Volumes III and IV of Covenantal Theology continue to develop the radical criticism, proposed in volumes I and II, of Catholic systematic theology as it has existed since the Council of Chalcedon. The criticism is focused upon that theology’s methodological dehistoricization of the Catholic tradition, an effect rendered inevitable by the dehistoricization of the Mission of the Son to give the Holy Spirit. This basic error arises out of the uncritical supposition, effectively universal in Catholic theology since the twelfth century, that the Son sent by the Father is not Jesus the Lord but the eternal Son, sensu negante, understood as immanent in the Trinity, thus as nonhistorical. The historicity of the Father’s mission of the Son is consequently precluded.
The evident corollary of this mistake is the dehistoricization, the nullifi-cation, of the economy of salvation. Its implication is the Monarchian heresy, for the revelation of the Trinity is economic and therefore historical. Obviously, there can be no knowledge of the Trinity as the substantial unity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit apart from its economic revelation by Jesus Christ the Lord. The dehistoricization of the Mission of the Son is the reduction of the Son to the divine substance, the ‘monarchy,’ which Popes Zephyrinus and Callistus in the early third century vainly attempted to defend as orthodox against the insistence of Tertullian and Hippolytus upon distinguishing within the divine substance the Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
The Catholic Church’s Eucharistic liturgy mediates the historical revelation by Jesus the Christ that he is the Father’s Only-begotten Son, sent by the Father to give the Holy Spirit, consubstantial with the Father as his only-begotten Son, consubstantial with us as conceived by and born of the Virgin, Jesus the Christ was Named “one and the same Son” by Irenaeus at the end of the second century, and eight times was so Named by the Council of Chalcedon in the middle of the fifth century. Jesus Christ the Lord is our sole access to the truth of the faith that the One God is Triune, comprising the Father as the Head of the Trinity, thereby the eternal source of his only-begotten Son and, through him, the eternal source of the Holy Spirit, the Gift whom he Sent his Son to give.
The dehistoricization of Jesus Christ entails ignorance of the Trinity, which in turn entails the removal of the Son from his immanence in the Trinity and his reduction to the Monarchian divine substance, the impersonal Deus Unus. This “one God, the Ipsum esse subsistens, the divine Monas, the Absolute, is not the Trinity on other than the Sabellian terms which deny the Personal distinction of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Nonetheless, Ipsum esse subsistens has been the familiar prime analogate of Catholic systematic theology for centuries.
The vain attempts to return the “immanent Son” to history are a perennial reminder that Jesus Christ is the Lord of history; there is no other Lord, and no other history than that in which he is Eucharistically immanent as its Head and which, as Head, he transcends as its Beginning and its End.
Whatever be the source of the drive to dehistoricize the subject of the Incarnation since the last testimonies to the apostolic Christology by Athanasius and Gregory of Nazianzen toward the end of the fourth century, this project thereafter dominated systematic theology in the East. It had been prevented from doing so in the West by Tertullian, whose Apologeticus affirmed the apostolic tradition that the One God is Triune, and that Jesus Christ is Lord. This is neither more nor less than the apostolic faith, the doctrinal tradition defined and confirmed by the first four ecumenical Councils. In the Orient, the dehistoricizing project was barred only by the four great Councils: Nicaea, I Constantinople, Ephesus and Chalcedon. The recognition of their authority, which is simply that of the Church over her worship, required a conversion from the political theology instinctive to the pagan culture. This conversion is from cosmology to history. It specifies the Spirit Christology of Tertullian’s Apologeticus and of Origen’s Peri Archon (Περὶ Ἄρχῶν).
In the West, Tertullian’s Apologeticus was unchallenged by the Gnosticism which threatened the existence of the Church in the Orient from the first century through the third, while the Spirit Christology of Origen’s masterwork formed the Alexandrine tradition in time to become defined at Nicaea. The subject of the Nicene Creed is God the Father and, inseparably, the historical Jesus the Lord, his only-begotten Son, God from God, light from Light, true God from true God, consubstantial with the Father, by whom all things are made.
The docetic foundation of the refusal to accept the historicity of Jesus Christ the Lord is noted and condemned by the Gospel of John and by his First Letter, which are replete with references by Jesus the Lord to his mission from the Father; e.g., “And this is eternal life, that they may know thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou has sent.” (John 17:3. [RSV]. The First Letter of John begins with the solemn affirmation that Jesus is the Son of the Father (1 Jn. 1:1-4) and repeats this central theme over and again (1:7; 2:13-14; 2:22-24; 3:8; 3:23; 4:2; 4:10-14; 5:1-5; 5:10-12; 5:20. This doctrine, simply the immanence of God in history, was challenged from the outset by the Gnostic movements which found no foothold in the West but were immediately attractive in the East, and were defeated only by the unflagging dedication of the Oriental bishops to the preaching of the apostolic tradition.
The contemporary version of the Gnostic challenge to the historical faith of the Church travels as Modernity, as that "critical clean-up” of the doctrinal tradition recommended by Eric Voegelin bears witness; see Vol. I, Introduction, endnote 35; endnote 178, infra.
Ignoring the apostolic, liturgical, scriptural and magisterial testimony to the contrary, the bulk of contemporary theologians continue to take for granted that the subject of the Mission of the Son from the Father, and therefore the subject of the Logos sarx egeneto of Jn. 1:14, of Jesus’ self-emptying, κένωσις (kenōsis) in Phil. 2:6-7, and finally of the Nicene Creed’s σάρκωθέντa (sarkothenta), is not Jesus but the “immanent Son,” whose pre-existence consequently cannot be primordial, as Jesus’ pre-existence was clearly affirmed to be in Phil. 2:6-7, in Jn. 1:1 and 1:14. Consequently, contemporary theology rejects out of hand the primordial pre-existence, i.e., “in the beginning,” of the human Son, the divine Word who is Jesus the Lord, but rather takes for granted the pre-existence of a supposedly Trinity-immanent divine Son, whose existence can only be ab aeterno, who is nonhistorical by definition, and of whom in consequence the Church’s historical tradition and worship knows and can know nothing.
The standard theological and exegetical reading of Jn. 1:1, “In the beginning was the Word,” supposes “the Beginning” to refer to the “immanent Word,” whose eternal nonhistoricity clearly bars that reading, long since condemned as Arian by the Council of Nicaea. Paul explicitly identifies Jesus as “the Beginning” in Col. 1:18, as does John in Jn. 1:1, and again in the Apocalypse where, summarily, Jesus is Named “the Beginning and the End.” The subject of I Jn., identified in the first verse as “That which was from the beginning” is identically the primordial Jesus the Lord who is identified in the first verse of the Gospel of John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.” There is no scriptural warrant for the dissociation of these texts. The Gospel of John knows only the one Son, Jesus the Christ, the Word who was made flesh (καὶ ὁ λόγος σὰρξ ἐγενέτο) by his obedience to his Mission from the Father into our fallen history. Only a willful ignorance can read Jn. 1:14 as “the Word became man, or “the Word assumed flesh,” or “the Word assumed a human nature.”
Nonetheless this time-honored nonsense infests the Catechism, as from 1970 it has infested I.C.E.L.’s Roman Missal, and continues to afflict the Roman Missal of 2011, whose translation of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed refers the Lucan Annunciation of our Lady’s conception of her Lord to the third person of the Trinity instead of following the Greek text of Lk. 1:35, the Greek of the Creed itself (σαρκοθέντα ἐκ πνεύματος ἁγίου καὶ Μαρίας τῆς παρθενον καὶ ἐνανθρωπήσαντα) which refers very clearly to the primordial Spirit who is Jesus the Lord. (see Vol. IV, endnote 184)
Even in its English deformations, the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed clearly identifies the Holy Spirit with the third Person of the Trinity, speaking of him after the Father and the Son, as proceeding from the Father and the Son, and as the inspiration of the prophets, the giver of life. It is evident that the Holy Spirit’s salvific office in the economy of salvation is dependent upon the priority of the Mission of the Son to give the Holy Spirit. It is then absurd to suppose in him a historicity prior to that of his source, Jesus the Christ, the Lord, sent by his Father to give the Spiritus Creator. Nonetheless, these obviously mistaken misinterpretations of the historical apostolic tradition have long since become the default reading of the Trinity for most theologians. Their flat unintelligibility is read into the RSV and even the new Roman Missal Having paralyzed Catholic theology for nearly a millennium, they bid fair to keep on doing so.
Only the primordial Jesus, the “one and the same Son” of the Father and of our Lady, can be the intelligible subject of Lk. 1:35, of Jn. 1:14, of 1 Jn.1-4, of Col. 1:18, of Phil. 2:7. It is by Jesus’ fulfillment of his Mission that Paul in I Cor. 15:45 will speak of him as a “life-giving Spirit,” It is as risen and Eucharistically immanent in our fallen history that the Apocalypse, v. 22:13, will assert his Lordship of that history, by Naming him its Beginning and its End. As risen to the right hand of the Father, yet as Eucharistically immanent in history, Jesus is its Redeemer, semper interpellans, transcending the fallenness of the historical creation as its Head, from whom the Spiritus Creator proceeds as the Gift of the risen Christ, whereby he makes all things new.
The primordiality of Jesus’ pre-existence is presupposed by John’s repeated references to “the beginning,” the moment of creation (Gen. 1:1) and of the fall, for the devil sinned “from the beginning” (1 Jn. 3:8), with the consequent corruption of creation by which the universe, simply as fallen, is in the power of the evil one (1 Jn. 5:19; cf. Rom. 8:19-23). In sum, Jesus Christ the Lord is the Son, immanent in the universe as the Head in whom it is created, and upon whose Fall his Mission to give the Holy Spirit, the Spiritus Creator, has become redemptive in order that it may be achieved. Sent to give the Spirit, the Son’s mission to give the Holy Spirit is now the redemption of the fallen world from death, its last enemy; He defeated by taking it upon himself, in order to restore all creation to the integrity it had in him, “in the Beginning” and which he retained, for as incarnate knew no sin , “For our sake He made him to be sin who knew no sin so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (II Cor. 5:21).
The Nicene Creed, the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, the Formula of Union of the Council of Ephesus, the Symbol of Chalcedon, and the articulations of the faith of the Catholic Church by every subsequent ecumenical council have a single subject, Jesus, the “one and the same Son” of the Father and of the Theotokos. The Council of Nicaea teaches that Jesus is consubstantial with the Father by his subsistence in the same unique divine substance as the Father who subsists in the Trinity as the eternal source of its eternally free Tri-Unity. The First Council of Constantinople repeats that doctrine. The Formula of Union of the Council of Ephesus teaches that Mary is the Theotokos, and on that basis affirms that Jesus, her Son, is consubstantial with us. The Council of Chalcedon confirms the doctrine of Ephesus that Jesus is consubstantial with the members of the same human substance, and links that doctrine to Irenaeus of Lyons who, more than two and a half centuries earlier, taught that Jesus the Lord is “the one and the same Son” of the Father and of our Lady.
The pages that follow explore the “great mystery,” the Pauline doctrine of the Jesus’ headship of the Church and thereby of all men, of all creation. Implicit in I Cor. 6:12ff., that doctrine is first explicit in Cor. 11:3. It is developed in Col. 1:15-20, in Eph. 1:10 and 5:21-33. Those passages, particularly Col. 1:15-20, identify Jesus’ headship of humanity with his headship of the Church. His headship is historical in the Event of his Mission from the Father, which terminates in his sacrificial institution of his union, that of the second Adam, with the second Eve in the One Flesh of the New Covenant. His offering of the One Sacrifice reveals the meaning of his headship. As Jesus is the Glory proceeding from the Father, the immanent Head of the Trinity, so he images the Father in possessing, as his glory, the bridal Church who proceeds from him as from her Head. Jesus headship of the bridal Church is in turn imaged by marital headship of husband, whose glory is his wife, who proceeds from him.
To be the head is to be the source of the free unity of the substance in which the head is immanent, as the Father is the immanent Head of the Trinity, as the Son is the immanent head of the One Flesh whose free nuptial unity images the free unity of the Trinity, so the husband images the spousal headship of Jesus, his head in the sacramental marriage wherein the husband is the immanent head of the marital one flesh that images the New Covenant, the good creation restored in Christ.
It is in restoring that free unity of the primordially Good Creation, through the offering of the One Sacrifice, that the one and the same Son images the Father, as the nuptial One Flesh images the Trinity, and as sacramental marriage images the Eucharistic One Flesh. Further, from every head proceeds a personally consubstantial glory: the Son proceeds from the Father eternally as the Father’s glory; the Church proceeds forever from the Christ, as his glory; in salvation history, the woman proceeds from her head, her husband, as his glory.
Thereby it may be understood that Jesus, the human source of the free unity of our redeemed humanity, cannot but be Personally consubstantial “with us.” His consubstantiality with us, like his consubstantiality with his Father, cannot be assigned merely to “his humanity,” as distinct from his divinity, for it is as Named, as Jesus, that the Nicene Creed teaches that he is the Only-begotten Son, consubstantial with his Father; it is as Named, as Jesus the Lord, the one and the same Son, that the Formula of Union and the Symbol of Chalcedon teach that Jesus is the Head of our human substance, the Personal source of our free created unity, thereby consubstantial with us as the Father, his Head, is consubstantial with Jesus and with the Holy Spirit whom the Father sent Jesus to give.
Our consubstantiality with Jesus, our head, also can only be personal, for we are created in him by our procession from him, the head of the Church, is the head of each member of the bridal Church. Our participation in her Eucharistic worship of her Lord, her head, is our sole access to him. Further, the free substantial humanity, the Church in which, as its head, he is immanent, was created in him “in the Beginning,” as the corollary of the Father‘s mission of Jesus the Bridegroom, whose glory, the bridal Church is the full Gift of the Holy Spirit, the Spiritus Creator whose mission from the Son is his outpouring upon the Church and, through her, upon the primordially unfilled universe, whose creation is the corollary of our creation in Christ.
Our universal personal consubstantiality with Jesus the Christ is the radical grace of our creation in him, a grace universally distributed, by which each of us, throughout our lives, are drawn to him: “trashy a Doe.” For each of us this grace is the uniquely personal possession of the fullness of humanity, a humanly unsurpassable dignity. In our fallen world, this dignity is sacramentally objective, historically factual, simply as the radical gratis Christi, gratis capitals.
As the uncreated eternal Persons of the Trinity proceed eternally from the Father as from their Head, so the members of the created human substance proceed historically from their head as created persons, each possessing the fullness of humanity, quite as the Son and the Spirit, proceeding from and Personally consubstantial with the Father, each not only possesses the fullness of divinity, but possesses it uniquely, i.e., Personally, as Named in the Church’s affirmation of the Mysterium fidei. Our personal possession of the fullness of humanity also renders each of us a personal mystery, for neither can we be categorized; we also must be named to be known. It is the ancient tradition that our naming is liturgical, baptismal, by a Christening, a naming, inseparable from our Naming of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit in the Church’s liturgy.
All this is the direct implication of the Nicene definition of the Personal consubstantiality, the homoousion, of the Son with the Father, a consubstantiality which, as Personal. can no more prescind from our Lord’s fully Personal humanity than from his fully Personal divinity. In brief, the Council of Nicaea, the first and the greatest of the Church’s ecumenical councils, affirmed the Personal divinity, the Personal consubstantiality with his Father, of Jesus the Lord. The next three Councils do no more than spell out the immediate implication of the Nicene definition of the homoousion of the Jesus with the Father: viz., the divinity of the Holy Spirit, the Personal unity of Jesus the Lord, a definition whose defined corollary is Mary’s motherhood of God and, finally Jesus’ Personal consubstantiality with all those who are created in him who is their head and source, and for whose redemption he died, that they may be divinized.
The Catholic tradition knows one Son of the Father, Jesus the Lord, than whom there is no other “King of kings and Lord of lords.” Jesus is our Lord precisely as the one and the same Son, sent by the Father to give the Spirit, by which mission Jesus, the Son, is our head, our Source, the Beginning, the Alpha and the Omega of the good creation, which is good only because in him, by him, and through him.
The consubstantiality of Jesus with the Father, defined at Nicaea, was immediately resisted on cosmological grounds, Arian and Semi-Arian, and continued so to be by conservative Oriental theologians for the sixty-six years from its proclamation in the Nicene Creed until its reaffirmation at I Constantinople – which is to say, for most the fourth century. Only with the summoning of the First Council of Constantinople in 381 did this ideological resistance to ecclesial authority of the Nicene Creed subside. It had lived solely by the intermittent political support, the inconstant Arianizing, of Emperor Constantine, and the whole-hearted support of the Arian Emperors Constantius and Valens. That support ended with the death of Valens in 379. Upon the death of Valens, the pro-Nicene Emperor Gratian appointed the pro-Nicene Spanish General, Theodosius, to replace him as Augustus and as the Emperor of the East. Three years later, in 381, Theodosius summoned the First Council of Constantinople, which reaffirmed the universal liturgical-doctrinal authority of the Church and of her first ecumenical Council, the Council of Nicaea. Until then, the great majority of the Oriental bishops, homoian, heteroousian, and homoiousian, were at best unwilling to accept the doctrinal indispensability of the Nicene Creed and, by immediate implication, were unwilling to accept the authority of the Church over the content of her faith. Von Balthasar has named that metaphysical monisim ‘cosmology’ and a Procrustean bed to which the Catholic tradition cannot conform. Thus warranted, that usage has been followed here.
The confident, unflinching recognition and assertion by Athanasius of Alexandria of the supreme ecclesial authority of the Council of Nicaea, his reliance upon and support of the ecclesial authority of the Bishops of Rome, disturbed the complacent confidence of the bulk of the Orientals in the legitimacy of the Eusebian caesaropapism, but it left them finally unpersuaded. Their naive politicization of the faith of the Church, their long submission of its content to imperial oversight, was deprived of the necessary imperial support with the proclamation of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed by the second General Council. From that point, the necessity to choose either the suppression of Catholic orthodoxy by its subordination to the secular interest of a potestas regalis, or the preservation of Catholic orthodoxy by ecclesial fidelity to the auctoritas sacerdotium as the sole alternative to its politicization, currently labeled “political correctness,” has become ever more evident.
Surveying the impact of the imperial Arianism upon the Councils of Rimini and Seleucia in his De Synodis, Athanasius saw the alternative to fidelity to the Nicene affirmation of the homoousion of Jesus with the Father to be the radical Arians’ ‘hetero-ousian’ refusal of the any substantial relation of Jesus to the Father. The Nicene faith proclaiming Jesus’ Personal consubstantiality, his homoousion with the Father, cannot but be absolute, Nothing has changed since then: flat contradictories are not negotiable.
While the Nicene Creed asserts the homoousion of the Son but not of the Holy Spirit, its concluding phrase, “and the Holy Spirit,” includes the Holy Spirit within the Council’s statement of the Church’s Trinitarian faith. Belief in the divinity of the Holy Spirit is explicit ab initio in the Catholic liturgy: in the sacraments, in the doxologies, in the sign of the Cross which begins and ends every prayer to the Father through the Son in the Holy Spirit. This concluding phrase of the Nicene Creed is a clear affirmation of the divinity of the Holy Spirit; its corollary is the Holy Spirit’s Personal consubstantiality with the Father and the Son, as inseparable from his divinity.
The divinity of the Holy Spirit was defined at the First Council of Constantinople, against the “Spirit-Fighters” who had denied it, but the consubstantiality of the Spirit with the Father was not included in the Conciliar definition. It had been resisted by the Cappadocian homoiousians from whose ranks the “Spirit-Fighters” had earlier emerged. A dozen years after Athanasius’ Tome to the Antiochenes (362) had made the Personal consubstantiality of each of the divine Persons the touchstone of Catholic orthodoxy, Basil of Caesarea, in his De Spiritu Sancto, affirmed the divinity of the Holy Spirit, but avoided affirming its corollary, the Holy Spirit’s consubstantiality with the Father. This ambiguity, rooted in a hesitation between belief in the Personal existence of the Holy Spirit, as opposed to identifying him with the impersonal divine substance, had pervaded the homoiousian theology from its origins in Basil of Ancyra’s quasi-council of 358. He had called it in reaction to the homoian Arianism promulgated at the Second Council of Sirmium in 357. Two years later, after the Council of Seleucia, Athanasius pointed out, in his De Synodis , the contradiction intrinsic to the homoiousion doctrine of a substantial similarity of the Son to the Father: homoios kata ousian. In 381, Gregory of Nazianzen, while president of First Council of Constantinople, had eloquently urged a Conciliar declaration of the homoousion of the Spirit, but to no avail; his homoiousian opponents, led by Gregory of Nyssa (whose brother, Basil of Caesarea, had died on January first, 379) and Diodore of Tarsus, carried the day.
Gregory of Nyssa’s defense of the homoiousian doctrine echoed and developed his brother Basil’s dissociation in his De Spiritu Sancto of the economic revelation of the Trinity by the Christ from the radical reality of the Godhead, an apophaticism lately taken up by Metropolitan John Zizioulas, of the ancient see of Pergamon in western Turkey.
In the next century, Cyril of Alexandria, who had succeeded his uncle, Theophilus, in the see of Alexandria, had been a proponent of the “Logos-sarx” Christology identification of the subject of the Incarnation, the Savior, the agent of our redemption, with the abstract “immanent Son,” rather than with the historical Jesus the Lord. However, shocked by the impact of Nestorius’ denial, in 328, of the humanity of the Logos, thus of the divinity of Jesus, upon the Church’s Eucharistic worship, Cyril undertook to correct his own Christology in his “Three Dogmatic Letters” to Nestorius, the Bishop of Constantinople. Thereafter he played the dominant role in the condemnation of Nestorius by the Council of Ephesus. Five years later, after the condemnation of Nestorius, Cyril subscribed to the “Creed of Ephesus,” i.e., the Formula of Union, which taught that Mary is the Theotokos and, in consequence, that her Son, Jesus the Lord, is consubstantial with us. This flat rejection of the Logos-sarx Christology infuriated his powerful subordinates in Alexandria, but he maintained his position until he died in 444. His concession to the Antiochene insistence upon the full humanity was matched by the Antiochene upholding of the full divinity and Personal unity of Christ. Cyril’s willingness to accept the “clothing” idiom of the Antiochenes, and his recognition of Mary as the Theotokos, persuaded the Antiochenes led by John of Antioch to accept the Formula of Union, the official dogmatic statement of that Council which affirmed, against Nestorius, as also against Cyril’s early Logos-sarx dehistoricization of the Johannine Logos, the dogmatic fact that Mary, the mother of Jesus, is the Mother of God and that Jesus, as her Son, is consubstantial with us.
The competing Antiochene theological tradition, initiated by Diodore, later (378) the bishop of Tarsus in the middle of the fourth century, when he had become convinced of the full, i.e., ensouled humanity of Jesus, but within the context of the Logos-sarx (Word-flesh) Christology. The Logos-sarx vocabulary was and would continue to be standard in the Orient but Diodore’s stress on the full humanity (not the soulless “flesh”) of Christ would be labeled the ‘Logos-anthrōpos’ (Word-man) Christology. Diodore seems not to have noticed the implicit dehistoricization by the Logos-sarx Christology of the subject of the incarnation, i.e., its reduction of Jesus to the eternal Son sensu negante, who assumed flesh; thus he could continue to use that language while, perhaps under the influence of the literalism of the Antiochene school of exegesis, insisting upon the full, consequently ensouled, therefore Personal humanity of Jesus.
This inconsistency issued in the insoluble “two sons” quandary. Julian the Apostate Emperor, a competent Christian theologian despite his apostasy, had been pleased to point out to Diodore that there could be no relation between the absolute “immanent Son” and the full, personal humanity of Jesus. However, Diodore refused to drop his Logos-sarx Christology; instead, he attacked Apollinarius’ radicalization of it, viz., his denial of a human soul in Jesus, and his consequent failure affirm Jesus’ full humanity, his “ensoulment,” but continued to do so within the context of his Logos-sarx Christology.
By the fifth century, under the influence of the leading Antiochene theologian, Theodore of Mopsuestia, a friend of Diodore and the mentor of Nestorius, the diophysism implicit in Diodore’s assertion of Jesus’ “ensoulment” had been accepted. The Antiochene Christology remained diophysite until diophysism and monophysism were alike condemned by the Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon in the fifth century.
Despite its formal condemnation at Ephesus, diophysism continued to be upheld by the followers of Nestorius. Their flight from persecution removed them further and further from the Greek Orient―in doctrine, in culture, and finally in geography. Via the Silk Route, they established Nestorian communities in the heart of Asia.
The Nestorian heresy has found effective expression in contemporary Christologies whether “from above” or “from below” but in each case agreeing, now as then, in the one cosmological necessity, the rejection of the communication of idioms in Jesus by which he is the Lord and his mother the Theotokos. Cyril, however mistaken his early subscription to the Logos-sarx Christology, recognized in 328 that the denial of the divinity of Jesus the Christ by Nestorius, the bishop of Constantinople, had unacceptable Eucharistic consequences.
Twenty years after the Council of Ephesus, the Symbol of the Council of Chalcedon, in affirming the affirming the same doctrine as the Formula of Union, proclaimed and repeated, over and again, Irenaeus’ brilliantly insightful naming of Jesus the “one and the same Son.” The Symbol of Chalcedon is the definitive statement of the Christology of the preceding General Councils. It made explicit what had been implicit in the Nicene definition of Jesus’ Personal consubstantiality with the Father, i.e., that the Personal unity of Jesus the Lord, at once human Son of Mary, the Theotokos, and the divine Son of the Father, requires his Personal consubstantiality with us as well as with the Father. In affirming this, the Symbol confirmed the assertion of that consubstantiality in the Formula of Union, and tied it to the title given Jesus by Irenaeus two and a half centuries earlier.
It must follow that, as a matter of particular emphasis, inseparable from the apostolic faith that Jesus is Lord (I Cor. 12:3; Phil 2:11), the Church’s liturgical-doctrinal tradition knows no “immanent Trinity,” no “immanent Father,” no “immanent Son,” and no “immanent Spirit.” The Trinitarian faith of the Church in the Trinity depends wholly upon the Father’s historical Mission of the one and the same historical Son, Jesus the Lord, to give the Spiritus Creator. It is solely by Jesus’ Revelation of his Mission from the Father to give the Spirit that the Church knows all that she has taught of the Trinity, all that she believes. No theology of the Trinity as “immanent,” i.e., no theology that abstracts from the revelation of the Trinity by Jesus, the one and the same Son, sent by the Father to give the Spirit, can be pertinent to the faith of the Church. Inescapably, the abstract Son ceases to be a Person, with a Monarchian consequence avoidable only by refusing to identify with the Catholic tradition what is only a school loyalty.
Phil. 2:5-7 is explicit. Jesus, not the ‘immanent Son,’ is the subject of the κένωσις, that Personal entry of the primordial Jesus into our fallenness for our redemption. I Jn. 4:2 is yet more explicit, condemning the emergent docetic gnosticism which barred the affirmation that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh, i.e., has entered into the history of the fallen world. There can be no doubt that the New Testament teaches that Jesus, the second Adam, the Son of Man, the man from heaven, the Joannine Word made flesh, the Beginning and the End, is the subject of the mission of the ‘one and the same Son’ from the Father.
Only the cosmological blinders which John the Evangelist condemned in his First Letter have prevented the theological “reception” of this central message of the New Testament. Its revelation that Jesus, the only-begotten Son of the Father, was sent by him to give the Holy Spirit is a free truth, a grace ex nihilo sui et subjecti. The Father’s Mission of his Son, Jesus the Lord, is not the product of a Trinity-immanent necessity; neither is it a manifestation of Plotinus’ pantheistic “bonum diffusivum sui.” By his Mission of the Son, we know that the last of the Names of the Father is Love; he eternally generates the Son and through the Son, pours out the Spiritus Creator, by which Gift all things are made and, having fallen, are made new.
By the Son’s Gift of the Spirit we know that all creation is “in Christ,” that “in the Beginning was the Word” who, by reason of the sin of Adam, in obedience to his Mission from the Father, “became flesh,” having “emptied himself” of his primordial integrity. The primordial glory which was his “in the Beginning,” inseparable from his Personal unity, from his headship of all creation, is veiled by his manifestation in our fallenness, his kenōsis, his divesting himself of that glory by becoming flesh, not by “assuming” the humanity which he possessed primordially in its fullness, and of which he is the head, the source, the creator.
Entering into our fallen mortality, conceived by and born of a woman, he became like us in all things save sin, accepting the “form of a slave.” Enslaved like us for all his life by the fear of death (Heb. 2:14-18), he is the “suffering Servant” of the prophecy of Isaiah; he died for our salvation and the salvation of the world. Taking the full penalty of Adam’s sin upon himself as our head, by his High Priestly offering of himself as the One Sacrifice to the Father, by which Offering he instituted the One Flesh of his primordial union with the primordial Church, he restored our free nuptial unity, his One Flesh with the bridal Church, restoring our freedom freely to believe in him, to hope in him, and thus to enter his Kingdom.
As our head, consubstantial with us, he conquered death by his One Sacrifice, his institution of the Eucharistic Bread of Life and Cup of eternal Salvation by which he is the Lord of history, the Beginning and the End. Rising from the dead, he ascended to the right hand of the Father, and will come again to judge the living and the dead, who are consubstantial with him.
Thus the only Trinity known to the Catholic Creeds is “economic,” which is to say, historical, known solely by the historical Revelation who is the Christ. It is not in prejudice of the eternity of the Trinity that we know of that eternity, not by borrowings from incompatible cosmological speculation upon a nonhistorical. divinity, but from the Revelation who is the Christ our head, in irrevocably free nuptial union with his bridal Church. We have no other access to the Trinity than Jesus’ revelation of his Mission by his Father to give the Spirit. That Mission from the Father is of him whom Irenaeus, at the end of the second century, would name “the one and the same Son,” a title affirmed and seven times repeated, two and a half centuries later, in the Symbol of Chalcedon. Jesus the Christ is the Son of the Father from eternity and the Son of the Theotokos in our fallen history. The bedrock of the Church’s faith is the Personal historicity of the eternal Son of the Father, Christ the Lord.
The Catholic faith that Jesus is the Lord asserts an obvious cosmological impossibility. The revelation that we have access to the Trinity by the Father’s mission of Christ the Son is an affront to our fallen rationality. Having fallen from our own free unity in solidarity with the first Adam, we spontaneously submit all reality to our own immanently necessary quest for “necessary reasons,” and thereby dismiss as irrational whatever is alien to the uninhabitable “cosmos” that we uncritically suppose to be our human habitat. It is from this despair of history that we are converted, drawn by God to recognize the “Splendor veritatis” who is the Son, Jesus the Lord.
Thus it is that the Revelation which the Catholic faith affirms to be historically objective, viz., the free Personal human immanence of God in history, has no antecedent necessity, hence no cosmological possibility, and can perceived by the sophisticated paganism of fallen rationality only as mere foolishness, incompatible with rationality as such. Five centuries of struggle to construct a consciousness freed from the absurdities of the mythological tradition had done no more than replace the consolations of the mimesis, the myth whose poetic expression Plato condemned, with a pessimism unalleviated by any recognition of beauty, the free unity and truth, in history and in the world. The mythos affirmed the human goal to be the attainment of the one, the good, the beautiful, their enfleshment even in the fallen world: καλος κἀγαθος ἀνήρ. With the “discovery of mind” and the consequent the rejection of the fatalism of the mimetic faith as irrational, and the corollary of this refusal, the postulate of a surrogate divinity – the cosmic Logos,–the novel rationalism sought, as the mythos had, to create the beautiful and the good and, for too brief a time, succeeded. But “the glory that was Greece” and its analogues in the great pagan cultures, could be neither the goal nor the product of the cosmological quest for a rational universe, for the synthesis of the beautiful and the good is an expression of the universal intuition of the free unity of truth, whose freedom is as resistant to rationalization as was the fatalism of the mythos.
The men and women of the pagan cultures were not personally locked into the cosmological despair of the circumambient dualist philosophies. Their universal spontaneous quest for the beautiful and the just was their openness to the “ancient beauty’ that is Christ, an openness manifest when the first Apostolic preaching began to enlighten the world,. The first converts were not from sophisticated cynics such as those in Athens who dismissed with irony Paul’s preaching of the resurrection, but were drawn instead from the lower classes exemplified by the stubbornly Christian peasants whom another sophisticated pagan, Pliny the Younger, encountered while Proconsul of Bithynia, and some of whom he executed for the crime of faith in Christ. Jesus’ Lordship, his Personal transcendence of history, is not rooted in the immanently necessary causes which are foundational for cosmological rationality. It is in reliance upon this classic pessimism that Plato rejected the phenomenological intelligibility of history, Aristotle, his student and sometime disciple, dissenting from his master, could affirm history’s formal intelligibility only by its idealization, its submission to his deterministic act-potency analysis, paradoxically ignoring the phenomenological peculiarity and unpredictability proper to the material universe which so fascinated him. In either case, whether phenomenologically or analytically conceived, the quest for an immanently necessary truth in history cannot but induce a despairing flight from history. This historical pessimism is taken for granted by the pagan mythologies. Their rationalization, whether the Buddhist denial of historical reality by monastic Buddhism, the Greek equivalent, the Eleatic reduction of reality to abstract unity, ever and again, the “discovery of mind” requires a flight from history, whose freedom cannot support the quest for a necessary unity.
Plato and Aristotle were agreed in viewing freedom as unintelligible, as mere randomness. Fallen rationality, apart from revelation, can do other than seek for a necessary intelligibility and, over the two and a half millennia of that quest, has found none in history. As has been earlier noted, that perennially unavailing ambition was foreclosed eighty years ago by Gödel’s publication of his incompleteness theorems. Strangely, this has not inhibited that ambition: it finds contemporary expression in the Darwinian dogmatism now identified with scientific detachment, despite its incompatibility with the laws of thermodynamics.
Inasmuch as the truth of the Catholic faith is revealed in history as a gift of truth, its affirmation can only be free, a reception of the gift of the living Truth. This reception is by a free conversion from the cosmological rationality which knows no historical truth and no freedom: the cosmological quest for truth, and the cosmological exercise of freedom, are expressions of the cosmological soteriology: they constitute a necessary flight from history to a nonhistorical ideal, whose immanent necessity every historical utterance affronts.
In direct conversion from the historical pessimism that marks all paganism, as well as all secular institutions of the contemporary neo-paganism, Catholic soteriology requires a free personal entry into salvific historicity, thus into the personal exercise of responsibility, authority and dignity implicit in our creation in Christ and our consubstantiality with him. Concretely, this free entry into freedom, into covenantal fidelity to the Church’s liturgy is personal participation in the historical mediation of the salvation worked by Christ’s institution of the New Covenant, Eucharistically represented. Personal appropriation of our redemption in Christ is precisely entry into the Eucharistic worship of the Church, thereby into the history of salvation.
History has only this significance: apart from the free recognition of the immanence in history of Jesus, the Alpha and the Omega, the Lord of history, its Beginning and its End, history has no instrinsic significance, and we can give it none for, apart from that Eucharistic mediation of the grace of Christ, we remain within that irretrievably fragmenting context that Paul labeled “the flesh.” As fallen, we are locked into its fatality, from which we can be freed only by entering into the freedom of Christ, whose historical mediation is by free participation in the sacramental worship of the Church. We cannot free ourselves; neither can we be forced to be free. Freedom can only be received, as a gift, the Gift our Lord was sent to give, the Holy Spirit.
We have referred elsewhere to the “costs of cosmology.” In the pages following it will become apparent that the price of theological indulgence in that monist metaphysical determinism, whether expressed in a monadic systematics, or in atomistic ‘historical-criticism’, is finally theological dissent from the faith of the Catholic Church, whose adequate theological expression, its personal free quaerens intellectum cannot be other than Eucharistically grounded and consequently cannot be other than historical.
As the Catholic Church has no other foundation than the Eucharistic sacrifice, so Catholic theology can have no other foundation than the Eucharistic institution of the New Covenant by the priestly offering in the Person of Christ of his One Sacrifice, by which humanity has been freed in sacramento from the fragmentation of the fall and, thereby, the universe redeemed.
To enter upon the systematic rejection of that transcendent Gift by its methodological submission to the fatalities of fallen reason is to have substituted an idolatry of method for the faith of the Church that Jesus is the Lord.
The concern of the present work is systematic: it intends a coherent exposition of the free unity of the analogia fidei, which is to say, of the truth of the Catholic faith that Jesus is the Lord. This volume presents the contemporary historical evidence vindicating the conversion of theological metaphysics from cosmological determinism to the intrinsically graced and consequently free historicity for whose theological necessity the first and second volumes of this study have argued. In brief, it will examine the negative impact upon Catholic theology of the identification, traditional well before Boethius and little reflected upon, of “intellectual substance” with “person” in the sense of an irreducibly simple, distinct and, as distinct, self-aware self. This monist cosmological conception of the divine substance was dismissed by the Nicene definition of the consubstantiality of the Son with the Father, and its atomizing application to the human substance was similarly dismissed by the Chalcedonian definition of the consubstantiality of Jesus with all human persons (i.e., “with us”). Notwithstanding the sesquimillenial dogmatic recognition of the consequent consubstantiality of all human persons with each other, this atomistic notion of the human substance: viz., as concretely identical with the human person, continues to dominate Catholic theology.
This time-honored identification of the human person with the human substance rests upon the yet more radical metaphysical assumption of the necessary unity of being and therefore of truth, a postulate built into the regnant theological metaphysics by way of the deterministic import of its hylemorphic and act-potency versions. The consequence, as will be seen, is the insouciant rejection, as by St. Thomas, of the Conciliar definition at Ephesus of the Theotokos of our Lady, and a correlatively naïve rejection of the Conciliar definition at Chalcedon of the human consubstantiality of Christ our Lord with those for whom, in obedience to his Mission as their head, he died, to institute that New and Eternal Covenant which frees them, enables them to believe in him, to love him, to enter his Kingdom and so to share his joy.
In short, the communication of human and divine idioms that is explicit in the Church’s faith that Jesus Christ is Lord has been found incompatible with the theological community’s persistently uncritical enlistment in a cosmological metaphysics. Inevitably, the Eucharistic Presence of the risen Christ as at once the High Priest and the Victim of the One Sacrifice (Heb. 2:17, 3:1) is similarly incompatible with that cosmological rationalization of the radical liturgical expression of the Catholic faith, the priestly offering of the One Sacrifice of the Mass in the Person of Jesus the Christ, at once High Priest and Victim of his One Sacrifice.
The theological critique inherent in the systematic interest of this volume focuses upon the anthropological corollary of the cosmological metaphysical monism: i.e., upon the assumption that each human person is a distinct intellectual substance, because this uncritical postulate has long distorted the meaning of our substantial imaging of the Triune God.[1] It has troubled the patristic tradition from the time of the Apologists, and has dominated the theological tradition almost from its inception down to our own day. However formulated, whether in Platonist, Aristotelian, Stoic, Augustinian or Thomist terms, this monist reliance upon our fallen “autonomous” rationality is inevitably dehistoricizing: it forces a flight from history, for the free, salvific, and finally sacramental unity of history is entirely incompatible with the determinist canons of the “autonomous” rationality underlying all cosmological metaphysics.
Further, the unvoiced postulate of the mono-personality of the human substance, universally accepted by the Fathers, by the monastic theologians, by the medieval systematists and now by their contemporary disciples, including the major defender of the indispensability of nuptial symbolism, Henri de Lubac, has deprived the One Flesh, the free, nuptial union of the second Adam and second Eve, the Head and the Body, the New Covenant, of metaphysical standing by reason of its a priori exclusion of the intrinsic freedom of its substantial unity and truth.
The concretely free, tri-personal, sacramentally and therefore historically objective, substantial, Trinity-imaging unity (Bridegroom, bride, covenant) of the New Creation in Christ, cannot be reconciled with the cosmological monism of substance that has controlled theological speculation from its origin in the late second century, for that monism is rests upon the unexamined supposition that truth of being, of the really real, is a necessary truth. Given that determinist point d’appui, theology must abstract from the indeterminacy, the cosmological irrationality, the fatality, of free historical existence. The cosmological irrationality of all historical reality was first perceived in the West by Heraclitus; thereafter it was affirmed as a mythic fatality by Plato. His pupil Aristotle reduced the mythic fatalism to an immanent necessity. He was followed in this by the Stoics and the Neoplatonists. It lives still in current discussions of the interrelation of nature and grace, reason and faith. That abstraction from history, that idealism, is simply inescapable. speculative reason, insofar as monist, as determinist, must dehistoricize its subject matter or abandon its project.
This cosmologically necessary process of abstraction from history has challenged Catholic theology nearly from the outset. Its first clear rejection may be that of the second-century Apologist, Theophilus, the Bishop of Antioch, whose Ad Autolycum (2, 15) first understood that the divine unity, the One God, must comprise the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and so must be a trias (τρíaς) rather than a monas (μόνας.) The Stoic terminology which Theophilus used to explain his insight could not sustain that burden, but the insight proved indefeasible. Translated a few years later by Tertullian in the Apologeticus as a substantial trinitas comprising tres Personae (the latter term rendered in Greek by Hippolytus as πρόσοπα). Their assertion of the Trinitarian substance of God was resisted at first by the conservative Roman heirarchy, Popes Zephyrinus and Callistus. However, ca. 260, Pope Dionysius affirmed it for the Roman tradition in his confused correspondence with his Alexandrine namesake, Dionysius the Great. It was formally proclaimed by the Nicene Creed’s inclusion of the Holy Spirit within the object of the Church’s faith (see 356, infra), but only with the Council of Chalcedon was the full implication of the Nicene doctrine of the homoousion of the Son with the Father recognized and affirmed. Justin, the first of the Apologists, and after him, Athenagoras, Theophilus, Tertullian, Hippolytus, Irenaeus whose Adversus Haereses had been anticipated by Justin, and Origen, the first Christian systematic theologian, and still the greatest, all recognized that the New Testament’s “Logos” is a title of Jesus, but these Fathers are exceptions to the all but universal programmatic dehistoricization of the Christ into the immanent Logos, and the dehistoricization of the Trinity into immanence divinity, the docetic temptation first exploited by Marcion and taken up by the Gnosticism which nearly triumphed in the third century. They had found in Christianity a wisdom transcending all the cosmological dualism―i.e., transcending Middle Platonism, transcending Gnosticism, transcending the Neoplatonic mix of Platonism and Aristotelianism. Their theological apologetic focused upon the historical Logos, the Christ whom the Christian faith affirms to be the source of the free intelligibility of the universe, whose mysterium is personally appropriated by baptism into the faith that Jesus is the Lord.
Irenaeus’ historical Christology, focused upon Jesus the Christ as the “Second Adam,” whom he is the first to designate “one and the same Son,” was equivalently the Spirit Christology, affirmed by the Apostolic Fathers, by Justin, Tertullian, Hippolytus and Origen, as well as by the first four General Councils. The Symbol of Chalcedon only continued the tradition whose most explicit statement is that of Irenaeus: Jesus is one and the same Son, of the Father and of the Virgin.
Despite the clear affirmation of the Spirit Christoloogy by Council of Chalcedon, the theological exegesis of the Johannine “Logos sarx egeneto” has continued to identify the subject of the Incarnation with the eternally preexisting “immanent” Logos of the Middle Platonic cosmology, who therefore must become the Christ, must become human, must become historical, if the immanent Word (Sermo, Verbum, Logos) is to be the Jesus whom the faith of the Church affirms to be the Lord. This cosmological fixation has ignored and continues to ignore the historical sense, i.e., the past tense of: Jn. 1:14; Καὶ ὁ λόγος σᾲρχ ἐγενέτο (And the word was made flesh) which refers to a past event, that which Paul knew as the kenōsis, the self-emptying, of Jesus the Lord, with its inescapable implication of his pre-existence precisely as Jesus the Lord, “in the beginning.”
Clearly, “becoming,” like “beginning,” is incompatible with the pre-existence ab aeterno of the Only-Begotten Son of God; this was settled by the rejection of the Arian cosmology at Nicaea, for we cannot read the Nicene Creed in abstraction from its historical subject, Jesus the Christ. The Arian cosmology focused upon an abstract―i.e., cosmological―point: i.e., the impossibility of plurality in the divine unity. Faith in the divinity of human Person, Jesus the Lord, was consequently irrational, untenable. However, the Nicene condemnation of Arius was not theological: Arius’ denial of the divinity of Jesus the Lord affronted the Church’s liturgical and therefore historical mediation of the truth that Jesus is the Lord. The Conciliar riposte was liturgical, not theological, not speculative, but concretely historical, a dogmatic affirmation of the Mysterium fidei, of consubstantial Personal plurality within the one and the same divine and consequently Trinitarian substance: Jesus is homoousios with the Father, an affirmation with enormous implications, the first of which is that the subject of theology is this liturgically-mediated historical truth, the inexhaustible mystery of the historical faith that Jesus is Lord, sent by the Father to give the Spirit.
The cosmologically committed Eusebians and their allies, supported by Constantine and his heirs, fought this definition à outrance. Within a decade the more prominent upholders of the homoousion of Jesus with the Father had lost their sees, leaving Athanasius nearly alone upon the field, but victorious nonetheless, for theological cosmology had died at Nicaea. The obsequies would be conducted by the next two Councils, and the funeral celebrated at Chalcedon.
Every attempt rationally to account for the impossible transit of the immanent Son, the nonhistorical word, from Trinitarian immanence to historicity must fail and, within that failure, the theological identification of the Word with the Lord Jesus also must fail, for within that abstract context it is the eternally immanent Word, not the man Jesus, who then is Lord, who is the subject of Christology and thus is the nonhistorical Personal agent of our historical salvation.
When this cosmological identification of the nonhistorical Son as Lord is taken seriously by theologians, as it has been since the Eusebian submission of the faith to political negotiation, the task of Catholic theology, whose sole historical subject is the Church’s faith that Jesus, the “one and the same Son,” is the Lord, has been dismissed. Its surrogate is the impossible project of reducing to “necessary reasons,” i.e., of rationalizing, of providing for the antecedent conditions of the possibility of the inexhaustible mystery of the union of divinity and humanity in the Person of Jesus the Lord. This has since been the central project of Christological speculation, which continues undiscouraged by the formal rejection of its a priori dehistoricization of the Johannine Logos by the Councils of Nicaea, I Constantinople, Ephesus and Chalcedon.
Church Councils do not teach theology. As the Fathers at Nicaea did not enter into a cosmological debate with Arius, as those at I Constantinople did not contend with Apollinarius or the Macedonians, so the Fathers who met at Ephesus and at Chalcedon did not convene to argue over the merits of monophysism versus diophysism. They met to conclude a development of the Nicene affirmation of the Personal consubstantiality with the Father of the one and the same Son who is Jesus the Lord It consisted in the correction of the theological assumption, by the Eutychians and the Nestorians, that the Nicene affirmation of the homoousion of the Son with the Father did not pertain to the Personal unity of their dehistoricized Logos, the “immanent Son,” but to Jesus the Lord. The Nicene definition of the homoousion of the Son was not concerned with an “immanent Son” of whom the Catholic tradition knows nothing. Rather, it was a statement of the faith of the Church in her Jesus Christ the Lord, which cannot and does not prescind from the Son’s humanity. It is Jesus Christ who is the Lord a matter settled dogmatically by the Ephesian entitlement of Mary as the Theotokos, which long since had been taken for granted in the worship of the Church. Thus, the subject of the Nicene definition of the homoousion of the Son with the Father is Jesus the Christ, not the Word in conceptual disjunction from his humanity, for that is to ignore his Personal unity, which is to say, it is to ignore the communication in idioms which the Council of Nicaea was called to defend, and which it did defend, precisely by defining Jesus’ Personal homoousion with the Father. It is inescapable that the Nicene affirmation of Jesus’ consubstantiality is proper to his indivisible Personal unity as at once fully divine and fully human. Consequently it must apply to his humanity as well as to his divinity, for both are Personal in the Personal unity of Jesus the Lord: once again, the subject of the Nicene doctrine is Jesus, not an “immanent Word.”
Jesus’ Personal unity was insistently affirmed and reaffirmed at Chalcedon: he is the One and the same Son, who subsists at once in humanity, in the human substance which comprises all for whom Christ died, and in the , divine Substance the Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The Apostolic tradition, particularly evident in the Gospel of John and his Letters, and in Paul’s affirmation of Jesus’ kenōsis in his Letter to the Philippians, insists that Jesus’ full humanity is as indispensable to his Lordship as is his full Divinity, and includes his Personal unity in that insistence. The consubstantiality with the Father of that Personal unity, of Jesus the Lord, the One and the same Son, was affirmed at Nicaea. Once that Personal consubstantiality was understood to be essential to the Church’s faith in Jesus’ divinity, the cosmologically-induced confusion over the incompatibility of Jesus’ divinity with the supposedly monadic unity of God was eliminated: the divine Substance could not be the divine Monas, the absolute Self, as Arius and his allies had taught. At Chalcedon, the Fathers proclaimed Jesus’ consubstantiality with those for whom, as their head, he died, as equally essential to the Church’s faith in his humanity.
This development at once of Christological and Trinitarian doctrine was complete with the Chalcedonian Symbol, despite the assertion by leading contemporary Catholic theologians that the Fathers at the Council of Nicaea understood homoousios in a sense quite different from that that of the Symbol of Chalcedon. These theologians suppose the former sense to be historical in the Nicene affirmation of the revealed divinity of Jesus the Christ; thus they properly reject, on the doctrinal, i.e., historical ground of the Nicene Creed, the cosmologically conceived unity of divinity as the Absolute Monas: the divine Substance is not the cosmological Monas, but the historically revealed Trinitas. However, they suppose meaning of the homoousios used in the Symbol of Chalcedon to affirm the consubstantiality of Jesus the Christ “with us,” to be its abstract cosmological sense, which insists upon the monadic substantiality of each human person, and on that basis conclude, without scriptural or doctrinal warrant, that the Chalcedonian affirmation of his human consubstantiality is unintelligible: in short, they apply Arius’ argument against Jesus’ divinity to his humanity: both must be monadic.
In this fashion, they insist upon the cosmological unity of man as that of a personal monas analogous to the divine Monas affirmed by Arius and rejected at Nicaea, thus a monas who exhausts the substance in which he subsists: this reduces humanity to a multiplicity of substantially immanent selves, whose human community is inexplicable and which they leave unexamined and unexplained.
This insistence upon applying a radically incoherent cosmological anthropology to the Lord in whom we are created and by whom we are redeemed is an obvious absurdity. The nearly unanimous commitment of Catholic theologians to these pseudo-theological persuasions is explainable only as an obsolete scholasticism: an academic commitment to the monadic rationality which was definitively rejected at Nicaea, a school loyalty which cannot accept the communication of idioms in Jesus the Christ, the Lord, the One and the same Son. The result is a dehistoricized metaphysics entailing a Monarchian rejection of the apostolic tradition across the board, but traveling as systematic theology. Its Christology has no historical subject, no past, no future and no theological relevance.
It is further evident that the freedom of the created, Trinity-imaging, covenantally-ordered metaphysical unity of the human substance cannot be put in question without also putting in question the freedom of the tri-Personal, substantial unity of the Triune God in whose image that substance is created.[2] The unexamined cosmological postulate of a multiplicity of monadic human substances obviously excludes the substantial, metaphysical unity of the nuptial image of God, as taught in Gen 1:27, as re-affirmed by Karl Barth in the mid-twentieth century, and as resumed at the turn of the twenty-first century in John Paul II’s affirmation of our nuptial imaging of God, the final development of his “theology of the body.”
The uncritical insistence upon the monism of human substantiality had also ruled out, a priori, the Personal unity of Jesus the Christ defined at Chalcedon: viz., defined as that of “one and the same Son” of the Father and of the Theotokos.[3] It is clear that the Apostolic-liturgical affirmation of Mary’s motherhood of her Son is to be taken literally, which is to say, historically: its literal truth, that she is the Mother of the Lord, is a liturgical affirmation of the Catholic faith; it is not subject to negotiation. Any theological speculation which dismisses that historical truth as false to the cosmologically-assured incompatibility of the divine and the human is out of court: Catholicism is a historical faith in the historical revelation that is Personally concrete in Jesus, the one and the same Son of Mary and of the Father. It is Jesus the Lord of whom the Catholic tradition speaks, and it speaks historically, not cosmologically.
It would be idle here further to detail the anti-Christian implications of the perennial mistake, the dehistoricizing of the Logos of Jn. 1:14, which has proceeded to dehistoricize the faith. The earlier volumes of Covenantal Theology have been concerned inter alia with their exposition: we may suppose those preliminary discussions to have been sufficient to signal the paralyzing impact of this perduring error upon Catholic theology.
It has been the project of the first two volumes of this study to provide the metaphysical foundation for the freedom of historical objectivity as such by showing that the truth of the Catholic faith requires that the prime analogate of being, as the theological tradition has understood that term, be the uniquely Prime Event whose primacy can only be that of the historically immanent, history-transcending Eucharistic representation of the sacrificial institution of the New Covenant by Jesus the Christ. It is uniquely by the Event of the offering of this One Sacrifice in the Person of Jesus the Lord who alone can offer it, that the fragmentation of our fallen time is healed, transformed into the history of salvation through the Eucharistic immanence of the risen Christ in history, whereby he is its Lord, its Alpha and its Omega. Our fallen history thereby possesses a sacramental free unity, that of the Eucharistic One Flesh: that it has no necessary unity is well established: any quest for that necessary unity is a flight from history.
The immediate implication of the Eucharistic a priori of theology is that history can be understood to possess objective unity and truth only insofar as its unity is sacramentally signed and caused by the Eucharistic celebration of the One Sacrifice of Christ. This much is inescapable, for history has no intrinsic significance other than that which is free, ex nihilo, incapable of inference from any status quo ante. Only the historical objectivity, the historical event-realism, of the radically Eucharistic sacramental signing that is constitutive of the Church’s worship is thus free and thus historical in the sense of possessing the intrinsic significance. The exegesis of Scripture as Scripture is possible only when its task of historical criticism is understood to rest upon the prime historicity of the Eucharistic Sacrifice which recapitulates and thereby redeems the entirety of historical reality―i.e., rendering it intrinsically intelligible because sacramentally significant and therefore freely coherent.
This recognition of history as intrinsically significant because signing an eschatological restoration of all things in Christ was the commonplace of the patristic and Carolingian periods; it overcame the anti-institutional influence of dévots of the “new (Eleatic) logic from the multitude of untutored dissenting preachers following the condemnation of Berengarius, down to Abelard and the Victorines, to triumph in Lateran IV’s affirmation of transubstantiation.
The medieval “reception of Aristotelianism,” with its postulated monism of substance, and the failure of the theologians of the thirteenth century to baptize that metaphysics by converting it to the free historicity of being, issued a century later in the rationalistic triumph of logic over metaphysics with the Nominalism that has been regarded as the “harvest”[4] but, more accurately, the “waning,”[5] of the Middle Ages. Interest in metaphysics was thereafter peculiar to those theologians whose concern for sacramental realism was soteriological and historical instead of cosmological and, increasingly, juridical.
Henri de Lubac’s hesitation before the substantial metaphysical import of the nuptial symbolism, whose dogmatic indispensability he has nonetheless affirmed, is traceable to his uncritical application of the Thomist-Aristotelian monadism of substance to the nuptial One Flesh, for that monadism bars any systematic, i.e., metaphysical theological recognition of the historically objective reality and truth of the free and yet obviously substantial unity of the New Covenant. The application of this determinism reduces to mere metaphor the One Flesh, the New Creation in which terminates the Son’s obedience to the Father’s mission, i.e., his Gift of the Spiritus Creator to his bridal Church, by whose liturgical historicity the One Sacrifice of the Son is redemptively immanent in fallen history.
It would be beside the point to fault de Lubac for failing to arrive at a theological insight that could arise―and in fact has arisen here―only out of a sustained study of his theology. Despite his signal contributions to systematic theology in Surnaturel and its sequel, Le mystère du surnaturel, de Lubac’s theological achievement was not neither speculative nor systematic. He was a patristic scholar of unmatched theological erudition whose long labors were wholly in the service of the Church. He left behind him a body of scholarly work that will illumine Catholic theology henceforth. The unity of his thought is identically that of the patristic tradition to whose study he devoted his long life: the unity of the Eucharistic liturgy, the unity of history as free, the unity of the res Catholica, the unity of the One Flesh of Christ and his Church, unitas corporis.[6] No one reading a dozen pages of any of his profound studies of the patristic exegesis can doubt the Eucharistic source of their unity.[7] The present work has attempted to proceed under a comparable aegis, in that it intends and has undertaken to provide the meta-systematic elaboration of the Eucharistic unity and foundation of the theological enterprise as such. This project, grounded in the Church’s worship, could not proceed in vacuo. Instructed by de Lubac’s scholarship, it cannot avoid a critical examination of his thought and work.
The development of that criticism in this Volume III has been prompted, ironically, by an error belatedly noticed by the present author, which appears twice in the endnotes of, respectively, the second and the sixth chapters of the first and second volumes of Covenantal Theology. The examination and correction of that error has required a re-examination and consequent discovery of the subtlety of the phenomenological analysis of sacramental realism by the Latin patristic tradition, as it is encapsulated in the sacramentum-res sacramenti paradigm of sacramental causality. A careful re-examination of the untroubled realism of the pre-Berengarian patristic tradition is the necessary preliminary to understanding its post-Berengarian development of the early medieval paradigm of sacramentum tantum, res et sacramentum, res tantum, whose significance has been largely lost in the cosmological confusion consequent upon the Reform.
The pages following propose the single remedy for that confusion. It cannot be other than the theological affirmation of and reliance upon the liturgical tradition, concretely historical in the Church’s indefeasible oral tradition, viz, her Eucharistic worship of Jesus Christ, her Lord.
The proximate origin of this extended Appendix (Volume III) to the two earlier volumes of Covenantal Theology is a re-examination of de Lubac’s classic study, Corpus mysticum. L’Eucharistie et l’église au Moyen age: Étude historique. Deuxième édition. Col. Théologie, 3 (Paris: Aubier; Éditions Montaigne, 1949) [hereafter, Corpus mysticum]. It was prompted by the discovery of a literal misstatement appearing in two endnotes of the first and second editions of Covenantal Theology. In these endnotes the present writer misread―anachronistically―a text in which St Thomas affirms a double Eucharistic res sacramenti. This anachronism consists in attributing an approval by St. Thomas of a double res et sacramentum in the Eucharist. This misreading would have the early St. Thomas, in his Commentary on the Sentences, identify the res et sacramentum of the Eucharist with the One Flesh, the nuptial union, of the Christ, the Head, with his ecclesial Body, the bridal Church.
In sum, this misreading would identify the medieval res et sacramentum with the Augustinian res sacramenti, i.e., with the Christus totus. This is not what St. Thomas wrote in the passage cited. However, whether he does in fact disagree with St. Augustine over the inclusion of the Church within the infallible effect ex opere operato of the Eucharistic signing, later designated the res et sacramentum, is another matter, to be taken up further on as this inquiry proceeds.
The first of the two endnotes of second volume of Covenantal Theology in which the misreading of St. Thomas occurs reads as follows:
Ch. V, endnote 21: Another variant of this error appears in St. Thomas’ Comment. in iv Libros Sententiarum IV, 12, (q. 1, art. 3) where, commenting upon Peter Lombard’s notion of the res et sacramenti, Thomas places a double res et sacramenti in the Eucharist, by which the Church as well as Christ is included in the res et sacramentum, but the Church is thus present by a concomitance which Thomas understands to be physical or organic, not free, covenantal and nuptial, which concludes to the Christomonism already noted. The difficulty is avoided in the Summa Theologiae iiia, q. 73, by assigning the Church to the res tantum, but at the cost of losing the sacramentality of the Church. See the discussion in Volume II, Chapter VI, note 139.
The reference in this endnote to “Peter Lombard’s notion of res et sacramenti” and to St. Thomas’ commentary upon it, contains two errata: both read “res et sacramenti,” (which does not exist) instead of the patristic “res sacramenti” with which both Peter Lombard, in this passage in his Four Books of the Sentences, and St. Thomas, in his Commentary on the Four Books of The Sentences, were concerned. Their common context is the traditional Augustinian-patristic correlation of sacramentum and res sacramenti, in which res sacramenti includes the total salvific effect of the infallibly efficacious sacramentum, the sacramental signing, without the later medieval differentiation between the effect produced ex opere operato, the “res et sacramentum,” and the effect produced ex opere operantis, communicant’s free and therefore fallible participation in the Eucharistic liturgy: this is the “res tantum” of the later, post-Berengarian, medieval paradigm of sacramentum, res et sacramentum, res tantum.
Thus, the concern of Peter Lombard, and of St. Thomas’ commentary, is not, as this endnote proposed, for the later refinement, the “res et sacramentum,” which the early medieval paradigm of sacramental causality (sacramentum tantum, res et sacramentum, res tantum). distinguished from the “res tantum” This is clear from their terminology itself, which concerns only the res sacramenti of the Eucharist. This latter term invokes the earlier dialectical patristic paradigm, essentially Augustinian, historical and existential rather than analytic, which links the infallible efficacy of the sacramental sign, (sacramentum) to its indivisible total effect, at once historical and anagogical, the res sacramenti. This analysis took for granted the free participation of the faithful in the Eucharistic liturgy. Without ignoring the warning in I Cor. 11:27-30 against unworthy reception, the patristic paradigm was concerned for the efficacy of the Eucharistic signing, the cause of the Church and of the salvation mediated by her celebration of the One Sacrifice of Christ.
In the early twelfth century, in the wake of the Berengarian heresy and the controversy surrounding it, the patristic paradigm of sacramental realism, “sacramentum, res sacramenti,” was supplemented rather than replaced by the medieval paradigm, “sacramentum tantum, res et sacramentum, res tantum,”[8] a development marking the attainment of a level of analytical rigor which theretofore had been beside the point. With Berengarius it became necessary to distinguish, with precision, the infallible from the fallible effects of the Eucharistic signing, for a failure so to do would not meet the challenge posed by Berengarius’ melding of the two historical effects of the sacramental signing into a single nonhistorical effect which could only be subjective.
As de Lubac has insisted, a price was paid for this clarity. From within the problematic to which this later paradigm of Eucharistic signing responds, the earlier expression, “res sacramenti,” must in fact be seen to lack the analytic precision that had become necessary by reason of the confusion arising out of the eleventh-century Berengarian heresy. Unfortunately, the conceptual differentiation and separation of the “res tantum” from the “res et sacramentum,” i.e., of fallible personal union with the risen Christ from the immediate and infallible effect of the sacramental signing, permitted or, better, suggested, even prompted, the rationalization and, inevitably, the dehistoricization of that final effect, the ultimate goal of sacramental worship, i.e., personal union in ecclesia with the risen Lord, by its conceptual isolation from the communal worship of the Church, and thereby its consequent openness to privatization, to dissociation from the Eucharistic worship by which the historical Church is historical.
By the fourteenth century, this dehistoricization had concluded to the Nominalist exaltation of “spiritual communion,” i.e., of the non-sacramental, and therefore dehistoricized, merely subjective, personal appropriation in voto of the grace of Eucharistic Communion. The severance of salvation from its sacramental mediation is a fatal error which, if it did not begin there, at least had the way to it smoothed by this early twelfth-century speculative sophistication. The dehistoricizing error, the reduction of worship to subjectivity, is certainly not inherent in the early medieval sacramental paradigm, but the distinctions it set between the sacramental sign, its immediate infallible effect, and its fallible effect, viz., its personal appropriation in Communion, permitted their rationalistic dissociation and thereby their dehistoricization. On the other hand, already in third century Cyprian had been able to rationalize Tertullian’s sacramentum, res sacramenti correlation to the point of anticipating the Donatist heresy. Rationalization and its corollary, dehistoricization, are ancient and permanent temptations, modalities of the .flight from history, the fear of freedom and free responsibility for the future, inherent in our fallen consciousness.
Continuing with the examination of the misinterpretation of St. Thomas in the aforementioned two endnotes of Covenantal Theology II, the second of them reads as follows:
Ch. VI, endnote 140: We have seen (Chapter V, note 21) that in the Comment. in IV Libros Sententiarum iv, d. 12, St. Thomas includes the Church under the duplex res et sacramentum of the Eucharist, as had Augustine (cf. Gessel, op. cit., 153): in the Summa Theologiae, however, Thomas places the Church at the level of the res tantum sacramenti which is to remove from the Church its historical reality, that of the sacramental signing of the Kingdom; see S. T. iiia, q. 73, a. 6, c., citing Mag. IV Sent., dist. 8, cap. Nunc quid ibi, and cap. Cum Marthae (DS §*782-*784), of Innocent III. See also q. 73, a. 1, ob. 2, where the same relegation of the Church to the res tantum sacramenti is asserted in obliquo and not rebutted in the responsum; the same assertion appears in q. 73, a. 3, c.
The second parenthetical reference is to Wilhelm Gessel’s Eucharistische Gemeinschaft bei Augustinus; ser. Cassiacum, Band XXI (Wurzburg: Augustinus Verlag, 1966).
In this second endnote, the confusion between “res sacramenti” and “res et sacramentum,” implicit in the first endnote, has become explicit. Peter Lombard’s discussion of the res sacramenti, and St. Thomas’ commentary upon it, are there read as though they were discussions of the quite distinct notion of res et sacramentum. This confusion is the basis for the conclusion, expressed in these two endnotes, that St. Thomas had simply relegated the Church to the standing of the res tantum sacramenti. Although St. Thomas had in fact thus described the Church in his Commentary on the Sentences,[9] he did so in a context at once so ambiguous and yet so strategic as to require further examination for its resolution.
Two texts in particular in St. Thomas’ Comm. in IV Libros Sententiarum of Peter Lombard reveal his interest in and use of the older, patristic paradigm of sacramental causality: [10]
Quod sicut in hoc sacramento est duplex res sacramenti, scilicet Corpus Christi verum et mysticum; ita etiam fractio duo significat, scilicet ipsam divisionem corporis veri, quae facta est in passione, et haec significatio tangitur in Littera; et distributionem virtutis redemptionis Christi per diversa membra Ecclesiae; et hanc significationem tangit Dionysius in 3. cap. Eccl. Hierar. Et secundumn hac accipitur significatio partium secundum diversum membrorum statum. Etc. (Emphasis added.)
In IV Sent., iv, d. 12, q. 1, a. 3, ad 3. The Latin text of the Sentences upon which St. Thomas here comments is set out in the text of endnote 10, infra.
(Corpus Christi verum) significat etiam quasi rem ultimam, Corpus Christi mysticum, scilicit Ecclesiam, qua propter distinctionem officiorum habet similitudinem cum toto corpore ratione distinctionis membrorum. (Emphasis added.)
In IV Sent. iv, d. 8, q. 2, a. 1, ad 4, 3.
The patristic sacramental paradigm, sacramentum, res sacramenti, inherited from the African tradition (i.e., Tertullian and Cyprian, developed by Augustine and by him passed on to the Fathers of the Latin West, had understood the direct effect of the Eucharistic signing to be a res gemina,[11] the “twin effect,” also named the duplex res sacramenti, of the sacramental signing: i.e., the Corpus Christi verum and the mystica eius caro: the bridal Church, One Flesh (una caro) with her Lord. The res gemina of the pre-Berengarian Latin tradition, i.e, the patristic tradition which Peter Lombard summarized in his Sentences, and which depends very largely upon St. Augustine, corresponds to Augustine’s theological focus upon the fulfillment of Eucharistic worship, the eternal life in the “holy society by which we belong to God.” The sancta societas, thus understood, can only be the One Flesh of Christ and his Church, the “whole Christ,” the final consequence of the Eucharistic offering of the One Sacrifice. However, as in the text upon which St. Thomas here comments, that nuptial union, Augustine’s sancta societas, was often regarded as the Church in the anagogical fulfillment of her union with the Christ: unitas Ecclesiae in praedestinatis, vocatis, justificatis et glorificatis.[12] The patristic interest in the res sacramenti, as de Lubac has stressed, is focused upon the Church, and the Church as fulfilled, the Church as purified of all sin. This is easily misunderstood, for the Fathers also knew the Church in history to be sinless; her union with her Lord does not wait upon the eschaton.[13] “Purified of all sin” describes the Church’s members, not the Church, whose procession from and Eucharistic union with her Head and Lord bespeaks her sinlessness.
Consequently, in the hands of the Master of the Sentences, the res gemina becomes the res et sacramentum of the medieval analysis, but with no intent to deny the anagogically-viewed sacramental realism of the patristic sacramentum―res sacramenti analysis. Thus the Lombard’s emphasis upon the final effect of the Church’s worship is not the suppression of the historicity of the Eucharistic Event, whether looked upon as the conversion of the elements or as the offering of the One Sacrifice, but rather presupposes that Event to be the efficacious cause of the fulfilled Kingdom of God, the holy society, the anagogical One Flesh upon which the One Sacrifice is focused and which its offering institutes: the New Covenant as sacramentally represented and historically objective in the Eucharist.
Thus the patristic focus upon the final goal of the Church’s worship accounts for Peter Lombard’s transposition in the first passage from the Sentences[14], commented upon by St. Thomas supra, of the patristic “mystica eius caro” to the standing of the medieval “res et non sacramentum” (i.e., the assignment of the Church to the res tantum sacramenti, commonly abbreviated to res tantum). This transposition rests upon his acceptance of the patristic understanding the Church as anagogically fulfilled: i.e., as “unitas Ecclesiae in praedestinatis, vocatis, justificatis et glorificatis.” When, further on in the passage cited, Peter Lombard transposes the patristic “gemina res sacramenti” to the medieval sacramental paradigm by his “gemina est res,” (see endnote 14), he contemplates no dissociation . This anagogically-oriented reading of the “mystica eius caro” suggests, even prompts, but does not at all require, the removal of the Church from the infallible effect that is the res et sacramentum, and its allocation to the res tantum, as “non significans:” i.e., as the final effect, the anagogue, of the Eucharistic signing, which by definition cannot be a sign. The Lombard’s conceptual dissociation of the Church from the medieval res et sacramentum rejected the emphasis of the patristic paradigm (sacramentum et res sacramenti) upon the anagogical Church, which within that context could never be dissociated from its historical cause, the Event-Presence of the High Priest offering himself as the Victim of the One Sacrifice, and therefore could never be dissociated from her own historical existence, in nuptial union with her Lord.
However, the acceptance of the new tripartite medieval paradigm, with its analytic conceptualization of the tantum sacramentum, res et sacramentum, the patristic understanding of the Church triumphant as sacramentally signed and caused, thus as inseparable from her historical cause in the Eucharistic sacrifice, began to evanesce. It became too easy to think of the Church as eschatological simply, as having no historical significance, which is to say, no historical objectivity: the way was opened to the nonhistorical ecclesiology of the Reform.
The patristic emphasis upon the Church “triumphant” is inherent in the patristic meditation on the Eucharist and is entirely consistent with the anagogical dimension of the Church’s sacramental worship and with her consequent historical visibility. Augustine’s ecclesiology is clear, as is that of the Church Fathers who depend on him: the unity of the Church is at once historical and history-transcending, which is finally only to say that the Church’s historical worship, her historical objectivity, is sacramental, for it is Eucharistic: she has the historicity of her risen Bridegroom. Saint Augustine’s commentary on I Cor. 12:27 could not be more to the point:
From Abel the just to the end of the world, for as long as men beget and are begotten, whoever of the just makes the passage through this life, all that now, that is, not in this place but in this life, whoever will be born in the future, constitute the one body of Christ, while they are each individually members of Christ. So if all constitute the body, and are each individually members, there is of course a head, of which this is the body. And he himself, it says, is the head of the body, the Church, the firstborn, himself holding the first place (Col. 1:18). And because it is said of him also that he is always the head of every principality and power (Col. 2:10), this Church which is now on its pilgrimage is joined to that heavenly Church where we have the angels as fellow citizens, with whom we would be quite shameless in claiming equality after the resurrection of our bodies, unless Truth had promised us this, saying, They shall be equal to the angels of God (Lk. 20:36) and there is achieved one Church, the city of the great king (Mt. 5:35).
Sermo 341, 11 (PL 39:1499); see Latin text in endnote 25, infra; cf. Moriones, Enchiridion §1218. Tr. from Hill, TheWorks of Saint Augustine series, Part iii, vol. 9).
St. Thomas, using the medieval, post-Berengarian idiom current in the thirteenth century and thereafter,[15] identified the “twin effect” of the Eucharist as the “Corpus Christi verum” (i.e., the Real Presence) causing the “Corpus Christi mysticum” (the Church) by efficaciously signing her: Corpus Christi figurativum corporis mystici,[16] thus stating the interrelation and the relative priority of these inseparable effects of the sacramental signing, i.e., of the sacramentum tantum, the celebration of the Mass.
As already indicated, the interpretation of the patristic theological expression, “res gemina,” given in the two endnotes examined supra, is erroneous because, anachronistically, it identifies the existential-dialectical patristic Eucharistic paradigm, sacramentum, res sacramenti, with the early medieval paradigm, analytic rather than dialectic, objective rather than existential, of sacramentum tantum, res et sacramenti, res sacramenti tantum (res tantum). This mistake opens the likelihood of imposing that analytical objectivity upon the patristic paradigm.
Here a caution must be interposed. The medieval paradigm was a defensive response to Berengarius’ eleventh-century reduction of Eucharistic realism to Eucharistic symbolism or subjectivity, the theological response to which required the analytical distinction between the necessary and the free effects of the Eucharistic signing. This defensive focus was a theological novelty: prior to Berengarius, there had been no attack upon the truth of the Eucharistic signing. The Carolingians had been tempted by the “new logic” to question the patristic existentialism, but they were not tempted by heresy.
The new medieval paradigm recognizes that the existential thrust of the res gemina, i.e., the res sacramenti of the older patristic paradigm, is a joinder of (1) the infallible effect of the Eucharistic signing, and (2) the fallible (because received by a fallen communicant) effect of the same Eucharistic signing. It in no sense contradicts the patristic paradigm, However, its objective analysis of the effects of the Eucharistic signing made it likely that sacramental theologians tempted by the same binary logic which had led Berengarius into denying the historical truth of the Eucharistic signing, would themselves be tempted to distinguish the infallible effect of that signing from the fallible, by restricting the historical truth, and thus the historical efficacy of that signing, to its infallible, i.e., necessary effect, while denying that historical efficacy to the free effect, the recipient’s union with his Lord in ecclesia. This was to reduce that effect to subjectivity, with the correlative dehistoricization of Eucharistic worship and of the Church caused by it.
In terms of our fallen historicity, the latter term of the medieval paradigm is best understood, not as the patristic theology had understood it, as the Church, particularly in her infallible anagogical perfection, but as the communicant’s fallible personal appropriation of the final goal of the One Sacrifice, the freely appropriated salvation of those for whom Jesus died.
Res gemina is a patristic term, antedating the Berengarian confusion, and thus it cannot be read to designate a joinder of the res et sacramentum with the res tantum of the later medieval paradigm. The phenomenological interest of the patristic res sacramenti is not concerned for the analytical distinctions of the medieval theology: the patristic focus is not on the possibility of a sinful refusal to participate in the Church’s worship, but upon our personal participation in the worship itself, i.e., upon our existence in ecclesia, in Christo. This distinction is of the first importance.
