome around the year 215, long ascribed to Hippolytus though that ascription is now disputed — already carries the full exchange, priest and people trading the same lines a worshipper hears today; Cyprian of Carthage quotes the Sursum corda around 252 as a thing taken for granted, the people’s hearts already lifted before the prayer can rise. In the East the same dialogue is described by the middle of the fourth century, in the catechetical lectures delivered at Jerusalem around 350. Few sentences in any living religion have been spoken continuously for so long with so little change. Liturgical scholars regard the opening dialogue, on the strength of this spread across the third- and fourth-century church, East and West, as a fragment older than almost everything around it — a piece of common inheritance from before the rites diverged.

From the dialogue the priest moves into the body of the Preface, a declaration that it is indeed “truly right and just” — Vere dignum et iustum est — to give thanks to God, which then names some particular ground for thanksgiving. That middle portion is the part that changes. The fixed frame holds; the reason for thanks is poured fresh into it. The Roman rite keeps many proper Prefaces, assigned to the seasons and feasts, so that the ground of thanksgiving shifts with the day — the Incarnation at Christmas, the resurrection at Easter, the descent of the Spirit at Pentecost. On a feast of the Lord the prayer gives thanks for what that feast holds; in a Mass for the dead it gives thanks that for the faithful life is changed, not ended. The body is, in the technical description, an embolism — an insertion — set between a fixed opening and a fixed close, the one stretch of the Eucharistic Prayer where the calendar can speak. When no proper is appointed, a common Preface serves, thanking God simply through Christ.

The number of these propers has risen and fallen with the centuries, and the swing is itself a small history of the Western rite. The early sacramentaries were lavish: the so-called Leonine collection assigns a distinct Preface to nearly every Mass, hundreds in all, each composed for its day. The medieval Roman use pruned this hard; by the late eleventh century the working set had fallen to about ten propers plus the common, and that spare list held, with few additions, through the rest of the Middle Ages and into the Missal that the Council of Trent standardized in 1570, which carried eleven in all. The reform that followed the twentieth-century liturgical movement reversed the contraction: the Missal issued under Paul VI in 1970 opened the corpus to some eighty Prefaces, and later editions added more, so that the part of the prayer most free to vary became, once again, abundant. The instinct that pared the list and the instinct that restored it both turned on the same recognition — that this is the place in the Mass where thanksgiving takes a particular shape, and the question of how many shapes to permit is the question of how much of the year the prayer should be allowed to say.

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, where the seraphim call the words to one another across the temple filled with smoke and the doorposts shaking at the sound. The close of the Preface is the hinge of that ascent: the earthly assembly is named into the company of Angels and Archangels, of Thrones and Dominations, and told that with them, and with the whole host of heaven, it sings the unending hymn. What the congregation then sings is not its own composition but the song already being sung before the throne — the worshippers do not begin the hymn, they join one in progress. The structure carries the theology without arguing it: thanksgiving rises until it can rise no further on its own and breaks into the praise of the angels, and at that point the line between the altar and the throne is treated as thin enough to sing across.

Isaiah’s vision of the throne, the seraphim, and the burning coal (Isaiah 6), the scriptural source of the Sanctus into which the Preface flows. Benjamin West, 1784. — Benjamin West, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

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 recognized pattern inherited in part from Jewish blessings — the berakhah, the form that gives thanks to God for a particular gift, naming the gift as the reason for the blessing. The anaphora in the Apostolic Tradition shows the shape at an early stage: a sustained thanksgiving running from creation through Christ, given as a model rather than a fixed script, and carrying as yet no Sanctus at all, that cry being a later guest in the prayer it now seems to crown. 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. The genetic study of the Western Mass associated with Josef Andreas Jungmann, whose Missarum Sollemnia reached English readers in 1951 as The Mass of the Roman Rite: Its Origins and Development, made this the standard account: the Preface as the surviving head of a prayer that once ran on, uninterrupted, from the opening dialogue to the doxology, and the Sanctus as the seam where it was later broken in two.

The older names confirm the genealogy. The Roman word praefatio is not the only one the Western churches used for this prayer. The Gallican books headed it Contestatio or Immolatio; the Spanish, Mozarabic rite called it the Inlatio, the offering or carrying-up — and in those traditions the name belongs not to a short prelude but to the whole great prayer that follows, the equivalent of the word Canon or Anaphora itself. That a single term once named the entire thanksgiving, and now in the Roman use names only its opening, is the clearest mark of what happened: a long prayer collapsed toward its head, and the head kept the name.

