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 soteriology throughout the centuries, even to this day and even in the Orthodox churches. See Cabasilas. He is largely responsible for the understanding of Christ’s sacrificial work as substitution for our sins: Christ suffered the punishment on our behalf; He sacrificed on our behalf; He died so that we may live. Thus, a thousand-year history of Christian theology is reduced to a single idea: substitutional atonement.

The following passage from Isaiah offers a support for Anselm’s substitutional theory of atonement:

Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows… he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities.

Isaiah 53.4-5; KJV.

If the above passage is a prophecy written in eloquent poetry regarding the meaning of the crucifixion that Christ was to suffer, it was Anselm who first rationally explained, justified, and reduced the meaning of Christ’s death to the sacrifice that saved the world by virtue of His vicarious death. Anselm assumed that sacrifice was a vicarious death; and from this he proceeded to argue rationally the reason why Christ, the God-Man, had to become man and to die for us. His argument is rational, not biblical. Even though 1 Peter 3.18, for example, attests to the idea of substitutional atonement (“For Christ … suffered for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous…”), it was not until Anselm when the idea of substitution became the dominant theme in soteriology. His theory achieved remarkable success to the point where the word ‘sacrifice’ became synonymous with ‘substitution,’ as in, for example, ‘sacrifice hit’ in baseball. After Anselm ‘sacrifice’ came to mean ‘substitutional death.’

Influenced by Anselm, in the 16th-century William Tyndale will invent the word “atonement” in order to translate the Hebrew word for sacrifice, קרבן (qorban). The Hebrew noun literally means ‘cause to come near’ (Moffitt, 2022:163), as in the Greek verbs, προσφέρω, meaning ‘to present,’ ‘to offer;’ and ἱεραγέω, meaning ‘to carry offerings.’

Another Hebrew word that is frequently (mis)translated as ‘atonement’ by Tyndale and the subsequent translators, is כפר, kipper, which refers to “both ransoming and purifying effects” (Moffitt, 2022:109). As one can see, there is no concept of ‘substitution’ in the Hebrew words associated with ‘sacrifice,’ which is often mistranslated as ‘atonement.’ See Leviticus 16 in Milgrom’s corrected translation.

The Anselm’s rational justification and reduction of Christ’s work to the concept of (substitutional) atonement had a devastating consequences, however, as Vladimir Lossky observes:

It was Anselm of Canterbury, with his treatise Cur Deus Homo [Why God-Man?], who undoubtedly made the first attempt to develop the dogma of redemption apart from the rest of Christian teaching. In his work Christian horizons are limited by the drama played between God, who is infinitely offended by sin, and man, who is unable to satisfy the impossible demands of vindictive justice. The drama finds its resolution in the death of Christ, the Son of God who has become man in order to substitute Himself for us and to pay our debt to divine justice.

Lossky, 1974: 99.

Once the exclusive focus is on Christ’s work on the cross as substitutional sacrifice, all other dimensions of His work in the Incarnation, Resurrection, and Ascension recede into the background; and accordingly the entire patristic theology become incidental, if not irrelevant. As Lossky asks: “What becomes of the dispensation of the Holy Spirit here?” (99) As he puts it:

The price of our redemption having been paid in the death of Christ, the resurrection and the ascension are only a glorious happy end of His work, a kind of apotheosis without direct relationship to our human destiny. This redemption theology, placing all the emphasis on the passion, seems to take no interest in the triumph of Christ over death.

Lossky, 1974: 99.

The substitutional death of Christ has nothing to say about Christ’s victory over “death by death.” Christ’s work, however, is so broad and cosmic that it cannot be reduced to His passion on the cross. There is His birth—as wondrous as Creation itself—the healing of the sick and demon possessed, the proclaiming of the Kingdom of God, the releasing of the oppressed and the captive, and the giving sights to the blind (Luke 4.16-21). Most importantly, as already mentioned, there is Resurrection, Ascension, and the Pentecost. How abut theōsis, the divinization of humans in the vision of God?

