confers on the term a priestly character and aura (as it had already had in the
Septuagint) that was anything but taken for granted at that point (as we have
seen, none of the original documents use the term priest— hierus, sacerdos—
to indicate a member of the community). From an occasional public service,
which does not have a specific title within the community, liturgy begins to
transform into a special activity, into a “ministry” that tends to define a particu-
lar subject as entitled to it: the bishop and the presbyters in the letter and, later,
the priest. What defines this activity? What constitutes a determined sphere of
action as a liturgy?
א In the section of the Apostolic Constitutions known as the Canones apostolici one can see how the passage from a charismatic community to an organization of a juridical
type was not only a fact already in some sense achieved, but had constituted the object
of a precise strategy. The text—which, although composed around the end of the fourth
century, pretends to be a work of the apostles themselves—actually opens with a lengthy
treatment of the traditional charismas (glossolalia, etc.), but the goal of the author is
obviously to minimize their relevance with respect to what he defines immediately after
as “ecclesiastical organization” ( ekklēsiastikē diatypōsis). In question are precisely the “constitutions” ( diatexeis, a technical term for testamentary provisions) that the apostles had established as a configuration or general model ( typos) of the church, from the ordination of the bishop to the articulation of the hierarchy to the rituals of the sacraments. What
is evident in the Constitutions is the construction of a separate ecclesiastical hierarchy which culminates in the bishop: “Those which were then the sacrifices now are prayers,
and intercessions, and thanksgivings [ eucharistiai]. Those which were then first-fruits, and tithes, and offerings, and gifts, now are oblations, which are presented by holy bishops
to the Lord God, through Jesus Christ, who has died for them. For these are your high
priests [ archiereis] and presbyters are your priests, and your present deacons instead of your Levites” ( Apostolic Constitutions 2.4.25). “If anyone does anything without the bishop,”
one reads a little further down, “he does it to no purpose [ matēn]” (2.4.27). “For neither
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may we address ourselves to Almighty God, but only by Christ. In the same manner,
therefore, let the laity make known all their desires to the bishop by the deacon” (2.4.28).
In Irenaeus, by contrast, the charismas are still not subordinated to the succession
according to apostolic ordination. The passage in which he recommends obedience to
the presbyters, “who, together with the succession of the episcopate, have received a
charisma veritatis certum” (Irenaeus 4.26.2), does not mean, as has been suggested, that he claims a sort of infallibility for the bishop. Rather, the fact that immediately afterward he distinguishes between good and evil presbyters and confirms the importance of the
charismata Dei shows that Irenaeus conceives the latter as an equally important element of ecclesiastical ordination: “Where, therefore, the gifts of the Lord have been placed [ ubi igitur charismata dei posita sunt], there it behooves us to learn the truth, namely, from those who possess the succession of the Church which is from the apostles, and among
whom exists what is sound and blameless in conduct, as well as that which is unadul-
terated and incorrupt in speech” (Irenaeus 4.26.5). At the end of the second century, a
charismatic community and a hierarchical organization still cohabitated in a functional
unity in the church.
7. Guy Stroumsa has recently called attention to the persistence of sacrificial
ideology in Christianity. It is well known that after the second destruction of
the Temple, rabbinic Judaism oriented itself in the direction of a spiritualization
of the liturgy, transforming it from a sequence of rites that accompanied the
sacrificial action into a collection of prayers that were actually substituted for
the sacrifices. From this perspective the talmud Torah, the study of the Torah,
supplanted sacrificial practices, and “the rabbis gathered in Yavneh in 70 suc-
ceeded in transforming Judaism—without admitting doing so, and perhaps also
without admitting it completely even to themselves—into a non-sacrificial reli-
gion” (Stroumsa, 129/72). Christianity, by contrast, defined itself early on “as a
religion centered on sacrifice, even if it was a reinterpreted sacrifice. The Chris-
tian anamnēsis of the sacrifice of Jesus has a power very different from that of the Hebrew memory of Temple sacrifices, because the anamnēsis is the reactivation
of the sacrifice of the Son of God, performed by the priests” (Stroumsa, 129/72).
Stroumsa could have added that the construction of the sacramental liturgy
is founded, starting already with the Church Fathers, on explicit and unreserved
opposition of the sacraments of the Old Law—which signify and announce but
do not achieve what they signify—to the sacraments of the New Law, which
accomplish what they signify.