The Augustinian-patristic theological tradition, condensed in the sacramentum-res sacramenti account of liturgical experience in ecclesia, was untroubled by any Eucharistic heresy and uninterested in the defensive rational distinctions which the later paradigm placed within the factual unity of the Eucharistic res sacramenti in order adequately to reply to the novelty of a Eucharistic heresy.
Further, that medieval distinction between infallible and fallible effects of the sacramental signing is not what St. Thomas has in mind in the two endnotes under discussion: there, as is clear from his “duplex res sacramenti” language, his theological context is the patristic paradigm: sacramentum - res sacramenti. Therefore he is concerned for the Church, the “mystical body,” as the “quasi-ultimate” effect of the sacramental signing, i.e., of the sacramentum, whose first effect he understands to be the “Corpus Christi verum,” the Real Presence of the sacrificed and risen Lord. The second effect, the Corpus Christi mysticum or Church, is inseparable within the res sacramenti from the first effect, the Eucharistic presence of the Christ: these twin effects are inseparable because they are irrevocably united in the transcendent freedom of their One Flesh, the New Covenant instituted, achieved, through the offering of the One Sacrifice by the second Adam for the second Eve. While, as we shall see, St. Thomas, with the patristic tradition itself, fails to perceive the freedom of this nuptial union, preferring to regard it as organic or physical, failing to recognize its covenantal reality, he knows it to be real, but not to be free, whereas in fact its objective historical reality and its covenantal freedom are inseparable.
It is by reason of the freedom of their nuptial and covenantal union that the Corpus Christi verum and the Corpus Christi mysticum constitute a single effect, or res gemina sacramenti. This patristic expression affirms their unity, their simultaneity: in short, the unitas corporis Christi that is the res gemina.[17] It is evident that this unity, the res sacramenti, can only be the free nuptial unity, the covenant in One Flesh, of Christ and his bridal Church: i.e., the free covenantal unity of the second Adam and the second Eve, the Head and the Body, sponsus et sponsa,[18] the New Covenant instituted by the One Sacrifice, represented Eucharistically on the altars of the Church.[19] The bridal Church has no other unity than her free union with her Lord.
The summary difference between the two Eucharistic paradigms (i.e., the patristic sacramentum, res sacramenti and the twelfth-century, medieval sacramentum tantum, res et sacramentum, res tantum, is thus easily stated. The older or Augustinian-patristic paradigm of sacramental realism, sacramentum, res sacramenti, looks to the necessary or infallible effect of the offering by the Corpus Christi verum of the Eucharistic Sacrifice: i.e., the Church, the second Eve, the Corpus Christi mysticum, the bridal Church, the Glory that proceeds from him as her Head, her source and the cause of her free unity, the unitas corporis Christi, in which she is One Flesh with her Lord, here and hereafter: historically and anagogically.
This unity is her covenantal, nuptially-ordered union with her Head in the One Flesh, the New Covenant, infallibly instituted by the One Sacrifice, offered on the cross and on the altars of the Church. Further, without denying the objectivity and historicity of the Eucharistic mysterium, the Fathers tended to think of this union in eschatological or, better, in anagogical terms which focus upon the inseparable causal link between the sacramentum and its final full perfection, the union of all the faithful with their Lord in the Kingdom of God, the anagogical fulfillment of the One Flesh of Christ and the Church. At the same time, this One Flesh is the effect of the full Gift of the Holy Spirit, for it is accomplished by the Jesus the Christ’s unqualified obedience to his Mission from the Father, his “obedience unto death,” as Paul emphasized in Phil. 2:8, “even death upon the cross,” that death which is his plenary giving of the Spirit, his One Sacrifice, offered daily upon the altars of the Church.
The Fathers have seen that this terminus of the Son’s Mission, the giving of this plenary Gift, can only be the eschatological fulfillment of the Eucharistic signing, which is to say, our plenary participation in the good creation, for their commentaries on Jn. 19:34-35 unanimously recognize in it the crowning work of the good creation prophesied in the creation of Adam and Eve as the nuptial image of God in Gen. 1:27, and by their creation in the One Flesh of Gen. 2:24, as fulfilled in the Christ’s sacrificial institution of his One Flesh with the Church, the New Covenant in his blood.
At least by implication, the death of Jesus on the cross is seen also as the Son’s imaging of the Father, in that from the second Adam, as her Head, proceeds the glory that is the Church in the substantial, Trinity-imaging covenantal union with him in One Flesh.
Magisterial recognition of this nuptial imaging of God would wait upon another day. However, in this Eucharistic context, de Lubac speaks of the communication of idioms between the Church and her Lord within the unitas corporis, which can only image the Trinitarian communication of idioms, the homoousion, of the Father and the one and the same Son, Jesus the Christ.[20]
In Vol. I, Chapter Two it was asserted that the historical communication of idioms must be substantial, with the free substantial historicity of the New Covenant.[21] The communication of idioms in Christ is foundational for the theological metaphysics set out in the preceding chapters. The prime Event of history and the prime historical Substance, the New Covenant, coincide in the Eucharistic institution of the One Flesh, the New Covenant. It is foundational for the Church’s sacramental doctrine, and for her doctrine of Christ, as de Lubac has lavishly shown.
This is certainly St. Augustine’s understanding of the Eucharistic duplex res sacramenti, the res gemina (sacramenti), the union of the Head and his ecclesial Body in One Flesh instituted by the One Sacrifice:
1: Our Lord Jesus Christ, brothers, as far as I have been able to tune my mind to the sacred writings, can be understood and named in three ways, whether in the law and the prophets, or in the letters of the apostles, or through our confidence about his deeds, which we know about from the gospel. The first way is: as God and according to the divine nature which is coequal and coeternal with the Father before he assumed flesh. The next way is when, after assuming flesh, he is now understood from our reading to be God who is at the same time man, and man, who is at the same time God, according to that pre-eminence which is peculiar to him and in which he is not to be equated with other human beings, but is the mediator and the head of the Church. The third way is: in some manner or other as the whole Christ in the fullness of the Church, that is as head and body, according to the completeness of a certain perfect man (Eph. 4:13), the man in whom we are each of us members.
This is what is preached to believers, and offered for their approval to the wise. In the short time available we cannot recall or expound all the innumerable testimonies of scripture, by which we could prove these three aspects of Christ. But on the other hand we cannot leave them all entirely unproved. So let me remind you of some of the testimonies, to that the rest, which lack of time does not permit us to recall, you can go on to note and discover in the scriptures for yourselves. …
2. So as regards the first way of putting forward our Lord Jesus Christ the savior, the only Son of God, through whom all things were made, we have that text that is the most noble and glorious one in the gospel according to John: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God; this was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him and without him was made nothing. What was med was in him life, and the life was the light of men, and the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it (Jn 1:1-5). These are wonderful and amazing words, and before they can be understood, they have to be wholeheaertedly embraced.
If food were set before your mouths, one of you would receive that part of the food, another this part; still the same food would reach you all, but not all the food would reach you all. So too, a kind of food and drink consisting of words is now being set before your ears; and yet all of it does reach you all. Or is it the case, perhaps, that while I am speaking, one of you takes one syllable for himself, another a second one? If that’s how it is, I am going to utter as many words as I see people, so that at least one word may get to each of you. And in fact it is easy to speak more words than there are people here, but all of them reach all of you. So a human word does not have to be divided up by syllables for all to hear it; and is the Word of God to be cut up into slices, in order to be everywhere? Can we suppose, brothers and sisters, that these spoken and passing words are comparable in any respect to that unchangeably abiding Word? Or have I, by saying this, been comparing them? But I only wanted to suggest to you in any way I could, that what God provides us with in material things can help you to believe what you cannot yet see about spiritual words.
But now let us pass on to better things, because words are spoken, and fade away. Think, among all spiritual thoughts, think of justice. Someone who stays in these western regions thinking of justice; someone staying in the east thinking of justice—how is it that the first one thinks of the whole of justice, and the second one also of the whole of it? I mean if you see justice, and do something according to it, you are doing it justly. You see inwardly, act outwardly. How can you see it inwardly, if nothing is present to you? Because you are staying in one area, the thought of someone somewhere else won’t reach that area. But you, staying here, see the same thing in you mind as he does, though he is staying so far away, and the whole of it shines on you, the whole of it is seen by him; because things that are divine and immaterial are whole everywhere. That being the case, believe that the word is wholly in the Father, wholly in the womb. Yes, believe this about the Word of God, who is God with God.
The second way: Christ as God and man.
3. But now listen to the other proposition, the other way of proposing Christ which scripture proclaims. What I’ve just been saying, you see, refers to before the taking of flesh. But now listen to what scripture goes on promptly to declare: The Word, it says, became flesh, and dwelt among us (Jn 1:1-3). He had said, you see, In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God; this was in the beginning with God; all things were made through him, and without him was made nothing (Jn 1:1-3). But he would have been declaring the divinity of the Word to us in vain, if he had kept quiet about the humanity of the Word. In order, I mean, for me to see that, he deals with me down here; in order to refurbish my gaze for contemplating that, he himself comes to the aid of my weakness. By receiving from human nature the same human nature, he became man. He came with the packhorse of the flesh to the one who was lying wounded on the road, in order to give shape to our little faith and nurture it, and to clear our intellects from mist, so that they might see what he never lost as a result of what he took on. He began to be man, indeed, but did not cease to be God. So that is the presentation of our Lord Jesus Christ insofar as he is the mediator, insofar as he is the head of the Church; that God is man, and man is God, since John says, and the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us.
11: The third way is how the whole Christ is predicated with reference to the Church, that is as head and body. For indeed head and body form one Christ. Not that he is not complete without the body, but that he deigned to be complete also with us, though without us he is always complete and entire, not only insofar as he is the Word, the only-begotten Son equal to the Father, but also in the very man whom he took on, and with whom he is both God and man together. All the same, brothers, how are we his body, and he one Christ with us? Where do we find this, that head and body form one Christ that is the body together with the its head? In Isaiah the bride is speaking with the bridegroom as if in the singular; certainly one and the same speaks, and behold what is said: As for a bridegroom he has bound a turban on my head, and as for a bride he has decked me out with ornaments (Is. 61:10). “As bridegroom and bride; he calls one and the same bridegroom with reference to the head, bride with reference to the body. They are seen as two, and are one”. (“Ut sponsus et sponsa: eumdem dicit sponsum secundum caput, sponsa secundum corpus. Duo videntur, et unum est“). Otherwise how are we members of Christ? With the apostle saying most clearly, You are the body and members of Christ (I Cor.: 12:17). (“Vos estis corpus Christi et membra“). All of us are at once members of Christ and his body; not only those of us who are in this place, but throughout the whole world, and not only those of us who are alive at this time, but what shall I say? From Abel the just to the end of the world, for as long as men beget and are begotten, whoever of the just makes the passage through this life, all that now, that is, not in this place but in this life, whoever will be born in the future, constitute the one body of Christ, while they are each individually members of Christ. So if all constitute the body, and are each individually members, there is of course a head, of which this is the body. And he himself, it says, is the head of the body, the Church, the firstborn, himself holding the first place (Col. 1:18). And because it is said of him also that he is always the head of every principality and power (Col. 2:10), this Church which is now on its pilgrimage is joined to that heavenly Church where we have the angels as fellow citizens, with whom we would be quite shameless in claiming equality after the resurrection of our bodies, unless Truth had promised us this, saying, They shall be equal to the angels of God (LK. 20:36) and there is achieved one Church, the city of the great king (Mt. 5:35).
12. Thus it is then that sometimes in the Scriptures Christ is presented in such a way that you are to understand him as the Word equal to the Father; in such a way sometimes that you are to understand him as the mediator, since the Word became flesh to dwell amongst us (Jn. 1:14); since that only-begotten Son, through whom all things were made (Jn. 1:3) did not consider it robbery to be equal to God, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, becoming obedient to the death, even death on the cross (Phil. 2:6-8).
Sometimes, though, in such a way that you are to understand the head and the body, with the apostle himself expounding as clearly as may be what was said about husband and wife in Genesis: They will be, it is said, two in one flesh (Gen 2:24). Observe that it is he himself who speaks, lest we may seem to you to have dared to invent something of our own. For they will be two, he said, in one flesh: (Gen 2:24) and he added, This is a great sacrament. And lest someone still suppose that this is something found in man and wife according to the natural copulation and corporal mixture of both sexes: Moreover I am saying that it refers, he said, to Christ and the Church. (Gen 2:24; Eph. 5:31.32) Consequently, therefore, what is said elsewhere―They will be two in one flesh: so they are no longer two, but one flesh. (Mt. 19: 5.6) And as they are bridegroom and bride, so also are they head and body: because the man is the head of the woman. Whether therefore I say head and body, or bridegroom and bride, you are to understand the same thing. That is why the same apostle, while he was still Saul, heard: Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me? (Acts 9:4) for the body is joined to the head. And when, as the preacher of Christ, he was suffering from another what he had done himself as a persecutor, that I may fill up, he said, in my flesh what is lacking from the afflictions of Christ (Col. 1:24) thus showing that what he was suffering pertained to the sufferings of Christ. This cannot be understood of the Head, which now in heaven is not suffering any such thing, but the body, that is the Church, the body, which with its head is one Christ.
So present yourselves to such a head as a body worthy of him, to such a bridegroom as a worthy bride. That head can only have a correspondingly worthy body; and such a great husband as that can only marry a correspondingly worthy wife. To present himself, he says, with a glorious Church, not having stain or wrinkle, or any such thing (Eph. 5:27). This is the bride of Christ, without stain or wrinkle. Do you wish to have no stain? Do what is written: wash yourselves, be clean, remove the wicked schemes from your hearts (Is. 1:16). Do you wish to have no wrinkle? Stretch yourself on the cross. You see, you do not only need to be washed, but also to be stretched, in order to be without stain or wrinkle; because by the washing sins are removed, while by the stretching a desire is created for the future life, which is what Christ was crucified for. Listen to Paul himself, once he was washed: Not, he says, because of the works of justice which we have done, but according to his own mercy he has saved us, by the washing of rebirth (Tit. 3:5). Listen to him as he is stretched: Forgetting, he says, what lies behind, stretched out to what lies ahead, according to intention I follow after to the palm of God’s calling from above in Christ Jesus (Phil. 3:13-14). [22]
St. Augustine, Sermo 341, 1; 11-13.
The following opening lines of this excerpt from Ch. I of Sermo 341 have been read to warrant the ascription to Augustine of the error which Grillmeier has attributed to Hippolytus and which he thought to have appeared in a number of other places in his works:[23] viz., a penchant for speaking of the Verbum as the nonhistorical or “immanent” Son, the suppoedly non-human submect of the Mission from the father, and thus the nonhuman subject of the “Logos sarx egeneto” of Jn. I:14:[24]
1: Our Lord Jesus Christ, brothers, as far as I have been able to tune my mind to the sacred writings, can be understood and named in three ways, whether in the law and the prophets, or in the letters of the apostles, or through our confidence about his deeds, which we know about from the gospel. The first way is: as God and according to the divine nature which is coequal and coeternal with the Father before he assumed flesh.
Such dehistoricizing of his text would do an injustice to the greatest of the Western Fathers. In fact, this passage does not present an instance of what Grillmeier has termed a “two-stage Christology,” locked into the consequences of its uncritical postulate of a non-historical Mission of a non-human eternal Son, Rather, while it is possible that this is an instance of what Crouzel has seen in Origen, the greatest of the Eastern Fathers, a “moment of reason.” in which case Augustine, like Origen, is musing on the condition of possibility of that Event which he knew to have none, and upon whose historical reality both he and Origen had long since constructed their Christology and their Trinitarian theology, well in advance of indulging in a “moment of reason,” it is far more likely that he is noting that the Scriptures affirm the full divinity of Jesus the Lord, for it is Jesus, not an “immanent Son, who is the sole subject of Sermo 341.
While these reflections are difficult to avoid, and particularly so in homilies to an untutored audience, in which the implication of an illustration of a given point is not to be pushed; so to read the final sentence of the excerpt supra would ignore Augustine's reliance upon the clear scriptural data of the concretely historical divinity of the Christ, the primordial Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End, the Bread from Heaven, the Jesus of Phil. 2:6-7, who did not think it robbery to claim equality with God, and whose kenōsis, equivalently the "logos sarx egeneto" of Jn. 1:14, is his obedience to his historical and therefore human mission from the Father. Thus the Scriptures speak the obedience of Jesus the Lord's “to death upon the cross,” the Jesus who at the same time is the Son of Man, who will ascend to “where he was before” (Jn. 3:13, 31; 6: 58, 60, 62). Augustine’s reference, in the excerpt supra, to the scriptural assertion of the divinity of Jesus hardly needs explanation or defense.
Similarly, his homiletic urging of his congregation to model themselves on Paul’s exhortation to rely upon the grace of Christ, forgetting what lies behind and looking only to God’s calling us into a stainless union with Christ cannot be read to mean anything less direct:
So present yourselves to such a head as a body worthy of him, to such a bridegroom as a worthy bride. That head can only have a correspondingly worthy body; and such a great husband as that can only marry a correspondingly worthy wife. To present himself, he says, with a glorious Church, not having stain or wrinkle, or any such thing (Eph. 5:27). This is the bride of Christ, without stain or wrinkle. Do you wish to have no stain? Do what is written: wash yourselves, be clean, remove the wicked schemes from your hearts (Is. 1:16). Do you wish to have no wrinkle? Stretch yourself on the cross. You see, you do not only need to be washed, but also to be stretched, in order to be without stain or wrinkle; because by the washing sins are removed, while by the stretching a desire is created for the future life, which is what Christ was crucified for. Listen to Paul himself, once he was washed: Not, he says, because of the works of justice which we have done, but according to his own mercy he has saved us, by the washing of rebirth (Titus 3:5). Listen to him as he is stretched: Forgetting, he says, what lies behind, stretched out to what lies ahead, according to intention I follow after to the palm of God’s calling from above in Christ Jesus (Phil. 3:13-14)
Sermo 341, 13
Augustine uses the classical language in this account of the Incarnation; The Word is the spouse of the virgin; her womb is the thalamus, the bridal chamber, even the marriage bed, of the consummation of their marriage, their union in one flesh:
. . . et illius sponsi thalamus fuit uterus Virginis, quia in illo utero virginali conjuncti sunt duo, sponsus et sponsa, sponsus Verbum et sponsa caro; quia scriptum est, Et erunt duo in carne una (Gen. II, 24); et Dominus dicit in Evangelio, Igitur jam non duo, sed una caro (Matth. XIX, 6).
In Joann. Ep. Ad Parthos (P.L. 35:1979-2062) emphasis added.. The electronic edition of Augustine's eighty-three page treatise permits a precise citation of the excerpted text, but the present writer has no access to that edition..
Augustine's reading of the Gen. 2:24 and of Mt. 19:6 conforms to Lk 1:35, which is to say, it conforms to the ancient Spirit Christology, in which the Incarnation is by the power and overshadowing of the Virgin Mary by the "sponsus verbum," the primordial Jesus, the subject of his own Incarnation, who "becomes flesh" by his union with the Virgin Mary who, in history, is fallen: i.e., is caro but, like her Lord, is sinless. . This ancient exegesis, as old as Justin Martyr, will be defined at Ephesus and Chalcedon.
Augustine goes on to invoke Isaiah in confirmation of this exegesis:
Et Isaias optime meminit unum esse ipsos duos: loquitur enim ex persona Christi, et dicit, Sicut sponso imposuit mihi mitram, et sicut sponsam ornavit me ornamento (Isai. LXI, 10). Unus videtur loqui, et sponsum se fecit et sponsam se fecit; quia non duo, sed una caro: quia Verbum caro factum est, et habitavit in nobis. Illi carni adjungitur Ecclesia, et fit Christus totus, caput et corpus.
Ibid.
The same reliance upon Isaiah LXI appears in Sermo 341. It is a classic statement of Augustine’s application of una caro to the Incarnation of Jesus the Christ who is never apart from his Bride, the second Eve, the Church, in such wise that he must be understood to be the Christus totus, for he cannot be separated from his nuptial relation to the Church: “illi carni adjungitur ecclesia.” It is evident that here can be no historical-salvific One Flesh apart from the historical exercise of Jesus’ headship of the Church as her historical Bridegroom. Jesus the Bridegroom cannot be replaced by the immanent Logos, to whom, as nonhistorical, the Pauline doctrine (I Cor. 11:3) of the Jesus the Christ’s historical headship of the bridal Church cannot apply.
The second sentence in the citation supra of Isaiah, "unus videtur loqui, etc." asserts a merger, an identity of the bridegroom with the bride: "One is seen to speak, who makes himself to be at once groom and bride, for they are not two but one flesh." Augustine reads this as corroboration of his exegesis of Gen. 2:24, Mt. 19:6. It may also contribute to his use of una persona to describe the nuptial "one flesh."
Earlier in Sermo 341, Augustine had already distinguished the Personal integrity of Jesus from the nuptial integrity of the Christus totus, which he understood to be the nuptial union of the Jesus the Head with his bride, the Church. Any application of nuptial symbolism to the Personal integrity of humanity and divinity in Jesus as though he were in se the Christus totus, would separate him from his primordial union with the second Eve, and would require a subsequent re-institution of their primordial unity in one flesh—quod est absurdum. It would entail the dualist, quasi-Nestorian Christology which is entirely incompatible with his exegesis of Lk 1:35 and of Eph. 5; here, as in the remainder of Ch. 12 and in Ch. 13 of Sermo 341, and which Augustine explicitly rejects in the Libellus Emendationis.[25], Augustine speaks historically, referring the “Una Caro” of Eph. 5 to the nuptial union of Christ and the Church.
Sometimes though, in such a way that you are to understand the head and the body, with the apostle himself expounding as clearly as may be what was said about husband and wife in Genesis: They will be, it is said, two in one flesh (Gen 2:24). Notice his exposition, because I don't want to give the impression of having the nerve to say something I've cobbled up myself. For they will be two, he said, in one flesh; and he added, This is a great sacrament. And in case anyone should still think that this is something found in man and wife according to the natural joining of the sexes, and their bodily coming together,28 But I mean, he went on, in Christ and the Church.: Moreover I am saying that it refers, he said, to Christ and the Church (Eph. 5:31-32). So this is how we take as referring to Christ and the Church what is said elsewhere; They shall be two in one flesh; there are not now two, but there is one flesh Mt 19:5-6).29
And just as bridegroom and bride, so also head and body: because the head of the woman is the man (I Cor. 11:3). So whether I say head and body, or whether I say bridegroom and bride, you must understand the same thing. And that is why the same apostle, while he was still Saul, heard t he words: Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? (Acts 9:4) because the body is joined to the head. And when, as the preacher of Christ, he was now suffering from others what he had done himself as a persecutor, that I may fill up, he said, in my flesh what is lacking from the afflictions of Christ (Col. 1:24) thus showing that what he was suffering was part and parcel of the afflictions of Christ. This cannot be understood of the head, which now in heaven is not suffering any such thing, but of the body, that is the Church, the body, which with its head is one Christ
Any conceptual dissociation of the nuptial unity of the second Adam and the second Eve, any rationalist isolation of the second Adam from the second Eve, whom God the Father had joined together in One Flesh by his Mission of his Son, lacks all foundation in the apostolic tradition, which affirms over and again that Jesus is the Son of God, sent by the Father, and that Mary is his virginal mother. The liturgical-doctrinal tradition in creeds and councils, is unanimous; the culminating doctrinal affirmation, the Symbol of Chalcedon, incorporates that tradition as the basis for all subsequent conciliar and doctrinal development. The patristic tradition, from Justin Martyr, Tertullian, Irenaeus, Origen in the second and third centuries, down to Ambrose in the fourth and Augustine in the fifth, is unanimous,
This unanimity does not bar theological error. Augustine, in common with the patristic tradition generally, did not understand the union of Christ and the Church to be free, for there was no speculative preparation for the reality of the free substance that is the New Creation, the New Covenant. Ignoring therefore the substantiality of the One Flesh, he attempted to find in the notion of "one person," una persona, a paradigm which might affirm the concrete reality of that nuptial unity and offer it a dignity beyond that which the cosmological meaning of "substance" would permit (the medieval acceptance of Boethius joinder of "substance" and "person" had not yet occurred). The equation of intelligibility and necessity which dominated the patristic and Carolingian theology, and continues so to do in our own day. This will become apparent as the examination of the difficulties inherent in the theology of Henri de Lubac, perhaps the greatest theologian of the past century, will demonstrate.
The failure to grasp the covenantal, bi-personal, nuptially ordered freedom of the union of Christ and the Church in One Flesh has had an unfortunate impact upon Catholic spirituality. Although the freedom of this nuptial union is concrete and historically actual in the Eucharistic representation of the New Covenant by whose institution the Head has liberated a fallen creation from its fallen servitude, the Fathers, the Carolingians, and the medieval theologians whom de Lubac cites pay that nuptial freedom little attention, if in fact they recognize at all the parity of the wife’s freedom and dignity with that of her husband. On this, see endnote 89.
In Sermo 341, we have seen Augustine careful to distinguish the Personal integrity of Jesus (equivalently, the Personal unity of the hypostatic union in him of the fullness of humanity and the fullness of divinity) from the integrity, i.e., the free, covenantal unity proper to the nuptial union in One Flesh of Jesus and the Church as entirely distinct from each other in their free union. .
In such passages Augustine exhibits a confusion common to the Fathers: their full faith-acceptance of the communication of divine and human idioms in the Church’s confession that Jesus is Lord is in tension with the cosmological rationalism in which their culture is steeped. The development of Christological doctrine is the triumph of the communication of idioms, inseparable from the radical affirmation of the faith that Jesus is Lord, over a cosmologized theology which ever seeks the dehistoricization of that historical Mysterium, to no avail. This victory over cosmology is the work of the first four great Councils: it is definitive and conclusive at Chalcedon. It is more than unfortunate that this, the apostolic tradition, has found little acceptance, in the past as in the present.
Inasmuch as, apart from his references to Christ as to the immanent Verbum in what amounts a “moment of reason,” Augustine speaks historically of the Jesus the Christ, this mistake burdens neither his Christology nor his Eucharistic realism although, in the fatigue of his latter years, in the context of a long dispute with the Pelagian Julian of Eclanum, he rediscovered the incompatibility of human freedom with the cosmological notion of God as Absolute, and concluded to a proto-Calvinist predestinationism entirely at odds with his doctrine of grace. His early but comparable confusion of the Personal unity and integrity of Jesus the Christ with the substantial unity and integrity of the nuptial union in One Flesh of Christ and the Church has continued to trouble Catholic theology. Henri de Lubac’s repeated references to the marriage of the Word (or Son) with humanity in the womb of the Virgin.[26]
We have already examined the strict association of Christology, Eucharistic doctrine, and the theology of history. In the dissertation cited in Vol. I, Chapter III, endnote 37, Daniel Hauser has shown the contrast between the Lutheran and the Catholic versions of this association, as exemplified respectively by Gerhard Ebeling and Henri de Lubac, both of whom accept the association, but each suo modo. The Lutheran refusal of the historicity of the Eucharistic Sacrifice issues in a quasi-monophysite Christology given its furthest development in Paul Tillich’s notion of an “Essential God-Manhood,” to whose unity with “the divine center” Jesus must sacrifice his Personal alienation from that center, i.e., his historical human self who, simply as such, cannot be identified with “Essential God-Manhood,” and whose corollary is a notion of history from which God must be absent; here Luther meets Calvin.
Those who with Calvin suppose Augustine to have understood the unity of Jesus to consist in a moral union of a “homo assumptus” with the disincarnate Logos must also contend for a quasi-Nestorian interpretation of Augustine’s Eucharistic theology, and for his dismissal of any historical mediation of the risen Lord. To have thus put Augustine’s Eucharistic realism in question is also to have to put in question his acceptance of the communication of idioms inseparable from faith in Jesus the Lord. From this assumption follows Augustine’s supposed reduction of the event-character of the Incarnation to the subjectivity of a moral union, his rejection of the infallible historical efficacy of the words of Eucharistic institution, and his consequent despair of history as salvific, any of which errors must separate Augustine’s Christology from the orthodox tradition of the first four Councils.
This consequence may not trouble those Catholic church historians whose uncritical views of historical consciousness and historical method in any case requires that they sit loosely to the doctrinal tradition, Thus poised for dissent, they find it difficult to affirm the historicity of the Eucharistic sacrifice, which failure cannot but conclude to a nonhistorical church, an institution indiscernible other than empirically, which accounts for the ongoing politicization and ensuing fragmentation of the Protestant churches. In any case, the denial of Event of the One Sacrifice is the denial of the historical cause of the historical Catholic Church, for her reality is that of her worship, the Eucharistic paradosis. To that subject we now return.
As has been pointed out, the only distinction between the liturgical and the doctrinal tradition is that the former is oral and the latter, written Within Catholicism: they are the concrete articulation of the intrinsic salvific significance of history which, so understood, has the sacramental objectivity of its unifying cause, the Eucharistic sacrifice. In that communion, the Eucharistic offering of the One Sacrifice is the institution of the One Flesh of the New Covenant and thereby the cause of the Bridal Church, the historical Body of Christ through whom the grace of the risen Christ is mediated to her members, in whom are included sinners as well as the just. This nuptial Event is the infallible effect, the “res,” of the “res et sacramentum” of the patristic tradition running from Justin Martyr and Tertullian through Cyprian and Augustine to the fifth-century Latin Fathers and thereafter to the Carolingians and the early medieval cathedral schools. The contrasting twelfth century medieval paradigm of sacramentum tantum, res et sacramentum, res tantum is intelligible, as will be shown, only when, like its patristic antecedent, it is understood to identify the infallible effect (res et sacramentum) of the Eucharistic signing (sacramentum tantum) with the unitas corporis, the One Flesh of Christ and the Church, the unitas ecclesiae that is the res gemina sacramenti of the patristic paradigm of Eucharistic signing.
Once the unitas corporis mystica (i.e., the Church as caused by the One Sacrifice, is recognized to be the infallible effect of the Eucharistic signing, it is evident enough that the later (medieval) paradigm of the Church’s sacramental worship found it necessary to distinguish, within the unitas corporis, what earlier it had not been necessary to distinguish, the fallible effect of the Eucharistic signing, (the res tantum sacramenti), viz., the recipient’s personal appropriation of union in ecclesia with the risen Christ, from the infallible or necessary effect, upon which necessity Tertullian and the Latin Fathers after him had been so insistent as to lead Cyprian into an anticipation of the Donatist heresy, i.e., the errant supposition that a baptized sinner is an impossibility, a contradiction in terms.
Thus the later, medieval, paradigm understands personal Eucharistic Communion with the risen Lord, the risen Head, Jesus the Christ, to be the res tantum sacramenti, an effect distinct from, but in free unity with, the res et sacramentum, to which it is related as effect to cause, and is thus not dissociated from the unity, unitas corporis Christi, who is the res et sacramentum of the Eucharist, viz., the Real Presence of the High Priest in the Beginning, the Event of his Offering of the One Sacrifice by which the Church, his Glory, proceeds from him as from her head, in the nuptial union with him that is his union in One Flesh with the bridal Church, the Bridegroom’s , the full outpouring of the Spiritus Creator upon the Bridal Church, and, through her, upon the fallen world..[27]
However the “res tantum” designation can induce―and has induced – the conclusion that the imperceptibility of the communicant’s personal union with the risen Christ, whereby it is an effect that is “only” an effect—for as imperceptible it cannot be a sign—requires that it be nonhistorical, a matter of personal subjectivity and no more. This is of course false, for worship in the Church is historical per se: clearly it is impossible to dissociate the final fulfillment of that worship from its Eucharistic source and font. Nonetheless, the rationalist dehistoricization of this historical paradigm of the Church’s worship conforms to an early quasi-nominalist temptation, an anti-sacramental animus latent in the ninth century and patent in the eleventh, when Berengarius fascination with the “new logic” .
We shall see that St. Thomas follows the later sacramental paradigm of sacramentum tantum, res et sacramentum, res tantum, whose use had been warranted early in the preceding century by theologians such as Alger of Liége who, ca. 1120, in De Sacramento corporis et sanguinis dominici, developed Guitmund’s affirmation of a “substantial change” of the Eucharistic elements into the “substantial presence” of the Body and Blood of Christ, anticipating St. Thomas’s development of a Eucharistic presence of Christ “per modum substantiae.” Finally, about 1135, Gregory of Bergamo published his Tractatus de veritate corporis Christi, in which he further developed Alger’s emphasis upon the substantial Real Presence.
This development of Eucharistic realism did not rest upon a speculative metaphysical foundation: fortunately none then existed in the West, a lack that made it possible for this vindication of Eucharistic realism to proceed under the sole aegis of the apostolic tradition, unburdened by the cosmological postulates of the “new logic” which had led astray such Carolingian theologians as Ratramnus of Corbie and Rhabanus Maurus, and would inform Berengarius’ denial of the historicity of the Eucharistic Words of Institution: requiring that “This is My Body affirm an impossible “This is That.”.
This theological defense of the presupposed realism of the Church’s Eucharistic worship, which focused upon the historical objectivity of its efficacy, was formalized early in the twelfth century by Anselm of Laon, the author of the medieval paradigm of sacramentum, res et sacramentum, rest tantum. By the middle of the twelfth century that analysis of Eucharistic realism was sufficiently established for Peter Lombard to write it into his Sentences. There he identified the Eucharistic res et sacramentum with the Real Presence of the sacrificed Jesus the Christ, usually as in association with the free, final effect of the sacramental signing, the res tantum which, as an effect only, and not a sign, is given ex opere operantis, i.e., when the recipient of Communion presents no obstacle to its grace, the complete fulfillment of the Church’s Eucharistic worship in the communicant’s personal union, historical because anagogical, in sacramento, in ecclesia, with the risen Christ in his Kingdom.
Unfortunately, if read literally, the Lombard’s identification of the res et sacramentum of the Eucharist with the Real Presence of the sacrificed Jesus the Christ is open to a restricted sensu negante reading, i.e., it can be read as an implicit denial of the Real Presence of Jesus the High Priest, offering himself as the Victim of the One Sacrifice. This reading would entail the further implication of a dehistoricization of the Eucharistic worship, for it would then no longer be the Offering, in the Person of Christ, of his One Sacrifice, of which he is at once the High Priest and the Victim: rather, the object of the Church’s worship would then be merely the Real Presence of Christ as the Victim which, no longer identified with Christ the High Priest, could not be Personal.
This inadvertent error is due to the juridical character of the riposte of the eleventh and twelfth century theologians, notably Cardinal Humbertus of Silva Candida, to Berengarius’ denial of the Real Presence of the Body and the Blood of Christ. The naïve but understandable supposition that it was sufficient to require of Berengarius that he explicitly affirm and justify the historical truth which he had explicitly denied, viz., the truth of the Words of Institution, “This is my body,” “This is my blood,” unfortunately ignored the correlative necessity of affirming what he had implicitly denied, the Eucharistic representation of the One Sacrifice.
Consequently, from this moment a latent dehistoricization of the Mass, a loss of theological attention to the Event of the One Sacrifice, entered into Catholic Eucharistic theology. Its traditional focus upon the Eucharistic Real Presence became static by reason of a general inattention, a failure to recognize its Event-character, its historicity, that of the One Sacrifice, the offering by Christ, the High Priest, offering himself as the Victim of his One Sacrifice. The discussion and final definition of the Real Presence, and the discussion and definition of the Sacrifice of the Mass at different sessions of the Council of Trent, separated by eleven years, could only contribute to reifying the merely sequential distinction between these definitions of the foundational elements of the apostolic tradition, whose historical mediation is radically liturgical.
This mistake was reinforced by the general failure of the patristic theology, and of the Carolingian and medieval theology as well, to distinguish the free and consequently historical reality of the One Flesh of Christ and the Church from the physical unity of an organism, an anatomical unity of head and body, whose reality was that of a thing, and object rather than an Event.
Consequently, it is more than important here to notice what is so easily missed. After the perception of Berengarius’ denial of the Eucharistic veritas sacramenti, i.e., of the sacramentally and therefore historically efficacious sign-value of the Eucharistic Words of Institution, Eucharistic theology could not avoid a focus upon what Berengarius had denied―that which, by the middle of the twelfth century, would be termed the ‘transubstantiation’ of the elements into the Real Presence of the body and blood of Christ. This was recognized to be indispensable to the “veritas” of the Eucharist, viz., indispensable to the efficacious significance, the objecttively historical truth, of the Words of Institution, and therefore indispensable to the priestly offering in persona Christi of the One Sacrifice. The obvious and immediate orthodox reaction to Berengarius’ rejection of the Real Presence was to affirm precisely only what he had denied: viz., the transubstantiation of the elements into the “Corpus Christi verum,” the Real Presence of Jesus the Christ, which the Latin patristic tradition had always understood to be sacrificial: i.e., the Eucharistic Real Presence of Jesus as at once the High Priest and the Victim of the One Sacrifice. As will be seen, St. John Chrysostom, tutored by Theodore of Mopsuestia, had early in the fifth century reduced the Eucharistic Real Presence to that of the Victim, with a consequent attribution the High Priestly offering of the One Sacrifice to the risen, no longer corporeal and thus nonhistorical Son.
The famous document which the emissary of Gregory VII, Cardinal Hubert of Silva Candida, required Berengarius to sign typifies the defensive response of the Latin theologians to his heresy; as a literal contradiction of that heresy, it required of Berengarius a formal rejection of the words with which he had framed his rejection of the historical objectivity of the Real Presence as the effect of the Words of Institution. Clearly enough, the orthodox reply could not rest content with that simplicity, but that it should thus begin is hardly surprising, and that it should proceed on the basis of that affirmation still less so. Nonetheless, it was a seriously inadequate reply to Berengarius, whose heresy was a tout court denial of the historicity of the Eucharistic sacrifice: more was required to meet it than a defense of transubstantiation as the effect of the Words of Institution: it was also necessary to affirm that the Real Presence of the Corpus Christi verum is historical: the historical Event of the High Priest offering himself as the one Victim of his One Sacrifice: as the Body and the Blood of the Lamb of God.
Thus we find St. Thomas, when using the later medieval paradigm, identifying the Eucharistic res et sacramentum with the Corpus Christi verum although, when writing in the terms of the older or patristic monastic paradigm, he had spoken of the res sacramenti as the duplex res sacramenti, i.e., as the irrevocable union of the Corpus Christi verum with the Corpus Christi mysticum, the latter “figured”―efficaciously signed―by the former, a signing which is the Institution of the One Flesh, the New Covenant, precisely by the Offering of the One Sacrifice in the Person of the High Priest, Jesus the Christ, who alone can offer it. However, St. Thomas here properly follows Peter Lombard: the Church is not in fact caused by the transubstantiation of the elements: she is caused by the Real Presence of the Corpus Christi verum, the High Priest offering himself as the Victim of the One Sacrifice.
De Lubac cites the causal nexus which we have seen St. Thomas, following a well-established patristic tradition, place between the Corpus Christi verum and the Corpus Christi mysticum:[28]
The true Body of Christ is figurative of the mystical body.
S. T. iiia, q. 82, a. 9, ad 2.
However, when deploying the later or medieval sacramental analysis, which had been perfected only in the early twelfth century in response to the Berengarian heresy, St. Thomas speaks ambiguously. In the two passages from his Commentary on The Sentences cited in endnote 10, he accepts the Lombard’s dictum that the res tantum of the Eucharist is the Corpus Christi mysticum, i.e., the Church, thus failing to recognize that the Church is thus caused by the One Sacrifice as to be in strict union with the Corpus Christi verum in the Eucharistic res et sacramentum. Here St. Thomas has in view the anagogical Church. Later, in the Summa Theologiae, St. Thomas will identify the Eucharistic res tantum sacramenti with the personal free appropriation of the grace made available to the communicant by participation in the Church’s celebration of Jesus’ institution of the Eucharist at the Last Supper. It is because this personal, sacramental and therefore at once historical and anagogical union of the communicant with the risen Lord has no historical, sacramental visibility other than the communicant’s participation in the sacramentum tantum, in contrast to the res et sacramentum, i.e., insofar as conceptually distinct from the infallible institution of the New Covenant, that the communicant’s union with the risen Lord is understood not to be a sign, but an effect only: that is, as dependent upon and caused by the Eucharistic signing, but not itself an efficacious sign: hence its medieval designation as the res tantum sacramenti; the patristic paradigm had included it in the res sacramenti as an effect of the Eucharistic sign, the sacramentum, the Offering of the One Sacrifice, whose efficacy is not open to question.
Clearly, the historical Church, whose historicity is precisely her Eucharistic worship, cannot be the res tantum of the Eucharist: i.e., the historical Church cannot be the invisible effect of her visible worship. Here St. Thomas is influenced by the patristic tradition which, as de Lubac has copiously noted, focused upon the anagogical Church in her risen perfection: it is in that eschatological context only that she is the res tantum sacramenti, the final and complete effect of the Eucharistic signing, in which all her children are at one with her. In departing from his earlier relegation of the Church to the res tantum Eucharistiae, and seeing in the res tantum the fallible because free effect that is the communicant’s union with the risen Christ, he preserved the historicity of the Church. Unfortunately, as has been seen, the communicant’s reception of the Eucharist, thus conceptually isolated from the Event of the One Sacrifice, could then easily become dissociated from the liturgical reception of the Eucharist: this dissociation of liturgical worship from personal union with the risen Christ had already begun during the turmoil of the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries, following the Gregorian Reform, to which we shall return.
For St. Thomas, as for the patristic tradition, there was no question of the Eucharistic cause of the Church, even in his Commentary on the Sentences, where we have seen him relegate the Church to the standing of the res tantum sacramenti, for he knew that the Church cannot be dissociated historically from its historical cause, the Eucharistic Sacrifice. We have seen that in the Summa Theologiae St. Thomas drops the application of this res tantum designation of the Church in favor of identifying the res tantum with the “effectus huius sacramenti” in the sense of the communicant’s personal appropriation of Eucharistic Communion with the risen Lord.[29] That understanding of the Eucharistic res tantum as the effect, ex opera operantis, of the communicant’s worship would leave the Eucharistic cause of the Church unaccounted for had not St. Thomas, following the patristic tradition, understood that it is the Real Presence of the Corpus Christi verum which causes the Church, and that it does so by a signing distinct from that of the sacramentum tantum, whose efficacy is directed to the transubstantiation of the elements, thus to the offering of the One Sacrifice which is inseparable from the Real Presence of Jesus the Lord as at once High Priest and Victim of the One Sacrifice.
This distinct signing of the Church by the Corpus Christi verum is intrinsic to the infallible Eucharistic effect, that of the res et sacramentum, and is that by which the res et sacramentum is not an effect merely, but includes also an efficacious sign. It is in this context that St. Thomas describes the Real Presence of the Christ is “figurative” of the Church, and that he describes the Church as a “quasi res ultima.” Here St. Thomas understands the res et sacramentum much as had the patristic tradition understood the res sacramenti, viz., as a “duplex res,” an effect which includes the Corpus Christi mysticum, the Church, because the infallibly efficacious signing by the sacramentum tantum of the Real Presence of the Corpus Christi verum includes the infallibly efficacious signing by which the Corpus Christi verum “figures” the Church, the Corpus Christi mysticum Christi who, One Flesh with her Lord, cannot be separated from his Eucharistic Presence, the One Sacrifice by which their One Flesh is instituted.
Thus, while it remains true that the Real Presence or Corpus Christi verum is the res et sacramentum, it is so as the sacramental sign that is the immediate and infallible source and cause of the source of the Church (as the Head is the source of his Glory) and as conjoined with her in a res gemina, i.e., the “twin effect,” of the Eucharistic signing, i.e., of the sacramentum tantum, the liturgical signing which effects the nuptial union in One Flesh of Christ the Head with the bridal Church who is his Glory, proceeding from him as from her head in her anagogical perfection, whose objective historicity is sacramental, inseparable from her Eucharistic worship.
Even so, one cannot simply identify the patristic duplex res sacramenti with the early medieval duplex res et sacramentum, for between the emphasis of the Fathers upon the final effect of Eucharistic signing―summarily, ecclesial union with our Lord in his Kingdom―, and the apologetic emphasis of the early medieval theologians upon the historical concreteness of the Eucharistic res et sacramentum, there had intervened the Berengarian challenge to Eucharistic realism.
The response to this challenge resulted in a radical change of theological perspective, to which we already have alluded and to which we shall presently return. De Lubac has pointed to the pivotal role of Paschasius in anticipating this change of perspective. In the ninth century, Paschasius had insisted upon the literal identification of the consecrated bread and wine with the sacrificial body of Jesus the Christ, in opposition to traditional Augustinians such as Ratramnus and Rhabanus Maurus who stressed rather the distinction between the consecrated species as signum, and that which they signed, the signatum that is the One Sacrifice.[30] Paschasius, in stressing the literal sense of the Words of Institution, implicitly abandoned the phenomenological hermeneutic of Augustinianism and of the patristic tradition generally, in favor of the literal realism best represented among the Latin Fathers by Ambrose of Milan, whose literal realism was simply the hermeneutic of the liturgy itself, resting on the truth of the Eucharistic Words of Institution which affirm and by affirming cause the historical identity of the consecrated species with the Christ, as at once High Priest and Victim of the One Sacrifice.
Had he wished to deploy it: Ambrose was well acquainted with the allegorical hermeneutic of the Apologists and of Origen, clearly he did not. His theological interest was liturgical, neither speculative nor systematic. Viewed from that latter speculative viewpoint, his literal reading of the liturgy might be thought closer to the hermeneutic of Antioch than that of Alexandria, but this also would be to misread him: his evident sacramental realism never entailed a metaphysics, and certainly not that which, with Diodore, Theodore of Mopsuestia and John Chrysostom, had put in issue the Eucharistic communication of idioms and prompted the Nestorian heresy.
In the context of the twelfth century resistance to Berengarius’ symbolism, we must recognize not only a double effect in the Eucharistic res et sacramentum, but also the corollary of that double effect, viz., a doubly efficacious Eucharistic signing:. The first efficacy of that signing is that of the sacramentum tantum, which is simply the Eucharistic rite as centered upon the Words of Institution, whose infallible effect is the transubstantiation of the elements into the body and the blood of Jesus the Christ, vi verborum. The second efficacy is that of this objective Event, which is eo ipso the priestly offering of the One Sacrifice for, thus transubstantiated, the elements have become the Corpus Christi verum, the Real Presence of the Eucharistic Lord who, at once High Priest and Victim; is the Corpus Christi verum, who infallibly and efficaciously “figures” or “signifies”:―infallibly signs and causes―and thereby is in infallibly free union with, the corpus Mysticum. It is thus that the second Adam is the head and source of and in union with, the second Eve who proceeds from him, freely to become “One Flesh” with him.
Berengarius’ rationalist attack upon transubstantiation presupposed his own dehistoricized notion of the Eucharistic Real Presence: his simple denial of the identity of the consecrated bread with the body of Christ, and of the consecrated wine with his blood, invited those who would counter it to accept without discussion his prior general dehistoricization of the Real Presence, in such wise that it became easy for the orthodox defenders of the faith to misunderstand the Real Presence as the Antiochenes had, as simply the presence of the humanity of Christ, thus of the Victim, not of the High Priest. Thus dehistoricized, the Eucharistic Victim ceased to be the sacramentally objective Real Presence of Jesus the Christ, the one and the same Son as at once the High Priest offering himself to the Father as the Lamb of God, but rather, merely the presence of his humanity which, in the absence of the One Sacrifice, could no longer be historical: abstracted from the Personal Event-Presence of Jesus the Lord, it could not but become subjective.
Guitmund of Aversa was the first to label as “impanationist” the evident Eucharistic symbolism of the Berengarian heresy, a label tending to camouflage, under the veil of subsequent controversy, the radical consequences of any rejection of the communication of idioms in Christ, whether by in the West by Berengarius denial of Eucharistic realism in the West, by the Antiochenes six centuries earlier, or by the fastidious distaste for the sacrifice of the Mass characterizing current liturgical publication.
There had long been waiting in the wings a patristic forgetfullness of the communication of idioms, a hesitation before the implications of the Church’s faith, explicit in Phil. 2:7, that Jesus is the subject of the kenōsis, that he, the Lord, the Son of the Father and of Mary, is the sole agent of our salvation. The Fathers were tempted to ascribe to Jesus’ human nature his Personal salvific agency, precisely insofar as historical, insofar as entailing his kenōsis, his historical immanence in our fallenness and thus all those dimensions of the Incarnation whose paradoxical incongruity Τertullian had seen to be at once incredible and yet inseparable from the faith that Jesus is the Lord.
The Fathers were still sufficiently immersed in the cosmology of the Greek philosophical tradition to be assured thereby that inasmuch as the cosmological God cannot die, the faith that Jesus Christ is Lord must be accommodated to the impossibility that it is as the divine Lord that Jesus died for our sins. Even put thus bluntly, the false card dealt the medieval theologians by Berengarius was one long familiar to the patristic tradition: it remains familiar today. An embarrassment with the communication of divine and human idioms in the Lord continually tempts theologians to submit the Church’s faith to what we have seen Voegelin refer as a “critical clean-up.” This tends to interpret Paul’s reference to Jesus’ kenōsis as proper to his divinity, not to his Person. However, Paul’s language does not permit this dissociation. Paul ascribes the kenōsis to “Christ Jesus,” which is to say, his doctrine of the kenōsis invokes the Personal Name of Jesus, and consequently the communication of idioms by which he is the Lord: Phil. 2: 5-11.
The subject of the kenōsis is therefore pre-existent Jesus Christ, whose pre-existence is Personal, and therefore primordial, that of his obedience to the Father’s mission to give the Spirit. The kenōsis cannot be the primordial Jesus’ “emptying himself,” of his Personal divinity, the “forma Dei” that Phil 2:5 ascribes to ;him; rather it is of his primordial human integrity, his unfallenness, that he empties himself, in order to fulfill his redemptive mission as the head of our fallen humanity, as the sole source of its free unity, and thus the free unity of the good creation whose goodness, as we learn from Gen. 2, is its nuptial unity. Thus he “became flesh,” entering into our fallenness, our dynamic of fragmentation unto the dust of death, He annulled that fragmentation proper to the flesh by his institution of the free unity of the One Flesh of the New Covenant, that is, by his offering of the One Sacrifice, on the cross and on the altar. The Fathers read Jn. 19:34 as the fulfillment of the prophecy given in Gen. 2:24.
His offering of the Eucharistic sacrifice, of which he is at once the High Priest and the victim is the infallible institution of the New Covenant, the One Flesh of Christ and his bridal Church, the New Creation. Clearly, the res et sacramentum cannot but be at once a gemina res, a “twin effect,” the sacramental institution of the One Flesh that is itself the sacramental cause of the eschatological Kingdom of God and of the communicant’s Eucharistically-signed union with the risen Lord in the Kingdom, in the Church triumphant.
This personal union in the Church triumphant and fulfilled, the anagogical res tantum, as distinct from the infallible Eucharistic institution of the New Covenant, the res et sacramentum, is always a free effect insofar as it concerns the members of the historical Church who, in Augustine’s words, are always at once just and sinful. Consequently their union with the risen Christ invokes the graced freedom of the communicant, and therefore is an effect which would be defeated by his sinful disposition, his rejection of that grace. Obviously it is not possible to describe the sinless Church as a reality defeasible by human sin, for the ecclesial Body is within the infallible efficacy ex opere operato of the One Sacrifice, i.e., within the res et sacramentum of the Eucharistic signing. Within the Eucharistic res et sacramentum, the Church is an effect distinct from the Real Presence of the Christ as at once the High Priest and the crucified Victim of his One Sacrifice, and yet indissociable from her risen Lord, for the res et sacramentum, the immediate and infallible effect of the One Sacrifice, is the union in One Flesh of the second Adam and the second Eve, as the Fathers have universally recognized.
It is evident that salvation in Christo can be imposed on no one. The problem of relating infallibly efficacious sacramental signing to its free salvific effect in the individual Christian, which was resolved doctrinally by the condemnation of Donatism in the fifth century,[31] rose again in another guise during the Berengarian controversy, and required the methodologically articulated response which had not been given it by the Augustinian sacramentum-res sacramenti sacramental paradigm in use during the patristic period. The early medieval restatement (sacramentum tantum, res et sacramentum, res tantum) of the sacramental efficacy which Berengarius had challenged, clearly distinguished, as the patristic sacramentum-res sacramenti had not, between the infallible efficacy of sacramental signing as, e.g., with respect to the Eucharistic institution of the New Covenant, and the fallibility of sacramental efficacy with respect to the personal freedom of the appropriation of the grace of Christ by the Eucharistic communicant.
This systematic statement of Eucharistic realism, viz., the sacramentum tantum, res et sacramentum, res tantum analysis of sacramental efficacy, was developed and in place within the first decade or nearly of the twelfth century. The conceptual distinctions explicit in the new sacramental paradigm, however necessary their contribution to theological precision, had unfortunate latencies. We have noted that they invited the reification and conceptual isolation of the metaphysically distinct effects of the Eucharistic signing, the res et sacramentum and res tantum, and the consequent dehistoricization of the latter, i.e., of the plenary eschatological realization in ecclesia of Eucharistic union with the risen Lord. However, once the, the res tantum sacramenti had been rationally distinguished from its infallible ground, the Eucharistic res et sacramentum, this anagogical fulfillment of the Eucharistic sacrifice, the Church in her perfection, could easily became remote from the Church’s worship as a merely subjective reality, lacking objective historicity. Thus lacking objectivity because dissociated from the Eucharistic signing by the inadvertent reification or objectivizing of the conceptual distinction between the twin effects of the Eucharistic signing, i.e., the res et sacramentum and the res tantum sacramenti, the latter could easily be misunderstood as salvation by faith alone.
It is evident that the res tantum sacramenti, the communicant’s fallible personal appropriation of the Church’s infallible union with the risen Christ, the final fruit and the goal of Eucharistic worship, cannot be identified with the Church for, infallibly instituted by the One Sacrifice, she is the precondition of all personal entry into her Eucharistic worship, which is to say, into the New Covenant constituted by her bridal union with her Lord.
The grace of the communicant’s personal union with Jesus the risen Lord is essentially ecclesial: it is eo ipso personal participation in the Eucharistic worship of the Church, and its anagogical dimension, membership in the fulfilled Kingdom of God, cannot be dissociated from the membership and worship in the Church, for the Church is strengthened and nourished by the communicant’s reception of the “bread of life and cup of everlasting salvation.”[32] The personal freedom marking this association of res et sacramentum with its proper effect, the res tantum, is not centrifugal, as their conceptual distinction might imply; rather, it is centripetal, the personal and historical quest of the worshiper for yet further union, in ecclesia, with the One Flesh of Christ and his bridal Church.
Union with the risen Christ cannot but be union with the Church that is his nuptial body, the Bride who is One Flesh with him. As de Lubac has remarked in the first page of the first chapter of Corpus mysticum, the Eucharistic interest during the patristic period tended to focus upon the Church as the body of Christ, rather than upon the Real Presence (the Corpus Christi verum) of the Christ, to the point of often seeming to ignore the Corpus Christi verum.[33] This focus upon the communicant’s anagogical union with the risen Christ in ecclesia tended as well to regard the Church anagogically, i.e., as in her realized eschatological perfection, the Church of the justified. Thus it is entirely proper and understandable that the anagogical patristic res sacramenti of the Eucharist should look to the res tantum rather than to the res et sacramentum of the medieval paradigm, but without that dehistoricization of their free unity which too often was associated with the medieval res tantum.
However, as de Lubac goes on to emphasize and extensively to document, this eschatological emphasis was not to the prejudice of the Real Presence of the risen Christ: rather, the Fathers understood the priestly-sacrificial body of Jesus and the ecclesial Body, the bridal Church to be inseparable, the totus Christus, but the phenomenological interest of the Augustinian quaerens intellectum, nearly all-pervasive in the patristic and monastic theology, could not but bear upon the worshiper’s personal union in ecclesia with the Eucharistic Lord, rather than upon the analysis of its condition of possibility and cause, the Eucharistic institution of the New Covenant, the One Flesh. Thus, the patristic authors thought of the Eucharistic Lord and the Church as in their liturgical unity, whose expression is ecclesial: thus to stress the bridal Church as the Body of Christ is to affirm him as her Head, Una Caro with her.
The patristic inability to perceive the free metaphysical unity, i.e., the metaphysical weight, the substantiality, of the Una Caro, and the consequent propensity to mistake its free, covenantal, and nuptial unity for the necessary and monadic unity attributed to a physical or organic “body,” plays a role here as elsewhere.[34] The determinist and inevitably monist intellectual legacy of Greek metaphysics has for most of two millennia blurred the theological recognition of the intrinsic freedom of the substantial free creation whose freedom is its nuptially-ordered imaging of God. The truth of creation thus understood, precisely as free and therefore as historical, as possessing sacramental significance, cannot be subordinated to the necessitarian and monist postulates inherited from a pagan despair of historical rationality.
In principle, the Augustinian phenomenology of worship in the Church barred any submission of the historicity of that worship to the canons of formal logic. Augustine’s response to the paradoxes he recognized―man as simul peccator et justus, the intus magister who is intimius intimo meo, the “two loves which have built two cities,” the “beauty ancient and forever new,” and many other comparable insights, was not a flight from history, but a vigorous defense of e.g., historical moral responsibility against Pelagius, of the historical realism of baptism and orders against the Donatists, and of the ultimate paradox of the Trinity against the paganism of fallen rationality itself. At the same time, it may be said, with respect, that his reasoning had not caught up with these insights of genius. The spontaneities of the ancient monist rationalism were native to him as to all men of his time; he did not escape their influence, nor did his followers. His failure and theirs to recognize the free unity of substantial being, which is to say, the free unity of the good creation, was a failure, neither of faith nor of intelligence, but the product of a cosmologically-induced confusion.
One cannot fault a Parmenides or a Plato for failing to perceive the freedom of the historical world, for that percept could exist only in a free personal response to the historical revelation, expressing the free and personal reception of the gift of historical truth. On the other hand, it is odd that the Catholic theological consciousness, formed by personal conversion to the revelation that is in Christ, should have been, and should yet remain, so cosmologically resistant to the revelation of the inherent free truth, finally to the beauty of the good creation, at one with its creation in Christ, “the ancient Beauty who is forever new.”
The theological interest of the twelfth-century sacramental paradigm of sacramentum tantum, res et sacramentum, res tantum, which stresses the free association of the Eucharistic res et sacramentum with its proper res tantum and, at the same time, stresses the analytic, conceptual distinction between them, is not to be identified simply with the interest of the earlier patristic paradigm, following Augustine, of sacramentum and res sacramenti. We have seen that the later or medieval paradigm includes, even stresses, an apologetic, a defensive analysis of the Church’s Eucharistic realism in response to a heresy, while the patristic paradigm had served a meditation that knew no Eucharistic heresy, thus one to which a defensive analysis could only have been irrelevant. Although Berengarius’ Eucharistic aberration heresy in fact latent in the Donatism of the fourth and fifth centuries in Africa, the Eucharistic implication of Donatism, i.e., that its realism was conditioned by the virtue of the celebrant priest or bishop, had remained undeveloped. Cyprian’s error had made moral probity to be a necessary effect of baptism, but his rationalization of sacramental efficacy, like that of the Donatists after him, had never been applied to the Eucharistic signing. During the first millennium, the interest of the Latin Fathers and monastic theologians was exegetical rather than systematic: it consisted largely in a meditation upon the Scriptures and upon the writings of the more illustrious of their predecessors, chiefly, as de Lubac has shown, Augustine and Origen.[35]
The early patristic vocabulary of sacramentum, res sacramenti not only developed during a period untroubled by any Eucharistic heresy; further, its methodological presuppositions are those of a phenomenology of worship which so takes for granted the free integration of the communicant with the Church in which he worships that a failure of that worship lies entirely outside its interest.[36] The patristic terminology of res gemina and duplex res sacramenti is intelligible only within this liturgical-phenomenological context, instinctive to Augustinian theology[37] Augustine had inherited from Tertullian, by way of Cyprian, the holistic meaning of sacramentum as inseparable from its effect, the res sacramenti. The Latin patristic tradition accepted this unity, the unity of the Mysterium fidei, as of course. Because of their entirely concrete theological interest, phenomenological and meditative rather than discursive and analytic, an interest whose object is the consciousness informed by participation in Church’s worship, the Latin fathers after Augustine were concerned for and focused upon the goal of that worship, the union in ecclesia of the Eucharistic communicant with the risen Christ, whose Eucharistic Presence is the bread of life, the cup of everlasting salvation. In Ignatius Martyr’s famous summary, this is the “remedy that we should not die.” The fatal consequences of a sinful dissociation from that one thing necessary―salvific union with Christ in the Church―were so obvious as to merit no attention, but yet more, they were irrelevant to the quaerens intellectum Mysterii[38] at the heart of Augustinian theology, then as now. Within that patristic quaerens, Eucharistic Communion with the risen Lord is intrinsic to the duplex res sacramenti, at once historical and eschatological, the unity of the res sacramenti understood as the free nuptial unity of Christ and his Church, into whose life-giving mystery the communicant is the more deeply immersed with each reception of Communion, and the pleroma that is the Church yet more fully realized in history.
Within this patristic consciousness, theologically explicit in the sacramentum, res sacramenti paradigm, whose ratio is intent upon the transcendent yet historically objective efficacy of the Eucharistic mediation of personal salvation in ecclesia, there was no place for a consideration of a personal failure so to worship, and consequently no interest in the latent theological implications of a sinful refusal of that mediation. This methodological disinterest betokened neither ignorance nor a state of denial, for in I Cor. 11:27-32, Paul had said all that could be said on the point. There Paul insists that a sacrilegious reception of the Eucharist is a profanation, a blasphemy, that works a “judgment” upon the sinner. This damnific effect is free, i.e., it is an effect ex opere operantis, quite as is the salvific effect of the worthy reception of the Eucharist. However, although this effect cannot but be included within the Augustinian-patristic res sacramenti, simply as an effect of the sacramental signing, the Augustinian-patristic tradition ignores as theologically irrelevant such sacrilegious refusal freely to enter into the freedom mediated by the worship of the Church. The patristic theology was intent upon the experienced reality of the Eucharistic worship itself, and was little or not at all interested in the consequences of its blasphemous profanation. Sin as such is not a subject of theology, for it has no intrinsic meaning: it is a work of the flesh, not of the Spirit. Such significance as it my come to have can only be sacramental, a graced repentance by which the sinner may return to the worship of the Church.
By the Carolingian period, all acquaintance with the classic Neoplatonic metaphysics of Plotinus and Porphyry, to an extent Christianized by Marius Victorinus, Augustine and Boethius, had been lost, along with its sources in Plato and Aristotle,[39] Some acquaintance with Aristotelian logic (“dialectic”) survived, but its dissociation, as logic merely, from its hermeneutical foundation in Aristotle’s analytical act-potency metaphysics, is patent in the attempted analytic deployment of the “new logic” by Carolingians such as Ratramnus and, in the eleventh century, by Berengarius, in whose hands it reverted to the primitive “either-or” binary format of the Eleatic logic of Parmenides and his disciple Zeno. Aristotle supposed his discovery of the intelligibility of contrariety as potentiality, inherent in his act-potency metaphysical analysis, to enable what Plato had denied, the metaphysical validity of literal language, i.e., language governed by its correlative, his act-potency analysis. This had grounded the formal logic he had long since developed in the works collected in the Organon.
There he had converted the binary dialectic inherited by Plato from the Eleatics to a novel discursive act-potency rationality that the hylemorphism of its subsequent Neoplatonic adaptation could not support. Under Neoplatonic auspices, the Aristotelian logic, which was intended to supplant the binary “matter-form“ dialectic of Platonism, became itself similarly a grammar, a linguistic convention without metaphysical foundation: the “new logic” which Berengarius would exploit as though it were rationality itself.
Its impact upon the signum-signatum dialectic with which Ratramnus and his peers had struggled in the ninth century amounted to a dismissal of the Augustinian phenomenology in favor of a binary analytic criticism of the subject-predicate relation of the Eucharistic Words of Institution. The liturgical meaning of those words, “This my body” – “This the cup of my blood” affirmed a change in the reality of the bread of the Offertory: it became the Body of the One Sacrifice, and a change in the reality of the wine into the Blood of the Covenant. At the same time, these “Words of Institution” affirmed an identity of the bread with the body of Christ, and of the wine with his blood. The lack of any metaphysical learning in the theologians of the Carolingian renaissance put a strain on their sacramental realism which soon became acute.
In the Carolingian period, we do find some implicitly metaphysical references to the change of the elements from their standing as Offertory gifts to their sacrificial reality, the body and blood of the One Sacrifice, but only in a most general sense of the language already available. Theological interest in the metaphysical sense of “transubstantiation” would wait upon the twelfth century. But we already read of the Eucharistic metabolé in Irenaeus at the end of the second century; a generation earlier, Justin Martyr had written of a “transformation” of the bread and wine analogous to the Incarnation.[40] The term or its equivalent (metapoiesis) was used by Gregory of Nazianzen, by John Chrysostom, and by John of Damascus. This pattern of historical metaphysical theology—fides quaerens intellectum—links Justin to the Alexandrine tradition, where it was the usual apologetic device, used by Clement and Origen. In the mid-fourth century, well before Augustine, the Euchologion of Serapion of Thmuis uses language similar to Augustine’s, an invocation (epiclesis) of the Logos in order that the elements become (genetai) the body and blood of Jesus the Christ. By the end of the fifth century, Faustus of Riez would speak of a change of the “substance” of the Eucharistic elements, but it will be another seven centuries before the term is linked to accidents in a precise sense capable of being developed metaphysically to account for the immunity of the Real Presence to corruption.
Faustus’ homily summarizes the Eucharistic doctrine of the Latin Church near the close of the patristic period. In the Eastern Church Cyril of Jerusalem had used similar language more than a century earlier. Only with the Antiochenes is there any intimation of a decline from this realism in the East, and after the condemnation of Nestorius at Ephesus that also ended; Eucharistic heresies invariably dehistoricize their subject and quite obviously can have no future. The last exponent of a Nestorian Christology is Theodoret, although his Eranistes is intent upon refuting the Monophysites rather than defending Nestorius.
There was no departure from a normative Eucharistic realism in the West before Berengarius in the eleventh century. Although the formula of Eucharistic realism which Cardinal Humbert of Sylva Candida, as the legate of Pope Nicholas II, ordered Berengarius to sign after the latter’s condemnation in 1059 by a Roman synod, asserted the substantial conversion of the Eucharistic elements (substantialiter converti), that phrase, merely a literal contradiction of a statement by Berengarius, affirms no more than Faustus had said, nor than Paschasius had taught contra the nascent symbolism of Ratramnus, which two centuries later Berengarius, as ignorant as Ratramnus of metaphysics, would develop into an explicit symbolism, a reduction of Eucharistic realism to subjectivity.
Thus the age of innocence ended with the challenge of Berengarius to the historical reality, the veritas, the res sacramenti, of the Church’s Eucharistic worship. By implication at least, he had reduced it to subjectivity.―[41] He may be regarded as the first Catholic theologian to take an abstract, “objective” stance external to worship itself from which to understand it, in complete contrast to the Augustinian tradition, whose fides quaerens intellectum presupposed the theologian’s commitment to the faith of the Church. However, from Berengarius’ disinterested point d’appui, theology could no longer be a faith-driven inquiry: the quaerens intellectum which, having its source in the Catholic faith, had in Anselm’s classic formula focused theological inquiry upon the Mysterium fidei, the doctrinal tradition mediated by the Magisterium of the Church. Thus conceived, the task of theology is grounded in personal participation in the faith and worship of the Church, thus in a liturgically-sustained inquiry into the truth that “Jesus Christ is Lord.” Removed from that foundation, theology would become a presumptively disinterested quest for necessary reasons in response to what would soon become articulate in a rational quaerens, an inquiry no longer rising out of personal faith, as had the theological quaerens intellectum, but out of impersonal, disinerested doubt: “An verum sit?”―”Whether it be true?” Such questions were raised by the professional obligation of lawyers to harmonize discordant canons, and by similarly disinterested theological efforts to resolve doctrinal paradoxes: thus Abelard’s Sic et Non. These were no longer historical questions, for the truth they sought was not the free truth mediated by the Catholic tradition but merely the dispassionate resolution of puzzlements arising out of often unexamined and tendentious postulates.
Berengarius was the first thus to prescind from the truth of the faith and to submit the realism of the Eucharistic liturgy to abstract and extra-ecclesial criteria whose application would inevitably reduce freedom to a subjective irrationality.[42] It is his theological insolence, in the strict sense, that makes him important: he rejected the liturgical norm of historical truth and historical objectivity and, from that moment, history began to cease to be understood as a sacramental, i.e., as a liturgical and consequently Eucharistically-ordered reality.[43] The defenders of the Eucharistic realism, as innocent as Berengarius of metaphysical sophistication, tended more and more to accept from him this false card, the novel deracinated logic of the new learning, that dehistoricized all it touched. The recovery and reaffirmation of the Eucharistic order of history thereby became the premier task of Catholic theology across the board, and remains so today.
The immediate response to the impact of the Berengarian heresy was of course defensive. From Lanfranc onward, the opponents of Berengarius upheld against him the historical realism of the Eucharistic worship and of the sacramental unity and efficacy of the Words of Institution whose significance Berengarius’ logical or “dialectic” analysis would disintegrate. This defensive task appeared to require an analytical response to Berengarius’ analytic attack upon the free truth of the Eucharistic Words of Institution. It also inspired a conservative Augustinian reaction stressing, as Augustine had, the contrast between the Eucharistic signum and signatum, but now this stress invoked a similarly ill-understood defensive rationalization of the phenomenological idiom of the patristic and monastic Eucharistic theology whose correspondingly binary dialectic, when submitted to a literal interpretation, could easily be reduced to a heretical dissociation of signum from signatum: i.e., of the Eucharistic sacramentum from its infallible effect, the res sacramenti.. Ratramnus’s fascination with the “new logic” had threatened to do so two centuries earlier.
Further, Augustine’s insistence upon locating the risen Christ, qua corporeal, at the right hand of the Father rendered paradoxical his equally insistent assertions that, with the words of consecration, the bread and wine of the Offertory become (“fieri”) the body and blood of the One Sacrifice and that Jesus the Christ is thus historically present in his concrete, Eucharistically-represented union in One Flesh with the historical Church. This apparent removal of the bodily risen Christ from history played into the phenomenological distinction between signum and signatum which, in the Carolingian period, had threatened a dissociation of the historical objectivity of the Eucharistic signing from the historically objective efficacy of that signing: a pure eschatologism threatened to replace the anagogical dimension of Eucharistic realism. Such dissociation of cause from effect is of course fatal to Eucharistic realism, denying as it does all historical objectivity to the Church’s worship, and thereby to the Church herself.
Augustine, not eschewing the paradox, rhetorically identifies the historical Church with the Personal immanence of the risen Christ in history, which is true enough in the hermeneutical context of their substantial unity in One Flesh, but which can be and has been heard to imply the nonhistoricity of the Church’s Eucharistic worship: i.e., heard as a denial of the objective truth of the Words of Institution. Pierre Batiffol has remarked upon the consequent confusion.[44] In fact, de Lubac is of the opinion that Berengarius thus understood Augustine.[45]. This may explain the Berengarius’ quasi-Eleatic binary “dialectical” analysis of the Words of Institution, an analysis which forced the defenders of Eucharistic realism to respond at an unwonted level of abstraction, one requiring the further development of the traditional sacramentally-grounded theological hermeneutic whose mature expression, sacramentum tantum, res et sacramentum, res tantum, was achieved early in the twelfth century at the School of Laon―but was not well understood.
This nonetheless remarkable achievement, the early-medieval revision of the Augustinian sacramentum - res sacramenti analysis, was indispensable to the defense of Eucharistic orthodoxy, not because the Augustinian-patristic analysis was in error, but because it had taken for granted what Berengarius denied, the Eucharistic res sacramenti understood as the unitas corporis, wherein the unity of the Church is utterly dependent upon her Eucharistic union with her Head. The patristic tradition had had no interest in defending the historicity of the unitas corporis against Eucharistic heresy, for none then existed. The age of Eucharistic heresy arrived with Berengarius’ perceived denial of the historical (which is to say, liturgical) truth of the Words of Institution, and so of their sacramental efficacy.
The shifts in Eucharistic terminology, which de Lubac has described, from the patristic period and through the early medieval period presuppose a metaphysical realism, but were unable to articulate it with sufficient precision until “substantialiter” was finally decided upon as the apt term by which to distinguish sacramental objectivity of the Christ’s Eucharistic presence from a mere symbolism on the one hand and from a quasi-Capharnaitic naiveté on the other.[46]
Thereafter, the theological focus upon resistance to Berengarius wrote finis to the patristic attribution to the Eucharistic res sacramenti of such terms as “spiritualis,” “mysticus,” “intelligibilis,” and the like (even Gottschalk’s “specialiter, naturaliter” distinction is heard no more), for these had been given a symbolist interpretation by Berengarius and his followers, whereas their original usage had been realistic and dynamic, referring to the virtus sacramenti, the sacramental efficacy whose finality was personal union with the risen Christ in the Church, rather than to the historical dimension of the res sacramenti, the objectively historical effect of the Eucharistic signing, viz., the infallible sacrificial presence of Christ in the Eucharist as at once High Priest and Victim of the One Sacrifice, a presence indissociable from the Church, hence from the unitas corporis Christi.
It was this “Real Presence” of the “Corpus Christi verum” which was now to be defended against Berengarius. Expressions such as caro spiritualis, which had referred to this dynamic reality, viz., union with Christ in a Church understood to be herself fed and strengthened by that union, needed after Berengarius to be integrated into the idiom of the novel apologetic theology of the early Middle Ages, whose immediate task was to distinguish the infallible ecclesial effect of the One Sacrifice from the fallible personal effect: in brief, the union of the Church with her Lord in One Flesh is infallibly given, given indefeasibly, and hence indissociable from the Eucharistic Sacrifice as its immediate effect, as distinguished from the defeasible effect that is salvific personal salvific union with the Lord―defeasible by reason of the possibility of personal sinfullness in the communicant. The theological elaboration of this distinction, heretofore unnecessary, abruptly become indispensable to dealing adequately with the Berengarian heresy.
However, this new apologetic interest had another consequence: it changed what may be designated the perspective, even the consciousness, of the theologian. The older patristic perspective, focused upon the Church, and not so much the historical Church as the anagogical Church, sustained by her Eucharistic union with her risen Lord, was no longer a viable option. We have seen de Lubac, in the opening pages of his Corpus mysticum, stressing the focus of the Augustinian-patristic theology upon the final goal of the Church’s Eucharistic worship, that union with the risen Christ in the Church which Augustine has described in a famous passage:
Proinde verum sacrificium est omne opus, quod agitur, ut sancta societate inhaereamus Deo, relatum scilicet ad illum finem boni, quo veraciter beati esse possimus.
De civitate Dei x, 6.
This ultimate goal of all sacrifice and, à fortiori, of the Church’s Eucharistic sacrifice, is obviously all-important, for it is that to which all else in the liturgy is directed as means to an end. This perspective is not simply eschatological, but it was also that, for the fulfillment of historical worship is union with the risen Christ, a union which, while it does not remove the communicant from the historical Church, nonetheless so preoccupies the theological attention of the Fathers as to make their reflection baffling to later generations whose theological preoccupation is nearly the reverse of the patristic interest. While after Berengarius, the goal of Eucharistic worship remained as it had been, union with the risen Lord, theological attention shifted to a defensive theological concentration upon the historical objectivity and efficacy of the Eucharistic signing, a subject that had scarcely arisen for the Fathers.
