The Eucharist

in Pseudo-Dionysius, Anselm, Francis, Cabasilas, et al.

Source: anglicancompass.com

By the look of the broken bread on the table in the picture above, we can see that the elements laid out there are not for the Orthodox or Catholic Eucharist. It might not even be for Anglican or Protestant eucharistic rite either. It might just be an ordinary offering of a meal, a supper or a provision laid out for traveling guests, perhaps. In that precise sense, a table set out for someone is an offering, a sacrifice, a hospitality. To sacrifice is to offer food, lodging, or one’s goods—in short, to offer something in hospitality, a gesture of pure gift without expectation of gain in return. Sacrifice is offering, a pure gift without return or exchange.

To welcome the Other is to set up a table for her, to sacrifice myself for her in substitution. It is to “offer [our] bodies as a living sacrifice” (Rom 12.1) or to pray (Psalm 141.2)—that is to say, to pour out one’s soul to God (I Sam 1.15) and to another person. Because to sacrifice (oneself) to God is to sacrifice (oneself) to my neighbor. To love God is to love my neighbor. One is not possible without the other. We all know the commandment: “you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. The second is this: You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Mark 12.30-31). The words “the second is” here need not indicate the order of priority but repetition: ‘that is to say.’ Thus Levinas says after a lifetime of mediation on the Torah: “[God] shows himself only by his trace, as is said in Exodus 33. To go toward Him is not to follow this trace, which is not a sign; it is to go toward the Others who stand in the trace of illeity” (Levinas, 1996: 64). To serve God is to serve my neighbor—that is, to bring about peace in the world, to establish God’s kingdom on earth. There is no other way to God than through my neighbor. To serve Him is to serve the one created in His image.

During the Divine Liturgy the concelebrants gather around the altar, kiss each other, and declare: “Christ is in our midst” (See Taft, 2004: 387-96). To kiss each other in the Mediterranean culture is to offer a greeting of peace with one another. Why is this ritual inserted at the point of breaking bread and mixing it with wine in the Divine Liturgy? Because the Eucharist is for peace, for establishing God kingdom and His righteousness/justice on earth as it is in heaven. Thus, to desire union with God without desiring peace among (any) humans is to desecrate the Eucharist. The question, Who is my neighbor? does not permit us to discriminate. Whether “Jew or Greek,” “slave or free,” or “male or female,” we are all “one in Christ Jesus” (Gal 3.28). We are one in Christ on the altar of sacrifice.

Peace without communion (κοινωνία) is not possible. If there is peace, there is communion. The rite of Communion symbolizes and thus actualizes our communion with God and with one another. If the peace we desire is of God—if it is divine peace—it is realized in the Eucharist. This is so because the Eucharist is essentially an offering—Christ’s offering of Himself to the world; and our offering of ourselves along with Christ to God and to the world. Thus, the deacon exhorts six times during the Divine Liturgy: “Let us offer ourselves and each other to Christ our God.” This exhortation would be meaningless, if we are not willing to offer ourselves, as Christ does. Peace is possible by way of sacrifice; it is impossible without it. Peace is costly, because it prerequisites sacrifice. It requires expenditure that exceeds the reserve or limits, like the love or forgiveness demonstrated by the prodigal son’s father (Luke 15.11-32). It is this costly peace with which we depart the church at the end of the Liturgy to spread in our communities to which we return—the peace that is envisioned like a living water flowing from the altar down to the valleys, rivers, and the seas, as seen in Ezekiel’s and John’s visions.

If the Liturgy aims to produce (perpetual) peace, moreover, it is same as ethics. As Levinas puts it, “liturgy is not to be ranked alongside ‘works’ and ethics. It is ethics itself” (Levinas, 1996: 50). By ‘liturgy’ he means here in its ancient Greek sense: “the exercise of a [public, civic] function which is not only totally gratuitous but requires on the part of him who exercises it a putting out of funds at a loss” (Levinas, 1996: 50). Liturgy—a public, civic work—requires exorbitant sacrifice. It thus symbolizes (and therefore actualizes) God’s offering of his only Son, Christ’s offering of Himself to the world, and our offering of ourselves together with one another “to Christ our God” and thus to the world as He did.

If liturgy is ethics, can ethics be liturgical? Kant offers a clue. See Kant on Baptism.

If the Liturgy is to offer the world to God, it must transcend it. For bringing the world to God requires that we ‘set aside all worldly cares” so that we can dedicate it as a whole to God. But to dedicate the whole world in its totality to God would mean that one can stand under it in support and in one’s offering it up to God. One must bear the weight of it all, as Christ did—not only on the cross but also at his birth, in his ministry, and in his resurrection—so that “God may be all in all (1 Cor 15.28). Like Christ, we must bear the weight of it all in responsibility; we must become the messiah. To be messiah, according to Levinas, is to be ‘me’ in the accusative (Difficult Freedom, 1990: 89). To be an ego is to be ‘me’ first and foremost, in the accusative, before I can think, feel, care, etc, or before I am a being-in-the-world to claim, to own, and ultimately to face death alone as my own most and utmost possibility or, to say the same, to look down at the darkness of the bottomless abyss.

It is not enough, then, that each of us become divine (theōsis) individually and privately; the whole world must become divine as well, as so envisioned by the prophets of old and new. Radical evil within ourselves and without must be demolished. But it all starts with a simple offering of bread and wine on a table like the ones shown above in the picture.

