'In the posture of worship and adoration': Prayer Book Communion and kneeling to receive the Sacrament

The people are to receive the Communion all meekly kneeling.

When, in his A Critical and Practical Elucidation of the Book of Common Prayer, Volume II (1801), John Shepherd addresses the Prayer Book rubric directing that the Sacrament is to be received "meekly kneeling", he immediately draws a parallel between this and the practice of the patristic and Eastern churches:

In the ancient Church the people appear to have more generally received the Communion standing. Yet they "stood with fear and trembling, with silence and downcast eyes." Cyril directs the communicant "to draw near, bowing his body in the posture of worship and adoration." In the modern Greek Church the communicant does not kneel, but inclines his body, and is instructed to exercise at the time this act of faith: "I believe and I acknowledge that thou art Jesus Christ the Son of the living God, who camest into the world to save sinners, of whom I am chief."

While it may seem counter-intuitive to justify the Western and Prayer Book practice of kneeling to receive the holy Sacrament by invoking the patristic and Eastern practice of standing, Shepherd rightly identifies a profounder unity in the different practices. Quoting the Mystagogical Catechesis of Cyril of Jerusalem and the great Liturgies of the East, he sees in both practices a shared expression of reverence and adoration when approaching reception of the Sacrament.

Shepherd is here reflecting a well-established approach in Prayer Book commentary. Sparrow's Rationale, for example, points to both Augustine and Cyril in his account of kneeling:

It is to be given to the people kneeling. for a sin it is not to adore when we receive this Sacrament, Aug. in Psal. 98. And the old custome was to receive it after the manner of Adoration, Cyril.

Likewise, Wheatley also pointed to the Eastern practice and quoted Cyril:

and though anciently they stood in the East, yet it was "with fear and trembling, with silence and downcast eyes, bowing themselves in the posture of worship and adoration".

In other words, from Sparrow's commentary of the 1650s, through Wheatley's oft republished work of the 18th century, to Shepherd in 1801, Church of England liturgists consistently understood kneeling to receive the holy Sacrament as sharing in the attitude of adoration encouraged by the patristic and Eastern churches. Such adoration is inherent to - in the words of the Black Rubric - "our humble and grateful acknowledgement of the benefits of Christ" given in the holy Sacrament.

This rich invocation of patristic and Eastern practice and piety leads me once again to note that Shepherd was writing over three decades before the beginning of the Oxford Movement. It not only testifies to a lively eucharist piety significantly predating the Tractarians, it also exemplifies how drinking deeply from patristic wells was not a post-1834 development within Anglicanism.

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