Apart from Augustine, Faustus of Riez, at the end of the fifth century, is nearly the only Latin witness to a patristic interest in what seven centuries later will be known as the transubstantiation of the bread and the wine, and his interest was no more defensive than had been Augustine’s; it was even idiosyncratic, for it never displaced Augustine’s “Spiritualiter intelligete.” Suddenly, however, with Berengarius, that formerly idiosyncratic interest in the metaphysics of sacramental realism became normative for Eucharistic theology, while interest in the convergence of both dimensions of Eucharistic efficacy upon union with the risen Christ became almost peripheral. For example, the Eucharistic res tantum begins to be understood as the res non contenta, i.e., an effect not contained “in” the transubstantiated species, because not a product of transubstantiation, and thus not of immediate interest. What is not of immediate theological interest has a way of being neglected as unimportant simply because theologically uninteresting. This disinterest cannot but be detrimental, even disastrous, to Eucharistic theology, as it is to the catechesis that reflects it.
The patristic theology had been intent upon the ultimate, complete accomplishment of the Eucharistic worship, that outpouring of the Spirit, that ultimate creative Gift, which Jesus, the Son of God, was sent to give and which is in his Gift alone. This Gift is salvation pure and unalloyed, no longer veiled in sacramento, but manifest: it is membership in that “holy society,” the Church of the predestined, membership in which is “that final good, by which we may be truly blessed.” This is personal membership in the Church as finally purified, finally realized and manifest as the glory of her Lord, as the Bride in splendor, in plenitudo, the Church triumphant, the Church eschatologically fulfilled.
Here the twin effects of the Eucharistic sacramentum, the res and the virtus, comprising the Mysterium, i.e., the reality of the One Sacrifice as source of all salvation, are inseparably at one in a union which de Lubac recognizes as also the res gemina of the Eucharist. His own theology, informed by the patristic tradition to an extent unmatched by any other theologian, is impatient of any other interest. While he acknowledges the necessity of the early medieval reaction against Berengarius, he regrets the subsequent theological neglect, humanly inseparable from that reaction, of the patristic concern for the one thing necessary, personal union in ecclesia with the risen Christ. In his theology, this union, the gemina res, the Eucharistic res sacramenti, is given eschatologically, but as the res, the effect, of the historical sacramentum, the historical Eucharistic worship of the historical Church. The res gemina, thus anagogically understood, is at once the consequence and the fulfillment of the Church’s worship of her Eucharistic Lord.
De Lubac’s theology is entirely consistent with that post-Berengarian apologetic interest whose programmatic statement is the tripartite medieval paradigm of sacramental realism: sacramentum tantum, res et sacramentum, res tantum. While it is true that de Lubac places the res gemina in what this later paradigm terms the res tantum, he has refused a priori the dehistoricizing of the Eucharistic res tantum by its dissociation from the res et sacramentum, as if they were distinct as the nonhistorical is distinct from the historical. That aberration is far from his understanding of the res gemina which, for him, is indissociable from the historicity of the res sacramenti. In fact, their unity is the basis of his exegesis, in which the historical unity of the Old Testament, the New Testament, and the Kingdom of God is Eucharistically underwritten―a doctrinal datum ignored by exegetes for decades, and now, under de Lubac’s influence, being rediscovered by them, or so one may hope.
De Lubac knows no nonhistorical Church, and no nonhistorical worship: he knows the historical Church to be unitary with and inseparable from her eschatological fulfillment. Like the Fathers, he dwells upon that fulfillment, rather than upon an apologetic defense of her historicity.[47] This defense was not a Eucharistic concern during the patristic period, and it is not his. His disinterest in that apologetic is not an archaism: rather it is a disinterest in that theological objectification of the Eucharist, the loss of its Mysterium, of its free unity of veritas et virtus sacramenti, to which the defense of the historicity of the Eucharist has so often led. Recovery from that loss can only be by way of the approfondissement of Eucharistic theology: in this he is the pioneer par excellence.
The post-patristic or early medieval, i.e., Carolingian Eucharistic theology is sharply distinguished from what went before―the patristic tradition―by the fascination with “dialectic,” the “new logic,” that had emerged with the Carolingian renaissance. Its untutored application to the Eucharist in the ninth century prompted its bolder application by Berengarius in the eleventh, to the point of his finding himself under attack by his contemporaries, and increasingly under condemnation by the Church. Whatever the merits and demerits of his Eucharistic theology, which de Lubac is unwilling to condemn out of hand, it foreshadowed a novel development in theology, that of systematic method. In effect, the dialecticians, however ill informed their use of logic, had accepted its identification with rationality qua tale as beyond discussion, thus as a new criterion of truth: an Eleatic or binary rationality understood as the rigorous application of that primitive logical analysis.
However, they knew of it only in its Neoplatonic format, thus as dissociated from the Aristotelian act-potency metaphysics that is alone consonant with this new hermeneutic, and consequently as precariously attuned to the binary Platonic hylemorphism which Aristotle had rejected.
When placed again under hylemorphic auspices, which deny the intrinsic intelligibility of material reality, the Aristotelian act-potency analysis of the intrinsic causes of material essences reverted to what “dialectic” had been for Plato, an analysis of concepts whose only intelligible unity was their finally ineffable reference to the nonhistorical absolute, which for Plato was the ideal coincidence of the Beautiful and the Good, the kalokagathon, the single object of the Platonic concept of the human quaerens or eros.
However, Plato’s metaphysics was mystical at its heart; radically dependent upon myth, while under Plotinus it had became locked into immanent necessity: thereby the Platonic kalakagathon was rationalized into the absolute One of Neoplatonism. Logic again became binary, as it had been for the Eleatics: the analytic dissociation of all historical unity because irreducible to identity: the infima species has no historical realization. Concrete discourse had been mere opinion for Plato, at best a “likely account;” under the new logic it became meaningless.
Nonetheless, this truncated logic had long since taken on theological standing. Passed on to the Carolingians by Boethius, its transcendent reference to the One was interpreted as a reference to a dehistoricized notion of the One God of Christianity who, as thereby dehistoricized, was incapable of historical immanence. It fascinated Carolingians such as John Scotus Eruigena, Ratramnus, and Rhabanus Maurus, whose Eucharistic application of it broke down the Augustinian signum – signatum analysis of sacramental causality to the point of putting that free association of historical sign and effect in question and, as has been seen, of presenting an implicit threat to Eucharistic realism.
Its further disintegrating impact needed only the impetus provided by Berengarius’ application of it to the conceptual disintegration, not simply of the signum-signatum polarity, but of the concrete Eucharistic “Hoc est enim corpus meum,” to demonstrate its radical incompatibility with the historical realism of Eucharistic orthodoxy.
Insofar as under that stimulus, the development of theological rationality during the twelfth century could only become became increasingly dissociated from the apostolic tradition; it accepted uncritically the legitimacy of the rationalist challenge, institutionalized as the “quaestio,” a term borrowed from the flush of juridical commentary prompted in the eleventh century at the University of Bologna by Justinian’s codification of the Roman law. Under the inspiration and leadership of the great legal scholar Irnerius there arose at Bologna in the latter half of the eleventh century a school of commentators (glossators) upon the newly rediscovered text of the Roman law, later named “Corpus Juris Civilis,” which had been published by Emperor Justinian in the sixth century. The rational criteria underlying the Quaestio easily supplanted those lacking in the binary dialectic, which had no interest in, or capacity for, the framing of syntheses. The Quaestio however is precisely aimed at building a synthesis, whether of literally discordant laws, or of literally discordant Church teachings. The forthcoming juridical and doctrinal syntheses supposed the Church’s doctrinal and moral tradition to have been formed under the same thirst for synthesis which drove the commentators. The result was the juridicalization of the of Church governance and mission, with a notion of obedience to law as the central, in fact indispensable virtue. This inherently unstable situation, in which the Church theology ceased to be so much a quest for understanding as for conformity. In short, it became an deterministic apologetics, as de Lubac has seen.
There were of course stalwart and highly effective defenders of the ancient Eucharistic tradition: Paschasius, whose forthright Eucharistic orthodoxy, over against the rationalist dissociation of signum from signatum by Ratramnus, Rhabanus Maurus, Gottschalk, and perhaps John Scotus Eruigena, provided the foundation for the latter development of Eucharistic realism by Lanfranc, Guitmund of Aversa, Alger of Liège, and Gregory of Bergamo. In their hands a realism of “substance” was effectively deployed against the burgeoning rationalism of the early Middle Ages prompted by Berengarius’ recourse to the “new logic,” deployed a millennium and a half earlier by Parmenides and the Eleatics. During this period, in the wake of a revived interest in Roman law originating in the University of Bologna and continuing at Montpelier, the “sic et non” successfully applied to clarify the obscurities of the canonical collections by men such as Ivo of Chartres and Gratian, found its way into the theology faculties in the form of the “quaestio.” This analytic device sought out the a priori intelligibility of not only the canon law but, notably in the hands of Abelard, also of the doctrinal tradition which, as the tradition of the free truth of the mystery of Christ, could have none. The rationality underlying the quaestio was the product of a a quest, innocently innovated by Anselm of Bec, for the “necessary reasons” which he naively supposed to be the object of his fides quaerens intellectum The implication of this quaerens was determinist, with a consequent tendency to ignore the freedom of the Catholic tradition and, for that matter, of the legal tradition. It was all too easy to identify the Anselmian fides quaerens intellectum with the quaestio of the commentators; by the fourteenth century this mistake would have had a destructive impact upon the freedom of the English common law tradition. While St. Anselm’s famous and definitive definition of theology as the quest of faith for understanding does not, in fact cannot, entail this rationalization of the free truth of the faith, this was not then well understood in the twelfth century, even by St. Anselm. The theological systematization of this rationalizing mentality would wait upon St. Thomas’ exploitation of the Aristotelian act-potency metaphysical analysis, by which he undertook to adapt to theological purposes the Aristotelian wedding of metaphysics to logic, lending the authority of a genius to that application.
By the sixteenth century this version of the systematization of theology had come to maturity in Cajetan’s exposition and exploitation of the rationalistic potentiality of the Thomist method. De Lubac, in Surnaturel,[48] famously rejected this rationalization of theology. He had published Corpus mysticum as the third volume in the collection, Théologie, in which his Surnaturel appears as the eighth volume. His dismissal in that later work of a rationalized “pure nature,” as the polar counterpart of the rationalization of “grace,” is very clearly the product of his long study of the patristic meditation upon the liturgical experience of graced existence in ecclesia. The recovery of that liturgically-grounded fides quaerens intellectum, with its implicit conversion of theological method to the freedom, the historicity of the Church’s worship, may well stand as his greatest contribution to the res Catholica.
The early medieval revision of the sacramentum, res sacramenti of the older patristic theology involved no doctrinal innovation for, without any felt need for specification, the older language had included, within the res sacramenti, sensu aiente (i.e., in its full historical sense, as opposed to sensu negante, i.e., in its restricted and abstract sense), the fallible effect which the later terminology designated the res tantum.[49] Augustine himself had been forced by the Donatist heresy to distinguish that which Cyprian and, fifty years after him, the Donatists, had failed to distinguish the infallible from the fallible effects of the Eucharistic signing. He affirmed then in the sacramentum a double efficacy or signing, and so distinguished between two effects in the res sacramenti, the one necessary, the other free.[50] This is precisely the distinction later drawn by the early medieval theologians between the res et sacramentum and the res tantum, but the relatively abstract, non-experiential, analytical distinction which Augustine’s refutation of Donatism had placed between the necessary and the free causality of the Eucharistic signing did not enter into the patristic discussion of the Eucharistic res sacramenti, which was intent upon the experience of existence in Christo, in ecclesia, rather than upon its analysis. The Eucharistic application of Augustine’s response to the Donatist heresy waited upon the Berengarian challenge to the historical objectivity of the objective presence of Jesus the Christ in the consecrated bread and wine, a dehistoricization of the Eucharistic worship unthinkable in the patristic period. For the Fathers, the effect of the Eucharistic signing was salvific; they were of course familiar with Paul’s warning in I Cor. 11 against unworthy reception, but their quaerens intellectum was understandably focused upon the effects of the worthy reception for which the Eucharist had been instituted.
When theologians lose sight of the free unity of the liturgical worship which they seek to understand, whether by the phenomenological, experiential or existential inquiry of the patristic sacramentum, res sacramenti analysis, or by its twelfth-century sacramentum tantum, res et sacramentum, res tantum analytic revision, is not kept in view, insoluble ambiguities arise by reason of the unreflective imposition of a false determinism or necessitarian rationalism upon the factual free unity of sacramental worship. The early medieval theologian’s response to the Berengarian analytic was unfortunately open to this error, by reason of its failure to grasp the intrinsic freedom of the nuptial substantiality of the Eucharistic One Flesh. Their apologetic interest in defending the Eucharistic tradition required a systematization whose inevitably abstract language and deployment of formal logic could easily be taken as requiring a dehistoricization of the historical truth of the Church’s worship. The likelihood of this dehistoricization was reinforced by the theological adaptation of the quaestio which, as borrowed from the then burgeoning analytic study of Roman law embodied in the Corpus Juris Civilis, could easily be mistaken for a valid expression of the fides quaerens intellectum: in fact, it was nearly inevitable that, once adopted by theologians as a heuristic device, the quaestio (summarily, as we have seen in the Epilogue, “An sit verum?”) be misunderstood to presuppose a causal explanation as the only appropriate response: Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo is the classic illustration of the response to a quaestio; Anselm provides just such an explanation for the Incarnation, arguing that only a propitiation for sin offered by someone at once divine and human might correspond to the infinite offense of sin to the divine majesty. Thus it was that Catholic theology became an apologetics, as de Lubac has observed. With the quaestio thus in place as a valid expression of the fides quaerens intellectum, it cannot but impose its own abstract criteriology upon the free truth of the Catholic tradition which, grounded in free gift of the free truth that is the Revelation, lacks the a priori causal explanation which the quaestio seeks. Classic Christology remains locked in this false problematic: it still seeks the prior possibility of the Incarnation, which of course has none.
The patristic theology had assigned the Church a sacramental and therefore anagogical reality. While the Fathers knew her to be caused, nourished and sustained by the Eucharist, at the same time they knew her to be a reality whose plenitude is manifest only in the eschaton. This anagogical sense of the Church as at once objectively historical while oriented to a transhistorical fulfillment was continued by her medieval title, Corpus Christi mysticum. Peter Lombard, when using the recently developed sacramentum tantum, res et sacramentum, res tantum sacramental analysis, summarized the patristic stress upon the anagogical aspect of the Church by assigning her, as Corpus Christi mysticum, the standing of the Eucharistic res tantum. This ascription neither entailed nor envisaged a dehistoricization of the Church, for her sacramental historicity was unquestioned by the patristic tradition, nor was it put in issue by Peter Lombard whose Sentences intended a summary of that tradition.
However, under the influence of the “new logic,” when using the older or patristic sacramental paradigm, the Master of the Sentences understood the Church, insofar as within the res sacramenti, to be a res significata sed non contenta: i.e., an effect signed by the sacramentum but not “contained” within its effect, evidently because the Church is not the product of the transubstantiation of the elements and thus is “contained” within the consecrated species. Peter Lombard’s “non contenta” specification is not patristic but medieval; it reflects the medieval focus on the res et sacramentum as simply the Corpus Christi verum, whose objective reality is the direct product of the transubstantiation of the elements, as the objective reality of the Church is not. This designation of the Church as “non contenta” intimated an isolation of the Church from her source, the Corpus Christi verum, whose historical realism was the explicit concern of the medieval theology, and separation from which inevitably entailed the Church’s theological dissociation from her Eucharistic cause, the Corpus Christi verum, present as the High Priest and the Victim of the One Sacrifice.
This isolation of the Church from her Head logically entailed a consideration of the Church in abstraction from that by which she is in fact historical and theologically intelligible, and hence entailed her dehistoricization and consequently a misunderstanding of her reality as the second Eve, the Bride of the Christ, the second Adam, One Flesh with Him and inseparable from him. Her reality began to be conceived in eschatological terms rather than analogical: i.e., her sacramental historicity was ignored. Thus, her relegation to the res tantum Eucharistiae was no longer read as anagogical but as nonhistorical, without reference to the Eucharistic Sacrifice by which alone she is real and historical. At the same time, her internal structure began to be accounted for in terms of the Aristotelian “perfect society,” Augustine’s “sancta societas” had been forgotten.
This dehistoricization of the Church entailed and coincided with the dehistoricization of the res tantum: the focusing of theological interest upon the transubstantiation of the elements and the objectivity of the Eucharistic Presence of the Christ had lost sight of the anagogical dimension of the Eucharistic signing: as non contenta, it was not of interest to medieval Eucharistic theology. We have seen that the imperceptibility of the communicant’s anagogical union with the Eucharistic Christ issued in the medieval theologians giving that full effect the Eucharistic worship a comparable standing of res tantum sacramenti, with the same latent inference of its nonhistoricity, its dissociation from the Corpus Christi verum.
Nearly a century before the publication of the Sentences, Berengarius’ rationalist bent had extrapolated from the anagogical fullness of sacramental efficacy what his contemporaries heard to be a heretical denial of the objectivity of the Eucharistic presence of Jesus the Christ. Such dehistoricization of the free historicity of the Eucharistic worship is the perennial product of the rationalization of the Eucharistic res gemina or duplex res sacramenti, the One Flesh, whether by the rationalist reduction of its free covenantal unity, its nuptial order, into the unity of a physical or organic structure, or of its free nuptial unity into two distinct bodies, the Corpus Christi verum whose Eucharistic historicity is defended à outrance, while under that same focus the correlative Eucharistic realism and historicity of the Corpus mysticum is first ignored and then forgotten, to become a subject for sociological or juridical rather than theological inquiry.
This drive for theological rationalization is inherent in and fed by uncritical theological commitment to the determinist, monist notion of substance, and to its accompanying literalist hermeneutic of “pure reason,” whose legitimacy was then unquestioned and has long remained so.[51] The rationalization of the Church’s worship―always its reductive submission to the canons of logical necessity and therefore its dehistoricization, for history is free by definition―proceeded thereafter to reify the conceptual but abstract, nonhistorical and unreal distinction placed by the new medieval sacramental analysis between the sacramentally worshiping and therefore historical Church, and the communicant’s participation in her worship.
Left in historical abeyance by reason of the imperceptibility of his personal union with the risen Lord, the communicant was thereby isolated from the historical Church in which, precisely, he is a member by baptism, even as a sinner. Thus arises the notion that his communion with the Lord is or may be independent of his sacramental worship in ecclesia, viz., his communion may be a ‘spiritual communion,’ with the Platonic equation of “spirit” with the nonhistorical presupposed
The older, i.e., Augustinian-patristic, sacramental paradigm had simply included the communicant’s union with the risen Christ within the res sacramenti. The dissociation of the sinner from the res tantum, understood as “effectus huius sacramenti,” by reason of the personal sin of the communicant, was not of theological interest, because not within the experience of worship in ecclesia upon which the Augustinian-patristic interest was focused. However, the theological reaction to Berengarius’ perceived denial of Eucharistic realism had forced the early medieval theologians to distinguish between the Church as the infallible effect of the Eucharistic Sacrifice, and the individual’s personal union with Christ as a fallible effect.
The distinction, once made, took on a life of its own: the conceptual, abstractly-posed distinction between the historical Church and those who worship in the Church became explicit: i.e., as between res et sacramentum and res tantum, and the implications of that abstract possibility began to be treated as concrete, as actuality: e.g., as “non contenta,” a label that would soon be applied to the Church herself, as not being the product of transubstantiation, thus not identified with the consecrated species, with the resulting dissociation of the Church from her Eucharistic source and cause which has been remarked. In this scenario, the Church also was left without the sacramental significance which was hers only by her nuptial union with her Lord. With that union disregarded, the Church, like those who baptized into her unity, and therefore who worship in her, lost her historicity.
However paradoxically, this unwonted degree of theological abstraction had become necessary in order to defend the freedom of personal worship, the freedom of the communicant’s integration into the Church and thereby the freedom of his union, mediated in ecclesia, with her Lord, the Eucharistic Christ. That such a systematic abstraction could not proceed without danger is manifest. In Corpus mysticum, de Lubac has pointed to the disadvantages of the revision’s conceptual, not metaphysical, isolation of the ex opere operato effect from the effect ex opere operantis within the free historical unity of the Eucharistic worship. While entirely consonant with the ancient liturgical and doctrinal tradition for as long as the historical unity―i.e., the free unity―of its conceptually dissociable elements was kept in view, the early medieval theologians’ safeguarding of that tradition by a reflexive analysis of sacramental efficacy could not be as clearly existential, as concretely historical, as had been the phenomenological sacramentum, res sacramenti analysis of the patristic theology. The new, rationalizing analysis was ill at ease, incompatible in fact with the freedom of the Church’s historicity.
It would be too much to say the openness of the abstract or conceptual distinctions entailed in the new (medieval) sacramental paradigm,, under the further impetus of the thirteenth century “reception” of Aristotelianism, led to the rationalization and fragmentation of sacramental worship out of which arose the image of the lonely worshiper, alone before his God, for this notion had its inception a millennium earlier in the patristic commentary on The Song of Songs.[52] Nonetheless, the image of the lonely worshiper is proper to the dehistoricized worship of the Reformation, for the elimination of sacramental worship inherent in the sola fide, sola scriptura, sola gratia of the Reform’s rejection of sacramental, and particularly Eucharistic realism precisely requires the collapse of the historical objectivity of the res et sacramentum into a res tantum no longer possessing the historical foundation that its objectively historical ground in the infallible res et sacramentum of the Eucharist had given it in Catholic worship, whose free unity is again being subjected to a comparably shallow rationalist criteriology.
Catholic worship thus becomes subjective merely, without historical content or significance, for the sacramental and historical objectivity of personal union with the risen Lord rests finally upon the communicant’s free union with the historical and sacramental objectivity of the Church’s Eucharistic worship. It is there that personal union with the risen Christ occurs; it is there, in personal participation in the unitas corporis, the Eucharistic One Flesh of Christ and his Church, that the communicant appropriates his own free, nuptially-ordered historicity, his imaging of God, his covenantal fidelity. Lacking this Eucharistic source and sustenance, the One Sacrifice of the Mass, worship inevitably seeks a political realization and efficacy; the politicization of the faith proceeds faute de mieux.
In the second of the texts from his Commentary on the Sentences quoted at the beginning of this appendix, St. Thomas describes the Church as the “quasi res ultima” of the signing effected by the Eucharistic presence of Jesus the High Priest and Victim, the Corpus Christi verum. The Augustinian-patristic paradigm had seen in the Church, the Corpus Christi mysticum, the infallible effect of the Real Presence, the Corpus Christi verum, an effect at once distinct from and irreducible to its cause, the Corpus Christi verum, as an effect must be irreducible to its cause, and yet an effect indissociable from its cause, the Real Presence, the Corpus Christi verum, because efficaciously signed by it.
Thus the Fathers understood the Church to exist in free unity, unitas corporis, with the Corpus Christi verum: the free and substantial, Trinity-imagining, nuptial unity that is the res sacramenti.[53] In this dynamic unity, this nuptial union, the Bride proceeds freely from her Head, her Bridegroom, her cause, freely responding to him in their free constitution of the substantial, covenantal, Trinity-imaging tri-unity of the covenantal One Flesh of Christ and his bridal Church This, the substantial New Covenant that is neither simply the Christ nor simply the Church, nor simply their irrevocable free marital union, but that reality, the good creation, in which Jesus subsists as its head, the Church subsists as his Glory, i.e., as proceeding from him, and their nuptial covenant subsists, as proceeding from the Head through his Glory, the Church. This is the trinitarian human substance that is created in Christ and is now redeemed, its primordial integrity restored, in sacramento, by his One Sacrifice, the outpouring of the Gift of the Spiritus Creator upon the Church and thereby upon all flesh. By this Gift, this outpouring of the Spirit, the free unity, the integrity of the One Flesh (mia sarx - σάρκα μίαν), lost in the fall, is restored in the sacrificial institution of the Eucharistic One Flesh, into which New Creation all humanity is free to enter, gratia Christi. It is within this covenantal and nuptial unity that the Church is in fact quasi res ultima, the infallible effect of the Eucharistic signing, distinct and yet inseparable from the Eucharistic Presence of her Lord.
However, it is all too clear that St. Thomas’ mature view of the head-body relation of Jesus to the Church is organic rather than nuptial: in a revealing passage from the Summa Theologiae, quoted by de Lubac, he says nothing of the union of Head and body in “one flesh:”[54]
Just as the whole Church is called one mystical body by reason of a similitude to the natural body of man. … (emphasis added).
S. T. iiia, q. 18, a. 1
It is evident that, when viewed as parts of an organism, “head” and “body” have a necessary relation to each other, that condemned in I Cor. 7:16, not the free nuptial relation of the “one flesh” (σάρκα μίαν ) of the prophecy in Gen. 2:24. Mk. 10:8, and Eph. 5:31, attributed in the next verse to the great mystery of the union of Jesus the Christ and his bridal Church. Further, an ecclesial unity of a physical organism cannot provide the free, covenantal fidelity that unites the members of the bridal Church to each other, and through her, to her Head.
De Lubac cites this passage in the Summa in connection with another taken from Comm. in IV Sent., which we have already examined, in which St. Thomas, speaking of the Corpus Christi verum, has written:
It signs also a quasi-ultimate effect, the mystical body, that is to say, the Church, which because of the distinction of offices has a similarity with the whole body by reason of the distinction of members. (emphases added)
In IV Sent., d. 8, q. 2, a.1; see also S. T. IIIa, q. 82, a. 9, 2.
Of this passage de Lubac observes, “l’on peut discerner la trace de la double origine” (i.e., the ecclesial ”Corpus Christi mysticum” and the Eucharistic “corpus naturale”).
Clearly enough, in these passages St. Thomas does not understand the ecclesial body, although caused by the sacramental signing of her Head (whose Eucharistic Corpus Christi verum, as we have seen, he considers to be figurativum corporis mystici), to be in nuptial union with the Christ by reason of that “figuring.” We have seen that, within the context of the early medieval sacramental paradigm, the “res ultima,” the final effect of the Eucharistic signing, can only be the Eucharistic res tantum. It is not possible to determine from the expression “quasi rem ultimam” precisely what St. Thomas means in qualifying its ultimacy with the term by “quasi,” but the term clearly departs from the language of the excerpts from his Comm. in IV Sent. quoted in endnote 10. It is quite possible that here St Thomas is writing within the context of the patristic paradigm of sacramentum, res sacramenti, not in that of the later analysis which sets off the res tantum from the res et sacramentum. Much of de Lubac’s discussion of the Christ-Church relation, based on his exhaustive study of the Fathers, depends similarly upon their familiarity with the older sacramentum, res sacramenti analysis, which de Lubac himself generally prefers to the medieval analysis, while recognizing the justification for the development of the latter.[55] In any case, St. Thomas here distinguishes the Church from the unqualified res ultima, the ultimate effect of the sacramental signing, the medieval sacramentum tantum. Granting this, the only alternative is that he understands the Church, as “figured” or signed by the Corpus Christi verum, to be in unity with the Eucharistic Christ. Elsewhere, he describes this unity as sponsal or nuptial. However, there et passim he does not understand that unity it to be free and covenantal.[56]
St. Thomas did not in fact develop his early concrete recognition, under the aegis of the patristic sacramentum-res sacramenti paradigm, of the Eucharistic duplex res sacramenti or res gemina into an assertion, under the newer, medieval paradigm of sacramentum, res et sacramentum, res tantum, of a double res et sacramentum. However, the early witnesses―patristic and early medieval―whose texts de Lubac has so carefully examined are unintelligible apart from their common assumption that the infallible effect of the Eucharistic signing, the res et sacramentum of the medieval paradigm, later designated the effect ex opere operato of the Eucharistic signing, is the One Flesh of the New Covenant, equivalent in its infallibility to the res sacramenti of the patristic theology.
This conclusion is inescapable, for the tradition de Lubac examines is unanimous that (1) the New Covenant is instituted by the One Sacrifice of Christ, and (2) the Eucharist is the historical offering of that One Sacrifice. However, as we shall see, the unanimity is implicit, for an overt recognition of these facts is uncommon among the patristic and early medieval texts that de Lubac’s study cites and which he discusses so carefully.
In the texts cited in endnote 10. St. Thomas apparently relegates the Church to the standing of the res tantum sacramenti. This is neither the doctrine of Augustine nor of the patristic tradition dependent upon him, although by the middle of the twelfth century, Peter Lombard’s Sentences, upon which St. Thomas commented, had thus mistakenly summarized the Latin patristic, Carolingian, and early medieval―basically Augustinian―theology of the Eucharist by way of its unreflective transposition into the idiom of the medieval sacramerntum tantum, res et sacramentum, res tantum. Yet we shall see that patristic theological tradition affirmed the nuptial and therefore implicitly covenantal ordo of the Head-Body relation of Christ to the Church. The patristic-Carolingian res sacramenti is revealed, in the context of the Amalarian “three bodies” controversy, to be the “One Flesh” of Christ and the Church, which requires that this free because covenantal union be rather the Eucharistic res et sacramentum of the early medieval sacramental paradigm than its res tantum. Yet the transposition of the phenomenological interest of the old patristic paradigm into the analytic interest of the medieval paradigm is a matter more complex than the Master of the Sentences and his boldest commentator recognize it to be. There can be no simple equation of any element of the one paradigm with any element of the other. They serve the same fides quaerens intellectum, but are otherwise irreducibly distinct.
Augustine, following I Corinthians 11 and Ephesians 5, understood the One Sacrifice to institute the irrevocable union in One Flesh of the second Adam and the second Eve, the New Covenant.[57] This union Augustine termed the “whole Christ,” the Christus totus, Jesus the Lord in his irrevocable nuptial union with the Church, who revealed himself to Paul on the road to Damascus.
The Augustinian ecclesiology requires that the Carolingian (Paschasius) “Corpus Christi mysticum”―which term de Lubac thinks to be original with Hesychius[58]―be the res, the infallible and immediate effect, ex opere operato if one may so speak, of the Eucharistic sacramentum. The early twelfth-century exploitation, in the time of Alger of Liége, of the sacramentum tantum, res et sacramentum, res tantum analysis to distinguish, within the earlier notion of the duplex res sacramenti, the Eucharistic real presence of the Christ from its immediate effect, i.e., the Church, is entirely consistent with the Augustinian Eucharistic theology, for Augustine insists upon the One-Flesh union of Christ and the Church as the immediate and infallible effect of the offering of the Eucharistic Sacrifice (thus, in the later analysis, the Church is within the effect ex opere operato of the sacramentum tantum, which is to say, it is integral with the res et sacramentum, but not as a product of transubstantiation: i.e., it is “non contenta” in the consecrated species). In brief, the Church is “contained” the res et sacramentum only because she is One Flesh with her Lord, caused by him as her head and thus inseparable from him.
To suppose that there is implicit in this twelfth century development the relegation of the Church to the Eucharistic res tantum would be to suppose the sacramentum tantum, res et sacramentum, res tantum analysis to entail the denial of the radical datum of the faith, viz., the institution of the New Covenant by the One Sacrifice of the Christ, which is absurd. From such a stance, the New Covenant would become a reality dependent upon the virtue of the worshiper, which again is nonsense. Further, it would also dehistoricize that reality, the Church, the Corpus Christi mysticum for, understood as the Eucharistic res tantum, the Church could have no historical sign value, no sacramental visibility or actuality: it would cease to be the sacramental sign that the Church must be if she is to be historical, for she has the historicity of her worship, i.e. a sacramental and radically finally Eucharistic historicity. We cannot really ascribe such sola fide subjectivity to the twelfth century custodians of the Augustinian tradition.
It is then inescapable that St. Thomas’ identification of the Eucharistic res tantum with the Corpus Christi mysticum, in the passage cited from his Commentary on the Sentences (cf. endnote 10), would deprive the Church of her inherent and constitutive free, nuptial relation to her Head, which relation constitutes the “whole Christ” of the Augustinian theology and which, according to Augustine, is the immediate effect of the Eucharistic consecration, indissociable from the offering of the One Sacrifice. The relegation of the Church to the standing of the res tantum, i.e., to the effect ex opere operantis of the Eucharist, understands the Church, insofar as the Body of Christ, to be “Body,” not in the nuptial or bridal sense required by the explicitly marital symbolism of Col. 1:15ff., Eph. 5:21-33, and by Augustine’s Christus totus, i.e., as in the nuptial inseparability from the Eucharistic presence of the Corpus Christi verum by which she is One Flesh with him. Rather, the Church so understood, merely as a intrinsically articulated society whose articulation suggests to St. Thomas an analogy with the articulation of a physical organism, in which each “member” is thus ordered for the benefit of the whole, much as we find “members” used by Paul in I Cor. 12 as the distinct but mutually supportive members of a physical organism, the “body” supported and defended (not caused) by their mutuality.
This Pauline analogy, if thus read in dissociation from the bridal sense of the Christ-Church union found in Ephesians 5 and stressed by St. Augustine, would suggest and in fact require an ecclesiology in which the Church is no longer caused by the Eucharist, as the second Eve proceeding from the side of the “sleeping” second Adam, but is merely the product, the effect, of the accumulation of her members. This “gathered church” theology envisions a church whose nonhistorical standing, sola fide, latent in such a reading of Paul, is explicit in the Reform ecclesiology. It is Catholic doctrine that the members of the Church are in fact “gathered,” but they are gathered by their baptism into the preexisting Church, the second Eve who, pace the careless language of the Lombard, is not “composed” by their gathering, but is rather the condition of its possibility. The language of “composition” is intelligible only insofar as it points to the free, Eucharistic, and therefore ecclesial unity of the communicant with the risen Christ, and thereby with the members of the Church: a union ever more complete by reason of an ever more profound personal entry into the Church’s worship of her Eucharistic Lord.
However, the passages cited from St. Thomas’ Commentary on the Sentences in endnote 10 are not definitive for his ecclesiology, for as we have seen in the same commentary, St. Thomas understands this ecclesial “body,” the Corpus Christi mysticum, to be so only as is in some way comparable to the res tantum: i.e., “quasi rem ultimam,” of the Eucharistic sacrifice but not identical with it―this with the consequence that, if his identification of the Church with the res tantum sacramenti would put the Church in danger of becoming understood to be invisible and thus nonhistorical, the “quasi” must stand in the way of that inference.
St. Thomas’ language would leave the historical Church in a metaphysical limbo were we not to read his “quasi” as we have seen de Lubac read Paschasius‘ “solidius,” viz., as understanding the Church’s union with her Lord to be the infallible effect of the One Sacrifice, and thus understanding the Church to be the historical consequence ex opere operato of the sacrificial presence of the Eucharistic Christ, for the second Adam and the second Eve cannot be separated in the Eucharistic liturgy, inasmuch as that liturgy causes, institutes, their freely irrevocable unity in fallen history, which is simply that of the New Creation, the One Flesh of the New Covenant instituted on the cross.
De Lubac has been at pains to point out that the expression. “Corpus Christi verum,” with its emphasis upon the reality of Christ’s Eucharistic presence, represents a change from the traditional patristic language which had been forced by Berengarius’ denial of the historical reality, i.e., the “veritas,” of the Eucharistic presence of the Jesus the Christ. Before Berengarius, “Corpus Christi verum” had referred to the Church, the bridal Body of whom Christ is the Head, rather than to the sacramental presence of Christ in the Eucharist. After Berengarius it was necessary to stress that which, notoriously, he had denied, the objective reality, the veritas, of the Real Presence, the truth of whose affirmation by the Words of Instition had until that time had never been put in question. Thus it was that “Corpus Christi verum” came to designate the Eucharistic Presence of the Christ, and the term “Corpus Christi mysticum” came to be a designation of the Church. However, as will be seen, the patristic res sacramenti of the Eucharist was more than the veritas, the immediate effect of the sacramentum; it was also virtus, the salvific efficacy of the veritas sacramenti, an efficacy that could only be ecclesial and, because ecclesial, historical, and therefore anagogical as well.
In light of these considerations, it is likely that St. Thomas intended to accommodate the infallibility of the sacramental (“figurative”) causality of the Corpus Christi verum, as effecting the Corpus Christi mysticum, to an effect less ultimate than the res tantum and at the same time definitive: viz., infallible rather than fallible. The then regnant sacramental analysis (sacramentum tantum, res et sacramentum, res tantum) did not appear to provide for that possibility, nor could it, unless and until the res et sacramentum was understood, as the earlier res sacramenti had been understood, to be not merely the product of transubstantiation, the Corpus Christi verum, but rather to designate the nuptial union of the Corpus Christi verum, i.e., Jesus Ch;rist, the High Priest Offering himself as the Victim of his One Sacrifice, instituting thereby the New Covenant, his union in one Flesh with his bridal Church, as taught in Jn. 19:34-5, Col. 1:15ff., and Eph. 5:21-33―the union named the “whole Christ” by St. Augustine in Sermo 341 among many other places, and taken for granted by the patristic exegesis of those texts. .
St. Thomas, when commenting on statements in the Sentences in which the older language of sacramentum, res sacramenti occurs, therefore does not intend to designate by “quasi res ultima” the res tantum of the Eucharist. as a literal translation of the expression would suppose. Rather, he understands the “quasi res ultima” to be the immediate and necessary effect of the Eucharistic presence of the Corpus Christi verum, the Christ, for he understands the Church to be signed by that Presence, thus to be an effect inseparable from the Eucharistic Presence of the Christ. This effect cannot have its cause in the free―and fallible―personal Communion of a worshiper; it is instituted, caused, by the sacrificial presence of Christ the Head as at once the High Priest and the Victim of the One Sacrifice. The Church is therefore one of the two inseparable but irreducible elements of the “duplex” effect ex opere operato of the Eucharistic signing, which is to say, of the institution of the Eucharistic Sacrifice by Jesus at the Last Supper.
The universal patristic interpretation of Jn. 19:34 as the institution of the Church, viz., the second Eve’s proceeding from the side of the “sleeping” second Adam on the cross, underlies this recognition of the “duplex res sacramenti” in the Eucharist.[59] This exegesis is certainly Augustine’s, but it does not originate with him: Tertullian had long since made it part of the African tradition, nor was it novel with him.
Clearly, the duplex res sacramenti cannot be read as though its meaning were controlled by the later analysis of sacramental causality set out in the tripartite paradigm of sacramentum tantum, res et sacramentum, res tantum. The “quasi res ultima” of this text must be understood within the context of the older patristic paradigm of sacramentum, res sacramenti, which understands the Church, the “Corpus Christi mysticum,”[60] to be the correlative and immediate effect of the sacramental signing of the “Corpus Christi verum.” This is true because the Words of Institution do not sign the Church, but only the “Corpus Christi verum,” the High Priest and the Victim of the One Sacrifice, whose Eucharistic presence is at one with but not identical with, the entirely dependent Eucharistic presence of the Church. She, the second Eve, the ecclesial Body, is present only because of the causally prior presence of the Corpus Christi verum, the second Adam, the Head, the Bridegroom, from whom she proceeds as his Glory. At the same time, by reason of the sacramental signing that is inseparable from his objective Eucharistic presence, she herself is infallibly, immediately, and objectively present as his Body, his Bride, his Glory, proceeding always from her Head and always in nuptial union with him. Where the Bridegroom is, there also is the Bride, One Flesh with him.
To repeat: it is only as included within the reality designated by the older idiom of “duplex res sacramenti” that the meaning of “quasi res ultima” can be understood: there this expression designates the Church as signed and caused by the sacramental presence of her Head, quite as the Second Eve has her source in her Head, the second Adam, and as created feminine wisdom has her source in uncreated Wisdom.[61]
We have seen that within the context of this older, patristic sacramental theology, there is no place for distinguishing what the later theological language will call the res tantum sacramenti, and which St. Thomas will describe―when using the older idiom and at the same time recognizing as his own the post-Berengarian apologetic theological concern―as “effectus huius sacramenti:” i.e., as the effect of personal sacramental Communion in the duplex res sacramenti. Thus, without gainsaying the phenomenological theological interest underlying that older idiom, whose interest is focused exclusively upon personal communion with the risen Christ in the One Flesh (mia sarx; σάρκα μίαν) instituted by the Eucharistic offering of the One Sacrifice, unconcerned for the abstract and fatal latencies of the fatally fragmented sarx that is our solidarity with the first Adam’s refusal to worship, St. Thomas carefully distinguishes, within the duplex res sacramenti, the free effect of this worship, effectus huius sacramenti, which can only be personal union with the risen Christ, but he does so without further naming it. Nor may one suppose that because that free effect of personal union with the risen Lord may be regarded in its eschatological dimension that it thereby coincides with the eschatological dimension of the Church; for the latter is a necessary effect of the Eucharistic signing, while the former is free effect of that signing and therefore is defeasible.
When later in the Summa Theologiae [62] St. Thomas specifically identifies the “effectus huius sacramenti” with the res tantum of the early medieval sacramentum tantum-res et sacramentum-res tantum analysis of Eucharistic causality, the distinction between the patristic res et sacramentum and the early medieval res tantum is that the latter is not the Augustinian expression of the full significance of existence in Christo, in ecclesia, but analytic, which is to say, it assumes the defeasibility of the communicant’s reception of Eucharstic communion, which is not understood as simply the communicant’s increased union with the risen Christ as the product of the communicant’s personal participation in the Church’s worship.
The patristic tradition was well aware of Paul’s warning against unworthy communion, but its sacramentum-res sacramenti paradigm was concerned for personal participation in the ecclesial celebration of the Eucharist, not for its blasphemous refusal. The patristic paradigm, sacramentum, res sacramenti, was entirely unambiguous. So much cannot be said for the medieval paradigm, whose analytic dimension presents a temptation, even an invitation, to the conceptual fragmentation of a paradigm which is a continuum. This entails the dissociation of its elements, and its dehistoricization, for in this analytic context, any abstraction of the elements of the analysis from their historical unity reduces them to entia rationis; mere words.
Thus the res tantum of the Eucharist, as “effectus huius sacramenti,” is methodologically intelligible only when the elements of this newer medieval analysis are understood concretely and historically, in their free unity, rather than, as too easily occurs, as abstracted from the concrete dynamic unity of the Eucharistic worship. At the same time, under this post-Berengarian medieval analysis, the free intelligibility, ex opere operantis, of the effectus huius sacramenti has become explicit, as it had not been under the older sacramentum, res sacramenti analysis.
Nonetheless, de Lubac’s uneasiness with the new analysis is understandable, for the analytical clarity thus gained, the distinction between the infallible and the fallible effects of the Eucharistic signing, is purchased at the risk of losing the historical unity of the older analysis, which was concerned solely with the experience of worship in the Church, the experience in which the dichotomous fleshly experience of existence simul justus et peccator is not annulled but transcended by Eucharistic Communion in the One Flesh, wherein the anguish of fallen, fleshly existence is resolved in anagogic union with the risen One Flesh of the risen Christ in his Kingdom as signed in history by his Church which thereby exists in the salvation history whose Lord is its Beginning and its End.
Within the pre-Berengarian, liturgically-formed Augustinian-patristic consciousness, the worshiper cannot and does not distinguish his Eucharistic Communion with the risen Christ from his existence in ecclesia. This unity, Communion in the unitas corporis, is indeed free. Its prior condition of possibility, as with the reception of all the sacraments, is the infallibly instituted covenantal and nuptially-ordered unity of the risen Christ with his bridal Church. The peril inherent in the medieval recourse to the tri-partite, post-Berengarian analysis is that the distinction between the three elements of this dense Eucharistic dialectic can so easily be understood to be their isolation from each other as thing from thing: i.e., their rationalization, their abstraction from their free historical unity, the unity of a free event, not of a thing.
This temptation to rationalize freedom into necessity had also been a danger with the sacramentum - res sacramenti analysis: we know that Cyprian and the Donatists had rationalized its free unity into a denial of fallen freedom in the baptized and the ordained in such wise as to force the inference that a recipient of baptism, or an ordained cleric, could not sin, as a matter of definition: consequently the presence of sin in a baptized or ordained Christian was interpreted as the annulment of his baptism or orders. The sin of the recipient subsequent to a purported baptism or ordination was held to have been proven his baptism and-or his ordination to have been a nullity.
The reverse of that error would be to think of the effectus huius sacramenti as abstract and unspecified, as Paul in I Cor. 11:27-8 very clearly did not. There can be no neutral “effectus,” no neutral consequence of the reception of the Eucharist: the communicant eats and drinks either to his salvation or to his damnation. Yet it would be a gross error to equiparate these alternatives: the “effectus huius sacramenti” can only be salvation; damnation is the effect of sin, not the effect of a sacramental signing.
The misreading of the texts of St. Thomas cited in the endnotes quoted at the beginning of this Volume had understood him to identify the referent of the older duplex res sacramenti (the nuptial, covenantal union of Christ, the second Adam and his bridal Church who is the second Eve―concretely, the nuptially-ordered New Covenant)―with the referent of the res et sacramentum of the later sacramental analysis, inasmuch as it was clearly the immediate effect, hence the effect ex opere operato, of the offering of the Eucharistic sacrifice.
This interpretation was clearly mistaken, for in this text St. Thomas accepted, in fact endorsed, what Peter Lombard there taught in the passage commented upon, viz., that the Eucharistic res et sacramentum of the newer sacramental analysis is the Real Presence of the Christ, at once High Priest and Victim of that One Sacrifice, distinct, but not disjunct, from the Church that, as the immediate effect of the Real Presence of her Lord, is not isolated from him but rather is signed by him within the Eucharistic liturgy, and therefore cannot be isolated from him in Eucharistic theology.[63]
We have seen that when, in the Commentary on the Sentences, St. Thomas writes in the context of the newer or medieval sacramental paradigm, he appears, like the Master of the Sentences, to understand the Church to be final effect, ex opere operato, of the Eucharistic signing, viz., the res tantum. Obviously, Peter Lombard had not understood this designation to be the dehistoricizing of the Church, nor had St. Thomas in his Commentary. In both cases, this is the consequence of the influence upon their thought of the “duplex res sacramenti” of the Augustinian-patristic paradigm, in which the Church is understood as the unitas corporis, whose unity includes the Head and the members of the Body in the One Flesh.
Nonetheless, this holistic viewpoint cannot be as simply maintained within the post-Berengarian medieval paradigm for, in distinguishing between the res et sacramentum and the res tantum as ex opere operato in the former, and ex opere operantis on the latter, the conceptual distinctions provided by the later paradigm’s defense of sacramental realism cannot but entail their theological distinction as well―a distinction which had been irrelevant to the experiential or phenomenological interest of the earlier patristic sacramentum–res sacramenti paradigm, but which had become central to the defense of that realism against its rejection by Berengarius.
The legitimacy and the necessity of the early medieval analytical distinction between the infallible and the fallible effects of the Eucharistic signing must be accepted―as de Lubac has done, however regretfully.
However, the new defensive paradigm carried with it the danger of the theological, not merely conceptual, dissociation of the Eucharistic res et sacramentum from its anagogic fulfillment, the Kingdom of God, for that fulfillment, included within the anagogical dimension of the patristic res sacramenti, is infallibly given by the One Sacrifice; it does not wait upon our fallible use of our graced freedom to enter into eternal life. Similarly the res tantum of the medieval paradigm cannot simply be identified with the res sacramenti of the patristic paradigm, for it is a fallible effect, as the patristic res sacramenti emphatically is not. The final, anagogical effect of the Eucharistic signing, viz., the Kingdom, is efficaciously signed, infallibly―or, in the later idiom, ex opere operato, by the Eucharistic institution of the One Flesh. The Spirit is fully given in the One Sacrifice, and the terminus of the Trinitarian Missions, the One Flesh, the New Covenant, the good creation in its unsullied plenitude and splendor, is irrevocably achieved. This is objective, historical fact, whose objectivity and historicity is its infallibly effective Eucharistic signing. One may not, consequently, suppose the eschatological effect of the Eucharistic signing to be ex opere operantis simply insofar as it is eschatological for, as the eschatological union of the Church with her Lord, it is very clearly an effect ex opere operato. Similarly, one may not suppose the free effect of the Eucharistic signing, the communicant’s union with the Christ in ecclesia, to be simply eschatological insofar as free, for its freedom is sacramentally caused, and hence is irrevocably historical.
Therefore, unless the Church is herself to be dehistoricized―a dehistoricization that entails the dehistoricization of the Eucharistic worship and a correlative denial of the Eucharistic sacrifice―she must be recognized to be included within the res et sacramentum of the Eucharist as she was understood to be included in the duplex res sacramenti of the pre-medieval Augustinian theology, the res gemina, the One Flesh of the Christ, the Head, and the Church that is his body. Neither is it possible to dissociate the res tantum sacramenti, as ex opere operantis, from the unqualified historicity of the Church’s worship; that would be to accept the Reform’s subjectiveunderstanding of salvation as by faith alone..
In the Summa Theologiae, St. Thomas thrice deploys the duplex res sacramenti account of the efficacy of the Eucharistic signing, using that expression, or its equivalent, in S. T. iiia, q. 60, a. 3, in q. 73, a. 3, and in q. 80, a. 4, sc: [64]
But to the contrary, in the sacrament of the altar there is a double signified effect, that is to say, the true and the mystical body of Christ, as Augustine says in the Book of the Opinions of Prosper.
S. T. iiia, q. 60, a. 3, sc. The reference the “Book of the Opinions of Prosper” (of Aquitaine) is to the latter’s summary of Augustine’s theology in the form of excerpts from his works; see Prosper’s Liber Sententiarum, ser. Corpus Christianorum, series Latina 68a, Prosperi Aquitani Opera, pars 2: Expositio Psalmorum; Liber sententiarum (Brepos: Turnholt, 1972). The Corpus Christianorum edition of Prosper’s Liber does not inform us of any text of St. Augustine supporting St. Thomas’ equation of the duplex res with the “Corpus Christi verum et mysticum.” The editors of the Marietti edition (1948) of the Summa Theologiae append here a note (4) directing the reader to the canon Hoc est quod dicimus, de Consecr., dist. 2, and to Lanfranc’s De Corpore et Sanguine Domini, c. 14.
St. Thomas’ reply to the objections raised under this question:
I answer it should be said that in this sacrament there are two things to consider, that is, the sacramental sign, and the effect of the sacramental sign. It has been said that the effect of the sacramental sign is the unity of the mystical body, without which there can be no salvation.
S. T. iiia, q. 73, a. 3, c.
The clear import of the two quotations supra is St. Thomas’ identification of the duplex res sacramenti with the union of the Corpus Christi verum and the Corpus Christi mysticum, wherein we have seen him speak of the former as “figurative” of the latter: i.e., as signing and thus causing the Church:
I answer that it must be said that in this sacrament, as in the others, that that which is the sacramentum is the sign of that which is the res sacramenti (the effect of the sacramentum). Moreover the effect of this sign is double, as was said above 5): one effect in fact that is signified and contained, that is to say, Christ himself, and another effect that is signified and not contained, that is, the mystical body of Christ, which is the society of the saints. Therefore whoever receives this sacrament by that very fact signifies himself to be united to Christ and to be incorporated in his members. This in fact is done through faith informed (by charity), which no one with mortal sin has. It is therefore evident that anyone in mortal sin who receives this sacrament commits a falsity in this sacramental signing. And therefore he incurs sacrilege, as a violator of the sacramental sign. And because of that, he sins mortally.
5. S. T. iiia, Q. 60, a. 3, arg. Sed contra, q. 73, a. 6.
S. T. iiia, q. 80, a. 4, c.
In the 1948 Marietti edition of the Summa Theologiae here used, a sixth editorial note. appended to the second objection posed to this article, defines “fidem informatum” in the usual sense of salvific faith,: i.e., faith informed by charity, as in contrast to “fides informis,” i.e., faith uninformed by charity, a faith that is not salvific: e.g., the faith proper to fallen angels, who “tremble and believe.”
On the first occasion in the Summa Theologiae in which he uses this Augustinian-patristic sacramental analysis (i.e., sacramentum, res sacramenti), St. Thomas refers explicitly to Augustine as its authority, perhaps because its language was no longer in common use in the latter thirteenth century. This older understanding of Eucharistic realism is entirely assimilable to the analysis expressed in the later tripartite formula but, as we have seen, it is a different analysis, for it ignores the res tantum sacramenti of the later analysis by having included even the fallible dimension of that reality within the res sacramenti, the unitas corporis, not as though the worshiper’s Communion with the risen Christ were an infallible effect, but rather as a free effect that is concretely or phenomenologically or existentially inseparable from the unitas corporis. As we have seen, this existential basis for theology is taken for granted in St. Anselm’s famous definition of theology as fides quaerens intellectum. Theology is there understood, as it was by the Fathers, to be a committed enterprise, arising out of personal participation in the faith of the Church. So it remains: theology is not “religious studies.”
St. Thomas has already stated the conformity of the later or medieval analysis with the earlier patristic analysis, in his Comm. in IV Sent., and does so again in the Summa Theologiae, Pars Tertia, q. 80, a. 4, c., by distinguishing, within the duplex res, its effect in “quicumque ergo hoc sacramentum sumit;” this effect, intrinsic to the “duplex res,” is then equivalently the personal “effectus huius sacramenti” which he identifies with the res tantum sacramenti of the later, medieval sacramental paradigm. This free effect (ex opere operantis) of the Eucharistic signing is included within the older, patristic idiom of “duplex res sacramenti” for reasons we have already noted. Put simply, the worshiper worships in the Church and as worshipping is within her free unity, thus freely inseparable from her. Equivalently, this union with the risen Christ is effected by the Eucharistic signing: it is, precisely, “effectus huius sacramenti,” a phrase that became problematic when, as in the Sentences, we find “res significata” is replaced by “res contenta.”
The third of the passages cited supra (S. T. iiia, q. 80, a. 4, c.) in which St. Thomas uses the patristic sacramental analysis has been quoted at length in order, in the first place, to make it clear that, for St. Thomas, as for the patristic tradition,[65] “Corpus Christi mysticum” and “societas sanctorum” refer to the historical Church, not merely the eschatological Church for, after describing the second element of the duplex res sacramenti as “significata et non contenta, scilicet Corpus Christi mysticum, quod est societas sanctorum,” he goes on to describe the effect of Eucharistic Communion as personal union with Christ and membership in the Church that is his Body, excepting those who receive Communion while in mortal sin, a reception consequently sacrilegious. Clearly, the Church St. Thomas has here in view is the Church of sinners, the historical Church, participation in whose worship is the subject of the Augustinian phenomenological theology. It is also the Church as built up, “gathered,” as the Didache has it,[66] by the distribution of the verum Christi corpus to her members, a distribution whose ecclesial density prompted some of the Fathers to speak rather of the Church as the recipient of the Eucharistic nourishment, than of the individual members of the Church. This usages witnesses to the unitas corporis mystici earlier noted. The Church is prior to her members, but not indifferent to them, for their sacramental worship is her historical concreteness, while their personal historicity is actual in their worship, which is always in ecclesia, in sacramento. It cannot be too often repeated that history is a sacramental reality, a theological category, whose unity is free simply because it is liturgical, and therefore is Eucharistically ordered. Any other notion of the intrinsic intelligibility of history, such as current theological assertions of a “dialectic’ relation between fallen history and its eschatological realization, reduce that realization to another ineffable monadic resolution of the one and the many
In the opening pages of Corpus mysticum, de Lubac cited a number of early patristic sources witnessing to a common understanding that unitas corporis, unitas ecclesiae has its source in the Eucharist, the sacramentum unitatis.[67] In the same context, he developed variations on theme of “communio sanctorum” as communion at once and equally in “holy things,” and in the “holy people.” This led him further to develop, in the pages following, the Augustinian assertion of the unity of Eucharistic reception and of incorporation in the Church; the union that Augustine named the “whole Christ,” the Christus totus.[68] It is curious that in these pages devoted to it, de Lubac should have ignored the one of the clearest statements of this extraordinarily influential Augustinian development of the Pauline nuptial symbolism: Sermo 341.
Within Eucharistic worship, sacramental and ecclesial Communion are quite evidently inseparable: hence the inseparability of the sacramental and the ecclesial bodies of Christ. However this Communion with the risen Lord by participation in the Eucharistic worship of the Church is not generally understood by the Fathers to be a nuptial union in the full covenantal sense of the One Flesh: i.e., as invoking and expressing the freedom indispensable to both parties of the covenant. Nonetheless, it is only when the freedom of the Eucharistic Communion with the risen Christ is stressed, and the intrinsic freedom of the Eucharistic community as well, that the communion of the worshiper with the risen Lord, with and in the Church, can be a free and personal participation in the One Flesh of the New Covenant, and thus an expression of the covenantal fidelity necessary to salvation. It is only thus, as free because sustained by the nuptial order of the Eucharistic liturgy, that his worship can be his imaging of God.
It must be kept always in mind that there is no concrete unity intrinsic to history other than that of the One Flesh, sacramentally instituted―primarily in the Eucharist, and secondarily in marriage. No alternative to the sacramental objectivity of historical unity has ever been discovered, and even the possibility of such an alternative objective unity in history has recently been foreclosed as barred by rationality itself.[69] The intellectual quest by the pagan world, East and West, for such an intrinsic unity has been futile, leading only to a flight from history, whether to an historically ineffable ideal unity, or to the coercive imposition of an unity at once irrational and unfree upon a thereby non-covenantal and dehistoricized society.
The only objective unity in history is at once free and sacramental: viz., the Eucharistic representation of that free unity, the One Flesh of the second Adam and the second Eve, instituted by the Christ who, as the Head, the Lord of history and its redeemer, is the single source of the long-sought free unity of the Good Creation lost in the primordial Fall, and restored to the fallen, fleshly, disintegrating world solely by his death and resurrection, his “recapitulation of all things” through the sacrificial institution of the One Flesh. This is the strict implication of the ἀνακεφαλαιώσασθαι τὰ πάντα ἐν τῷ χριστῷ (anakephalaiōsasthai ta panta en tō Xristō) of Eph. 1:10.[70]
In brief, we are created in Christ the Head; we are fallen in the first Adam, but in the second or New Adam we have been recreated by the Gift of the Spirit of freedom, a freedom of the New Covenant whose order can only be nuptial. To this nuptially-ordered freedom there is no alternative other than the despair that forms, frames, and imprisons the pagan world. We are delivered from this otherwise universal despair by the revelation of the good creation whose goodness is its free unity, the unity of the Christus totus, the One Flesh, the appropriation of which is solely in sacramento, in ecclesia.
De Lubac’s preliminary references to the Christus totus are hardly clear: the chief referent is always the Church: but often there is evident a confusion in his thought between the free unity of the Church qua tale and the free unity of Christ and the Church in One Flesh or, minimally, a failure to distinguish between them. Simply as a matter of logic, the nuptial unity of the second Adam and the second Eve cannot be identified with the unity of the Church that their One Flesh nonetheless betokens, for the nuptially-ordered covenantal unity, the One Flesh of Bridegroom and the bride, is the causal presupposition of the intrinsic free unity of the bridal Church: i.e., the Bride is free only as in nuptial union with her Head, her Bridegroom. It is this covenantal unity, the nuptial One Flesh of Christ and the Church, that Augustine had designated the Christus totus. De Lubac recognizes the totus Christus to present, to the Carolingian theologians, a “perspective de totalité et d’unité,” but it is evidently a confused perspective: concerning it, they “scarcely experience any need to seek out formulae or qualifications to distinguish “body” from “body.” Yet it is only by way of such distinctions that the “totus Christus” is intelligible as a free unity.[71]
Here it must be kept in view that in the first place, from the fifth century onward, the Latin patristic tradition is heavily influenced by the genius of Augustine, whose theological expression of his personal faith, of his personal conversion, is spontaneously phenomenological, in that he is concerned always with the truth, at once veritas and virtus, and the salvific efficacy, of personal experience of and personal participation in the worship in the Church, as that in and by which the dichotomies of our personal fragmentation, of our solidarity with the fall of the first Adam, “simul justus et peccator,” are transcended by our Eucharistic communion in the sancta societas, the nuptial union of Christ and the Church, wherein alone our existential restlessness is objectively resolved in what he has named the unitas corporis Christi, wherein we recognize that our “restlessness” is our fallen solidarity with the first Adam, healed but not removed by the second Adam’s sacrificial institution of the One Flesh, an eminently Pauline insight.
It follows that Augustine’s references to this experience of our integration in the “whole Christ” are not analytic. He is not interested in the conceptual exposition of the unitas corporis Christi. Because our participation in its freedom cannot but be itself free, that unity is not open to such analysis, which always presupposes the abstract and therefore ideal unity of its object. Because the concrete unity of personal existence in ecclesia exists only as free, as grace, as free assimilation to the unitas corporis Christi, it is the subject of theology, not its object. The objective reality of personal communion in the unitas corporis Christi is presupposed rather than questioned.
As de Lubac has famously insisted, the Augustinian theology knows nothing of an ungraced (i.e., “natural”) reality. Yet that theology knows a constant temptation, to which Augustine in his latter years showed himself not immune, to lapse into the sarkic mentality, whose quest for necessary reasons inevitably disintegrates all free unity by submitting it to the dynamic of fragmentation upon which our fallen reason is inexorably intent, seeking a necessary intelligibility, a rational synthesis of the fragmented universe which it cannot find. This failing is of course entirely alien to his lifelong quest for the “ancient beauty, forever new,” the Christ, the intus magister, intimius intimo meo.
The Church considered apart from her sponsal union with the Christ is not the Christus totus.. The Church; as the Bride, cannot be identified either with her Head, the Christ, or with their union in One Flesh. Their One Flesh is their free, nuptial unity, a covenantal unity of two free spouses, not therefore in the literal sense a unity whether of “One Body,” or of “One Person.”
The unity of the Church with Christ, as Head, is a scriptural datum. Speaking to Paul on the road to Damascus, the risen Jesus the Christ identified himself with that community which, as Head, he had freed to be his bridal body, the Church who, in that freedom, is joined with him in the One Flesh that is the New Covenant, instituted by his One Sacrifice. Nonetheless, the Fathers and the medieval theologians often read his “headship” in the merely organic terms of I Cor. 12:12ff. and Rom. 12:4ff, in which all the members of the ecclesial body, however disparate their ecclesial offices, have the same basic moral responsibility: i.e., the support of the Church. At the same time, it is evident that the members cannot be understood to be the cause of the bridal Church, for the free unity, the free, nuptially-ordered Communion that the Church receives as proceeding from her nuptial Head, is the presupposition of the responsible, because free, ecclesial role of each of her members, a role that is in each case nuptially signed, for the covenantal fidelity of each member of the Church is a nuptially-ordered fidelity, a Communion in the Una Caro, the New Covenant, achieved in the offering of the One Sacrifice. The members of the Church can and should contribute to the unity into which they are baptized, but the cannot cause it; obviously it preexists their baptism and their Communion in her with her Lord.
For example, De Lubac maintains (Corpus mysticum, at 127) that I Cor. 12:12ff. (with Rom. 12:4), rather than I Cor. 10-11, controls the Pauline meaning of “head.” He believes I Cor. 12 to have been written by Paul “en approfondissement le vieil apologue de la tête et des membres” found in I Cor. 10-11 and in the parallel passage in Rom. 12:4. In this, he is simply mistaken.
The context controlling the interpretation of I Cor. 10-11 is Paul’s explanation (I Cor. 11:3) of the Trinitarian foundation of the nuptially-ordered Head-Body relation, while the context controlling that of I Cor. 12 is entirely different, for there Paul sets out the responsibilities of each of the variously positioned members of the Church for the well-being of each other and of the whole Body, the Church, whom he has already affirmed, in the just-concluded discussion, to be the Bride, nuptially and therefore personally distinct from the Bridegroom, thus personally distinct from the Head who, as Head, obviously cannot be a member of the Church he heads, for he is the free source of her freedom.
The references to the “head” in I Cor. 12 are entirely metaphorical, as are the references there to the other bodily organs in relation to the head. The ancillary organs of the body do not protect the Head who is Jesus the Christ: the reverse is true. In I Cor. 12 and Rom. 12:4, Paul exhorts the members of the Church to recognize the obligations inherent in their covenantal fidelity, a fidelity whose order is nuptial. Clearly, his exhortation is not addressed to the Christ, whether misunderstood to be a member of his Body, the Church, or to be in Personal identity with her. It is past discussion that Jesus the Christ cannot be a member of the Church for whom he died or of the bridal Body with whom he is in nuptial union.
De Lubac’s discussion of the patristic tradition lacks clarity on this point. One the one hand, he rejects the notion that the body of Christ is “from” the body that is the Church; yet he appears to regard the Christ-Church union as quasi-organic: e.g.:
Although, from a certain viewpoint, the Church can be one of the customarily numbered three bodies, she is not however in reality, by relation to the first two, an “other body.” Thus envisaged, she is only “the other body,” “the remaining body,” that is to say, the remainder of the body, in contrast to the Head. Were one to envisage her in her totality, that is to say, with her head, then she is herself the Body who, in the last analysis, contains in herself all the body of which on can say that they are of Christ.[72] (emphasis added).
Thus, following his patristic sources, de Lubac refuses to separate the Church, as though a separate “corpus,” from what he understands to be the quasi-organic union of Christ and the Church in “The Body” for, clearly, here he understands the Church, in union with her Head, to form a “body,” not the covenantally-ordered una caro of their nuptial union. It is on that basis that de Lubac understands the Church, in union with her head, to comprise in herself all that is “body” in relation to the Head.
While his final conclusion that the Church is “Body” by her relation to her Head is unquestionably correct, it is also insufficient, for her union with Christ the Head as his bridal Body is nuptial and therefore free and covenantal: but the union of Christ with the Church is not in that ecclesial Body, but in the nuptial One Flesh of the New Covenant and not, as de Lubac has it, in “One Body.” Paul never speaks of that sponsal union as though it were an organism, a physical unity of head and body. Paul speaks of the Church as a “corpus” only to describe her intrinsically free unity into which her members are baptized: this is that unity which is proper to the Church herself but which is hers only as received from her Head as his Bride.
Thus, her nuptial union with her Spouse is causally prior to and constitutive of her free intrinsic unity, the unity that connotes the moral freedom and moral responsibility of her members. It is their fallen weakness, not hers, and, à fortiori, not that of her Head, that has prompted the moral exhortation that Paul has written into I Cor. 12 and 13. That exhortation presupposes the Church’s nuptial relation to and personal distinction from her Spouse, her Head. This we know from I Cor. 11:3, wherein the Father, as Father, is the Head of the Son, and the Christ, as Bridegroom, is the Head of the bridal Church. In Col. 1:15 Paul affirms the Bridegroom to be the Head of creation as well as of the Church. The nuptial union of Christ and the Church, which is derived from, depends upon, and images the transcendentally free union of the Father and the Son, is covenantal because it is first nuptial, the free unity of Christ and his bridal Church: in short, it is the New Covenant in his Blood, instituted by the One Sacrifice. This is the clear teaching 1 Cor. 11 and Eph. 5:21-33.
In the opening paragraph of the first chapter of Corpus mysticum, de Lubac has finely written of the patristic and early medieval witnesses to the unity of Christ and the Church in the Pauline-Augustinian tradition, illustrating the theme by an examination of its signal Latin witnesses.[73] A bit further on, he summarizes that tradition as follows:
Ainsi le sacramentum panis les conduit tout droit à l’unitas corporis26. A leurs eux, l’Eucharistie est essentialement, comme elle l’était déja pour Paul et pour les Pères, mysterium unitatis27, elle est sacramentum conjunctionis, federationis, adunationis28. Elle nous a été donnée “ad unitatem naturae nostrae”29. N’est-ce pas la verité que nous inculquent plusieurs de ses rites et des termes qui les désignent? Tel ce nom de “collecte” dont Amalaire nous avertit qu’il a été donné à la première oraison de la messe, “quia populus inchoatur colligare in unum”30.
26 Bède, In Lucam, 1, 6 (P. L., 92, 628 B), d’après Augustin, De consensu evangelistarum, 1, 3, c, 25, n. 72 (34, 1206). Amalaire, De ecclesiasticis officiis (le titre véritabile est: Liber officialis), 1, 3, c. 34 (105, 1153 D).
27 Ildefonse (P. L., 96, 170 B). Haimon, Homilia 62 (118, 350 A). Remi d’Auxerre, Expositio missae (c. 40 du Liber de divinis officiis, compilation mise sous le nom d’Alcuin; P. L., 101, 1260 C et D). Cf. Hilaire, De trinitate, 1, 3, c. 24: “Sacramentum perfectae unitatis” (10, 246 B); Augustin, Epistula 185, n. 50 (33, 815).
28 Eutherius et Beatus, Ad Elipandum (en785) (P. L., 96, 41 D), Amalaire (105, 1131 B), Raban Maur, De clericorum institutione (107,320 B); In Numeros, I. 3: “De nostro populo, qui in sacramentis Christi confederatus est” (108, 744 B). Hincmar, De cavendis vitiis, c. 10 (125, 924 B, 925 A). Jusqu’au XIIIe siècle inclus, de telles expressions seront courantes; c’est parce qu’elle est sacramentum unitatis, sacramentum communionis, que, aux yeux d’un certain nombre de théologiens, les schismatiques ne pourront avoir l’Eucharistie, se trouvant eux-mêmes hors de l’unité, hors de la communion. Voir les textes cités par Landgraf dans Scholastik, 1940, pp. 210 et 211. Cf, infra, conclusion.
29 Paschase Radbert, Liber de corpore et sanguine Domini, c. 10 (P. L., 120, 1305 C).
30 Ainsi le nom “collecte”. Amalaire, Eclogae de officio missa: “Prima oratio… dicitur collecta, quia populus inchoatur colligare in unum” (P. L., 106, 1327 D). Remi d’Auxerre (101, 1249 D), etc.
De Lubac. Corpus mysticum, at 27.
Following the Institution Narratives in the Synoptics and First Corinthians, the patristic-monastic tradition teaches that the Christ’s One Sacrifice, offered on the cross and on the altar, institutes the New Covenant. Further, given the universal patristic interpretation of Jn. 19:34 as the fulfillment of Gen. 2:24, there is no doubt of the patristic tradition’s identification of the New Covenant with the One Flesh of Christ and his Church, nor is it questioned that the patristic tradition understands this institution to be the immediate and infallible effect of the One Sacrifice: viz., the institution of the New Covenant is not dependent upon the virtue of its beneficiaries as though it were a grace given ex opere operantis, i.e., as though it were the res tantum sacramenti of the later theological parlance. The patristic hermeneutic and the monastic lectio divina alike understood the Covenant to be instituted by Jesus the Christ, not by the piety or faith of the members of the Church. Whatever else may be said of it, the infallible institution of the New Covenant by the One Sacrifice is for the patristic tradition what the medieval theology will call the res et sacramentum of the Eucharist. As covenantal, this effect cannot but be the free unity, the nuptial One Flesh, of Christ and the Church, as Paul taught in Ephesians 5 and John taught in Jn. 19:34-35.[74]
While de Lubac is explicit that, for this tradition, personal Communion in the Church is at one with the worthy reception of Communion in the sacrificed Body of the Lamb of God, he is also clear that the early writers from Augustine onward did not elaborate a conceptual distinction between the two effects of the Eucharistic signing, viz., the institution of the Covenant and personal participation in the Eucharistic One Flesh, the unitas corporis.[75] That task was left to those who, centuries later, were called upon to counter the Berengarian heresy. Out of that controversy arose the doctrinal exposition of the efficacious signing by Eucharistic liturgy, as the comparable exposition of the Trinitarian faith had occurred in consequence of the Arian heresy. With the Berengarian confusion, it became necessary to distinguish the elements of the sacramentum unitatis, equivalent, as we have seen, to the duplex res sacramenti, the res gemina, without which there is no salvation.
We have remarked that in de Lubac’s view this early medieval clarification entailed both profit and loss. The profit was the effective safeguarding of the orthodox faith: i.e., of the Church’s worship in truth of the Truth incarnate. The loss occasioned by that defensive necessity to narrow the range of the Eucharistic interest of the fides quaerens intellectum by focusing it upon the affirmation of the reality of what Berengarius had denied, viz., the objective sacramental immanence of the Eucharistic Lord, was a diminution of interest in and attention to the free unity of the Eucharistic worship that had until then been taken for granted by the Fathers in their multifold elaboration of the allegorical understanding of the Eucharistic mystery which is the object of that historical worship.
De Lubac has stressed that there can be no doubt of the simultaneity, in the minds of these writers, of the Eucharistic Real Presence of Jesus the Christ, at once as the High Priest offering himself, and as the Lamb of God, the Victim offered in his One Sacrifice, with the inseparable sacramental effect of that Offering, the free unity of the Church. The Real Presence, thus sacrificially understood, and the Church are given together as cause and its immediate and inseparable effect As we have seen, de Lubac insists that this effect is a “unitas corporis.” Read literally, however, this a multi-valent term.
First, “unitas corporis,” abstractly considered, can refer to the Eucharistic Lord himself, in whom the unity of his divinity and his humanity is free because proper to, identical to, his free obedience to his historical mission from the Father, the obedience unto death of the Son who images his Father on the cross, precisely by becoming there the Head of a glory, the Church, of whose free unity he, is the source, precisely as her Head.
Secondly, by a comparable abstraction, ”unitas corporis” may refer also to the unity of the Church, the free moral unity intrinsic to the Body, the moral unity Paul treats in I Cor. 12:12 and Rom. 12:4ff. That intrinsically free community, the bridal Church into whom her members are baptized and thereby gathered into her prior unity with her Lord, is the gift of Christ, the creative work, the historically concrete effect then, of his obedience “unto death, death on the cross,” and of the consequent outpouring from the Father through the Son of the Spirit he has lavished upon the Church, by which Gift she is freely his Bride, the Body whose distinction from him is actual and express in her worship of him as the Head from which she, as his glory, proceeds in the consummation of his One Sacrifice, in immediate free nuptial unity with him.
The patristic and early medieval emphasis upon the union of the Bridegroom and the Bride rather than upon the distinction of the spouses needs no justification: it is their union that is salvific, “the holy society by which we belong to God,”[76] without which, as St. Thomas has insisted, there is no salvation. This “sancta societas” can only the New Covenant, instituted by the One Sacrifice. For Augustine, and for the Latin tradition of which he is the major source, the nuptial union of Christ, the Bridegroom, with his bridal Church is not in question: following Paul, St. Augustine had insisted upon it.
Thus, finally, “unitas corporis,” as understood historically and concretely by the patristic and early medieval authors on whom de Lubac relies, refers concretely not to the Church simply, nor simply to the Christ who as Head is the source of her free unity, but to the duplex res sacramenti, the free nuptial unity, the One Flesh, of Christ and the Church, the “holy society” which cannot be identified with Christ, or with the Church, precisely because it is their nuptial union, the “whole Christ” of Augustine’s idiom. After all, the Church receives her unity from her Spouse: her “unitas corporis” cannot be other than a nuptial unity. We have just seen St. Augustine identify this nuptial unity with the Eucharistic food and drink, an indispensable insight, for it provides the irrefutable answer to the meaning of the unitas corporis: it can only be the Eucharistic unity of the One Flesh: the concretely historical nuptial union of the Corpus Christi verum and Corpus Christi mysticum in una caro, the integrating cause of the free unity of the ecclesial body. It is also clear that this is the Augustinian-patristic duplex res sacramenti, res gemina, the sacramental representation of the full Gift of the Spirit, the One Sacrifice, offered identically, inseparably, upon the cross and upon the altar. .