For offer of peace (sacrifice) precedes violence of war (slaughter), as the story of Cain and Able demonstrates. They sacrificed before they went to war against each other and against all. War cannot be the father of all things, as Heraclitus believed. That is, beings are possible, not because of their active, self-giving (not self-sacrificing) gesture of ‘be-ing’ in the verbal sense of the noun ‘being’ but because of giving, as in for-giving, self-giving (as in self-sacrifice), as in “In the beginning…” The creation proceeded from God who gave himself in self-granting, in self-giving, in self-sacrifice. This is to say that gift(ing) precedes being (or be-ing) that, according to Heidegger, is said to arise on its own (θέσις), giving itself to be by self-arising, justifying itself on its own by claiming ‘This is my place in the sun’ (Plato in a sense), which for Pascal is the beginning of imperialism. Being granted (the creation) is good in God’s sight. Being arising by itself on its own (Heidegger’s be-ing) is imperialism, colonialism, and nihilism. According to Hobbes, echoing Heraclitus, man in his original state of being is in the state of war in which one is in perpetual fight against and with each other for survival, domination, and exploitation; and government arises out of the fear of this permanent insecurity. Kant refers to Hobbes at the end of the first Critique and in his last book on religion. Ethics is Kant’s response. If one’s freedom, he said, is sufficiently governed by categorical imperatives, there is no way one can interfere, diminish, or threaten another’s freedom. If such governance of reason were at play at the level of one’s maxim and civil conduct, the kingdom of ends may eventually arrive, he hoped. Levinas, too, responds to Hobbes by asserting that being (such as assumed by Hobbes and articulated explicitly and tirelessly by Heidegger) is not primary. Ethics beyond being is. Giving as he defines it in terms of ‘substitution’ or sacrifice in the strict sense of offering (in my definition) lies beyond the logic of being, in which one must either barter or kill. Christ’s sacrifice (incarnation) transcends these two alternatives and establishes the Kingdom of God in which God’s justice and peace reign.

The Prayer of the Offering or the Offertory Prayer (that the priest says silently after the Great Entrance has been completed, and while the deacon recites a litany) captures the essence of the Eucharist performed in the Divine Liturgy. It runs as follows (with my commentaries added in parentheses):

O Lord God almighty, who alone are holy [transcendent] and receive the sacrifice [offering] of praise from those who call upon you with their whole heart [in prayer], accept the prayer also of us sinners; bring us to your holy altar, enable us to offer your gifts and spiritual sacrifices for our sins and for the people’s transgressions, and deem us worthy to find favor in your sight [mold us in your likeness], that our sacrifice [offering] may be pleasing [acceptable] to you, and that the good [Holy] Spirit of your grace [work] may rest upon us, upon these gifts here present, and upon all your people [and transform and divinize them].

As quoted and translated by Mateos, 2016: 56-57; italics added.

As Mateos notes, “us” in the Greek is missing (“bring us to your holy altar). For that reason it is often taken to refer to the prior prayer: “bring it (the prayer) to your holy altar.” But, as Mateos further notes, the Liturgies of St Basil and St Mark “refer the phrase explicitly to the celebrants and not to the prayer” (57; italics his). This interpretation is also supported by the ending of the prayer itself: that the Spirit of grace “may rest upon us [the celebrants], upon these gifts here present, and upon all your people.”

What is asked here? Transformation by the Holy Spirit to divinize “us”—to make us in God’s likeness—the bread and wine, and the faithful who gather in the synaxis to “receive the Body of Christ.” Unless the elements are divinized, they cannot be given; unless we are divinized, we cannot receive the Gifts.

The Eucharist in the Liturgy is the taste of the Resurrection, a realized eschaton, in which offering of oneself for the Other is made possible (by the Holy Spirit) beyond the logic of exchange (Anselm) but in radical substitution of oneself-for-the-Other (Levinas). Ethics is made possible by the Holy Spirit. Even Kant said so, when he resorts to Christian baptism (a sacramental symbol) as the answer to the question of radical evil (see his Religion).

In this essay, I will trace the genealogy of the Protestant understanding of the Eucharist that, in my view, has its origin in the early 5th-century Bishop of Mopsuestia, Theodore II (d. 428). The strand that starts from him runs through both the Latin and the Greek (Orthodox) theological traditions thereafter, as it makes itself known in figures such as Patriarch Germanus (d. 740), Anselm of Canterbury (d. 1109), Francis of Assisi (d. 1226), Nicholas Cabasilas (d. 1392), Symeon of Thessalonica (d. 1429), and in the Reformers such as Martin Luther (d. 1546) and John Calvin (d. 1564).

The development that inevitably leads to the Protestant view of the Eucharist was set in motion, I submit, by even an earlier historical fact: the act of Constantine the Great commissioning the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem in 326 and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem in 336. Ever since then Jerusalem and Bethlehem became the major sites of pilgrimage, as they continue to be to this day—being visited by Christians of all denominations with the longing for proximity to the historical and physical sites of Jesus.

The quest for historical Jesus, then, did not begin with Albert Schweitzer and his predecessor, David Strauss, in the early 20th-century. It began rather in the 4th-century, as I said, by Constantine the Great, not to critique or to demythologize Christianity (as Schweitzer and Strauss did) but to experience Christ’s presence closer to one’s heart, historically and physically.

The desire to be close to Jesus physically—whether it is with respect to a relic or through receiving the Bread and Wine—inevitably leads to loss or neglect toward ontological union with Christ, i.e., becoming divinized in the image and likeness of Christ. In short, by aiming physical union with Christ one loses sight of achieving divine union, theōsis. To become divine without losing humanity is precisely the aim of the Incarnation. As Irenaeus of Lyon puts it, as repeated by many subsequent patristic theologians, “… if the Word is made man, it is that men might become gods” (Against Heresies, V pref., col. 1035; as quoted by Lossky, 1963: 42). Theōsis (deification) is the ultimate aim of the Incarnation. This amiable goal however gets lost, as Christians over the centuries sought to be close to Jesus Christ in real, historical, and physical ways. There no longer is the talk nowadays of having a communion with Christ and His Spirit in the participation in the eucharistic rite. Rather, the eucharist becomes a devotional aid, heightened by the sense of Christ’s real and physical presence. Piety is the aim of the eucharist, as we will see in St Germanus, St Anselm, St Francis, St Cabasilas, St Symeon, Luther, Calvin, and many others. The list runs across the Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestants—all Christianity.

For Protestants, the Eucharist primarily rekindles the memory of historical Jesus and his work on the cross, as the eucharist is understood as the re-enactment of Christ’s passion. The assumption here is that the memory rekindled by the rite would bridge the historical gap between Jesus of history and the faithful who participate in it here and now: “Do this in remembrance of me” applies everywhere at any time (Lk 22.19, I Cor 11.24). Christ, the Head, is joined to His Body, the Church, in the active living memory of Her members achieved by the eucharist rite, bringing thereby the reality of Jesus of Nazareth to the present consciousness of the Church as a whole. In other words, the Church as His Body lives in the memory of its members, who recalls Jesus’ birth, ministry, death, and resurrection, recalled and accepted as historical events of the past that nonetheless live in the present moment of Church’s consciousness. The Body of Christ, the Church, lives in and as the memory. Christ’s presence, then, is maintained by and in the memory of the believers, by their affirmation and reaffirmation time and again held fast in their memory in the act of receiving the bread and wine. Memory and faith—the two moments of consciousness—reproduce the historical Christ-Events of the past into the present moment of sacrifice at the communion table. “Christ is in our midst”—to use an Orthodox phrase—insofar as we remember and believe. However, is this a real presence, a real communion or a reality filtered through the present moment of consciousness that recalls? Is the divine work of Christ subject to (and reducible to) our memory?

