www.byzcath.org Forums Faith & Christian Life The Christian East & West Transubstantiation

Dear Steve,

Did I say one was better over the other?

It is a matter of spiritual culture - and when it comes to culture, I see it as a sociologist would, rather than a theologian.

It is where we feel most at home and where our beings feel most involved in worship.

To say that something is not "right" for the East doesn't mean it isn't "right" period.

Otherwise, there would only be one universal Rite!

Alex

Bless me a sinner, Father Kimel!

Actually, the East always approached the Eucharist from within the perspective of mystery - the covering up only underscored it.

Again, I am looking at the spiritual cultures of East and West, very much as a sociologist working within a probabilistic theoretical model would, and I suppose I do step on some (positivist )toes in so doing.

But it is not my intention and when I speak of the "Filioque" I am only using it as an "ideal type" to illustrate and not to pronounce infallibly or even generally.

It is not my wish to suggest, for example, that the Spirit is not active in the West!

I'm only looking at the liturgical culture, the noted (by others much more theologically qualified than me) absence of the overt liturgical role of the Spirit in the West for a period of time.

That doesn't mean that the Spirit is absent in the West - it reflects a different perspective than that of the East where the Spirit is also, so I've heard, active!

The impact of this on the administrative model of the Western church is a matter of debate.

No one, and least of all myself, is saying the papacy does not have excellent points about it.

But I would see the growth of the papacy in the face of the vaccuum created by the barbarian invasions and the lack of a strong civil leader as an "outgrowth" of those social and political conditions. It was inevitable and if it was indeed "liberating" then that is a plus for it. But it would have occurred in response to those conditions first and foremost notwithstanding.

So the impact of the "Filioque" is not simply "flippant" - it is so to a Western Catholic such as yourself who has always accepted it as part and parcel of the ancient Catholic faith and Creed - and we both know it certainly was never that.

I think you assume that your assessment of Lossky and Orthodox thinkers is somehow THE assessment, as I gather from your presentation, and really it is a classical and biased, Western view open for debate.

Overt devotion to the Holy Spirit is what is truly liberating in the life of the Church and this surely has an impact on its organizational, doctrinal and devotional life.

The West has tended to emphasize the role of the Holy Spirit and I've read those who say that, in the West, He was the "Forgotten God" and the like.

As someone who came from a very Latin background, what attracted me to the East was precisely its emphasis on the overt liturgical role of the Spirit in the Church and our spiritual lives. The emphasis on Theosis, the Resurrection of Christ, the work of all Three Persons of the Trinity as contained in the frequent liturgical invocation of Them (Rahner's view of the "social conception of God") and the glorification of the Mother of God and the Saints in heaven.

Theosis, for example, is not emphasized in the West, although Meyendorff would say the Thomists did admit of the beatific vision which is similar.

As for the ethnic and other forms of "narrowness" you mention, now that is really an overgeneralized statement!

As a member of the Anglican Communion that is itself composed of national Churches - really!

Your Anglican saints, John Mason Neale, John Keble and Henry Martyn, not only translated Eastern liturgies and worked with Eastern Churches (for which they were highly admired by them), but they understood the truly liberating role the Churches of the EAst played in maintaining their peoples, defending them and preserving them, their culture and their sense of self-hood through years of religious persecution and foreign domination.

And we have never pretended to be somehow "universal" in the Western Catholic sense which has come to mean a universal "Latin" mentality of the West imposed on other cultures.

Orthodoxy has a proven track record of allowing local cultures to grow into it organically and holistically i.e. Siberia, China, Alaska, and now North America.

And this at a time when the West is moving away from its own Western religious patrimony through secularization, a movement begun really at the time of the Reformation in which your own tradition is rooted and which only came to return to its Western Catholicism much later and not without great struggle.

And we know Anglicans very well. We have Anglican Rite Orthodox and Catholics in communion with Rome, but that is an aside.

Orthodoxy has become very closely identified with the culture and identity of the people it has ministered to in history.

The perceived narrowness of it all in North America is not that at all for those Eastern Church members for whom their ethno-cultural Particular Churches are of the utmost relevance to them, as mine is to me.