De Lubac has summarized the apologetic task confronting the early medieval theology in terms of developing a new “concordisme,” here translated as “attempt to harmonize.”[77]
More laborious would be the accomplishment of this new attempt to harmonize by the perfect unification of the last two terms of each series: the caro spiritualis―become meanwhile according to some persons caro mystica―and the corpus-Ecclesia―itself in process of becoming with some others Corpus Christi mysticum. If the former caro spiritualis, before giving place to a caro materialis, had formerly merged without too much difficulty with the Corpus Christi mysticum of Rhabanus Maurus and Paschasius Radbertus, now it was no longer the same: the new acceptation of caro spiritualis did not coincide so easily with the Corpus Christi mysticum in its new meaning. Being no longer simply the Eucharist, by that fact the “spiritual flesh” of the Christ was thereby no longer the Church.
The unification was nevertheless attempted. It was accomplished, not without some fumbling, within the framework of the sacramental theory that distinguished within the mystery of the Eucharist a triple element: sacramentum-tantum, res-et-sacramentum, res-tantum. The theory was of Augustinian inspiration, although it did not respond exactly to the habitual language of St. Augustine.1 If its conceptuality, of a rather academic flavor, contrasted vividly with the fluid thought of St. Augustine, it nonetheless permitted—and this was a great advantage—dissipating the equivocation burdening the two expressions, sacramentum and res sacramenti, and of escaping thereby contradictory interpretations, alike untenable, of the texts in which the great Doctor used those terms.
1 For him, the res sacramenti is still most often the res gesta (or gerenda) of which the rite is the memorial (or the heralding symbol, the anticipation). In the case of the Christian sacrament, it is a matter of that res gesta which is the death and resurrection of the Christ; the daily sacrifice of the Church is the sacrament of that reality that was the sacrifice of Calvary. Cf. De civ. dei 10, c. 20 (P.L. 41, 298); Contra Faustum, 1, 19, c. 13-14 (42, 255); Sermo 22 (38, 1246); Epist. 55, n. 1 (33, 305); Enchiridion c. 42 (33, 253), etc. However, In Joannem, tract. 26 (35, 1614); Sermo 227 (37, 110), etc. Cf. Pseudo-Bède, In Joannem; “tanta rei sacramentum” (P.L. 72, 719A); it is the passion that is here in view. See above, ch. ii.
Corpus mysticum, at 189.[78]
The antecedents of this quest for a “new effort to harmonize” the meaning of “caro spiritualis” with that of “corpus-ecclesia” (Corpus Christi mysticum) should be understood. In the preceding chapter of his Corpus mysticum, entitled “Caro spiritualis,” Lubac has traced these terms to their source in the patristic discernment, within the res sacramenti, of a distinction between a veritas and a virtus. However, before proceeding to develop this distinction, he distinguishes the meanings which the patristic tradition has given to corpus and to caro, i.e., to “body,” and to “flesh.”
De tout temps, on l’a vu, caro s’était dit de l’Eucharistie plus spécifiquement que corpus. La chose se conçoit aisement, puisque corpus avait en outre, depuis saint Paul, un emploi dogmatique de premier plan auquel caro ne pouvait prétendre.1 Il y a, en effet, dans l’acception courante du mot “corps” un idée de totalité à la fois unifée et diversifée qui est essentielle à la conception paulinienne de l’Église. “Corps”, c’est organisme, c’est échange entre des membres aux fonctions variées et conspirantes, et c’est aussi plénitude. Les théologiens du XIIIe siècle ne manqueront pas d’observer que, à ne considérer l’Eucharistie qu’en elle-meme, indépendemment de sa signification, il conviendrait davantage de l’appeler caro Christi2.
1 Cependant, Grégoire d’Elvire, Tractratus 9: “Caro Christi, quod est ecclesia” (B. W., p. 99). Mais si l’Église est dite chair du Christ, c’est plutôt comme son épouse que comme son corps; c’est ce que marque, par example, la formule suivante de Godescalc, De corpore et sanguine domini: “Deus homo, Verbum caro, dat Ecclesiae suae sponsae suae, carni scilicet suae, manducandum carnem suam” (Lambot, p. 335.)
2 Ainsi la Somme d’Alexandre, IVa, qu. 10, m. 4, a. 2. cf. m. 3, a. 3.
Corpus mysticum, 139.
The distinction which de Lubac has here drawn between the Church as body and the Church as bride is doubtless patristic, but it does not conform to Augustine’s language in Sermo 341:11 (endnote 25) where we read:
Verumtamen, fratres, quomodo corpus eius nos sumus, et nobiscum unus Christus? Ubi invenimus hoc, quia unus Christus est caput et corpus, id est, corpus cum capite suo? Sponsa cum sponsus sua quasi singulariter loquitur apud Isaiam: certe unus idemque loquitur; et videte quid ait: Velut sponso alligavit mihi mitram, et velut sponsam induit me ornamento (Is. 61, 10). Ut sponsus et sponsa: eumdem dicit sponsum secundum caput, sponsam secundum corpus (emphasis added).
Nonetheless, here de Lubac has in mind, as with Gottschalk and, much earlier, with Ambrose, the first Adam’s rejoicing in the presence of his bride: “Here is bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh,” conjoined to the Johannine preference, already noted, for speaking of the Eucharistic sacrifice as “caro” rather than “corpus,” as in the Synoptic and Pauline Institution Narratives. The resultant stress is upon the Eucharistic dependence of the bridal Church upon her Head. De Lubac then details, with a wealth of citation, the complexus of meanings assigned to “flesh” in the Scripture and in the patristic scriptural commentary, finding that underlying its deprecatory signification―viz., that which cannot possess the kingdom of God―there is a more positive signification, the Eucharistic caro spiritualis, which is not simply the “Real Presence:”
elle insiste avant tous sur la vertu vivifiante de l’Eucharistie, vertu liée en fait à la foi et aux dispositions du communiant.
Corpus mysticum, 141.
The effect of the virtus of the Eucharistic res sacramenti then approximates the later res tantum sacramenti, the free effect which the sacrament has upon the worthy recipient, that which St. Thomas will distinguish as “effectus huius sacramenti.” But this personal reception is never to be privatized: it is a reception in ecclesia and otherwise is impossible. The patristic tradition well knows and continually stresses, as does de Lubac, that this personal reception of the Eucharist effects the further radication of the communicant with and in the Church. However, that tradition, as de Lubac presents it, perhaps insufficiently stresses that it is not that further incorporation in the Church that is salvific, but only the simultaneous union of the communicant with the risen Christ in and by the Church’s union in One Flesh with her Lord: to be in ecclesia is to be in Christo: the final goal of Eucharistic worship is the communicant’s integration into the Christus totus, the One Flesh, the New Covenant, the “holy society by which we belong to God.” It is this dynamism toward further incorporation into the One Flesh that is the virtus of Eucharistic reception: there can be no other. There is of course an implicit recognition of this fact in the distinction de Lubac here spells out between caro spiritualis, understood as the virtus sacramenti, and caro spiritualis understood as that union to which the virtus is directed: e.g., quoting Paschasius, “Caro carni spiritualiter conviscerata.” Read in terms of de Lubac’s explanation of the meaning of “caro spiritualis,” the quasi-visceral union, which this clause understands the communicant to seek, is not with the Church, but with the goal of the Eucharistic virtus; this can only be the communicant’s union with the risen Christ in his Kingdom. It is this union that is the effectus huius sacramenti, viz., communion in the One Flesh of Christ and his bridal Church, the principle and the goal of all Eucharistic communion. Summarily, this is entry into the “holy society by which we belong to God,” the res sacramenti that is the “whole Christ.” We have seen de Lubac describe Augustine’s understanding of the res sacramenti as the representation of the Passion simply. However this is hardly what Augustine affirms in Sermo 341: there the offering of the One Sacrifice terminates in the “One Flesh” union of Christ and the Church: this with explicit reference to Ephesians 5, and thereby to Gen 2:24. The Fathers will not have failed to apply the “mysterion touto mega” of Eph. 5:32 to the Mysterium of the Eucharistic una caro, given their very clear reading of Jn. 19:34-35 as the fulfillment of the prophecy in Gen 2:24.
However, it then becomes impossible to follow de Lubac’s distinction between the dogmatic weight which Paul and the biblical tradition after him assigned to “corpus,” as opposed to what he thinks to be the relative doctrinal insignificance of Paul’s Eucharistic use of “flesh.” The relation which the Pauline Gospel places between our fallen and disintegrating “flesh,” and its recapitulation and liberation from ultimate disintegration, i.e., from the “dust” of death, through the sacrificial institution of the New Covenant by the Head, to the free unity of the One Flesh, is of the highest dogmatic significance. Apart from the salvific correlation of the free unity of the “One Flesh” to the necessary disunity of the fallen “flesh,” the doctrine of Original Sin and Fall is unintelligible. It is true that the authors whom de Lubac cites in such profusion appear not to have been much intent upon this institution of the New Covenant in set terms, but their universal interpretation of Jn. 19:34 as the fulfillment of Gen 2:24 testifies to their entire familiarity with the significance of Eph. 5:22-33. It does appear that, for reasons we have indicated, they were baffled by the covenantal freedom of the irrevocable and thereby substantial unity in the One Flesh of Christ and the Church, but this is very far from their having ignored its reality or its importance.
The change in language which de Lubac has instanced responds to the perception of a change in the task of theology. Throughout the patristic and monastic periods, theology had been a free and untroubled meditative exploration of the inexhaustible mystery mediated by the Eucharistic liturgical tradition in which the Old and the New Testaments as integrated int the single object of contemplation, the Mysterium fidei. With the Berengarian revolt, the task of theology became one of apologetics: the defense of the Eucharistic community, of the Church, whose enemy was discovered to be within the gates. The new language is also indispensable to the resolution of the novel threat to the unity of the whole Christ which, two centuries earlier had been thought, mistakenly, to be threatened by Amalarius’ account of the Pauline uses of “body of Christ.”
Amalarius, without objection from his critics, had assimilated the nuptial unity of the Una Caro to the physical unity of the corpus Christi; he took for granted the inclusion of Christ the Head within the supposedly organic unity of the ecclesial body, as had many of the Fathers, as did the Carolingians of his time, as has the theological tradition generally apart from Augustine. Amalarius thereby suppressed the freedom of the nuptial unity of head and body, of Christ and the Church. Because the One Flesh was thus read as “one body,” the unitas corporis, which Amalarius well understood to transcend all distinction within the “triforme corpus Christi,” was inexplicable within the context of the “three bodies,” regardless of whether one agrees with Amalarius over his notion of a triforme corpus Christi or with a critic of it such as Paschasius.[79]
The result was a gradual dropping of the third “body,” and a simplification of the remaining two: the first as identified with the historical Jesus, the second with the sacramental Christ, the Corpus Christi verum of the One Sacrifice, a merger that entailed also dropping Jerome’s references to the pejorative sense of “flesh,”[80] for the two “bodies” whose isolation from the third, the ecclesial body, de Lubac thinks to have begun with Paschasius, had presented a problem of harmonization complicating the primary problem of the unity intended by unitas corporis. Jerome stressed the two opposed significations of “flesh:” i.e., that which cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven, as against that flesh in which Jesus is incarnate, to our salvation. Despite their evident differences over the meaning of “flesh,” at least in emphasis, de Lubac had earlier attributed to Augustine and Jerome a single point of view, a harmonized usage of “flesh,” which found expression in a distinction between the Eucharistic “caro spiritualis,” and “caro carnalis,” the latter in the unqualified sense of sarx in its pejorative Pauline usage, as designating the fallen condition of man in his world. However, this harmonization gave way, under the influence of St. Ambrose, to a simple non-pejorative application, hardly Jerome’s, of “caro spiritualis” to the historical Jesus, understood at once as historical, as risen, and as Eucharistically represented. Long before Paschasius, Jerome’s two ways of speaking of the “flesh” had been assimilated to the two ways in which Augustine spoke of “corpus,” i.e., as historical and visible on the one hand and as sacramentally represented on the other.
From this intermediate “concordisme” the need arose for yet another harmonization: i.e., between Ambrose’s notion of the risen and history-transcending Christ, and Augustine’s quite different view of Christ’s risen corporeality. Augustine considered “body” to designate visibility and localization; thus he understood “body” to connote empirical availability as a matter of definition, whether it be historical or risen, with the immediate implication of the empirical absence of the Risen Christ from fallen history by the fact of his Resurrection: as risen, he is empirically available, i.e., visible, concretely located, only in heaven, seated at the Father’s right hand. Thus is to be explained Augustine’s stress on understanding the Eucharistic reality “spiritualiter.” As we shall see, he considers the alternative―“corporaliter”―to import a naïve, quasi-Capharnaitic conception of the Eucharistic presence of the risen Christ.
De Lubac thinks Augustine’s consequent difficulties with the Eucharistic Real Presence to have led him to a “symbolisme ecclesiastique,” citing in support of this conclusion a passage wherein Augustine interprets the evangelical promise of the Christ to remain with his disciples until the end of the world as fulfilled in the historical Church, with which our Lord had identified himself to Paul.[81]
We have seen that this literal identification of Christ with the historical Church is common in Augustine’s works. When properly understood as a substantial identity, that of the One Flesh, it raises no problem, quite as the substantial identity, the homoousion, of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit raises no problem. The definition, in the Formula of Union and the Symbol of-Chalcedon, of the consubstantiality of the One and the same Son with us―“consubstantialem nobis”―is, inter alia, the definition of his consubstantiality with his bridal Body. The patristic stress on the final effect of the Eucharistic causality is summed up by Peter Lombard as the “Res autem significata et non contenta,” i.e., the ”unitas Ecclesiae in praedestinatis, vocatis, justificatis, et glorificatis.” This ecclesial plenitude is not given in fallen history, but it cannot be dissociated from its historical cause, the One Flesh instituted by the One Sacrifice.
Were Augustine’s commonplace assertions of the identity of Christ with his Church read literally as a personal identity, ignoring the clear distinction Augustine makes between the Head, the Body, and their unity in One Flesh, they would of course undercut the Augustine’s stress on the nuptial union of Christ and the Church, for thereby that free and covenantal union would become simply nominal, lacking historical concreteness or significance. It would be regarded as eschatological merely, lacking all historical ground: of it nothing beyond identity could be said. This would force a reversion to a Calvinist “dialectic,” which supposes a polar tension\ between a totally corrupt historical condition of human fragmentation, and its eschatological redemption. Thus understood, the tension is insurmountable in history because without objective historical foundation and resolution. Consequently, it can be understood to be resolved only in the eschaton by the divine potentia absoluta: i.e., by “forensic grace,’ which is to say, resolved juridically, by a divine command lacking all intrinsic intelligibility, a mere “decree.” The “dialectic” postulated lacks historical ground as a matter of definition. It is therefore an ideal construct, an ens rationis, of no theological interest.
Karl Rahner, who also denies the historical mediation of divine grace, has consequently understood the union of divinity and humanity in Jesus as a comparably nonhistorical “dialectical analogy” rather than as the Personal unity defined at Chalcedon; John Zizioulas’ interpretation of the relation of Christ to the Church as similarly “dialectical” rests upon the same dehistoricization, i.e., desacramentalization, of the liturgical tradition. Thereby the nuptial symbolism that specifies the Catholic tradition of the Sacrifice of the Mass, the One Flesh of Christ and the Church, is undone, the union of Christ and the Church in their nuptial One Flesh having been denied or precluded, it must follow that their union is eschatological only. However, the sacramental nexus between the historical and the eschatological having been denied, nothing historical can be said of the eschaton: its ineffability forbids that it even be affirmed. The inevitability of this consequence has been worked out by the nonhistorical pagan religious traditions entirely too often and too unanimously to be overcome by any fancied dialectic.
Zizioulas’ rejection of the historically objective Eucharistic representation of the One Sacrifice places him, as it places Rahner, in the Protestant tradition, close to Calvinism. The Christ-Church dialectic with which Zizioulas would replace nuptial symbolism resembles Rahner’s “dialectical analogy,” precisely in having no historical―i.e., sacramentally objective―ground, for both “dialectics” deny their sole possible historical basis, the sacramental reality of the Event of the institution of the New Covenant, the Eucharistic representation of the One Sacrifice. Their reliance on a nonhistorical dialectic therefore rejects the instrinsic intelligibility of history, and proceeds to the dehistoricization of the liturgical tradition. It must follow, as the Reform has discovered, that faith in the product of that despair of history, that flight from history, lacks all historical content and referent. Rahner’s inability to find a historical foundation for subjective self-awareness in the Trinitarian Persons (Trinity, at 19 et passim) relies upon the same anti-sacramental postulate: the unity of the “one flesh” is metaphorical, not metaphysical; thus the nuptial imaging of God cannot possess theological significance. Zizioulas’ refusal of the significance of the economic revelation of the Trinity is of the same genre.
Augustine very clearly did not accept a dehistoricization of the Eucharistic celebration of the One Sacrifice. Reliance upon the nuptial unity of the Christus totus is a constant in his theology, as we have seen and shall see. It is further evident that, at his every celebration of the Mass, Augustine repeated the Words of Institution: “This is my body, which is given for you.” Although as de Lubac points out, some of his followers diluted their Eucharistic realism in reliance upon Augustine’s exegesis of Jn. 6:53-56 as referring to the ecclesial body, Augustine can hardly be supposed to have confused the bridal Church, whom he knew always to be in union with her Head, with the sacrificed body that is “given for you,” nor is he likely to have supposed the historical Church, fed and sustained by the Bread of Life, to be self-sufficient. Augustine certainly insisted upon a rigorous interpretation of the unity of the One Flesh, but he knew it to be a nuptial unity, the fulfillment of Gen. 2:24, wherein the first Adam celebrates the free complementarity of the woman taken from his side; it is only after their fall that he deprecates her presence.
In Augustine’s time, there was no philosophical language by which this free nuptial unity might be expressed and, while Augustine failed to recognize the application to the Bridegroom and Bride in their One Flesh of his hard-won understanding of the interrelation of the Persons of the Trinity, it would go far beyond his mind to suppose the “una Persona” by which he described that union to be the reduction of the Bride to the Self of the Bridegroom, or the personal nullification of the Mother of God by her “Fiat,” or of the second Eve, by her Sacrifice of Praise. Augustine makes this too evident for controversy:
18. Haec ex persona sui corporis Christus dicit, quod est Ecclesia. Haec ex persona dicit infirmitatis carnis peccati, quam transfiguravit in eam quam sumpsit ex Virgine, similitudinem carnis peccati. Haec Sponsus ex persona sponsae loquitur, quia univit eam sibi quodam modo.
Epistula 140, c. 18 (P.L. 33:0545; emphasis added).
The “univit eam sibi quodam modo” of this quotation points up Augustine’s puzzlement over the further characterization of this union of the Sponsus and sponsa in One Flesh; no word appeared adequate to it. None can be, until the union is recognized to be on the level of substance: the One Flesh of the second Adam and the second Eve is the substantial trinitarian Image of the Triune God. It had not occurred to Augustine, as it had occurred to no philosopher or theologian before him, that the human substance could be freely unified as nuptial or, more generally, that reality could be at once substantial and free. This insight waited upon the conversion of the classic cosmological metaphysics to the historical truth of Christian revelation which began at Nicaea and reached its final statement at Chalcedon.
Therefore, here once more we encounter the hermeneutical obstacle to theology perennially posed by the common patristic failure to appreciate either the substantiality or the freedom of the sponsal unity of Christ and the Church, of the Head and the Body. The consequence was the implicit Christomonism consequent upon the patristic interpretation of their nuptial One Flesh as the unity of a body or of a person. As a result, and despite the emphasis which Augustine, following Eph. 5, placed on nuptial union of Christ and the Church, and the consequent personal distinction and polarity between them as Bridegroom and Bride, his rhetoric made it all too easy simply to identify Christ with the Church and the Church with Christ.
As earlier noted, Batiffol has pointed to the confusion caused by this reduction of Augustine’s Christus totus to a Christomonism on the one hand, or on the other, to a “symbolisme ecclésiastique,” as de Lubac has named it, insofar as it may be thought to rest upon Augustine’s insistence that the risen and still visible body of Jesus must be located in Heaven and consequently not on earth. De Lubac has acknowledged the equation of “corporeal” and ‘visible’ in the Fathers dependent upon Augustine;[82] Batiffol has pointed to an excerpt from the doctrine of the Council of Trent as the dogmatic resolution of this “confusion.”
Le Sauveur ne laisse pas d’être à la droite du Père dan le ciel « iuxta modum existendi naturalem » pendant quíl est « multis aliis in locis sacramentaliter praesens sua substantia », mode d’existence que nous concevons que Dieu peut réaliser, mais que nous pouvons à peine exprimer, « existendi ratione, quam etsi verbis exprimere vix possumus, possibilem tamen esse Deo cogitatione per fidem illustrata assequi possumus » (DS *1636; †874).[83]
Batiffol attributes this language to the cited chapter of the Council of Trent: in full, Cap. 1. "De reali praesentia d. n. i. Christi in ss. Eucharistiae sacramento," of which it is an accurate French translation, interrupted by two verbatim Latin excerpts from the Conciliar text. Unfortunately, Batiffol badly confused the translation by referring it, via endnote 83, to page 447 of his Études d'Histoire II, L’Eucharistie. It does not appear there or elsewhere in Volume II of the tenth and final edition of Études d'Histoire. The confusion would have been avoided had Batiffol simply presented the Latin text of the Conciliar chapter, followed by its French translation. It is likely that, a most careful scholar, he had intended to do so, but simply forgot. If so, it was a protracted forgetting, for page 447 in the posthumously published tenth edition (1930), duplicates the text of the seventh edition, published in 1920. No damage was done; the confusion is of minor moment, dwelt on here to fend off its troubling the prospective reader of this work
There appears no reason to believe that Augustine thought otherwise than did the Tridentine authors of Cap. 1. "De reali praesentia d. n. i. Christi in ss. Eucharistiae sacramento," However, Protestant scholars contemporary with Batiffol (Gore, Schweitzer,Pusey, Harnack, Loofs), held firmly to the rather odd notion that his injunction, spiritualiter intelligete, is an appeal to justification sola fide, rather than to the meta-empirical but objectively historical Eucharistic immanence of the risen Lord. Such a symbolist reading of that tag must fly in the face of very clear evidence of that which Camelot’s study of Augustine’s Eucharistic doctrine has named “son réalisme vigoureux”.
Ambrose, inspired by Greek theology, and familiar with the Greek metaphysical tradition affirming the transcendence of the ideal over the historical order of reality, easily understood Christ’s humanity to be thus transfigured by the Resurrection as to remove all its carnal subordination to the dimensions of fallen space and time: Augustine’s association of “location” with corporeality does not entail the subordination of the risen Christ to fallen space and time which Ambrose had rejected. Augustine’s supposition that the risen Christ is be seated at the right hand of the Father does not place him at some measurable distance from the here and now of the fallen world. The entire compatibility of the “corporeal” Jesus with his Eucharistic historicity is stated by Augustine in a single compelling sentence:
Ferebatur enim, Christus in manibus suis quando commendans ipsum corpus suum, ait: Hoc est corpus meum
Enarr. In Ps. 33, s. 1, 10; (P. L. 35: 3906); Moriones, 592).
Thus, as with Ambrose’s Eucharistic realism, Augustine’s literal identification of the consecrated species with the Christ’s body and the blood, was untroubled by his attribution of locality to the risen Christ. The localization of Christ in space and time before his Resurrection pertained to his kenōsis, his having “become flesh” but, Jerome knew that by his Resurrection, Jesus ceased to be “flesh” in the sense of subjection to the conditions of fallen materiality. Rather, he became a life-giving Spirit, without ceasing to be fully human, possessing a transfigured but still concretely physical humanity: it is thus, as Eucharistically immanent in fallen history, that he is the Lord of history, its Beginning and its End, not as subject to its fallenness, but as redeeming it by his recapitulation of it, his restoration of its free unity and free significance, in sacramento, in ecclesia, in Christo.
The Carolingian theologians were incapable of the rational harmonization of these literally conflicting views of the presence of Christ in the Eucharist. The absence of the visible body of the risen Jesus from history appeared to exclude his objective Eucharistic immanence in history. There is ample evidence that Augustine’s understanding of corporeality as empirical per se, and his consequent conviction of the equally empirical localization of Jesus before and after the Resurrection, was read as in tension with his unquestioned Eucharistic realism. This felt tension rested upon inadequate hermeneutical foundation available to the Carolingian theologians whose naïve entry into speculative theological inquiry was guided only by the Aristotelian logic passed on by Boethius, with the consequent tendency to revert to the binary Eleatic logic which we have examined in Vol. II, Ch. 6 of the present study. The Carolingians’ inevitably literalist reading of Augustine’s phenomenological language could not discover the free coherence of dialectically-poised polarities of his Eucharistic doctrine. Thus his injunction, “spiritualiter intelligete” was read by Ratramnus as requiring so sharp a distinction between the Eucharistic signum and signatum as effectively to preclude their historical interrelation as cause and effect.
We will return to this issue further on: it enough here to recall that whenever Augustine found his Platonism becoming an obstacle to his Catholicism, he kept the faith and dropped the Platonism.[84] In any case, this tension did not lead the Fathers after him to a liturgical impasse: rather, they met a felt need to harmonize the unquestioned authority of Augustine, Jerome, Ambrose, and Hesychius by a return to the older terminology which had named as “spiritual” the mysterious reality of the Eucharist, whether viewed as food, as sacrifice, as presence, or as the object of faith. This traditional usage corresponded at once to the “spiritualiter intelligete” of Augustine, and to Jerome’s stress upon the distinction between the flesh of Christ by whose sacrifice we are redeemed, as opposed to that unredeemed flesh which, as such, cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven, while in the language of Ambrose and Hesychius, “spiritual,” in the sense of “mysticus,” presented no difficulty for, in this harmonization, “spirituale” was understood to be equivalent to supernatural, mystical, miraculous; thus corpus spirituale corresponded both to the “veritas” or historicity, and to the “virtus,” the eschatological efficacy, of the Eucharistic mystery. The subjects of this attribution of “spiritual” thus included the historical Event of the Eucharistic offering in the Person of the High Priest, of his One Sacrifice of his Body and his Blood, whose historically objective Real Presence is effected in the transubstantiation of the Church’s offering by the Words of Institution. This mysterious change of the reality of the bread and wine of the Offertory to the Corpus Christi verum of the Christ was also named “spiritualis.” The “corpus spirituale” of the Eucharistic Lord was, as “spirituale,” beyond the range of our sense knowledge, but was the concretely objective presence of the “corpus Christi” for all that.
It should be noticed that while “veritas” and “virtus” here refer to the historicity and the efficacy of the One Sacrifice, the Words of Institution are understood narrowly to be focused upon Real Presence of the Corpus Christi verum, the corpus spirituale. This is not yet their dehistoricization, but that is clearly latent.
At the same time, however, as de Lubac has emphasized, the acceptance of “corpus spirituale” as a designation of the Eucharistic Christ included an equally universal rejection of any labeling of the Eucharistic presence of the Lord as “corporalis” or “corporaliter;” similarly, while the consecrated host is “caro,” it is not “carnalis:” that terminology is reserved for objects of sensible knowledge and does not bear on the Eucharistic reality, the body of the One Sacrifice.[85]
Supposing with de Lubac that -
Being no longer simply the Eucharist, by that fact the “spiritual flesh” of the Christ was thereby no longer the Church―the caro spiritualis must find its referent somewhere between the sacramental reality of the body that is the Church and the sacramental efficacy of the Eucharist, the union of the communicant with his risen Lord.[86]
Within the patristic sacramentum-res sacramenti paradigm, this posed no problem, for that union was simply in ecclesia; it benefited the Church as well as the communicant, inseparably. However, within the newer paradigm forced by the Berengarian challenge to Eucharistic realism, the caro spiritualis became the res tantum sacramenti and thus an effect conceptually dissociable from the Church, as it had not been when understood, in terms of the older Eucharistic paradigm, to be a virtus within the res sacramenti. At the same time, it became possible under the newer paradigm to find in the new usage of “spiritual flesh” simply the familiar “caro una” and thus refer it to the Eucharistic institution of the nuptial union of Christ and the Church in the “One Flesh,” the “great mystery” of Eph. 5:32.[87] This agrees well with the familiar and traditional language of “duplex res sacramenti” and “res gemina.”[88] However, as we have seen in the excerpt supra, de Lubac’s description of the Augustinian res sacramenti as the sacramental representation of the salvific res gesta, the sacrifice of Jesus the Christ on Calvary, does not explicitly include the institution of the New Covenant: i.e., of the One Flesh, by which institution the res gesta of the cross is, precisely, salvific. As earlier remarked, it is difficult to accommodate to the language of Sermo 341, quoted above, a narrowly literal reading of de Lubac’s description of Augustine’s understanding of the sacramental significance of the Eucharistic sacrifice, for Augustine surely recognized that the One Sacrifice causes the One Flesh, the Whole Christ, in whose Name the risen Lord spoke to Paul on the road to Damascus (Acts 9:4-5; cf. Acts 22:8, 26;15).
However, this failure to recognize, in the Eucharistic institution of the New Covenant on the cross and on the altar, the nuptially-ordered freedom intrinsic to and inseparable from the One Flesh of Christ and the Church which constitutes it, became the commonplace of patristic, monastic and medieval theology. The cause of this inadvertence appears to be a still-insufficiently converted cosmological imagination, specified by the metaphysical monism alluded to at the beginning of this Appendix and, also, by a certain quasi-Platonic fastidiousness over the sacramentality of the nuptial union: e.g., for St. Thomas, marriage is the least spiritual of the sacraments, because the most physical.[89] Under such auspices, it became difficult to recognize in the marital “one flesh” the Magnum Mysterium of Eph. 5:32.
Those Carolingian theologians who, with Paschasius, rejected Amalarius’ explanation of the “triforme corpus” which the latter supposed to be symbolized in the Mass by the fractio panis, were still faced with the problem of giving theological expression to the unity of the Body, the Church whose celebration of her Lord’s One Sacrifice is her reality; they consequently failed to understand the intrinsic freedom that is the gift of Christ to his bridal Church as her Bridegroom. The Bridegroom and the bride are clearly distinct, and yet their unity is the immediate, concrete and historical effect, the single and unique Mysterium fidei, of the Eucharistic sacrifice. “Dialectical’ solutions do not serve the need for this historical unity, a unity corresponding to the historicity of the Eucharistic worship. For this, only the free, covenantal and sacramental unity of the Eucharistic One Flesh suffices, and does so only when this is specifically understood to be the res et sacramentum of the Eucharist, the New Covenant instituted by the One Sacrifice. As Paschasius taught:
And thus witnessed the holy Cyprian, that neither should there be water in the chalice without the blood, nor the blood without the water, because by the water is signified the people washed by the water of baptism, and by the blood of Christ (is signified) that by which he redeemed us: and by this it is understood that Christ and the Church form one body. Thus neither is Christ without the Church the pontifex in eternity, nor is the Church without Christ offered to God the Father. These indeed are mysteries in which the truth of the flesh and the blood is not of anyone other than the Christ, but in mystery and in figure.[90]
De Lubac notes that union of head and the body is in “one flesh,” while the union of members is in “one body.” Referring to these expressions as “métaphores pauliniennes,” he observes:
Nevertheless, the two Pauline metaphors of the union of Christ and the Church in one flesh, and of the union of the members of the Christ in one body, did not coincide.[91]
This quandary, arising out of a supposed failure of synthetic unity in Paul’s thought, troubled de Lubac’s theology thenceforth. It is not clear that he ever discovered its resolution to lie in the distinction between the irreducibly distinct yet entirely reconciled meanings which Paul assigned on the one hand to the covenantal-nuptial unity of the “one flesh,” emphasized in I Cor. 6, 7 and 11, and given a final expression Ephesians 5, and, on the other, that which he assigned to the consequently free unity of the members of the “body” emphasized in I Cor. 12-13 and in Rom. 12:4, viz., the bridal Church of whom Christ is the Head because he is her Spouse, in covenantal-nuptial union with her. The Church as “body” is clearly not the “one flesh” of her free, covenantal union with her Lord, although we have just seen Paschasius’ confusion on this same point. It is in this nuptial union with her Lord that the Church is his bride, his body, his glory, for she proceeds from him as from her Head; by that procession she is immaculate, and by that freedom from all taint of sin she is free to be one flesh with him. De Lubac finds a resolution, indeed, but as achieved in the medieval res tantum sacramenti:
But with Peter Lombard, who follows soon after Peter of Troyes, all division is brusquely suppressed. The effect of the mystery appeared to be single, the virtus is identified with the res. As had everyone, Peter Lombard juxtaposed the two symbolisms of the species: nourishment of the interior man, the effecting of ecclesial unity. But, in the unity of the members of the Church gathered in one body, or in the unitas fidelium, he did not hesitate to see the mystica caro Christi in which consists the final effect or reality of the sacrament. Res-et-non-sacramentum, mystica ejus caro. The terminology is thus unified. Mystica caro and Corpus Christi mysticum come to be interchangeable. The first expression will efficaciously break the way to the second. [92]
We have seen that this identification of the Corpus Christi mysticum with the res tantum et non sacramentum (res tantum), affirmed by St. Thomas as well as by Peter Lombard, can be read to reduce the Church to a fallible effect of the Eucharistic signing. We have also indicated that it need not be so read, and should not be, whether with respect to Peter Lombard or to St. Thomas. The Eucharistic res sacramenti reaches its full effect eschatologically, but does so only in consequence of the infallible efficacy of the Eucharistic signing, the achievement in history of the res sacramenti, the Eucharistic union in One Flesh of Christ and the Church, is historical and, as historical, is anagogical, simply because it is sacramental: a concretely historical sign effectively signifying its effect, whose fullness can only be eschatological, but which is linked to its sacramental signing as effect is linked to cause.
This causal sequence inseparably links the Church of the eschaton to the Church of our fallen history: the unitas ecclesiae is sacramentally objective in history, and only thereby has a history-transcending anagogical significance and efficacy, that of her eschatological union with the risen Lord―the union by participation in which all personal union with the Lord is given. This is only to insist that, in the later medieval idiom, the res tantum is the effect of the res et sacramentum or, in the earlier patristic idiom, that in the res sacramenti of the Eucharist, all union with the risen Lord is in ecclesiae: only thereby is our personal union with the risen Christ possible. The theological analysis of the freedom of personal union with Christ should not be allowed to mask the sacramental historicity of that union, as too often occurs, when the res tantum is denied historicity simply because it is not itself a sign: the res tantum is always the effect of the historical res et sacramentum, and so is itself ineluctably historical, even as anagogically fulfilled.
By the end of the patristic age and the emergence, with the Carolingians, of the monastic theology anticipating the early medieval period, the theological usage of “corpus” had become ambiguous if not equivocal.
Augustine’s phenomenological approach to Eucharistic theology, reinforced by his supposition that the risen Christ is sensibly or empirically “located” in heaven and ‘not here,’ led to his placing a distinction between the consecrated species and the risen Christ summed up in his “spiritualiter intelligete”; Ambrose, on the contrary, understood the transcendence of the risen Christ to be entirely compatible with the literal identification of the consecrated species with the risen Lord. This emphasis upon the literal truth of the Words of Institution, “This is my body,” “This is my blood,” could not but appeal to a liturgist such as Amalarius, whose “three bodies” language was predicated upon the literal identity of the consecrated species with the risen Christ. Hence his puzzlement over the “fractio panis” during the Communion rite of the Mass, wherein the host was broken into three pieces, one to be placed in the chalice, one to be consumed by the celebrant, and one to be preserved for later distribution to the sick. However, the influence of Ambrose upon liturgists, by way of his De mysteriis and De sacramentis, was matched by the influence of Augustine among the theologians; he had been the dominant theological authority during the patristic period, and remained so during the ninth century, and down to the latter half of the thirteenth. It is not surprising that ninth-century theologians such as Florus and Paschasius should find Amalarius’ literalism not to their taste.
Amalarius’ study of the Pauline use of “body” had found expression in his analysis of the “fractio panis” into what he described as the “triforme corpus Christi.[93] An approximate translation of the crucial passage reads as follows:
The body of Christ, that is, of those who have tasted death and whose who will die, is “triforme”: viz.; the first (“form” of that body) is the holy and immaculate body assumed of the virgin Mary; the second is the body which walks on the earth; the third is that which lies in the tomb. By the offered particle which is immersed in the chalice is shown the body of Christ who is risen from the dead; (by the particle) eaten by the priest or the people (is shown) that body which still walks on the earth; (that part) left on the altar shows the body which is lying in the tomb (see endnote 93 for Amalarius’ Latin text.)
De Lubac summarizes the history of Florus’ attack upon Amalarius’ text:
In this text, Florus thought to have discovered the heel of Achilles. He focused upon it with a persistent fury and he achieved his end. Already in 835 he had written to the bishops assembled at Thionville denouncing the allegorism of Amalarius.13 That effort does not appear then to have produced any effect. However in September, 838, at the Council of Quierzy, following upon a fiery indictment, he had obtained the condemnation of the corpus triforme.14 Nonetheless, despite his’ indignation, despite the sentence at Quierzy, despite the successful intervention in the quarrel by Agobard personally, and then by his second successor at the See of Lyon, Remi,15 the authority of Amalarius was never seriously weakened, due at once to the scientific value of his work and to the taste of that epoch for symbolism. The victory of the purism of Lyon was without a future. The corpus triforme would know a long success.―However, as often happens in such cases, while the formula continued to be repeated, little by little its meaning was changed. It might be interesting to follow these vicissitudes: first to determine the original sense of the expression, that which Amalarius himself attached to it. It has had for several the effect of a hieroglyphic, and not all the historians who have occupied themselves with it have understood it alike.
13 He concluded: “Claudendus est plane juxta legis praeceptum bos cornipeda et os eius sempiterni freno silentii constringendum, imo… divinarum sententiarum lapidibus obruendus!” (.P. L. 119, 76 b-C). “According to the clear precept of the law (of the council) the hoofed ox is to be lamed and his mouth eternally constrained by a bridle of silence, indeed by divine sentence he should be overwhelmed with stones!”
14 M.G.H., Concilia, t. II, pp. 768-778. This is the beginning of the discourse that forms, in P. L. 119, the Adversus Amalarium III (col. 94-96). No source is known for the decision of the council apart from Florus’ recital of it (M.G.H. ibid., pp. 778-782); this is the first part of the Adversus Amalarius II in P. L. 119, 80-85. One is justified in thinking that his objectivity is much more perfect than that upon which he prided himself in his discourse. Cf. 82C: “Deliberatum est doctrinum hanc esse omnino damnabilem, et ab omnibus catholicae fidei cultoribus funditus respuendam.” I.e., “It was decided that this doctrine is entirely damnable, and is fundamentally to be rejected (literally, vomited or spit out from the depths of one’s being) by all who hold to the Catholic faith.”
15 Liber de tribus epistolis, c. 40 (P. L., 121, 1054). This treatise may well be by Florus, who survived Amalarius and never disarmed.
Corpus mysticum, at 299ff. Tr. by present writer underlined.
De Lubac then proceeds, in the chapter following this passage, to outline the prevailing and mutually exclusive interpretations of Amalarius’ text, the first of which understands the second and third “parts” of the “triforme corpus” to be concerned for the Real Presence, and the second, his own preference, which reads them as referring to the ecclesial Body. De Lubac’s defense of the latter interpretation does not mask the union, in Amalarius’ one “triforme corpus,” of the risen Christ and the Church, a union that is in fact the One Flesh instituted on the cross. However, neither does de Lubac’s interpretation recognize the free unity of the union of Christ and the Church. Like Amalarius, he speaks rather of the physical unity of a “corpus,” albeit “triforme.” This is not the free unity, the nuptial One Flesh, of Augustine’s Christus totus.
Contemporary scholarly interpretations of the “triforme corpus” were thus divided between those which refer the second term to the body that is the Church, and those which refer it to the sacrificed and risen body of Christ, which hung upon the cross.[94] De Lubac has chosen the first option: he believes that Amalarius posed his statements in the context of the Pauline usage of the “body of Christ.” In that idiom, “body,“ when used without qualification, means the bridal body of Christ, the Church. Thus, in de Lubac’s interpretation, Amalarius identified the first of the “triforme” aspects of the “body of Christ” with the risen body of Christ, which he had taken from the Virgin Mary. i.e., the “body” which hung on the cross and is now raised to the right hand of the Father. The two remaining parts of the fractured host signify, respectively, “forms” of the unqualified or ecclesial body: i.e., the Church “militant” on earth, and the Church of the dead, irrespective of whether in purgatory or in heaven.[95]
De Lubac’s interpretation of Amalarius’ “triforme corpus Christi” is entirely consistent with its identification with the One Flesh of the New Covenant. In fact, it requires that identification, for the covenantal distinction between Christ and the Church in the freedom of their nuptial union is not otherwise maintained. Here again we encounter the patristic difficulty of accounting for the free unity of that nuptial union―which was recognized by the unanimous patristic exegesis of Jn. 19:34― in terms which would not by implication deny its freedom, a denial that would undercut the New Covenant itself. The still-cosmological imagination of the Fathers could articulate only a monadic image of substantial unity: thus, the reduction of free, historical unity either to organic or to personal unity and, by implication, of freedom to necessity―an implication liturgically and therefore metaphysically unacceptable to them.
This is the only possible resolution of the theological problem raised for the Carolingians by the distinctions Amalarius made: that is, it would affirm what Florus and his sympathizers heard Amalarius’ “triforme corpus Chris ti” to have been denied, the unity of the unitas corporis, a unity that can only be the One Flesh of Christ and the Church. In this free and nuptially-ordered unity, (1) the verum corpus Christi, the sacrificed and risen body of Jesus the Christ, the Head, is in nuptial union with (2) the ecclesial body, his bridal Church, which proceeds from him as the second Eve from the second Adam, in (3) their covenantal union in One Flesh. It is from this stance that Amalarius’ proposal, first published in 813, may be seen to have posed the hermeneutical issue for all subsequent Eucharistic theology: the problem of how to speak accurately of this unity of the Head and the Body in terms which respect at once its unity and its covenantal freedom, the freedom that is constitutive of the New Covenant, instituted by the One Sacrifice.
During the ninth century, Amalarius was seen by those loyal to the Augustinian tradition, notably by Florus but also by Paschasius Radbertus, to have divided the unitas corporis theretofore taken for granted by Augustinian sacramental doctrine as the Eucharistic res sacramenti. For Florus, a highly traditional Augustinian, the concrete event-unity of the Eucharistic realism, of the res sacramenti that would later, under further analysis, be divided between res et sacramentum and res tantum, was indiscussible, and Amalarius’ supposed willingness to fragment it and differentiate the fragments was therefore simply unacceptable.
But even in those traditional quarters in which Amalarius’ view was rejected, controversy over the relation of the Eucharistic “body” to the risen “body” had already arisen. Augustine’s phenomenological approach to the Eucharist had distinguished the efficacious sign from the effect of the sign while at the same time stressing, even delighting in, the paradoxical unity of Christ and the Church. Much of the tension between Paschasius and Ratramnus is traceable to the tendency among the Augustinian theologians intrigued by the “new dialectic” to rationalize Augustine to the point of a near-dehistoricization of the Eucharistic res sacramenti. Thus, Laidrad of Lyons, Florus’ mentor, has been charged with teaching a merely virtual presence of Christ in the Eucharist, analogous to the presence of the Spirit in the baptismal water.[96] Augustinians such as Ratramnus and Rhabanus Maurus, under the rationalist influence of the “new logic,” were beginning so to stress the distinction between the sign and the effect of the sign, i.e., between the consecrated species and their effect understood as Augustine had understood it, i.e., as the Church in nuptial union with her Lord, as to threaten to dissolve the free unity asserted of them by the very Words of Institution.
In this Carolingian tendency to the dehistoricization of sacramental causality we hear an echo of the either-or rationalism of Cyprian’s exaggerated sacramental realism which concluded to a denial of the possibility of grave sin in a baptized Christian. Augustine also had learned from the Latin tradition of Tertullian’s “sacramentum,” the inseparable unity of sacramental sign and sacramental effect; however, in his dispute with the Donatists, he developed an interpretation of the sacramentum that we would now term phenomenological. While he had read Porphyry’s rendition of Plotinus in the Enneads and was influenced by it, Augustine never internalized the Neoplatonic binary adaptation of Aristotelian logic and the consequent rigorous submission of reality to immanent necessity. In this he may seem to have followed Plato rather than Plotinus, although Augustine does not speak in terms of a Platonic fatalism. For him, the intrinsic irrationality of man’s fallen condition, concretely experienced in the “two loves that build two cities”―loves whose inner tension is experienced as historically transcended only in ecclesia―, and of existence in ecclesia as “simul justus et peccator,” are given only when standing in the liturgical presence of the risen Christ, Redeemer and Judge. These lived tensions, native to and inseparable from historical existence as such, also define existence in ecclesia, but in that experience their historical meaning is revealed in the transcendence of the fatal disunity of sarx (σὰρξ) by the free unity of the mia sarx (σάρκα μίαν) instituted by the One Sacrifice. The ecclesial experience of existence as simul justus et peccator cannot be stated in the clinical language of literal statements, but only in the conversion of the Platonic dialectic which, as converted, finds its resolution, not in a myth-inspired flight from history to the ideal, but in the sacramental unification, the recapitulation of all things, by the One Flesh of the Eucharistic sacrifice, personal participation in which is the sacramentally objective restoration of the personal unity lost in the fall. Thus the historical pessimism of the Platonic tradition is transcended by the anagogical historicity of sacramental worship, wherein the ancient pagan téleion is replaced by the res sacramenti of the Eucharist, the Church triumphant.[97]
Literal language, for the Augustinian, bears solely upon the fragmentation of the broken world and is therefore broken language: if taken literally, it would normalize, institutionalize, that fallenness, that radical insignificance of fallen existence. Augustine therefore is very far from rationalizing historical reality: his admonition, ‘Spiritualiter intelligete,” reduces it neither to illusion nor to necessity. The objective free unity of truth and being is a sacramental unity, rooted in the nuptial freedom of the One Flesh, and emphatically not in the logical devices of a mind locked in its own immanence. Thus Augustine postulated the necessity of illumination, precisely as the free offer, universally given, of an escape from that fatal immanence. This offer: alone permits conversion to the freedom of the Good News; it is not other than the trahi a Deo, a universal grace given man by his creation in Christ, the radical gratia Christi.
Consequently, although his mentor Ambrose had stressed the literal identity of the consecrated species, the sign (signum), with the effect of the sign (signatum), the risen Jesus, the Christ, as at once the Victim and the High Priest of the One Sacrifice, Augustine’s phenomenological approach to the signum-signatum distinction recognized their dialectical tension or non-identity in the liturgical affirmation of their spiritual identity. Cyprian’s literal reading of the unity of the sacramentum and the res sacramenti was driven by the naïve conviction that their unity was their identity: that the res sacramenti was sanctification, to the extent that a baptized sinner must be a contradiction in terms.
The Donatist institutionalization into a heresy, an informed rejection of the Catholic tradition, of what in Cyprian had been merely a mistaken interpretation of that tradition, left Augustine with the task of defending the literal realism of infallible sacramental efficacy, while defending the paradoxical freedom of baptized and ordained existence in the Church. This led him to recognize the double efficacy of sacramental signing: it is precisely under that signing, in the ecclesial worship to which it is the point of entry, that the baptized knows himself to be continually the object of divine mercy, one of that world of men for whom Christ died and yet, at the same time, to be a sinner, unworthy of the divine mercy, the salvific Mission of the Christ. Thus within the res sacramenti, there is no necessary salvation: we remain, in Billot’s famous phrase, ”beggars for the beatific vision.”
It may be thought that Augustine left unresolved a problem arising out of his failure to affirm what Ambrose had so readily taught, the coincidence of the risen Lord’s immanence in and transcendence of history in the Eucharistic offering of his One Sacrifice. We have already pointed to the “transportation problem” implicit in Augustine’s occasionally quite literal reading of the Johannine “He is risen: he is not here” and the impanationist implications of that stance, which continue to trouble students of Augustine’s Eucharistic theology. On the other hand, there is no difficulty in assimilating the distinction, upon which Augustine insists, between the Eucharistic and the risen Lord if it be kept in mind that, as de Lubac stresses in the opening pages of Corpus mysticum, the entire Latin tradition followed Augustine in affirming, over and again, the concretely historical Eucharistic Presence of Jesus the Christ, while affirming at the same time that his Presence is a mystery, a veiled or spiritual reality, while the corporeal Presence of Christ at the right hand of the Father, the unveiled Presence of Light from Light, is not so to be named.
For Augustine, the corpus spirituale of the Eucharistic Real Presence is beyond our comprehension: it is to be adored, not investigated as though a reality accessible to the quest of fallen minds for ‘necessary reasons.’ The difference between Ambrose and Augustine is the latter’s phenomenological emphasis upon the experience of worship in the Church: it is an experience of the mysterium, of the veiling of the Glory of the Lord. Ambrose, the author of the De sacramentis and the De mysteriis, familiar with Origen and the Greek theological tradition, is hardly in denial of the Eucharistic mystery, but his liturgical emphasis upon the literal truth of the “This is my Body” is rather an affirmation of the doctrinal tradition than the expression of his experience of the Eucharistic mystery. These two interests are not in conflict, but in the absence of a theologically adequate metaphysics, grounded in the primacy of the Eucharistic Event, they can easily be made to seem so. However, it is not true that Augustine’s persuasion that the risen Christ is thus located at the right hand of the Father as to be “corporeally (i.e., empirically) absent from history should stand in the way of his Eucharistic realism; in fact it did not do so. Taken at the letter, the “symbolisme écclésiastique” by which de Lubac has described Augustine’s Eucharistic doctrine flies in the face of the latter’s “Spiritualiter intelligete” which, while denying the empirical presence of the risen Christ in the Eucharist, insists upon the historical objectivity of that Presence, vi verborum.
It is quite clear that Augustine’s Eucharistic realism did not wait upon the resolution of a “transportation problem;” such doubts as may arise from a supposed dichotomy between his realistic and his allegedly symbolist Eucharistic statements[98] are easily resolved by the application of the Head-Body dialectic inherent in the sacramental paradigm which, in the early twelfth century, was the crowning achievement of Augustinian sacramentalism―but only when its historicity is systematically maintained in the face of all the temptations posed by a still-cosmological imagination to dissociate the free unity of its elements in the name of “necessary reasons.”
The resolution of the finally systematic rather than doctrinal issue posed by the mutual irreducibility of the phenomenological realism of Augustine’s Eucharistic phenomenology and Ambrose’s liturgical literalism had to wait upon the emergence of a properly theological hermeneutics: none then existed, beyond that provided by the Eucharistic liturgy itself, whose Truth was normative for each.[99]
It cannot be too often affirmed that it is out of this liturgical mediation of the Truth of the faith that the theological quaerens at once arises and to which it is directed, as question to answer, for theological questions are not directed to theologians, and cannot be answered by them. Then as now, the Catholic fides quaerens intellectum is indissociable from the liturgy, for there, at the Eucharistic heart at once of the liturgy and of the Church, the mystery is concretely mediated: given, as a perennial personal invitation, “ancient and forever new,” to the mind of the worshiper, and there only does the faithful quaerens intellectum find at once its object and its sustenance.
Thus it was that Paschasius’ rejection of Amalarius’ analysis of the “three bodies” of Christ did not entail a refusal to face the theological problem that Amalarius had raised, if only inadvertently. Paschasius even accepted the then unavoidable idiom of the “three bodies” to state his own resolution of the unity of the Eucharist. Like Florus, he stood in the Augustinian tradition. The final product of the theological statement of the Augustinian sacramental doctrine, viz., the distinction between sign and signified set out in the classic early medieval analysis of sacramentum tantum, res et sacramentum, res tantum, would not appear for more than two centuries after Paschasius, when, to meet the symbolist challenge of the Berengarian heresy, the full explication of the double sacramental efficacy was achieved and with it, an account of the necessarily double sacramental signing―ex opere operato and ex opere operantis, as a still later theology would describe those irreducibly distinct effects of sacramental signing, whose doctrinal indispensability Augustine the bishop had been the first in the Latin tradition at once to recognize and to defend.
In any case, whether Amalarius’ proposal of a “triforme corpus” intended by that expression the “body” that is the Church, or the “body” that is the priest and victim of the Eucharistic sacrifice, or simply presupposed―as is more likely―their unity, the unitas corporis Christi, the One Flesh of the Head and the Body―that Una Caro which Augustine named the Christus totus[100] but which the Latin Fathers had often referred to as a body, the Carolingian theologians responded to the perceived challenge of Amalarius’ “triforme corpus” by recourse to Augustine, who had so stressed the ecclesial dimension of the Eucharistic res sacramenti as to take for granted the realism of the Eucharistic offering of the One Sacrifice in order to concentrate upon its salvific effect, personal Communion in ecclesia with the sacrificed and risen Lord. It is this Communion, at once with the risen Christ, the Church, and the members of the Church, that is the final product of the Words of Institution―the effectus huius sacramenti, in the words of St. Thomas―assimilation to the Christus totus, whose unity Augustine, following Paul, understood to be nuptial, that of the Head who is the Bridegroom with the Body who is the Bride, the sancta societas (qua) inhaereamus Deo.
De Lubac has shown the “three bodies” question to have been inherited from Augustine’s own speculation upon the relation of Christ as Head to his Body, the Church.[101] With Florus’ indictment of Amalarius’ obscure venture as a division of the unity of the body of Christ, a debate had begun which soon engaged most of the major figures active during the Carolingian period. It called forth what Vernet has pointed to as the first technical treatise on the Eucharist, Paschasius Radbertus’ Liber de corpore et sanguine Domini;[102] upon which pivoted most of the Eucharistic discussion over the next two centuries.
Here it is appropriate further to examine the evidence, made available by de Lubac’s research, for the assertion of the present study that the patristic and early medieval theological deployment of the nuptial “one flesh” symbolism can alone unify the “three bodies” of Amalarius’ liturgically-inspired inquiry. The unity of the “three bodies,” from the inception of their distinction by Amalarius in the early ninth century, has provided the radical hermeneutical problematic for Eucharistic theology: viz., the Eucharistic meanings to be assigned to “corpus” (body), to “caro” (flesh), and to “una caro” (one flesh). It should be noted at the outset that Amalarius’ liturgically-oriented explanation of the fractio panis of the Mass did not directly bear upon the Pauline-Augustinian Head-Body union. While Florus bitterly criticized Amalarius’ analysis for having divided that free unity, de Lubac has indicated that the nuptial symbolism supporting that free unity was not contrary to the “triforme corpus” analysis that Amalarius deployed in his interpretation of the fractio panis of the Mass. As de Lubac observes:
While he (Florus) speaks of the Church whose unity the Christ wished to seal by his death, or of the ineffable mystery of unity that was prefigured in Adam and Eve, without question he says nothing that Amalarius would not have been as well disposed to admit as he, and in this sense his words are fruitless, but they are not irrelevant [103] (emphasis added).
We shall shortly see Paschasius dismissing the Amalarian problematic in order to assert the union of the sacrificial body of Christ, the Head, the second Adam, with the Body that is the Church, the second Eve, in their One Flesh. De Lubac thinks that this is not what Amalarius intended to discuss, although he would not have objected to it. Nonetheless any discussion of the Amalarian “three bodies” of the Eucharistic celebration raises a question of the unity of their subject that must finally come to terms with the unity of the sacrificed Body of Christ the Head and the bridal ecclesial Body, whose free unity with her head is the product of his One Sacrifice: this is of course the covenantal union in which Christ and the Church are One Flesh (emphatically not “One Body,” nor “One Person”). For Augustine’s understanding of it, see his Sermo 341.[104]
De Lubac has devoted Part II of his classic Corpus mysticum[105] to an exposition of the development, at once of doctrine and of symbolism, undergone over the centuries by Amalarius’ “triforme corpus.” As has been seen he believes this evidence to show that Amalarius’ “triforme corpus” had the unity of the Church in view, not that of the “sacramental body” as Florus had supposed. Amalarius would then have been was speaking of the Church’s union, caused by the Eucharistic consecration, with the risen Christ, as that effect within the res sacramenti of the Eucharist that the later language will qualify as ex opere operato, or infallibly given.
It would therefore not be to go beyond Amalarius’ liturgical concern for the “triforme corpus,” but only beyond the Carolingian riposte to it, to assert that the “three bodies” should be understood to be (1) the sacrificial body of the Head, i.e., of the Christ as Priest and Victim, (2) the body of the Church who proceeds from him as the second Eve from her head, the second Adam, as his glory, and (3) the One Flesh of their free and nuptial unity, the New Covenant instituted on the cross and on the altar by that outpouring of the Spirit which the Son was sent to give.
The free, covenantal, nuptially-ordered unity which Paul ascribes to the interrelation of Christ and his Church, seeing in that interrelation the fulfillment of the “one Flesh” of Gen 2:24 is still little understood today. We have pointed to the likely reason for this incomprehension at the beginning of this Appendix: a failure to grasp the free substantial unity of the One Flesh, for this requires an intellectual conversion to the substantial standing of the free, sacramentally-signed unity of the recapitulated New Being, whose newness is that of her Head, the “ancient beauty” which Augustine feared he had come to love too late. Most probably for this reason, the Pauline “One Flesh” has been understood by many of the Fathers, by St. Thomas, and by such recent interpreters of Augustine as Stanley Grabowski,[106] to possess only that non-covenantal organic unity of a living body, whose head and members cannot be understood to possess the free, covenantal and nuptially-ordered unity of the second Adam and the second Eve proper to Head and Body as invoked by Paul in Eph. 5 and developed by St. Augustine in many places. Neither can the Church, in such a context, possess the intrinsic free unity of worship indissociable from the sinless second Eve.[107]
We have noted that de Lubac believes Amalarius to have posed his account of the “three bodies” within the context of the Pauline usage of the “body of Christ.” In Pauline usage, the term “body,“ when used without qualification, meant the bridal body of Christ the Head: i.e., the ecclesial Body, the Church. In the course of his famous commentary upon the “fractio panis,” the breaking of the consecrated Host into three parts by the celebrant during the Communion of the Mass, Amalarius identified the first of these aspects of the “body of Christ” with the risen body of Christ, which he had taken from the Virgin Mary―i.e., the body which hung on the cross, and is now raised to the right hand of the Father. The two remaining parts of the host he referred, respectively, to the unqualified body: the Church “militant” on earth, and to the Church of the dead, irrespective of whether in purgatory or in heaven.
These explanations uniformly ignore the nuptial union of Christ and the bridal Church in One Flesh. However de Lubac, in discussing the viewpoint of Paschasius, an opponent and near-contemporary of Amalarius, points out that Paschasius own explanation of the “three bodies” identified their final unity with the una caro of Christ and the Church. De Lubac does not agree with Paschasius’ inclusion of the “One Flesh” in the “triforme corpus” of Amalarius; he believes it to be compatible with Amalarius’ viewpoint, but not to be included within the problem presupposed by Amalarius’ analysis of the “three bodies.”[108]
By the end of the eleventh century, the original Augustinian problematic had nearly vanished under the entirely alien “dialectic” imposed upon theological speculation and controversy by the challenge of the Berengarian heresy, which had read literally and analytically the signum-signatum tension that had surfaced in Laidrad’s work, written a generation before Florus’s attack upon Amalarius. From the moment of the emergence of this “new dialectic,” during the Carolingian period, Aristotelianism was in the air; two centuries later, it would be seen to be indispensable for dealing with Berengarius, because his assault upon Carolingian orthodoxy had relied upon a sub-Aristotelian version of the “new dialectic” to ground a destructive critique of Eucharistic realism. Berengarius’ challenge to Eucharistic orthodoxy rested upon the supposedly inexorable criteriology of Aristotelian logic, ill understood because received from Boethius as entirely divorced from its metaphysical foundation in the act-potency analysis of substance-accident, matter-form, but which was identified with rationality as such by its philosophical fautores, under whose exploitation it could not but return, as with Berengarius, to its binary Eleatic format.
Those early medieval defenders of the doctrinal tradition who rose to meet that challenge found themselves forced to deal with its instrument, the “new logic” or “new dialectic” which henceforth was at once suspect of heresy, as in the hands of an Abelard, and yet an acquaintance with which became increasingly necessary for participation in the new analytic intellectuality, before which the subtlety of the Augustinian phenomenology of worship, viz., as the Eucharistic recapitulation of a fallen and broken creation, gave way. The increasingly abstract deployment of a rationality implicitly autonomous and self-sustaining sought to defeat the Berengarian denial of Eucharistic realism by an appeal to “necessary reasons” for an apodictic proof of that realism, as by St. Anselm and the Victorines. This effort found its mature expression more than a century later in St. Thomas’ application of the Aristotelian act-potency metaphysical analysis to the resolution of the theological “quaestiones” of the new apologetic theology The necessitarian latencies of the act-potency analysis were canonized at the end of the fifteenth century by Cajetan’s De nominum analogia.[109]
Paradoxically, it was at this time, in the early twelfth century, that, under another Anselm, the School of Laon developed the final, revised expression of the Augustinian sacramental realism. By the middle of that century, that synthesis had been itself misunderstood, and fell into disuse. Only the quasi-magisterial standing of Peter Lombard’s Sentences preserved a theological acquaintance with it, but it underwent no further development. Instead, under the impact of a triumphant Aristotelianism, the Augustinian phenomenology of worship began to undergo the rationalization that led from St. Bonaventure’s reluctant deployment of an Aristotelian vocabulary to Duns Scotus’ abandonment of illumination, and finally to the Nominalist rejection of metaphysics as such, whereby faith in sacramental realism become a blind obedience of the mind, a sacrificium intellectus, instead of the free appropriation of the Eucharistic mystery Fathers had known it to be.
Prior to the renewal of theological anthropology by John Paul II at the beginning of his pontificate, it was little remarked that the terms “flesh” and “one flesh” have an intrinsic relation: that between the necessary disunity of our existence in fallenness, and the restoration by the Head of the free nuptial unity, proper to the Good Creation, that is the work of redemption. “Sarx” is quite simply the product of the Fall of man and with him, the Fall of the Good Creation: it designates the fragmentation and fallenness of man in his world. As the Original Sin issued in death, so the “flesh,” sarx, is that disintegrating condition of fallen humanity that proceeds inexorably in each of us and in all of us toward the finality of utter dissolution that is the “dust” of death. In this Pauline perspective, death then is the sign of sin, and the sign of death is the flesh. This doctrine still stands in need of development, although its major themes were supplied by John Paul II in his early lectures, in Veritatis splendor, in Evangelium vitae and, during the last year of his long pontificate, in the Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Collaboration of men and women in the Church and in the World, which the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith published on May 31, 2004.
All that we can know of the nature of original sin must be derived from reflection upon the redemption worked by Christ. Our involuntary solidarity in the sin of the first Adam is perceptible and thereby comprehensible only in terms of our free solidarity in the redemption worked by the second Adam. To ignore our solidarity with the second Adam is to naturalize the Fall. Our imprisonment by sin, by the fear of death which Paul so stressed, is precisely our necessary, non-covenantal, solidarity in the determinacy of death, a solidarity in sarx which, as fallen from our first moment we have no freedom to avoid, insofar as left to our own devices,. Fallenness, sarx, has no intrinsic remedy: it is fatality simply, tragedy without catharsis. Our restoration to integrity is a work of creation, not of mere change: it requires the Son’s outpouring, mediante ecclesia, of the creative Spirit, Spiritus Creator, upon the fallen and disintegrating universe.
Secondly: our solidarity in sin makes no sense except insofar as it is related to the guilt of the prospective head of humanity, the fallen Adam, whose sin was his refusal to accept the primordial offer to him “in the Beginning” of the authority of headship, in the meaning of that term as it is revealed by Christ: viz., to be a head is to be the source of a free substantial unity. It is the office of a Head to provide the free unity of the community of which he is the head: absent that provision, the community concerned can have no unity: it has only a necessary disunity.[110] Only the institution of the free, nuptially-ordered unity of the One Flesh on the altar and the cross, a work of creation by the Mission of the Spirit from the Father through the Son, could remedy the first Adam’s primordial refusal of the imaging of God, which is identically the refusal to be free, that is the Original Sin: Adam and Eve refused the uniquely free order of their nuptial union, and with that, the creation whose free unity was dependent upon its source in a Head was without that Headship, and fell into the inexorable process of disintegration that is sarx, the fallen, fleshly dynamics of death.
Paul famously described our redemption as “recapitulation:” (anakephalaiosis, the substantive of the “anakephalaiōsasthai ta panta” (ἀνακεφαλώσασθαι τὰ πάντα) of Eph. 1:10). The term was taken up in the late second century by Irenaeus, whose Christological summary thus uses “recapitulation” to name the redemptive deed of Christ upon the cross. However, often the meaning currently assigned the term by theologians is merely nominal, as designating a facile generalization or summing-up. This reduces it to the banality of a merely pragmatic or forensic term. In fact, however, “recapitulation” invokes precisely the headship of Christ who, as the new Adam, the new Head, is the source of the free unity of the nuptial One Flesh, the Eucharistic One Flesh, the gratia capitis of which, as precisely as Head, Jesus the Christ is the source.[111] The Pauline analogy is explicitly Trinitarian: as the Father is the Head because He is the source of the free unity of the Trinity, so the Christ is the Head as the source of the free unity of the One Flesh, the created and historical image of the Trinity whose secondary image, as John Paul has stressed, is sacramental marriage, the public and inevitably political sacrament whose impact upon a fallen world is irresistible ex opere operato: it underlies the rule of law of all free society, and thus all social freedom, whether religious, political, economic, or cultural.[112]
From an examination of the recapitulation of the fallen world and fallen man by Christ, it is evident that the sin of the first Adam could only be his refusal to be the head of the free humanity that would have been constituted by his nuptial union with Eve. This refusal, most subtly detailed in the opening verses of Gen 3, involves the prospective Body as well as the prospective Head. In responding to the subtlety of the Serpent, Eve implicitly dissociates herself from Adam’s headship, choosing another and false freedom entirely other from that of which he should have been the source, as Jesus the Head is the source of that restored freedom by which we are freed to be free. The first Adam, by acquiescing in the first Eve’s disavowal of his authority, disavows nuptial union with her, thus refusing the office of Head, as she correspondingly refuses the union with him by which she should freely have been his bridal body, one flesh with him.
Their choice had as its immediate consequence the disintegration of their world and with it, their humanity. Their “flesh,” no longer the free unity of the nuptial “one flesh,” thereby became “flesh” absolutely, “dust,” because devoid of the intrinsic free unity, the free intelligibility of the good creation. Once this free unity had been refused, the refusal was of unity as such―for the unity of creation, even as fallen, is incapable of subsumption to the necessary unity invoked by fallen reason. Thus with sin, death entered the world, for by the sinful refusal of free, nuptial unity, life was intrinsically transformed into the necessary dynamic of dissolution whose telos is death, the absolute disintegration signified by the “dust” from which we are made, and to which we must return. The created universe, devoid of intrinsic unity, was left without meaning, having neither beginning nor end; it exists in entropic disintegration..
The possibility of the Original Sin, Karl Barth’s “impossible possibility,” was negatively latent in creation, for freedom can only be a gift, freely to be appropriated by a humanity with no unity whatever of its own: thus the: “from dust you are” of Gen 3:19. The actualization of this refusal of free unity, viz., of integrity, is the Fall. Its restoration, its redemption, was achieved by the second Adam on the cross, whereon his One Sacrifice instituted the New Covenant, the One Flesh of Christ and the Church, freely to be appropriated by a fallen humanity in and through her sacramental worship, which in sum is covenantal, nuptially-ordered fidelity. The redemptive restoration of the One Flesh by the institution of the New Covenant through the One Sacrifice is the rest*oration of that free order by which the whole creation is good and beautiful: its free unity is precisely its goodness and its beauty.
This is ancient doctrine: revealed in the Pauline Gospel, its exploitation after Irenaeus was primarily by Augustine, but his explicit recognition of the nuptial and therefore by implication the covenantal unity in One Flesh of Christ and the Church has been much neglected and, where recognized, much distorted by reason of a fallen, ‘sarkic’ misunderstanding of our free, sacramentally achieved solidarity in its freedom and its unity. So necessary is the mutual freedom of the second Eve and the second Adam in the New Covenant that its institution required of her a finite freedom as sinless as her Lord’s: his union with her would otherwise have been despotic, an imposition rather than a sacrificial fidelity to the Mission whose terminus is that sacrificial outpouring of the Spirit by which we are redeemed. To ignore the covenantal integrity of the One Flesh of the New Covenant is to reduce it to a dualistic master-slave relationship, precisely that coercive order of existence from which conversion is demanded by the New Covenant itself.
We have seen that there had arisen in the patristic and Carolingian ecclesiology a confusion over the relation of “head” to “body,” a confusion evidently fostered by Paul’s inclusion of the “head” within the “parts” of the “one body” in I Cor. 12. Paul addressed this chapter specifically to the members of the Church as “parts” of the ecclesial “body,” in that Paul urges the members to be devoted to the good of the whole “body” rather than merely to their own private concerns:
As it is, there are many parts but one body. The eye cannot say to the head, “I have no need of you,” nor again, the head to the feet, “I have no need of you.” On the contrary, the parts of the body which seem to be the weaker are indispensable, and those parts of the body which we think less honorable we invest with greater honor, and our unpresentable parts are treated with greater modesty, which our more presentable parts do not require. But God has so arranged the body, giving the greater honor to the inferior part, that there may be no discord within the body, but that the members may have the same care for each other. If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together.
Now you are the body of Christ, and individu ally members of it (sic). And God has appointed in the Church first apostles, second prophets, third teachers, then workers of miracles, then healers, helpers, administrators, speakers in various kinds of tongues. Are all apostles? Are all prophets? Are all teachers? Do all work miracles? Do all possess gifts of healing? Do all speak with tongues? Do all interpret? But earnestly desire the higher gifts.
I Cor. 12:12-31 (RSV)
From its beginning to its end, the exhortation comprising I Cor. 12 cannot be understood to have been directed to Jesus the Christ, the Head of the Church, as though he were one of the members whom Paul addresses, finally urging that each member “earnestly desire the higher gifts.” Paul concludes this exhortation to ecclesial unity, a unity which can only be free, thus moral and so covenantal, with the famous paean comprising I Cor. 13, pointing to charity as the highest gift, the gift without which the others are useless.
Clearly, Paul is not urging virtue upon his Lord, as though a “member of the body,” although there is a reference to the “head” as among the “many parts” of the “body;” viz., “The eye cannot say to the head, etc.” Further, here the reference of the head is not to a person, as it is in I Cor. 11 (i.e., the Father is the head of Christ, Christ the Head of every man, and the husband of the wife, but rather is listed among the subordinate parts of a body, along with the eye, the feet, the hands. Nevertheless, as we shall see, and notwithstanding its evident absurdity, the notion that the Head who is Christ is a “part” of the “body” and that the Church’s Head is a “part“ of her Body became widespread among the Fathers. In this common reading of the “one flesh” as a physical association of head to body, the Fathers and early medieval theologians simply ignored the nuptial emphasis of head and body in Augustine’s Sermo 341, itself a summary of repeated passages in the Enarrationes in Psalmos and elsewhere; see endnote 81, infra.
The surface explanation for this lapse is simple enough: the unity of the ecclesial body was early so associated with the unity of the One Flesh, viz., with the nuptial unity of the “whole Christ,” that it was easy for the Fathers to look to I Cor. 12:12 and Rom. 12:4 which do not deal with the transcendent New Covenant, the nuptial unity of the One Flesh of Christ and his Church, but with the free and therefore moral unity of the members of the Church within the Church. This latter unity which, although moral, the Fathers nonetheless regarded as organic, having read Paul’s use of a Stoic metaphor in these passages rather too literally. Thus, as we have seen, the Fathers commonly dealt with the Head-Body union of the Bridegroom and the Bride as though it were the organic unity of a physical body, not the free, covenantal, nuptial union in One Flesh of Christ and the Church instituted by his One Sacrifice.
This confusion was perhaps facilitated by what appears to have been a fastidiousness, not so much over the use of nuptial symbolism, as over its covenantal implication. The Fathers tended still to understand marriage in patriarchal, quasi-dualist terms: i.e., the wife was seen to be subject to the husband, unilaterally.[113] This lingering misogyny is a relic of the widespread Platonism of the Hellenistic world, but theologically it is better understood simply as an insufficient conversion of the patristic and medieval imagination from the pagan paradigm of femininity as a principle of resistance to the to the nuptial imagery of the Eucharistic liturgy. We find the same mistake in St. Thomas, who steadfastly ignores, even in his Commentary on Ephesians, the free because covenantal complementarity of the union in One Flesh of Christ and the Church. It is most probable that the common patristic and medieval predilection for interpreting the One Flesh as the non-covenantal, even organic, unity of “one body” or “one person” may be thus explained. The Fathers, as well as the monastic and medieval theologians, did not at all reject the nuptial symbolism, but they very often minimized or at least hesitated before its covenantal significance, its connotation of mutuality in freedom. This is another heritage from the Platonic-Aristotelian background of patristic and medieval speculation: the uncritical assumption that the truth, unity, and goodness of being must be intrinsically necessary, and cannot be intrinsically free: here the ancient pagan confusion of freedom with irrationality is evident.
The revelation of creation as perfected in the free nuptial unity of Adam and Eve, a creation which only then is “very good,” is prophesied in Gen. 2; we have seen that the Fathers commonly understand that prophecy to have been fulfilled by the sacrificial institution of the New Covenant, the One Flesh of Christ and the Church. Augustine went so far as to refer to this nuptial unity as “the whole Christ,” the “complete Christ,” language which, given the prevalent cosmological postulates of the patristic, medieval, and also most modern theological speculation, could only be taken either as the assimilation of the person of the second Eve to the Person of the Christ―the attribution to this unity of “una persona” was a patristic and medieval commonplace―or, as with de Lubac, taken to be quasi-metaphorical, in the sense of an assertion of an intrinsic, mysterious, but less than substantial metaphysical unity.
Thus there existed perennially a confusion over the meaning of the unitas corporis Christi, leading to a neglect of the covenantal meaning of that term and thus a failure to grasp the free and therefore covenantal reciprocity of the sponsal unity of Christ and the Church in One Flesh. This confusion goes far to explain the tendency among the Fathers, including Augustine, and among the early medieval theologians, to envision the unity of the One Flesh as that of “one person.” We find this in St. Augustine, as also much later in Peter Lombard and St. Thomas. But it had other effects as well: the interpretation of that sponsal unity as personal rather than as nuptial implied a Christomonist merger of the Church into the Christ as integrating parts of a single organism, the Body of Christ.[114] Add to this the unreflective cosmological equation of person with intellectual substance, a commonplace passed on to the Western theological tradition by Boethius: thus guided, a theologian intent upon upholding the historical unity of Christ and his Bridal Church could scarcely avoid thinking this unity to be substantial and therefore that of one Person. Those who used this terminology were not Christo-monists, but the path to such a mistake was clearly open.