Is the collective memory of the Church that re-enacts and recalls the historical Christ-Event of the past sufficient to accomplish Christ’s ontological presence and our union with Him? Does the Divine Reality rest on human memory or consciousness to be efficacious? Furthermore, how does God’s saving work that took place in the past impact the present reality of the Church? Does the efficacy of Christ’s saving work cease to be, now that He had offered himself “once and for all” on the cross (Heb 7.27)?

These questions force us to pose a more fundamental one: What do we mean by salvation or God’s saving work? In church history, there seem to be the following two basic answers to the question: salvation by becoming and returning to God, on one hand; and salvation by being made righteous before God in grace and forgiveness, on the other. I call the former the ontological soteriology once maintained by Orthodox Church; the latter legalistic soteriology held by Catholics and Protestants in general ever since Anselm down to the present. Anselm’s legacy is long and sweeping.

After the time of Pseudo-Dionysius (b/d. ~500)—whose Alexandrian mystical theology Maximus the Confessor (d. 662) tried to revive (without success, in my view)—the quest for divinization (theōsis) by ontological and visional union (theōria) (to employ pleonasm) seemed to have disappeared in the patristic theology in the east, while in the west Dionysius’s concept of hierarchy was appropriated subjectively in terms of individualistic and private spiritual journey, as in Bonaventure and Aquinas in the 13th-century. Regardless, nowadays hardly anyone talks about theōsis, if the term is understood at all. I note, however, that within the last decay or two or more there has been an attempt to employ the term theōsis to designate the mystical encounter with God in the Catholic tradition.

The trajectory of turning toward historical realism and away from the (mystical) union/vision with God was set in motion, however—as I said already—when the aforementioned two historical churches were erected in Bethlehem and Jerusalem by Constantine the Great in the 4th-century, and when they became the sites of pilgrimage thereafter. But two centuries later in Constantinople another Emperor Justinian I (re)built Hagia Sophia from the ashes of its ruins (caused by fire) and the other great churches in the city and elsewhere, including Ravenna and in the Egyptian desert of Mt Sinai. These great churches, which later came to be called Byzantine, invoke a different spiritual effects, namely, the incarnational union with God or ‘God with us.’

If the aforementioned churches in Palestine built in the 4th-century gave rise to historical realism in patristic theology (that later became labeled as the Antiochene tradition with Chrysostom as its chief representative), the churches in the east built in the 6th-century Constantinople seem to have revived the Alexandrian tradition (where it is believed that ‘to see’ or ‘to contemplate’ (theōria, θεωρία) is to be transformed to become that which one sees/thinks/contemplates (θεωρέω). Theōsis results from theōria. The architectural effects of the effortlessly rising dome above the nave in Byzantine churches heightens the sense of the immanence of the transcendent God—the immanence despite (or in) the transcendence, the incarnational paradox of the Infinite in the finite actualized in the architecture. In the experience of encountering the transcendent God—the experience enabled by the effects of the vaulting dome—the historical Jesus of Nazareth recedes in the background. For “Christ is in our midst,” as the concelebrants (the clergy) around the altar beneath the vaulting dome would have said togather (as they still do), before they exchanged (as they still do) the kiss of peace, prior to reciting the communion prayer (“I believe, Lord, and I acknowledge….” ), and prior to partaking the Bread and Wine, and before mingling the Elements for distribution to the faithful in the nave in Orthodox churches.

Why would history matter when “Christ is in our midst”? If the Palestinian churches are partially or initially responsible for the rise of the—to use Robert Taft’s terminology—“incarnational realism” (Taft, 1980/1981: 59; also see below), the Byzantine churches in Constantinople seem to have revived the Alexandrian theology of theōsis that the vaulting domes above the naves re-enforced. See the ancient descriptions of Hagia Sophia in which light plays the vital role in the design of the dome and in the experience of the people underneath, as the visitors from Kiev attested in the 11th-century.

The aforementioned term “incarnational realism” is coined by Robert F. Taft, who attributes it to the consequences arising from the Orthodox Church’s triumph over the iconoclasm in the 8th- and 9th-century (726-787, 814-842). He writes, negatively however, referring to Patriarch Germanus, who in 725 defended icon veneration before the iconoclast emperor Leo III, the Isaurian (Sendler, 1988: 23):

So what we find in Germanus is the encroachment of a more literal tradition upon another, more mystical level of Byzantine interpretation—and this precisely on the eve of Iconoclasm, when shifts in Byzantine piety led to such growth in the cult of images that Orthodoxy soon found itself locked in [in] mortal combat to defend this new expression of radical incarnational realism against the reaction of a more traditional iconoclastic spiritualism.

Tarf, 1980/1981: 58-59; italics mine.

I have provided selective texts written by Germanus below to show that what Taft calls the “radical incarnational realism” is clearly demonstrated in Germanus’ text, in which he provides extravagant allegorical interpretations on the Eucharist and the associated implements, which he himself would have likely used as Patriarch in the Liturgies of Hagia Sophia.

In the defense of icons, in short, the Church became more, as Taft puts it, “literal” in the sense that an image must refer to something in biblical history or in theology in at least one-to-one correspondence (there could be multiple correspondences, too), so that, as Germanus interprets it, the altar represents the tomb of Christ, the laying down (προσφέρειν, τιθέμεν) of the Elements on the altar represents reenactment of Christ’s offering and being offered (προσφέρων καὶ προσφερόμενος) as (self) sacrifice (προσφορᾶς, Ecclesiastical History and Mystical Contemplation,” par. 4; P. Meyendorff, 1984: 59), etc. (“The holy table corresponds to the spot in the tomb where Christ was placed [ἐτἐθη]” (Ibid.). But it is also, Germanus continues, “the throne of God” because “He rested in the body.” It is also, according to him, the physical table where Jesus sat for the Last Supper with the disciples, as well as the altar in the tabernacle where manna (Christ) was placed (Ibid). One liturgical object can have multiple referents in the allegorical interpretations of Germanus and subsequent Orthodox theologians.