Anselm’s theory of atonement would have very little to say about these fundamental concepts that the patristic theology routinely discusses. St Athanasius of Alexandria, for example, offers an entirely different understanding of Christ’s work when he says:

Christ, having delivered the temple of His body to death, offered one sacrifice for all men to make them innocent and free from original guilt, and also to show Himself victorious over death and to create the first fruits of the General Resurrection with His own incorruptible body.

Athanasius, De incarnatione verbi, 20; PG 25, col. 129D-132A; as quoted in Lossky, 1974: 99-100.

The idea of descent in order to assume humanity at its lowest point before ascending to God with the assumed humanity and the other creation thereby in order to uplift, to divinize, and to bring them all back to God, is central to Athanasius, as it is in other patristics, such as St Irenaeus of Lyon, St Athanasius of Alexandria, and St. Maximos the Confessor, to cite only the few:

… if the Word is made man, it is that men might become gods.

Irenaeus of Lyon, Against Heresies, V pref., col. 1035; as quoted by Lossky, 1963: 42.

The Word was made a bearer of the flesh (σαρκοφόρος), in order that men might become bearers of the Spirit (πνευματοφόροι).

Athanasius, On the Incarnation, PG 43, col. 172BC; as quoted by Lossky, 1963: 70. Φορέω means: to bear.

… just as God by His condescension [συγκαταβáσει] is and is called man for the sake of man, and also so that the power of this reciprocal disposition might be shown forth herein, a power that divinizes man through his love for God, and humanizes God through His love for man. And by this beautiful exchange, it renders God man by reason of the divinization of man, and man God by reason of the Incarnation of God.

Maximos the Confessor, Ambigua, Ambiguum 7, 1084C; Constas trans.

Divinization is the goal and apex of Orthodox theology. Luther’s obsession with one’s justification before God—an idea grounded in Anselm’s theory of substitutional atonement—cannot be the sum total of Christian theology.

Furthermore and more importantly, Anselm’s theory of substitutional atonement distorts the meaning of ‘sacrifice.’ As we have argued above and elsewhere, the primary meaning of ‘sacrifice’ does not refer to the notion of ‘substitution,’ though it is implied, but to the act of ‘giving’ or (bringing the) ‘offering.’ See Introduction. Anselm is largely responsible for the (mis)understanding the concept of sacrifice as substitution or (substitutional) death in atonement. ‘Substitutional atonement’ became pleonasm after Anselm.

The Substitutional Theory of Atonement

In his seminal work, Cur Deus Homo (Why God Became Man or more literally, ‘Why the God-Man,’ 1098), Anselm proposes that God’s justice cannot tolerate human sins, on one hand; and God’s love cannot allow punishing humans appropriately and deservedly for their sins, on the other. To forgive human sin without appropriate recompense, however, would be “to upset the right order of things, [and, as consequence,] there would be in the universe… a certain ugliness, resulting from the violation of the beauty of order…” (Bk 1. 15; Anselm, 1998: 288). Preserving the order of things and the beauty thereof, for Anselm, is very important for God’s governance, which must be orderly, harmonious, and thus beautiful.

Faced with the divine conundrum, Anselm’s proposed solution is this: Only a being equal to God can bear the magnitude of human sin in totality, on one hand; and only a genuine human being can recompense for the sins that they committed, on the other. As he puts it, “no one can pay [the recompense] except God, and no one ought to pay except man” (Bk 2. 6; Anselm, 1998: 319). Thus, Christ—being fully God and fully man—took upon Himself the punishment humans deserve on their behalf to satisfy both God’s justice and God’s mercy at the same time in the single act of sacrifice on the Cross. Only God-Man can satisfy the requirement that “recompense ought to be proportional to the magnitude of the sin” (Bk 1. 20; Anselm, 1998: 302). 

The outcome of this marvelously rational solution to God’s conundrum is that only Christ’s sacrificial death on the Cross substitutes for our death in penalty; and only His divine body given up for “a ransom for many” (Mark 10.45) releases us from the debt we owe to God. Thanks to Christ’s sacrifice assumed in perfect obedience, God can forgive our debts without upsetting divine justice upheld in “the right order of things.” Only God-Man Jesus Christ can sacrifice for our sins, as no one else can. Only Christ can die for us, so that we may avoid death. He paid for our salvation. The believers are the benefactors of Christ’s work offered to us in free grace.