Hence thus may be understood the common misinterpretation of the Pauline nuptial symbolism that would make the Head to be a part of the Body, and the Church therefore a part of the Body as well. This mistake is at one with the misinterpretation of the “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” addressed to St. Paul’s in his encounter with the risen Christ on the road to Damascus, wherein Jesus identifies himself with the Church whom Saul is persecuting. Very clearly, Paul is not the source of this mistake:
Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by every joint with which it is supplied, when each part is working properly, makes bodily growth and upbuilds itself in love.
Eph. 4:15-16 (RSV)
In this passage, the head-body distinction and the Church whose members are thereby the members of her Head is explicit. In the next chapter of Ephesians (5:21-33), it is further clear that the Head-Body relation is sponsal, that of bridegroom and bride. The meditation which culminates in the insight of Eph. 5:21-33 into the One Flesh of Christ and the Church has its inception in I Cor. 6:13-20, where a man’s unhallowed sarkic union in “one body” with a prostitute is contrasted with the “one flesh” of the Good Creation that is the free order of nuptial union in the image of God, a freedom instituted on the cross, where the fallen disunity of the “flesh” is “recapitulated,” restored to the free unity intended for it “in the beginning,” which is to say, “in Christ.” (Col. 1:16).[115] This passage in I Cor. 6:13-20 is central to the Pauline interpretation, in Eph. 5:21ff., of the One Flesh of Gen 2:24.
I Corinthians 6:13-20
13: The body is not meant for immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body
Τὸ δὲ σῶμα οὐ τῇ πορνεία ἀλλὰ τῷ κυρίῳ, καὶ ὁ κύριος τῷ σωματι.
14: And God raised the Lord and will also raise us up by his power.
ὁ δὲ θεὸς καὶ τὸν κύριον ἤγυρειρεν καὶ ἡμᾶς ἐξεγερεῖ διὰ τῆς δυνάμεως αὐτοῦ.
15: Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Shall I therefore take the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute? Never!
Οὐκ οἴδατε ὅτι τά σώματα ὑμῶν μέλη Χριστοῦ ἐστιν; ἄρας οὖν τά μέλη τοῦ Χριστοῦ ποιήσω πόρνες μέλη. μὴ γενοιτο.
16: Do you not know that he who joins himself to a prostitute becomes on body with her? For, as it is written, “The two shall become one.”
[ἢ] οὐκ οἴδατε ὅτι ὁ κολλώμενος τῇ πόρνε ἓν σῶμά ἐστιν; ἔσονται γάρ, φησίν, οί δύο εἰς σάρκα μίαν.
17: But he who is united to the Lord becomes one spirit with him
ὁ δε κολλώμενος τῷ κυρὶον ἓν πνεῦμα ἐστιν.
18. Shun immorality. Every other sin which a man commits is outside the body; but the immoral man sins against his own body.
Φεύγετε τὴν πορνεὶαν. Πᾶν ἁμάρτημα ὃ ἐὰν ποιήσῃ ἄνθροπος ἐκτὸς τοῦ σώματός ἐστιν. ὁ δὲ πορνεύων εἰς ἴδιον σῶμα ἁμάρτανει.
19: Do you not know that your body is a temple of Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God? You are not your own.
οὐκ οἴδατε ὅτι τὸ σῶμα ὑμῶν ναὸς τοῦ ἐν ὑμῖν ἁγιου πνεύματος ἐστιν οὗ ἔχετε ἀπὸ θεοῦ καὶ οὐκ ἐστὲ ἑαυτῶν.
20: you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.
ἠγοράσθητε γὰρ τιμῆς δοξάσατε δὴ τὸν θεὸν ἐν τῷ σώνατι ὐμῶν.
The English text is taken from RSV;; the Greek is taken from Nestle-Aland, 28th edition, 2012.
This is Paul‘s summary at once of his anthropology and of his moral doctrine, the covenantal fidelity that is the corollary of our creation in Christ,. It follows that the nuptial interpretation of Eph. 4:15 is of the first importance.
(11) And his gifts were that some should be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, (12) to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ (13) until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ; (14) so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by the cunning of men, by their craftiness in deceitful wiles.
(15) Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by every joint with which it is supplied, when each part is working properly, makes bodily growth and upbuilds itself in love.
A failure to understand this verse as the invocation of that nuptially ordered covenantal fidelity can only proceed to a devolution of doctrine, a failure to appropriate the Truth of the Church’s worship of her head. Eph. 4:15, with its intricate preface (vv. 1-14) has drawn that line which distinguishes the followers of Christ from the fatal alternative: “you must no longer live as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds.” The conversion to Christ which Paul here invokes has its culmination in Eph. 5:21-33, in which the full meaning of our fidelity to Christ is summed up in his fidelity to the Church in their One Flesh.
Therefore Eph. 4:15 is intelligible only as spoken of the Head, whose covenantal union in One Flesh with the bridal Church, his Body, instituted by his One Sacrifice, frees the Church, enables her freely to exist in nuptial union with him, the source of her free existence, whereby precisely as her Head he speaks, not for her but for her union with him, the nuptially-ordered Good Creation, the substantial One Flesh of which he is the source. His exercise of Headship is his offering of the One Sacrifice ; in this he Images the Father, the Head of the Trinity, whose image is the substantial New Covenant, the Good Creation, restored in Christ to its primordial integrity..
The Father precisely as Head is the source from whom the Son proceeds. It is through the Son that the Father is the source, the Head, of the Spirit. The Father’s sending of the Son to give the Spirit terminates in the fullness of life that is the gift of gifts, the New Covenant instituted by the One Sacrifice. This terminus of the Mission of the Son to give the Spirit is the free substantial unity of Head and Body, Bridegroom and Bride in One Flesh, the Image of the Trinity. Clearly the Image must itself be trinitarian: it is evident a posteriori that the free immanence of the Triune God in the Good Creation cannot but be Trinitarian, and the Good Creation that is good by reason of the divine free immanence within it and ordering it, could not freely image its source were it not the free unity, the substantial unity, that is the One Flesh, for there is no other created free unity than this and those which, in ecclesia, are radically dependent upon it because freely ordered to it by their liturgical participation in it.
The Church’s voice is her worship of her Lord, her sacrifice of praise: she has no other voice than this, and therefore cannot speak for their One Flesh, as does her Head, just as the Son who can do nothing on his own cannot speak for the Trinity. Only the head can speak for that of which he is the head, and he cannot speak as other than the head. The utterance of the Father’s Word is the Mission of the Son and through the Son of the Spirit: by these Missions the Trinity is revealed; the utterance of the Son is the Gift of the Spirit, the Spiritus Creator whose procession from the Father through the Son issues in the Good Creation, but only through the Son’s obedience to the Father, his acceptance of that office of Headship whose ultimate expression is his sacrificial death upon the cross in the institution of the New Covenant.
To forget the office of headship is to meld the free order of the Trinity into a monadic identity, and so to undo the freedom by which the Good Creation is good, for its goodness is its Trinitarian imaging in the freedom for which Christ has made it free. This created freedom cannot but be nuptially ordered: there is no other created freedom, no other freedom in all creation, than this nuptially ordered unity, freely appropriated in the worship of the Church.
It must be stressed that the problem posed by the puzzlement of Amalarius and later theologians over the Pauline head-body-flesh language is resolved only in that free covenantal union in One Flesh of the sacrificed second Adam with his glory, the second Eve who proceeds from him as from her source: this resolution, at least intimated by Paschasius, as de Lubac witnesses in his commentary on Paschasius’ Eucharistic doctrine quoted above, is entirely without prejudice to the stress, emphasized by de Lubac, of the Johannine Eucharistic doctrine upon the Eucharistic Jesus as the Bread from Heaven, Communion in whose risen flesh is the one source of life eternal, for his flesh, as risen, is One Flesh with his bridal Church in the sacrament of the altar. At this point, it is necessary further to examine de Lubac’s view of this matter:
The author (again Abelardian) of the Ysagoge in theologiam and Othon de Lucques adopt a solution a little more complex. Even before coming to the central element of the mystery, i.e., the res et sacramentum, they already introduce the Church as the body of Christ, à propos of the symbolism of the species, and only then do they make mention of the virtus or the efficacia sacramenti, which they confuse with the spiritual flesh of Christ. However, while they perceive especially in the corpus-ecclesia the unity of the members of Christ among themselves, the spiritualis caro is in their eyes the unity of each communicant―each member of Christ―with the Head.
In these last two examples―and one might cite many others―the Johannine line has already approached the Pauline line, thanks to the explanation of the doctrine contained in the discourse on the Bread of Life by the doctrine contained in the discourse after the Supper. The union of Christ and the faithful, become a “union of head and members” (citing sources), admits at least an allusion to the idea of the “body of many members in union”. The allusion is found reinforced in the texts―also very numerous―where the subject who receives the sacrament is no longer the individual soul, even as a member, but the Church herself. “Sacrifices by which the Church is marvelously fed and nourished”―“The life of the Church, the flesh of the Savior”. For, from the moment at which the Church is a social reality, there is a manifest correspondence between her life and her unity: is it not the union of her members, a union strengthened by the sacrament, that measures the intensity of her life? Nevertheless, the two Pauline metaphors of the union of the Christ and of his Church in one sole flesh, and the union of the members of the Christ in one sole body, do not converge. The double symbolism of the species, joined to the natural opposition of meaning between “flesh” and “body,” maintain a separation between the Eucharistic line of St. Paul and that of St. John. Although approaching each other, they remain parallel rather than convergent. As Gandolph of Bologna will say a little later, the effect of the Eucharist is a “twin effect.” [116]
This expression “twin effect,” literally, res gemina, of the Eucharist is used here in a sense quite different from that we have earlier examined. There it had designated the simultaneity of the infallibly efficacious representation of the Christ and the Church, inseparably, in the res sacramenti of the Eucharist: viz., the Eucharistic una caro. Here the “twin effect” refers to the causal relation between the res et sacramentum and the res tantum, between the Eucharist and its anagogical fulfillment. As de Lubac makes clear further on the “twin effect” is achieved in the eschatological union of the risen Christ and the fulfilled Church, the manifest glory of the Christ, in which case we have returned to the original meaning, the Eucharistic una caro.[117] The achievement is of course Eucharistic, the final or ultimate effect of the offering of the One Sacrifice and its institution of the New Covenant. However, these distinct theological references, the former historical, the latter eschatological, reflect the difference between the apologetic thrust of the early medieval theology, over against the anagogical patristic emphasis upon what the medieval theologians would refer to as the res tantum sacramenti. These usages are not in conflict; while they pertain to quite different points of view, quite distinct emphases, they speak of the one Gift of the Spiritus Creator, which is historical only as sacramental and history-transcending. On the other hand, de Lubac’s failure to recognize that the Pauline “one flesh” is precisely the synthesis of Christ the head with his bridal Body, the Church, stems not from any écartement between the Johannine and Pauline Eucharistic doctrines, but from his own commitment to a metaphysics which cannot reconcile freedom with substantial unity.
We have earlier pointed to the development of the meaning of caro spiritualis in its final “concordisme” after Berengarius by way of its assimilation to the sacramentum tantum, res et sacramentum, res tantum sacramental paradigm: thereby it becomes the res tantum of the Eucharist, the communicant’s union in ecclesia with the risen Lord. We have noted that in the earlier, patristic sacramentum-res sacramenti paradigm, the caro spiritualis, thus understood, is identically the communicant’s more profound incorporation in the Church, and the Church’s growth by that incorporation (adunatio) of her members through their Eucharistic communion with her Head. The medieval reply to the Berengarian heresy required that what had been implicit in the patristic paradigm of sacramentum-res sacramenti be given the explicit expression it finds in the medieval paradigm, which distinguishes between the infallible effect of the Eucharistic signing and the fallible effect, and therefore required medieval theologians conceptually to distinguish what is not distinct phenomenologically or experientially, viz., the worshiper and the Church in which his worship is actual.
However in this passage, salva reverentia, a basic confusion enters the discussion; it is consequent upon de Lubac’s failure, which is the failure generally of the patristic and medieval theologians, adequately to grasp the sacramentally-realistic and therefore substantial and metaphysically objective import of Paul’s insight into the nuptial symbolism of Gen. 2:24 as fulfilled in the second Adam‘s sacrificial institution of the One Flesh of his Covenantal union with the second Eve. That passage in Genesis refers to the covenantally free, nuptial unity by which the work of the sixth day is good and very good: the metaphysically substantial standing of the One Flesh cannot be put in issue without rejecting the Yahwist doctrine of the good creation as well as its Elohist parallel in Gen. 1:24.
There can be no question of the distinction between this free, nuptial union of the bridal Church with her Bridegroom-Head and the internal, organic unity of the one (ecclesial) Body, the Bride of Christ whose free unity is given her by her Head, the Jesus who most certainly, contra the Fathers whom de Lubac cites, is not “adunatum ad” the Church. That expression is proper to the Christian who by his baptism becomes a member of the Church whose existence is prior to his membership. It cannot be applied to Jesus, the Head of the Church. As her source, his union with her is not with a preexisting reality, but with a personal reality whose existence is her procession from him. It has been sufficiently emphasized that he does not enter into an organic or physical composition with her, as though as Head he were an organ of the ecclesial body.
The intrinsic, free, and therefore nuptially-ordered covenantal community of the members of the ecclesial body is given them by their baptism into the Body, who is thus free by her procession from her Head. His relation to her is the Image of the free relation of the Father to the Son, viz., it is an analogy of the Trinitarian relation of the Head, the Father, to his Glory, his Son. Therefore, as is evident in I Cor. 11:3, the nature of the relation of Christ to the Church of whom he is the Head is governed by the free, substantial Unity of the Trinitarian Relations: the Image of which Jesus is the Head is itself a free substantial unity, a single substance, the One Flesh of the New Covenant. Consequently the Trinity-imaging unity of the One Flesh cannot be other than the substantial, free unity of the Bridegroom, the Bride, and their nuptial union in One Flesh. In their free and substantial unity, these three constitute the substantial Image of the substantial Triune God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Finally, the members of the ecclesial, bridal Body “for freedom are made free” by their baptism into this Body, this bridal Church, and thus into the One Flesh of her constitutive union with her Lord. By their baptism they enter into the nuptial unity of the Church’s worship, their freedom is given concretely historical expression by their sacramental signing, as masculine or as feminine persons, of the Trinity. This free and sacramental signing is their covenantal fidelity.
In the quotation supra, de Lubac believes to have discovered, within the Pauline “line” of Eucharistic doctrine, a lack of synthesis between Paul’s emphasis upon the quasi-organic unity of the members of the Church in one (ecclesial) Body, and his stress upon the nuptial union of the Church with her spouse in One Flesh; he then passes on to assert a comparable “écartement” or failure of synthesis, between the Pauline “line” and the Johannine “line” of Eucharistic doctrine. De Lubac identifies the former “line” with Paul’s finding in the Eucharist the cause of the unity of the Church (una caro); he identifies the latter or Johannine “line” with the Evangelist’s finding in the “panis vitae” the principle at once of the deification of the communicant and of the growth of the Church.
While de Lubac maintains that the connotations of “flesh” (caro) preclude that term’s denotation of an organism,[118] elsewhere, in describing Augustine’s passing from the “metaphor” of head-body to the “metaphor” of bridegroom-bride,[119] he quite clearly fails to see what Augustine took for granted, i.e., that these two “metaphors” have the same referent, viz., the One Flesh, Una Caro, of Christ and the Church. We have seen Augustine insist on the identity of head-body and bridegroom-bride in Sermo 341, where he uses these polarities as interchangeable expressions of the same nuptial union of the second Adam and second Eve in One Flesh.
De Lubac maintains that this supposed failure of synthesis with a consequent confusion, between the Pauline emphasis upon the ecclesial Body (Corpus Christi mysticum), and the Johannine emphasis upon the Eucharistic nourishment of the communicant and so of the Church (caro spiritualis), marks theological development up to the Sentences of Peter Lombard, whom we have seen identify the Church as the res tantum sacramenti: he then cannot avoid placing the “effectus huius sacramenti,” i.e., the communicant’s union with Christ, at the same level. Clearly enough, they are within the same patristic res sacramenti; with an equal clarity, placing the Church in the medieval res tantum risks depriving her of her sacramental historicity. Only when the Eucharistic res tantum is seen as the final and complete effectus huius sacramenti. applicable to the individual worshiper precisely as worshiping in ecclesia, is this risk obviated.
De Lubac finds an Augustinian foundation underlying this “amalgam” of Corpus Christi mysticum and caro spiritualis: Augustine often speaks of Eucharistic communion as receiving the body that is the Church. We have seen that for de Lubac, the meaning of the “head - body” union is governed by I Cor. 12, not by I Cor. 7, 11 and Eph. 5: consequently, finally and despite himself, he must look upon the One Flesh of the Head and Body as an organic unity, and not as the nuptial unity it is for Paul and Augustine. In fact, these Pauline “metaphors” both have the same substantial, intrinsically and freely intelligible reality in view, the nuptial union of the second Adam and the second Eve, the New Covenant. As the good creation, its substantiality is beyond question, but it is a substantiality unrecognized by the patristic tradition, and by de Lubac himself: a free substance was evidently unthinkable.
De Lubac’s frequent relegation to metaphorical standing of expressions such as res gemina, and notably, the Pauline nuptial imagery, is not to be read as a refusal to grant them an intrinsic or metaphysical significance and weight; he has insisted, almost alone, upon the doctrinal indispensability of the nuptial symbolism underwritten by the One Flesh of the Church’s Eucharistic worship.[120] As has been said heretofore, his hesitation before the substantial standing of the One Flesh of Christ and the Church rests upon an uncritical subscription to the Aristotelian and Thomist identification of material “substance” with the physical unity of a body. Obviously, this bars his understanding of the Una Caro as a substantial unity although, since he identifies the union of Christ and the Church as the radical Mysterium, its metaphysical standing is obvious. A further complication appears in the commonplace failure of medieval metaphysics to recognize the application of the intrinsic freedom of the Trinity to that which is created in its image, the proleptic “one flesh” of Adam and Eve, the Image of the Trinity that, as its image, cannot but be substantial: its free unity is in fact the terminus of the Missions of the Son and the Holy Spirit.
Thus, immediately following the long quotation supra, de Lubac finds, in a final, anagogically-oriented synthesis, the Johannine Eucharistic doctrine to be at one with the Pauline doctrine, with particular reference to their common use of nuptial symbolism:
Thanks to this Bread of Life promised in the sixth chapter of St John, the “unus panis, unum corpus” of the first Epistle to the Corinthians is realized. For the spiritual life is a social unity:
Virtus enim ipsa quae ibi intelligitur, unitas est, ut redacti in corpus ejus, effecti membra ejus, simus quod accipimus.
The principle of this life is not other than the Spirit of the Christ, which is a Spirit of unity, in such wise that to live in the body of Christ is to be fed by his Spirit. Is not this once again the teaching of the farewell discourse of Saint John? Beginning with the allegory of the vine and finishing with the priestly prayer, nothing could better suggest that the intimacy of the communicant with the Christ is an increase in the dimensions of the Church. In that, there is no concordism. Commented by St. Paul, Saint John says it as well by himself, if it is true that the allegory of the vine and the whole of the recital of this evening meal (soirée) are not less Eucharistic than the foretelling of the Bread of Life. Had not St. Paul, for his part, also recalled the manna, the “spiritual food,” of the Hebrews in the desert? And does not this offer yet another basis for the convergence of the two points of view when, with respect to another “great mystery” it evokes the union of the Christ and the Church, a union so intimate that the one and the other form only one flesh? Unus panis, una caro…
This last trait should be striking, the more so in that St. John, he also, showed in his fashion―on Calvary, at the site of the first paradise―the wedding of Christ and his Church: the new Adam and the new Eve. One might observe again, exploiting the Pauline symbolism of the “one bread,” that in the making of the dough, water plays an indispensable binding role: aquae coagulum; was not this water that of baptism, which actually begins the work of unity that the Eucharist is to deepen? From the time of St. Irenaeus, the teaching of Saint Paul had begun to receive this colorful but authentic commentary, and St. Augustine liked to imbue the minds of neophytes with it. “All are made to be one bread, the dominical bread”. The correspondence of symbols does not cease there. For this water of baptism, was not it again St. John who showed it flowing with the blood―symbol of the Eucharist―from the side of Jesus, opened by the spear? “That is drunk which flowed from the side of Christ”. The liturgies did not fail to recall it at the moment at which the priest adds water to the wine in the chalice. But, did not this mystical mixture symbolize at the same time, as Saint Cyprian had explained at length, the necessary union of Christ and the Christian people, ransomed by the Passion of Christ in the sacrifice of the Church? Who separates water, denies the union of Christ and the Church. Since both were necessary at Calvary, to form the Church, the blood and the water remained together equally necessary to effect our salvation. From that proceeds the necessity of the water and of the wine for the sacrament, a necessity underlined in turn by the more recent liturgical prayers.[121]
Augustine had developed the doctrinal foundation of nuptial symbolism t in his Sermo 341 and in many other places. De Lubac has himself asserted it to be indispensable to Catholic worship, as it could not be had he supposed it to possess a merely extrinsic metaphorical significance.[122] Augustine has written:
Et quomodo sponsus et sponsa, sic caput et corpus: quia caput mulieris vir. Sive ergo dicam caput et corpus, sive dicam sponsus et sponsa; unum intelligete.
Sermo 341, 12,
This is amply clear, insofar as it goes, but it provides no clarification of the “unum” which it affirms, and which Augustine will refer to as “una persona” which makes little sense. Neither do the Fathers appear to have been able to distinguish clearly the entirely distinct meanings of the Pauline “métaphores” which designate on the one hand (1) the covenantal unity of Christ and his Church as the nuptial “One Flesh” instituted on the cross: that is, as the free, covenantal union of Christ and the Church (the New Covenant) and, on the other hand (2) the Church as the bridal body whose members are freely unified by reason of their free participation in ecclesia in the metaphysically prior One Flesh, the product of the outpouring of the Spirit upon the Bridal Church into which they are baptized.
While as we have seen de Lubac’s repeated references to the Pauline language as metaphorical does not carry in French the stress upon extrinsic denomination that the English ‘metaphor’ bears, they do tend to dismiss without discussion the substantial metaphysical import of Paul’s use of “mia sarx” to denote the free unity of the substance whose source is the Head. For Paul, the foundation of the free unity of the Head and the Body in One Flesh is very clearly the free substantial unity of the Trinity, whose source is the Head, the Father, from whom proceed the only-begotten Son and, through the Son, the Holy Spirit that is their subsistent Love, the Spirit that is the irreducibly, personally distinct, subsistent free Unity of the Father and the Son.[123] The Trinitarian Missions of the Son and the Spirit terminate in the One Flesh that is the substantial Image of the divine Substance, the Trinity. The One Flesh, as the Image of the Trinity, must possess an analogously trinitarian order, that of the procession of the second Eve from her Head, the second Adam and from him, through her, the procession of distinctly subsisting love that is their irrevocable nuptial covenant, by which they are One Flesh.
Clearly, only the concrete, substantial unity of the free, Trinity-imaging One Flesh can justify Augustine’s Eucharistic doctrine. Apart from the recognition of that free, nuptial, Trinity-imaging substantiality, Augustine’s Eucharistic doctrine is easily regarded as defeated by the semantic obscurities to which de Lubac, Batiffol, and Camelot, among many other patristic scholars, have referred.[124] These critics are not on that account to be thought in sympathy with the allegation by major Church historians, and exploited by a host of sub-theological contemporary liturgists, of a Christomonism in Augustine’s Eucharistic theology to the point, in at least one contemporary instance, of finding there a symbolist departure from the Catholic doctrinal tradition.[125]
Johannes Betz’ denial of Augustine’s Eucharistic orthodoxy reduces it to a symbolism, a departure from the tradition of the Catholic Church.[126] He is convinced that Augustine did not understand the Eucharistic consecration to effect the historically objective Real Presence of the Body and Blood of Christ. He argues that Augustine’s use of “fieri” to designate the effect of the Eucharistic consecration does not entail or require the explicitly metaphysical change found in the “deutlichere, speziellere Wandlungstermini.” We have noted Pierre Batiffol’s critical remarks upon Augustine’s failure to use such terms as metabolé, metapoiesis, transubstantiatio and conversio to denote the transubstantiation of the elements. In Augustine’s defense it first should be pointed out that those terms are analytic; and do not respond to Augustine’s phenomenological interest in the Eucharist. His assertion of the change of the elements into the body and the blood of Jesus the Christ employs the concretely historical term, “fieri,” to denote a concrete event: the prime Event of the Eucharistic Sacrifice.[127] The “more specialized” terms which Betz considers to have a metaphysical import lacking to “fieri” are in fact abstract and refer not to the prime Event but to its direct implication: the Event-Presence at once of the sacrificing High Priest and of the Victim of the One Sacrifice offered in his Person. It should be remembered that “real presence” does not of itself denote that Event, as Luther well knew, having condemned the sesquimillenial Eucharistic offering of the Sacrifice of the Mass as a “Babylonian Captivity” while insisting, against Karlstadt, Zwingli, and the Sacramentarians, upon the “real presence” of Christ in the Eucharist. His static understanding of the real presence is underlined by his effort to explain it in terms of ubiquity, his cosmological label for the eternal divine omnipresence.
Betz’ criticism of the inadequacy of “fieri” fails to note the clear metaphysical import of “fieri” in John 1:14, whose Latin rendition, “Verbum caro factum est, et inhabitavit in nobis” denotes the Event of the kenōtic immanence of Jesus Christ in fallen human history. The same usage occurs in Jn. 1:12, wherein those who believe in Jesus’ Name may become (genesthai) the children of God: “filios Dei fieri.” It is idle to deny the metaphysical import of this New Testament usage of the “fieri,” and equally idle to condemn its use by Augustine, and not only by him. It is here worth noting that the fourth-century Euchologion or Sacramentary of Serapion of Thmuis, an ally of Athanasius against the Arians, uses “genetai,” i.e., “becomes,” to describe the transubstantiation of the elements’ Cyril of Jerusalem used “metaballesthai” to the same effect[128]. Similarly, Betz fails to note the use of the “fiat mihi” in Mary’s consent to the Event of her conception of her Lord, whereby she “became” the Mother of God:
πῶς ἕσται τοῦτο, ἐπεὶ ἄνδρα οὐ γινώσκω . . . . ἰδοὺ ἡ δούλη κυρίου. γένοιτό μοι κατὰ τὸ ῥῆμά σου. (LK. 1:34, 37-38)
Nestlé-Aland, Novum Testamentum Graece et Latine, 28th ed., 2012 [hereafter, Nestlé-Αland], pp. 179-80.
Quomodo fiet istud, quoniam virum non cognosco? . . . . Ecce ancilla Domini: fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum.
Ibid.
It is beyond discussion that Mary’s conception of her Lord, her becoming the Mother of God, is a metaphysical event, an objective change.
Here we are already on Eucharistic ground, for it is quite impossible to understand Mary’s motherhod of Jesus apart from the transubstantiation of her gift of her fecundity, concretely, of her ovum, into the Body and Blood of Jesus the Christ, for she conceived, not his humanity, but his Person, the “one and the same Son:” only thus is she the Theotokos. As we shall see, the close association of the Incarnation with the Eucharistic liturgy is ancient patristic doctrine: Justin was familiar with it in the second century(Apol. 1, 66). It is in fact incontestable. Every theological effort to explain Our Lady’s motherhood of Jesus as an assumption of “flesh” in her by the non-historical Logos – i.e., “flesh” in the cosmologized sense of an impersonal human nature, inevitably an abstraction, for its individuation can only be personal, apart from which individuation the Christ would not possess the fullness of humanity has failed. As earlier observed, Mary’s conception of her Lord is the prolepsis of Jesus’ sacrificial institution of the New Covenant at the Last Supper; Mary’s “fiat mihi” is the antetype of the Church’s Eucharistic offering of her gifts, also as the second Eve, that they may become the Real Presence of Jesus Christ the High Priest offering himself as the Victim of his One Sacrifice. It is in her Eucharistic celebration that the Church is manifest as the second Eve, becoming One Flesh with her Lord, as Mary, by her offering, became One Flesh with her Lord, her Son. This event, in which the second Eve is One Flesh with her Lord, is single: as there is One Flesh, there is one Bridegroom and one bride: their union is one Event, his transubstantiation of her gift by which she, proceeding from him in immaculate integrity, is at once his mother and his bride. .
Betz finds further indication of Eucharistic symbolism in Augustine’s preference for speaking of the consecration in terms of the “mystical word and the Holy Spirit.” This charge intimates Augustine’s use of a consecratory epiclesis of the Spirit.
Er spricht aber von der Konsekration der Elemente durch das mystische Wort un den Heiligen Geist.
De trinitate 3, 4, 10.
The Latin text of this passage reads as follows: .
10. Si ergo apostolus Paulus, quamuis adhuc portaret sarcinam corporis quod corrumpitur et aggrauat animam, quamuis adhuc ex parte atque in aenigmate ideret, optans dissolui et esse cum Christo, et in semetipso ingemiscens, adoptionem exspectans redemptionem corporis sui, potuit tamen significando praedicare dominum Jesum Christum, aliter per linguam suam, aliter per epistolam, aliter per sacramentum corporis et sanguinis ejus; nec linguam quippe eius, nec membranas et atramentum nec significantes sonos lingua editos nec signa litterarum conscripta pelliculis corpus Christi et sanguinem dicimus; sed illud tantum quod ex fructibus terrae acceptum et prece mystica consecratum rite sumimus ad salutem spiritalem in memoriam pro nobis dominicae passionis, quod cum per manus hominum ad illam uisibilem speciem perducatur non sanctificatur ut sit tam magnum sacramentum, nisi operante inuisibiliter spiritu dei, cum haec omnia quae per corporales motus in illo opere fiunt deus operetur mouens primitus inuisibilia ministrorum siue animas hominum, siue occultorum spirituum sibi subditas seruitutes; quid mirum si etiam in creatura coeli et terrae, maris et aeris, facit deus quae uult sensibilia atque uisibilia ad se ipsum in eis sicut oportere ipse nouit significandum et demonstrandum, non ipsa sua qua est apparente substantia quae omnino incommutabilis est omnibusque spiritibus quos creauit, interius secretiusque sublimior?
We are here concerned for Eucharistic symbolism as a Christian heresy; in that sense, it was unknown before Berengarius, whose untutored application of binary logic to the Eucharistic Words of Institution amounted to an a priori denial of their truth and so of their sacramental efficacy. A consistent use of that logic would have forestalled his own argumentation, as similarly constituted by sentences whose respective subjects and predicates must either identify or exclude each other, their association being mere tautology in the one case, and flat nonsense in the other. In the event, Berengarius was charged with “impanationism,” the heretical assertion of a Eucharistic presence of Christ independent of any change in the Eucharistic elements, in such wise that the presence of the Christ could not be a historical presence, an objective and therefore public event, the offering of the One Sacrifice. With this, the Eucharist lost historical objectivity, to became the ritual expression of a subjective piety. Eucharistic symbolism, however conceived or labeled, is always the corollary of the denial of the historical objectivity of the Eucharistic offering of the One Sacrifice. Summarily, symbolism is the alternative to the sacramental realism of the Catholic liturgy, which rests upon the priestly offering of the One Sacrifice: this is the linch-pin of Catholicism, as Luther well knew.
From the first century, the objective historicity of Jesus the Lord has been under attack. The pagan/gnostic critique of the historical unity of God and man in Christ could not but bear as well upon his Eucharistic historicity. The rational impossibility of a divine immanence in history is basic to pagan liturgies, and has a variety of technical expressions in the philosophical speculations of the more advanced pagan cultures. These philosophies, the “plunder of the Egyptians,” are monist in their supposition of the radical unity of substantial being, and dualist in their recognition that this unity is contradicted in history by a “meontic” principle of duality and change that bars the realization of the divine attributes of unity, goodness, truth, and beauty in history.
This anti-historical rationale characterizes all attacks upon Catholic sacramental realism, of which Eucharistic sacrifice is the effective expression, the root cause of the historical Church. Its rejection by the Reform requires a nonhistorical worship by a nonhistorical church, which is to say, a church whose nonhistorical purity would be sullied by any tinge of historicity: the theologians of the Reform suppose Catholic sacramental realism to be the product of a ‘fall’ of the nonhistorical church into the confusions of historicity.[129] Schillebeeckx would postpone this “fall” to the Middle Ages.
The contemporary modalities of Eucharistic symbolism are variations upon the Protestant denial of the historical mediation of the grace of the risen Lord and the consequent reduction of that grace to nonhistoricity via justification sola fide. These modalities differ only in the degree to which the immanent logic of this dehistoricization is accepted and affirmed. The concrete historical content of the New Testament inhibits this rationalization to the extent that some elements of that content are held as matters of faith: Luther’s rejection of Zwingli’s radical dehistoricization of the Eucharist is an evident example of this inhibition. Unfortunately, over the course of time it is more and more regarded as irrational.
Sacrosanctum Concilium is the first of the documents of the Second Vatican Council to be promulgated, and in some ways the most important, for its text underlies most of the changes which the Catholic Church has since undergone. Chief among these is a confusion over the Real Presence of Jesus the Christ in the Eucharistic celebration of the One Sacrifice:
To accomplish so great a work Christ is always present in his Church, especially in her liturgical celebrations. He is present in the Sacrifice of the Mass not only in the person of his minister, “the same now offering, through the ministry of priests, who formerly offered himself on the cross,”20 but especially in the Eucharistic species. By his power he is present in the sacraments so what when anyone baptizes it is really Christ himself who baptizes21 He is present in his word since it is he himself who speaks when the holy scriptures are read in the Church. Lastly, he is present when the Church prays and sings, for he has promised “where two or three are gathered together in my name there am I in the midst of them.” (Mt. 18:20)
20. Council of Trent, Session 22, Doctrine on the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, ch. 2.
21. Cf. St. Augustine, Tractatus in Joannem, vi, ch. 1, n. 7.
Sacrosanctum Concilium, Ch. I, § 7.
Read within the context provided by the entire document, and by those later promulgated by the Council, it is quite evident that this language is at one with Council’s concern for Eucharistic orthodoxy, and that at the same time recognizes a need felt among the bishops to mitigate in some fashion the Tridentine stress upon those doctrines which the Reform had rejected, notable among which is of course the Real Presence as the direct implication of the Sacrifice of the Mass. These had been the subject of an extensive ecumenical discussion which the Conciliar fathers wished to encourage without any departure from the Tridentine definitions. This will have contributed, as will appear, to Sacrosanctum Concilium’s affirmation of a variety of liturgical-sacramental “presences” of Christ, viz., in the celebrant, in the Eucharistic species, in the preaching of the word, in baptism. No attempt is made to integrate them, although “especially in the Eucharistic species” provides the principle of that integration. The concluding paragraphs of §7 make this explicit:
Christ indeed always associates the Church with Himself in this great work wherein God is perfectly glorified and men are sanctified. The Church is His beloved Bride who calls to her Lord, and through Him offers worship to the Eternal Father.
Rightly, then, the liturgy is considered as an exercise of the priestly office of Jesus Christ. In the liturgy the sanctification of the man is signified by signs perceptible to the senses, and is effected in a way which corresponds with each of these signs, the communication of whose meaning to the congregation in order that they may appropriate that truth is the purpose of the liturgy. In sum, the Church’s public worship, radically the Eucharistic liturgy, is performed by the Mystical Body of Jesus Christ, that is, by the members of his Church, the Bride who offers her worship to the Father through the authority of those ordained to offer the One Sacrifice of Christ in his Name, in his Person.
From this it follows that every liturgical celebration, because it is an action of Christ the priest and of His Body which is the Church, is a sacred action surpassing all others; no other action of the Church can equal its efficacy by the same title and to the same degree.
Pius XII had introduced the theme of a plurality of Eucharistic presences in the encyclical Mediator Dei (November, 1947). Paul VI repeated this theme in Mysterium Fidei (September, 1965), published two years after Sacrosanctum Concilium was promulgated, and three months before the close of the Second Vatican Council. Mysterium Fidei was written inter alia to condemn the theologies which would exchange the doctrine of objective Eucharistic transubstantiation for the entirely subjective changes then being labeled “transignification” and “transfinalization.” These terms named symbolist departures from Eucharistic realism; their subjectivity could not sustain the historical objectivity, the Event, of the Eucharistic Sacrifice.
In Mysterium Fidei the Pope elaborated upon the language of Sacrosanctum Concilium §7, first by designating the subsidiary Eucharistic presences as “real,” thus more clearly associating them with the Real Presence of Christ as High Priest and Victim of the One Sacrifice, and then by carefully placing the several liturgical “real presences” of Christ within the context of their relation to and dependence upon the uniquely substantial Real Presence, i.e., the Event of the priestly offering of the One Sacrifice:
34. The few things that We have touched upon concerning the Sacrifice of the Mass encourage Us to say something about the Sacrament of the Eucharist, since both Sacrifice and Sacrament pertain to the same mystery and cannot be separated from each other. The Lord is immolated in an unbloody (incruente) way in the Sacrifice of the Mass and He represents the sacrifice of the Cross and applies its salvific power at the moment when he becomes sacramentally present—through the words of consecration—as the spiritual food of the faithful, under the appearances of bread and wine.
35. All of us realize that there is more than one way in which Christ is present in His Church. We want to go into this very joyful subject, which the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy presented briefly, (30) at somewhat greater length. Christ is present in His Church when she prays, since He is the one who “prays for us and prays in us and to whom we pray: He prays for us as our priest, He prays in us as our head, He is prayed to by us as our God” (31); and He is the one who has promised, “Where two or three are gathered together in my name, I am there in the midst of them.” (32) He is present in the Church as she performs her works of mercy, not just because whatever good we do to one of His least brethren we do to Christ Himself, (33)but also because Christ is the one who performs these works through the Church and who continually helps men with His divine love. He is present in the Church as she moves along on her pilgrimage with a longing to reach the portals of eternal life, for He is the one who dwells in our hearts through faith, (34) and who instills charity in them through the Holy Spirit whom He gives to us. (35)
36. In still another very genuine way, He is present in the Church as she preaches, since the Gospel which she proclaims is the word of God, and it is only in the name of Christ, the Incarnate Word of God, and by His authority and with His help that it is preached, so that there might be “one flock resting secure in one shepherd.” (36)
37. He is present in His Church as she rules and governs the People of God, since her sacred power comes from Christ and since Christ, the “Shepherd of Shepherds,” (37) is present in the bishops who exercise that power, in keeping with the promise He made to the Apostles.
38. Moreover, Christ is present in His Church in a still more sublime manner as she offers the Sacrifice of the Mass in His name; He is present in her as she administers the sacraments. On the matter of Christ’s presence in the offering of the Sacrifice of the Mass, We would like very much to call what St. John Chrysostom, overcome with awe, had to say in such accurate and eloquent words: “I wish to add something that is clearly awe-inspiring, but do not be surprised or upset. What is this? It is the same offering, no matter who offers it, be it Peter or Paul. It is the same one that Christ gave to His disciples and the same one that priests now perform: the latter is in no way inferior to the former, for it is not men who sanctify the latter, but He who sanctified the former. For just as the words which God spoke are the same as those that the priest now pronounces, so too the offering is the same.” (38) No one is unaware that the sacraments are the actions of Christ who administers them through men. And so the sacraments are holy in themselves and they pour grace into the soul by the power of Christ, when they touch the body.
The Highest Kind of Presence.
These various ways in which Christ is present fill the mind with astonishment and offer the Church a mystery for her contemplation. But there is another way in which Christ is present in His Church, a way that surpasses all the others. It is His presence in the Sacrament of the Eucharist, which is, for this reason, “a more consoling source of devotion, a lovelier object of contemplation and holier in what it contains” (39) than all the other sacraments; for it contains Christ Himself and it is “a kind of consummation of the spiritual life, and in a sense the goal of all the sacraments.” (40)
39. This presence is called “real” not to exclude the idea that the others are “real” too, but rather to indicate presence par excellence, because it is substantial and through it Christ becomes present whole and entire, God and man. (41) And so it would be wrong for anyone to try to explain this manner of presence by dreaming up a so-called “pneumatic” nature of the glorious body of Christ that would be present everywhere; or for anyone to limit it to symbolism, as if this most sacred Sacrament were to consist in nothing more than an efficacious sign “of the spiritual presence of Christ and of His intimate union with the faithful, the members of His Mystical Body.” (42)
In order that they should achieve a deeper understanding of the mystery of the Eucharist, the faithful should be instructed in the principal ways in which the Lord is present to his Church in liturgical celebrations.
He is always present in a body of the faithful gathered in his name (cf. Mt. 18:20). He is present, too, in his Word, for it is he who speaks when the Scriptures are read in the Church.
In the sacrifice of the Eucharist he is present both in the person of the minister, “the same now offering through the ministry of the priest who formerly offered himself on the cross,” and above all under the species of the Eucharist. For in this sacrament Christ is present in a unique way, whole and entire, God and man, substantially and permanently. This presence of Christ under the species is called ‘real’ not in an exclusive sense, as if the other kinds of presence were not real, but par excellence.”
The Congregation of Rites published Eucharisticum Mysterium in May, 1967, a year and a half after the close of the Council, using language very similar to that of Mysterium Fidei to stress the ancillary character of those insubstantial Eucharistic “real presences” of Christ which had been proposed in Sacrosanctum Concilium, ¶7, and whose reality had been clarified by Mysterium Fidei, including that “presence” referred to in Mt. 18:20. Their reality was again affirmed to be dependent upon “liturgical celebrations,” and again their subordination to and dependence upon the offering of the Eucharistic sacrifice is evident.[130]
In order that they should achieve a deeper understanding of the mystery of the Eucharist, the faithful should be instructed in the principal ways in which the Lord is present to his Church in liturgical celebrations.
He is always present in a body of the faithful gathered in his name (cf. Mt. 18:20). He is present, too, in his Word, for it is he who speaks when the Scriptures are read in the Church.
In the sacrifice of the Eucharist he is present both in the person of the minister, “the same now offering through the ministry of the priest who formerly offered himself on the cross,” and above all under the species of the Eucharist. For in this sacrament Christ is present in a unique way, whole and entire, God and man, substantially and permanently. This presence of Christ under the species is called ‘real’ not in an exclusive sense, as if the other kinds of presence were not real, but par excellence.”
Paul VI, Eucharisticum Mysterium, §9
Henri de Lubac has summarized this Eucharistic doctrine with his usual precision :
“Communicare,” “participare,” ”consortes et socios esse”: le sens complexe de ces formules, constatons-nous une dernière fois, se calque exactement sur la sens complexe du mot “corpus.” Elles aussi, au fond, désignent moins deux objets successifs que, à la fois, deux choses que n’en font qu’une. Car le corps du Christ qu’est l’Èglise n’est point autre qu ce corps et ce sang du mystère. (emphasis added
The Venerable Bede had made the same point:
Ne quisquam se Christum agnovisse arbitretur, si ejus corporis particeps non est, id est, Ecclesiae.
In Lucae Evang. Cap. xxiii
The dependence of Eucharisticum Mysterium upon Mysterium Fidei is evident: e.g.,
This (sacrificial) presence is called “real”—by which it is not intended to exclude all other types of presence as if they could not be “real” too, but because it is presence in the fullest sense: that is to say, it is a substantial presence by which Christ, the God-Man, is wholly and entirely present.(41) [Conc. of Trent, Decree on the Eucharist, Ch. 3.] It would therefore be wrong to explain this presence by having recourse to the “spiritual” nature, as it is called, of the glorified Body of Christ, which is present everywhere, or by reducing it to a kind of symbolism, as if this most august Sacrament consisted of nothing else than an efficacious sign, “of the spiritual presence of Christ and of His intimate union with the faithful, members of His Mystical Body.
Paul VI, Mysterium Fidei, 39.
Paul VI wrote Mysterium Fidei (1965) simply to reaffirm Eucharistic orthodoxy against theological currents which had understood Vatican II to have severed the post-Conciliar Church from its past: from that dissident stance, the Church’s Eucharistic tradition, her historical worship in truth, was now to be submitted to the criterion of a consciousness informed by a modernity unavailable to those centuries in which the doctrinal tradition had taken its shape, but which would henceforth be the touchstone by which the authenticity of the Church’s radically liturgical and Eucharistic mediation of the truth of Christ must be judged. Until 1975, this attempt to reform the Church’s worship by its submission to a criterion transcending her Eucharistic union with her Lord had been by way of theological dissent: this was to change.
The first intimation of a quasi-official subscription to Eucharistic symbolism appears in the Introduction of the G.I.R.M. of 1975; it was faithfully copied into the 5th edition (2000) of the Institutio Generalis Missalis Romani. Three years later, in 2003, the U.S.C.C.B. published a “study translation” of the Institutio Generalis Missalis Romani, now commonly known as the “new G.I.R.M.”: The pertinent text is as follows:
The older Missal (promulgated by Pius V in 1570), belongs to the difficult period of attacks against Catholic teaching on the sacrificial nature of the Mass, the ministerial priesthood, and the real and permanent presence of Christ under the Eucharistic elements. Saint Pius V was therefore especially concerned with preserving the relatively recent developments in the Church’s tradition then unjustly being assailed, and introduced only very slight changes into the sacred rites.
G.I.R.M. 2000, §7, copied from G.I.R.M. 1975, Introduction, §7 (emphasis added).
One must ask, with regard to the aforesaid “relatively recent developments in the Church’s tradition” further described as “then (in the late sixteenth century) unjustly being assailed,” precisely what moment it is to which these “developments” are “relative.” Clearly, insofar as they are “recent developments”, their relation can be only to a previously achieved state of the Church’s tradition, a state prior then to the moment in which these developments were “then being unjustly assailed.”
Both of these editions of the G.I.R.M. specify these developments as (1) the sacrifice of the Mass, (2) the sacrificing priesthood, and (3) the Real Presence, observing that these elements of the Eucharistic worship of the Church were at the time of the publication of the “older Missal” under attack by Protestant theologians―an attack which had been familiar since Berengarius’ revolt in the eleventh century. A dozen years John XXIII announced his intention to convene an ecumenical council, Pius XII had reaffirmed the constant Catholic tradition:
2. But what is more, the divine Redeemer has so willed it that the priestly life begun with the supplication and sacrifice of His mortal body should continue without intermission down the ages in His Mystical Body which is the Church. That is why He established a visible priesthood to offer everywhere the clean oblation [4] which would enable men from East to West, freed from the shackles of sin, to offer God that unconstrained and voluntary homage which their conscience dictates.
4 Cf. Mal. 1 :11.
Pius XII, Mediator Dei, ¶2.
It is evident that nothing taught at Vatican II warrants the notion that the worship of the primitive Church was not Eucharistic from the first Pentecost:
And they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching, to the breaking of the bread, and to prayers.
Acts 2:41. (RSV)
It is further noteworthy that the authors of the G.I.R.M., under the same subheading: “A Witness to the Unbroken Tradition,” in the paragraph (No. 9) invoking the patristic tradition, did not mention the earliest witnesses to the central element of that unbroken tradition, viz., the Eucharistic sacrifice, and to its corollary, the apostolic succession of the bishops to offer that sacrifice. Clement of Rome had witnessed to both before the end of the first century; Ignatius Martyr had done the same at the beginning of the second century, and Justin Martyr, in the middle of that second century, had also witnessed to precisely these matters, as had Irenaeus at its close. This patristic witness was given by a Pope and two martyrs within a century of the martyrdom of St. Peter and fourteen centuries prior to the Council of Trent. It is unconscionable to ignore them when appealing to the patristic tradition to support the “unbroken tradition.” The tradition is indeed unbroken: as liturgical, as Eucharistic, as divinely instituted, it could not be otherwise.
The G.I.R.M.s’ entirely gratuitous attribution of relative novelty to the Eucharistic doctrinal tradition, viz., to the Sacrifice of the Mass, to the Real Presence of Christ in the consecrated elements, and to the sacrament of Orders by which the bishops and priests have for nearly two millennia succeeded to the apostolic authority to offer the Eucharistic Sacrifice in the Person of Christ, implies that a yet older, more venerable tradition underlies the Church’s Eucharistic worship of her risen Lord, a tradition then of non-sacramental worship from which the tradition of Eucharistic worship emerged, and which consequently must transcend its product, the Sacrifice of the Mass, as cause transcends effect.
Both the 1975 and the 2000 editions of the G.I.R.M. agree in asserting this evolutionary understanding of the Church’s Eucharistic worship. By implication, both editions deny the Eucharistic cause of the Church, for in the scenario envisioned, the Church is the cause of the emerging Eucharistic worship, rather than being the effect of the Apostles’ exercise of the Eucharistic office given them at the Last Supper, which was their prime responsibility, and is the prime responsibility of the episcopal successors to the Apostolic office. The kindest explanation of this travesty is an ill-informed ecumenical sensitivity infecting its authors; it need not be the most likely.
The decade prior to the issue of the 3rd edition of the G.I.R.M. (the “study translation” published by the U.S.C.C.B. in 2003) witnessed the waning, for good and sufficient reason, of the traditional Catholic interest in a systematic theology governed by the immanent necessities of one or another metaphysical monism, in favor of a turn to the fresh air of the positive sciences, notably exegesis, church history, and sociology, all under the influence of an ill-defined historical consciousness whose possessors came routinely to suppose the humanism and historicism of the Enlightenment to be indispensable to intellectual honesty. In the words of one of them, exegetical method must be “presuppositionless.” Inasmuch as taking this ambition seriously would preclude such presuppositions as the principle of contradiction, we may suppose that the suppositions to be exorcised are those embodied in the Catholic tradition, there evidently being none other threatening academic integrity.
A long-standing humanistic anxiety has required that adherence to the Catholic doctrinal tradition be foresworn as a contamination of the mind. This anxiety in turn was discovered by the Reform to demand the a priori commitment to the pagan persuasion of the intrinsic meaninglessness, the insignificance, of history. In consequence of an effectively unanimous academic enlistment in what Von Balthasar has labeled an anti-Romische Affekt, the theological vocation which, under Catholic auspices, had been a free, because graced, quaerens intellectum, underwent a sea-change, to become a querulous quaerens potestatem. a quest for the power to impose inevitably arbitrary interpretations upon otherwise meaningless concatenations of phenomena produced by a value-free exegesis in order that they might have a the unity of a “narrative” corresponding to what Plato labeled ‘a likely account:,” in sum, an abstract continuity of discourse possessing no intrinsic significance.
The application of this pagan insight to history had puzzled the Greeks, whose historians display an unwonted curiosity about the past which the historical pessimism, inherent in all paganism and canonized by the Platonic tradition, is unable to warrant. Historical reality had been disdained as irrational by Plato and his disciples: by reason of its lack of intrinsically intelligible causes; history ceased to be an object of theoretical inquiry, nor could Aristotle’s riposte, the act-potency rationalization of historical existence, justify any such curiosity about history as Herodotus and Thucidides had displayed, and as Aristotle would later display in the empirical studies which chiefly occupied his latter years.
The same dilemma doomed the Enlightenment’s secularization of history: Hume’s four-volume History of England was no more focused upon the intrinsic significance of that history than had been the “whig interpretation of history” which he intended to dethrone. Hume, the quintessence of enlightened scholarship, was loyal to the Cartesian ab extra mathematiccization of truth rather than to a quest for the instrinsic signifycance of history, for in his view it could have none. This required that he lump even his own History of England under those works not worth reading. His famous put-down of confident non-empirical learning is a study in self-contradiction:
When we run over libraries, persuaded of these principles, what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Part III, Of the academical or sceptical Philosophy, para. 11.
It may be said with some confidence that the book in which this statement appears does not satisfy the criteria asserted as prerequisite to their existence, nor could they, without entering upon an infinite recession avoidable only by begging the question posed. The concession to “experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence” is no more than a the warrant for the de gustibus view of historical scholarship which it embodies; any alternative basis for its synthesis would savor of “divinity or school metaphysics.”
On both counts, whether as fostering the religious corruption of the intelligence, or as insisting upon the objective, intrinsic significance of history, Catholic sacramental realism found itself under the gun, and not least from within the Catholic community. We have noted the observation of one major Catholic theologian that while there may be unchanging elements in the Church, this would have to be proven to the modern mind.[131] Hume exemplifies at once the ‘modern mind’ and the absurdity of finding in that secular rationality the criterion of what the Church may reasonably teach.
As it turned out, insofar as the historical Church is concerned the modern mind was and remains not much interested. Under the auspices of the secularized notion of academic freedom promulgated by the American Association of University Professors as indispensable to intellectual honesty, the Catholic academy gradually subscribed to the ancient axiom that the road is better than the inn: the scholarly quest for truth bars its historical possession. Under this dogmatic agnosticism, personal commitment must be reduced to politics, to the quaerens potestatem of the modern university, with the consequence that the co-existence in the same mind of subscription to the historical Catholic faith and commitment to rigorous scholarly inquiry as understood by the A.A.U.P. can scarcely avoid schizophrenia.
It appears that the authors of all three editions of the G.I.R.M. were under this positivist influence in their insertion of an evolutionary Eucharistic worship into their texts. Either because the dogmatic presuppositions of the Eucharistic worship were first solemnly defined by the Council of Trent against the Reformers (emphatically, they were not “proposed” as the G.I.R.M. proposes), or because the theological defense of the ancient tradition against Berengarius which in the twelfth century issued in a doctrine of Eucharistic transubstantiation as the inexorable implication of the Eucharistic Words of Institution had been given doctrinal standing only at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, the inference was drawn that the Catholic tradition was articulate only as thus solemnly proclaimed. From the ninth century, the theologians’ search for the necessary reasons they thought to underlie the truth of the Catholic faith had prepared the way for this sancta simplicitas by suggesting that the rationality of the Catholic faith requires its reduction to prior causal principles: taken seriously, this quest refuses the free historicity of the faith that Jesus is the Lord―which knows no abstract statement and therefore no necessary causes.
It seems that the authors of all the editions of the G.I.R.M. supposed that only solemn dogmatic definitions can authentically utter the faith of the Catholic faith, and this in such wise that prior to their promulgation their content had not entered into the Church’s worship in truth. This has the logical consequence that any doctrinal statement must be relatively novel, i.e., relative to the presumptively inarticulate status quo ante of the faith of the Catholic Church and so of the Catholic faithful which, from the stance of the G.I.R.M., has become remarkably similar to that of the nonhistorical and the nonhistorical church of the Reformers.
The casual presumption by the authors of the G.I.R.M. of an inarticulate but liturgically mediated faith is obvious nonsense: the Church’s worship of her Lord is her Eucharistic celebration of the One Sacrifice of Jesus the Lord. This celebration has never needed definition, for its oral tradition underlies all doctrinal definition: it transcends all doctrine, as it is itself incapable of being transcended by the doctrinal tradition of which it is the source.
The G.I.R.M. attribution of novelty to these central doctrines is thus patently false: the sacrifice of the Mass is a scriptural datum, affirmed as of course by Clement of Rome in Ad Corinth. §44. 1,4, by Ignatius Martyr, whose Letters to the Churches are an eloquent and extended testimony to the inseparability of the Eucharistic sacrifice, the hierarchy, and the Church; by Justin Martyr’s exposition of that Eucharistic orthodoxy in his Dialiogue with Trypho: in sum, by the entire the patristic tradition: it was first challenged by Berengarius in the eleventh century. Luther’s early polemic/against Eucharistic orthodoxy, The Babylonian Captivity, recognized that his denial of the Sacrifice of the Mass contradicted fifteen centuries of tradition. This is not the place to detail the patristic sources: a passing acquaintance with the first volume of Msgr. Jurgen’s The Faith of the Early Fathers would have revealed the absurdity of the G.I.R.M. assertion that the Tridentine defense of the Church’s Eucharistic doctrine was a defense of “recent developments.” The theological riposte in the eleventh and twelfth century theologians to the Berengarian heresy was a defense of the ancient faith which the Fathers at Trent only re-affirmed.
The symbolist implication of this attribution of “development” to the liturgical proclamation of the ancient Faith that Jesus is the Lord is evident: it echoes the standard Protestant ecclesiology.[132] The G.I.R.M. application of this Protestant ecclesiology supposes that the Church’s liturgy also undergoes the same development: it also must have “become episcopal” in flat denial of the Apostolic succession and of all that depends upon it: viz., the Eucharistic worship of the Church.
It is manifest that the Catholic Church and her Eucharistic worship are not the product of such a process, for the Catholic tradition is Eucharistic from the outset: were it not, the Church would not exist, for her source is the Eucharistic Sacrifice, whereby she is One Flesh with her Lord, proceeding from him as from her Head: absent his institution of the Eucharist, it could not exist, for the offering of his One Sacrifice has no surrogates.
There is of course a development of doctrine within the Eucharistic tradition, for in that worship the Mystery it mediates is “forever ancient and forever new,” forever transcending its reception by the believer, but the Mystery, the immanence of the risen Christ as High Priest and the One Sacrifice in his bridal Church, is objectively proclaimed as factual, as historically actual in the Sacrifice of the Mass. The Catholic tradition is in fact the Catholic worship, whose Eucharistic heart is the priestly offering of the One Sacrifice in the Name of Jesus the Lord, whose Sacrifice it is, as its High Priest, and as its Victim. The Eucharistic liturgy is the source of the Catholic Church, of Catholic doctrine, of Catholic moral practice. It is divinely instituted. To suggest that the Eucharistic Sacrifice is a product of development is to have departed from the Catholic tradition.
By supposing the Eucharistic tradition to consist in “recent developments in the Church’s tradition,” the Introduction to the G.I.R.M. must also suppose the Church to be a “gathered” church, one whose source is not the Eucharist, and whose unity is nonhistorical, thus subjective. This assumption devolves to an ecclesiology of the baptized whose “assembly” constitutes the Church. But Catholic Church preexists the assembly of the baptized, all of whose members are baptized in order that they may then enter into the preexistent Church, solely that they may participate in the fullness of her Eucharistic worship, and responsibly undertake the historical mission which that historical worship sustains.
Six years after the publication of the 3rd edition of the G.I.R.M., and fifteen years after his publication of The Eucharist, Edward Schillebeeckx published his own comparably symbolist assault upon the Eucharistic tradition.[133] There he condemned the offering of the Sacrifice of the Mass in the Person of Christ as a medieval deformation of the ancient faith, an imposition of an elitist hierarchical governance upon a church whose unstructured freedom of worship it had violated. Further to this end, In order to support of his denial of the authenticity of the Catholic Eucharistic worship, Schillebeeckx chose to omit the crucial elements of Clement’s Letter to the Corinthians, and to postpone the accepted dating of Ignatius Martyr’s Letters to the Churches (ca. 110 AD) to the close of the second century, inasmuch as their early dating did not offer a sufficient time for the predicated evolution of their doctrinal content, particularly with respect to Ignatius’ clear and repeated testimony, as the bishop of the ancient see of Antioch, where Christians were first so named, where Paul appears to have learned his Eucharistic doctrine, to the existence of a hierarchical Eucharistic ministry in the first century
Schillebeeckx’ ‘in house’ critique of the priesthood and, necessarily, of the Eucharistic tradition by which the Catholic Church exists, had the usual succès d’éstime, confirming a generation of fashionable theologians in their felt need to free the Catholic tradition of its more alarming affirmations. Schillebeeckx’ Eucharist, and six years later, his Ministry, inspired a rash of analogous publication of works that have had their impact upon the Church’s sacramental worship not least by way of inspiring some astonishingly ill-informed Pastoral Letters, as will be seen.[134]
Much of their confusion arises out of the affirmation of a variety of Eucharistic presences of the Christ which occurs in all editions of the G.I.R.M. This affirmation, when read literally, in abstraction from the liturgical and Eucharistic context wherein the magisterial documents of Vatican II expressly placed it, can easily be understood to reduce the Eucharistic Real Presence of Christ as at once the High Priest and the Victim of the On Sacrifice to an instance of an independent category of “real presence.”
Section 7 of the 1975 edition of the G.I.R.M. reads as follows
7. At Mass or the Lord’s Supper, the people of God are called together into unity, with a priest presiding and acting in the person of Christ, to celebrate the memorial of the Lord or eucharistic sacrifice. (See the decree on the ministry and life of priests, no. 5; SC art. 33.) For at the celebration of Mass, which perpetuates the sacrifice of the cross, [see DMS, chapter 1: Denz-Schön, 1740; see SPF, no. 24: AAS 60 (1968), p. 442], Christ is really present to the assembly gathered in his name; he is present in the person of the minister, in his own word, and indeed substantially and permanently under the Eucharistic elements. [See Sacrosanctum Concilium, art. 7; see Mysterium Fidei: AAS 57 (1965), p. 764; see Euchisticum Mysterium, no. 9: AAS 59 (1967), p. 547].
The G.I.R.M. published in 2000 copied this language from the 1975edition, but with a single drastic change. The 1975 edition reads “Christ is really present to the assembly” has been changed to “Christ is really present in the assembly.” The former affirmation is Catholic, consistent with the presence of the Bridegroom to his Bridal Church in their One Flesh. The latter expression merges the Bridegroom and the Bride into a chimera, thus accepting a nonhistorical, quasi-Barthian resolution of the Calvinist “dialectical” dichotomization of history and eschaton. In this, the “new G.I.R.M.” follows Karl Rahner’s “dialectical analogy” (cf. endnote 204) and Zizioulas’ invocation of a “Corporate Christ” (cf. endnote 249).
27 At Mass or the Lord’s Supper, the people of God are called together into unity, with a priest presiding and acting in the person of Christ, to celebrate the memorial of the Lord or eucharistic sacrifice. (See Presbyterorum Ordinis, no. 5; see Sacrosanctum Concilium, art. 33). For this reason Christ’s promise applies supremely to such a local gathering together of the Church: “Where two or three come together in my name, there am I in their midst” (Matthew 18:20). For at the celebration of Mass, which perpetuates the sacrifice of the cross, [see DMS, chapter 1: Denz-Schön, 1740; see SPF, no. 24: AAS 60 (1968), p. 442], Christ is really present in the assembly gathered in his name; he is present in the person of the minister, in his own word, and indeed substantially and permanently under the Eucharistic elements. [See SC, art. 7; see MF: AAS 57 (1965), p. 764; see EuchMyst, no. 9: AAS 59 (1967), p. 547].
G.I.R.M. 2000, Chapter Two: Structure, elements and parts of the Mass. I. General Structure of the Mass.
Before proceeding further, the contrast here between the capitalization of “Lord’s Supper,” a not noticeably Catholic idiom, together with the coincident failure to capitalize “eucharistic sacrifice,” manifests a certain “ecumenical” fastidiousness before the constitutive Event by which the Church and her worship exist. This squeamishness is very clearly out of place in a “General Instruction” focused upon that One Sacrifice. While any liturgical or theological emphasis upon the Sacrifice of the Mass had been avoided, even deplored, by the ecumenical enthusiasms of the post-conciliar decade, such cringing before the temper of the times is even more than unseemly here. The failure to capitalize “Eucharist” can only be deliberate: “Eucharist” is capitalized in the official translations of Mysterium Fidei and of Eucharisticum Mysterium, as well as in most English dictionaries: it use needs no defense and requires no apology.
The assertion that Christ is “really present” in the Church is found in many magisterial documents, most recently, as noted, in Mysterium fidei and in Eucharisticum Mysterium, where it carries no symbolist connotation, for those documents are integral with those in which the Church has affirmed her source to be in the Eucharistic representation of the One Sacrifice of her Head, from whom she proceeds as the Bride from the Bridegroom (emphatically, Christ did not “give birth to [genuit] the Church: such a reading of Jn. 19:34 has no ground in the Catholic tradition). However it is by no means clear that in affirming the presence of the Christ “in the assembly gathered in his name,” the “new G.I.R.M.” recognizes the Eucharistic ecclesiology of Mysterium fidei as its own. The Catholic Church is not adequately described as “the assembly gathered in his name” unless it is clear that the unity implicit in their “gathering” is the causally prior free unity of the Church into which they are baptized. The unbaptized have no unity of their own which might be thought to serve to constitute the Church. Facile reference to the Church as an “assembly” has unmistakably Calvinist overtones entirely false to the historical reality of the Church, and consequently to the reality of the Eucharist as the cause and source of the Church.
The orthodox intent of this language in the G.I.R.M.s would be easier to accept were it not for the symbolist assertion of a Eucharist development copied in G.I.R.M. 2000, §7, from G.I.R.M. 1975, Introduction, §7, and had not at least three local ordinaries within the last twenty years published pastoral letters teaching a symbolist Eucharistic doctrine: Bishop Tafoya, of Pueblo, Colorado, Cardinal Mahony of Los Angeles, and Bishop Robert Lynch, of St. Petersburg, Florida. Each of these pastoral letters asserts the liturgical priority of the presence of Christ in the community by way of baptism over the Eucharistic Presence of the Jesus as the High Priest and the Victim of the One Sacrifice, fearing that a liturgical stress upon the latter would distract the faithful from this supposedly primary presence of Christ in the baptized community. In all these letters, and most explicitly in those of Cardinal Mahony, we find the “gathered church’ ecclesiology developed. Once again, baptism becomes the foundational sacrament, the cause of the Church. The defined doctrines of the Eucharistic One Sacrifice and of ordination to offer in the Person of Christ give way to this entirely Protestant anti-sacramentalism, this ignominious retreat from Eucharistic realism.
Bishop Tafoya, the local ordinary of Pueblo, Colorado, has issued a Pastoral Letter, “Liturgy: Time of Sacred Encounter: A pastoral reflection on the Eucharist” (1991) from whose first page the symbolist tone of his reflection is evident:
To the Christians of the First Century the presence of Jesus was not so much localized in the elements of bread and cup as it was in this very assembly of believers who “remembered” and “embodied” him.
Clearly, the Bishop of Pueblo is not at peace with the sacrifice of the Mass, nor for that matter with the overwhelming Scriptural evidence for it―which is from “the first century” nor has he read the First Letter of Clement (95 AD) its first patristic witness;. He is equally unfamiliar with the Seven Letters to the Churches of Ignatius Martyr, the second Bishop of Antioch, who died in the Coliseum about 110 and who, in his Letters famously taught the Eucharistic species to be the entirely “localized” “medicine of immortality;” “the remedy that we should not die.”
These witnesses, the earliest we have, know nothing of any “embodiment” of Christ by the “assembly.” Clement rebukes the Corinthian ‘assembly’ for having expelled those men who had been ordained to offer the “sacrifices” and had worthily done so, as we shall see. Ignatius’ Eucharistic doctrine has been found similarly difficult to revise: he is concerned for the unity of the Eucharistic worship, which he links, over and again, to the offering of the One Sacrifice by the local bishop, or by one of the priests whom hethe bishop has ordained to do so. Both Clement and Ignatius focus their Eucharistic doctrine on the sacrifice of the Mass, offered solely by those consecrated and ordained to offer it. In this very early stress upon the apostolic succession they are at one with the accounts of the Last Supper in the Synoptics and I Corinthians, with which the sixth chapter of the Gospel of John is entirely in harmony.
Bishop Tafoya’s next sentence infers from the foregoing unconcern for the “localized” Eucharistic Presence of the Christ, what he is pleased to designate “the primacy of the assembly.” For neither of this affirmations is any documentation offered, nor could there be. Bishop Tafoya’s Pastoral Letter relies heavily upon the Eucharistic theology and ecclesiology of the late Tad Guzie, which is no more than a restatement of Zwingli’s.
The paragraph immediately following the except supra reads:
The postures and gestures of the eucharistic prayer are changing as they have so often in the past. As our experience changes, so must our understanding. As our understanding changes, so will the ritual expression of our experience.
The naively charming circularity of this rationale cannot but carry the day: viz., our continually changing experience (of what?), with its corollary, our continually changing understanding (of what?), with its corollary, our continually changing ritual expression (of what?), with its corollary, our continually changing experience, and so on and so on,, is foreordained, inexorable:
As the communal nature of the eucharistic prayer and its focus on thanksgiving becomes apparent to our assemblies, the posture of standing rather than kneeling will be experienced more frequently. Kneeling has always been recognized as a posture for private prayer; one that suggests begging forgiveness or interceding for help. However, scripture confirms standing as a position of praise and thanksgiving. Since Jesus, himself a Jew, was so very sensitive to Jewish ritual, it is probable that he prayed in this position as he gathered with the disciples for public prayer in the Temple. Kneeling was introduced as a common form of posture during prayer by monks who dedicated themselves to penitential prayer and fasting.
But we must reject out of hand the application of this invocation of inevitability to Bishop Toyota’s notion of liturgical renewal as dependent upon the experience of the assembly whose voice he presumes to be. In the first place, the focus of the Catholic Mass is not upon the assembly, as his Letter supposes. It is upon the offering of the One Sacrifice by which we are redeemed. It is by reason of the reality of the priestly offering of the sacrifice of the Mass in the Person of Christ, the one High Priest, that the Mass is a thanksgiving which, as ecclesial, is communal, with or without a congregation. The One Sacrifice is the cause of the Church, which is not, as the trendy idiom of the Letter would have it, of “the assembly.” a term applicable to any group of people gathered for any purpose whatever. Its application to the Church immediately invokes the “gathered church” of the Reform, whose cause is not t he Eucharist.
The Catholic Church is caused by her Eucharistic worship of her Lord. Her objective reality and intrinsic intelligibility do not arise out of whatever is “becoming apparent to our assemblies.” Bishop Tafoya’s Letter’s appeal to the “assembly” to certify the authenticity of the Church’s worship in truth amounts to an abdication by the local ordinary of his central responsibility―but it is evident that Bishop Tafoya does not understand his primary episcopal responsibility to be for the truth of the Church’s worship, whose full expression is the sacrifice of the Mass. As a result, his concern for the appropriate “posture” for thanksgiving is not that which is appropriate to the Eucharistic Presence of the Christ, the Lord, who died for us and rose again for our salvation. Rather, his Letter’s admonitory reference to a more frequent “experience of standing rather than kneeling” as more appropriate to a growing recognition of “the communal nature of eucharistic prayer (sic)” has so melded Christ and the Church as to render both unrecognizable.
The Letter’s further observations continue this support the practice of standing during the Canon, which Bishop Tafoya intends to implement, despite the indult sought by and granted to the U.S. episcopacy permitting American Catholics to continue their practice of kneeling during the entire Canon. The Letter goes on to say:
Today as we prepare for the revision of the Sacramentary, the question of posture is once again under serious discussion.
But this discussion is evidently not one from which laity who wish to continue to kneel during the Canon, in accordance with the indult granted them to do so, any contribution is accepted or acceptable, for we read:
During this time of discussion, we have begun to experience a true sense of DISUNITY during the prayer that is meant to be the very core of our Christian UNITY. (CSL #26) Hence, to strengthen our unity as a diocesan church, the following directive is to be observed. (original emphasis)
Directive for the Diocese of Pueblo
The assembly is to be encouraged to STAND during the proclamation of the Eucharistic Prayer, namely from the preface through the final doxology. A deep bow, as a sign of reverence and adoration is to be shown after the consecration of each of the elements of bread and wine. (original emphasis)
Following this prescription which, not incidentally, annuls §21 of the General Instruction on the Roman Missal, viz., “unless impeded by lack of space, density of the crowd or other reasonable cause, they should kneel for the Consecration,” Bishop Tafoya’s “General Reflection” continues with the assertion that the Eucharistic prayer is primarily a prayer of thanks and praise. Once again, although this notion is a central item in the liberal theological wish list, it is simply false as a matter of Catholic doctrine. Taken at the letter, it would reduce the Catholic Eucharist to the sola fide dimensions proper to the Lutheran Reformation by omitting the constituting element of the Eucharist, the priestly offering in persona Christi of Christ’s One Sacrifice, a consequence entirely consistent with the doctrine taught in the earlier chapters of the Letter.
But we are not to read it thus literally, for at the conclusion of a discussion of “building liturgical bridges” the “General Reflection,” goes on to say:
Finally, we join our sacrifice to that of Christ by offering ourselves and surrendering to God’s will so that we can return to our daily routines confident that we can handle any situation when we work “through Him, with Him, and in Him.” Eucharistic praying is not just offering the sacrificial victim, critically important as that is, but it also involves the offering of one’s life as a response to God’s saving grace. Such self-offering must be deliberate.
This sole concession to Eucharistic realism serves only to introduce another theme: “The Dysfunctional Eucharist:”
To use modern terminology, the eucharistic prayer is dysfunctional in many of our churches today. The eucharist is confected, but lives are not transformed. New wording of the texts and the introduction of ritual adaptations will not, of themselves, lead to recovery of the prayer’s meaning. It is only when the assembly is led into conscious action by the dynamic proclamation of the presider that the doxology can conclude with a full hearted “Amen” in response to the presence of Christ in the eucharistic species.
In the first place, this language is overwrought. Equally so is that of the pages following, in which the ritual significance of the greeting of peace, the breaking of the consecrated bread, the agnus Dei and the distribution of Eucharistic communion under both species[135] are dealt with as “dysfunctional” unless somehow rendered into politically powerful devices of social transformation and unification. The implication of these disjointed pages is that insofar as a religious transformation of the lives of the faithful by reason of their worship is not empirically verifiable, and insofar as their Eucharistic unity is not a comparably tangible reality, there is effected in them no sacramental transformation or unity, and thereby the Eucharistic worship is perceptibly “dysfunctional.” Consequently, the infallible sacramental efficacy of the Eucharistic Sacrifice is ignored. In fact, we have seen Bishop Tafoya’s Letter denying it outright:
It is only when the assembly is led into conscious action by the dynamic proclamation of the presider that the doxology can conclude with a full hearted “Amen” in response to the presence of Christ in the eucharistic species.
The supposition of Bishop Tafoya’s Letter that the Eucharistic consecration awaits upon “the dynamic proclamation of the presider,” is pure Protesantism; in this scenario, it is not the bread and wine of the Offertory that become the body and blood of Christ, the High Priest and the Victim of the One Sacrifice, but the congregation, as “led into conscious action” by the rhetoric of the “presider.” The identification of the “presider” with a priest ordained to offer the One Sacrifice in persona Christi has long vanished from the Bishop’s perspective, or, rather, from that of the anonymity who wrote the Letter for him, for it is unlikely that he understood a line of it.
The Letter amounts not only to a condescension, even an insolence, to the people in the pews that is at best unattractive in a pastoral document, for it is a denial of their Catholic faith in the sacrifice of the Mass.. Unfortunately its Protestant posture is commonly assumed in liturgical exhortation as part and parcel of the politicization of the Catholic liturgy by ordinaries forgetful or even ignorant of the liturgy’s inherently sacramental efficacy which, as sacramental, is also inherent in the everyday public praxis of the faith by the laity. Only as thus mediated by the laity has the Catholic liturgy an effective public expression. Between the sacramental efficacy of the publicly celebrated liturgy and its political impact lies the exercise of free and personal exercise of public responsibility for the common good by the laity. This exercise has a political impact: its radical expression is the nuptial fidelity of the laity, their living out of their liturgically informed and sanctified lives. Insofar as this fidelity informs their political decisions, it makes them to be exercises of personal responsibility which, fed and sustained by participation in the liturgy, are not themselves liturgical and therefore are not under the liturgical authority of the ordinary which, as liturgical, has no political dimension whatsoever.
The Letter’s quest for an inevitably political “function” as the appropriate anodyne for the “dysfunctional” Eucharist immediately raises the impossible because false question of what the empirical and tangible criteria of a properly “functional” Eucharist might be. Were that gambit accepted, a course must be found between the Scylla of charismatic enthusiasm and the Charybdis of politicized faith. Such prospects for that transit as are offered by the pastoral Letter’s liturgical renewal of clericalism, juridicalism and triumphalism in support of a radical misconception of the Catholic liturgy cannot inspire much confidence.