As Sendler notes, after the defeat of iconoclasm, an important shift in iconography occurred: proliferation of biblical scenes. Accordingly, icons became realistic and illustrative—thus no longer symbolic. He writes:

‍After iconoclasm, Church decoration found form, and these literary forms were fully developed in art. First of all biblical scenes covered the church walls even to the saturation point as we see in Servia, for example, at Decani [a 14th-century monastery in Kasavo]. There we can count more than one thousand scenes. The churches of Romania also manifested this great richness. [Some Romanian churches in Moldovia have their outer walls painted with biblical scenes and icons.]

Sendler, 1988: 68.

With paintings of biblical scenes, icons became didactic and literal. They also became realistic, as they began to refer to historical scenes or events in the lives of saints (although “patterned after the life of Christ” such that the birth of the Theotokos is modeled after the nativity of Christ, the pattern that is repeated in the icons depicting the birth of St. Nicholas or St. Sergius of Radonezh) (Sendler, 1988: 69).

The turn towards historical realism or incarnational realism occurred not only in the eastern Orthodox Church, however. It also occurred in the west. As Volker Leppin optly describes of the time of St Francis of Assisi (early 13th-century):

A picture wasn’t simply the work of a painter but played an important role in the execution of a believer’s cultic responsibilities, a medium between God and humankind, a place of presence, a subject of pious performance. In a society where icons of saints were themselves actors in the liturgical drama, of course a crucifix could speak. This wasn’t the result of extravagant imagination or pious deception—it was only to be expected in a God-entranced world. In Francis’s spiritual development, his experience of the divine presence grew more and more intense. The representation of Christ on the cross became a gateway into a closer experience of Christ himself (2025: 45).

In the same vein, G. H. Williams observes that it was the late 11th- and 12th-centuries “when the regal figure of the Romanesque crucifix was beginning to show the lineaments of the Gothic Man of sorrows” (1957: 252). The wounded body of Christ hanging on the cross began to appear, literally and physically representing the suffering of Christ. Accordingly, the Cross—once the symbol of resurrection (as it still is in the Armenian Orthodox tradition)—became the symbol of God’s suffering and humility that we are to intimate in our lives.

Neo-Platonism and Iconoclasm

The iconoclastic spiritualism, on the other hand—the movement away from the realistic and material images that the Protestantism embraced—had its roots in Plotinus (d. 270), the father of Neo-Platonism, who is known to have despised image making, even making of his own statue. Following Plato, Plotinus’ model of contemplation (theōria) promotes the elevation of the soul to the Intelligible by setting aside or shedding off the sensible. For him,**

The Neo-Platonic notion of “participation” in the One by imitation thus gives way in this historical trajectory to the Platonic notion of representational function of image in which art thrives, according to Plato, to the detriment and in degradation of ontological reality it (the imaging art) represents and distorts. As consequence, the Syriac notion of symbol (raza)—in which a symbol does not refer to anything other than itself (enclosed in its own mystery, hiddenness, density/opaqueness/depth, in itself, i.e., in its aporia)—is lost. Accordingly, the notion of the Eucharist as a divine (sacramental) Symbolic (thus real, not representational) presence of God is also lost.

Here, I want to trace and document what has been lost in the genealogy of the interpretations of the Eucharist, as manifesting itself through the authors mentioned above with the hope that the understanding of the symbolic participation with the Divine in the Eucharist could be retrieved and revived, as in Pseudo-Dionysius.

Theodore of Mopsuestia (d. 428)

Theodore became the bishop of Mopsuestia in 392 after being a presbyter for a decade at Antioch. In his Mystagogic Catecheses, he provides, for the first time, a description of “anything resembling today’s ritualized transfer of gifts” (Taft, 2004: 35), i.e., the Great Entrance. He is also the first to interpret “the eucharistic liturgy as an anamnesis of the resurrection, and … the procession with the gift as the burial procession of Christ” (Taft, 2004: 37). Theodore, then, was a precursor of the “incarnational realism.” He wrote in his homilies:

It is the deacons who bring out this oblation… which they arrange and place on the awe-inspiring altar, as vision … awe-inspiring even to the onlookers. By means of the symbols we must see Christ who is now being led out and going forth to his passion, and who, in another moment, is laid out for us on the altar… And when the offering that is about to be presented is brought out in the sacred vessels, the patient and chalices, you must think that Christ our Lord is coming out, led to his passion… by the invisible hosts of ministers… who were also present when the passion of salvation was being accomplished… And when they bring it out, they place it on the holy altar to represent fully the passion. Thus we may think of him placed on the altar as if henceforth in a sort of sepulchre, and as having already undergone the passion. That is why the deacons who spread linens on the altar represent by this the figure of the linen cloths of the burial… [And afterwards] they stand on both sides and fan the air [aer] above the holy body so that nothing will fall upon it. They show by this ritual the greatness of the body lying there… which is holy, awe-inspiring, and far from all corruption… a body that will soon rise to an immortal nature… It is evident that there were angels beside the tomb, seated on the stone… and now too shouldn’t one depict as in an image the similitude of this angelic liturgy? … [the deacons] stand around and wave their fans… because the body lying there is truly Lord by its union with the divine nature. It is with great fear that it must be said out, viewed, and guarded. These things take place in complete silence because, although the liturgy has not yet begun, still it is fitting to watch the bringing out and deposing of such a great and wonderful object in recollection and fear and a silent and quiet prayer, without saying anything… and when we see the oblation on the altar as if it were being placed in a kind of sepulchre after death, a great silence falls on those present. Because that which is taking place is awe-inspiring, they must look on it in recollection and fear, since it is suitable that now, by the liturgy… Christ our Lord rise, announcing to all the participation in ineffable benefits. We remember therefore the death of our Lord in the oblation because it makes manifest the resurrection and the ineffable benefits.

Taft, 2004: 35-36; italics added.

Taft notes: “When Theodore says ‘the priest begins the office of the prothesis,’ this should not be understood as referring to a prothesis in the modern Byzantine sense of the term” (2004: 38).

