It is the Holy Spirit who manifests the bread as the body and the wine as the blood of Christ.2 The Orthodox Church has always insisted that the transformation (metabole) of the eucharistic elements is performed by the epiclesis—the invocation of the Holy Spirit—and not by the words of institution. This doctrine, however, was often misunderstood by the Orthodox themselves. Its point is not to replace one “causality”—the words of institution—by another, a different “formula.” It is to reveal the eschatological character of the sacrament. The Holy Spirit comes on the “last and great day” of
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