The Eucharist

in Pseudo-Dionysius, Anselm, Francis, Cabasilas

A broken loaf of bread and the chalice for communion.

By the look of the broken bread in the picture above, we can see immediately that the elements laid out here are not for Orthodox or Catholic Eucharist. It might not even be for Anglican or Protestant either. It might be for an ordinary meal in a puritan household.

In this essay I will trace the genealogy of the Protestant view of the Eucharist that has its origin in the early 5th-century Bishop of Mopsuestia, Theodore II. The strand runs through both the Latin and the Orthodox Churches, such as Anselm of Canterbury, Francis of Assisi, and Nicholas Cabasilas. The development that inevitably leads to the Protestant view of the Eucharist was set in motion, I submit, when Constantine the Great commissioned the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem in 326 and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem in 336. Ever since then Jerusalem became the site of pilgrimage and continued to be to this day. The search of the historical Jesus did not begin with Albert Schweitzer in early 20th-century. It began in the 4th-century, not to critique religion (as Schweitzer and his predecessor David Strauss did) but to experience Christ’s presence closer to heart historically and in realistic way. Pilgrims rely on the historical reality of Jesus and the saints (if making a pilgrimage to a saint). The same reliance on the historicity of Christ is at work in Protestant view of the Eucharist, which functions as the occasion for remembring Christ: “Do this in remembrance of me” (Lk 22.19, I Cor 11.24).

Once the Christ-Event is approached with historical realism, the problem of application arises: What does Jesus of Nazareth have to do with me at the 21th-century? How can my life be connected to Christ in meaningful way?

Nicholas Cabasilas‍ ‍

For Nicholas Cabasilas, the Eucharist is a representational symbol. It is a means of recalling the atoning work of Christ for edification of our souls.

Here we have already departed from the Syriac notion of raza, which means ‘symbol,’ ‘mystery,’ ‘secret’—all at once (Brock, 1985: 41). As in Greek, its plural form, raze, refers to the Eucharist, the ‘Mysteries”—the divine Reality thot exceeds human understanding and transcends human reality. And yet, still, it is something that we can touch, see, consume, and become one with in union; because it is something physical; because it is a Symbol.

For the ancient Syro-Palestinians, a symbol has the intrinsic reality in itself, though hidden and invisible. A symbol carries within it a secret reality in itself that defies human intelligibility. Symbol is something inherently unknowable, irreducible, and incomprehensible. For in symbol there is the Infinite in the finite, the Uncontainable in the contained, like the paradoxical symbolism of Mary’s womb, like the Incarnation itself.

The rich or ‘heavy’ notion of the meaning of ‘symbol’ in Syriac (raza) I just described, however, gets reduced in Greek, as it mutates into the function of a sign. A symbol (σύμβολον, a sign or token) is where the two different or incongruous realities are put together or thrown together (βάλλω) into something visible and tangible. The two divergent things are arbitrarily put together into a single thing. The visible refers and defers to the invisible, like a crown, for example, that stands for the royal power and authority. In itself it is merely a head gear or a ring of jewels, no matter how luxurious or magnificent it is. The seal, scepter, cloak, etc.—they all represent the royalty that they stand in for as tokens, as symbols. They are the token signs of the king’s or queen’s power and authority. A totem pole functions much the same way.

In modern linguistics, language is a system of signs that refer and defer to other signs to make up a meaning: a signification signifying the signified. A sign differentiates itself from the signified or the referent that may never (come to) be present, as Jacque Derrida argued.

Understood this way, the Eucharist is often interpreted as a sign that signifies the historical event of Christ’s crucifixion. The bread and wine stand in for the Body of Christ as signs of His presence immolated and crucified. The Eucharist recalls the Christ-Event narrated by the synoptic Gospels. Such is often the understanding of the function of the Eucharist in particular and of the Sacraments in general, or even of the Divine Liturgy in modern time.

But already such an understanding dominates Nicholas Cabasilas in the 14th-century, as it did in Anselm in the late 11th-century and even in Theodore of Mopsuestia in the early 5th-century, who said in one of his catechetical homilies in reference to the Eucharist:

We must see Christ now as He is led away in His passion, and again later when He is stretched out on the altar to be immolated for us. This is why some of the deacons spread cloths on the altar which remind us of winding sheets while others stand on either side and fan the air above the sacred body…

Theodore of Mopsuestia, Holimy 15, Synopsis; as quoted in Paul Meyerdorff, 1984: 29.

The symbolism invoked here almost borders on allegory, while its realism in referring to Christ in history is palpable. No other explanation can be more historical and realistic than this. For Theodore the Eucharist symbolically refers to Christ’s “immolation;” the cloth upon which the bread and the cup lay (the antimension is a late 12th-century invention) symbolize the winding sheets that wrapped the crucified body of Christ; and the fans perhaps refer to the mourning angels or cooling of the air above the dead body. For Theodore sacrifice means above all immolation; and the Eucharist recalls Christ’s body “immolated for us.”

But where is “Christ among us,” the Risen Lord who seeks to commune with us at the table? How does the Communion unite us with Christ and transforms us to follow and become Him?

Is our memory of Christ in the past history—no matter how firmly held in our belief—enough to save us? Christ among us, God with us, the indwelling and work of the Holy Spirit in us and on us—the trinitarian Reality of the God-head must occur. For this is the reality of the Eucharist that we invoke at the epiclesis, when the priest prays that the Holy Spirit descend “upon us and upon these gifts.” To seek the change of the bread and wine to become Christ without the concomitant change of us to become His image is to seek a magical phenomenon to be awed and mystified by it in the ritual, where we remain spectators. The Eucharist is not a magic to behold; just as the Incarnation is not a miracle to recall. They are the divine reality of God’s work and energy (θεουργία) in physical and human forms (Symbols, raze).