In reality the author of the Letter to the Hebrews does not establish any con-
nection between the doctrine of Christ’s priesthood and the eucharistic celebra-
tion. This is not the place to reconstruct the genealogy of this connection, whose
strategic importance for the Church is obvious. Already implicit in Origen
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( Homiliae in Numeros 9.5.2, 10.21), it often appears surreptitiously, through the
simple juxtaposition of the two motifs. Thus in two passages of the Apostolic
Constitutions, in which the ecclesiological preoccupation is evident: “Lord, grant that this your servant, whom you have chosen to be a bishop, may feed your
holy flock and discharge the office of a high priest [ archierateuein] before you
blamelessly night and day . . . offering to you a pure and unbloody sacrifice,
which you have appointed through Christ as the mystery of the new covenant”
( Apostolic Constitutions 8.2.5; translation altered); “The first High Priest therefore, who is so by nature [ prōtos . . . tēi physēi archiereus], is Christ the only begotten; not having snatched that honor to himself but having been appointed
such by the Father. He was made man for our sake, and offering the spiritual
sacrifice to his God and Father, before his suffering charged us alone to do this”
(8.5.46); and in Epiphanius (“so as to be made a priest for us after the order of
Melchizedek . . . for he abides forever to offer gifts for us—after first offering
himself by the cross, to abolish every sacrifice of the old covenant”; Epiphanius
55.4.5–7, 2:80–81). Later, we find the two terms connected in Ambrose (“Who
then is the author of the sacraments but the Lord Jesus? . . . We learn that those
sacraments were prefigured in the times of Abraham, when holy Melchizedek of-
fered sacrifice, having neither beginning nor end of days. Hear, O man, what the
Apostle Paul says to the Hebrews”; On the Sacraments 4.13, 5.1) and in Augustine
(“Also, our priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek, he offered him-
self as a sacrifice for our sins, and recommended the reenactment of that sacrifice
to be celebrated in memory of his suffering and death, so that what Melchizedek
offered to God now we see o
ffered in the Church of Christ throughout the
whole world”; De diversis questionibus, question 61 [117]).
In each case, in bringing together two distinct texts, it is a matter of conceiv-
ing the institution of the Eucharist as a priestly service of Jesus, who according
to the doctrine of the letter acts as high priest of the order of Melchizedek and
in this way transmits the priestly ministry to the apostles and to their successors
in the Church. In this sense one can say that the definition of the priestly char-
acter of the ecclesiastical hierarchy is constructed precisely through founding
the sacramental liturgy in the doctrine of Christ as high priest. In the summa
of the Catholic liturgy that is William Durand’s Rationale divinorum officiorum,
the connection already has the obviousness of a formula: Missa instituit Dominus
Iesus, sacerdos secundum ordinem Melchisedech, quando panem et vinum in corpus
et sanguinem suum transmutavit, dicens: “Hoc est corpus meus, hic est sanguis meus,”
subiungens: “Hoc facite in meam commemorationem” (The Lord Jesus instituted
the mass as priest according to the order of Melchizedek, when he transmuted
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bread and wine into his body and blood, saying, ‘This is my body, this is my
blood,’ and enjoining, ‘Do this in memory of me’”; Durand, bk. 1, 240).
The Council of Trent (session XXII, chap. 1) confirms beyond any doubt the
foundational and eternal character of Christ’s priesthood, which is renewed and
perpetuated in the eucharistic liturgy, in the celebration of which the Church is
linked to Christ as the liturgue of the Letter to the Hebrews:
He, therefore, our God and Lord, though He was by His death about to offer
Himself once upon the altar of the cross to God the Father that He might there
accomplish an eternal redemption, nevertheless, that His priesthood might not
come to an end with His death, at the last supper, on the night He was betrayed,
that He might leave to His beloved spouse the Church a visible sacrifice, such
as the nature of man requires, whereby that bloody sacrifice once to be accom-
plished on the cross might be represented . . . , declaring Himself constituted a
priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek, offered up to God the Father
His own body and blood under the form of bread and wine, and under the forms
of those same things gave to the Apostles, whom He then made priests of the New
Testament, that they might partake, commanding them and their successors in
the priesthood by these words to do likewise: Do this in memory of me.
In the idea of Christ as a “priest forever,” the “once for all” ( hapax) of the Letter to the Hebrews is joined with the “forever and ever” of the eucharistic celebration ceaselessly repeated by the Church, and the continuity of the ecclesiastical
hierarchy of Clement’s letter receives its priestly seal.
The definition of the liturgy in twentieth-century encyclicals has only con-
firmed this connection: “The sacred liturgy is, consequently, the public worship
which our Redeemer as Head of the Church renders to the Father, as well
as the worship which the community of the faithful renders to its Founder,
and through Him to the heavenly Father” ( Mediator Dei §20; cf. Braga and
Bugnini, 571).
The fact that the Church has founded its liturgical praxis on the Letter to the
Hebrews, namely by putting at its center an unceasing reactualization of the sac-
rifice achieved by Christ the leitourgos and high priest, constitutes both the truth and the aporia of Christian liturgy (which Augustine summarizes in the antithesis semel immolatus . . . et tamen quotidie immolatur [offered once . . . and yet he is offered daily]). The problem, which will never cease to appear again and
again in the history of the Church as its central “mystery,” is precisely that of
how one is to understand the reality and effectiveness of the sacramental liturgy
and, at the same time, of how this “mystery” can take the form of a “ministry,”
which defines the specific praxis of the members of the ecclesiastical hierarchy.