The Reformers

Martin Luther (d. 1546), John Calvin (d. 1564), and other Reformers will later argue further and maintain that only Christ’s righteousness accomplished in his perfect obedience can be imputed upon us—while we are yet still sinners—to make us deemed righteousness in God’s eyes. As yet sinners, we are robed in Christ’s righteous—the robe through which God sees us as righteous. Thus, as a Protestant hymn puts it: “What can wash away my sin? Nothing but the blood of Jesus.” In this view, becoming Christ in imitation is beside the point. Rather, we must borrow the cloak of His righteousness to cover up our hollowness and corruption. Salvation amounts to obtaining Christ’s righteousness for free—without effort but only by faith (sola fide) and by free and amazing grace (sola gratia) alone.

[T]he moment you begin to have faith, you learn that all things in you are altogether blameworthy, sinful and damnable. When you have learned this, you will know that you need Christ, who suffered and rose again for you, so that if you believe in him, you may, through faith, become a new man, in so far as your sins are forgiven, and you are justified by the retie of another, namely of Christ alone.

Martin Luther, “The Freedom of a Christian” (1520), 1961: 55f.

… all the righteousness of men collected into one heap would be inadequate to compensate for a single sin. For we see that by one sin man was so cast off and forsaken by God, that he at the same time lost all power of recovering salvation.

John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (1559), Book 3, Chapter 14, Section 13; Henry Beveridge, trans. 1845.

The efficient cause of our eternal salvation the Scripture uniformly proclaims to be the mercy and free love of the heavenly Father towards us; the material cause to be Christ, with the obedience by which he purchased righteousness for us; and what can the formal or instrumental cause be but faith? […] … Christ is both righteousness and life, and that the blessing of justification is possessed by faith alone.

Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 3. 14. 17.

Anselm’s View on the Eucharist

The impact of Anselm’s substitutional theory of atonement is direct and far-reaching in the understanding of the Eucharist. The Eucharist becomes a penitential sacrament that connects the individual to the historical and salvific work of Christ at Calvary. The Sacrament thus becomes individual, devotional, and pietistic—quite similar to the allegorical understanding the Eucharist offered by Philoxenus of Mabbug (ca. 500). See Symbol.

Anselm writes in Meditatio III redemptionis humanae, referring to Christ’s utter obedience in taking the chalice at the Garden of Gethsemane:

This let thy heart chew, O man, this let it ruminate, this let it suck, this let it swallow when thy mouth receives (accipit) the Body and Blood of the selfsame, thy Redeemer. Make this in this present life thy daily bread, thy viand and viaticum, for by means of this and by nothing except this shalt thou at once remain in Christ and Christ in thee….

Meditatio III, p. 89; as quoted by G. H. Williams, 1957: 266.

By engaging in an individual meditation on the meaning of the Eucharist, one can, according to Anselm, be united with Christ in his perfect obedience. His obedience covers over and purges our disobedience, if we chew, mull over, and swallow the Bread and the Wine, the Body of Christ. The Bread and the Cup become a means of our union with Christ through meditation. The act of receiving the Body of Christ becomes itself an allegory that deepens one’s meditation.

If baptism signifies the entry into the new life in Christ (by immersion), the Eucharist is the spiritual daily bread necessary to maintain the new life gained thereby after baptism. As a commentator of Anselm, G. H. Williams, puts it, “all men may participate in the action of the one Man, not preeminently through the sacramental death of baptism… but through the sacramental obedience of the eucharist” (Williams, 1957: 168).

We participate in Christ’s obedience that satisfies God’s justice—not so much in Christ’s divinity. This is so, because, for Anselm, what matters is the legality of God’s forgiveness, despite human disobedience. What matters is our justification before God—the idea that obsessed Martin Luther some 400 years later.

