Prothesis

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The prothesis is the rite by which the bread and wine of the Eucharist are prepared, in the Eastern Christian churches, before the public liturgy begins. The Greek word means a setting-forth, and it names three things at once: the action, the small table on the north side of the sanctuary where it is done, and — by extension — the loaf set out upon it. In the Byzantine tradition the same rite is more often called the proskomide, the office of the offering.

What the priest does is exact and largely hidden. From a stamped leavened loaf, the prosphora, he cuts a cube called the Lamb, the amnos, reciting words drawn from Isaiah’s suffering servant — as a lamb led to the slaughter. The Lamb is laid on the paten and pierced; wine mixed with a little water is poured into the chalice, echoing the blood and water of the crucifixion as the Gospel of John records it. Around the Lamb the priest then sets further particles cut from other loaves: one for the Mother of God, a rank of nine for the orders of saints, and smaller crumbs commemorated by name for the living and the dead. The whole arrangement, covered and censed, becomes a miniature of the Church gathered around Christ — heaven, earth, and the departed set out together on a single plate.

Historically the rite is a late and gradual growth. The earliest liturgies prepared the gifts simply; the elaborate proskomide, with its scripted cutting and its theology of the particles, took shape across the Byzantine middle ages and was not fixed in its present detail until perhaps the fourteenth century. Commentators of that era, reading the completed rite backward, found in it a compressed image of the whole of salvation — the cutting of the Lamb as the Nativity and the Passion at once. Scholarship treats that reading as the rite’s own self-interpretation rather than its origin: the symbolism was discovered in the ceremony after the ceremony had grown, not the reason it was built.

For those who practice it, the prothesis is where the dead are kept present. Each particle dropped into the chalice at communion is held to carry the soul it was named for into contact with the sacrifice, and lists of names submitted by the faithful are read here in a low voice no congregation hears. It is the most private moment of an otherwise public liturgy — an altar of preparation standing slightly apart, doing in miniature what the great altar will do aloud. The rite makes a claim it never argues: that to name a person over the bread is to set them, for that moment, among the saints.

→ Related: Agnus Dei · Sacrifice Ritual · Aquileian Rite · Christian Burial