Anselm and the Byzantine Synthesis

Pieta by William Adolphe Bouguereau, 1876

St Anselm, the Archbishop of Canterbury (1093-1109), is arguably one of the most important theologians in the West. His substitutional theory of atonement was accepted by the Reformers and became dominant in the understanding of the salvific work of Christ throughout the centuries, even to this day and even in the Orthodox churches. He is largely responsible for the understanding of Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross as substituting for our death warranted by our sins. In fact, Anselm was the first to articulate explicitly the notion of sacrifice as a vicarious death voluntarily undertaken on behalf of others: “For Christ also suffered for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous…” (1 Peter 3.18). After Anselm the word ‘sacrifice’ implied ‘substitution,’ as in ‘sacrifice hit’ in baseball. As we have argued, the primary meaning of ‘sacrifice’ does not refer to ‘substitution,’ though it is implied, but to ‘giving’ or ‘offering.’ See Introduction.

The Substitutional Theory of Atonement

In his seminal work, Cur Deus Homo (“Why the God-Man,” 1098), Anselm proposes that God’s sense of justice cannot tolerate human sin; that it cannot be forgiven without adequate recompense. However, God’s love compels Him to save humanity, that He cannot allow the entire humanity to perish as well deserved. The solution to the divine dilemma that Anselm proposes is this: Only someone equal to God can bear the magnitude of human sin in totality and only such person can suffer adequate enough of a punishment that would recompense for God’s demand for justice. Thus, Christ becomes man and suffers the punishment appropriate to the magnitude of human sin in totality. He had to be a genuine human, otherwise the punishment He undertakes cannot be for humans. He had to be God, on the other hand, because no other human can bear the weight of the punishment appropriate to the magnitude of human sin in totality. Only Christ can satisfy both God’s love and justice at the same time in the single act of his sacrifice on the Cross. As he puts it, only God (in the form of man) can offset the totality of human sin in the divine ledger, where debt owed must be paid by equal or comparable worth: “recompense ought to be proportional to the magnitude of the sin” (Anselm, 1998: 283). 

The outcome of this marvelously rational a solution to God’s dilemma is a theory of atonement: that Christ assumes humanity along with their corresponding debt and receives punishment appropriate to and warranted by the magnitude of their debt by suffering and dying on the Cross. His sacrifice thus undergone as punishment substitutes for our sacrifice. He died as “a ransom for many” (Mark 10.45).

The impact of Anselm’s substitutional theory of atonement on the understanding of the Eucharist is direct and significant.

If Christ suffered on our behalf as a payment for our sins, the Body of Christ represented by the bread and wine testifies to His suffering on the Cross, the very act of substitution that redeems us. His death once and for all in history in the past is sufficient enough for our redemption. The sacrament of the bread and wine in the present only remind us of his loving act of mercy and forgiveness as shown on the Cross. We are deemed righteous, as we wear the robe of Christ’s righteousness, even though we may be wicked and unrighteousness in ourselves. What remains for us is the obligation to be grateful and thankful to Christ for his vicarious suffering and death and his act of love in substituting himself for our sin and death. It is hope that such a gratitude one feels toward the Cross would result in good works.

In Anselm’s theory the meaning of Christ’ resurrection recedes into the background. This is another shortcoming. But for St Paul it is the resurrection that vindicates Christ and thus ourselves by participation—Christ “who was handed over for our trespasses and was raised for our justification” (Rom 4.25). Christ assumes our sins in his death and confers us a victory (over death and sin) in his resurrection in which we participate.

J. W. Goethe (d. 1832) captures the idea of sacrifice as substitutional death perfectly, when he writes about Ottilie’ death (by suicide) in his novel Elective Affinities, published in 1809:  

She saw herself as the source of all misfortune, and only in annihilation could she find purity.

Elective Affinities, Part 2, Chapter 18.