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8. The doctrine of the liturgical character of Christ’s sacrifice has its root
in the doctrine of the Trinity itself. We have shown how the Fathers, in order
to reconcile the unity of substance with the plurality of persons in God and in
close hand-to-hand combat with Gnosis, initially formulate the doctrine of the
Trinity in terms of an oikonomia, of an activity of “administration” and “man-
agement” of the divine life and of creation (Agamben, 17–50). In the words
of Tertullian, who (in opposition to the monarchians) was among the first to
elaborate the doctrine of the Trinity as a divine “economy”: “they must believe
in one only [God], yet they must believe in him along with his oikonomia. . . . A
unity which derives from itself a trinity is not destroyed but administered by it
[ non destruatur ab illa sed administretur]” ( Against Praxeas 3.1; qtd. in Agamben, 42). Reversing an expression of Paul, who in his letters had spoken, in reference
to the divine plan of redemption, of an “economy of the mystery” ( oikonomia
tou mystēriou, Ephesians 3:9), Hippolytus, Irenaeus, and Tertullian thus pre-
sented the very articulation of the Trinity and its salvific action as a “mystery
of the economy” ( mystērion tēs oikonomias, oikonomias sacramentum). The insistence on the “mysterious” character of the divine work of salvation shows, how-
ever, that the caesura they had wanted to avoid on the level of being reappears
as a fracture between God and his action, between ontology and praxis. What
is mysterious is now no longer, as in Paul, the divine plan of redemption, which
demanded an oikonomia that was clear in itself. What is inscrutable or myste-
rious is now the “economy” itself, the very praxis through which God secures
the salvation of his creation. Whatever meaning is to be assigned to the term
mystērion and its Latin equivalent sacramentum, what is essential here is that the divine economy takes the form of a mystery.
Through the incarnation, Christ takes this mysterious economy on him-
self. But on the basis of the passage from John according to which “the Son of
Man has been glorified by God and God has been glorified in him” (13:31), the
“economy” is understood simultaneously as a glorification and as a reciprocal
manifestation of the Father through the Son and of the Son in doing the Father’s
work. In Origen’s commentary on the Gospel of John, the “economy of the
passion” of the savior thus coincides perfectly with the economy of the glory by
which the Son reveals and celebrates the Father. The mystery of the economy is
a doxological, which is to say liturgical, mystery.
It is along with this aporetic conception of the trinitarian “economy,” in which
Christ acts as “economy” of both redemption and the glory of the Father, that one
must read the doctrine of the Letter to the Hebrews, in which Christ is presented
in the guise of a leitourgos, of a high priest who takes upon himself the “liturgy,”
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the “public” and “sacrificial” service of the redemption of the human race. Trin-
itarian Chri
stology is elaborated, that is to say, through a twofold metaphorical
register: to the political and cultic metaphor of Christ as liturgue of redemption
in the Letter to the Hebrews there corresponds point by point in the Fathers the
“economic” metaphor of Christ as administrator and dispenser of the divine mys-
tery of salvation. The relation and tension between these two metaphors define the
locus in which Christian liturgy is situated. In liturgically celebrating his sacrifice (his “mystery”), Christ brings the trinitarian economy to completion. The mystery
of the economy, insofar as it is an economy of salvation, is fulfilled in and trans-
formed into a liturgical mystery, in which the economic metaphor and political
metaphor are identified.
Modern theologians are accustomed to distinguishing the “economic Trinity”
(or Trinity of revelation), which defines God in his salvific action with respect to
humans, and the “immanent Trinity” (or Trinity of substance), which defines the
internal articulation of the divine life in itself. Economic Trinity and immanent
Trinity must correspond in the liturgy. But the tensions and contradictions that
are implicit in the “economic-mysterious” paradigm of the Trinity will also con-
tinue to mark the public activity of the Church, in which mystery and economy,
priestly action and economic-political praxis, opus operatum and opus operantis will continue to be endlessly distinguished and superimposed. The “kingdom of
priests” of Exodus 19:6 and the “royal priesthood” of the Septuagint and the First
Letter of Peter define the paradigm and, at the same time, the constitutive aporia
of the Church’s liturgy.
9. The Letter to the Hebrews and the Letter of Clement constitute two po-
larities, and Christian liturgy will never cease to articulate itself and define itself
through the tension between the two. On the one hand, the semel [once] of the
efficacious but unrepeated sacrament, whose sole subject is Christ; on the other,
the quotidie [daily] of the “liturgy” of the bishop and the presbyter in the community. On the one hand, the mystery of a perfect sacrificial action, whose effects are accomplished once and for all (in the words of Cabasilas’s liturgical treatise, “sanctification”); on the other, the ministry of those who must celebrate its memory
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