Mateos comments on the above passage by Theodore:

… linking the placing of the gifts on the altar with the deposition of the Body of Christ in the sepulcher is an allegory. Theodore continued his allegorical explanation of the liturgy, connecting the Epiclesis to the Resurrection. In our times, it seems that the symbolical action to signify the Resurrection is the commission of the Body and Blood after the fraction, and that the death is signified by the double consecration. Thus, the old allegory of Theodore tends to create confusion.

[…] [Chrysostom] never indulges in Theodore’s elaborate and forced explanations.

Mateos, 2016: 56.

After all this, Taft notes, the priest greets the people with ‘Peace be to you,’ and the kiss of peace is exchanged, the concelebrant washes his hands, the diptychs are proclaimed, and the anaphora begins (Id., 36-37).

As Taft notes further, by Theodore’s time, “the former simple transfer of gifts has already become a ‘Great’ Entrance” (Id., 37). And, says Taft, “this interpretation was to find its way into the Byzantine liturgical commentaries, and inevitably affected the ritual of the liturgy itself” (Id., 37). Most importantly, Taft notes in Theodore “the burial-cortège symbolism” and “the sacramental realism,” where “the gifts are already the body (dead) of Christ” (2004: 28). As Theodore makes it clear, that only the deacons take part in the procession and that there is no accompanying chant (Id.). Everything takes place in dead silence, as in a funeral procession.

The Eucharist as the symbol of Christ’s passion has taken its root as early as late 4th-century.

Narsai (d. 502)

A century after Theodore of Mopsuestia, in a desert saint Narsai, a contemporary to Pseudo-Dionysius, we find a similar interpretation of the Eucharist. In his Liturgical Homilies, Narsai writes, steeped in symbolism:

Let us put aside … anger and hatred, and look upon Jesus led to death for us. He goes forth to suffer in the paten and chalice, with the deacons… It is the symbol of his death that they carry in their hands, and when they place it on the altar and cover it, they symbolize his burial. The deacons do not represent the Jews, but the watchers who ministered at the passion of the Son. He was served by the angels during his passion, and the deacons accompany his body which is suffering mystically… All the priests in the sanctuary present the apostles who gathered at the sepulchre. The altar is the symbol of the tomb of our Lord… The veil above them [i.e., the bread and wine] presents a symbol, that of the stone sealed with the seal of the priests and guards. The deacons who stand on each side and weave their fans are a symbol of the angels… The sanctuary is the symbol of the garden of Joseph [of Arimathea]…

Taft, 2004: 38-39.

Germanus (d. 740)

St Germanus was Patriarch of Constantinople from 715 to 730. He was a fearless defender of the icon veneration in the eve of the iconoclasm persecution, for which he had to abdicate the patriarchy. His love of icons, however, shifted his theological orientation toward what Taft calls the “incarnational realism” (1981: 59). Germanus’ realism in turn forced him to interpret liturgical symbols in allegorical terms, turning almost everything into a sign referring to some historical object, place, or deed associated with Christ’s passion. The following are some examples of his allegorical interpretations, taken from his Historia Ecclesiastica, a track written largely for the catechumens (the paragraph numbers are preserved):

(3) The apse [behind the altar] corresponds to the cave in Bethlehem where Christ was born, as well as the cave in which he was buried…

(4) The holy table corresponds to the spot in the tomb where Christ was placed. On it lies the true and heavenly bread, the mystical and unbloody sacrifice. Christ sacrifices His flesh and blood and offers it to the faithful as food for eternal life.

The holy table is also the throne of God, on which, borne by the Cherubim, He rested in the body. At that table, at His mystical supper, Christ sat among His disciples and, taking bread and wine, said to His disciples and apostles: “Tate, eat, and drink of it: this is my body and my blood” (cf Mt 26:26-28). This table was prefigured by the table of the Old Law upon which the manna, which was Christ, descended from heaven.

(5) The ciborium [a large canopy over the altar table, consisting of four columns and a roof. At Hagia Sophia, it was made of silver] represents here the place where Christ was crucified; for the place where He was buried was nearby and raised on a base. It is placed in the church in order to represent concisely the crucifixion, burial, and resurrection of Christ…..

(6) The altar corresponds to the holy tomb of Christ. On it Christ brought Himself as a sacrifice to [His] God and Father through the offering of His body as a sacrificial lamb, and as high priest and Son of Man, offering and being offered as a mystical bloodless sacrifice, and appointing for the faithful reasonable worship, through which we have become sharers in eternal and immortal life…

(20) The bread of offering, that is to say, which is purified, signifies the superabundant riches of the goodness of our God, because the Son of God became man and gave Himself as an offering and oblation in ransom [ἀντἰλυτρον] and atonement [ἐξἰλασμα, ‘ransom,’ ‘propitiatory offering’] for the life and salvation of the world.

P. Meyendorff, 1984: 59, 61, 71.

For Germanus, the communion table is the table of Christ’s Last Supper with his disciples, a table where manna was laid, as well as His tomb and His throne. The ciborium made in shining silver in Hagia Sophia is Golgotha where Christ was crucified, buried, and risen from the dead. The table is also the altar where Christ offers himself and is being offered as the bloodless sacrifice as a “ransom and [propitiation] for the life and salvation of the world.” We can already anticipate here Anselm’s substitutional theory of atonement.

Germanus’ polysemic allegorical interpretation is not only confusing, as it contributes toward erosion of the meaning of the liturgy, but also decisively distorts the meaning of the Bread and Wine. The consecrated Bread and Wine are not the signs referring to the Flesh and Blood of Christ on the Cross but the Symbol containing the Uncontainable, the reception by which we become initiated into the divine Reality/Mystery. Once meanings are referred to in one to one correspondence, all mysteries evaporate. Nothing is mystical, in which an ontological transformation is to occur: One becomes divine; one is initiated into the mystery or mystical reality.

Allegory destroys mystical symbolism. In Germanus’ allegorical interpretation of the Divine Liturgy, the rich symbolism therein is destroyed, as symbols are reduced to the role of signs that refer to the historical work of Jesus on the cross in Golgotha. Signs in themselves have no reality. They only serve referential functions. In a few centuries later, Anselm will provide a rational explanation for the historical reality of Christ’s salvific work in terms of a transactional accounting ledger, a quid pro quo.

Anselm of Canterbury

Anselm’s rational explanation for Christ’s unique role as the mediator between God and human within the legal framework of substitutional theory of atonement has dominated soteriology ever since.