Ottillie is portrayed as innocent and pure, despite her love for Eduard that is never consummated. Her death, however, brings about (it is hoped) purification in the otherwise adulterous marriage involving the quartet: Charlotte and Eduard in marriage that leads to the birth of a child named Otto (who is conceived, while during the intercourse each was thinking of the other person outside the marriage, and who was (sacrificially) killed in an accident), Charlotte and the Captain in an adulterous relationship that was never consummated, and Eduard and Ottillie in a similar adulterous relationship without consummation. The only consummation in these triple pairs of romantic relations takes place legitimately within the joyless marriage while mentally committing adultery with each of their spiritual lovers. Like Otto’s, Ottillie’s death (by suicide), fated by her love for Eduard, substitutes for the transgressions of the quartet and purifies the entire household that harbored the affinities among the four bonded together in spiritual adultery.

For Goethe sacrifice is vicarious death. As such it purifies and redeems. But is sacrifice vicarious death? Must a sacrifice die? How can we offer “our bodies as a living sacrifice”? as Paul exerts us to do (Rom 12.1). What about the grain offering, as described in Leviticus 2 and 6.14-18? What about one of the two goats that lives and is lead to the wilderness (Azazel) on the Day of Atonement, as prescribed in Leviticus 16.6-10, 21-22? Even for the bull and the goat that are killed, they are killed in order to obtain the blood, which in turn is sprinkled and smeared in specific and prescribed ways to cleanse and purify (Lev 16.9, 11, 15). The hides, flesh, and hung are burned in fire “outside the camp” (Lev 16.27). Only the suet (the fat portion) is burnt “into smoke on the altar” in the court yard of the tent (Lev 16.25). It is burnt for sweet smell that arises to God, as is the case with the grain offering (the bread or cake), in which oil and frankincense are put on the unleavened bread (either baked in oven or roasted in fire) and then burn “into smoke” on the altar in the court yard (Lev 2.2, 9, 16).

In further consideration of the consequences of Anselm’s Christology, we must note that the idea of divine life that we are to participate and to partake in here and now in the Liturgy is relegated to the realm of the afterlife. Once we are justified, our goal is to maintain the status by persistent belief held firmly with respect to the salvifict work of Christ on the cross in past history some 2,000 years ago. One’s faith alone (Sola Fide) ties oneself to the salvifict Christ-Event that took place in the past history. The faith, then, must always be firmed up and maintained by use of spiritual aides such as reading of the Bible and the representational eucharist that renews our memory and commitment. 

The Renaissance, modernity, and even “the later Byzantine synthesis” (between the Antiochene emphasis on historical realism and the Alexandrian emphasis on theōsis (Taft, 1980/1981: 70)) have resulted in the Church’s focus on the salvation of individual souls rather than on the redemption of the whole world, including societies at large and the eco-system of the planet. The contemporary rise of the Evangelicals such as Billy Graham—the first successful American tele-evangelist who had never pastored a church—becomes the inevitable outcome, to be modeled after and followed by hundreds of other pastors, who run mega churches and promote the prosperity gospel with efficiency on par with entertainment industry and business executives. 

The trajectory that began in the wake of the 8th-century iconoclasm controversy (or, perhaps, even before with Theodore of Mopsuestia in the 5th-century) is a dangerous one. Thus, the so called “the later Byzantine synthesis” is perhaps not as benign as Taft seems to believe, because it paved a way towards the rise of the Reformation, which on its part brought iconoclasm to the extreme. If the trajectory were to continue in the present age, however, the Church along with her magnificent Liturgy—with all of its symbolism and pageantry—would peter out eventually and invariably. Given this prospect, a retrieval of Pseudo-Dionysius’ liturgical theology, it seems to me, is more urgent now than ever as a central task of our time.

Moreover, another consequence of such a historical realism is the reduction of Symbols into mere representations and elimination of the real and sacramental presence of Christ in Them. Henceforth, furthermore, symbols come mere signs that merely refer to something else other than itself: The bread refers to and represents Jesus body stabbed on the cross, the wine his blood spilled on the cross some 2,000 years ago. Since they are mere signs, they could be replaced by something else such as flakes and fruit juice. As long as they serve the function of an audio-visual aide to refresh our memory of Christ, they will do. 

But the aim of theōsis is not to be close via memory in proximity to the historical Jesus and his work in the historical past, but to be one with the Risen Lord, who offers the perpetual sacrifice as our High Priest in heaven in the order of Melchizedek. We are to participate in His death and resurrection, not only in thought and memory but in reality and in our being and life. Our participation in the Christ-Event is and must be real ontologically. We receive Him literally (and thus symbolically). 