Alex

Alex wrote:

I need to challenge you here, Alex, if I may. I recognize in your argument the thought of Alexander Schmemann. I love his book on the Eucharist, but I am not persuaded yet by his arguments on symbolism. He ignores the fact that already by the fifth century various Eastern writers are becoming unhappy with the language of symbol by which to speak of the Eucharistic elements. This aversion to this language of symbol has continued and intensified even to the present. Consider the following:

Theodore of Mopsuestia (5th century):

Macarius of Magnesia (5th century):

St. John of Damascus (7th century):
St. Theophylact (11th century):
St. Gregory Palamas (14th century):
Of decisive dogmatic significance is the decision of the 2nd Council of Nicaea and the conflict with iconoclasm. Jaroslav Pelikan notes that on the Eucharist the iconoclasts and the iconodules enjoyed fundamental agreement, but they disagreed on the nature of an image. A true image, the iconoclasts asserted, was homoousios with its prototype. Consequently, the Eucharist was the only proper image of Christ, because the Eucharist is identical in being with Christ. II Nicaea considered the iconoclastic argument and rejected it: the Eucharist is not an image of the body and blood of Christ; it is the body and blood of Christ.

In his Byzantine Theology John Meyendorff notes the Byzantine rejection of the language of symbol to speak of the Eucharist and its impact on the Eastern perception of the Eucharist:

I wonder what Schmemann would say about this development within Orthodox theology and experience. In any case, symbol is not just a Western problem when it comes to the Eucharist. The East also is historically uncomfortable about speaking of the Eucharistic elements as symbols of the body and blood of our Lord. The language of symbol works just fine when we are living in a culture that lives and breathes neo-Platonism. But what happens when our experience is no longer mediated through neo-Platonism, as is the case for us today. Outside of neo-Platonism, folks will naturally posit a separation between a symbol and its object. Surely we do not want to say that the Church's explication of the Faith is necessarily tied to one specific philosophy. In this situation, I imagine we will end up creating the notion of "efficacious signs" or "efficacious symbols"--i.e., special signs that effectively communicate that which they symbolize. Are the East and West really so far apart? I don't think so.

Pax,
Alvin+

oops. sorry for the double posting. i clicked add reply instead of preview, but quickly clicked on "Stop" on my browser and thought I had successfully interrupted the process. I guess I wasn't quick enough.

Dear Alex,

No you did not! Sorry for the implication.

Steve

A quick response, Alex, to your last post. I must have pushed a button with my brief(!) reference to the conflation of religion and ethnic identity. In my defense, let me say that I was only reporting what a number of Orthodox folks have said to me. They are the ones who see it as a major problem within their communion. Indeed, do you not even have a name for this sin (which at the moment escapes me)?

I'm not sure why you brought up Anglicanism here, but I must correct you at one point. Anglicanism is most definitely not a communion of national or state churches. Can you think of one place where to be ____ is to be Anglican? That identification no longer obtains even in England!

In the Episcopal Church to be an Episcopalian does probably mean to be white and middle class. (We long ago ceased to be the favored religion of the upper class!) But fortunately this problem does not not exist in the largest and most vital part of our communion--namely, the churches in Africa!

You are, of course, quite correct that many Anglicans, particularly those belonging to the Anglo-Catholic wing, have looked quite sympathetically to Orthodoxy and have enjoyed exceptionally cordial relations with the Orthodox.

Just in case you were wondering, if I didn't love Orthodoxy, I wouldn't have joined this bulletin board.

Pax,
Alvin+

Bless me a sinner, Father Alvin!

Thank you for sharing with all members of this Board your exhaustive theological knowledge!

You are my favourite kind of Anglican!

Theodore of Mopsuestia had a point in the quote you made - but he isn't honoured in the Orthodox Church for obvious reasons . . .

Your other quotes were not "dissatisfactions" with the use of "symbol" but a DEFENSE of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist against heretics who, like the later Protestants, affirmed the dichotomy between "symbol" and "reality" and maintained that the Eucharist was only the former.

So I don't see in these important quotes the meaning you've given them, but I could be wrong, I don't make it a practice to insist on my own view over and above that of the Clergy, trained in theology in ways that I never will be!