The long standing patristic goal of attaining theōsis (divinization or deification) is entirely forgotten. In fact, Anselm never speaks of theōsis: “Anselm has no trace of the deificatory theory in his writings,” says Williams (1957: 268).

Implications of Anselm’s Theory

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 offered once and for all in history is sufficient enough for our redemption here and now. The sacrament of the bread and wine in the present, then, only remind us of his salvific act Christ’s carried out in perfect obedience in the past. We are deemed righteous, thanks to His sacrifice on Golgotha. What remains for us is the obligation to be grateful and thankful to Christ for his vicarious suffering and death and for his act of love in substituting Himself for us in death. It is hoped, moreover, that such a gratitude one feels toward Christ for his vicarious death on the Cross would result in our good works. Our piety, it is hoped, would lead to our good deeds. Thus, the Eucharist becomes a penitential means of imputing Christ’s righteousness upon us. From this it is only a small step to arrive at the Reformer’s conclusion: that the bread and wine merely represent the Body of Christ that was once broken and His Blood shed for us to pay for our debts once and for all. The real presence of Christ on the altar of the church, which was in vogue at the time of Anselm (the 11th-century), became unnecessary and later became a heresy to be eliminated.

Moreover, in Anselm’s theory, the meaning of Christ’ resurrection recedes into the background. This short coming rests on the fact that the theory forces us to concentrates on the Cross, the very act of Christ in perfect obedience. The focus on the cross without understanding it as a part of the other side of the coin, resurrection, goes against what St Paul declares: that it is the resurrection by which we are justified: “[Christ] was handed over for our trespasses and was raised for our justification” (Rom 4.25). For Paul, justification rests on the Resurrection, not in his death. When death is defeated by death, our life in Christ receives final justification and vindication. Because of His resurrection, we have the hope of victory over sin and death, and exclaim: “Where, O death, is your sting?’ (1 Cor 15.55). Crucifixion alone cannot accomplish the victory.

Anselm’s Impact

Nevertheless, Anselm’s substitutional theory of atonement is deeply engrained in the West. J. W. Goethe (d. 1832), for example, captures the idea of substitutional atonement perfectly, when he writes about Ottilie’ death in his novel Elective Affinities (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 by suicide, however, brings about (it is hoped) purification in the otherwise adulterous marriage involving the quartet within the same household: between Charlotte and Eduard in marriage that leads to the birth of a child named Otto (who is conceived while each was thinking of the other lover outside the marriage), between Charlotte and the Captain in an adulterous relationship that was never consummated, and between Eduard and Ottillie in a similar adulterous relationship without consummation. In this way, the quartet is intertwined in a triple relationship within the same household. The only consummation in these triple pairs of illicit romantic relations takes place within the legitimate but joyless marriage. Otto—the child who is conceived in physically legitimate marriage is, through no fault of his, illicitly borne of spiritual adultery—is sacrificed, though accidentally in a boat incident. Like Otto’s, Ottillie’s death (by suicide), fated by her love for Eduard, substitutes for the deep transgression involving the quartet that permeates the household. It is hope that her and Otto’s sacrificial death would purify the household that harbored the triple adulterous relationships.

For Goethe, as for Anselm, sacrifice must involve death, a vicarious death. To sacrifice is to die in substitution.

Sacrifice in Leviticus

But must sacrifice involve death? If so, how can we offer “our bodies as a living sacrifice”? as Paul exerts us to do (Rom 12.1). A living sacrifice cannot die. Since our lives must be presented as a living sacrifice, death brings to us the end of sacrifice. One must live in order to be a living sacrifice. To sacrifice is to offer oneself to the Other—before one dies. One must sacrifice without dying. In short, one must live in order to offer oneself as sacrifice for God and the others. Death brings an end to sacrifice, as René Girard (d. 2015) argues. For him, sacrifice means vicarious death, as in Anselm. It implies victimization.

If we examine carefully the biblical texts the notion of sacrifice involves the simple act of offering, such as offering a meal or gifts. Consider the grain offering, as described in Leviticus 2 and 6.14-18. Or one of the two goats that is chosen and lives, as it is lead to the wilderness (to Azazel) on the Day of Atonement, as so prescribed in Leviticus 16.6-10, 21-22. That is, the goat bearing the sin of Israel is lead away to the wilderness to live freely. He is not slaughtered.