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 hearts that are bidden upward are bidden to leave the level of the day’s distractions, and the assent — that they have indeed lifted them to the Lord — commits the gathering to the elevation before the great prayer begins. 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 praise offered at the altar and the praise offered in heaven are taken to be, for the length of the hymn, one praise. The thanksgiving that fills the prayer is read in the same key: not gratitude for benefits received so much as the creature’s proper answer to the fact of God, the only fitting thing — dignum et iustum — that a made thing can say to the one who made it. The architecture of the Mass keeps this prayer at the threshold of its holiest moment, so that the act of consecration is reached only through, and on the far side of, an act of thanks.

It is worth marking how much of the prayer’s force lies in its grammar. The Preface contains no petition, no confession, no narrative of institution — those belong to the parts of the Eucharistic Prayer that follow. It asks for nothing. Its single movement is to declare that thanks is owed and then to render it, and the declaration and the rendering are the same words; to say that it is right to give thanks is, in the saying, to have begun. The dialogue stages this in miniature, the priest’s invitation and the people’s assent building the prayer out of an agreement rather than a command — the assembly is asked whether it is fitting to give thanks, and answers that it is, and the prayer proceeds on the strength of that shared yes. The seasonal middle then supplies the reason, and the reason is always the same kind of thing: that God has done something — made the world, taken flesh, risen, sent the Spirit — for which the only adequate response is praise. The Greek word for thanksgiving, eucharistia, names the whole rite the prayer opens, and the Preface is the place where that name is made literal: the act of thanks from which everything after it is held to flow.

The Eastern churches order their anaphoras differently and do not isolate a “Preface” by that name. In the Byzantine and other Eastern rites the thanksgiving that opens the great prayer is fixed rather than seasonal, and it runs on into the Sanctus without the formal break the West came to mark — the West printing its Canon as a separate thing that begins after the Sanctus, the East keeping the whole movement continuous, a single rising prayer that passes through the angels’ hymn without pausing at it. The same architecture is there — the lifting of hearts, the giving of thanks, the ascent into the cry of the seraphim — but it is not cut into a named, detachable, variable piece.

The textual record and its scholarship

The Preface is unusually well anchored in the early record, and the documents that anchor it are themselves landmarks in the study of how Christian worship took shape. The opening dialogue’s third-century footprint rests on three witnesses. The first is the church order known as the Apostolic Tradition, written near Rome around 215; its fourth chapter carries a model Eucharistic prayer that opens with the same exchange of Sursum corda and Habemus ad Dominum still in use, and that prayer became, in the twentieth century, the direct ancestor of the second Eucharistic Prayer of the reformed Roman Mass — the ancient text returning to the altar after seventeen centuries. The English reader can follow Burton Scott Easton’s edition and translation, The Apostolic Tradition of Hippolytus (Cambridge, 1934), now in the public domain. The second witness is Cyprian of Carthage, who around 252 treats the Sursum corda as an established custom in his letter on the Lord’s Prayer; the third is the set of mystagogical lectures delivered at Jerusalem around 350 and transmitted under the name of Cyril, which walk the newly baptized through the dialogue line by line.

The Gellone Sacramentary (BnF Latin 12048, c. 790–800), folio 143v: two angels sing the Sanctus beside the crucified Christ, the cross forming the historiated “T” of Te igitur — the seam where the Preface and Sanctus pass into the Canon. — Master of the Gellone Sacramentary, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The genetic study of the Western Mass that gathered these threads into a single account is Josef Andreas Jungmann’s Missarum Sollemnia, first published in German in 1948 and reaching English readers in 1951 as The Mass of the Roman Rite: Its Origins and Development. Jungmann read the Preface as the surviving head of a thanksgiving once spoken whole, and his reconstruction shaped both the scholarship and the twentieth-century reform of the rite. The early sacramentary collections that show the propers at their most abundant — the Leonine (Veronese), Gelasian, and Gregorian books — preserve hundreds of Prefaces composed for particular days, and the contraction and later re-expansion of that corpus can be traced across the printed Missals, a history surveyed for general readers in the Catholic Encyclopedia’s article on the Preface and, for the twentieth-century reform, in studies of the propers added under and after Paul VI such as The Once and Future Preface. The older non-Roman names for the prayer — the Gallican Contestatio and Immolatio, the Mozarabic Inlatio — are documented in the same liturgical literature, and it is those names, naming the whole great prayer rather than its head alone, that most plainly preserve the memory of what the Preface once was.

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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