I will briefly summarize Anselm’s substitutional atonement theory now. In his seminal work, Cur Deus Homo (Why God Became Man, or 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 in proportion to the magnitude of their sin in totality. To forgive sinful humanity without appropriate recompense would be, as he puts it, “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). A whole-sale, unconditional cancellation of debts (or forgiveness of sins), according to him, would destroy the order of things and the beauty therein that God had established. Preserving God’s harmonious and beautiful order—the order which incidentally also obeys logic of reason—is sacrosanct for Anselm.

To resolve the conundrum, he projects into God’s logic (namely, the tension between divine justice and divine mercy), Anselm proposes the following solution: Only a being who is equal to God can adequately bear the magnitude of human sin in its totality, on one hand; and only a genuine and fully human being can pay for the sins humans committed, on the other. As he puts it succinctly, “no one can pay [the recompense] except God, and no one ought to pay except man” (Bk 2. 6; Anselm, 1998: 319). Thus, only Christ—being fully God and fully man—can and must pay for debts that humans incurred. Christ’s incarnation—an event in history in which his death on the cross is interpreted as an act of payment that satisfies both God’s justice and His mercy at the same time, while at the same time it is also interpreted as delivering humanity from the bondage of sin. In short, in Anselm’s interpretation embedded in history and transactional logic, only God-Man Christ can satisfy the requirement that Anselm sets forth: “recompense ought to be proportional to the magnitude of the sin” (Bk 1. 20; Anselm, 1998: 302). Payment must fit the debt. It cannot fall short.

Anselm’s marvelously rational solution to God’s conundrum (projected within commercial and transactional scheme of debts incurred and debts paid) works because of another logic, namely, the logic of substitution. Legally speaking, Christ has no standing to pay for sins that he did not commit. His humanity alone does not qualify him to pay for the sin of the world. He in his full humanity must stand in for humanity that deserves punishment. The strictly transactional logic does not allow him to stand in for the fallen humanity. Another logic must be employed: the logic of substitution or that of hostage in which his divinity is given up as “a ransom for many” (Mark 10.45). Thanks to Christ’s sacrifice in perfect obedience, God can now forgive our debts without upsetting his divine justice and “the right order of things.” Only Christ, the perfectly innocent, can stand in and is offered as the innocent hostage as a ransom proportionate and sufficient enough to reconcile our collective debt. Here, however, the hostage is the ransom required. Thus, only Christ can reconcile; only Christ can substitute; only Christ can die for us. We do not and cannot. We only reap the benefit of his atoning sacrifice freely given on our behalf and without us contributing in any way towards repayment of debts. We receive free grace based on Christ’s willing substitution. We live because he died.

Anselm’s focus on Christ’s innocent suffering and substitutional death has serious consequences, including his interpretation of the Eucharist, which I now want to consider.

G. H. Williams notes that Anselm belonged to the time of the late eleventh and twelfth centuries “when the regal figure of the Romanesque crucifix was beginning to show the lineaments of the Gothic Man of sorrows” (1957: 252). Concomitant to this development was the shift toward individual piety and devotional practices, where the Eucharist became the sacrament of penance. For Anselm, more specifically, the Eucharist is the physical means by which the benefits of Christ’s atoning work is subjectively appropriated by the individual believers. The Eucharist serves as an occasion for receiving and digesting the divine food necessary for spiritual sustenance. To be Christ means to take his physical flesh and blood.

Anselm writes in Meditatio III redemptionis humanae, referring to Christ’s obedience in taking the cup at the Garden of Gethsemane the following. Note the emphasis on the physical aspects of Christ’s suffering that ought to correspond with our physical intake thereof:

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. ‘Viand’ is ‘an article of food.’ ‘Viaticum’ is ‘The Eucharist given to a dying person;’ ‘a supply of provisions for a journey.’

Here the Berengarian metabolism is metaphorized spiritually. We participate in his vicarious and historical suffering by chewing, mulling over, and swallowing his broken body and blood that he shed in substitution. The physical act of mixing with his flesh through ingesting combined with the mental act of recalling the historical event of Christ on the cross is supposed to effectuate our participation in Christ’s atoning death. What has been accomplished by Christ in the past (that satisfied God’s conditions for love and justice) becomes efficacious in the present moment for the believers in the physical act of ingesting of his body and blood and in the mental act of recalling the past event of Christ’s atoning act on the cross. Christ’s death in history recalled in the present moment of the believer at the eucharist table becomes the way of acquiring and sustaining the new life in Christ, the new life in which we “remain in Christ and Christ in [us].” The new life in Christ then begins with and is maintained by the eucharist. If baptism signifies the entry into the new life in Christ by immersion, the Eucharist is the spiritual daily bread necessary to effectuate and maintain the new life in Christ. 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). As Williams reiterates, “in post-Berengarian metabolism (Geiselmann’s term) the sacrament of the altar possesses Christ substantially, and hence makes possible a greater degree of participation in redemption in the measure that actual sacramental incorporation into Christ is superior to sacramental rebirth” (1957: 252).

Anselm’s shift of focus from baptism to the eucharist reenforces his theory of atonement that almost entirely rests on Christ’s act on the cross. It is as though the significance of the whole Incarnation is reduced to the single act of substitution on the cross, the act which for the first time receives an English name in the early 16th-century (sometime between 1505-15, according to Random House Dictionary) when William Tyndale translated the Hebrew word קרבן (qorban) as ‘atonement.’[1] It is reasonable to assume that Anselm’s theory of Christ’s substitutionary act on the cross heavily influenced Tyndale some 400 years later.

Anselm never speaks of theōsis, as G. H. Williams notes (“Anselm has no trace of the deificatory theory in his writings” (1957: 268)). In Anselm, the immersive union with Christ in baptism recedes in the background, as the substitutional death of Christ on the cross is put forth in the foreground.

[1] Expiation is a word invented after the invention of the word ‘atonement.’ It is derived however from Latin, expiare, meaning ‘to clear, to cleanse, purge.’ Sacrificare means ‘to perform a sacrifice, to offer sacrifice, to offer as a sacrifice.’ In English, however, ‘expiation’ is defined reductively in terms of ‘atonement.’