The Anglican Communion is definitely based on national churches, although, I agree with you, not in the same way as Catholic and Orthodox Churches are linked with countries.

HOWEVER, an Anglican from Africa belongs to a Church that is truly Africanized, with local African saints (I think of Blessed James Hannington of Equatorial Africa, Blessed Bernard Mizeki, Blessed Arthur Cripps - then there is Blessed James Coleridge Patteson of Melanesia. Blessed James DeKoven, one of my favourites, of the U.S.). I will refrain from going on about St Charles, King and Martyr .

It is to its great credit that the Anglican Communion has adapted to the national cultures of the peoples among which it has established roots.

And it promotes this kind of national inculturalisation - again to its great credit.

As does the Latin Church these years.

That is all I meant when I made the comparison with the Orthodox Eastern Churches.

It is not a perfect comparison, of course.

Alex

To all:

So much focus on the "changes" taking place on the bread and wine at the Eucharist.

How about the "two becomes one" change during the sacred mystery of crowning? or the "new life" that occurs when one is baptized?

Do two married couples change substance? Are they tranfigured? Is this new life just words?

What words/language/philosophical system do we use to describe these other sacred mysteries whereby the Holy Spirit is called down to transform them?

Does speculation increase our chance of understanding the changes taking place?

How does the Kodak Moment of "transubstantiation" apply elsewhere? Do two people really or symbolically become one, whereby their "accidents" remain?

Dear Cantor Joe,

You da Man!

Alex

And as much as I try, it's usually JoeT who throws the knockout punch!

In Christ,
Cantor Andrew.

Regarding ethnicity and the Church:

In my meaner moments at seminary (I had one or two as I recall), I would set up my fellow seminarians who were rabidly against ethnicity in the Church.

I would say (like a nice guy) "so you want to use only English, right?" They'd reply, "Yes! Yes!"

"And you want music written here by the faithful in North America, right?" They'd reply, "Yes! Oh, Yes!"

"And you don't want clergy imported from abroad, but clergy from amongst the faithful here in North America?" They'd reply, "Exactly! You finally understand us!"

I would reply, "Yes, I do. And I wish to congratulate you. What you have just defined is another ethnic Church - The American Orthodox Church. We need such, we have such (more and more), and I support such. But don't you dare try to knock down the other ethnic Churches that brought you this faith."

They were not amused.

In Christ,
Andrew

Dear Reader Andrew,

As far as knockout punches are concerned, I would say your post above is good for a ten count!

Alex

Indeed, I think Joe T. has hit it on the head.
Fr. Kimel was making a distinction earlier (in order to defend transubstantiation from the charge of matter phobia) between "physical" and "metaphysical realities". It seems to me that as soon as you start using philosophical distinctions like this, you may as well be saying "It's all a mystery" because nobody knows what those words mean. I know people say they know what a metaphysical reality is, but they really don't. And Fr. Kimel's posts reveal that he knows enough philosophy to appreciate this. (and of course he made the point that western doctrine does not proclaim the end of mystery)

At the end of the day all we really know is

1. It's the Body and Blood of our Lord
2. It still looks and tastes like bread and wine

If you want to use words like substance and accidents to say 1. and 2. Be my guess, but I dont think you could use them to teach me anything that I didn't just say. Those words just don't mean much anymore. Philosophy changes. The Faith stays the same.

Peace,

David Lewis

Dear David Lewis,

Yes, excellent points!

The Eastern Churches have tended to have a good deal of wariness about them with respect to the Greek philosophies, especially Neo-platonism.

It is clear that St Gregory of Nyssa, for example, allowed this philosophy to influence his theology - and the Church didn't like some of his conclusions at all.

The fact is that St Paul does indeed call Holy Communion "Bread" and our Lord Himself did that as well at the Mystical Supper before His Passion.

The word for "Bread" that our Lord used in Chapter Six of the Gospel of John, referring to Himself of course, is "Superessential Bread."

And it is the same word that He uses in the prayer "Our Father" for "Daily Bread."

"Superessential Bread" would then be identical to what Reader Andrew has proposed here and would certainly not be, in any way, a form of "Consubstantiation."

Alex