In 2003, a dozen years after the publication of Liturgy: Time of Sacred Encounter: A pastoral reflection on the Eucharist (1991), Bishop Tafoya felt called upon to amend its regulations. In a Lenten letter of that year read in all his parishes, Bishop Tafoya wrote as follows:
As we are about to begin Lent, I wish to revisit the posture for the Eucharistic Prayer within the Diocese of Pueblo. Years ago, when I made the ‘suggestion’ that we stand during the Eucharistic Prayer the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops had not yet determined a posture for the Church in the United States of America.
Recently, the Conference of Catholic Bishops has determined that after the ‘Holy Holy’ to after the ‘Great Amen’ the faithful would kneel. Therefore I am rescinding my previous ‘suggestion’.
In addition, the General Instruction of the Roman Missal has designated the posture of standing during the Communion Rite. This means that the faithful stand when the reception of the Communion of the Faithful begins and remain standing while all in the assembly receive Communion. When the presider has returned to his chair after Communion, the faithful may kneel or sit at this time. The appropriate posture for receiving Communion is to stand.
Beginning on the First Sunday of Lent, March 8 and 9, 2003, the faithful of this diocese shall follow these regulations. This is being done so that our diocese will be in unity with the rest of the United States Church and in communion with Rome and the new document, General Instruction of the Roman Missal. (2002).
It is hardly necessary to note that the “new G.I.R.M.” of 2003 has not required that “the faithful stand when the reception of the Communion of the Faithful begins and remain standing while all in the assembly receive Communion.” The “new G.I.R.M.,” §3, contains the following language:
But it is up to the Conference of Bishops to adapt the gestures and posture in the Order of the Mass to the customs and reasonable traditions of the people according to the norm of law.54 The Conference, however, must make sure that such adaptations correspond to the meaning and character of each part of the celebration. Where it is the custom that the people remain kneeling from the end of the Sanctus until the end of the Eucharistic Prayer, this is laudably retained.
54 See ibidem, art. 40; see Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, Inst. Varietates Legitimae, 25 January 1994, n. 41: AAS, 87 (1995), p. 304.
“Study Translation” of the INSTITUTIO GENERALIS MISSALIS ROMANI., Prepared by the NCCB Secretariat for the Liturgy. 2003.
This “study translation” of the I.G.M.R. of 2000 would not have been available to Bishop Tafoya at the time of writing, but he would have attended the meeting of the National Conference in which the bishops firmly rejected the arguments of leading liturgists against that document’s approval of the kneeling posture during the Communion rite.[136] He would in any event found no basis for his exercise of authority over their posture during the Mass : that authority is clearly reserved to the bishops’ national conferences.
But enough and more than enough of his excellency Bishop Tafoya of Pueblo. We turn to more recent and detailed expressions of the same Eucharistic symbolism, published by the Cardinal Archbishop of Los Angeles.
Cardinal Mahoney published his interpretation of Eucharistic doctrine, together with the ecclesiology that is its corollary, in two pastoral letters: “Gather Faithfully Together” A Guide for Sunday Mass (1997) and “As I Have Done for You:” A Pastoral Letter on Ministry (2000).[137]
Like Bishop Tafoya’s “Liturgy: Time of Sacred Encounter,” Cardinal Mahony’s “Gather Faithfully Together” is unconcerned for the realism of the Church’s Eucharistic worship, and is similarly intent upon enhancing the psycho-sociological and finally political impact of the Eucharistic ritual in order to bring about or reinforce what its author perceives to be lacking: viz., an adequate ritual expression of community solidarity, capable in principle of being empirically verified. For example:
My hope is that we can fulfill this mandate in our Archdiocese by a singular and concentrated effort to strengthen Sunday Liturgy. Lacking that effort, we have no center, no identity as the Body of Christ.
“Gather Faithfully Together,” at 4.
The latter sentence in this quotation from the Letter is literally false; whatever rhetorical value the statement may be thought to possess, the Letter’s assertion that the reality of the Church waits upon the “strengthening of the Sunday liturgy” is simply not true. The merely practical, psycho-sociological emphasis of the Letter entirely misconceives the sacramental efficacy of the Eucharistic rite, viz., of the sacramentum tantum, the sacramental sign which is only a sign, and this only in its graced, causal relation to its effect. The efficacy of the sacramentum tantum is not empirical in any sense; it is not open to pragmatic evaluation, enhancement or strengthening. It falls under no empirical criteria, and is not verifiable by whatever scrutiny. This should be obvious. However, the effective politicization of the liturgy is the inerrant index of a denial of sacramental realism, which is to say, of sacramental efficacy. Under this deviant notion of liturgical reform, the Church’s worship of Truth incarnate ceases: its only objective efficacy is pragmatic, a quest for political control. We will see further indications of this transformation of the liturgy in the examination of Bishop Lynch’s pastoral letter/
The Cardinal’s Letter goes on to quote the late Archbishop Romero with approval:
Moments before his death, he talked about Eucharist as the vital center of all that the Church does. His martyrdom itself seems to be in these words:
This holy Mass, this Eucharist, is clearly an act of faith.
“Gather Faithfully Together,” p. 5
In the first place, while the Eucharist is certainly “the vital center of all that the Church does;” the Catholic Church’s quarrel with the Reform was precisely over the latter’s affirmation, condemned at the Council of Trent, and not to be attributed to Archbishop Romero without further proof than the Letter is able to offer, that the sacramental and objectively historical Event of the Sacrifice of the Mass, the Eucharist, should be regarded as “clearly an act of faith.” So to understand it is pure-quill symbolism, a radical denial of the concretely historical objectivity of the Eucharistic Sacrifice.
It should be obvious that the res et sacramentum of the Catholic Mass, the infallible effect ex opere operato of the Eucharistic rite, viz., the nuptial New Covenant instituted by the priestly offering of the Eucharistic Sacrifice, is not an act of faith, nor is it a function or effect of anyone’s faith. This is the clear implication of the fourth and fifth century condemnations of Donatism; it is the presupposition of the patristic meditation upon the Eucharist, and is explicitly taught in the Tridentine condemnations of the errors of the Reform’s dehistoricization of the Eucharist by the denial of the transubstantiation vi verborum of the Eucharistic elements, and of the Sacrifice of the Mass. It is passing strange that an archdiocesan pastoral letter should be so blithely dismissive of defined doctrine.
To celebrate Sunday Eucharist the followers of Jesus risked their lives in some times and places. Such was the gathering, such was the praise of God given there, such was the need to assemble the Church and make the Eucharist! In our day, the obstacles are perhaps greater than hostile emperors. What will it take to reclaim this day and its holiness?
“Gather Faithfully Together”, 7
In fact, this language is incomprehensible in any other context than that of a sola fide celebration of the Lord’s Supper, à la Luther. It suffices to observe that a church which needs to assemble, and “make the Eucharist,” is not the Catholic Church, whose unity does not wait upon our assembling, and whose Eucharist is instituted not by the Church but by the One Sacrifice of Jesus the Christ as Eucharistically represented in the Sacrifice of the Mass.
If the Catholic Eucharist can be said to be “made” in any sense, it is only in the sense of being confected, not by the assembled congregation, but by the priest acting in the Person of Christ, the Head and the source of the Church. To blur, to meld, finally to identify, the roles of priest and congregation in the offering of the Eucharistic sacrifice is to cease to speak of the Catholic liturgy, which presupposes an essential difference between the liturgical offices of the clergy and the laity. To ignore the hierarchical order of Catholic worship is to enter upon its dehistoricization, which is to say, its reduction to subjectivity, to symbolism. In his A Pastoral Letter on Ministry (2000), the Cardinal asserts blandly that
Although the notion of the priesthood of the community is older than the concept of an ordained ministerial priesthood (1 Peter 2:5-9), the Church very early recognized the consecrated ministry of those who are called uniquely to the service of God’s priestly people.
“As I Have Done for You,” p. 27.
I Peter 2: 4-9, reads as follows:
Come to him, to that living stone, rejected by men but in God’s sight chosen and precious; and like living stones yourselves built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptale to God through Jesus Christ. For it stands in Scripture:
“Behold I am laying in Zion a stone,
a cornerstone chosen and precious
and he who believes in him will not
be put to shame.”
To you therefore who believe, he is precious, but for those who do not believe,
The very stone which the builders rejected
Become the head of the corner”
“a stone that will make men stumble,
a rock that will make them fall”
for they stumble because they disobey the word, as they were destined to do. (RSV)
In the first place, 1 Peter 2:5-9 says nothing whatever about the priority of the priesthood of the community vis à vis the ordained priesthood. The summons to become a holy priesthood built up of stones into the building, the Church, whose cornerstone is Jesus the Lord, is addressed to all who read the letter, the Christians of northern Syria, whom he urges continually in his letters to strengthen their faith in Jesus Christ, to accept willing, even joyfully, the pagan (gentile) persecution for their faith, modeling themselves upon Jesus’ willingness to endure the suffering by which we are redeemed.
To read I Peter as Cardinal Mahony’s pastoral Letter “As I Have Done for You,” reads it is sheer and deliberate eisegesis; and provides a fair index of that Letter’s agenda, viz. the implementation of an ecclesiology incomepatible with the Eucharistic realism upon which the Catholic Church is founded. The Cardinal begins this pastoral with a contrast between a St. Leo’s parish as it existed in 1955 and that same parish as he hoped to see it exist five years after publishing the pastoral. The latter St. Leo’s parish has been enlightened:
First it must be recognized that lay ministry rooted in the priesthood of the baptized is not a stopgap measure. Even if seminaries were once again filled to overflowing and convents packed with Sisters, there would still remain the need for cultivating, developing and sustaining the full flourishing of ministries that we have witnessed in the Church since the Second Vatican Council. In the wake of the Council, we have arrived at a clearer recognition that it is in the nature of the church to be endowed with many gifts, and that these gifts are the basis for the vocations to the priesthood, the diaconate, and the religious life, as well as for the many ministries rooted in the call of baptism.
Ibid., at 15-16.
The Cardinal has his own view of the shortage of vocations to the priesthood:
What some refer to as the “vocations crisis” is, rather, one of the many fruits of the Second Vatican Council, a sign of God’s deep love for the Church, and an invitation to a more creative and effective ordering of gifts and energies in the Body of Christ. This is a time of great challenge and opportunity in the Church, not least of all because the gifts of the lay faithful have been flourishing in unprecedented numbers and in unforeseen ways.
Conciliar Orientations
Following the Second Vatican Council there has been a rediscovery in Catholic theology of baptism as the foundational sacrament of ministry, and a clear recognition that ministry is not just for the ordained.
Ibid., at 18.
The Introduction to the first volume of Covenantal Theology deals at some length with this dissenting “Catholic theology,” whose ecclesiology would substitute baptism for the Eucharist as the cause of the Church. This view of baptism as the basic or central sacrament is proper to Protestantism, not Catholicism. The church thus in view knows no priestly offering of the Eucharistic Sacrifice in the Person of Christ. It is not accidental that the Letter’s dithyramb over the prospective efficacy of “ministry” at the St. Leo’s parish of 2005 entirely ignores this constitutive priestly office when speaking of the ordained ministry. It cannot have escaped the Cardinal’s notice that Vatican II’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church was emphatic on the point. In fact, neither is the Cardinal much concerned over the failure of his clergy to attract vocations to the priesthood: A page or two earlier he concluded a paragraph detailing a convocation of the archdiocesan clergy with these words, as requiring no commentary:
A further tension remains. While most priests claim to be happy and fulfilled in their ministry, they give little evidence of enthusiasm for promoting priestly vocations.
Ibid, at 25.
In their display of unconcern for priestly vocations, the clergy of Los Angeles merely reflect the attitude of their archbishop and cannot but manifest its corollary, their own demoralization.
In 1955 the priests serving in a parishes such as the Letter imagines St. Leo’s to be, together with the priests of the other parishes of the Los Angeles archdiocese, routinely recruited altar boys in their hundreds to serve the Church’s liturgy. It is from them that the archdiocese of Los Angeles, and the other dioceses and archdioceses across the nation, drew many and probably most of their priestly vocations. Many of the others were graduates of the magnificent pre-Conciliar Catholic grammar and secondary school system wherein religious men and women of many congregations had vied with the diocesan religious and clergy in turning out, generation after generation, graduates whose literacy and familiarity with the Catholic tradition could be taken for granted, and many of whom had been sufficiently inspired by the role models encountered during their years in Catholic schools to decide to follow them, emulating their decades of devoted service to the Church.
In those years the graduates of the Catholic secondary schools routinely possessed a level of literacy unmatched by the bulk of our Catholic college graduates today, and a knowledge of the Catholic tradition which is today dismissed by the Directors of Religious Education who, having been taught for a quarter century by Thomas Groome, and themselves teaching under the powerful persuasion of Groome’s loyal disciples in the Catholic Education Association, regard acquaintance with the Church’s doctrinal and moral tradition as simply beside the point.
But the Cardinal’s Letter displays no interest in that travesty, nor does he offer any reason to hope that the disastrous consequences of this post-Conciliar pseudo-catechesis are not manifest in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. Central to that catechesis is its deprecation of the priesthood and of sacramental realism generally. Its practitioners will feel entirely at home in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles as Cardinal Mahony visualizes it.
When local ordinaries delight in the clericalization of the laity and correspondingly deprecate the indispensability of the sacrificial office of the ordained priesthood, preferring to regard the dwindling numbers of his clergy as the work of divine Providence rather than of their own patent irresponsibility, and go so far as to inculcate this viewpoint in the laity by way of their pastoral letters, the current minuscule number of priestly vocations may be expected to persist indefinitely and most certainly in Los Angeles for as long as Cardinal Mahony is its local ordinary. It is to be hoped that his successor will disappoint them.
The notion that baptism is foundational for “ministry“―a sublimely misleading label for the total clericalization of the laity and the correlative dismissal of any intrinsic distinction between the sacraments of baptism and orders―may stand as the leitmotiv of Cardinal Mahony’s equation of liturgical renewal with departure from the Catholic Eucharistic tradition. This evident emphasis of Cardinal Mahony’s two Letters is a subscription to the Protestant ecclesiology of a developing church, one whose original situation knew nothing of the succession of bishops to the Apostolic authority to offer the One Sacrifice in the Person of Christ, but which somehow, whether by corruption or by an immanently necessary evolution, emerged from that originally nonhierarchical, non-sacramental, romantic indiscernibility into the effectively Protestant situation in which the Cardinal understands the post-Conciliar Church to exist. It is one in which baptism is held foundational for its mission, which is to say, for its existence. We have already pointed out that this evolutionary view of the Catholic Eucharist entails as a matter of necessity a dehistoricized church and a dehistoricized Eucharist. Cardinal Mahony’s view of the ordained priesthood makes that ordained office to be a derivative of the office of priesthood of the baptized: in effect, it is reduced to a matter of lay preaching. This view simply dismisses the doctrinal tradition of the universal Church, a dismissal apparent in his distaste for its one cause: the priestly offering of the One Sacrifice in persona Christi. E.g.:
Our understanding of the ordained priesthood has changed and is still changing. But certain key terms have been used over time to try to pinpoint the priestly role.
The term in persona Christi (in the person of Christ) has been used to show that it is really Christ who acts in the Eucharist and in the sacraments. No personal power or gift of holiness on the part of the minister can assure this, even though the priest’s gifts must be put at the service of Christ and the Spirit to add a fitting witness to the sacramental action. The priest can never stand in as a substitute for Christ, nor ever represent all that Christ truly is.
The term in persona Christi capitis (in the person of Christ the head) has been used to indicate that the priest acts in the person of the Church and of Christ the head of the Church. Affirming that the priest acts in persona Christi capitis relates priestly ministry to the whole Body, head and members, and emphasizes the priest’s collaborative role, the need to work with other ministries, and the need to draw into the unity of the Gospel and the Church community all the gifts and ministries that come from Christ and his Spirit. As head of the community, the priest addresses challenging prophetic words to the community, exercises pastoral ministry of oversight and direction of the charisms of the community, and presides sacramentally as the instrument of Christ’s action in the sacraments. But, in headship, the ordained minister is in the Church, is not above the Church, or apart from the Church. The Church is the primary subject of liturgical and sacramental activity. The whole Church celebrates the sacraments—head and members.
“As I Have Done for You,” 25-26.
The first sentence here is a recital of the Cardinal’s theological confusion; it intimates a corresponding dogmatic confusion, a magisterial vacillation which resists clarification. His Eminence apparently has never read Presbyterorum Ordinis, which vigorously reaffirms the ancient doctrine.
The second sentence quoted is either meaningless or false. Read as a report of how “in Persona Christi Capitis” has been used, it is irrelevant except insofar as that usage is authentically Catholic, which “As I Have Done for You” does not dare to deny. In fact, the “in Persona Christi” has been used authentically in the documents of the Second Vatican Council:
2. The office of priests, since it is connected with the episcopal order, also, in its own degree, shares the authority by which Christ builds up, sanctifies and rules his Body. Wherefore the priesthood, while indeed it presupposes the sacraments of Christian initiation, is conferred by that special sacrament; through it priests, by the anointing of the Holy Spirit, are signed with a special character and are conformed to Christ the Priest in such a way that they can act in the person of Christ the Head.(10)
Presbyterorum Ordinis, Chapter 1, 2.
This pellucidly clear Conciliar affirmation is immediately followed by a statement of the relevance to the Church of the priestly action in the Person of Christ the Head; : It completely denies what Cardinal Mahony has asserted in his Letter. :Presbyterorum Ordinis teaches that:
In the measure in which they participate in the office of the apostles, God gives priests a special grace to be ministers of Christ among the people. They perform the sacred duty of preaching the Gospel, so that the offering of the people can be made acceptable and sanctified by the Holy Spirit.(11) Through the apostolic proclamation of the Gospel, the People of God are called together and assembled. All belonging to this people, since they have been sanctified by the Holy Spirit, can offer themselves as “a sacrifice, living, holy, pleasing to God” (Rom. 12:1). Through the ministry of the priests, the spiritual sacrifice of the faithful is made perfect in union with the sacrifice of Christ.
Loc. cit.
The meaning of the priest’s authority to act in the Person of Christ the Head is further spelled out in another Conciliar document:
10. Christ the Lord, High Priest taken from among men,(100) made the new people “a kingdom and priests to God the Father”.(101) The baptized, by regeneration and the anointing of the Holy Spirit, are consecrated as a spiritual house and a holy priesthood, in order that through all those works which are those of the Christian man they may offer spiritual sacrifices and proclaim the power of Him who has called them out of darkness into His marvelous light.(102) Therefore all the disciples of Christ, persevering in prayer and praising God,(103) should present themselves as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God.(104) Everywhere on earth they must bear witness to Christ and give an answer to those who seek an account of that hope of eternal life which is in them.(105)
Though they differ from one another in essence and not only in degree, the common priesthood of the faithful and the ministerial or hierarchical priesthood are nonetheless interrelated: each of them in its own special way is a participation in the one priesthood of Christ.(2) The ministerial priest, by the sacred power he enjoys, teaches and rules the priestly people; acting in the person of Christ, he makes present the Eucharistic sacrifice, and offers it to God in the name of all the people. But the faithful, in virtue of their royal priesthood, join in the offering of the Eucharist.(3) They likewise exercise that priesthood in receiving the sacraments, in prayer and thanksgiving, in the witness of a holy life, and by self-denial and active charity.
Lumen gentium, ch. 2, 10.
Cardinal Mahony’s mistaken interpretation of “in persona Christi Capitis” serves as the introduction to a paragraph crammed with doctrinal error. Its teaching is clearly false to the Catholic doctrinal tradition. It must be noted at the outset that neither “Gather Faithfully Together” nor “As I Have Done for You” ever associates the office of the ordained priest with the offering the Sacrifice of the Mass. In the concluding paragraph of “Gather Faithfully Together,” the necessity for the Sacrifice of the Mass is extolled, but there is no mention of its priestly offering in the Person of Christ, the High Priest and the Victim of his One Sacrifice. The word “sacrifice” does not appear in “As I Have Done for You.” This is not oversight. The only “sacrifice of the Mass” possible to the Cardinal’s ecclesiology is that of the laity, the “sacrifice of praise” whose sole value however is its liturgical conjunction with the offering of the One Sacrifice in persona Christi. Without the latter, we have no access to the Kingdom of God, as the second paragraph of the passage excerpted supra from Presbyterorum ordinis makes entirely clear.
As to specifics: in the first place, the Letter’s assertion that “our understanding of the priesthood has changed” is simply false. Vatican II’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium, and its Decree on the Ministry and Life of Priests, Presbyterorum Ordinis, both reaffirm the ancient doctrinal tradition, upon which any contemporary Catholic theology of the priesthood must be grounded and with which it must be in conformity if it is to be Catholic. The suggestion, which we have seen made by Archbishops Murphy of Seattle and Pilarczyk of Cincinnati, that the doctrine of the priesthood is controlled by a local ordinary’s theological dissent to the Catholic tradition, has no place to stand, whether in their own misled archdioceses, or in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles for which Cardinal Mahony wrote his pastoral Letters.
Pastoral letters are published by a local ordinary in the exercise of his liturgical authority precisely as the local ordinary, for he has no other. Consequently they are addressed to the Catholic people of the diocese or archdiocese in which his local liturgical authority is exercised, and more broadly to the Church as a whole. The Letter’s use of the collective, “our,” to address the Catholic people of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles is therefore an invocation of the faith of the Church, the sensus fidelium, and thus an invocation of the participation of the Catholic people of Los Angeles in the faith of the Roman Catholic Church.
Pastoral letters which dissent from the sensus fidelium cannot be regarded as an exercise of episcopal authority: rather they express an episcopal irresponsibility. The episcopal authority is liturgical: it depends totally upon the institution of the Catholic liturgy by Christ our Lord, and upon the bishops’ apostolic succession to the authority given the Apostles at the Last Supper. The undercutting of the radically Eucharistic liturgy of the Church by a bishop totally dependent upon it is no novelty. Most of the bishops in England at the time of the Reformation had learned some time since to look to the King as the source of their authority; the outstanding exception to this betrayal was Cardinal Fisher, for which treason he was hanged, drawn and quartered. After the Restoration these bishops looked to the Parliament for that warrant, and still do. Those Catholic bishops in the United States who are thus inclined have lately learned to look to one of the political parties. The avowedly pastoral letters which the U.S.N.C.C.B was wont to issue were of this ilk: i.e., exercises of a political responsibility which bishops as bishops not only do not possess, but from whose assumption they are barred by their liturgical responsibility, entirely immiscible with political responsiblity, These mass display of irresponsibility are cloaked with solemnity, but only to mask their futility. Their public impact is minuscule: they .provide ephemeral occupation for the media, the academy and the entertainment industry, but have no discernible political impact other than the confusion of the Catholic laity which has of late learned to doubt the competence of the episcopacy to meet the responsibilities of their proper office, and have no reason to trust their judgment in those matters left to the laity by Vatican II.
For the rest, there is no doubt that “The whole Church celebrates the sacraments―head and members”. This has never been in issue, but it is true only insofar as it is recognized that the Church is hierarchically ordered, and that the liturgical authority of the celebrating priest or bishop is essentially distinct from that of the universal priesthood of the laity, for he acts in the Person of Christ, not as a delegate or representative or functionary of “the assembly.”
The Protestant churches, which are Protestant simply by their denial of the Sacrifice of the Mass, deny thereby the existence of that hierarchical order. So also does the passage of the Cardinal’s Letter quoted above, for it refuses the distinctions which the Catholic Eucharistic doctrine requires. At bottom, this Letter agrees with the Protestant Reformation in denying the priestly authority to offer of the One Sacrifice in the Person of Christ, who is Eucharistically present in the Mass as the High Priest and the Victim of the One Sacrifice.
Within the hierarchically-ordered Eucharistic liturgy, there is a clear distinction, not in degree but in kind, between the liturgical authority of the priest and the liturgical authority of the laity, quite as there is between the authority of the man and the authority of the woman in marriage. The former distinction is indispensable to the Church’s celebration of the Eucharist, as the latter is to the celebration of marriage: both celebrations are hierarchically ordered. The Cardinal’s reliance upon the currently popular dissenting supposition that the priest exercises his liturgical office not so much in persona Christi as in persona Capitis either dismisses or, at least as likely, is ignorant of the nuptial denotation of Christ’s headship of the Church. Jesus is the head of the Church, the second Eve, precisely as her Bridegroom, the second Adam,, and can no more be identified with the Church than the Bridegroom can be identified with the Bride. The priestly offering of the One Sacrifice, whether in Persona Christi or in Persona Christi Capitis, institutes the One Flesh of the New Covenant, the nuptial union of the Bridegroom with the Bridal Church who, in that union, proceeds from him and in union with him, is the New Creation, the New Covenant.
A variety of dissenting feminist theologians have devoted decades to the proliferation of the confusion to which Cardinal Mahony’s “As I Have Done for You” so clearly subscribes, specifically in promoting the distinction it would inculcate between the priest’s acting in persona Christi and his acting in persona Capitis. The Cardinal has been persuaded that when Jesus acts as the head of the Church he acts and speaks in the person of the Church: thus the priest, when acting in persona Christi Capitis, is held to speak and act in the person of the Church and, when acting in persona Christi, he acts and speaks in the Person of Christ.
It should be evident to his Eminence that this view of liturgical renewal relies upon a division of the Personal unity of Christ, which is absurd. But for its adepts it has the supposed advantage of eliminating what they adamantinely reject, the priestly offering of the Sacrifice of the Mass, which can be offered only in the Name of Jesus the Lord: it is offered for the Church, not by her. Thus any priest who acts in persona Christi Capitis acts in the Person of the head of the Church, quite as he does when acting in persona Christi, for it is as the head of the Church that Jesus the Lord offers the One Sacrifice. A notion of liturgical renewal which would contravene the crucial distinction between Jesus the Head and the bridal Church who is his body obviously has no place in a pastoral letter because it has no place in the Catholic liturgy that grounds the Cardinal’s authority to publish pastoral letters.
The ordained priest’s offering of the One Sacrifice in the Person of Christ the Head is indispensable to and constitutive for the celebration of the Eucharist. In his celebration of the Mass, the priest of course does not, as the Letter has it, “act sacramentally as the instrument of Christ’s action;” he acts in the very Person of Christ, who obviously is not an instrument of his own action. To act in the Person of Christ is identically to act in the Person of Christ the Head of the Church. Once again, and emphatically, this is not to act in the person of the bridal Church, for Christ the Head is not to be identified with his bridal Church, but rather he is One Flesh with her, irreducibly distinct from her as the Bridegroom is distinct from his Bride. Jesus’ headship is a topic much in need of theological discussion and development: steps to that end have been taken in the present work.[138] We have here to do with the centrality of nuptial symbolism to the Eucharistic offering of the One Sacrifice, thus with its centrality to the New Covenant instituted by Jesus the Christ, the Head, upon the cross. It is a pity that the nuptial symbolism of the Mass is so alien to Cardinal Mahony’s view of liturgical renewal, for that project cannot proceed unless continually clarified by continual reference to the unity of Christ and the Church in One Flesh.
Thirdly, the Cardinal’s evident fear of an overweening priesthood has led him into another serious error with respect to the sacrament of Orders: we cite his words again::
The term in persona Christi (in the person of Christ) has been used to show that it is really Christ who acts in the Eucharist and in the sacraments. No personal power or gift of holiness on the part of the minister can assure this, even though the priest’s gifts must be put at the service of Christ and the Spirit to add a fitting witness to the sacramental action. The priest can never stand in as a substitute for Christ, nor ever represent all that Christ truly is.
“As I Have Done for You,” 25-26.
This language is confused and, as with this Letter generally, often obscure, but it can more easily read as a denial than an affirmation of the sufficiency of a priest’s ordination to assure the objective efficacy of his offering of the One Sacrifice in persona Christi. While the Cardinal would doubtless disapprove the celebration of the Mass in the absence of a congregation, the presence of one is not essential to the priestly offering of the One Sacrifice. The celebration of the Eucharist by a priest without a congregation is entirely valid and efficacious, as was taught at Vatican II, in Presbyterorum Ordinis, §13. It follows that no celebration of the Mass can be a “private” celebration, for the Mass is essentially the Offering of the One Sacrifice for all mankind, for all those for whom Christ died precisely as their head, their source. It is by the One Sacrifice, offered by the one High Priest on the cross and on the altar, that humanity is redeemed and the universe restored. It is then evident that the celebration of the Mass: has a radically ecclesial efficacy. Any denial of the authority of an ordained priest to offer the Sacrifice of the Mass, as though it depended upon extrinsic factors, such as those bearing upon his association with a congregation, is false to the earliest level of the doctrinal tradition. In and by the celebration of the Mass, the Church proceeds from the High Priest as from her Head: she has no other cause, no other source. Because the priest in his celebration of the Mass acts always in the Person of the Head, he does not act as a member of the Church. He acts in the Person of the Christ whose One Sacrifice causes the Church. This is inescapable, however incompatible it may be with Cardinal Mahony’s version of liturgical renewal.
It should be further obvious that the doctrinal tradition has never supported the absurdity that, by acting in persona Christi, the priest “becomes” Jesus the Lord. What the Cardinal may mean by denying that the priest can “stand in as a substitute for Christ” is too obscure for discussion here. Insofar as that expression does not intend to deny the authority of the ordained priest to offer the One Sacrifice in the Person of Jesus Christ, at once the High Priest and the Victim, it may stand. What it might mean within that orthodox context is of no pressing doctrinal or theological concern; it is enough that in offering the Sacrifice of the Mass, the celebrating priest or bishop offers the One Sacrifice of Christ, and does so in his Person, for it cannot otherwise be offered.
However, the Cardinal goes on expressly to deny that the priest can “ever represent all that Christ truly is.” Once again, he is speaking of the priest in the concrete context of the Catholic Eucharistic liturgy, in which the priest offers the One Sacrifice in the Person of Christ. It cannot be questioned that Jesus and his Person are identical: his reality is his Person, precisely “all that Christ truly is.” The priest, offering the One Sacrifice in persona Christi, offers Jesus the Christ’s full expression of his Personal authority and responsibility, for it is in this Offering that the Christ, the Son, fulfills his Mission from the Father, whereby he reveals the Father and himself as the Son of the Father by his sacrificial redemption of the fallen world. Any language denying or intimating a denial that the celebrating priest adequately represents Jesus’ offering of the One Sacrifice by offering it in his Person is indefensible because false to the apostolic liturgical-doctrinal tradition. At best, it is quite evident that the Cardinal’s grasp of the apostolic tradition is unsure: it will be equally so for those who, reading his Letters, are asked to share the confusion they would inculcate.
But once again, enough. We now pass on to Bishop Lynch, whose recent pastoral letter, “Concerning Eucharistic Adoration, Exposition and Benediction,” (2001) is a prototypical instance of the doctrinal impact of the affirmation, by both editions of the G.I.R.M, of a multiplicity of Eucharistic “real presences.” His Pastoral Letter warns his diocese at some length against the danger that Eucharistic exposition might detract from the recognition of the prior presence of Christ in the congregation, and further spells out in detail the elements he deems essential to the liturgical expression of a proper reverence for that Protestantized congregational presence:
Important as private prayer is, it should always lead the individual back to the Lord who is present in the celebration of the Eucharist and in the midst of his people. Christ present in the Eucharist presupposes his presence in the assembly gathered for common prayer, his presence in the word, his presence in the minister, and his presence in the sharing of the eucharistic bread and cup. Therefore, private devotion and adoration of the reserved Blessed Sacrament should lead the faithful to a fuller appreciation of the communal dimension of the Mass. (added emphasis added)
Bishop Lynch shares Bishop Tafoya’s and Cardinal Mahony’s dissenting and quite untutored postulate that the Eucharistic transubstantiation bears upon the congregation, not the bread and wine of the Offertory. He supposes that the multitudinous Eucharistic presences recited in the G.I.R.M. are in sum more “real” than that achieved by the consecration of the bread and wine, to the point that they are in fact the “presupposition” of that consecration. This is of course his purely arbitrary diktat, with no warrant whatever. But such ukases are the familiar discourse of Bishop Lynch; they specified his triumphant tour as the General Secretary of the U.S.C.C.
After proclaiming the reduction of the Eucharistic Presence to a by-product of the quite metaphorical presence of Christ in the Congregation, Bishop Lynch passes on to the implications of his fiat: his “Conclusion” informs us that
Although exposition of the Blessed Sacrament may help foster devotion to Christ’s presence in the Eucharist, a parish’s first priority is well-planned and well-celebrated Masses. Parishes seeking to inaugurate or restore eucharistic devotions should reflect on their practices during the communion rite and their commitment of time and money (stewardship) to social services. Are they as respectful and reverent toward Christ’s presence in the gathered Body, the Church, as they are to the presence of Christ in the Sacrament? Is the fuller expression of the Eucharist under the forms of bread and wine being offered to the faithful at all Masses? Does the eucharistic bread look like bread? Does the parish carefully prepare enough communion for the gathered assembly instead of routinely going to the tabernacle? Does the eucharistic procession take its own time or is the focus to try to get through the communion rite as efficiently and expediently as possible? Do the echaristic ministers reflect the parish, i.e., inclusive of age, ethnicity, and gender? Have the eucharistic ministers been properly trained and is their formation ongoing? Is the Eucharist being brought to members of the parish who cannot gather on Sunday because of sickness or advanced age? When these issues have been addressed, then the deeper understanding of communion that Christ intended in the Eucharist will be achieved.
Bishop Lynch’s fear that the resources expended on Eucharistic exposition will interfere with “well planned and celebrated Masses” and depreciate the congregation’s “commitment of time and money (stewardship) to social services” relies heavily upon the view of liturgical renewal we have seen developed by Cardinal Mahony’s “Gather Faithfully Together” of four years earlier: we note once again the fastidious refusal to capitalize “Eucharist.” The standards for “well-planned and well-celebrated Masses” which Bishop Lynch’s Pastoral Letter establishes in the parishes under his jurisdiction are intended continually to challenge the legitimacy of any pastor’s institution of Eucharistic adoration. The bishops’ check sheet for such celebration identifies aspirations with obligations, a device long popular with autocrats.[139] The assignment of impossible responsibilities is the a priori establishment of a hermeneutic of suspicion aimed at any independent exercise of responsibility by a pastor―in this case, any pastor who recognizes the value of the scheduled exposition of the Blessed Sacrament.
Thus Bishop Lynch’s pastoral letter deploys the tactics made familiar by his governance of the old United States Catholic Conference (U.S.C.C.), of which he was the Associate General Secretary for five years, from 1984 to 1989, and the General Secretary for the next six years, from 1989 to 1995, when Cardinal Bernardin arranged his appointment as the bishop of St. Petersburg. The U.S.C.C. was from 1966 the staff organization for the National Conference of Catholic Bishops (N.C.C.B.). In principle, the U.S.C.C. was subordinate to the N.C.C.B, but this subordination was confused from the outset by the assigning of distinct responsibilities for social policy to the U.S.C.C., with the result that, in the view of the U.S.C.C., the authority of the bishops of the N.C.C.B. was limited a priori to those responsibilities which did not fall under that heading. This insolence was underwritten by the careful failure of Cardinal Bernardin and his minions to recognize specific responsibilities in the N.C.C.B.
This classic bureaucratic maneuver left to the bishops comprising the National Conference only what was indelegable: their liturgical responsibility for the Church’s worship in truth. However, because this worship is sacramental, it is public, concretely historical, and effective ex opere operato, i.e., irrespective of the political passions of the local ordinary. Unfortunately, bishops’ radically liturgical responsibilities could scarcely be exercised without trespass on those “social” responsibilities whose delegation to their theoretically subordinate staff they had consented and even approved, if only by their silence.
The delegation was of course a nullity: the bishops had no responsibility for, or authority over, “social responsibilities” to delegate, and their properly episcopal liturgical authority is incapable of delegation. The inherent irresponsibility and insubordination of a staff organization whose existence was predicated upon episcopal irresponsibility seems to have troubled no one in the N.C.C.B./U.S.S.C.
Nonetheless, despite this episcopal faineance, the accumulated incongruities soon became evident. The creation of the office of General Secretary as head of the dual U.S.C.C./N.C.C.B. sufficiently indicates the bureaucratic imposition of order upon that incoherent conglomerate, and the correlative relativization of the authority of the bishops comprising the N.C.C.B,, who soon became accustomed to seeking U.S.C.C. approval even of their own appointment of the chairmen of their own committees.
During Lynch’s ascendancy the bureaucracy studiously obstructed the U.S. bishops’ discussion of the episcopal responsibilities for which their semi-annual meetings as the N.C.C.B. were intended: this by the simple device of by presenting them beforehand with a social-work agenda of indisputable political correctness, laced with heavily political overtones having nothing to do with the bishops’ pressing responsibility for dealing with the manifold liturgical crises then as now facing the Church. Thus, portentous documents on the economy, on the rights of women, on warfare, on health, issued as though the unanimous policy statements of a faceless American episcopacy, each of whose members was persuaded that dissent from the received opinion constituted an unthinkable breaking of the ranks.
Thus domesticated, muzzled, rendered impotent by the U.S.C.C./ N.C.C.B bureaucracy, the American bishops remained immobile until at last informed by John Paul II that the U.S. episcopal conference, the U.S.C.C./ N.C.C.B., had no ecclesial authority unless its unanimity were real.[140] As led by Cardinal Bernardin, the U.S.C.C./N.C.C.B had never known a free unanimity, and has known none since. The consequence of John Paul II’s Apostolos Suos has been a gradual recovery by the bishops of the personal authority they had so servilely abdicated.[141] The recovery has been very gradual: Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz’ refusal to apply in his diocese the absurd diktat of the Dallas Conference of the U.S.C.C.B (2002) is regarded by the bulk of his fellow bishops as bad form, although the recent presidential election has revealed that for many in their flocks, abortion is not bad form. After all, the USCCB advice to the electorate issued in 2008 had found the intrinsic evil of abortion to be negotiable. Enough said.
Bishop Lynch’s bureaucratic regimentation of the U.S.C.C./N.C.C.B, at one with his pastoral attempt to regiment his own pastors, is merely the corollary of that politicization of liturgy which is itself the inevitable consequence of a loss of faith in its intrinsic sacramental efficacy. After all, the “assembly” must assemble to some purpose. When it is no longer to participate in the sacramentally efficacious worship of the risen Lord in his Eucharistic immanence in this fallen world, some other agenda must be confected, some other communion concocted, some other efficacy manifested. It is only in this context that Bishop Lynch’s Pastoral Letter is comprehensible. Its suppression of the personal authority and the free responsibility of his pastors and, through their suppression, the suppression of the responsible freedom of the laity as well, makes perfect sense, but not in the context of the Eucharistic worship of the Catholic Church, which is entirely liberating.
Unfortunately, Cardinal Mahony, Bishop Toyota and Bishop Lynch can find warrant in official Church documents for their fastidious avoidance of the res Catholica.
In 1965, in Mysterium fidei, §§36-39, Pope Paul VI, elaborating upon Sacrosanctum Concilium §7, had carefully placed the several “real presences” of Christ described in that document within the context of their relation to and dependence upon the uniquely substantial Real Presence, i.e., the Event of the priestly offering of the One Sacrifice: Paul VI concluded in the following language:
This presence is called “real”—by which it is not intended to exclude all other types of presence as if they could not be “real” too, but because it is presence in the fullest sense: that is to say, it is a substantial presence by which Christ, the God-Man, is wholly and entirely present.(41) [=Conc. of Trent, Decree on the Eucharist, Ch. 3.] It would therefore be wrong to explain this presence by having recourse to the “spiritual” nature, as it is called, of the glorified Body of Christ, which is present everywhere, or by reducing it to a kind of symbolism, as if this most august Sacrament consisted of nothing else than an efficacious sign, “of the spiritual presence of Christ and of His intimate union with the faithful, members of His Mystical Body.
Mysterium Fidei ¶39.
While the “new G.I.R.M” refers to very similar language in ¶9 of Eucharisticum Mysterium, the Congregation of Rites there uses that language to point out the ancillary character of those “presences” of Christ, including that “presence” referred to in Mt. 18:20,: they are all in function of “liturgical celebrations;” in which context their subordination to and dependence upon the offering of the Eucharistic sacrifice is evident. It is unfortunate that the “new G.I.R.M.” suggests that the “presence” of Christ is rather “in the assembly” than “to the assembly,” a notion radically inconsistent with the doctrine of Euchristiam Mysterium, where we read:
9. The Different Modes of Christ’s Presence
In order that they should achieve a deeper understanding of the mystery of the Eucharist, the faithful should be instructed in the principal ways in which the Lord is present to His Church in liturgical celebrations.43
He is always present in a body of the faithful gathered in His name (cf. Matt. 18:20). He is present too in His Word, for it is He who speaks when the Scriptures are read in the Church.
In the sacrifice of the Eucharist He is present both in the person of the minister, “the same now offering through the ministry of the priest who formerly offered himself on the Cross,”44 and above all under the species of the Eucharist.45 For in this sacrament Christ is present in a unique way, whole and entire, God and man, substantially and permanently. This presence of Christ under the species “is called ‘real’ not in an exclusive sense, as if the other kinds of presence were not real, but ‘par excellence’.”46
43 Cf. Vat II Const. on Liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium, n. 7-AAS 56 (1964), pp. 100-101.
44 Council of Trent, Session XXII, Decree on the Mass, Chap. II- Denz. 940 (1743).
45 Cf. Vat. II Const. on Liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium, n. 7-AAS 56 (1964), pp. 100-101.
46 Paul VI, Encyc. Lett. Mysterium Fidei-AAS 57 (1965), p. 764.
Eucharisticum Mysterium, ¶9, Instruction on Eucharistic Worship, Sacred Congregation of Rites, May 25, 1967.
The “new G.I.R.M.” refers also to Sacrosanctum Concilium (SC), Ch. 1, §7, where as we have noted, a comparable statement of the priority of the Eucharistic sacrifice is found:
7. To accomplish so great a work, Christ is always present in his Church, especially in her liturgical celebrations. He is present in the sacrifice of the Mass, not only in the person of his minister, “the same now offering, through the ministry of priests, who formerly offered himself on the cross”(8), but especially under the Eucharistic species. By his power he is present in the sacraments, so that when a man baptizes it is really Christ himself who baptizes(9). He is present in his Word, since it is he himself who speaks when the holy Scriptures are read in the Church. He is present, lastly, when the Church prays and sings, for he promised: “Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them” (Mt. 18:20) .
It is clear that magisterial references to multiple Eucharistic “presences” of the Christ must be read within the context of those numerous passages in Sacrosanctum Concilium, as in the other Conciliar and magisterial documents, which affirm the radical priority, over all elements of the Church’s worship, of the priestly offering in persona Christi of the Eucharistic Sacrifice. Jesus the Christ is present to the Eucharistic community only Eucharistically: these other insubstantial “presences” cannot be added to that transcendent Presence, nor can they be distinguished from the Eucharistic presence in any concrete sense, for they have no independent objective reality. Once removed from their dependent relation to the sacrificial and substantial presence of the risen Christ in the Eucharistic liturgy, they have no reality whatever. Within the celebration of the Eucharist, they have no objectivity; the “presence” then ascribed to them is subjective and non-historical, an expression of personal piety, not a product of the transubstantiation of the elements, of the High Priestly offering of the One Sacrifice.
The alternative to the recognition of the priority of the sacrifice of the Mass over all other “real” presences of the Christ is the rejection of the Eucharistic sacrifice, for it is absurd to suppose that the “presence” of Christ assigned, e.g., to the congregation, or to the homilist, is that of the High Priest offering the One Sacrifice. His “Real Presence” is the Event of his offering to the Father of the One Sacrifice, of which he is as at once the High Priest and the Victim. This Event-Presence of Jesus the Lord in the Mass is historically efficacious in the institution of the New Covenant, the One Flesh of Christ and the Church whereby the fallen universe of broken space and time is redeemed, made new. Entry into this redeemed history is by the liturgical appropriation of its salvific significance by participation in the worship of the Church. Consequently, relative to this Real Presence, all the other liturgical “presences” of Christ are insubstantial: their only reality is that of the Eucharistic Sacrifice.
When Sacrosanctum Concilium’s §7 is read to teach―as a number of pastoral letters issued over the past decade in the U.S. have read it―that the several “real presences” of the risen Christ in the Mass are all at the same level, the Council is thereby understood to have abandoned the Catholic Eucharist in favor of its Lutheran counterfeit, a prospect not in view then or since apart from an influential handful of dissident liturgists. Cardinal Mahony’s unfortunate 1997 Pastoral Letter on liturgical renewal manifested and promoted this “liturgically correct“ confusion and, as has been seen, other U.S. bishops have since shared it.
Such Eucharistic “real presences” lack historical objectivity; consequently, reference to their reality can only be metaphorical. Objective historical presence is possible only to an objective historical reality. At the close of the Second Vatican Council it was being urged by Catholic theologians that the Church’s unity is due to the “abiding presence of the Holy Spirit.”[142] This is false to the Catholic liturgical and doctrinal tradition, for the Spirit is not incarnate, and has no Personal historicity other than that which is dependent upon his Mission through the Son. Absent the Eucharistic historicity of the risen Christ, there is no presence of the Spirit in the world, and the Church’s worship ceases to be historically efficacious, and historically objective: Inasmuch as the Church’s historicity is that of her worship, the Church also disappears from historical objectivity, to become the subjective “church” of the Protestant Reformation.
The Spirit’s effects are, in sum, the Good Creation, but the Spirit’s efficacy is not by way of his Personal historical immanence, for he has none. The historicity of his Mission is the Personal historicity, the Eucharistic immanence of the “one and the same Son,” of the Son through whose One Sacrifice the Spirit is sent, poured out upon the Church and, through her, upon the whole of creation.
In the opening decades of the third millennium, as in the closing decades of the second, a romanticism has descended upon the Western world, a misanthropic distrust of historical institution as such, and most particularly of the Church of sinners. Carl Armbruster’s article, cited supra, is a fair expression of that malaise, which can impose any interpretation whatever on the work of the Spirit, as warranting, e.g., the theological dissent it embodies, by its rejection of the Catholic past.,[143] , the historical Church whose Mission is historical only by the historicity of Jesus the Christ, the One and the same Son, a historicity that is his One Sacrifice as Eucharistically represented: apart from that representation his death upon the cross would be without the transcendent historical significance that is his as the Lord of history, by which Lordship history is salvific. The primitive faith that Jesus is the Lord is uttered in the Eucharistic worship of the Church, and is inseparable from that worship. His Lordship of salvation history, of history as objective, is Eucharistic: it is only as the Eucharistic Lord that Jesus is the Alpha and Omega, the Beginning and the End: his death on the cross would otherwise be an element of the fallen temporality which it would not have transcended and could not have redeemed.
Nonetheless, the inability of the cosmologically oriented methodology of the great majority of Catholic theologians over the past century and more has produced a theological consensus, taught for generations in the seminaries, that reduces the priestly offering of the sacrifice of the Mass to Calvinist dimensions: Christ is present only in his humanity and thus present only as sacrificed; consequently Christ is not understood to be present as the High Priest offering himself as the Victim of that sacrifice: this despite the explicit doctrine of the Council of Trent and the Second Vatican Council that the priestly offering of the One Sacrifice is made in the Person of Jesus the Christ, the Lord, whom Chalcedon, following Irenaeus two and a half centuries earlier, eight times affirmed to be “the one and the same Son.” There can be no question that the Catholic Eucharistic liturgy is the Offering in the Person of Christ of his One Sacrifice: the doctrine of the Real Presence is ancillary to and controlled by this Event, by which Jesus the Lord is immanent in fallen space and time as its risen Lord, its head, the source of its free truth, its beauty, thus as its creator, but he is thus Personally present at once as the High Priest, offering himself as the Victim of his One Sacrifice, and consequently his Personal Real Presence is as the Victim whom he Personally offers to the Father in the One Sacrifice which, objectively because in sacramento, redeems and restores the whole of creation, making all things new. The cosmological bowdlerization of this foundational, constitutive Event in terms of ‘liturgical renewal’ has been the tragedy of our times. It is providential that Pope Benedict XVI has understood the necessity of the “reform of the reform” of the liturgy.
In the first volume of a dense study published before the Second Vatican Council, Johannes Betz, a dogmatic historian of the first rank, proposed what he has designated the Actualpräsenz of Christ in the Eucharist: this view of the Eucharistic Presence of Jesus the Lord he regards as a return to the original patristic understanding of the Eucharistic presence of Christ as dynamic rather than static.[144]
Unfortunately, Betz’ understands the Eucharistic Aktualpräsenz as that of Christ solely as the passive Victim of the One Sacrifice, and explicitly not as the High Priest who offers himself as that Victim. This eliminates the Event-character of the Eucharistic Presence, and must conclude to a nonhistorical symbolist theology of the Eucharist.
Betz developed his theory of a Eucharistic Aktualpräsenz well prior to Vatican II, at a time when the Tridentine definition of the Eucharistic Real Presence was thought by a number of European theologians to have been heavily influenced by the Thomist-Aristotelian metaphysics,[145] leading to the conclusion that the Tridentine Fathers had in view an Aristotelian conception of Real Presence which, as “substantial,” could hardly be other than static: “substantialist” was then on the way to becoming an epithet in the Catholic theological circles influenced by Rahner and Lonergan. We here prescind from discussing the value of this reading of Trent, for it is obvious that the Fathers at Trent understood Christ’s Eucharistic Presence to be historical, i.e., as an intrinsically free event, inasmuch as they identified it with the Event of the One Sacrifice, stressing that the Christ is present in the Eucharist at once and inseparably as the High Priest of the One Sacrifice, and as the Victim whom the High Priest offers in the One Sacrifice.
There can be no question of a Tridentine definition―or supposition―of a ‘static’ Real Presence, for the primary emphasis of the Council was to re-affirm what the Reform denied: the historicity or event-character of the Sacrifice of the Mass. It was in this adversarial and consequently historical context that the Fathers at Trent taught that the Eucharistic Real Presence is the historical Event of the Offering of the One Sacrifice. The Tridentine doctrine of the “Real Presence” is therefore simply the corollary, the immediate implication, of the historicity, the Event, of the One Sacrifice: there can be no justification for looking elsewhere for its meaning.
The not uncommon supposition in medieval and baroque theology that the Real Presence, as the “product of transubstantiation,” is merely the humanity, the body and the blood of the Christ and consequently, that only the body and the blood of the Victim are received in communion, but not the Person who is at once the High Priest and the Victim of his One Sacrifice, is an evident reflection of medieval reaction to the heresy of Berengarius of Tours, who had denied the objective truth of the Eucharistic Words of Institution: “This is my body;” “This is the chalice of my blood.”
The theological defense of Eucharistic realism against Berengarius’ reduction of it to a subjectivism, the work notably of Lanfranc and Guitmund of Aversa in the eleventh century, and of Alger of Liége and Gregory of Bergamo in the twelfth, developed the “substantial” (i.e., objective) character of the Real Presence, but in a context so linked to Berengarius’ heresy as to focus interest so particularly upon the substantial change of the Eucharistic elements (labeled “transubstantiation” by the middle of the twelfth century), upon their becoming what Berengarius had denied, the body and blood of Christ, as to neglect the identity of the Jesus the High Priest with the Jesus the Lamb of God, the Victim of his One Sacrifice, the Bread from heaven. This neglect continued through the twentieth century. The Eucharistic tractates of that time taught the doctrine of the Council of Trent, but as mediated by authorities such as St. Robert Bellarmine in the seventeenth century, Franzelin in the nineteenth, and Louis Billot, Maurice de La Taille, and Abbot Anscar Vonier in the early twentieth, who had begun to rediscover the Nominalist objection to the supposed “repetition” by the priest-celebrant of the Eucharist, of the sacrifice of the cross.
The sophisticated development of history as governed by the Eucharistic unity of the two Covenants, which dominated the patristic exegesis, had been put in issue during the Carolingian period by a fascination with the “new dialectic,” exploited by Ratramnus and Rhabanus Maur, which had begun to undercut the sacramental foundation of the Augustinian theology of history that underlay his admonition, “spiritualiter intelligete,” by which alone is the Real Presence intelligible as the sacrificial institution of the Eucharistic union in One Flesh of Christ and his bridal Church. Berengarius’ heresy was the full flowering of this atomization of discursive language, and thereby of the free unities of history, all of which are at bottom sacramental. This dissent to reality, the quest for necessary reasons which troubled theology from the twelfth century, is always an analytical disintegration of the object of inquiry, a quest for the atom, the indivisible, which does not exist in history. This servile modality of the theological quaerens intellectum, the submission of the truths of the faith to the immanent fragmentation native to fallen rationality, and to the spontaneous dehistoricization of its subject native to the cosmological imagination, continually tempts theology, as it tempts all efforts to learn and understand, for our quest of truth is not a necessity of thought, but a gift. Therefore it is free, and seeks a truth that is equally gift, and equally free..
Thus burdened by an imagination which cannot accept, i.e., cannot imagine, the Personal unity of the Lord as the indivisible Personal unity in him of humanity and divinity, theologians proceed to dehistoricize that Personal unity in order that it be imaginable, non-mysterious. Thereby we hear that it is the non-human, nonhistorical “eternal Son” who is the agent of our salvation, using his assumed humanity only as an instrument, and consequently acting as God, not as a man. The Corpus Christi verum, which for the Fathers labeled the sacrifice of Christ, has been transformed by a fatally flawed cosmological theology into a radically passive, thus nonhistorical, victim of a nonhistorical sacrifice.
This scenario, wherein Jesus is neither a human person (thus not the Son of Mary) nor the divine Son of the Father (and thus not “the one and the same Son” of the Council of Chalcedon) is the hallmark of a time-honored and pervasive theological confusion in the Latin Church, originating in the defensive reaction to Berengarius’ denial of the truth of the words of Eucharistic institution, and enhanced by a comparably defensive reaction to the Reformers’ denial of the sacrifice of the Mass. Betz has found the same Eucharistic confusion flourishing a millennium earlier in the Antiochene tradition represented by John Chrysostom and his contemporary, Theodore of Mopsuestia. In the sixteenth-century Reformation as in the diophysite confusion typifying the Antiochene tradition in the fifth century, the sacrifice of the Mass gave way to the monadist demands of a cosmologized Christology, whose subject, the dehistoricized, non-human Logos who, as reduced to the standing of an abstract divine Person, became the Absolute, incapable of relation, thus incapable of historicity.
Persuaded by this rationale, the theologians of the Reform and, a millennium earlier, those of the Antiochene tradition represented severally by John Chrysostom, Theodore of Mopsuestia and, a generation later, Theodore’s disciple, Nestorius, reduced the One Sacrifice of Christ to the unrepeatable event of Jesus’ crucifixion. From which cosmologically-controlled inference the objectively historical Event of the Eucharistic representation of the One Sacrifice becomes impossible. Consequently, that representation was reduced by both traditions to a subjective anamnesis of the Crucifixion as an event of the irretrievable past. In this all-too-common error, the One Sacrifice is understood not to entail the historical immanence of the risen Lord, and so does not transcend the dualities, the fragmentation, of our fallen history. Rather, the opposite is held to be true. The One Sacrifice belongs to the past, and the past to the “philologists” who, as Lonergan famously observed, have deprived the theologians of their sources.
As governed by this cosmological, pseudo-theological rationale, the Mass ceases to be the offering of the One Sacrifice in the Person and with the authority of the risen Lord, the High Priest of the One Sacrifice. The institution of the Eucharistic Sacrifice by our Lord at the Last Supper is obviously prior to his death upon the cross, and cannot be understood as a repetition of that event without falsifying the Words of Institution spoken by Christ, as in the current (2011) consecration narrative: "Take this all of you, and eat of it, For this is my Body which will be given up for you." The textus receptus of the Order of the Mass needs more work. The New Testament Institution Narratives are all in the present tense.
The Council of Trent refused that Protestant proposition by defining the Mass as the unbloody Offering of the One Sacrifice, distinguished it modally, not historically, from the sacrificial death of Jesus on the cross. No other interpretation of the words of Jesus at the Last Supper, instituting the Eucharistic representation of his One Sacrifice, is possible. The Tridentine definition of the Eucharistic Sacrifice is loyal to its Institution by Jesus the Christ. This, the truth of the faith that Jesus Christ is Lord, transcends any rationale. Its free liturgical mediation is a flat rejection of the cosmological appeal to immanent necessities. The faith of the Church is the worship in truth of Truth himself, the radical mystery of Jesus Christ the Lord, who thereby, as the object of the Catholic faith, is the historically objective norma normans et non normata of Catholic theology. But to the sarkic mind, this affirmation must be tested―by the sarkic mind―which, locked into its immanent neccessity, must deny any free unity in history, and searches in vain for any other. .
No doubt, in the centuries following the Council of Trent, a good many Catholic theologians had inferred, from the temporal priority of the Tridentine Canons defining the Real Presence to those defining the Sacrifice of the Mass, an actual and even causal priority in the Real Presence, justifying a theological emphasis on the Real Presence in such wise as to leave in the background the Conciliar definition of the historical identity of the One Sacrifice and the Real Presence, even to the point of attempting to deduce the Sacrifice of the Mass from the a consequently abstract definition of the Real Presence.
This reverses their causal priority for, in fact, as a matter of faith, it is in his High Priestly Offering of his One Sacrifice that Christ is Present on the altar. The theological focus upon the Real Presence as that of the transubstantiated bread and wine of the Offertory, over against Berengarius’ denial of that transubstantiation, began to identify the Real Presence with the Sacrificed body and blood of Jesus the Lord, in an implicit dissociation from the High Priestly offering of that One Sacrifice, which had long been attributed by the dominant Christological theology, in the East as in the West, not to the Person of Jesus, but to the “immanent Logos.”
This diophysite dissociation of the Christ from his humanity developed a deformed Eucharistic doctrine and spirituality, apparent in Theodore of Mopsuestia’s application of the Aristotelian cosmological analysis to the Incarnation, whose subject he understood in common with the Alexandrines to be the nonhistorical Logos, the eternal divine Son who, as absolute, could not be identified with the human Jesus. This Christological error had the Eucharistic consequence that the body and blood of the merely human Jesus, Eucharistically represented, could have no salvific efficacy. Cyril’s recognition of this diophysite consequence led to the condemnation of Theodore’s disciple, Nestorius, by the Council of Ephesus, together with the condemnation of that Christological diophysism by the proclamation that the Virgin Mary is the Mother of God. However, Cyril himself, who maintained the subject of the Incarnation to be the non-human or immanent Logos, would have been hard put to identify the Eucharistic presence with Jesus the High Priest, the agent of our salvation. He perceived the error of the Nestorian diophysism, but was blind to same error, inherent in his own monophysism. His affirmation of the Theotokos was the product of his faith in Jesus the Lord. It could not be sustained by what had been his own Christology prior to 428, when he encountered the Eucharistic heresy inherent in Nestorius’ diophysism.
The same reversal of liturgical priorities by which the theological focus was upon the Victim of the One Sacrifice rather than upon Jesus’ High Priestly offering of himself as the Victim of his One Sacrifice could not but endanger the theological recognition of the event-character, the Eucharistic Offering, of the One Sacrifice in persona Christi,, and thus of its historicity, a consequence aided by a diophysite predilection for Aristotelian analyses among the Antiochenes in fifth century and by the Thomism dominant in Western theology from the High Middle Ages. However, this mistake cannot be attributed to the Conciliar Fathers at Trent, who taught doctrine, not theology.[146]
The supposed priority of the Real Presence over the Sacrifice of the Mass finds no support in respective Tridentine Canons on the Real Presence and on the Sacrifice of the Mass.[147] Despite the eleven years separating the treatment in the Council’s XIIIe Session on the Real Presence from the treatment in Council’s XXIIe Session on the Sacrifice of the Mass, Canon 2 of the latter Session, “Sacrificium visibile esse propitiatorium pro vivis et defunctis” affirmed the historical unity of the Sacrifice on the cross with the Eucharistic Sacrifice, defining these to differ only in the mode of offering, as between cruente and incruente: bloody and not bloody: they do not differ as events. In the Eucharistic celebration, there is One Sacrifice, one Event, one dynamic Event-Presence, and these coincide.[148]
Betz, to the contrary, citing John Chrysostom, that the liturgical actualization of the Eucharist is the anamnesis of the sacrificial death of Jesus on the cross. Of itself, this contention raises no problem: the Mass is at once memorial, sacrifice, thanksgiving and celebration. Jesus’ command to the Apostles, “Do this in memory of me” cannot but be decisive. However, the Catholic tradition identifies that anamnesis with the historical Event, the objective Eucharistic representation, of the One Sacrifice, with which the anamnesis coincides and is identified. To say so much is clearly to reject outright the authenticity of the “historical criticism” brought to bear upon the Eucharist by contemporary Catholic liturgical scholarship, much of it relying upon Betz’ assessment of the Antiochene tradition prior to the Council of Ephesus.
The intrinsically free intelligibility of history is the common doctrine of the historical Church. History is thus free only as Eucharistically ordered, as given its free unity, by the immanence within it of the Event of the One Sacrifice by which all creation, including its temporality, is redeemed. There is no other freedom in the fallen world than this, as the pagan traditions knew, and as the Protestant rejection of the Eucharistic sacrifice was forced to rediscover: the soteriological flight from history is a cosmological constant which has no place in the Catholic tradition, and none in Catholic theology.
Personal existence in the Eucharistic reality of historical freedom is achieved by baptism into the freedom of the Church’s Eucharistic worship: personal participation in that worship is personal entry into salvific historicity, and thus into the covenantal fidelity that is our sacramental imaging of God. By entry into that worship in truth of Truth, the sinner is able to recognize, whether immediately or over time, at once his alienation from the Truth he worships, and his desire for it: he discovers himself to be riven by two loves, to be at once justified by Christ, freed by Christ, drawn by the beauty that is the freedom of truth, and yet tempted continually by the infidelity, the degradation, that is his fallen solidarity with the first Adam, by his graced solidarity with the second Adam, enabled to resist that innate temptation in the here and the now of his existence in ecclesia. Only in that worship can he come to know himself, only there does his own condition of radical indigence become apparent to him, and only there is its remedy made known to him: participation in the Eucharistic celebration of the new creation, the New Covenant, the One Flesh of the risen Lord and his bridal Church.
This personal appropriation of the freedom of salvation history, of free and responsible existence in ecclesia, has its concretely historical foundation in the Eucharistic representation of the One Sacrifice, the Event by which Jesus is the beginning and the end, the Alpha and the Omega of history as fallen in the first Adam and redeemed in Jesus Christ, the second Adam. The Church thus viewed history as the liturgically-sustained realm of free and hence of moral existence in ecclesia, in Christo from her first century. The recognition that history possesses an intrinsic salvific significance, entailing a personal moral responsibility, a fidelity, to a covenant with God, first appears in the Pentateuch; there also appears, in Genesis, the reality of original sin as the degradation of the good creation, but not its utter condemnation: Gen. 3:15 witnesses to the ancient Hebrew conviction of the permanent love of the Lord for his chosen people. The Church’s faith that Jesus is the Lord, the Christ, is intelligible only as fulfilling the historical Jewish tradition of hope and faith in a salvation achieved only by the Lord.
During the latter half of the twentieth century, the Enlightenment version of history became normative in the Catholic academy, by way of the academic excommunication of those who dissent from its secular orthodoxies. This notion of history as intrinsically secular, devoid of any intrinsic significance and, a fortiori, of the intrinsically salvific significance defended by Augustine’s City of God and written into the legal codes of the Western civilization thereafter, reached its classic if not final expression in the publication of Voltaire’s Essai sur les moeurs in 1756. There Voltaire challenged the intrinsic significance, the legitimacy, of historical institutions as such by accounting for their reality much as Darwin was to do a century later: they were the product of “natural causes,“ reductively, to mere chance: Darwin’s dogmatic evolutionism would have served his purpose well. Voltaire focused his critique upon the historical institutions of the time, and particularly those of the Catholic Church, as the Renaissance humanists had done before him. His anti-Catholic invective, summed up in “Écrasez l’infame,” still informs the contemporary secularism, as illustrated by the European Council’s drive to establish, contra the policies of the Catholic nations of the European Union, a universal right to abortion.
It is evident that the secular reading of history as meaningless can have no historical foundation. Consequently, as with any ideology, its standing is merely that of an axiom, an ens rationis, as freely to be denied as affirmed. It can be denied, as here, on religious and consequently historical grounds: similarly, it can be affirmed as the corollary of a secular faith, finally a nihilism whose only historical expression is a foredoomed struggle for the power by which an arbitrary unity may be imposed ab extra upon an intrinsically fractured, fungible and meaningless temporality. The fascination this historicism has for scholars lies in its capacity rationally to disintegrate everything it addresses in order to create from shards a more satisfactory reality: the utopianism of the secular academy is the obverse, the counterpart, of its nihilism.
Those who have internalized this axiomatic historicism as “historical consciousness,” thus as intuitively clear and beyond discussion, may then proceed to its apply its a priori determinism to the free historical objectivity of the Eucharistic liturgical tradition, with the fore-ordained conclusion that the tradition is irrational insofar as its freedom is irreducible to the logical necessity which the historical consciousness identifies with causal necessity, with the correlative denial of any intrinsically free intelligibility in history. This consequence is inescapable, however unaware of that are its ‘historically conscious’ adepts.
Inasmuch as the Gödel’s incompleteness theorems have some time since eliminated the possibility of a rational comprehension without remainder of any non-trivial historical reality, the axiomatic quest for the immanently necessary unity of history is foreclosed, for it has none. The only unity history has is free; it has its sole foundation in the institution of the One Flesh, the New Covenant, by the One Sacrifice. In dismissing that intrinsically free unity as impossible, Enlightened historical scholarship proceeds to disintegrate all intrinsically free historical structure, thereby endorsing the classic pagan soteriology, the flight from the irrationality of history. We have been here before. It is more than curious that the academic adepts of this historical criticism have remained so long so blind to its impact upon their own endeavors which, as historical, cannot be supposed to possess intrinsic significance, as their authors cannot. If it be granted that the historicist axiom is intuitively clear and consequently indiscussible, it is thereby rendered indefensible as well. The lever sought by Archimides is always unavailable: to affirm a stance outside of and transcending history is to affirm the absurd.
Betz’ version of the Eucharistic anamnesis as Aktualpräsenz supposes it to be the liturgical memory of the whole sweep of Heilsgeschichte, centered indeed upon the history of Jesus from his Incarnation to his Ascension, but with no recognition that this history possesses salvific significance only by reason of the Eucharistic immanence within it of Jesus precisely as the High Priest offering the One Sacrifice, apart from whose Eucharistic immanence in history as its head, as the Lord of history, history remains irremediably fallen, lacking free unity and consequently all unity whatsoever: it is only as the Eucharistic Lord that Christ is immanent in history as its Lord, the Beginning and the End.
Nonetheless, Catholic historians have learned, have even been forced by a consciousness (here labeled ‘sarkic’ because it seeks to normalize the fallen condition of all humanity (sarx) as an immanent necessity) to accept sarkic disintegration of history as prerequisite to their discipline. By implication, the secularized historian has the task of rendering his subject intelligible by imposing upon its fragmentation, its radical discontinuity, a rationally justifiable unity, which is to say, one which will pass editorial scrutiny. The criteria for this approval can only be political for, with the quest for the intrinsic truth, the free significance, of historical events methodologically foreclosed, it is impossible to be interested in them: only the quest for power over them remains. It is not a pretty sight.
Betz’ examination of the liturgical tradition is of this sort: he seeks to correct it by a procedure which dehistoricizes it by eliminating the Event, the Eucharistic Sacrifice, by which alone it is historically objective and intelligible. This tactic immediately raises the cosmological quandary of ‘the one and the many:’ it imposes upon the theologian the task of providing an a priori account of the unity of his subject, which unity can only be extrinsically imposed as a plausible re-assembly of the disparate fragments discovered by his historical research. Thus we find the exponents of the classic Christologies struggling in vain to account for the immanence of a dehistoricized Logos in the human Person of Jesus the Lord; similarly, Betz and those like him are unable to account for the historicity of the Sacrifice of the Mass: the defined doctrine that it is offered in the Person of Jesus the Lord flies in the face of the classic Thomist Christology’s refusal of the Personal unity of Jesus the Lord as defined at Chalcedon. The Eucharistic corollary of that cosmological Christology is a refusal to accept the historicity of the Sacrifice of the Mass. It is held to be offered not by Jesus but by the abstract, nonhistorical Logos, the agent of our redemption according to the Thomist Christology, who does not act in history.[149] When this subjective scenario replaces the objective Offering of the Sacrifice of the Mass, those who accept it have left the historical Church by their denial of the historicity her worship.
In despite of such vagaries, the oral liturgical tradition of the Eucharistic recitation of the Words of Institution is decisive of this point: at the Last Supper, Jesus told the Apostles, “Do this in memory of me.” He did not tell them, “Remember this of me.” The Catholic Eucharistic anamnesis centers upon the Event of the High Priest’s Offering of himself as the Victim of the One Sacrifice, the sacramental institution of the One Flesh, as Eucharistically represented by a bishop or a priest who by ordination stands within the Apostolic Succession to the authority to offer it in the Person of the Lord Jesus the Lord, whose Sacrifice it is.. Apart from the historical immanence of the Eucharistic Lord of history the anamnesis would have no Heilsgeschichte to remember. The Apostles’ fragmentary recollection of the past would be subject to the dynamic of disintegration attending all that is flesh. As it is, the books constituting the New Testament have the intrinsically free unity of the Eucharistic anamnesis of the Offering of the One Sacrifice which is their source and their sole authentic exegesis. Enlightened exegetes find this confidence in the free unity of Scripture unintelligible, but have been unable to propose a substitute. The notion of ‘narrative,’ the ex parte reintegration of the biblical text fragmented by historical criticism, is the unpersuasive product of a finally arbitrary project.
As has been noted, Johannes Betz’ Aktualpräsenz theology relies particularly upon the Fathers within the Antiochene tradition as represented by John Chrysostom, whose faith in the Lordship of Jesus the Christ sustained their insistence upon his full humanity, an emphasis which, pursued in the context of the cosmological presuppositions then dominating theology, could not avoid the diophysite expression that issued in the Nestorian heresy. However, the Antiochene stress upon the full humanity of the Christ was expressly vindicated at the Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon; the latter Council made its own the doctrine of Irenaeus who at the end of the second century taught that Jesus is “one and the same Son,” of the Father from eternity, and of the Virgin Theotokos in our fallen history. This is simply the apostolic tradition, whose ‘Spirit’ Christology upheld the full divinity, the full humanity and the full unity of Jesus the Christ, quite as had Tertullian more than a century before its proclamation at Nicaea.
Eustathius, the Bishop of Antioch, one of the most important cities in the Greek Orient, was brought to that see from Beroea by the anti-Arian advisor of Constantine, Ossius of Cordova, because of Eustathius’ stalwart opposition to the burgeoning Arian heresy while the bishop of Beroea. A senior member of the cluster of conservative bishops who defeated the allies of Arius at the Council of Nicaea, he may have been the first to perceive that the Nicene Creed’s assertion of the Personal consubstantiality of Jesus Christ the Lord with the Father requires that, as the Lord, Jesus be fully human as well as fully divine. It is in any case certain that he was the first to perceive that the condemned Arianism had denied the full humanity of Jesus, on the theory that the finite human soul is a principle of sin and consequently must be replaced in Jesus by the created by sinless Arian logos.
This conviction of the full, finally Personal humanity of Jesus identifies the Antiochene tradition. Its stress upon the humanity of Christ, which as complete must be free, has a radically liturgical, i.e., apostolic foundation, the Naming of Jesus the Lord. Its rationalization began in the mid-fourth century with Diodore and John Chrysostom. Its systematic dehistoricization by Theodore of Mopsuestia and his disciple, Nestorius, could only betray that apostolic recognition of Jesus Personal humanity, the corollary of his Naming by the apostles. The Antiochene Christological speculation, in the line from Diodore, Chrysostom, Theodore of Mopsuestia, Nestorius and finally, to Theodoret of Cyr, had been unable to provide a coherent account of the unity of the full humanity and the full divinity of the one Lord Jesus, largely because the distinction between a concrete human substance and a concrete human person, although asserted by Tertullian (duae substantiae, una Persona), was unknown to the Greek tradition apart from Origen, who was little understood until, a year before the Council of Antioch, Athanasius of Alexandria’s Tome to the Antiochenes validated the distinction, long since set out in Origen’s Peri Archon, between ousia (substance) and hypostasis (subsistence).
The speculative puzzlement arising out of the Antiochene emphasis upon the full humanity of Jesus always presented a temptation to deny the Personal unity in Jesus the Christ of Personal fullness of divinity and the Personal fullness of humanity. Origen’s affirmation of their historical Event-synthesis in the primordial Henōsis who is Named Jesus the Lord, had been lost to sight under the influence of the doctrinaire subordinationism of Eusebius of Caesarea, the greatest scholar in the Orient and supposedly the authoritative interpreter of Origen. Eusebius’ subordinationism entailed a denial of the divinity of Jesus. He did not think clearly enough to be an Arian, but from Council of Nicaea until his death he was a close ally of their leader, his namesake of Nicomedia, and provided the Oriental bishops with a cosmological rationale for their political rejection of the Nicene Creed. Diodore accepted this rationale, whose rejection of the Creed required the displacement of Jesus by the pre-human Logos as the subject of the Incarnation. The impossibility of any relation of the Logos thus conceived to the economy of salvation dominated Christian theology from the middle of the fourth century. The consequent ignorance of the apostolic-liturgical foundation of their stress upon the humanity of Christ amounted to a relapse by the Antiochene theologians into a cosmological denial of the communication of divine and human idioms (Names) in Jesus Christ the Lord.
We have seen that it is on this account that the apostate Emperor Julian charged Diodore’s diophysite Christology with proposing a “two sons” doctrine. A century earlier, Dionysius of Alexandria, by reason of a similar confusion, was accused of making the Lord to be a creature, a man. The theologians of the Alexandrine tradition made this their standard objection to the diophysite Antiochene Christology. From the latter fourth century Alexandrine theologians were comparably tempted by Apollinarius’ monophysite melding of the humanity and divinity of Christ into a single nature, at once divine and human, understood as a single subject, by giving the eternal divine Logos the role of the Stoic hegemonikon, or governing principle, of Jesus.
This monophysite error, although condemned by the First Council of Constantinople, was inherent in Cyril of Alexandria’s Christology; he insisted upon identifying the non-historical, non-human Logos as the subject of the thereby impossible Incarnation. This emphasis upon the Logos as the subject of the Incarnation imperilled the function and thus the reality of the human soul of Jesus― as the Antiochenes were not slow to point out.
Both the monophysites and the diophysites identified the fully human, i.e., ensouled, human nature with a concrete human person; both refused to accept its evident implication, the Personal unity of the “one and the same Son,” which Irenaeus was the first clearly to affirm at the close of the second century, and which Chalcedon would eight times affirm in the middle of the fifth century.