Even for the bull and the goat that are slaughtered, they are killed in order to draw blood. It is the blood that is used in a certain prescribed manner that acts as the purification agent. The leftover blood, the carcass, and bones are not sacrificed on the altar but discarded outside and away from the camp (Lev 16.27).

During the purification rite, the blood is sprinkled and smeared in specific and prescribed manner to cleanse and to purify the altar (in the courtyard) and the inner curtain (Lev 16. 14, 18, 19). While the hides, flesh, and dung 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 also the case with the grain offering (the unleavened bread or cake either baked in oven or grilled), on which oil and frankincense are smeared to burn “into smoke” on the altar in the court yard (Lev 2.2, 9, 16). The frankincense in the bread that is burnt is important, because God desires the sweet aroma. God does not take, eat, or otherwise consume the sacrifice. He smells the sweetness of the arising aroma, as the offering is burnt on the altar—the fat or the oil and frankincense on the cake.

Belief as a Means of Reaping the Benefits of Christ’s Work

Back to Anselm’s soteriology, we must note that in his theory of atonement the idea of divine life that we are to participate and to partake in here and now in the Liturgy of the Eucharist or baptism is mostly neglected and relegated to the realm of afterlife. Once we are justified by imputation of Christ’s righteousness, we are no longer under condemnation. Our task henceforth remains: How to apply and make efficacious the benefits of Christ’s substitutional death for us.

We maintain the benefits of Christ’s perfect obedience rendered on the Cross by our belief held firmly and persistently on the meaning of Christ’s work on the cross. Faith alone (Sola Fide) connects us to the salvific work of Christ at Golgotha. Faith brings us to the foot of the Cross, thus bridging the gap between the past work of Christ and the present moment of one’s salvation effectuated by one’s faith.

Thus, faith must be affirmed, reaffirmed, and perpetually maintained by refreshing our memory of Christ’s work on the cross in the past history. The Bible and the sacraments, then, function as tools for refreshing our memory, renewing our faith, and rekindling our piety and gratitude, as we saw above in Anselm’s pietistic and meditative interpretation of the Eucharist. As the Eucharist becomes a penitential sacrament, the bread and wine must be chewed and mulled over as the Body of Christ suffered on the cross for us. Our subjective faith on Christ aided by the Eucharist is what unites us to Christ’s obedient and perfect life and to the benefits of His death. The Eucharist, then, recalls Christ’s work on the cross. It does not bring Christ to us to receive—physically (and thus symbolically). We do not receive the Body of Christ, we recall his broken Body and become grateful for his substitutional suffering and death. The more vivid and realistic we recall His suffering on the cross, the more piety we can invoke within us—so it is said. See Mel Gibson’s 2004 movie: The Passion of the Christ.

The Byzantine Syntheses

Anselm’s impact does not stop with Protestants in the Renaissance and in modernity. It infiltrated into the Orthodox theology as well even before the Reformation. See Cabasilas.

The so Called “Byzantine synthesis”—the synthesis between the Antiochene emphasis on historical realism of Christ and the Alexandrian emphasis on theōsis (Taft, 1980/1981: 70)—have unexpectedly resulted in the Orthodox churches’ focus on the salvation of individual souls rather than on the redemption of the whole world. Christian ethics turned inward, toward the purification of individual souls rather than toward the society at large. The focus on hesychastic prayer and the noetic vision of God renders mute systematic and global approach to Christian ethics and politics. For, it is assumed that salvation is a matter of individual souls and that the societal transformation can be only brought about by individual transformation. (Buddhist, too, believes this way: a societal transformation by individual’s mindfulness.)