The Testimony from the Original Precommunion Prayer Regarding the Eucharist

The pristine formula of the Byzantine precommunion prayer (which is now expanded greatly and offered as part of the Great Entrance) attests to an entirely different approach that we should take with respect to the eucharistic rite: the so called Alexandrian approach, namely, that the Eucharist engenders illumination of and union with Christ. This is the approach that is taken by both Pseudo-Dionysius and Maximus the Confessor, among many other Church Fathers.   

According to Taft’s hypothesis, the following is the proposed original precommunion prayer, from which the current form of the litany of the precommunion prayers (during the Great Entrance) was evolved into and amplified: 

And for the gift offered to our Lord God let us pray, that the good God receive it, through the mediation of his Christ, on his heavenly altar as a pleasing fragrance.

Taft, 2000: 95. He says: “The petition to receive the oblation … [as] original nucleus [of the prayer is] attested in all sources” (2000:92).

Taft interprets the original precommunion prayer as follows:

… the primitive nucleus of this litany was a petition that God receive the oblation on his heavenly altar and send down upon us in return his divine grace and the gifts of the Holy Spirit, presumably in communion, which is described, precisely, as a koinonia in the Holy Spirit elsewhere in the precommunion.

Taft, 2000: 102.

In the prayer the priest petitions that God accept our gifts in exchange for sending down His gifts of the Holy Spirit upon us for our communion (koinonia) with the Spirit. We offer our offerings so that we may receive, as Dionysius puts it, “a unifying communion with [God]” (EH 444A; Louth trans.). 

Chrysostom, too, understood the eucharistic rite in the same way. While employing the trinitarian formula, he says in one of his sermons: 

… let us approach this table and the nipple of the spiritual cup. … like nursing children let us eagerly draw out the grace of the Spirit, for to share in the divinity of Christ is to be in communion also with the Father and the Holy Spirit, who share the same divine nature. So to receive the eucharist is to receive the Holy Spirit.

Mt hom. 82 (83), 5; as quoted in Taft, 2000: 119. 

The patristic testimonies are clear: that the goal of the Eucharist is theōsis, our participation in and communion with God/Christ/the Holy Spirit. There is no mention of our remembrance of the historical Christ-Event that we are to believe firmly in faith and memory. Instead, we are to seek communion with the Risen Lord and His Spirit here and now, so that His Kingdom may be blessed “on earth as it is in heaven.”

Let us note in passing that communion with God/Christ/the Holy Spirit is the meaning of participation in the rite, not to be confused with the unity among the faithful as a Body of Christ—although the union among the faithful is implied in the communion with Christ and His Spirit. God is One; and whoever communes with Him is by inference one with anyone else who also communes with Him. 

Theōsis, of course, presupposes purification, forgiveness, remission of sins, virtuous life, etc. It goes without saying that one cannot commune with God while remaining sinful and submerged in darkness. 

The main focus is and should always be the imitation of, our becoming of, and our communion with Christ. We “receive the Body of Christ and taste the fountain of Life,” as we take a share in His divinity in the Bread and Wine. 

In his treatment of the eucharistic rite, Dionysius almost entirely focuses on the ritual movement, which is, according to Louth, 

almost exclusively [understood] in terms of God’s love outwards to us in creation and redemption, drawing us back to him in our own answering movement of love. It is the Neoplatonic movement of procession and return …

Louth, 1989: 60, also 61. 

Participation (μετουσία, ‘participation,’ ‘communion’) in the initiation (τελετή, ‘rite,’ ‘initiation in the mysteries’) into the divine reality of redemption is the key to understanding the Eucharist. In the rite we participate in the divine procession of descent in order that we also participate in the divine procession of ascent in the returning movement toward God the Father. The ascending movement of sacrifice that arises like the smoke of the burnt offering (holocaust) is our prayer that arises like “incense … and the lifting of [our] hands as an evening sacrifice (Ex 29.41; Lev 1.9, 13, 17, 8.28, 17.6, 23.13, 23.18; Ps 141.2).