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. By the time the worshippers gather and the deacon raises his voice for the opening blessing, the whole of it is already over. The Eucharist that will be carried in procession and lifted at the altar has, in a sense, been assembled in advance — cut, arranged, and named at a table that most of the congregation will never see used.

The proskomidia (prothesis) being performed at the table of preparation before the public liturgy begins. — Gorgi Gurcinovski, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The table and the loaf

The prothesis table stands in the northern corner of the sanctuary, to the left of the altar as one faces east, set a little apart. In the commentary tradition it is read as the cave of Bethlehem and the manger: the place where the gifts are made ready is the place of the Nativity, so that the rite begins, symbolically, where the life it commemorates begins. The vessels gathered on it are few and have ancient names — the diskos or paten, a footed plate; the chalice; a small two-armed stand called the asteriskos, the little star, set over the bread to keep the veils from touching it; the lance, a small spear- shaped knife; and the veils themselves.

The bread is leavened, which is the first and oldest mark of difference from the Latin West, where the host is unleavened. The Eastern churches read the risen leaven as a sign of the risen and living Christ, and the point became one of the sharper irritants in the long estrangement between Constantinople and Rome, the Greeks naming the Latins azymites, users of the unleavened, as a term of reproach. A round stamped loaf, the prosphora — literally an offering, a thing brought forward — bears a seal pressed into the top before baking. At the center of the seal is a square divided into four by a cross, with the letters IC XC NIKA: Iesous Christos nika, Jesus Christ conquers. That central square is the part that matters most. From it the priest will cut the Lamb. The rest of the loaf is not wasted: it becomes the antidoron, the blessed bread distributed to all at the end of the liturgy, including to those who have not communed, so that the single offered loaf binds the whole assembly even where the consecrated Gifts do not reach.

A prosphora, the round stamped loaf of leavened bread from which the Lamb is cut; the seal bears a cross dividing a square into four, with the letters IC XC NIKA, “Jesus Christ conquers.” — via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Cutting the Lamb

What the priest does is exact and largely hidden. From the stamped loaf he cuts a cube called the Lamb, the amnos, the portion that alone will be consecrated and become the Body. He cuts along its four sides while reciting words drawn from Isaiah’s fourth servant song — as a lamb led to the slaughter, and as a sheep dumb before its shearers, so he opens not his mouth. The image governs the whole action: the loaf is treated as the suffering servant of the prophet, silent under the knife — the same Lamb of God, the Agnus Dei, whom John the Forerunner pointed to at the Jordan, and whose taking-away of the sins of the world the whole rite enacts in advance. The Lamb is freed from the loaf, turned seal-upward on the diskos, and cut crosswise underneath so that it can later be broken. Then it is pierced on the right side with the lance, and the priest speaks the words the Gospel of John sets at the foot of the cross: one of the soldiers pierced his side, and at once there came out blood and water. Wine mixed with a little water is poured into the chalice at that moment, the mingling understood as the blood and water of the crucifixion itself. The Lamb, then, is read as two things at once: the infant laid in the manger of the prothesis table, and the body opened on the cross. The cutting is the Nativity and the Passion in a single gesture — a compression the later commentators found astonishing, and which they made the center of their interpretation.

The particles and the gathered Church

Around the Lamb the priest sets further particles cut from other loaves, and it is here that the rite becomes a kind of map. To the right of the Lamb he places a single triangular particle for the Mother of God. To the left he sets a rank of nine particles, in three rows of three, for nine orders of the saints — prophets, apostles, hierarchs, martyrs, ascetics, healers, the holy forefathers, and the rest. Below the Lamb come two further rows of small crumbs: one for the living, one for the dead, each lifted out while a name is spoken. The faithful submit lists of names — diptychs, in the old term — and these are read here, in a low voice no congregation hears, the priest moving through them one by one and cutting a particle for each.

When the work is finished the whole arrangement is covered, censed, and left. What sits on the single plate is a diagram of the entire Church: Christ at the center as the Lamb, his mother at his right hand, the saints ranged on his left, and beneath them the whole communion of the living and the departed, gathered by name. Heaven, earth, and the dead are set out together on one paten, around the body that will be broken for them. The diskos has become a portrait of the gathered Church drawn in bread.

This is what distinguishes the prothesis from a simple preparation of materials. A loaf is cut and a cup is filled, but the cutting and filling are made to carry the structure of a whole cosmos and a whole community. The Eastern churches read the moment as an act of sacrifice already begun — not the consecration itself, which waits for the public anaphora, but its foreshadowing, the victim set out and the worshippers ranged around it before a word of the great prayer is spoken. The particle for the Mother of God touches the Lamb; the particles for sinners living and dead lie beneath it; the whole range of the saved is drawn into a single arrangement whose meaning is proximity to Christ. To be commemorated at the prothesis is, in the rite’s own grammar, to be placed near the body that saves.