Francis of Assisi

For St Francis the Eucharist is primarily a devotional means of individual piety. Before celebrating the Eucharistic, Fracis stated in his 1215 Letter to All Clerics, the priest must prepare his heart (Leppin, 2025: 161; summarizing from Frascis’s 1215 “Letter to All Clerics,” 101). The intention of the celebrants must be “holy and pure;” and they are “to direct their thinking and feeling not toward other human beings but toward God” (Leppin, 2025: 162; summarizing the same Letter).

The individual piety toward God, furthermore, is accentuated especially because the Eucharist is approached as an occasion of Christ’s physical presence in his death and resurrection.

The historical context is helpful here to see why Francis understands the Eucharist this way—with the emphasis on the realism of Christ’s presence.

In November 1215 Pope Innocent III convened the Fourth Lateran Council. Although there is no record of Francis attending the Council, the decision issued by the Council deeply influenced Francis.

His close relationship with the Pope is well known. He met Pope Innocent III in 1209 and received Pope’s recognition of his order (Leppin, 2025: 92). When the Pope died in 1216, a year after the Council, Francis was at his bedside in Perugia (Leppin, 2025: 166, 155).

The Fourth Lateran Council declared that Jesus Christ’s “body and blood are truly contained in the sacrament of the altar under the forms of bread and wine; the bread being changed into the body, the wine being changed into the blood of Christ (‘transsubstantiatis’) by divine power” (as quoted in Leppin, 2025: 169). In declaring changes in the substance, οὐσία, the Council fundamentally deviated from the doctrines formulated by Plato and Aristotle, according to whom substance by definition cannot undergo change.

In any event, the Council did not raise the issues implicated in its own declaration: that Christ in his substance is actually present in the physical elements consecrated on the altar.

In 1059, about two century prior, Berengar had already raised such an issue, for which he was condemned, namely, that the changed bread and wine as Jesus Christ’s body and blood were “not only sacramentally but in truth … taken and broken by the hands of the priests and crushed by the teeth of the faithful” (as quoted in Leppin, 2025: 169, fn 20; it is not clear whether Leppin is citing canon 1 in “The Canons of the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215” or Bradshow and Johnson’s “The Eucharistic Liturgies,” 224). As Leppin puts it, the Fourth Lateran Council “did not finally reflect on the matter beyond coining a new word, transsubstantiare, derived from the word substantia, meaning substance [οὐσία], to obviate the need for further explanation” (Leppin, 2025: 169).

In any event, Francis took the matter further than the Council was willing to go. As Leppin notes, “when we turn to his [Francis’s] view of the Lord’s Supper, we witness something more extreme” (Leppin, 2025: 169). The Council’s pronouncement however was not “the chief cause of Francis’s understanding and spiritual appreciation of the Lord’s Supper” (Leppin, 2025: 170). Francis radicalized the Council’s pronouncement by understanding the Eucharist to be the real presence of Christ in his recurrent death and resurrection to be repeated every time the eucharist is celebrated and my incorporating Christ’s real suffering into his own and his community’s lifestyle of penance and poverty.

In his “Letter to a General Chapter,“ 105, written shortly before his death in 1226, Francis writes, as if the priest at the altar is about to receive the body of Jesus crucified, buried, and risen. Historical realism is palpable in the following passage he bequeathed:

Listen to this, my brothers: If it is right to honour the Blessed Virgin Mary because she bore him in her most holy womb; if St John the Baptist trembled and was afraid even to touch Christ’s sacred head; if the tomb where he lay for only a short time is so venerated; how holy, and virtuous, and worthy should not a priest be; he touches Christ with his own hands, Christ who is to die now no more but enjoy eternal life and glory. . . . A priest receives him into his heart and mouth and offers him to others to be received.

As quoted in Leppin, 2025: 170.

Commenting on the passage, Leppin notes: “the body of Christ that once was on the earth is identical with the body of Christ that now returns to the earth in every Mass” (Leppin, 2025: 171). The eucharistic rite re-enacts and relieves the historical reality of Christ’s death and resurrection. One encounters Christ here and now on the altar—physically, as if to touch his head and his dead and risen Body.

Here in this passage, furthermore, we find a strange mixture between allegory and realism: Christ present in the bread enters the priest’s “heart and mouth”—literally into the mouth but metaphorically into the heart. The literal and physical act of receiving the Body in turn heightens the subjective and devotional attitude on the part of the receivers. Thus, Francis writes in the same letter:

Kissing your feet with all the love I am capable of, I beg you to show the greatest possible reverence and honour for the most holy Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ through whom all things, whether on the earth or in the heavens, have been brought to peace and reconciled with Almighty God”

“Letter to a General Chapter,” 104; as quoted in Leppin, 2025: 171.

Again, Francis writes:

Our whole being should be seized with fear, the whole world should tremble and heaven rejoice, when Christ the Son of the Living God is present on the altar in the hands of the priest. What wonderful majesty! What stupendous condescension! O sublime humility! O humble sublimity! That the Lord of the whole universe, God and the Son of God, should humble himself like this and hide under the form of a little bread, for our salvation.

“Letter to a General Chapter,” 105-6; as quoted in Leppin, 2025: 172.

The salvific work of Christ in his physical Body reconciles all things whether on earth or in heavens. In his physical and historical presence that is offered in sacrifice both in history and on the altar Christ accomplishes peace and reconciliation between God and human. His physical presence at the altar and his physical body handled by the priest at the Eucharist rite effectuates atoning sacrifice. We are to fall down before His presence with “the greatest possible reverence and honor.” Christ’s humility in history and on the altar humbles us.

Francis does not speak of unity or becoming Christ ourselves. But rather his historical realism heightens the sense of awe and trembling fear toward Christ’s accomplishment. As Leppin puts it, “… such warnings [to prepare oneself for the awesome presence of Christ] culminated at the sacrament of the altar in a kind of Christ-focused piety with which Francis approached the meal” (Leppin, 2025: 172). Christ’s physical presence becomes an object of awe and worship. Francis does not speak of becoming united with Christ. Rather, Christ as bread and wine provokes our “Christ-focus piety.” As G. H. Williams observes, Anselm “best explain[s]” “the changing piety and iconography of the late eleventh and twelfth centuries, when the regal figure of the Romanesque crucifix was beginning to show the lineaments of the Gothic Man of sorrows” (1957: 253, 252). St Francis continues to embrace the new Zeitgeist already initiated by Anselm some 200 years earlier in the understanding of Christ’s redemptive work and the subjective impact invoked therein.