However, Jesus’ commands to “seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness [δικαιοσύνην]” (Matt 6.33). By righteousness He does not mean individual piety and holiness. Rather, ‘righteousness’ can and should be translated as ‘justice.’ And justice cannot be a matter of individual concerns. Justice is universal, like ethics. It aims at the society at large. For without justice peace is not possible. Peace one experiences in isolation from one’s neighbor—in one’s gated community—is not true peace; just as peace cannot be achieved by force (i.e., the so called “Board of Peace” in Palestine). In the Book of Revelations the vision of God involves purging of satanic forces in cosmic scale. A transformation not only of the individuals but of the whole world is necessary, if Christ is to reign. Thus, theōsis in the Book of Revelation refers to the New Jerusalem “coming down out of heaven from God” (Rev 21.2). It comes down to earth with the river of life flowing from its center, as in Ezekiel’s vision (Ezekiel 47) .

The focus on the individuals is a legacy not only of the Renaissance or modern individualism but of Anselm’s substitutional theory of atonement. For Christ’s universal work justifies and provides the ground for each individual’s forgiveness. While Christ carries the sin of the whole humanity by His single act on the Cross, the societal structure of humanity that give rise to the sins of humanity in the first place is entirely neglected. What is the benefit of the individual justification, while the individuals are plunged in the darkness of a corrupt and evil society. How can the righteous live in the city of Sodom and Gomorrah? Abraham’s pleads for the cities’ salvation fell on deaf ears, because the cities as a whole had to be purged. The Kingdom of God must come not only within our hearts but also “on earth as it is in heaven.” Anselm’s theory of substitutional atonement is grossly inadequate to address the collective and systematic evil in the world. A victory over “death by death” must defeat corruption and complicity that perpetuate evil in global scale.

The Cosmic Liturgy

The Liturgy must be for the whole world, as Maximus the Confessor had envisioned, when he said that the Church is both the image/icon of God and the image/icon of the world (Mystag. 2019: 197/54-55). As God’s image, the Church exhibits His glory, goodness, mercy, and justice. As the image of the world, She exhibits the world not as fallen but as uplifted and divinized. Since She exhibits the image of the divinized world, and since the world is not yet fully (or even partially) divivised, the Church is tasked to “baptize” to the ends of the world and thereby to transform it. She is to actualize God’s will on earth as it is in heaven. She is tasked to establish God’s Kingdom and His justice/righteousness on earth. Needless to say, the Church cannot baptize by wielding swords or dropping bombs but only by servitude or sacrifice—by offering and giving oneself to the Others in imitation of Christ.

Jesus said that the Gospel is fulfilled when the following Scripture from the Book of Isaiah is fulfilled:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.

Luke 4.18-19, quoting Isaiah 61.1.

The Gospel mandates justice: freedom of the oppressed and of the sick and the blind. Mostly the poor were imprisoned then, as they are now.

At Christ’s crucifixion, the sun became dark, and the earth shook (Matt 27.51). As we sing on Holy Friday:

The whole creation, O Christ, hath been transfigured by fear at beholding thee suspended on the Cross. The sun was darkened, the foundations of the earth were troubled, and everything suffered with the Creator of all. Wherefore, O thou, who didst endure this willingly for us, O Lord, glory to thee.

The Aposticha (Tone 1), Orthros of Holy Friday (The Twelve Passion Gospel), following the Eleventh Gospel.

The whole creation groans with Christ, according to St Paul, awaiting redemption (Rom 8.22). Christ’s work cannot be limited to the salvation of the individuals alone.

The Rise of the American Evangelicalism

If the Gospel is limited to the salvation of the individual souls, the 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 then modeled after and followed by hundreds of other similar evangelists, who in their further evolution run mega churches and promote the prosperity gospel, administered by and re-enforced with the efficiency of entertainment industries and big corporations.  

The so called “the later Byzantine synthesis,” I submit, paved the way towards the rise of the Reformation that on its own momentum in the 16th-century revived and brought about the extreme iconoclasm of the 8th-century. Once the sacraments are reduced to the functionality of audio-visual aides (for strengthening and refreshing our memory and faith), the extreme iconoclasm ensues, as we see in church history. If this trajectory were to continue, the Church along with Her magnificent Liturgy—with all its symbolism and pageantry—would peter out. Given this prospect, a retrieval of and revitalization of Pseudo-Dionysius’ liturgical and symbolic theology becomes an urgent task of our time.