The growth of a rite

Historically the prothesis is a late and gradual growth, and the elaboration is the whole story. The earliest liturgies prepared the gifts with no ceremony at all: bread and wine were simply brought to the table when they were needed, an act of housekeeping rather than a rite. The deacon, not the priest, long had charge of it. Over the Byzantine middle ages of the Byzantine Empire the preparation drew forward in time, detached itself from the moment of the offertory, and acquired its own script. By the seventh and eighth centuries it carried symbolic weight; by the eleventh and twelfth a more or less independent rite of preparation had formed; and it was not fixed in its present detail until the fourteenth century, in the diataxis — the order of ceremonies — drawn up by the patriarch Philotheos Kokkinos, who held the see of Constantinople in two turns between 1353 and 1376. It is Philotheos’s order, step by step, that underlies the proskomide as it is performed today, and it is in that period that the priest, rather than the deacon, took the rite into his own hands.

The Stuma paten, a sixth-century Byzantine silver diskos engraved with the Communion of the Apostles, now in the Istanbul Archaeological Museums; the diskos is the footed plate on which the Lamb and particles are arranged. — Dosseman, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

What grew, then, was not first a meaning but a practice. The cutting, the naming, the careful arrangement of particles accreted over centuries, each addition answering some need of devotion or order, until the table held the dense, fully worked rite of the late medieval church.

The commentators and their reading

A second tradition grew alongside the first: the running explanation of what the liturgy means. The eighth-century Historia Ecclesiastica of Germanus, patriarch of Constantinople from 715 to 730, served from then until the fourteenth century as the quasi-official key to the Byzantine rite, reading each action as a moment in the life of Christ. In the fourteenth century Nicholas Cabasilas, a layman of Thessalonica writing in the last bright generation of Byzantine theology, gave the rite a more interior reading in his Commentary on the Divine Liturgy: the particles laid around the Lamb, he wrote, are at once a thanksgiving and a supplication, the offerer naming those for whom he pleads while honoring the saints already crowned. In the next century Symeon, archbishop of Thessalonica until his death in 1429, the year before the city fell, wrote the last great Byzantine commentaries and described the proskomide as it stood on the eve of the Ottoman conquest.

These readings found in the completed rite a compressed image of the whole of salvation — the cutting of the Lamb as the Nativity and the Passion at once, the table as Bethlehem, the diskos as the cosmos. Modern scholarship, above all the work of Robert Taft, treats that interpretation as the rite’s own self-understanding rather than its origin. Taft, the liturgical historian whose study of the preanaphoral rites of the Liturgy of John Chrysostom devoted some five hundred pages to roughly fifteen minutes of ceremony, argued that the symbolism was discovered in the rite after the rite had grown — that the salvation history was read backward onto a ceremony assembled for other, more practical and devotional reasons. The Nativity-and-Passion reading is luminous and old, but it is interpretation, not blueprint. The rite was built; then it was explained; and the explanation, repeated for a thousand years, became inseparable from the thing it explained.

Research and sources

The standard critical history is Robert F. Taft’s The Great Entrance: A History of the Transfer of Gifts and other Preanaphoral Rites of the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom (Orientalia Christiana Analecta 200; the revised second edition of 1978), which traces the preparation and procession of the gifts through the entire manuscript record and remains the point of departure for all later work. The medieval self-interpretation can be read in its primary witnesses: Germanus of Constantinople, On the Divine Liturgy, in Paul Meyendorff’s edition and translation, and Nicholas Cabasilas, A Commentary on the Divine Liturgy, in the translation of J. M. Hussey and P. A. McNulty; Symeon of Thessalonica’s liturgical commentaries survive in the critical edition of Steven Hawkes-Teeples. For the rite as the Greek Orthodox church describes its own practice, the Office of Oblation published by the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America sets out the cutting, the seal, and the arrangement of the particles in detail. The development of the fixed order belongs to the diataxis of Philotheos Kokkinos, the fourteenth- century document whose authority closed the long medieval growth of the rite.

The named dead

For those who practice it in the Eastern Orthodox and Eastern Catholic churches, the prothesis is where the dead are kept present. This is the heart of the rite’s pastoral life. After the consecrated Lamb has been broken and a portion placed in the chalice, the commemorated particles — those cut for the living and the departed, by name — are themselves swept into the cup, and each is held to carry the soul it was named for into contact with the Blood of the sacrifice. The practice rests on the conviction, held across the Christian East as in the Latin West, that prayer for the dead avails them, that the departed are not beyond reach, and that the living can lift them toward mercy by setting their names where the saving body lies — a conviction the churches of the Reformation would later contest, and which here is not argued but performed. The same logic stands behind the church’s other rites of the threshold: as viaticum gives the dying the Eucharist as provision for the road, the prothesis gives the dead a continuing place at the table they have left.

Lists of names submitted by the faithful — the living to be kept, the dead to be remembered — are read here in a low voice no congregation hears, the priest moving through them while, beyond the doors, the people gather and the public service has not yet begun. 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, and standing to the Eastern Eucharist somewhat as the preface of thanksgiving stands at the threshold of the Western. 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.

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