Moreover, Christ’s humility is literally and physically imitated in Francis’ and his fellow associates’ lives, who were knows as “penitant” monks. As Leppin puts it, “[t]he sacramental presence of Christ on the altar and following Christ in the peripatetic lifestyle of the first poor apostles were two sides of the same coin” (Leppin, 2025: 173). But, the penitent attitude was also communal. As Leppin notes, “It was not the sacramental act of an individual priest before God that was determinative of the community but rather the corporate encounter with Jesus Christ in the Eucharistic celebration” (Leppins, 2025: 172-73). The community was found on Christ, literally and physically encountered by the community at the eucharist table. As Leppin puts it, “[t]he cross was also a symbol and expression of an ascetic lifestyle, for living under the sign of the cross meant rejection of a life of luxury….” (2025: 66). The cross becomes the symbol of penitence and poverty in both spiritual and material sense.

Nicholas Cabasilas ‍

In Cabasilas we see Anselm’s language and concepts directly implanted in the text of his book The Life in Christ (Cabasilas, 1974: 117-118).

Adopting as a central motif Paul’s dictum: “it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Gal 2.20), Cabasilas understands the Christian life to be a life lived “in Christ.” By “in Christ” he means physical and literal ingesting of the eucharistic elements: receiving and taking in the physical Body and Blood of Christ at the altar: “the power of the [communion] table communicates the Flesh and Blood of Christ to him who is initiated” (66).

Just as Christ “was united to [our] blood and flesh pure from all sin,” we too must be united to His divine and pure Blood and Flesh by physically partaking the sacramental Elements. To argue this, Cabasilas employs the patristic language of incarnation. Christ’s Incarnation, he says, makes our physical union with Him possible. This is so because by becoming human Christ “deified” human nature. By dying “for the sake of the flesh, and [by rising] again,” He has deified humanity. Repeating the mantra first spoken by Irenaeus of Lyon and then repeated by Athanasius of Alexandria, Cabasilas says: “He [Christ] descended in order that we might ascend” (66). In this paradoxical logic of descent and ascent, we can be divinized because Christ humanized himself; we can rise to divinity because Christ descended to humanity, including his descent to death and hell. Cabasilas writes:

He who seeks to be united with Him must therefore share with Him in His flesh, partake of deification, and share in His death and resurrection. So we are baptized in order that we may die that death, and rise again in that resurrection. We are chrismated in order that we may become partakers of the royal anointing of His deification.

Cabasilas, 1974: 65-66.

Participation in Christ’s divinity requires participation in Christ’s humanity by eating His Flesh and drinking His Blood. Here participation is understood in the physical sense, as in taking the Elements.

It is notable that in Cabasilas the following Neo-Platonic idea is entirely absent: that an image participates in its archetype through imitation and assimilation (ὁμοίωσις). Absent this metaphysical and ontological framework of likeness or becoming like…, Cabasila is left with the idea of participation by way of ingesting:

By feeding on the most sacred bread and drinking the most divine cup we share in the very Flesh and Blood which the Saviour assumed.

Cabasilas, 1974: 66.

Berengarian metabolism, I must say, is more difficult to understand than the Neo-Platonic notion of imitation by way of image and likeness.

We join in Christ life and death by our act of ingesting the Bread and Wine—by way of the Berengarian metabolism. The shift from the ontological and symbolic (thus real) union with Christ in the Eucharist to the physical and symbolic (thus representational or token) union achieved through the physical ingesting of the Bread and Wine is significant. The concept of transubstantiation, as pronounced by the Fourth Lateran Council in early 13th-century makes its ironic turn in Cabasilas in late 14th-century: that insofar as our union with Christ is effectuated by physical intake of the Bread and Wine, the union with Christ remains physical and material, and therefore it must be symbolic and allegorical. Sacramental union refers to and represents the shared experience with Christ:

Union with Christ, then, belongs to those who have undergone all that the Saviour has undergone, and have experienced and become all that He has.

Cabasilas, 1974: 65. 

By union, then, Cabasilas means sharing Christ’s experience, life, and suffering on the cross as happened in history. Absent in Cabasilas is the mystagogy (μυσταγωγία) that his Orthodox tradition bears: the idea of liturgical rite (τελετή, initiation) in which one enters and becomes initiated into the divine mysteries. A union achieved through the ritual initiation is not a token participation meant to rekindle our memory of Christ’s life and death and our devotion to emulate such a life. Even though Cabasilas uses the vocabulary of ‘deification,’ the notion remains hallow.

Anselm’s focus on the necessity of God-Man becoming the unique substitute for the fallen humanity and the resulting emphasis on the historicity of Christ’s atoning sacrifice usher in what Robert Taft calls (in a different context) the “incarnational realism” (1980/1981: 59), in which Christ’s real presence in history and in the sacrament of the altar is highlighted. One of the consequences of the shift toward the incarnational realism is the rise of subjective pietism occasioned by the sight of the cross with the figure of Gothic Man of sorrow hanging thereon. The Eucharist becomes a sacrament of penance grounded in Christ’s substitutional death on the cross . Ironically, however, the Christ-centered realism in the sacramental life of the Church paves the way to a symbolic and token participation in Christ’s suffering, concomitant with subjective piety and the Franciscan lifestyle of poverty and humility. In Cabasilas we see the culmination of the subjective turn that emphasizes participation in Christ’s experience as He lived and died: “Union with Christ, then [he says, to quote again], belongs to those who have undergone all that the Saviour has undergone, and have experienced and become all that He has” (Cabasilas, 1974: 65). The churches both in the east and the west, thus, begin to lose sight of actualizing the goal of divinizing the world and humanity therein. Consequently, becoming Christ or becoming divine can only be symbolic (in the sense of representational) and subjective; and our participation in Him is said to be achieved by means of Berengarian metabolism, by mean of material ingesting of the Bread and Wine. The once condemned Berengarian metabolism makes its comeback in the emphasis given to the physical and historical aspect of Christ’s redemptive work on the cross and the corresponding appropriation thereof. But, if “Christ is in our midst” at the sacramental altar, the cross that once hung Him in suffering and death in history becomes less prominent. For Incarnation—God with us, Immanuel—saves us at the table here and “now and forever, and throughout all ages.”  

Symeon of Thessalonica

Martin Luther

John Calvin

Pseudo-Dionysius