Jesus the Christ’s human consubstantiality with us is implicit in the Personal consubstantiality of the Father with the Son as defined at Nicaea. The Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon, in affirming the consubstantiality of the Son with us, only stated its corollary, the indispensable and indefeasible doctrine of the full humanity as well as the full divinity of Jesus the Lord. What the Nicene Creed taught of him is taught of his Person, at once human and divine. Thus his divine consubstantiality with the Father must entail his consubstantiality with his mother, the Theotokos and, consequently, with us. The Council of Nicaea, like every Council since, was called to defend the faith that Jesus Christ is Lord. Its affirmations are liturgical, not theological. They transcend theology as the faith transcends the questioning, the quaerens intellectum , which proceed from it. In affirming the Personal consubstantiality (homoousios) of the Son with the Father, the Council of Nicaea laid the foundation for the affirmation of his consubstantiality with us by the Ephesian Formula of Union, and two decades later by the Symbol of Chalcedon. The very Name, Jesus the Lord, denotes his subsistence in the human substance quite as it does his subsistence in the Trinity. As has been seen, this recognition of his Personal humanity, rooted in the apostolic tradition, is much resisted, for it overthrows the time-honored Aristotelian-Thomist identification of the human substance with the human person, together with its implication, disintegration of the historical unity of humanity into a population of human monads, each substantially distinct from the others, and consequently incapable of communication with them.
Adhering to the Thomist tradition, Bernard Lonergan and Louis Bouyer insist upon this notion of human intellectual substance. Despite its creation in Christ and in the image of the Trinity, the human substance, in their Thomist view, is thus monadic as to permit no consubstantiality of Jesus the Lord “with us.” : Greek Orthodox theology, insofar as represented by John Meyendorff, agrees.[150]
It is finally impossible for a bishop or priest, whether within the Antiochene tradition or the Alexandrine, entirely to separate his homiletics from his theology. As the latter is more firmly held, it tends to intrude upon the realm of doctrine, perhaps subtly at first but, in the end, factually. The Antiochene and the Alexandrine theological traditions both accepted as foundational the impossible problem of relating the supposedly nonhistorical divine Logos to “flesh,” which both traditions understood abstractly as human nature: both theologies of course failed, and the more doctrinaire proponents of each tradition began to permit their theological predilections to govern the content of their preaching.
Johannes Betz relies heavily upon St. John Chrysostom’s homilies for support of his notion of a Eucharistic anamnesis which, as Aktualpräsenz, bears upon the whole Heilsgeschichte rather than upon the unique Event that is the source of its free intelligible unity, the Eucharistic immanence in fallen history of Jesus the Lord.
Some of St. John Chrysostom’s Christological expressions are clearly diophysite, to the point of threatening the unity of the Christ:
These words do not signify the agony alone, but also the two wills that are in opposition to each other, one (will) of the Son and one of the Father. This is made clear when He says, “Not as I will, but as You will” (Mt. 26:39). But they (the Alexandrine theologians) never admit this, and are always quoting us as saying, “I and the Father are one (Jn. 10:30). They assert that what was said about the power was said about the will; and they say that Father and Son have but one will. If then there is but one will of Father and Son, how is it that He says, “Only not as I will, but as You will?” Were this saying to be attributed to the Divinity it would result in a certain contradiction and it would give birth to numerous absurdities. But if it is attributed to the flesh, the words will have such consistency that no complaint will be possible.
St. John Chrysostom, Homilies against the anomoians and on the consubstantiality of the Father and the Son, 7, 2, 6; tr. W. A. Jurgens, Early Fathers ii, §1133, at 95.
The diophysite resolution of the dilemma Chrysostom here poses arises out of his failure, and not only his, to recognize that the Personal consubstantiality of the Father and the Son, defined at Nicaea, and the consequent consubstantiality of the Spirit, recognized after I Constantinople to be implicit in that Council’s proclamation of theSpirit’s divinity, require that the single substantial will of the One God, the Trinity, be possessed fully, and uniquely, i.e., relationally, irreducibly, Personally and freely, by each of the consubstantial Trinitarian Persons, the Father, the Son, and the HolySpirit, in whose ordered Trinitarian unity there is no hierarchical subordination: each Person possesses the fullness of divinity. The Personal freedom of the one and the same Son is revealed in his free obedience to his Mission from the Father, and that of the Spirit is revealed by his free obedience to his irreducibly distinct Mission from the Father through the Son.
The uncritical and finally cosmological supposition that the divine transcendence of history must be by way of remoteness from history, underlies both the Nestorian and the Monophysite heresies, both of which entail a rejection of the communication of idioms, the former by denying the historical immanence of the Son, the latter by accepting the Son’s historicity but in terms of his submission to the immanent necessities of physis. In neither case is Jesus Christ the Lord of history.
Chrysostom, no heretic, links his diophysite Christology to an inadequate understanding of the homoousion of the Son with the Father as defined at Nicaea. He does not understand that the divinity of the Son, i.e., his homoousion with the Father, is Personal: summarily, Chrysostom does not understand that Jesus is not consubstantial with the divine Substance, i.e., with the Trinity, but rather is consubstantial with the Father and with the Spirit in the dynamic unity of their free Trinitarian perichoresis.
The Council of Ephesus, in declaring Mary to be the historical mother of the Jesus the Lord, and thereby to be the Theotokos, rejected the Antiochene error and provided its concrete doctrinal correction. The human Son of Mary, bearing the human Name of Jesus given him by the Angel of the Annunciation, is God. The full implication of the definition of Mary as Theotokos would be set out in the Ephesian-Chalcedonian doctrine of the double consubstantiality of Jesus the Lord, who subsists as the one and the same Son, therefore Personally, in the free unity that is the divine Substance, the Trinity, and thereby is consubstantial with the divine Persons of the Father and the Spirit, and subsists also, as the same one Son, in the free unity of the human substance, and thereby is consubstantial with all human persons. As the one and the same Son, his subsistence is single, that of his Person, in whom Personal divinity and Personal humanity subsist Personally without diminishing their irreducibility.
The Antiochene tendency to dissociate the “flesh” of the Logos from his Person, which may have found support in Origen’s intimation―for it was no more―of a mediante anima Christology, would be foreclosed by the condemnation of Nestorius at the Council of Ephesus, and by the vindication there of Mary’s right to the title of Theotokos as spelled out three years later in the definitive Formula of Union. Twenty years after Ephesus, the Chalcedonian Symbol emphatically reaffirmed the Church’s faith that Jesus is the Lord, already explicit in the Ephesian ascription of the Theotokos to Mary, and the correlative affirmation of her Son’s consubstanthiality with the human persons for whom he died. The Symbol of the Council of Chalcedon, by linking the doctrine of Ephesus to the assertion and the seven-fold repetition of Irenaeus’ doctrine of the Personal unity of “one and the same Son” of the Father and of our Lady, affirms thereby the Church’s faith that Jesus is the Lord.
St. John Chrysostom, writing a half-century earlier, also affirms the Personal unity of the Son, if only in obliquo:
In the Passion the Evangelists ascribe to Christ much that is human, thereby showing the reality of the Incarnation (τῆς οἰκονομίας). Matthew guarantees this by the agony and the confusion and the prespiration, John by sorrow. For if Christ had not been of our nature, He would not have been overpowered by grief, once and again a second time.
Ibid., Greek inserts and tr. from Jurgens, op. cit., II, §1167, at 108.
Christ says, “If anyone sees Me, he sees the Father (Jn. 14:9).” If He were of another essence (ἑτέρας οὑσίας) He would not say this. But if I may make use of an argument of the crasser sort, no one who is ignorant of gold is able to discover the essence (jύsiV) of gold in silver. For the nature (την οὑσίαν) of one thing is not manifest in another.
Ibid.; Greek inserts and tr. from Jurgens, op. cit. II, §1168, at 109.
St. John Chrysostom stands at a mid-point between the dropping of the Logos-sarx Christology by Diodore in the mid-fourth century, and the condemnation at the Council of Ephesus in 431 of Nestorius’ rationalization of the alternative Logos-anthrōpos polarity into a denial of the unity it was intended to defend. It is apparent in the passages quoted supra that Chrysostom held to the communication of idioms in Jesus the Christ. However, the basic expression of the communication of idioms is liturgical, which is to say, Eucharistic; Jesus’ Lordship is his sacrificial institution of the New Covenant as represented in the Mass. The diophysite Christology of the Antiochene tradition was not at ease with the communication of idioms, as the monophysite Christology of the Alexandrines was not, but both intended fidelity to the worship of the Church. So much may be said even of Nestorius and Eutyches who, in the passion of controversy, could lose sight of the mystery of Christ.
The Symbol of Chalcedon simply dismissed the quandary imposed by the Antiochene diophysism which Nestorius had been unable rationally to resolve, and dismissed as well the comparably irresoluble dilemma imposed by the late Alexandrine monophysism which had confused Cyril’s Christology, but not his faith in the Eucharistic Lord, whereby he saw what Nestorius had not seen, that a diophysite Eucharist is impossible.
Chalcedon affirmed, contra both of the competing theological schools, that Jesus the Lord’s transcendence of history, as its Lord, is “one and the same” with his free immanence in it: viz., with his concretely human historicity, the Son of Man, the Son of Mary. whose post-Ascension historical concreteness is sacramental, i.e., his Eucharistic Lordship of history. Chalcedon taught, in short, that Jesus the Christ, the Lord, is Lord by his homoousion with the Father and “with us.“ It must be kept in view that Chalcedon was concerned for the historical Jesus the Christ, whose historicity then as now is Risen: his Eucharistic immanence in history as its Lord.
The foundation of the salvific transcendence of history by the Son who is its Eucharistic Lord can only be the fulfillment of his Mission, at once on the cross and in the Eucharistic Sacrifice, the one Event of the institution of the One Flesh of the New Covenant. The Eucharistic transcendence of history per modum substantiae is the Lordly immanence of the risen Jesus the Christ in fallen time and space, not subject to its immanent dynamism of disintegration, but recapitulating it precisely as the Caput, the Head, the Beginning and the End, victorious over sin and death, and thus the source of the free unity of the good creation, liberating our fallen time and space in signo, bestowing upon it the free, sacramental significance of salvation, the One Flesh of the New Creation, of the Kingdom of God.
However, prior to the Council of Ephesus the Antiochenes appear not always to have been of this view. In our time, Johannes Betz’ Aktualpräsenz Eucharistic doctrine is comparably diophysite. Relying upon Chrysostom’s having succumbed to the temptation of a proto-Nestorian separation of the supposedly non-historical Logos from the historical Jesus with whom the Logos is no longer Personally to be identified, Betz’ Aktualpräsenz reading of the Eucharistic anamnesis is unconcerned for the Eucharistic Sacrifice of Jesus the High Priest, arguing that the Arian heresy’s displacement of the human soul of Christ by a less than divine logos has somehow made the traditional emphasis upon Jesus’ offering of his One Sacrifice an embarrassment to St. John Chrysostom. Betz’ reading of the Greek patristic tradition as represented by Chrysostom is set out in a definitive passage, here excerpted from the Schlusswort or conclusion of Betz’ first volume:
Denn als Arius die frühalexandrinische αρχιερεùς λóγος-Ιdee zur Begründung seiner häretischen Christologie benützte, verlegt man Jesu Hohepriestertum in das Erlösungwerk des Menschen Jesus. Als dann gar die jetzige und erneute himmlische Hohepriestertätigkeit Jesu von Johannes Chrystostomus geleugnet wurd, schob sich die vergegenwärtigende Anamnesis des geschichtlichen Heilswerkes von selbst in den Vordergrund.
Mit Anamnesis ist die Zentralidee gennant, die das Wesen Abendmahls am genauesten trifft. Jesus selbst hatte in seinem Stiftungswort sein Sakrament unter diesen Begriff gestellt, die griechischen Theologen haben im Anschluss daran ihre Eucharistielehre gestaltet
Betz., Eucharistie I, at 344.
In short, Betz has grounded his Aktualpräsenz doctrine in the postulate that Jesus’ Hohepriestertätigkeit, his Offering of the One Sacrifice, is not the object of the Anamnesis as understood by St. John Chrysostom, and does not enter into the Eucharistic worship. In Betz’ view, Jesus, as the divine High Priest, is risen, and is not here. He is not the object of the Eucharistic anamnesis, which is historical. “Do this in memory of me” consequently refers only to Jesus as the victim of the One Sacrifice, but not Jesus the Lord, not Jesus the High Priest, who offered himself on the altar and on the cross in the One Sacrifice for our redemption and who, as risen, intercedes for us as the High Priest.
Betz’ interpretation of Chrysostom’s theology of the Eucharist is clearly diophysite. Whether it can be reconciled with J. N. D. Kelly’s summation of Chrysostom’s homiletics on the Eucharistic sacrifice is discussible:
Chrysostom develops Cyril’s (of Jerusalem) teaching, referring4 to “the holy and most awesome sacrifice’ (τὴν φρικωδεστάτην . . .θυσίαν) and to the Lord sacrificed and lying there, and the priest bending over the sacrifice and interceding’.5 He makes the important point6 that the sacrifice now offered on the altar is identical with the one which the Lord himself offered at the Last Supper. He emphasizes this doctrine of the uniqueness of the sacrifice in commenting7 on the statement in Hebrews that Christ offered Himself once: ‘Do we not offer sacrifice daily? We do indeed, but as a memorial of His death, and this oblation is single, not manifold. But how can it be one and not many? Because it has been offered once and for all, as was the ancient sacrifice in the holy of holies. This is the figure of the ancient sacrifice, as indeed it is of this one, for it is the same Jesus Christ we offer always, not now one victim and later another. The victim is always the same, so the sacrifice is one. Are we going to say that, because Christ is offered in many places, that there are many Christs? Of course not. It is one and the same Christ everywhere; He is here in His entirety and there in His entirety, one unique body. Just as He is one body, not many bodies, although offered in many places, so the sacrifice is one and the same. Our high priest is the very same Christ who has offered the sacrifice which cleanses us. The victim Who was offered then, Who cannot be consumed, is the self-same victim we offer now. What we do is a memorial of what was done then. . . . We do not offer a different sacrifice, but always the same one, or rather we accomplish the memorial of it.’ Christ ‘offered sacrifice once for all, and thenceforth sat down’, and the whole action of the Eucharist takes place in the heavenly, spiritual sphere;1 the earthly celebration is a showing forth of it on the terrestrial plane.
4. De sacerdot. 6, 4.
5. Ib., 3, 4.
6. In 2 Tim., hom. 2, 4.
7. In Hebr. hom. 17, 3.
1.In Hebr. hom. 13, 1; 14, 1.
J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines [hereafter, Doctrines], 451-2 (emphasis added).
Underlying this aberrant Antiochene theology of the Eucharist is the supposition that the Eucharistic representation of the One Sacrifice could only be a repetition: “Christ ‘offered sacrifice once for all, and thenceforth sat down, and the whole action of the Eucharist takes place in the heavenly, spiritual sphere; the earthly celebration is a showing forth of it on the terrestrial plane.” The basis for this assumption is the unexamined cosmological postulate that the past is incapable of sacramental representation, by which supposition the entirety of the historical Catholic tradition―liturgical, doctrinal, moral―would be undercut, as the Reform has seen. Thus, the liturgical “showing forth” or anamnesis, of a nonhistorical, “heavenly” action cannot but be subjective, for the objective “action of the Eucharist takes place in the heavenly, spiritual sphere.”
All this is a sub-theological musing predicated upon Theodore of Mopsuestia’s Aristotelianizing of the Antiochene tradition; it has no place in the liturgical tradition, the concretely historical paradosis, whose most ancient statement is by Paul:
23 Έγὠ γὰρ παρέλαβον (άπὸ τοῦ κυρὶον), ὃ καὶ παρέδοκα ὐμῖν, ὅτι ὁ κύριος °Ἱησοῦσ ἐν τῇ νυκτί ᾖ παρεδίδοτο ἔλαβεν ἄρτον 24 καὶ εὐχαριστήσας ἔκλασεν καὶ εἶπεν. τοῦτό μού ἐστιν τὸ σῶμα τὸ ὑπὲρ ὑμῶν. τοῦτο ποιεῖτε εἰσ τὴν ἐμὴν άνάμνεσιν. 25 ὡσαύτως καὶ τὸ ποτήριον μετὰ τὸ δειπνῆσαι, λέγων. τοῦτο τὸ ποτήριον ἡ καινὴ διαθήκη ἐστὶν ἐν τῷ ἑμῷ αἴματι. τοῦτο ποιεῖτε, ὁσάκις ἐὰν πίνητε, ὁσάκις ἐὰν πίνητε, εἰς τὴν ἐμὴν άνάμνεσιν. 26 ὁσάκις γὰρ ἐὰν ἐσθίητε τὸν ἄρτον τοῦτον καὶ τὸ ποτήριον πίνητε, τὸν θάνατον τοῦ κύριου καταγγέλλετε, ἃχρι οὖ ἔλθῃ.
I Cor. 11: 23-26 ; Nestlé (2012), 540.
The Revised Standard Version reads this passage as follows:
For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it, and said “This is my body which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” In the same way also the cup, after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as oftern as you drink it, in remembrance of me.” For as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.
Inasmuch as the Eucharistic Sacrifice is the sacrament, the infallibly effective sign, of the One Sacrifice by which the one and the same Son achieved the goal of his Mission from the Father, viz., the restoration of our freedom to return to the Father through Jesus Christ our Lord, by reason of the Spirit he poured out upon his bridal Church and, through her, upon those for whom he died, there can be no objection to understanding the risen Lord’s stance at the right hand of the Father as “semper interpellans” precisely in the context of his obedience to his Mission. This is to say, he is “always interceding” as the Eucharistic Lord of history, in whose Person his One Sacrifice is daily offered in the Mass. Jesus’ redemptive Lordship of history is integral with the priestly offering of his One Sacrifice in his Name and Person. Were it not so offered, Jesus as risen would not be immanent in our fallen history, which would remain as the Reform has taught, i.e., intrinsically corrupt, possessing neither unity nor goodness nor intelligibility, for those are the gift of the head by reason of his Eucharistic immanence in history as its Lord, as the source of its free and sacramentally objective salvific meaning. This meaning is established Eucharistically by Jesus the Lord’s offering of the One Sacrifice, “The New Covenant in my blood.” Without the Eucharistic immanence of the Christ, history is without significance, without recourse, as every pagan soteriology has taken for granted, and is a matter of faith for the churches of the Reform..
The influence of the diophysite Christology upon Chrysostom’s Eucharistic theology is tangible in Kelly’s summation: the One Sacrifice was offered once and for all by the now risen and absent Lord, the Lord whose will as risen is not distinct from the will of the Father, in contrast to the human will of Jesus which, as human is distinct from the will of the Father. We see here that misreading of the Son’s homoousion with the Father, which understands it as substantial rather than as Personal, from which the inference of a dehumanization of the Logos by his Resurrection is difficult to avoid, as is the correlative de-divinization of the Eucharistic High Priest, Jesus the Lord. This view of the Resurrection as the dehistoricization of the Logos reflects the pagan cosmological conviction of the transcendence of the divine by the absence of the divine from the historical order. Thus, during the historical absence of the Logos, “We do not offer a different sacrifice, but always the same one, or rather we accomplish a memorial of it.” ‘The victim who was offered then . . . is the self-same victim we offer now’.
However, the “we offer now;” language of the latter excerpt supra is repeated elsewhere:
The oblation is the same even if some common person1 offer it, even if Paul offer it, even if Peter offer it. It is the same which Christ gave to His disciples, and which now the priests do. The latter oblation is not inferior to the former, because it is not men who sanctify it but the same [Christ] who sanctified the former. For just as the words which God spoke are the same as those which now the priest says, so to is the oblation the same, and the Baptism, as that which he gave.
This too therefore is His Body, as well as that. Anyone who thinks that the one is inferior to the other does not know that Christ is present even now and that even now he is working.
1.It is clear a few words further on that Chrysostom has no thought of the sacrifice being offered by anyone who is not a priest. His common person or chance individual is simply the ordinary unlauded parish priest. Such a priest’s Mass is the same as that of St. Peter or St. Paul, and indeed, the same as that of Christ himself, for Christ is the high priest of every Mass.
John Chrysostom, In 2 Tim,, hom. 2, 4; tr. and note by Jurgens, Early Fathers II §1207, at 122-23.
This language makes it quite clear, as Msgr. Jurgens has noted, that Chrysostom identifies the Eucharistic sacrifice with the One Sacrifice offered by the Christ at the Last Supper and on the cross. Jesus is the one High Priest, he is the one Victim, of the One Sacrifice. Chrysostom’s anamnesis is of that One Sacrifice. His faith, as it finds expression in this Eucharistic homily, is not diophysite: its spontaneous expression is entirely in conformity with the ancient worship of the ancient Church. At bottom, it is the Eucharistic theology he learned from Theodore that fails, not his faith.
Chrysostom understands the risen Christ as “semper interpellans” at the right hand of the Father. The question may then arise as to whether on the one hand he understands the High Priest’s absence from history as a local absence somewhat in the manner of Augustine, and thus as entirely consistent with what Augustine terms a “spiritual” presence, an objective event-presence that is given with the bread and the wine becoming, vi verborum, his body and his blood or, on the other hand, does Chrysostom understand the Eucharistic presence as Nestorius will, viz., as merely that of the man Jesus, sensu negante, the merely human victim of the one Sacrifice who has become personally distinct from the now-risen High Priest who offered it once and for all? The question has been answered with full clarity in the passage quoted supra. It is evident that the response to this question is conclusive of Chrysostom’s understanding of the office of the priest-celebrant: he offers the one and the same Sacrifice in the person and with the authority of the risen Christ?
Chrysostom understands the anamnesis to be single because of the single victim of the One Sacrifice, the Christ. While the repeated “we offer” in J. N. D. Kelly’s summary of Chrysostom’s Eucharistic doctrine is ambiguous, as open to an anamnesis by one not ordained as to one offered by an priest ordained to that office, there is no evident place in the Betz’ Aktualpräsenz interpretation of Chrysostom’s Eucharistic doctrine for a priest who would offer the One Sacrifice in the Person of the High Priest, for in that reading the One Sacrifice is only memorialized, not offered in the terrestrial order of historical Eucharistic worship―which is to say, objectively and historically. Betz’ inference finds further corroboration in J. N. D. Kelly’s commentary on St. John Chrysostom’s younger friend, Theodore of Mopsuestia, who had studied under Chrysostom, and who became Nestorius’ theologian:
Theodore taught that the sacrifice of the new covenant was a memorial of the one true oblation, an image or representation of the eternal liturgy which is celebrated in heaven, where Christ, our high-priest and intercessor, now fulfills His ministry.
J. N. D. Kelly, Doctrines, at 152, citing Hom. Cat. 15, 15 f.
This is very much Betz’s interpretation of Chrysostom’s Eucharistic doctrine. Theodore, Chrysostom’s contemporary, would have handed it on to Nestorius who, as Archbishop of Constantinople, taught an emphatically diophysite Christology, to the point of persecuting those of his subordinate clergy who in their homilies referred to Mary as the Theotokos. The Eucharistic implication of this Christology drew the attention of Cyril of Alexandria and led to its condemnation at the Council of Ephesus. It should be noted that Theodore of Mopsuestia identified of the Father with the divine Substance, and consequently was a Trinitarian modalist as well as a Christological diophysite. These errors appear to have been induced by Theodore’s systematic deployment of the Aristotelian monism associated with the literalist exegesis of the Antiochene tradition. However, Theodore lived and died in communion with the Church, his death occurring in 328, three years before the Council of Ephesus, five years before Cyril’s Laetentur Coeli and the Formula of Union.
There is little trace of Aristotle in Chrysostom’s thought: his interest in systematic issues was negligible. As the official homilist for a dozen years in Antioch, and then as the Archbishop of Constantinople for another half dozen, he taught the faith, not theology. It is by his preaching that he is one of the great Doctors of the Church. Among his many and eminent virtues, perhaps not the least is his perhaps prescient disinterest in the systematics of his time. While his acceptance of Theodore’s Eucharistic theology, with its implicit dehistoricization of the Eucharistic sacrifice, cannot be ignored, the celebration of the Mass as Chrysostom understood it requires ordination to the sacrificial priesthood: in the absence of the Eucharistic offering of the One Sacrifice the priest’s recitation of the words of consecration amount to no more than the expression of a subjective anamnesis, i.e., of the faith of the congregation who memorializes the Sacrifice on the cross. We have seen that St. John Chrysostom did not thus view the priestly offering of the Mass. Apart from the enthusiastic reception of his work by the contemporary liturgists, there is no reason to suppose that Johannes Betz does either, but the inference of a nonhistorical symbolism from his Aktualpräsenz doctrine is immediate nonetheless. The loss of the Eucharistic communication of idioms in Jesus the Lord would make him to be no longer the Lord.
Betz has imposed a systematic clarity upon Chrysostom’s understanding of the Eucharist that can only distort it: Chrysostom was not a systematist, and the imposition upon him of the implications of his understanding of the Eucharistic anamnesis is an anachronistic enterprise. Were the Antiochene anamnesis as preached by Chrysostom reducible to Betz’ Aktualpräsenz, it would be rather cosmic than historical, for it would presuppose the existence of a salvation history without a unifying event distinct from its creation, which can be a creation in Christ only if the Christ is the Jesus who is the Lord, the Head, at once its Beginning and its End, thus transcendent to history precisely by his free Eucharistic immanence within it as its Redeemer, its Head, the source of its free and salvific unity.
The Aktualpräsenz of Jesus as the Victim, but not as the High Priest offering the One Sacrifice, is merely passive, and thus not an event; further, his presence as passive would then not be that of the Lord, the Head, and consequently could not be redemptive. Finally, the Eucharistic anamnesis of sacrifice of Jesus, thus understood as passive merely, cannot be that of the Lord of history, for as passive, Jesus is not the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End. Those titles belong to Jesus as the head of all creation, who stands revealed as it head upon the cross and at the altar in his High-Priestly offering to the Father of the One Sacrifice of his Body and his Blood. These offices, that of the High Priest and the Victim of the One Sacrifice, are inseparable in the historical realism of the Church’s Eucharistic worship. The interpretation of the Antiochene Eucharistic anamnesis as an Aktualpräsenz thus leaves the Mass without an Offering to be represented by the celebrant in persona Christi; thereby the infallible effect ex opere operato of the Eucharistic signing in the Catholic Mass is simply denied.
Betz’ emphasis upon the Mission of the Christ as terminating in creation is justified, but only within the context of the Son’s Mission to give the Holy Spirit, the Spiritus Creator, which Gift terminates in the sacramental objectivity of the Good Creation. That outpouring of the Spirit is achieved historically by the Eucharistic offering of the One Sacrifice, and not otherwise: given the defined unity of the Sacrifice of the Mass and the Sacrifice on the cross, the universal, i.e., creative impact of the Eucharistic celebration is inseparable from the Eucharistic sacrifice, as effect from cause. The alternative is the positing of a Mission of the Spirit independent of the historical Mission of the Son: this of course is Protestantism, a dehistoricization of the Eucharist whose consequence is a radical dehistoricization of the created order and a rejection of its inherent value and significance, which can only be free, and only gift. This disconnect between the Mission of the Son and the Mission of the Spirit is also implicit in the Orthodox disconnect between the eternal Trinity and the historical Missions: see the remarks of Cardinal Kasper quoted at 628, infra. Creation, as we learn from Paul, is creation in Christ, in the Beginning who is the Christ, Jesus the Lord.
The objectivity of creation, as the terminus of the Mission of Christ, is somewhat dilute in Betz’ statement:
Durch die Aktualpräesenz, die sie zum beherrschenden Motive ihrer Abendmahlslehre erhoben, rückten sie das entscheidende gottlich Tun and den Platz, der ihm gebührt; damit schufen sie eine wohltuende theozentrische und heilsgeschichtlich orientierte Eucharistieauffassung. Indem se auch das Geschen an den Elementen unter die Aktualpräsenz einbezogen und es als Inkarnationsanamnese faßten, erklãrten sie auch den Wandlungsvorgang mit einer erstlinig nicht der Physik oder Metaphysik entnommenen, sondern mit einer genuin theologischen Kategorie; denn die Aktualprãsenz ist eine heilsgeschichtliche Kategorie.
Betz. Eucharistie I‘, at 345-46.
Unfortunately, for the reasons here argued, the Aktualpräsenz is not the historical Event of the Offering of the One Sacrifice: consequently it cannot be labeled as Betz would have it, “eine heilsgeschichtliche Kategorie” for it is lacks precisely the public, historical objectivity, the Event of the Offering of the One Sacrifice, that is constitutive of the historical realism, the “Heilsgeschichtlichkeit,” of the Church’s worship. In short, the Aktualpräsenz cannot be identified with the Event of the High Priestly Offering of the One Sacrifice. It is not “die jetzige und erneute himmlische Hohepriestertätigkeit Jesu.” Betz’ rejection of Metaphysik may be a rejection of the cosmological metaphysics which von Balthasar has condemned for its imposition of immanent necessity upon the freedom of the economy of salvation: the correction of this mistake is long overdue in Catholic theology, but it not achieved by the rejection of the Eucharistic High Priesthood, and the One Sacrifice, of Jesus the Lord, without which there is no historical economy of salvation, for it is only by his Eucharistic immanence in history that history is salvific.
To refuse the historical objectivity, the Event-character, of the Eucharistic Sacrifice, which is not empirical, as proper to a Physik, but is precisely historical, precisely Heilsgeschichte, is to refuse the free liturgical integration of an otherwise disintegrating spatio-temporal cosmological sequence: it is to prefer the fallenness of the flesh to its redemption by the sacrificial institution of the Eucharistic One Flesh.
The alternative to the metaphysical reality of sacramental efficacy is the sacramental symbolism which the Reform has chosen in its rejection of the sacrifice of the Mass. This can hardly be what Betz has in view, for he condemns its supposed appearance in Augustine’s Eucharistic doctrine: nonetheless, because the Actualpräsenz is not the history-transcending, historically-immanent Event of the High-Priestly offering of the One Sacrifice, it is not the Eucharistic institution of the covenantal One Flesh of Christ and the Church, for this “actual presence” is thought of as a dynamism only, in a sense indistinguishable from the ‘dynamism’ of Christ’s gift of the Spirit in Baptism, a gift whose objectivity presuppose the objectivity of the Eucharistic representation of the One Sacrifice, by which alone that gift is given, poured out upon the bridal Church.
Inasmuch as Baptism effects no change, no “transubstantiation,” of the water, the efficacy of the Eucharistic Words of Institution, as thus analogized by Betz’ notion of an Aktualpräsenz to the efficacy of the Baptismal formula, can cause only a similarly transitory, “dynamic” Eucharistic “presence” of the Christ. This reduction of the efficacy of the Eucharistic signing to an epiclesis of the Spirit, which includes no representation of the One Sacrifice, does not permit the efficacious signing of the Event-Presence of Christ in the Eucharist as at once of the High Priest and the of Victim of his One Sacrifice: by this alone is the Spirit given, for his Mission is dependent upon Mission of the Son, as the Gift he was sent to give. The “Aktualpräsenz” doctrine on the other hand supposes the Spirit to be present and salvifically effective apart from the historically objective Eucharistic immanence of the Son―which is to reverse their Trinitarian ordo as set out in the Baptismal formula: “in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” We have pointed to the anti-sacramental impact of this reversal of the liturgical signing, whether by the theologians of the Reform, or those whose opposition to the Filioque has led them to dissociate the Missions of the Son and the Spirit from their eternal ground.
The formula of Baptism in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, is common to the Reform and to Orthodoxy, as it is to Catholicism. It recites the order of the Trinitarian Mission of the Son from the Father and of the Spirit from the Father through the Son, and thereby states the order of the Trinitarian perichoresis, viz., the eternal procession of the Son from the Father, and of the Spirit from the Father through the Son: otherwise there could be no return to the Father through the Son in the Spirit: we could not speak of the Personal distinction between the Son and the Spirit, the τάξις, the order of their Trinitarian Mission from the Father, and the Baptismal formula would be meaningless. The Baptismal formula is integral to the Church’s worship in truth: it is not theologically negotiable.
The generality of those who have understood the Eucharistic liturgy as efficacious in the fashion of the “Aktualpräsenz” theology have grounded it in the post-Resurrection meals of the risen Christ with his disciples. Joachim Jeremias has defended this view; it is indispensable to the Lutheran denial of the Sacrifice of the Mass. It supposes the Catholic Eucharistic liturgy and doctrine to be a departure from the original apostolic worship of the risen Lord who, as risen, is absent from the fallen world and from fallen history, and the Catholic Eucharistic realism therefore to be the product of a “fall of the Church,” a devolution of her nonhistorical worship into a corrupt Frühkatholizismus whose corruption is the sacramental realism, the historical efficacy, of Catholic liturgical worship. The critical examination of this supposed devolution has long been the preoccupation of Protestant exegesis, and now has been taken up by Catholic scholars laboring under the impression that the offering of the Sacrifice of the Mass in the Person of Christ is an ecumenical and consequently theological embarrassment. However, the symbolist rejection of sacramental realism has consequences all too evident in the continuing disintegration of the Protestant tradition. A purely eschatological Christianity is by definition indiscernible; its public expression bereft of sacramental realism and efficacy, can only be political.
As has been seen, the symbolist supposition that the Catholic Eucharist is a product of evolution has affected Catholic theology over the decades since the Second Vatican Council to the point of having informed both of the post-Conciliar editions of the Insititutio Generalis Missalis Romani, as well as a number of diocesan and archdiocesan Pastoral Letters. During the same period the European ventures in the “theology of future hope” were transformed into a “theology of politics” and then into a “liberation theology” which saw in the Marxist doctrine of class struggle a criterion for judging the authenticity of the mission of the Church. This was no novelty; one or another triumphalist humanism has undertaken that role since the second century, as Origen’s Contra Celsum testifies.[151]
There is no reason to suppose that Betz would approve a politicization of the Church’s worship, but his Aktualpräsenz doctrine is nonetheless quite open to it, by reason of its denial of what Trent has defined, the historical identity of the Eucharistic Sacrifice and the Sacrifice on the cross. This denial is ineluctably symbolist in its consequences, one of which is the need to account for the Eucharistic memorial as a product of a development, for it is severed by its historicity from its supposedly nonhistorical source, Jesus’ command to his disciples, “do this in memory of me,” as the conclusion of his High-Priestly Offering of his One Sacrifice at the Last Supper. This consequence has been accepted by Alexander Gerken and Robert J. Daly, S.,J., who have examined the Catholic Eucharistic liturgical tradition in quest of a prior cause of its freely instituted unity, but without success. Contemporary “historical consciousness” suffers from an inability to imagine historical reality as possessing a freely intelligible significance, and few of its adepts seem aware of the futility of seeking a necessary historical intelligibility. The impact of Gödel’s incompleteness theorems upon historical criticism as such is not much discussed by its professed practitioners.
Although the patristic sources upon which Betz relies for his Aktualpräsenz revision of the Eucharistic tradition predate the Council of Ephesus and so would include Augustine, he has chosen to concentrate upon the Greek rather than the Latin patristic tradition. He clearly does not associate the supposed orthodoxy of his Aktualpräsenz revision of the Eucharistic tradition with the symbolism he has thought to discover in Augustine. He criticizes Augustine’s Eucharistic doctrine as a departure from Eucharistic realism, hence as a symbolism, an approximation of the Reform’s reduction of Eucharistic realism to justification “by faith alone” which is to say, to subjectivity. Augustine’s “symbolism” would thus be a denial of the objective efficacy of the Eucharistic signing of the One Sacrifice, the Event by which we are redeemed. This dehistoricization of the Church’s Eucharistic worship, explicit in the rejection of the sacrifice of the Mass, would commit Augustine to the privatization of the Church’s sacramental worship as such, to its removal from all objective public expression. We have defended Augustine’s Eucharistic orthodoxy elsewhere and at length: here we would emphasize Betz’ rejection of the subjectivism which he thinks to have found in Augustine. Betz’ Eucharistic faith is not in issue: the discussion here concluded bears upon the errors in his Eucharistic theology.
The authentic Catholic faith is found in the historical Church’s continual oral tradition of teaching and Scripture as these overlap and reinforce each other in her liturgical worship. In this ecclesial tradition the primacy belongs to the liturgy, to the Eucharistic cause of the Church: see I Cor. 10:17, 11:23-26. Doctrine is necessarily secondary to liturgy, the Church’s sacramental worship in truth, whose efficacy is ex opere operato―God’s work, not man’s. [152]
The last two centuries of Church historical scholarship have proposed a variety of interconnected questions: What books are in Scripture? How are these determined? How are they interpreted? What is, in fact, the tradition to which they bear witness? To what extent are these books supplementary, to what extent are they independent of each other at the various periods of Church history? Finally, what doctrinal or magisterial authority is exercised by the Church and what is its ground? (one should be alert to the circularity which can easily enter into this question). Here, we are mainly concerned with question of relation of scripture and tradition, rather than with the canon and with exegesis, although these also fall within the purview of tradition.
Actively viewed, tradition is the handing over (tradere, παραδίδωμι), in the sense of an authoritative delivery of an unwritten doctrine Viewed passively, it is the doctrine thus handed down. Since it is the authoritative character of the delivery which has been emphasized from the beginning, the stress of the term has come to lie upon the origin of the body of Church doctrine as committed to the Church by Jesus through his Apostles, whether the doctrine be written or as unwritten. It must be understood that the foundational paradosis (παράδοσις) is liturgical, finally Eucharistic.
Generally, the specifically unwritten teaching came to be specified by another term, kerygma, although even the kerygma is known only as written, as is evident from the instances of it found in the apostolic preaching in Acts, and the summary statement in I Cor. 15:3b-8.
Contemporary Church historical scholarship has not developed the Eucharistic ground of this unwritten “handing over”; nonetheless, as we shall see, the “tradition” of the Catholic Church, unwritten, scriptural, and doctrinal, is explainable only as identical to the Church’s liturgy, committed to the Apostles by Christ at the Last Supper, and for that reason bearing apostolic authority.[153]
The reality of the tradition insofar as doctrinal (the teaching of Church at end of first century) also raises the problems of (a) the interrelation of ecclesial doctrine with the Scripture (the Old Testament and the emergent New Testament) and (b) the mediation of this doctrine by other means than Scripture alone. This mediation, which includes the Church’s preaching, is the tradition, paradosis, (παράδοσις). We have seen that the Latin verb, tradere, translates the Greek παραδίδωμι. In I Cor 11:23-26 Paul uses this verb three times. First, he uses it to designate the Eucharistic rite which previously had been handed on to him, probably at Syrian Antioch, and which he now hands on to the readers of his Letter. Secondly, Paul uses paradidomi to refer to Judas’ betrayal of our Lord: ἐν τῆ νυκτί παρεδίδοτο, by which phrase he also denotes the handing over of Jesus by his Father to his executioners: the Latin of Nestle’s edition[iii] makes this reference explicit in v. 24, where the Greek τὸ ὑπὲρ ὑμῶν (huper umon = for you) is rendered as quod pro vobis (tradetur). Hence, Paul uses forms of παραδίδωμι (paradidomi) rendered by the Latin tradere, to signify, not only this “handing over” of Jesus by the Father, as well as Jesus’ betrayal by Judas and generally by those for whom our Lord died, but also to name the liturgical ἀναάμνησις (anamnesis), the sacramental representation, of this One Sacrifice, the παράδοσις, paradosis or traditio (handing over) by the Father of Christ the Son, obedient unto death upon the cross for the redemption of the world. For Paul, these uses of ἀναάμνησις and παράδοσις refer to a single event: the Eucharistic παράδοσιος or Sacrifice, which is numerically identical with that One Sacrifice and which had its culmination on the Cross.[154]
This unity of the One Sacrifice, on the cross and on the altar, is affirmed in the Words of Institution, the Eucharistic paradosis uttered by the Christ at the Last Supper, “This is my Body, given for you; this is my Blood, poured out for you.” The truth of these Eucharistic Words of Institution is indistinguishable from the truth that Jesus is the Lord: the Church’s worship in truth is single, because it is Eucharistic, the representative anamnesis of the event of the cross.
Thus, for Paul, the “tradition,” the “handing over”, is basically liturgical, in a complex sense. At bottom, and concretely, that which is “handed over” as the “tradition” is the Eucharistic liturgy which represents sacramentally the unique historical deed in which Jesus, the Lord, is “handed over” by the Father to his executioners, and sacrifices himself in obedience to the Father, who sent him to give the Spirit by which all things are made new. The Eucharistic tradition, the Eucharistic liturgy, is the foundation, the constitutive source, of the Church’s worship in truth. From the outset, it has connoted and caused the preaching―originally apostolic―of the faith that the Eucharistic Jesus is the Lord.
This apostolic affirmation of Jesus’ Lordship, the central doctrine of the faith, itself centers upon and is sustained by the Eucharistic anamnesis, the liturgical memorial, of the historical Event of the One Sacrifice of Christ. For it must be recognized that the preaching of the apostles was not self-sustaining: the radical and nuclear expression of the apostolic memory of the Lord is the apostolic celebration of the Eucharistic anamnesis of the One Sacrifice of Christ, as anticipated in the many sacrifices of the Old Testament (cf. the Letter to the Hebrews), as fulfilled upon the cross, as instituted at the Last Supper by the one High Priest.
This anamnesis, this radically liturgical memory of the Lord, is elaborated in the apostolic preaching, and summarized in the books of the New Testament. It follows that the objective, historical truth of the New Testament, as of the apostolic preaching which preceded and normed its formulation, is grounded in the apostolic Eucharistic anamnesis, the objective historical Event of the Eucharistic representation of Christ’s One Sacrifice. For, in the Eucharistic anamnesis, the entire historical Truth that is the Christ is historically actual, historically immanent within and by the Church’s worship.[155]
The Eucharistic anamnesis is consequently the unshakable, infallible ground of the doctrinal elaboration of the faith, which affirms and guards the truth of that preaching, and like the preaching which grounds it proximately, is heard and understood only in the historical context of the Eucharistic liturgy from which everything in the Church takes its origin.[156]
The anamnesis is also the formally unifying cause of the Catholic Bible, and is the free, liturgical union of the Old Testament and the New. Later theology will see this relation of the Old and New Testaments in terms of the ordered unity of the Eucharistic liturgy, in which the Old Testament has the single significance of being the significant cause, the sacramentum tantum, of the New, and the New Testament itself as the res et sacramentum of the final effect, the res tantum of the Eucharist, the Kingdom of God.[157]
The Scripture and the liturgical-doctrinal-moral tradition are therefore mutually implicit, mutually indefectible, by reason of their Eucharistic ground and their consequent liturgical unity, which as Eucharistic is indissoluble. They are given together wherever the Gospel is preached and heard as an integrating element of the Church’s Eucharistic liturgy. It is for this reason that the Eucharistic liturgy is basic, radical, fundamental: all else in the Church depends upon it, as the documents of Vatican II have many times and in many places said.
The unity of the Eucharistic tradition is given, as has been seen, ex opere operato: it is not dependent upon the Church, but upon her institution by the Christ. This unity is the prius, the a priori datum, controlling any doctrinal elaboration of the mystery of the Eucharist such as took place at the Council of Trent, over a period of eighteen years. During this time, challenges from the Reformers, notably Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli, were met by solemn reaffirmations of the doctrines which these men had put in issue. These reaffirmations centered upon the Sacrifice of the Mass, which had been famously condemned by Luther at the outset of his reforming career as a fifteen-century-long “Babylonian captivity.” Integral to this condemnation is a rejection of the capacity of history to mediate the salvation worked by Christ, and a consequent reassessment of our personal historical existence itself, which was seen by Luther and the Reform generally to be no longer capable of morally significant actions.
It is perhaps idle to look for priority as between Luther’s conviction of the total corruption of historical existence, and of the impossibility of the priestly offering of the One Sacrifice in the person of Christ. It is enough to note that the Lutheran understanding of the Mass required its dehistoricization: no free, historical event could mediate the Real Presence of the risen Christ, whether it be named transubstantiation or sacrifice.[158] The Church was dehistoricized by the same principle: salvation or justification was by a faith itself dehistoricized, incapable of a publicly reliable utterance, whether doctrinal or sacramental. Sola scriptura replaced the doctrinal tradition.
Calvin and Zwingli accepted the Lutheran condemnation of the Sacrifice of the Mass, and carried its dehistoricizing logic further than had Luther. We cannot and need not here enter into the complexities of their interpretations of the Reform. It suffices that they agreed and still agree upon a rejection of the sacramental mediation of salvation by free historical events, i.e., by the sacramental symbols of Catholic worship as focused upon the Sacrifice of the Mass.
The Fathers of the Council of Trent underwrote the strict association of the Sacrifice of the Mass with Eucharistic transubstantiation by taking up the Protestant challenges to the Sacrifice of the Mass in another session eleven years later, in which Council of Trent taught that the event of the transubstantiation of the bread and wine is the event of the offering, in the Person of Christ, of his One Sacrifice. (CCC 1410-1411; DS §§*1739-*1741; §§*1751-*1759).
The identity of the Sacrifice of the Mass with the One Sacrifice offered on the cross is explicitly affirmed by that Council:
As the Apostle testifies, there was no perfection under the former covenant because of the insufficiency of the Levitical priesthood. It was, therefore, necessary (according to the merciful ordination of God the Father,) that another priest arise after the order of Melchizedek (cf. Gen. 14. 18; Ps. 110 [109] 4; Heb. 7:11) our Lord Jesus Christ who could make perfect all who were to be sanctified (cf. Heb, 10.14) and bring them to fulfillment.
He, then, our Lord and God, was once and for all to offer Himself to God the Father by His death on the altar of the cross, to accomplish for them an everlasting redemption. But, because His priesthood was not to end with His death (cf. Heb, 7.24, 27), at the Last Supper, “on the night when he was betrayed” (I Cor. 11.23), in order to leave to His beloved Spouse the Church a visible sacrifice (as the nature of man demands) by which the Bloody sacrifice which He was once for all to accomplish on the cross would be represented, its memory perpetuated until the end of the world and its salutary power applied for the forgiveness of the sins which we daily commit―: declaring himself constituted “a priest for ever after the order of Melchizedek” (Ps. 110 [109] 4) He offered His Body and Blood under the species of bread and wine to God the Father, and, under the same signs gave them to partake of to the disciples (whom He then established as priests of the New Covenant) and ordered them and their successors in the priesthood to offer, saying: “Do this as a memorial of me”, etc. (LK. 22.19; I Cor. 11.24) as the Catholic Church has always understood and taught.
For, after He celebrated the old Pasch, which the multitude of the children of Israel offered to celebrate the memory of the departure from Egypt (cf. Ex. 12.1ff.) Christ instituted a new Pasch, namely Himself, to be offered by the Church through her priests under visible signs in order to celebrate the memory of His passage from this world to the Father when by the shedding of His Blood He redeemed us, “delivered us from the dominion of darkness and transferred us to His Kingdom” (cf. Col, 1.13).[159] (emphases added)
There can be no doubt that Trent affirmed that the Event by which the Person of our Lord, his Body and Blood, his humanity and his divinity, comes to be present on the altar is identically the Event of the transubstantiation of the Eucharistic elements, and identically the Event of the Offering of his One Sacrifice. Trent knows no temporal sequence of transubstantiation, Real Presence, and Sacrifice: the Fathers at Trent taught the Eucharist to be the sacramental representation of the One Sacrifice on the cross, which representation includes within the unity of its efficacious signing the transubstantiation of the bread and wine of the offertory, the Real Presence of Christ as Priest and Victim, and the Offering of the One Sacrifice by which the One Flesh of Christ and the Church, the New Covenant, is instituted.
The Council of Trent reaffirmed first the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. It is not infrequently said that this reaffirmation was directed at Zwingli, who had totally subjectivized the Presence of Christ at the Last Supper, rather than at Luther, who maintained a Real Presence against the other Reformers, including Calvin, sufficiently objective to bar the “virtual presence” doctrine of Calvin, and to permit the sinner to receive Christ’s Body at the Lord’s Supper.[160] This Catholic concession to Luther is ecumenically pleasing, but is quite mistaken, for the Real Presence taught at Trent is a dynamic event-presence, a historical presence mediated by the Event of the transubstantiation of the elements, which is the Real Presence of Christ as at once the High Priest offering the New Pasch, and the Christ as the Victim offered. This Catholic faith is in the historical Real Presence of the sacrificed and sacrificing Christ, and emphatically not in the nonhistorical, nonsacrificial “Real Presence” of Lutheranism. The Real Presence which the Catholic Church identifies with the One Sacrifice offered in the Mass cannot be identified with the Lutheran “Real Presence,” if only because the latter rests upon Luther’s denial of the Sacrifice of the Mass. The recognition of this distinction is simply a matter of honesty and candor.
However, that mistake has its uses here and now, for it permits us to emphasize what is easily missed, that the Catholic doctrine of the Real Presence is indissociable from the Catholic doctrines of the transubstantiation of the Eucharistic elements into the sacrificial Body and Blood of Jesus the Christ, and of the priestly offering of the Sacrifice of the Mass in the person of Christ. We have spoken of the integrity of the Eucharistic tradition: that integrity reaches the whole of the Eucharistic doctrine, for the Eucharistic Lord is single, as his sacrificial immanence among us is mediated by a single Event.
In the session following that in which the doctrine of the Eucharistic sacrifice was laid down, Trent also took up the Protestant challenge to the priesthood, reaffirming the doctrine already asserted in Cap. 1 of the Session Twenty-one’s “Doctrina de ss. Missae sacrificio” (DS §*1740), viz., the hierarchical priesthood was instituted as a true sacrament by our Lord at the Last Supper, and that the power of consecrating and offering his Body and Blood, and of forgiving sins in his name, over and above, and distinct from, the office and ministry of preaching, was given to the Apostles and their successors in the priesthood. The close association of ordination to the Catholic priesthood with the authority to offer Christ’s One Sacrifice in the Mass is stressed in the Tridentine canons because it had been specifically denied by the Reform, as had been most of the elements of the Church’s sacramental worship. The Council also asserts, inter alia, the permanent character of the priesthood, and its distinction from the priesthood of the laity given by baptism.
Another dimension of the Eucharistic sacrifice must be mentioned here: its institution of the New Covenant. It is Pauline doctrine that the New Covenant is the cause of the Church; I Cor. 10:17 reads: “Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread.”[161] This causality is that by which Christ, the Head, is the source of his glory, the Church which proceeds from him in free union with him, his bride, his ecclesial Body. The allusions in I Corinthians to the holiness of marriage and to the sacrilege of πορνίεα, to the assimilation of the headship of the husband over his wife to an analogy of the headship of God over Christ and of Christ over the Church, parallel the meditation in Romans upon the Christ as the second or last Adam, the source of the second Eve. In Ephesians 5 this meditation reaches its full expression in the assimilation of the “one flesh” of the Jahwist creation account to the union of the Christ the Head with his bridal Church, instituted by his One Sacrifice. In this passage, and in the hymn in the first chapter of Colossians, Christ’s sacrificial headship is given cosmic range, becoming the primordial deed of the Trinitarian creation, the Father’s sending of the Son to give the Spiritus Creator.
To understand more fully the recapitulatory significance of Christ’s One Sacrifice, it is necessary to appreciate the free unity of the One Flesh, the New Creation, the New Covenant, which as Head he instituted by his death upon the cross. That it has that covenantal order is stated explicitly in the Words of Institution in all four Institution Narratives: “This is the Blood of the (new) covenant.” An unfortunate separation of eleven years between the sessions of the Council of Trent in which the Eucharistic sacrifice and the Eucharistic transubstantiation, respectively, were treated, led in subsequent theology to the isolation, even the dissociation, of One Sacrifice from the historical-liturgical presence of Christ in the Mass, and to a consequent failure to appreciate their factual integrity.[162] The older theology knew better; the greatest doctor of the western Church, whose thought nourished Catholic theology for a thousand years before the controversies of the Reformation, and whose genius should instruct us here, has written:
Thus a true sacrifice is offered in every act which is designed to unite us to God in a holy fellowship (sancta societate), that is, which is directed to that final Good which makes possible our felicity. This is the sacrifice of Christians, who are ‘many, making up one body in Christ.’ This is the sacrifice which the Church continually celebrates in the sacrament of the altar, a sacrament well known to the faithful where it is shown to the Church that she herself is offered in the offering which she presents to God.[163]
So understood, sacrifice is specified by its purpose, the effecting, the instituting, of the sancta societas, by whose reality we may reach our final and blessed end of union with God. What this society may be is next to be understood, and again Augustine teaches us: it is the “whole Christ,” Christus totus, integer, plenitudo Christi, the covenantal, marital union of Christ with his Church.[164] The Second Vatican Council included Augustine’s language in Presbyterorum Ordinis:
However, the Lord also appointed certain men as ministers, in order that they might be united in one body in which “all the members have not the same function” (Rom. 12:4) These men are to hold in the community of the faithful the sacred power of Order, that of offering sacrifice and forgiving sins, and were to exercise the priestly office publicly on behalf of men in the name of Christ. . . .
. . . ….Through the ministry of priests the spiritual sacrifice of the faithful is completed in union with the sacrifice of Christ the only mediator, which in the Eucharist is offered through the priests’ hands in the name of the whole Church in an unbloody and sacramental manner until the Lord himself come.12 The ministry of priests is directed to this and finds its consummation in it. For their ministration, which begins with the announcement of the Gospel, draws its force and power from the sacrifice of Christ and tends to this, that “the whole redeemed city, that is, the whole congregation and community of the saints, should be offered as a universal sacrifice to God through the High Priest who offered himself in his passion for us that we might be the body of so great a head.”
§5: . . . . Therefore the eucharistic celebration is the center of the assembly of the faithful over which the priest presides. Hence priests teach the faithful to offer the divine victim to God the Father in the sacrifice of the Mass and with the victim to make an offering of their whole life[165] emphases added)/ [166]
12 Cf. I Cor. 11:26.
More recently, the nuptial order of the New Covenant, established by the One Sacrifice, has been reaffirmed by Pope John Paul II.[167] Here, in this free unity, in this One Flesh, the gift of the Head to the Body in and by which the Body comes to be, converge all the themes with which we are concerned. The Good Creation is good because signed with the free order of the marital image of the Triune God by its Creation in Christ. The nuptially-ordered Covenant of the New Adam with the New Eve, the Church; Christ the High Priest, whose absolute obedience to the Father is his Sacrifice, his irrevocable self-donation to and for the Church which thereby is his Body, his Bride, and finally, the Holy Society by which we may belong to God understood as the Christus totus, the marital One Flesh of Christ with his Church, the New Covenant in his Blood.
The sacramental and historical significance and the sacramental efficacy, of this nuptial symbolism must be appreciated, not only because it is at the very heart of the economy of salvation, but because of its political impact, the creation, sustaining and fostering of a free, nuptially-ordered society. By the sacramentally-mediated grace of Christ, we are baptized into the free unity of his body, the Church, whose freedom and unity are hers only by her union with her Lord, and are ours only insofar as we enter into that ecclesial worship by which she is the Body of Christ, One Flesh with him. By that entry, our existence becomes truly historical and truly public because truly free: so to exist, in ecclesia, is to be engaged in a continual exercise of nuptially-ordered freedom, authority, responsibility, and personal dignity. Its radical sacramental expression is of course the Sacrifice of the Mass, the institution of the New Covenant, but its political expression, the hierarchical auctoritas sacrata exercized by the common priesthood of the laity, an authority effective ex opera operato in sacramental marriage, is the continual realization of effective limit upon the otherwise unlimited potestas regalis, whose most memorable exponent is certainly Henry VIII, whose ‘separation of Church and state” had been anticipated by Nominalists such as John of Jandun and notably Marsilius of Padua two centuries earlier.
Marriage has ever been seen as a surd by utopian thinkers from Plato’s Republic down to the plethora of schemes for a social reconstruction whose sine quo non was the deconstruction of marriage lent a certain color to American society in the early nineteenth century. The most notable and enduring of them is the Mormon community which established its center on the shores of Utah’s Great Salt Lake, but less ambitious projects, such as the Oneida Community, exhibited an analogous impatience with the irrationality of traditional marriage.
It is primarily by sacramental marriage, or its Protestant variants, that the recognition of the Covenantal freedom, authority, responsibility and personal dignity of men and women is mediated to the world irrevocably, ex opera operato. Its presence is dynamic, a liturgical and hence communal public praxis by a married couple of their free responsibility for each other and for their children that begins to permeate society wherever found, converting it, however slowly, to that same free exercise of public responsibility that is existence in Christo, in ecclesia. It is only thus, as exercising her sacramentally-grounded freedom, authority, and responsibility, that the Church may be understood to be in relation to the state, as one of the “two by which the world is ruled.”[168] By the infallibly effective means of her sacramental worship, the members of the Catholic Church and of those baptized into her community engage in an exercise of covenantal freedom, authority, responsibility and dignity―in a word, of fidelity―which connotes a continual refusal of the idolatry of power endemic to the monadic, non-covenantal understanding of society that is the single alternative to the covenantal, nuptially ordered civil community which the Catholic worship institutes, sustains, and defends.
This exercise of nuptially-ordered fidelity inserts into the body politic a leaven which no despotism can suppress, and whose innate attraction is subversive of all the rationalist and utopian degradations of historical human dignity. The Western rule of law has no other ground than this nuptially-ordered and sacramentally-sustained free, nuptially-ordered exercise of responsibility, authority, and human dignity, a ground that is uniquely sufficient and thereby indispensable. Free societies remain free only as efficaciously realizing that freedom in covenantal worship. The free societies of the West have their origin in the sacramental imaging of God, an imaging whose free unity or order is nuptial: the order of the One Flesh of Christ and his Church, the only free society known to man, and that knowledge is only by revelation, the free gift of the free truth of human existence, appropriated in nuptially-ordered covenantal fidelity.
This section may be summed up by observing that as the unity of the liturgy is nuptial and therefore free, so also is the unity of the Church. Any liturgical departure from that unity will inevitably reflect a basic denial of the offering, in the Person of Christ, of Eucharistic Sacrifice, which institutes the New Covenant, the free unity of the One Flesh, and thereby is the cause of the Church, the second Eve who exists only in that unity with her Lord. The denial of the Eucharistic offering in persona Christi of the One Sacrifice proceeds with the same inevitability to the dehistoricization of the Real Presence, and so of the transubstantiation of the Church’s offering of bread and wine, with a consequent dismissal of the sacramental mediation of the grace of Christ. The history of the fragmentation of the Reformation churches within the century between Luther’s challenge and the Socinian Unitarianism, provides the sufficient proof of the Eucharistic Sacrifice as the free cause of the free unity of the Church. When the historicity of the Eucharist, i.e., the historicity of the Sacrificial institution of the Christus totus, the One Flesh of Christ and his Church, is rejected, so also is the historical freedom and its historical unity of the Church.
The historical record offers no support for the commonplace symbolist interpretation of Augustine’s theology, which is sufficiently refuted by his long struggle with the Donatist heresy, whose anti-sacramental implications he was at pains to refute with a precision until then unknown to the Latin tradition and little developed in the Greek: it underlies the medieval ex opera operato – ex opera operantis distinction between the infallible and the free efficacy of the sacramental signing. In brief, Augustine was very clearly no symbolist. His theology is a phenomenology of worship in the Church; from this experience in ecclesia of the human condition as at once fallen and redeemed―simul peccator et justus―and the simultaneity of the “two cities” that are the product of the “two loves” consequent upon that fissure of the fallen consciousness, he derived a theology of history inseparable from the Catholic faith in the historical, liturgical, sacramental mediation of the grace of Christ.
Once disjunct from that sacramental realism, once alienated from participation in the central Event of Catholic worship, the One Sacrifice of the Mass, communal worship of the risen Lord encounters an impossible dilemma: as communal, that worship must have a communal and therefore public expression, but a non-historical liturgy can permit none: justification by faith alone can have nothing to say whether as doctrine or moral law. It is obvious that no religious community can survive the strict application of sola fide, sola scriptura: even the preaching communicates no public truth.
As a result, there has been a universally experienced tension between the Reformer’s denial of the sacramental mediation of the grace of the risen Christ, and the continuing felt need for some public, i.e., liturgical, expression of the faith. This tension is felt throughout those Christian communities which by their rejection of the Eucharistic representation of the One Sacrifice refuse sacramental realism as such. It becomes evident that the rationale justifying the rejection of the Eucharistic Sacrifice must put in issue the objective efficacy of Baptism as well. The anti-sacramental rationale has as its telos a radical secularity and the consequent reduction of sacramental efficacy to a political efficacy: once thus politicized, the Church’s worship is soon seen to require a radical secularization as well. The current rhetoric of the theoreticians of the European Union provides a rather vivid illustration of this inexorable consequence.
This tension between the requirements of public worship of Jesus the Lord and the finally cosmological objections to the historical objectivity of his Lordship first appeared in the Docetism of the first century, as is evident in the Gospel and Letters of John the Evangelist. It was basic to the Gnosticism of the second and third centuries, and appeared again in the Donatism of the early fourth century, whose anti-sacramental inferences from the African emphasis upon the infallible efficacy of sacramental signing (Tertullian, Cyprian, Augustine) were countered in the fifth century by Augustine’s distinction between the necessary effect of sacramental signing, and the free appropriation of that effect by the individual Christian. Five centuries later, the application to the realistic Augustinian sacramental signing of the rediscovered Neoplatonic “dialectic” by Carolingian theologians such as Ratramnus and Rhabanus Maurus had begun to question the free unity of the sacramentum - res sacramenti, cause-effect polarity intrinsic to the efficacy of that signing. The “new” logic renewed an ancient cosmologically-driven quest for understanding by way of discovering antecedently necessary causes for the truth of any affirmation. The determinist a priori of this quest necessarily reduced the free truth of the liturgy to irrationality. Thirteen centuries earlier Parmenides’ disciple, Zeno, had discovered the sole alternative to his master’s ideal monism: the ideal disunity of reality. This binary, either-or critique was latent in the Carolingian rationalism which, locked in the same rationalist dilemma, must proceed similarly. Two centuries later Berengarius would use the same ‘dialectical’ analysis to disintegrate the Eucharistic Words of Institution and thereby to conclude to an impanationist Eucharistic heresy, reductively a symbolism by its denial of the truth of the sacramental signing, the uttering of the Words of Institution over the bread and wine of the Offertory. His reasoning was exquisitely simple, viz., “This is my body” cannot be true, for it is said of bread, not of body.
The dogmatic formulation of the orthodox reply to the Berengarian symbolism, from Lanfranc to the Fourth Lateran Council, required most of two centuries. The theological work was complete early in the twelfth century.[169] It issued in two distinct achievements: the use of “substance” to describe the character of the change of the Eucharistic elements into the body and the blood of Jesus the Christ, and consequently the reality of the risen Christ’s Real Presence under the signs of bread and wine. Secondly, because Berengarius’ symbolism had reduced the efficacy of the Eucharistic signing to subjectivity, it had become necessary to render explicit what in patristic sacramental paradigm of sacramentum – res sacramenti, had been implicit: viz., that the infallible historical objectivity of sacramental efficacy did not foreclose the personal freedom of the worshiper to worship in truth, and that this freedom, which is actual in our fallen history of salvation includes a freedom to reject the freedom which our Lord died that we might possess, for freedom cannot be imposed.
Thus it was seen to be necessary at once to stress what Berengarius had denied, the infallible historical objectivity of the sacramental signing, and also the freedom of the personal appropriation of the salvation mediated by that worship. This required that a distinction be made between the infallible effect of the Words of Institution, i.e., the objective offering of the One Sacrifice, and the fallible personal appropriation of the benefits of that offering. Thus the free infallibility of the cause-effect unity of sacramental efficacy, as expressed by the sacramentum – res sacramenti paradigm of the Augustinian-patristric tradition, underwent a change. In order to stress what had been implicit in that polarity, i.e., the free appropriation of sacramental efficacy, it was necessary that the patristic paradigm, which under Augustinian influence had stressed the universal salvific efficacy of the Eucharistic worship, should become quasi-analytic. It had become necessary to separate conceptually the cause from the effect, and distinguished within that single efficacy between the infallible effect that is also a sign, and that final effect which is the full accomplished result of the sacramental signing, viz., personal union with the risen Christ.
Thus the patristic paradigm, sacramentum – res sacramenti, (sign – infallible effect of the sign) was not discarded but supplemented by the medieval theological paradigm, sacramentum tantum, res et sacramentum, res tantum. (the sign only, the infallible effect which is also a sign, and the effect only)
The complexities attending this change of theological language are explored elsewhere in this volume. It is enough here to point out that this truly brilliant analytic statement of sacramental efficacy, the work of Anselm of Laon at the Cathedral School of that city, was achieved during the same period as that in which the theology of transubstantiation was developed. Together, they are indispensable to Catholic theology, whose foundation is the liturgical mediation of the One Sacrifice by which we are redeemed and, with us, the whole of the creation that is in Christ, the head.
While this work was being done, during the latter half of the eleventh century and the first half of the twelfth, attacks upon Eucharistic realism and sacramental realism were gaining strength: their affinities with the Reform’s anti-sacramentalism are not far to seek. Their anti-sacramental motif, insofar as articulate, depended upon Berengarius’ heretical teaching, in association with the nihilist Catharism which also appeared in Europe in the early decades of the eleventh century. This proto-romanticism was bruited about by lay-preaching movements following upon the tidal social impact of the eleventh-century Gregorian Reform, whose dissolution of the feudal merger of ecclesial authority and royal power could not but undercut the stability of European society, in which religious and political unity were hardly distinct. Gregory VII’s re-assertion of ecclesial authority in rejecting the lay investiture of bishops and abbots which had long been exercised by the feudal barons, and which presupposed the submission of the higher clergy to their overlords as vassals of greater or lesser consequence, undercut the feudal system generally in Continental Europe. With it, there began the disintegration of the feudal order, whose fatal weakness was its monist merger of moral and political authority, and its consequent incapacity for change: a monadic unity can only cease to be.
Intolerable as the lay investiture of the higher clergy had become, it was consistent with the subordination of those barons to the moral and doctrinal authority of the papacy. This formal subordination of the emperor to the moral authority of the papacy―the auctoritas sacrata pontificum―was essential to the unity of the Christendom which Charlemagne had founded and for political authority over which he sought papal sanction, however ambiguous his crowning by Pope Stephen. However, the doctrinal basis for this authority, rooted in Augustine’s doctrine of the “two cities” and restated in a late fifth-century letter in which Pope Gelasius I corrected the misimpression of the Byzantine Emperor Anastasius I, that he possessed an ecclesial authority over the papacy, had been forgotten in the turmoil of the collapse of the Roman Empire in that same fifth century.
The Gelasian doctrine of the free compatibility of the moral authority of the Church, viz., the auctoritas sacrata pontificum, with the imperial potestas regalis, was in tension with the standing practice of a quasi-sacramental coronation of monarchs, and particularly of the Emperor, whose consequently religious standing could be understood to be his simply as the monarch, independent of any relation to the papacy. The ancient joinder of all authority―legislative, judicial, military and religious―in the monarch had confused Constantine at the Council of Nicaea early in the fourth century, nor had he been discouraged from regarding himself as the “bishop of those outside,” by bishops such as Eusebius of Caesarea, nor even by the Pope, Sylvester I. Charlemagne’s restoration five centuries later of a measure of the pax romana was not informed by the insight of Gelasius I into the indispensability to a free Christendom of the positive interelation of the moral auctoritas sacrata pontificum and the political potestas regalis. Here it may be remarked that the tension between ecclesial authority and royal power, the subjects of Gelasius’ “There are two by which the world is governed,” are not “two powers:” It was not Emperor Anastasius’ threat to dominate the Italian peninsula to which Gelasius objected, but his interference with the governance of the Church. Thus, although the Roman law made little or no distinction between authority and power, Gelasius clearly wrote in another context, that of the interrelation of civil government and the Church’s sacramental and therefore public worship. Their overlap, their tension, is a constant in Augustine’s theology of history, wherein the eschatological triumph of one or the other of the “two cities” is the telos of all human striving. Gelasius was an Augustinian: Anastasius was a caesaropapist by instinct: there was no Greek tradition to the contrary, as Justinian would soon demonstrate.
While Charlemagne and his heirs intended the construction of a Christian empire out of the fragments of the western Roman Empire, they understood its unity in terms of a melding of the ecclesial institutions with those of the Empire, inevitably blurring the irreducible distinction which Gelasius had set between them. This confusion was further confounded by the existence of the papal governance of large areas of the Italian peninsula and Sicily, which by way of papal treaties with Pepin and Charlemagne had become the Papal States―territories secured by those treaties to the papal governance, which by then had become effectively indispensable to the public peace for, since the collapse of the Roman Empire in the fifth century, the Papacy had been the only effective governing authority in and around the Italian peninsula.
This situation required an incongruous papal exercise of a potestas regalis then regarded as inherent in the exercise of the auctoritas sacrata pontificum simply because practically inseparable from it. This situation could only cause a standing confusion between the Gelasian irreducibles, the moral authority of the Pope and the political power of the government, by whose free unity Gelasius had seen the world to be ruled: neither could afford to transcend the other, still less to be identified with it, but the Papacy would require centuries again to arrive at this recognition.
George Weigel has persuasively argued that the papal confusion of the auctoritas sacrata pontificum with the potestas regalis ceased only with the reign of John Paul II.[170] Because this distinction rests finally upon Pauline-Augustinian insight into the free unity of history as salvific, with its dialectic of the “flesh and spirit,” of “two loves which build two cities,“ it is unlikely to be perceptible to those who would impose a necessary unity on history rather than appropriate its intrinsic freedom, particularly inasmuch as this free unity of the human society can be given no secular explanation: its appropriation is finally in function of personal participation in the worship of the Church, and of the nuptially-normed and therefore sacramentally grounded social order inseparable from that worship.
By the eleventh century the distinction between the Pope’s moral authority, his auctoritas sacerdotum, and the Emperor’s political governance of the empire, his potestas regalis, given its classic statement by Pope Gelasius in the last decade of the fifth century, had been forgotten; unknown to the Merovingian kings since the coronation of Clovis in 500 AD, it was similarly unknown to the Carolingians, and to their early medieval successors in interest. Insofar as an untutored public was concerned, authority was the coercive exercise of power, whether by the popes in their governance of the Papal States or by their feudal and imperial counterparts. This supposition was buttressed by a general substitution of juridical for theological categories: Justinian’s codification of Roman law at Constantinople had been studied at Bologna from the tenth century; in the twelfth a French translation would be made and studied at the newly-founded school of law at Montpellier in southern France. This study was continued at Oxford from its founding in the early thirteenth century, where it entered into the Common Law by way of Bracton. Already in the twelfth century a maieutic device familiar to Roman law, the “Quaestio,” would begin to inform a nascent theological method.[171] Its cosmological presuppositions passed unchallenged: the Princeps as the transcendent source of law was replaced by a transcendent source of theology, the “necessary reasons” whose Diktat was comparably absolute, and equally irresponsible.
Signal among the consequences of the collapse of the Roman empire was a general loss of interest in metaphysics and a correlative loss of interest in the transempirical significance of the physical world The metaphysical expression of learned curiosity, which throughout the classical period survived its systematizations, was replaced by an increasingly abstract juridical conceptuality, whose categories were soon taken to be substantive, i.e., theological. The confusion of theological categories with those of law reinforced the feudal equation of the Church’s magisterial office with a quasi-legislature whose enactments invoked obedience, rather than an understanding of and assent to their intrinsic truth and unity. Thus we find in Abelard’s Sic et Non a collection of apparently discordant doctrinal statements with no attempt at their theological resolution, quite as the scholars of the law were publishing collections of discordant canons. The crude analytical rationality, the “dialectic” or “new logic” deployed by Berengarius to disintegrate the Eucharistic Words of Institution into discordant concepts, now underwrote also the disintegration of the Catholic tradition as such. When the Parmenidean identification of the unity of truth with the unity of the concept is given its head, the disintegration of reality and of truth cannot but proceed indefinitely in its quest for the indivisible ultima species, equivalently the despairing pagan flight from history which possesses no indivisible unity, whether empirical or ideal.
The reaffirmation and implementation by Gregory VII of the Gelasian distinction between the moral authority of the Church and the political power of civil government, by invalidating their long-standing feudal merger and thereby undercutting the old order, could not but prompt a search for a new order free of the coerced unity and ideal immobility which marked feudal society, as it had marked all pagan societies. The educated men of the time, clerics for the most part, had little acquaintance with the new theological speculation; the orthodox authorities distrusted the novel “dialectic’ which they had seen used destructively by Berengarius, and which would be used in much the same way by the disciples of Abelard. St. Peter Damian and St. Bernard typify this conservative animadversion. Fortunately, as we have seen, other theologians, equally opposed to Berengarius, were intent upon a reasoned refutation of his heresy, and had began to construct a theology of Eucharistic realism which would be foundational for the development of Eucharistic doctrine taught by the Fourth Lateran Council.
It is more than likely that the Eleatic binary rationalism which had inspired Berengarius and his followers had a yet further impact in the novel situation following the destabilization of the feudal order. According to this “either-or” conceptualism, the alternative to the identification of the ecclesial and the political governance of the world must be their mutual exclusion in a manner anticipating the mutual exclusion of the Cartesian “clear and distinct ideas” and, currently, the “wall of separation” invoked by the Supreme Court in the Everson decision of 1947. When pushed, this rationale is fatal to all free institution, for reality is seen to consist of necessary unities each of which is what it is by its absolute dissociation from all that it is not, and whose verbal association is only nominal and thus inescapably arbitrary: an expression of opinion and no more.
This vast simplification, whose roots are Heraclidean and whose systematization Platonic, has no small appeal; it is reinvented over and again. Particularly it appeals in societies whose free unity, whose consensus on the public decencies, is in disarray: then the eloquent presentation of a sancta simplicitas is most likely to persuade those who have lost their moral bearings. Unfortunately, under this rationale freedom is understood as personal dissociation from all that might impede personal autonomy: in moral terms,. Freedom in exercise is then simple irresponsibility; J. S. Mill’s On Liberty is its classic statement. This is freedom from all historical responsibility, from all positive relation to anything of significance. It understands: men to live in a world of things, of objects, but not of subjects. Thus conceived as personal autonomy, freedom is a flight from the universal exercise of a truly historical responsibility, for responsible freedom is exercised communally, in a free community whose freedom can only be sacramentally sustained. The sole alternative is freedom as autonomy, as a flight from history and from historical self-awareness: in brief, freedom as nihilism. Its exercise is of course radically anti-institutional: the only politics possible is that of protest; anything more is an expression if not an exercise of personal responsibility for the future.[172]
Consequently, the Gregorian rejection of the long feudal merger of ecclesial and political governance led to a common critique, an antipathy to government as such. Each rule now must justify its concrete application, a Rahnerian theme used to warrant the student protests of the latter decades of the twentieth century and the second of the twenty-first, whose “I don’t see why not” has echoes in every age. Thus, if by papal edict an unworthy emperor can lose his authority because of its misuse, so also can an unworthy bishop lose his authority by its misuse. Implicit in this critique is the assumption that both authorities are exercised coercively, as inhibitions upon personal freedom: thus Church doctrine and civil law stand under the same critique.
This assumption had solid grounds. The political authority of the Popes over the papal states had been and long remained all too easy to confuse with their doctrinal authority, in such wise that manifest injustices committed under the former heading were easily read into the magisterial proclamation of the doctrinal and moral traditions, the more easily in that both were perceived in the same juridical contest, which is to say, as commands, thus as restrictions upon freedom as personal autonomy, inhibitions on the exercise of personal irresponsibility.
