Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts

Great Lent poses a liturgical dilemma the Byzantine church solved with characteristic ingenuity. The full Divine Liturgy is a paschal act, a celebration, and the ancient instinct of the fast forbade celebrating it on the strict weekdays of Lent. But the same church did not wish its faithful to pass whole weeks without communion during the very season of deepest effort. The answer is a service with no anaphora at all.

At the Sunday liturgy additional Lambs are consecrated and reserved, and on the appointed evenings the church gathers for vespers, into which the Presanctified rite is grafted. The psalms and hymns of the evening office proceed; the reserved gifts are brought from the table of preparation to the altar in a silent entrance before which the whole congregation kneels, an entrance often accompanied by the hymn Now the Powers of Heaven; the prayer of the day is offered; and the faithful receive the presanctified mysteries after a day of fasting. Nothing is consecrated, so the service is not a eucharist but an extension of the previous one, a design that expresses the theology of the reserved sacrament with total clarity. The atmosphere is unlike anything else in the Byzantine year: candlelight, prostrations, the great Lenten prayer of Ephrem the Syrian, and the sense of a church deliberately holding back its own joy until Pascha releases it.

The Presanctified liturgy enters written law at the Council in Trullo, held in Constantinople in 692, whose fifty-second canon directs that on the days of the holy fast, except Saturdays, Sundays and the feast of the Annunciation, the liturgy of the presanctified is to be celebrated. The canon regulates an existing custom rather than inventing one, so the practice is older than its legislation, and historians trace the underlying habit to the early Christian custom of the faithful keeping the reserved sacrament for weekday communion at home, a private usage the church gradually gathered into a public evening service. The attribution history is a small comedy of ecclesiastical exchange. Greek manuscripts transmit the service anonymously or under various names, but the Slavic books assign it to Gregory the Dialogist, the same Gregory the Great who reigned as pope of Rome from 590 to 604 and whose Dialogues gave him his Eastern surname.

The legend grew from Gregory's genuine reputation in the East and from traditions about his liturgical work in Rome, where a presanctified communion rite also existed on Good Friday; scholarship finds no evidence connecting him to the Byzantine service. The Roman Rite, for its part, kept its own presanctified rite on exactly one day of the year, Good Friday, which it retains still, so the two halves of Christendom each preserve a version of the same ancient instinct, one annually and one throughout Lent.