The Testimony from the Original Precommunion Prayer

The pristine formula of the Byzantine precommunion prayer (which is now expanded greatly and offered as part of the Great Entrance, while the choir sings the Cherubic Hymn) attests to an entirely different approach toward the Eucharist, namely, that the Eucharist engenders illumination of and union with Christ by way of participation and partaking thereof. The Gifts are offered in exchange for the Gift of the Holy Spirit. There is no trace of Christ’s righteousness substituting for our sins, while the idea of sacrifice as bringing of the Gifts and offering—the proper understanding of sacrifice—is prominent.

According to Taft’s hypothesis, the following is the proposed text of the original precommunion prayer, from which the current, elaborate form of the litany of the Great Entrance (entitled as the precommunion prayers) was evolved:  

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 just cited above 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, then, the priest petitions that God accept our gifts in exchange for sending down the gifts of the Holy Spirit upon us to bring about our communion (koinonia) with the Spirit. In short, we offer our offerings so that we may receive, as Pseudo-Dionysius puts it, “a unifying communion with [God]” (EH 444A; Louth trans.). This is the essence of the pre-communion prayer. It seeks theōsis: our encounter with Christ and thereby becoming divine ourselves.

Chrysostom, too, understands 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. 

Thus, the patristic and the pristine liturgical 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 remembering the historical reality of Christ-Event that we are to believe firmly in faith and to remember always by means of the sacraments. Instead, we are to seek communion with the Risen Lord and His Spirit here and now by partaking in His sacrifice/offering that brings a new life in resurrection, so that God’s Kingdom may actualize “on earth as it is in heaven,” as we are thereby divinized and as God becomes present all in all in His creation.

We note in passing that communion with God/Christ/the Holy Spirit is realized in our participation in the rite of the Eucharist. The communion, however, is often misinterpreted as the communion among the faithful. This is not true. Of course, the union among the participants is implied in the union with Christ Himself, who enables the union among ourselves in the first place as the collective Body of Christ, the Church. God is One; and whoever participates in the One becomes one collectively. We participate in His oneness. But strictly speaking, communion (κοινωνία) implies our intercourse with God and, derivatively, among ourselves, the faithful.

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

The main focus of the sacraments in particular and in the Liturgy more broadly should always be our imitation and becoming of, and having 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, Pseudo-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 Christ is what happens in the Eucharist.

In the communion rite we participate in the divine procession of descent and ascent, in Christ’s humiliation, Resurrection, and Ascension—a procession that condescends before it ascends.

In the ascending movement of our sacrifice we arise like the smoke of the burnt offering (holocaust), like 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). We thus offer our “bodies as a living sacrifice” (Rom 12.1), emitting the sweet aroma of Christ (2 Cor 2.15). This is the aim and reality of the Eucharist in the Divine Liturgy, wherein we participate. This is the height of the Mysteries: ἐποπτεία.

Clement [of Alexandria] reserves the negative way for those who have been initiated into the Christian mysteries. It is a contemplation of God which one reaches by way of intellectual abstractions—a contemplation which, according to Clement, ought to correspond to the ἐποπτεία, the highest degree of the mysteries of Eleusis. The use of the language of the mysteries and the effort to establish parallels between the stages of Christian gnosis and those of the Hellenic mysteries are explained by Clement of Alexandria’s attitude toward Greek wisdom: it profited in large measure by the revelation given to Israel, whether by simply plagiarizing Moses and the prophets or by receiving a partial revelation through the deceit of an angel, similar to the deceit of Prometheus, who stole the fire of Olympus in order to communicate it to mortals.

Lossky, 1974: 19.

It is not by accident that the Orthodox call the Bread and Wine the Mysteries, which in Syriac (raze) means ‘symbols’ as well as the Elements. The sacred Symbols cannot and should not be reduced to rational explanations, as in Anselm. Salvation along with Creation, Incarnation, life, death, and resurrection—all remain in mystery. The economy of God’s Providence cannot be reduced to a rational theory. Theology must remain symbolic.