The exercise of moral freedom had long been misunderstood, as by Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics and the Stoic natural law, as a centripetal conformity to the nonhistorical cosmological rationality, i.e., as conformity to essentially timeless norms: moderation, nature, law, whether viewed as natural or divine, all universal and unchangeable. Morality amounted to passive submission to a permanent status quo, a cosmos whose inhabitability was its immunity to history and to change: finally, its immunity to freedom. With the crumbling of the old order, its morality of submission and conformity became untenable. Unfortunately, within the cosmological rationality of the time, the sole alternative to personal servility was personal autonomy, a flight from all induced order, whether ecclesial or political: freedom became a centrifugal flight from history, an “abolition of man.”[173]
The majority of the feudal society, serfs and servants, the working class, had long been unaccustomed to any exercise of personal authority and responsibility transcending the domestic management of their families and homes and, at the artisan level, of their crafts. The latter were being affected by the rise of a monetary economy whereby the artisans were developing or being co-opted into a mercantile class, to whom literacy was a necessity: a learned laity was emerging, but a laity whose learning was not theological, and whose rationality, insofar as learned, conformed to the “new logic” of a Berengarius, the binary, proto-nominalist disintegration of truth and being which could only reinforce the interpretation of the new freedom as anarchy.
The popes of the eleventh century, down to Gregory VII, ruled over a Church troubled by schismatic contestants for the papacy, by bishops whose selection and investiture by feudal lords had made them vassals of their lords rather than servants of their Church, and whose neglect of their episcopal responsibilities had too often left their dioceses to the doubtful competence of vicars drawn from the lower clergy who lacked the then necessary social standing to exercise the authority delegated them. The quality of parochial preaching of course declined with the decline of episcopal residence, i.e., the residence of the local ordinary in his diocese instead of a vicar appointed him, and thereby the decline of effective episcopal oversight. The evangelical counsels were widely ignored by the clergy, many were ignorant of the doctrinal and moral traditions of their faith to the point of at least material heresy: simony was common among them, and the problem of clerical concubinage had become sufficiently acute as to draw the attention of a succession of provincial and Roman councils.
The monastic orders had undergone a comparable deviation from lived fidelity to their original rule, devoting their energies instead, as at Cluny, to an elaborate liturgy rather than to the less refined tasks of the evangelization and catechesis of the surrounding population, while more and more leaving the manual labor integral to the monastic vocation to a laity whose association with the monastery was to provide the necessary labor. For the men, this comprised tilling its fields, tending its cattle and harvesting its crops; for the women, cooking, baking, housekeeping, weaving, sewing: the domestic occupations apart from which convents and monasteries could not exist. The Cistercian reform of the Benedictine order at the end of the eleventh century bears a sufficient witness to the feudal sclerosis and consequent corruption of the ancient monastic institutions. Unfortunately, well before the Reformation, the Cistercian reformers had themselves fallen prey to comparable lapses from their rule.
The result of these greater and lesser infidelities of the Church’s servants was a wide-spread resentment of ecclesial authority, whether as magisterial or as temporal The consequent unrest inevitably found its leaders among those of the clergy and laity in whom literacy, ability, and conviction of the need for ecclesial and civil reform had met. Most of them were loyal to the Church, but all agreed upon the need for reform both of the Church and of the civil governance, and the distinction between the reformer and the rebel was hardly clear in the minds of those thus designated, nor in the minds of the authorities, lay and clerical, whose uncritical conservatism was met by a similarly unexamined dissatisfaction with and disaffection for the status quo.
This widespread unrest found expression in a variety of lay preaching movements, whose common theme was a return to authentic Catholicism, to a Christianity envisioned as in some manner incorrupt, unsullied by contamination from the world. This was easily assimilated to the romantic quest for an unstructured religion, reductively dualist. A ‘hermeneutic of suspicion’ was being born, appeasable only by the destruction of its object: the only universally encountered and immediately identifiable object of that global distrust was the Church. Unlike the municipal political institutions, it was omnipresent, a single object upon which to focus a critique which soon became ferocious.
It must be remembered that ecclesial reform as a return to origins is a universal goal, inseparable from the worship of the Church of sinners, Ecclesia semper reformanda, at first an expression of loyalty to the Reformation, has lately been found as inseparable from the Catholic faith in Jesus the Lord, and inseparable from fidelity to him by a people irremedially fallen, simul peccastor et justus, until Christ shall come again. The recognition of reform as the renewal of fidelity is apparent in the earliest levels of the New Testament; it is the commonplace of Deuteronomy. Existence in the Church is identical with existence as a sinner whose awareness of his sin is at once with his participation in the worship of the ecclesia semper reformanda. The need for ecclesial as well as personal reform is permanent. The perception of the need, and insistence upon it, is at one with the Catholic faith that Jesus is the Lord, under whose judgement we stand.
This permanent interest in the reform of the Church has a corollary too little remarked: i.e., that the reformation of the Church, and of the civil society its faith informs, has its ground in the Eucharistic liturgy. It does not rest upon utopian percepts, upon the experience of injustice and of affronts to one’s dignity, and so on. These can afford no concrete criterion for reform. There is no source of the free unity that is the goal of all true reform other than the Eucharistic worship of the Church. Only in the nuptial order of that worship is the personal dignity and responsibility of every human being recognized, affirmed and sustained, precisely as nuptially normed and fulfilled. Apart from this criterion of personal and ecclesial reform, our fallen reasoning falls back into ideological soteriologies, flights from history which, finding historical existence insupportable, seek salvation from it in ultimately totalitarian surrogates for the good creation, the longing for which is indelible among us, and is routinely betrayed by schemes for self-salvation. Within the Church’s communion, the nuptial unity and order of the good creation are a standing reproach to the infidelities that afflict us all, that continually mask the beauty of the bride of Christ, but which can never destroy it nor entirely conceal it; .
Insofar as the quest for ecclesial reform, however pervaded with doctrinal error, was not experienced as a refusal of the Church’s worship, it remained within the wide range of Catholic unity: as John Paul II observed, dissent is only dissent; while it can provides no basis for authentic reform, its latent heresy need not find overt expression: it can and generally does arise out of ignorance. However, throughout the latter half of the eleventh century the Church’s worship had been under doctrinal attack: Berengarius, the head of the Cathedral school of Tours, which Alcuin had once governed, was so fascinated by the rationalization of the real by the binary “new logic” as to apply it to the free truth of the Eucharistic Words of Institution, “This is my body,” “This is my blood,” whose truth he consequently denied on the exceeding simple ground that a “this” cannot be a “that” distinct from and other than itself. By the middle of the eleventh century, Berengarius had forced a defensive posture upon Catholic theologians, to the point of requiring them to amend the Augustinian paradigm of sacramental efficacy, sacramentum – res sacramenti, in order to counter the first Eucharistic heresy the Church had known. Berengarius’ substitution of a symbolist subjectivity for the historical objectivity of Catholic Eucharistic realism anticipated the anti-sacramentalism characterizing the Protestant Reformation.
In the end, the significant minority of those seeking reform, i.e., those who had so interiorized the feudal meld of ecclesial and political governance as to reject governance as a single evil, drew from that supposition a false dualist asceticism, a false preaching of flight from the historical order to a vaguely non-historical, unrealizable goal, generally a rationalized poverty, and thus undertook a false destructive reform, one entailing a rejection of the historical Church’s sacramental mediation of the grace of Christ. Were this minority to be effective it required a persuasive justification, leadership and organization. The justification was provided by Berengarius’ rejection of the Eucharistic realism that grounds the sacramental realism of the Church and thus the objective historicity of the Church. Once thus perceived as nonhistorical, the Church’s worship provided no justification for the existence of the historical institutions attending the Church sacramental liturgy and historical mission. In the argot of the sixties, ‘unjust institutions’ comprised whatever social entity could not prove it necessity. Forty years later, this indictment has come to include the legal recognition of marriage insofar as heterosexual and free, and hence incapable of justification by the canons of “reason.”
The need of this minority for leadership and organization was met by the coincidental resurgence of an ancient Gnosticism, the Catharism which began to appear early in Europe in the early decades of the eleventh century, effectively contemporaneous with the Berengarian heresy and with the Gregorian Reform. By the twelfth century it had adopted, paradoxically, the hierarchical organization of the Church, and was well on the way to converting the inhabitants of southern France, then the most populous and wealthy part of that nation.[174]
The medieval Manichees, as the Catharists have been named,[175] were a development of a third-century oriental dualism transmitted from East to West by way of the Balkans; its eleventh-century reviviscence in Europe was coincident with the social, political and religious instability induced by the Gregorian Reform. There were many versions of this dualistic religion: e.g., the Bulgari (Bougres), Patareni, and Albigensii (people of Albi, in southern France). The last of these groups, so styled whether because of the number of converts to Catharism among the population of Albi, or by reason of the condemnation of Catharism by a provincial synod held there, has come to label the Catharist movement en gros.
Elements of it had been present in Aquitaine from the first decades of the eleventh century. Their insurgence there was protected by Duke William IX of Toulouse who, if not a convert, was certainly sympathetic to Catharism. By the late twelfth and early thirteenth century, the Albigensian Cathars had many members in the area around Toulouse. They were led by their elite practitioners, the perfecti or bonhommes, who reached this status by way of a long catechumenate and the reception of a quasi-sacrament called the consolamentum; the remainder, constituting a small but activist element of the total population of the Aquitaine, were credentes or auditores who received consolamentum only on their deathbeds. The Catharists held matter to be the principle of evil; in consequence, they were bitterly anti-Catholic, anti-sacramental, anti-clerical and anti-nuptial: some of them were allies of Berengarius, recognizing in his denial of sacramental realism an affinity with their own views. They preached a radical asceticism, a rejection of the involvement in history inherent in the ownership and use of material goods, and of course bitterly opposed the Church’s historical optimism, whose foundation was her sacramental worship, the heart of which is the sacrifice of the Mass, as instanced by the Catharist assault upon the Church in the Netherlands, the present Holland and Northern Belgium, at the turn of the twelfth century. Led by a lay preacher, Tachelm, it was directed to an open profanation of the Eucharist. St. Norbert and his Norbertines successfully opposed it, reconverting the people it had led into this sacrilege.
Although condemned by the provincial council of Toulouse in 1019, the Albigensians retained the support of the bulk of the wealthy nobility of a wealthy Languedoc, and of course flourished. In the next century, from about 1015, they were aided by the anti-sacramentalism preached by a dissident priest, Peter de Bruys, who had been a pupil of Abelard. His followers were known as Petrobrusians.[176] After de Bruys was killed in 1031, evidently by a mob of those he had outraged, a similar group in southern France, the “Henricians,” were led by Henry of Le Mans. Henry and his followers were opposed by St. Bernard of Clairvaux, among others, and were finally exterminated by the Albigensian crusade. Until then, their anti-institutionalism made them the natural allies of the anti-sacramentalist Berengarian heretics and more radically, of the Cathars.
The Catharism campaign against the Catholic Church was expressed in much the same terms as those voiced by the early lay preachers, but resting upon an entirely different religious foundation, that of their metaphysical dualism, which regarded physical existence as inherently evil. At bottom the Catharist gnosis found its typical expression in the condemnation of marriage and, more specifically of the sexual reproduction implicit in marriage, and also because marriage is the clear expression of personal commitment to the historical optimism of Roman Catholicism, whose liturgy celebration of the sacramental and salvific significance of the historical order is particularly explicit and publicly effective in the sacrament of marriage. This sacramental existence and practice of married couples is of course flatly and effectively opposed to the comparably programmatic Catharist commitment to flight from the physicality of historical existence as evil per se.
The Catharist antagonism to the sacramental significance of masculine and feminine existence found its way into a variety of proto-Reformation movements, all of which rejected the sacramental mediation of the grace of Christ. Catharism was a radically alienated and alienating movement, spontaneously allied to every revolt against institutional establishment and authority, and particularly to those attacking the historical Catholic Church. The basically pagan soteriology of Catharism looked to the abolition of the historical creation, which its adepts saw to be totally corrupt, and could not but focus upon the Church as its great enemy, for the Church celebrated what Catharism loathed, the good creation which is in Christ.
By the last decades of the twelfth century, a significant segment of Catholic population of Languedoc had become Cathars: the proportion of converts to the general population is disputed: In a recent study, Lutz Kälber has put it at under twenty percent, which is still a shocking proportion.[177] The reasons for conversion of this considerable fraction of the people of Languedoc are hardly clear. Cultural division between the north and the south of France played some role in it. The “langue de oc” dialect (Occitan’Aquitaine), in which “oc” (derived from the Latin demonstrative pronoun “hoc”) was equivalently “yes,” then commonly spoken in southern France, was not easily intelligible in Paris, whose French dialect, the “langue d’oïle” in which “oui” (derived from the Latin demonstrative pronoun “ille’) expressed “yes,” was similarly incomprehensible in the south. This linguistic separation imported a cultural dissociation which inevitably found political expression. The very wealthy and powerful Counts of Toulouse had come to exercise a quasi-royal authority over southern France, and had developed a correlative independence of the French monarchy centered in Paris, while the local episcopacy, anticipating the Gallicanism of a later age, assumed a comparable independence of Roman authority which their flocks could not but reflect. It may be supposed that the anti-institutional rhetoric of the Catharist leadership found an audience already thus receptive to what H. U. von Balthasar has termed an anti-Roman Affekt as to have found support for it in the local hierarchy, and most certainly in the local aristocracy.
With his election to the papacy in 1198, Innocent III immediately undertook to resolve the Catharist problem, the first wide-spread heresy Christendom had known since the decline of Arianism in the sixth century. The Pope send his legate, Pierre Castelnau, accompanied by other Cistercians, to effect the re-conversion of a population formerly Catholic but by then largely infected by Catharist sympathies. His efforts were to little avail. He found it necessary to replace a number of Languedoc bishops, and to excommunicate the more prominent converts to Catharism, but with an equal lack of effect. Finally, in 1208, after a decade of failure to counter the Catharist heresy, Innocent III sent Castelnau to Count Raymond VI, to inform him of his excommunication for failing to cooperate in the Pope’s decade-long effort to suppress the Catharist heresy. However, the Count had nothing to fear from papal sanction: his people, whether Catharist or Catholic, were no longer obedient to Rome and their loyalty to him was not predicated upon his fealty to the Pope. On the day following a stormy interview with Raymond VI, Castelnau was murdered by one of the Count’s courtiers. The Count’s reply to Innocent’s pastoral mission amounted to a thrown gauntlet.
The following year, Innocent III issued the Bull initiating the Albigensian Crusade, calling upon the French king and his nobles to suppress the heresy by force of arms, and ensuring their cooperation by granting to the victors the estates of their defeated opponents in Languedoc.
The Albigensian Crusade lasted for twenty years. It ended with the decisive defeat of the Catharist forces, but at an enormous cost in lives, and with the devastation of Languedoc, which never regained its former prosperity or cultural standing. In 1229, at the end of hostilities, Innocent III established the Inquisition to discover and suppress such Catharist opposition as remained. Under its supervision by the newly-formed Order of Preachers (Dominicans), Catharism ceased to have an effective presence in the territories it had once controlled, although it was extirpated only in the fourteenth century.
The more usual expressions of popular political and religious alienation associated with the Gregorian Reform had been those of literate laymen who undertook the neglected task of preaching and whose preaching was imbued with protest against the misuse of political and religious authority over their lives: this emphasis was soon abetted, even to the point of identity, by an anti-institutional re-interpretation of Christianity. The lay preaching was no longer merely against the misuse of authority, whether ecclesial or political, but against the exercise, and even the existence, of ecclesial authority as such. The lay preaching envisaged Christianity as ideally freed from the authority of the Church as well as from that the feudal society, in this echoing themes insistently and eloquently preached by the Catharist leadership, whose goal however was not laity’s romantically-envisioned reformation of Christianity and civil society by the elimination of their injustices, but the abolition of both.
The quasi-permanent lineaments of this vision of a Christianity reformed by the rejection of its structures of oppression, i.e., dogma, canon and moral law, priesthood, and sacraments, were traced during the latter decades of the twelfth century by Joachim di Fiore, a Cistercian monk whose theology looked to the emergence of an unstructured version of Christianity, the Kingdom of the Holy Spirit, which Joachim understood to transcend both the age of Old Testament, in which the Father ruled by Law, imposed by fear, and the age of the Son, his New Covenant and his Church. The third and final age is that of the Kingdom of the Holy Spirit, who will rule by a love proceeding from but transcending the Gospel of Christ, and which will have no need of the magisterial, legislative, and pastoral institutions of the Church. These Joachim regarded as disciplinary, finally coercive: his recognition of sacramental realism and efficacy of Catholic worship was minimal. He maintained that insofar as the integrating elements of the Church’s worship bear upon doctrine and morals, they will have somehow have been transcended in a final union of the Latin and Greek Churches, to which the Jews will be converted. Joachim surmised that this apocalyptic event would occur around 1260.
Joachim was at first a lay preacher, therefore teaching without ecclesial authority; when objections to this irregularity arose, he became a Cistercian monk, was ordained a priest, and lived an exemplary life as a Cistercian until his death in 1202. He was particularly intent upon evangelical poverty, and was much honored and respected. Without question he intended loyalty to the Church, having submitted his three major works to Innocent III, although he died before any decision upon them was made. Only in 1250 did the doubts arise which led to the Papal condemnation of his doctrine in 1256.
However, his works were seized upon by radical enthusiasts, notably the Joachimite party of the Spiritual Franciscans, whose doctrinaire exaltation of poverty as a universal solvent of historical institutions understood Joachim’s “Eternal Gospel” to be fulfilled in their own agenda. Some contemporary authors have regarded Joachim’s speculations as grounding twentieth century totalitarianism.[178] The Joachimites sought the eradication of the Church as an obstacle to a dehistoricized society in which all historical institution is condemned a priori. The inherent evil of the “unjust structures” which in the sixties and seventies of the twentieth century were identified with the institutions of Western civilization as such, is rediscovered by every ideological fixation on the one thing necessary, the abstract goal transcendent to and alienated from whatever is historical It changes its name, but not its animosity which, since the first century, has been focused upon the historical liturgy and the historical faith of the historical Roman Catholic Church.
Inasmuch as the concrete, pastoral exercise of the Church’s authority is at bottom sacramental and magisterial, therefore intrinsically institutional. The rejection of ecclesial authority cannot but look to a romanticized and finally politicized religion, a church devoid of historical institution, alien to the exercise of pastoral authority by bishops and lower clergy, lacking sacramental worship, consequently lacking the liturgical mediation of the doctrinal and moral tradition . The Church’s apostolic tradition is viewed by the current anti-clericals as imposing unwarranted and therefore arbitrary limits upon a personal freedom increasingly identified with autonomy―which is to say, with personal irresponsibility. This equation of freedom with irresponsibility could not but conclude to a Christianity without ecclesiastical establishment―lacking not only doctrinal and moral authority, but lacking also the clergy, parish churches, diocesan cathedrals, schools, colleges and universities: in sum, the lay and clerical staff essential to the mission of the universal Church. The rejection of the ecclesial establishment in the name of poverty insofar as physical, as the possession and control of property, had by the end of the eleventh century come to be perceived as the corollary of freedom from an ecclesial authority already heavily politicized and to that extent coercive.
Under these anti-institutional auspices, preaching could not but become a lay activity, which is to say, an office undertaken by men whose education permitted them to read the Scriptures, but few of whom were otherwise learned. They preached what they knew, supplemented by what they felt, and so tended to focus upon a personal interpretation of Scripture, and upon an advocacy of poverty, the latter to a considerable extent in reaction to the abuse of wealth by the clergy and the religious orders. The arrogance of the feudal prince-bishops, the corruption of monasteries and convents, the concubinage, simony and general incompetence of many of the parish clergy, the so-called “mass priests,” the lavishly ornamented liturgical celebration such as that for which the Abbey of Cluny had become famous, and such other exhibitions of what the newly emancipated laity saw as ecclesial indiscipline and self-indulgence as were at hand, ensured that there be no lack of targets for their homiletic condemnation.
The lay emphasis on poverty as a fundamental virtue, even the fundamental Christian virtue, could and did lead to its perception as an absolute, a sine qua non, an abstract, non-historical and asymptotically remote goal continually to be sought in its purity at whatever cost. This absolutism specified some of the more fervent of the party of the so-called Spirituals among the Frairs Minor, during the century of turmoil following the death of their founder. St. Francis was for all his life a lay preacher: he made poverty to be the particular characteristic of his Order, most of whose members in its early years were laymen. The Spiritual Franciscans stressed the anti-institutional reading of monastic poverty, whose implementation could only destroy their order. They were checked by Bonaventure in the latter half of the thirteenth century, but were not banned from the Order until the next century. It is evident that an absolutizing of poverty was contrary the missionary and therefore historical vision of St. Francis and of those who followed him, wishing to serve the Church by imitating the humility and poverty of Jesus their Lord: they did not envisage a political movement, still less an ideology.
The Gregorian Reform’s re-assertion of the ascendancy of the moral authority of the Church (auctoritas sacrata pontificum) over the otherwise untempered coercive political dominion (potestas regalis) of the Emperor and his barons, had an intrinsically counter-institutional effect at the socio-political level, i.e., upon the feudal vision of social unity Its social impact was largely upon the peasant class, whose status in the eleventh century was little better than that of serfs, a condition countenanced by a feudalized Church, the implicitly vassal status of whose clergy made them complicit in the coercive feudal ordering of society. The laity, including members of the artisan and the growing commercial middle class as well as the peasantry, could not be expected to make distinctions between lay and clerical overlords, or between the moral authority of the clergy and the coercive power of the feudal aristocracy, given that, in the higher ecclesial echelons, the two were so often joined in the same man, a bishop or archbishop of noble family who also was little given to drawing fine distinctions between the authority of his episcopal office and his allegiance to his feudal standing as at once a feudal overlord by birth, and a vassal of a greater feudal overlord.
The Gregorian emancipation of the Church from subordination to the potestas regalis, her liberation from feudal oversight, had challenged the feudal institutions at their heart. Thereafter they could no longer be self-sustaining, unquestioned as inherent in the order of the world. When a pope could dissolve them with a word, and had threatened to do so to the point of forcing an imperial obeisance to him, the principle of feudal fealty, allegiance of the vassal to his overlord, had been irretrievably qualified by Gregory VII’s assertion of the higher obligation of fidelity to the Church: the ecclesial and the feudal fidelities were now distinct, and their relation could not but be in issue.
Both fidelities were moral, and therefore in principle free, but only the ecclesial was in principle liberating, while the feudal system presupposed a subject class, without political authority. Assertions of such authority were impossible to the lower classes; as lowly born, they were incapable of exercising feudal responsibility, and thus of taking the vassal’s oath of fealty to his lord. Their legal rights amounted to the protection of their security, their remaining as they were. The actual refusals of feudal responsibility were breaches of the feudal oath binding vassal to overlord, and amounted to acts of war against that overlord. Only the stronger barons were capable of this refusal, and the degree of their capability amounted to the degree of their irresponsibility: an irresponsibility unlike that of the peasant passivity before authority in being an active quest for greater power, whether the better to resist the power of an overlord, or to establish personal power over him.
The latter ambition had to an extent been tempered by the attribution of a sacral character to the feudal fealties, but only to a limited extent: while the feudal monarch of a Catholic people could not risk an excommunication which would free his vassals of their oath of fealty, the violations of their feudal oaths by the lesser nobility did not attract that degree of papal attention. Internecine warfare had been commonplace between feudal principalities; their political unity was little more than that which could be provided by force majeure. The anarchy pervading England in the middle of the twelfth century, when the possession of the crown had long been contested, offers a vivid illustration of this weakness.
The political and diplomatic impact of the Gregorian reform upon the feudal governance of Europe is easy to exaggerate: for example, it had very little immediate effect outside continental Europe, due largely to the highly unified feudalism imposed on the English society by the Norman kings, and especially by Henry II, although by the thirteenth century English feudalism also had begun to give way before economic changes which rendered the customs of feudal vassalage obsolete.
It is more difficult to exaggerate its impact upon a peasant class whose members, largely by reason of the Gregorian reform but also by economic changes enhancing the value of a peasant’s labor, no longer accepted their servile condition as an irrefragable fact of life. The peasants became restive, not so much in that they envisioned a stable political freedom as that they had come to identify their participation in the social order with servility, and so rejected social order as such: they were not in principle anarchical, but having known political and ecclesial institution only as imposed and in principle as coercive, once conscious of the possibility of the dissolution of this coercion, they were instinctively anti-institutional. In those cases wherein their reaction against the abuse of clerical authority in the Church alienated them from her liturgy, their animus could not but focus upon her Eucharistic realism, i.e., on the priestly offering of the Eucharistic sacrifice and upon the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, the full expression of ecclesial authority.
In secular matters, their rejection of the authority of civil government soon became anarchical. The Peasant Revolt and the Lollard rebellion in fourteenth century England are speaking instances of a militant rejection of still-feudal conceptions of an imposed social order.
Other factors contributed to the overt expression of this alienation: the recent emergence of a mercantile class had already shaken the feudal stabilities by increasing the value of land and of labor: the peasant was no longer regarded as merely an adjunct of the soil he tilled: larger horizons beckoned, for the feudal stability was undercut by a competition for the peasants’ labor, the emergence of economic opportunity and the correlative emergence of an awareness of personal dignity. The inhibitions which the feudal social order had imposed on the lower classes became unenforceable and economically irrelevant.
Another and more powerful factor was also becoming effective in awakening a consciousness of personal dignity among the lay members of early medieval society: a novel appreciation of sacramental marriage as incapable of coercion. The patristic theology had recognized that the validity of the marriage required the free consent of the wife as well as of the husband, but this pertained to her free entry into the married state, wherein her exercise of her free responsibility was not understood to cease. The heritage of the Roman law was effective in the theology of marriage: as the wife was assimilated to the juridical persona of her husband, so also for the theology of marriage.
While the theologians would continue for some centuries to regard marriage as the least of the sacraments,[179] and the Common and Civil Law was at least as reluctant to give legal standing to women, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries the pastoral clergy were giving marriage an increased attention, which could not but entail a recognition of the dignity of women. The ancient patriarchal subordination of women to their nearest male relatives, characteristic of paganism and also of the feudal law, was inconsistent with the full personal freedom essential whether to entry into sacramental marriage or to living in nuptial fidelity. The recognition of the dignity of women could not but entail a re-examination of the dignity of men: both were properly measured only by the sacramental fidelity and consequent sanctity of marriage. A new anthropology was developing, however slowly. The recognition that a coerced marriage is no marriage is at one with the recognition of an equal and correlative dignity in the spouses, and of the free exercise of personal responsibility in marriage which was as novel for the husbands as for the wives.
Here the reality of adult responsibility, of adult dignity as masculine and as feminine, began to be internalized in its exercise. Marriage transcends all political inhibition, for it is itself the most radical exercise of a public authority: that authority cannot be coercive and remain nuptial. At its root, sacramental marriage is the public personal exercise of the authority of personal participation in the Church’s highly public sacramental worship of her Lord. The marriage of baptized adults submits to no coercion; it can neither be forced nor forbidden. While in principle the man and the woman administer the sacrament to each other, Church would resist the privatization of marriage, for marriage has not only has the intrinsically public character of a sacrament, as a participation in the public worship of the Church, but it is also a public exercise of personal responsibility in the public order. As such,
it is a leaven of free order in a transpolitical society which, apart from that leaven, knows no freedom which is not adverse to order, and knows no order that is consistent with freedom.
The socio-political impact of marriage thus understood is incalculable: it is the one inviolable free institution. No political ideology can co-exist with it, for it presupposes the covenantal, Trinity-imaging view of authority. This view of authority is foundational for the free and irrevocable exercise of nuptial authority which constitutes a marriage. As a public praxis of personal authority, marriage is inescapably an assertion of personal political freedom, of personal political authority by the man and by the woman. This plenary exercise of free responsibility exists only as proper to both. Its objectivity cannot be challenged, hence the ideological efforts to extirpate sacramental marriage as something alien to a properly ordered political community―which is to say, proper to a coercively unified people whose personal freedom is read as centrifugal, as disorderly, irrational and finally criminal.
Although the displacement of the monadic patriarchal paradigm of authority by the sacramental historicity of its free nuptial reality, marriage would wait nearly a millennium for theological recognition, it was pastorally recognized as liturgical worship from the outset, and that recognition over the centuries of the collapse and restoration of the Western civilization established its free, customary, public decencies, as from Giotto onward it illumined the art of late Middle Ages and of the Renaissance.
Integral to the development of canon law, marriage thereby soon became integral to the rule of law in the Western world: in England the Church’s jurists would from around the fourteenth century temper the rationalized rigors of the Common Law with the principles of equity, although by then the Common Law had itself anticipated much of these, since they were inseparable from the customary civil practices of the Christian communities from which the Common Law had emerged. Only with Henry VIII did sacramental marriage cease in England to transcend the potestas regalis, and thus cease to be sacrosanct in law.
After him, with the increasing refusal of sacramental realism by Western intellectuals, the rule of law, i.e., that “higher law” by which legal systems exist to protect the freedom of the free society, began to lack foundation. The new jurisprudence from Marsilius of Padua onward rested again upon the possession of force majeure by the civil government. Jeremy Bentham and John Austin were its apostles in England: their path had been cleared and charted by the Nominalism of William of Ockham, John of Jandun, John Wycliff and Henry VIII.
In 1958 Granville Williams brought the ultimate expression of this reduction of law to coercion from a no longer merry England to a United States wherein the rule of law had long been under assault by the students of the pragmatic jurisprudence taught by a Boston brahmin, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., while a member of the Harvard law faculty, and implemented by him for thirty years as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court.
Under Granville William’s guidance, the crime of abortion, whose criminality had long been recognized by the common-law and by every State jurisdiction to be a crime, was discovered by a demoralized Supreme Court to be worthy of protection by the Constitution. In the decades since the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973, secular jurisconsults have been intent upon abortion’s obvious implication, the disestablishment of what remains of marriage. Several professedly-Catholic moralists have supported this project.[180] Once again, this recourse to rationalization, to the reduction of historical freedom to immanent necessity, is inescapable once the sacramental foundation of freedom is refused. Inevitable also is the decay of the rule of law as the bulwark of a free society whose freedom is at one with thefree consensus of its members in the praxis of personal historical responsibility, a praxis that as free is nuptially ordered, and can alone ground the rule of law characteristic of and indispensable to a free society.
The feudal system had no remedy for the burgeoning awareness of its obsolescence. Its rigidly authoritarian and inherently coercive understanding of authority as patriarchal was incapable of reform. At bottom, the feudal order was static: “may no new thing arise” was its watchword.[181] The Gregorian Reform was that “new thing;” its assertion of the independence of the Church from all political oversight inserted an irreversible dynamic of the public exercise of religious freedom into the feudal world. The ground of this freedom is the Eucharistic liturgy, whose celebration of the sacrificial institution of the New Covenant is the indefeasible desacralization of the suppressive pieties of the feudal order, summed up in the keeping of one’s place, existing in a servile state while zealously guarding that coercive social order.
The reform of the Church is of course possible only by the fact of her divine institution, her Eucharistic liturgy. Nonetheless, four centuries of failed attempts at disentangling the Church’s from essentially feudal customs and preoccupations would pass between the Gregorian Reform and that promulgation of effective reform measures by the Council of Trent. Even then, a loyal implementation of the Conciliar edicts required a strength of character rare among the bishops charged with that implementation: St. Charles Borromeo, who took the Tridentine reforms seriously, had few admirers in the sixteenth century, and few imitarors since.
Among unanticipated consequences of the Gregorian Reform was an “Anti-Roman Affekt” among the clergy, the monastic communities, and the emerging middle class, which mirrored the antipathy of much of the lay preaching to the authority of the Church. Many bishops, and not only in Languedoc, were more comfortable with a familiar obeisance to their feudal lords than with obedience to a distant Pope.
Inasmuch as the Church’s authority is sacramental and therefore inherently historical, its institutional exercise includes an authoritative preaching of the revelation given in Jesus the Christ. With the denial of the sacramental mediation of salvation, a doctrine of predestination was waiting in the wings: Wycliff’s anti-sacramentalism would give it voice well before Calvin. The Church’s magisterial authority was challenged by charismatic homilists who usurped the teaching authority of the Church’s priestly ministry, as the hearing of their sermons was beginning to the replace lay participation in the Church’s Eucharistic liturgy.
Given the sacramental worship of the Church, a worship in truth of Him who is the Truth, the universal Logos, it must follow that the authentic Catholic interpretation of Scripture can only be ecclesial, i.e., liturgical: the preaching of the faith and the interpretation of the Scripture coincide. However, the pervasive atmosphere of revolt against authority as such included the usurpation of the Church’s teaching authority. With Wycliffe’s dismissal of the ancient doctrinal and moral traditions of the Church, and of the civil institutions they had informed, the preaching of the morality inherent in the freedom of the faith was displaced by the preaching of the new autonomy, the new irresponsibility which could abide no authority. This preaching needed no ecclesial warrant: the principle of sola scriptura had came into its own with its corollary, the private interpretation of Scripture, and the privatization of the faith, whose corollary is an ineffable sola fide..
Such unqualified dissent could not of course endure: we have seen it driven to imitate the ecclesial institution which had been the object of its bitter criticism: so also for the autonomous interpretation of Scripture. By the end of the Middle Ages it was mitigated by the rise of a new authority, that of a dissenting humanistic biblical scholarship. The magisterial authority of the Church’s bishops was displaced by the academic authority of biblical scholars such as Wycliff, later of Luther and Calvin. Their universal rejection of Eucharistic realism, particularly as inherent in the sacrifice of the Mass, in favor of a subjective Eucharistic symbolism, was implicit in the radical historical pessimism which was finally the single alternative to Eucharistic realism. Vehemently preached, this pessimism belied the ancient Catholic confidence in the realism of the Church’s sacramental worship.
These and similar threats to the Church and her sacramental worship were for the moment checked by the Fourth Lateran Council, but while the thirteenth century may well be celebrated by Catholics as “the greatest of centuries,” it ended in a failure of the intellectual confidence which had marked its theology, particularly the Thomist synthesis which may stand as the supreme expression of that intellectual optimism.
The next two centuries witnessed a steady decline from the high point of ecclesial confidence represented by the Fourth Lateran Council, and from the theological confidence most evident in the work of St. Thomas Aquinas. By the end of the thirteenth century his reliance upon Aristotle had been condemned, albeit ineffectually, by the University of Paris; by the beginning of the next century Duns Scotus’ theological synthesis would drastically limit what the human mind could know of God. A few decades later the brilliant attack by William of Ockham, a Franciscan monk, upon the failures of the traditional monist metaphysical reasoning captivated the theological faculties north of the Alps, but made a coherent theological defense of sacramental realism impossible. Under this Nominalist aegis, deprived of its inherent quaerens intellectum, the Catholic faith could only be an obedience, a sacrificium intellectus.
Catholics were beginning to hear and speak of “spiritual,” i.e., subjective, communion as a surrogate for sacramental Communion, seeing in that immediate personal devotion to the Eucharistic Lord an adequate substitute for the Eucharistic mediation of that Presence, with the added advantage of its independence of all priestly ministry of the Eucharist.
The subjectivism inherent in Eucharistic symbolism was becoming familiar and acceptable in the guise of a piety. This implied a privatization of the Church’s worship, such as the “fuga mundi” (‘flight from the world’) which Thomas à Kempis urges in his Imitation of Christ. At the same time there was a recurrence, particularly stressed by John of Ruysbroek, of a nuptial spirituality in which the soul of the worshiper is assumed without discussion to be the bride of Christ. This is inescapably a spirituality of immediacy, impatient of the sacramental mediation of the risen Christ by the Church’s manifestly public liturgical worship.
The stress placed by the Ruysbroek’s devotio moderna upon personal union with Christ in Eucharistic worship melded easily with “spiritual communion;” and a consequently diminished interest in the ecclesial mediation of the risen Lord. Rather, there arose an enthusiasm for a preached spirituality. The greatest preacher of his age, Gerhard de Groote, the founder of the Brothers of the Common Life, a man of unimpeachable orthodoxy and sanctity, displayed no interest in ordination to the priesthood. Ordination to the diaconate was ordination to preach, and he looked for no more, whether before or after his conversion to the extraordinarily austere practice of his faith which marked his latter years. He died in 1381 at the age of forty-two of a disease caught while serving the poor and the sick. During those years he was much influenced by Ruysbroek’s spirituality of immediacy, of union with God independent of any sacramental mediation of gratia Christi. De Groote’s preaching beca,e the major inspiration of the devotio moderna. Its stress upon immediate union with the risen Christ was laced with a vigorous condemnation of the sinful lives of the clergy, diocesan and regular. His followers understandably distanced themselves from the religious orders whose laxity and corruption de Groote had condemned: they took no religious vows but undertook to live private lives of personal humility and poverty, patterned on the practices of the primitive Church as set out in the Acts of the Apostles. Inevitably, their intensely personal spirituality distanced them from participation in the community Church’s liturgical worship.
De Groote had studied widely and well: he was intent upon the re-establishment of learning in a Netherlands which had become steeped in ignorance To this end, his followers founded a flourishing educational establishment which filled Germany and the Netherlands with its schools, which started out intent on providing a solid elementary education, but from that beginning the educational mission of the Brethren developed to include institutions of advanced humanistic learning, including theology: Gabriel Biel was one of their students. As the educational goal of the schools of the Brethren looked to the imparting of a well instructed humanism, so the theological curriculum was also imbued with humanism. Humanistic theology became more and more autonomous: rejecting “Scholasticism” entailed a concentration upon scriptural scholarship as its adequate reform of the Nominalist scholasticism which had begun to dominate and to render sterile the academic theology of the late fourteenth century. In the fifteenth it had achieved that dominance. Under it, Catholic theology began to die. The nominalist impact upon doctrinal and moral theology was disastrous. The Nominalist refusal of metaphysics led to an abstract conceptual speculation increasingly remote from historical reality. Its thrust was inherently anti-intellectual, and students of theology whom the Brethren’s schools had introduced to the new humanistic learning looked beyond the aridity of that scholasticism to the humanistic study of scripture, a study governed not by the ecclesial tradition as all theology had been prior to the Nominalist revolution, but by a solid Latin literary training, sometimes, if not often, enhanced by Greek and Hebrew scholarship.
Under this humanist, proto-secular influence, the private interpretation of scripture had become normal, and with it a disdain for the Nominalist “scholasticism” and for the Catholic doctrinal and moral tradition which that “scholasticism” had stultified and, in the minds many of the humanist scholars, with which it was identified. From the outset the adepts of the “new learning” expressed an increasingly overt contempt for the res Catholica. This contempt had been festering since the coincidence in the eleventh century of the Berengarian heresy, the rise of lay preaching, and the resurgence, in the Netherlands, in Germany, and especially in southern France and northern Italy, of the ancient dualist heresy, traveling as Catharism―the name denotes a purification and connotes a radical flight from history, and a radical opposition to the Church’s celebration of salvific history.
We have seen that the Cathars soon found alliances among the Berengarians, the Petrobrusians, the Henricians, the Waldensians, and later among the Lollards, who were unified in a single increasingly militant rejection of Catholicism.
Infused with the “new learning,” theology became vituperative, imbued with an invective mined from the Latin literature then being intensively explored: not all of it was edifying. The objects of this attack were at first the institutional Church and particularly the clergy, many of whom merited it, but from the eleventh century it also focused upon the Mass. Opposition to the Church’s sacramental liturgy, particularly to the Eucharistic realism at the center of that liturgy, was instinctive to the Cathars, and it had begun to contaminate the clergy. Cathars. welcomed by the nobility of southern France early in the eleventh century, had found ready support among the middle class, and many converts. The bishops of Languedoc, accustomed to subordination to the nobility, provided ineffective opposition.
For all its loathing of “scholasticism,” the “new learning” of the humanists was in full agreement with the Nominalist substitution of grammar for metaphysics, with that tendency to lend a sacramental significance to literature as such. This was not novel with Erasmus, for we find it as early as Origen, but with Erasmus it would underwrite the sola scriptura dogmatism of the new learning. Nominalism had effectively overturned the still-cosmological metaphysics of the High Middle Ages by cutting language off from its traditional anchor in historical objectivity, thus opening a path for a biblical exegesis which immediately dehistoricized the “literal sense” of scripture by identifying it with the product of an at best disinterested philological examination of a text which on Nominalist grounds could have no intrinsic intelligibility. Whatever significance was assigned to the text had to be supplied by the exegete’s grammatical and literary skills. Obviously this view of exegesis was consistent with the private interpretation of Scripture, but it was an interpretation uniquely warranted by the humanistic scholarship of the exegete, whose application of that learning to the biblical text was routinely spiced by a bitter execration of the Church’s traditional exegesis, which the humanists gladly mistook for that of the Schoolmen’s tedious logic-chopping.
Erasmus’ translation of the Greek New Testament offers a ready illustration of this hermeneutic.[182] The same humanistic animus characterizes the theology of Luther and Calvin: like Erasmus, both had abjured not only the metaphysical interest inseparable from the sacramental realism of Catholic worship, but also the Catholic emphasis upon the historical truth of Scripture: i.e., the historically-grounded “senses of Scripture,” which had occupied the Church Fathers from the second century. In this the Reformers accepted as of course the Nominalist evacuation of intrinsic significance from history as such, quite as had the untutored dissenters of the eleventh century who read into scripture what they wanted it to mean.
The Church’s liturgical exegesis, the homiletics which took for granted the intrinsic significance of scripture, a meaning at once doctrinal and moral, which had for centuries informed the patristic lectio divina, was now rejected out of hand, along with the validity of the liturgy which grounded it. The revolt against the ecclesial tradition is always liturgical before it is doctrinal or moral, for the Catholic ecclesial tradition is identically the liturgy. Common to all the manifestations of this revolt is a Eucharistic symbolism which denies all historical mediation of the salvation given us by the One Sacrifice of Jesus the Lord:
Absent that celebration of the historical because Eucharistically signed immanence of the risen Lord, his incarnation could have no impact on the world of men; thus the Lord Jesus’ becoming flesh was futile, annulled by the flesh as fleshly. In consequence of this dehistoricization of the Catholic Church’s liturgical, doctrinal and moral tradition, we are left in our sins, apart from the Eucharistic institution of the “One Flesh” now celebrated by the marriages of the laity, supported by a pastoral clergy newly awakened to its importance.
Ockham’s systematic Nominalism is the quintessential expression of an ancient tradition. The binary, ‘either-or’ Eleatic rationality rediscovered by Carolingians such as Ratramnus and Rhabanus Maurus, exploited by Berengarius two centuries later, and then toyed with by Abelard, was given a systematic development by William of Ockham. [183] It entailed the nullification, the utter devaluation, of the finite world as the necessary implication of understanding Being as an absolute Unity, whether as God or cosmos.
The Eleatics had grasped this point six centuries before the birth of Christ. Parmenides affirmed the absolute unity of being as necessarily true, and accepted the consequent denial of the significance of our experience of the world’s dynamic multiplicity. The defensive ‘paradoxes’ of his disciple Zeno were framed to exploit the absurdities entailed in what Parmenides supposed to be the sole alternative to absolute unity of being, its absolute disunity. This “either-or” or binary logic is the product of the truly ferocious univocity inherent in any absolutizing of reality or of thought, for it can then tolerate no analogy. Correspondingly, the rejection of analogous predication, as by Ockham’s predecessor in interest, Duns Scotus, rests upon a dehistoricizing of being and thought, the transformation of the historical quaerens intellectum into a flight from history whose goal cannot but be the extinction of the quest by its absorption or dissolution into the Absolute. Nominalism is the embodiment of this quest.
The fragmenting impact of Zeno’s binary logic led Plato to the mathematicization of the fragmented world, the imposition of an extrinsic rational order upon the otherwise irrational experience of historical existence. His disciple, Aristotle, retained in his Metaphysics the Eleatic postulate of the intrinsically necessary unity of being, but the genius of Aristotle had postulated the indefinite or potential divisibility of the finite world, rejecting thereby the Platonic postulate of an absolute division, an absolute multiplicity, and thus the radical disunity of the finite world, no fragment of which could possess an inherent unity.
Thus while in Aristotelianism reality was still intelligible only as necessarily ordered, Aristotle’s act-potency metaphysics―summarily, the possibility of change inherent in every material entity―validated the literal truth of the language in universal use, the truth of whose spontaneous joinder of subject and predicate in its affirmations and negations Plato had relativized, reduced to mere opinion. True knowledge of the material world had been excluded by Plato’s matter-form (hylemorphic) analysis of the matter and form constituting its fragments. With hyle (matter) and morphe (form) understood in binary terms, i.e., as mutually exclusive principles of multiplcicity and of unity, incapable of meaningful integration, Plato’s hylemorphism eliminated the intrinsic intelligibility of the physical universe, i.e., of history, and in consequence the humanly ineluctable quest for truth required a flight from history to the world of Forms, the exemplars of the historical entities whose materiality contradicted the unity, the truth, the beauty of the encountered world. Thus Plato’s hylemorphism, his matter-form analysis of material being, could not accept any intrinsic significance in the physical reality whose irrationality contaminate s he world in which men live.
Aristotele’s act–potency metaphysics re-integrated the physical universe whose integrity Plato’s hylemorphic application of the Eleatic logic had refused, and underwrote also the literal truth of the language which appropriated and expressed its intrinsic act-potency intelligibility and unity. This integration and metaphysical validation of the literal truth of ordinary language amounted also to the discovery of logic as the implication of the act-potency metaphysical analysis. Logic then would become the criteriological principle of the intrinsically necessary intelligibility of a literal statement, a criterion which could be effective only for as long as the act-potency metaphysics was sub-understood by the logician: i.e., for as long as the subject and predicate of the literal affirmation or negation were recognized to be related to each other in an act-potency metaphysical unity.
The Aristotelian metaphysical foundation of the literal truth of discourse could not survive the Neoplatonic melding if Aristotelian logic with the Platonic hylemorphism. Within this incongruous application of logically-ordered discourse to a metaphysics whose matter-form polarities were incapable of rational resolution, the logically ordered truth of literal affirmation and negation lacked metaphysical foundation, for the Platonic matter-form analysis could not support literal statements of metaphysical truth: the act-potency continuum of predicate and subject in literally true affirmations was no longer recognized by logicians.
Neoplatonism was a late arrival in the Mediterranean world: its influence was interrupted by the collapse of the Roman Empire, and by the centuries of cultural decay which followed. Particularly, the quest for truth and rationality which had led Plato to find the ultimate source of intelligibility in supernal Forms, and which had led Aristotle to find it in an “agent intellect,“ was displaced by a juridical interest: the categories of law had become more meaningful than those of philosophy. Thus the Neoplatonic dissociation of logic from metaphysics became the more effective.
With this dissociation in place, logic became subordinate to grammar rather than, as before, governing it as the expression of the underlying immanent necessities of the act-potency metaphysics of Aristotelianism. The result was a “new logic,” the so-called “dialectic” which emerged in the ninth-century rediscovery by Carolingian theologians of the Eleatic-Platonic fragmentation of the historical world into entities and concepts each mutually exclusive of all others in a “great chain of being” whose unity could only be a pantheism. This latency was explored by John Scotus Eriugena in a brilliant Christological synthesis which remained unappreciated until adapted by William of St. Thierry three centuries later. Apart from such conversion to the Catholic tradition, the Neoplatonic atomization of reality and of language raised the “problem of the one and the many” which again became inexorable. Lacking any metaphysical interest, the binary propensities of logically-ordered discourse soon became evident.
Under this Eleatic aegis the more cosmologically-minded Carolingians began the analytic dissociation of the free unity of the Eucharistic signum and signatum , but not without opposition from Augustinian loyalists, notably such as those whose final fruit was the Berengarian reduction of Eucharistic realism to subjectivity.
Thereafter the primary task of Catholic theologians became the vindication of the realism of the Church’s Eucharistic worship, a task which required the construction of a theological metaphysics, for the vindication in view could be neither empirical nor ideal. The theological construction of metaphysics was impeded to the point of futility by the unexamined cosmological postulates which Catholic theology had inherited from Plato and Aristotle, chief among them the necessary unity of being and therefore of truth.
Catholic theology cannot but be a free inquiry into the free truth of the Revelation in Christ. That inquiry is entirely incompatible with, and cannot but be defeated by, the cosmological rationality whose highest development was that of St. Thomas’ adaptation of Aristotelianism to theological purposes. The fourteenth century witnessed to its failure; unfortunately, the cosmological postulates of the failed metaphysical theologies survived in Ockham’s effort to protect the dignity of God from what he thought to be an indignity, the theological ascription to God of theologically-confected “divine ideas.”
Ockham’s Nominalist rejection of metaphysics in theology amounted to a rejection of the traditional Augustinian theology of history as intrinsically significant, and the substitution for it of a grammar, a nonhistorical hermeneutic governed by an abstract logic, whose criterion of theological truth was the Absolute, the One God, to whom the Father was subsumed. As had Parmenides, Ockham presupposed the absolute unity of being as divine, as the One God of a Neoplatonizing theology those temptation had been a Parmenidean reduction of all distinctions into that ultimate Unity. The One God, considered as absolute, could not but be unqualified omnipotence, the potentia absoluta which left no remainder. No relative unity could co-exist with God so understood: no relative truth, no relative goodness, no relative causality. The One God must be conceived as the sole agent; no secondary causality, no secondary agency, is intelligible. In brief, God as absolute majesty, omnipotence, authority and truth can have no analogues. There can exist no finite unity, or truth, or beauty which would not relativize God the Absolute.
The perceived existence of finite beings can then be only by an entirely arbitrary divine condescension, which Ockham names the potentia ordinata, which cannot but be intrinsically unintelligible. Inasmuch as the economy of salvation exists only by the concession of the divine potentia absoluta, the distinction between the potentia absoluta and the potentia divina is a matter of faith. Inasmuch as he was also a Catholic theologian, Ockham affirmed the reality of the Christian economy of salvation: he contravened no truth of the Catholic faith. To save its truth, he posed, as has been seen, over against the divine potentia absoluta, a potentia ordinata by which God concedes a nominal but still extrinsic unity, goodness and truth to the historical order. However the potentia ordinata concedes no relative or secondary causality. This denial of secondary causality entails a denial of personal moral responsibility. Thus the absolute predestination of every human being to salvation or damnation without reference to historical conduct became inescapable, although that view of predestination does not enter significantly into Ockham’s theology.
Equally inescapable is the rejection of sacramental causality: this is at one with the comparable rejection of the intrinsic significance of finite reality. Again, Ockham did not go so far. Similarly, there can be no presence of the divine, of the absolute, in history: the finite realities of the historical order are simply incapable of any mediation of the divine: finitum non capax infiniti (the finite cannot mediate the infinite). Further, one must not presume upon the concessions granted by the potentia ordinata: God remains the potentia absoluta, and cannot conceivably be determined by his condescension to the economy of salvation as potentia ordinata. God as absolute neither is nor can be “bound” by any finite reality. Here we have the ground of that element of Calvin’s theology designated (by Lutheran critics) the “extra Calvinisticum,” Calvin’s insistence upon the inability of the Church, her sacraments, the economy in short, to bind the One God, the Absolute. Calvin suppressed the Socinian heresy. but Unitarianism was waiting in the wings.
Finally, it must follow that inasmuch as the finite realities we encounter have no intrinsic significance, their evaluation by ourselves has a merely functional or operational value. However, even in a world which of itself has no truth to be asserted, provision must be made for the fact that still one must converse, must still speak of a world in some sense ordered, possessed at least of a surface intelligibility. Ockham provided for this human necessity by the attribution of common names to common phenomena, clearly a work of cultures, not of individuals who, in learning languages, learn the names by which their world has meaning and so is discussable. The naming is of course fictive, but that need not preclude the writing of such books as Ockham’s brilliant Summa Logicae, a summary of his Nominalism.
It must be remembered that Nominalism understands the transcendence of this world by the One God to be His absence from it. The divine subjection of the universe to his unqualified omnipotence establishes no relation of God to the creation. Ockham’s philosophy presupposes the Deus Unus of the medieval cosmological theology, whose absolute omnipotence is also an absolute Self-immanence. The medieval theologians had understood the Deus Unus, the Creator, to be incapable of extrinsic relation. They knew a nominal compatibility of the Deus Unus with the Trinity of Persons, but within the economy, the medieval notion of the Deus Unus stood, and still stands, in the way of an acknowledgement of the Personal unity of the Jesus Christ, the Son. Ockham’s Trinitarian doctrine is similarly abstract; the Persons are eternal simply: hence the insoluble problem posed by the Incarnation of the Son. The divine stance, as absolute, to the world is that of an agent to the object upon which he acts but to which his action neither establishes nor can establish an intrinsic relation, for the object has no intrinsic actuality to which a relation could refer. Justin Martyr had dealt with this defect in his Christology simply by ignoring it; his Christ is entirely historical. Thirteen centuries later, Ockham failed to ignore the same problem and, in trying to deal with it found in Jesus the Christ a surd he could not resolve.
Ockham, as a Christian, recognized that the Deus Unus is the Trinity: consequently he transferred the attributes of the Personal divinity of the Nominalist One God to God the Father, but still understood in Nominalist terms: i.e., as nonhistorical. Consequently, the Father’s absolute, nonhistorical and entirely immanent omnipotence cannot be fulfilled, as the Catholic faith assumes, in his sending of the Son to give the Spirit, simply because Ockham’s reduction of divinity to omnipotence must be conceived in nonhistorical terms, i.e., as immanent. Its exercise cannot terminate transitively, i.e., in finitude.
It is evident that the divine omnipotence, thus viewed, cannot be regarded as benevolent, despite Ockham’s attempted mitigation of this deficiency―in view of the economy of salvation―by positing a factual divinely-imposed limit upon God’s full exercise of his omnipotence, but the mitigation is only extrinsic: nothing is changed by this concession, neither in the world nor in God, for God cannot deny himself.
Ockham was primarily a logician, concerned rather with terms than with essences; following Scotus, he supposed that we have an intuitive knowledge of singulars, and opposed the metaphysics of Thomas and Duns Scotus, although in some respects, such as in upholding the univocity of “being,” he is a follower of Duns Scotus. Evaluations of his “Nominalism” differ; whether as the “harvest” or the “autumn” of the medieval quest for theological synthesis.[184] It is quite clear that the Nominalist theology cannot deal adequately with sacramental realism; its rationale is basic to the Eucharistic symbolism that is the inescapable consequence of the Reformation denial of Jesus the Christ’s institution of the sacrifice of the Mass, upon which Catholic sacramental realism is grounded.
For the purposes of Eucharistic theology, the themes of Ockham’s system which are of chief interest are his atomistic isolation of singular things from each other, by the denial of any intrinsic connection between them, together with his more fundamental denial of the secondary causality by which finite things are concretely related. Ockham is thereby forced to rely entirely upon the omnipotence of God as the sole principle of explanation, which is to say, the sole criterion of theological reasoning. [185]
This explanation, as dependent upon the divine will, is therefore entirely abstract. It abolishes whatever intrinsic intelligibility things may be thought to possess. Created reality is as it is solely by the omnipotent will of God; no other explanation has validity. Therefore there is no sacramental causality, and Ockham’s theology of the sacraments is entirely occasionalist, as that of Duns Scotus had been, with the addition of the empiricism that specifies Nominalism: viz., a satisfaction with merely verbal accounts whose legitimacy is their noncontradictory character, beyond which the quaerens intellectum must cease to inquire, which inhibition is explicit in “Ockham’s razor:” This maxim, entia non multiplicanda sunt sine necessitate (entities [i.e., beings] are not to be multiplied without necessity). abolishes the free intelligibility of creation which, as free can only be intrinsic. It reduces to an intellectual servility the classic (Anselmian) understanding of theology as fides quaerens intellectum, and similarly transforms the human imaging of God to a comparable personal irresponsibility: the passivity that befits a “creature” in the presence of the Absolute. Ockham’s logic is the cosmological rationality we have criticized in St. Thomas, whose view of morality also is conformist and whose understanding of creation supposes it to be ungraced, as not invoking the divine Missions. Hence he supposes the “Creator” to be the absolute Deus Unus, i.e., to be monadic. This postulate, provides a basis for the Nominalist extrapolation of a divinity whose transcendence is his immanence, his necessary absence from history instead of his revealed free immanence in it. It is obvious that God so understood cannot create.
With and following Duns Scotus, Ockham prefers to suppose the non-impossibility of the simultaneous existence of two substances in the consecrated host; this postulate gives the more honor to the omnipotence of God. Thomas considered such a coexistence intrinsically contradictory, but no question of intrinsic possibility or intelligibility exists for Ockham; such a question would be metaphysical and he refuses its legitimacy, for it supposes a knowledge which reaches to unities beyond that of singular existing things, which Ocham does not admit. For Ockham, possibility is established by the inability to demonstrate empirically the impossibility of an affirmation. The reliance is thus upon empirical experience, and upon logic; in the latter study Ockham made real advances upon the thirteenth century.
It is also evident that Ocham’s notion of substance has nothing to do with Thomas’s notion; for Ockham, substance is either extended matter, or immaterial spirit; the reality of immaterial “spirit” is taken to be established by faith. And faith, on this voluntaristic account, amounts to assent to what is taught authoritatively by the Church.
For Thomas, “transubstantiation” had involved an intrinsic relation or causal nexus between the sign and the signified. Consequently Thomas attempted to provide a metaphysical account of the intrinsic causes or conditions of intrinsic possibility of the truth of the Words of Institution: “This is my Body,” which he reads as affirming this nexus.
Scotus, to a lesser degree, also appears to maintain an intrinsic nexus, since he insists that the term of the conversion of the elements (the bread and wine) is not nothingness, but the Body of Christ, and so refuses any explanation which involves the annihilation of the bread and the substitution for it of the Body of Christ.
Ockham however does accept the annihilation of the bread, and supposes the mere succession to it of the Body of Christ to be sufficient to support the doctrine (normative if not yet solemnly defined) of transubstantiation.
Thus he supports the doctrine by showing that it is not intrinsically contradictory, in that one cannot empirically refute the annihilation-succession schema. But “companation” is equally possible: that fact that one is true and not the other is by the will of God (potentia Dei ordinata) revealed to him by the teaching of the Church.
Ockham argues that transubstantiation requires two incompatible terms: these cannot be ens and ens, nor non ens and non ens; consequently, they must be ens and non ens. Therefore, given the doctrine of transubstantiation, the ens of the bread is reduced by the words of consecration to the non ens of a purely conceptual possibility. In this fashion, the Scotist postulate of a transitus in the bread or wine from an esse hic (being here) to a non-esse hic (not being here) is read as a purely logical sequence, one providing no ontological sequence or link between the substance of the bread and the Body of Christ. As a result, the remaining “species” or empirical appearance of the bread is entirely without sign value. Ockham ignores the possibility of such a link, due as it appears to his merely empirical reading of logically correct language.
Ockham considers that the Body of Christ is the formal term of the Eucharistic transubstantiation, while Christ’s blood, soul, & divinity are present per accidens. The manner in which he conceives of the possibility of Christ’s bodily presence requires an examination of his notion of quantity.
For Ockham, quantity is a connotative term, not an absolute term. Thus, quantity is logically (i.e., conceptually), but not really (i.e., empirically), different from substance. It is not permitted to infer from the logical difference, a real distinction between the denotations of the terms, for each denotes the same material singular existing thing. Otherwise put, Ockham maintans that there is no empirical difference between what is referred to by the term ‘substance,’ and that which is referred to by the term ‘quantity.’
For him, material substance is quantified by the first cause, God who by his potentia absoluta,can create or effect a non-quantified material substance, which then behaves exactly like an immaterial or spiritual substance.
God can do this because although the merely logical distinction between quantity and substance does not-establish or in itself constitute a real altereity or distinction between the denotations of these terms, nevertheless for Ockham it implies that their real separation from each other is not an impossibility: i.e., their terminological distinction sufficiently establishes the non-contradiction of their “absolute” separation. In brief, whatever is logically possible is also really possible, by appeal to the absolute power of God, and the test of logical possibility is finally terminological, or nominal.
The non-quantified material substance thus provided has clear antecedents in the “spiritual matter” of such Franciscan-Augustinian entities as the Bonaventurian angel. The Augustinian-Franciscan tradition had for long objected to the notion of a nonmaterial individuation, even for spiritual substances, and Ockham is well within that tradition. Such a nonextended material substance is present definitive (sometimes spelled diffinitive) as opppsed to a presence circumscriptive, i.e., a presence in physical contact with its environment, as would be the case were it extended. This “spiritualizing” of material reality is the Ockhamist version of the Thomist presence per modum substantiae.
For Thomas, quantity is the same as divisibility; for Scotus and for Ockham, it is to have “parts outside of parts.” For Thomas and for Scotus, quantity is really distinct from substance; for Thomas particularly, quantity, as the most fundamental of material accidents, is the “subject of inhesion” of all the qualitative accidents (i.e., “species”) of the bread after transubstantiation. This postulate assures that only the accident of quantity is without a “subject of inhesion” or substance and consequently it is quantity alone that needs to be upheld by divine omnipotence in the event of the transubstantiation of the bread and wine of the offertory.
Further, for Thomas and for Scotus, Christ is present in the Eucharist with his quantity, although for Scotus, the quantified Christ is present diffinitive, i.e., without extension. As has been seen, this term is also used by Ockham, but its meaning is changed by Ockham’s identification of quantity and material substance. This accounts for his invocation of the potentia absoluta divina to actualize the otherwise nominal or terminological distinction between the two, and thereby to effect what otherwise would be paradoxical:, viz., an immaterial material substance, but one whose presence, as diffinitive, is without extension.
It is this unextended Body of Christ, conceived in terms reminiscent of the Bonaventurean angel, whose presence in the Eucharist is thereby thought of as diffinitive by Ockham. There is no change in the totality of Christ, (his Personal unity of humanity and divinity (which is not to be identified with the Augustinian Christus totus, the One Flesh of Christ and the Church). The unextended Christ is thereby made present in the Eucharistic conversion, by something which would be analogous to local motion, were that not barred by his lack of extension. This is in effect the “spiritualization” of the Eucharistic presence. It is not far from the Lutheran understanding of the Eucharistic presence as effective by faith alone, which Luther’s Nominalism permitted.
Because the substance of Christ is present in the Eucharist, by Ockham’s principles the Eucharistic presence should be visible, for material singulars are known directly, i.e., intuitively, not mediately, through their impact upon the sensoria (the physical senses), and through the consequent production of phantasms, which, when illumined by the activity of the mind, become intelligible and then known, as in St. Thomas’s account of sense knowledge.
Thus, Ockham’s epistemology holds that the knowledge of material things is immediate, a matter of intuition. Material singulars, and all existents insofar as they are known at all, are known by an intellectual intuition, entirely independent of circumscriptive (physical) contact with the reality known. This is close to Duns Scotus’ intuition of the haecceitas of the material entity, a knowledge which as intuitive cannot be categorized. Ordinarily, knowledge of the material entity occurs through the secondary causality of the object known, although God can, as primary cause, dispense with such secondary causality and cause to be known existents which in fact do not exist. In the case of the Eucharist, the reverse occurs: it is by God’s ordination that Christ is not known in the Eucharist, although in principle He is knowable there, because He exists there.
On Ockham’s principles it becomes impossible to distinguish between a sacramental and a “spiritual” reception of the Eucharist: i.e., a reception in voto: viz. the “spiritual” reception earlier discussed.. This result of throwing the reality of the reception in the direction of a function of the dispositions of the recipient and so puts in question the need for priestly consecration of the elements. The piety of the via moderna, then in vogue, had an anti-intellectual and anti-institutional cast with a close affinity to Ockham’s view of the Eucharist. Its Nominalism influenced Luther’s theology.
England had been little affected by the Gregorian Reform whose repercussions had so disturbed continental Europe, although from the time of Anselm of Bec’s reluctant acceptance of the office of Archbishop of Canterbury in the last decade of the eleventh century down to the murder of Archbishop Thomas à Becket in that cathedral by the servants of Henry II, the investiture controversy between crown and crozier was as evident in England as it had been in the continental versions of feudalism.[186] Neither had England been troubled by the Catharism which in the twelfth and thirteenth century had pervaded southern France and parts of what are now Holland and Belgium. Until the latter fourteenth-century England had in fact known no heresy.
However, the impact upon English society of the Hundred Years War with France had been disastrous for England as well as for France. Many of the returning English soldiers took easily to banditry, while the quality of the parish clergy had become such as to be an object of public ridicule. As the trial of Joan of Arc witnessed, some of the higher clergy had become mere secular servants of the Crown: a few of them had married. The monasteries and convents reflected this general decline in clerical morality and morale. As the Church’s pastors ceased to merit the respect ordinarily given them, their conduct undercut their personal religious authority, it could not but undercut also the authority of the Church.
Earlier in the fourteenth century, the Averrhoist philosopher Marsilius of Padua had offered what would become the standard academic resolution of the long-standing conflict between royal prerogative and episcopal authority. He simply subordinated the Church to the temporal or political authority, a resolution which Ockham and John of Jandun, among others, also advocated, and which could only add to the unrest of that troubled century.[187] There is a correspondence between the political subordination of the Church to civil government and the refusal of sacramental realism which reduces sacramental efficacy to political efficacy. This would be played out during Wycliff’s career. Yet worse, in mid-century the bubonic plague, the “black death,” had broken out in continental Europe and inevitably also in England: it would depopulate Europe by a third. The resulting scarcity of labor in England as elsewhere increased its value, with a consequent tension between the desire of the laboring class for prosperity, and of the propertied class for an economic stability threatened by an increase in the cost of labor.
Thus there had arisen in England in the last decades of the fourteenth century the same surging lower-class resentment of the political and ecclesial authority as risen earlier on the continent, and the rise of a similar distrust of authority as such, thus of the political and religious institutions in England. The resentment would find its justification and its the leader in John Wycliff, a brilliant professor of theology at Oxford, at once a theologian, a scriptural scholar, and a man learned in canon and common law. The anti-sacramental influence of Marsilius of Padua’s radical populism is evident in Wycliff’s theology as in his jurisprudence.
Wycliff was born about 1324 of a prosperous familty: he entered Oxford University, where he earned a baccalaureate in theology and was ordained. He became the master of his college (Balliol) and was given a local parish whose care permitted him to remain in Oxford, where he went on to take a master’s degree and a doctorate in theology.
His theology was strongly influenced by Ockham, an influence especially evident in his supposition that acceptance of the authority of the Church’s doctrinal tradition requires a sacrificium intellectus, i.e., an obedience to a diktat rather than understanding of a doctrine. He was thus led to reject the authority of the ecclesial magisterium in favor of the authority of scripture alone: he tested the truth of the Church’s doctrinal tradition by submitting it to his own biblical scholarship, by which test he could not but find it wanting. This viewpoint immediately undercut the authority of the historical Church: in fact, it undercut the authenticity of every historical institution.
In particular Wycliff denied the sacramental realism upon which the Church is founded, rejecting priestly and episcopal ordination, Eucharistic transubstantiation, the sacrifice of the Mass, auricular confession, clerical celibacy, and the value of prayer for the dead. He taught the universal priesthood of the baptized, and for the ultimate authority of Scripture, over the crown as well as the Church. He denied membership in the Church to the eternally damned. Inasmuch as in history the eternally damned are not concretely distinguishable from the eternally elect, Wycliff cannot admit a visible Church, although he did not understand the Church to be merely eschatological, for he considered it to include historical members, however indiscernible their election may be. He denied all ecclesial authority apart from that of Christ himself, as uttered in Scripture and, of course, interpreted by his own objective scholarship. In this connection, Wycliff also denied authority in sinners, whether priests and royal officials. He followed Marsilius, Ockham, John of Jan dun and the Guidelines generally in opposing the ownership of property by Church: he concluded, as earlier had the Spiritual Franciscans, to the Church’s disestablishment by way of denying the legitimacy of its ownership of temporal goods. He taught that, in principle, church property insofar as temporal belongs to the crown. He upheld the crown against the papacy in re the feudal tax levied by the papacy since the early thirteenth century when King John I had made England a papal fief to save his throne. On the same grounds, Wycliff attacked indulgences, as connoting an authority over temporal goods.
Finally, about 1380, Wycliff organized bands of preachers (Lollards) for the preaching of these doctrines: at first, they were priests, later on he admitted laity to the preaching office. Thus arose the Lollard heresy which in various ways prefaced the Reformation, although there is nothing in Lollardy that Marsilius had not been condemned for urging in his Defensor Pacis, wherein he developed the rationale for a single law and a single source of law, the will of the people. This anticipation of Rousseau was a secularism outré, a universal solvent of historical institutions as such. Marsilius is not usually listed among the Proto-Reformers, but his anticipation of the Reformation’s antisacramentalism and historical pessimism is evident.
Wycliff’s doctrines were condemned after the Peasant’s Revolt in 1381, and his Lollards were excommunicated. He himself was never excommunicated; he continued to teach and preach his antisacramentalism until his death in 1384. His doctrine traveled to Bohemia (Czechoslovakia) by way of the connection effected between the two nations by the marriage of the English King Richard II to Anne of Bohemia, the daughter of Bohemian King Wenceslas IV, who at the time ruled most of continental Europe; the marriage opened Bohemia to English traders.
By the end of the next century more texts of Wyclif are said to have existed in Bohemia than in England. Thus Wycliff’s rejection of the doctrinal authority of the Church by the submission of her authority to a learned reading of Scripture, and his corresponding undercutting of the political authority of the crown by the same device, came to influence John Hus and, through him finally to challenge the authority of the Council of Constance, which had met to resolve the Great Schism that had occupied nearly forty years of the fifteenth century.
John Hus, fifty years younger than Wycliff, was born in Bohemia, in 1378, eight years before the forty-year “Great Schism” began. In 1415’ he was executed as a heretic by the Council of Constance, three years before it brought the Schism to its end. Hus’ antisacramentalism, like Wycliff’s has roots in the anti-institutionalism of the Cathars, and in their influence upon the early lay preaching whose antisacramentalism resonates with that of the Cathars. Further developed by the dissident groups led by men such as Peter de Bruys, by the Waldensians and the “Spiritual” Franciscans, the anti-sacramental dissent was inherently a politics, a “hermeneutic of suspicion,” a refusal of legitimacy to any institution of authority. Nonetheless, the proximate origin of Hus’ doctrine is Wycliff’s calculated rejection of sacramental worship as such, with a particular focus upon the Lollard rejection of Eucharistic realism, and the consequent and inexorable reduction of liturgy to politics. a doctrine which Hus adapted to his own antisacramentalism and applied in his own political radicalism.
Hus was born to a peasant family in Husinetz, the small Bohemian town from which he took his name. He was early attracted to the priesthood; travelling to Prague in his youth, he supported himself as a university scholar by singing and serving the liturgy in the churches there. His character was outstanding, as also was the diligence shown in his studies at the University of Prague, where he earned the Master’s degree in theology, was ordained, and began to preach the reform of the Church with great enthusiasm and effect.
The corrupt Bohemian Church was uninterested in the reform movements which were led in that country by the Carthusians and the Augustinian Canons. Preaching Church reform as Wycliff had understood it, Hus spread the Lollard heresy, particularly in upholding the authority of Scripture over the Church, and in denying the authority of a sinful pope.
Hus twice became rector of the University of Prague; he was a preacher of great eloquence and conviction. Unfortunately, he was entirely committed to Wycliff’s heresy, and obstinately resisted all efforts by his archbishop to make him comply with a directive by Innocent VIII actively to oppose the spread of Wycliff’s heresy. Hus had been Wycliff’s powerful defender and advocate in the University, and was responsible for much of Wycliff’s influence there. He continued to defend Wycliff to the point of protesting anti-Wycliff measures by popes previous to Pope John XXII. Finally, in 1410, the Archbishop of Prague excommunicated him for continuing to adhere to Wycliff’s heresy. Hus ignored the excommunication, and continued to advocate Wycliff’s doctrines; thus in 1411 the Archbishop published throughout Prague his sentence of 1410 excommunicating Hus.
Hus continued as before, but now also undertook to condemn and vigorously oppose the Bulls in which John XXII proclaimed an indulgence for a crusade he had ordered. Hus aroused the university and the local people against the indulgence so effectively as to prompt the Vatican to reaffirm his excommunication of 1410, and to place his residence under interdict: later the Pope ordered him to be imprisoned. To avoid this, Hus left Prague for Asti in southern Bohemia, where he wrote his major work, De ecclesia. Returning to Prague, he posted another Wycliff-inspired treatise, De sex erroribus, on the door of the Bethlehem chapel, where he had been accustomed to preach. Jean Gerson, then Professor of Theology and Chancellor of the Cathedral of Notre Dame and of the University of Paris, drew from De ecclesia and De sex erroribus a sufficient evidence of heresy to prompt his warning the new Archbishop of Prague, Konrad von Vechta, of the heretical stance of Hus’ theology.
Later in November of the same year, 1414, the Council of Constance assembled. Under the urging of King Sigismund of Hungary, and provided with the King’s safe-conduct, Hus chose to appear before that body and defend his doctrine. However, there he was again condemned. Refusing to recant, he was burned at the stake by the authority of the Council on June 6 of that year, in violation of the safe-conduct given him by King Sigismund.
His death gave rise to a continuing controversy: he is still honored by the people of Czechoslovakia as a martyr. Of his courage, even his audacity, there can be no question, nor can his honesty been put in question. His fault, or, rather, his fatal error, was the politicization of doctrine inseparable from his Wycliffian Nominalism. The imprisonment and execution of Hus by the order of the Council was an exercise of the same politicization of doctrine. Church Councils, as such, have no political authority whatever; they had none then, which did not prevent their exercise of it, then and later, under the color of law.
Biel was born in Speyer in the Rhineland. He helped found the University of Tübingen in 1477, after having entered the Brothers of Common Life in 1468 at the age of 58. He taught at Tübingen from 1484 until his retirement in 1491; he died in 1495. He compiled Ockham’s doctrine in a commentary on Peter Lombard’s Four books of the Sentences. He is frequently cited at the Council of Trent, where he is referred to as the Doctor Catholicus. He is also the author of a work of fundamental importance upon the Mass, Canonis Missae Expositio in 1488, three quarters of which was borrowed from the sermons that Master Egeling Becker had preached some thirty years earlier. [188]
Biel’s soteriology was of the Christus Victor type, in which the salvific imitation of Christ is interpreted as an active obedience. Christ’s life thus provided the viator with energy and knowledge to escape the prison whose gates had had been opened by the life and death of Christ. Biel considered the life of Christ, which he conceived as an active obedience to the Father, to be more effective in the work of our salvation than his death, understood as a merely passive obedience. For Biel, suffering pervaded the life of Christ; his death was incidental to the obedience demanded of him as Son.
However, Christ’s work of obedience can be frustrated by the disobedience of the viator. While Biel probably avoids, and certainly intended to avoid, the Pelagianism with which he is reproached by Luther’s early Disputation against Scholastic Theology [1517], he does fall into the Semipelagianism condemned at II Orange, for he also understands the initium salutis to be ungraced. This Latin term, “the beginning of salvation,” is associated with a fifth century heresy of some monastic communities, the so-called Masillenses, later named Semipelagians, located in the region of present-day Marseilles, who had argued that the first act of personal conversion or repentance leading to salvation must come from man, without grace. Augustine had denied this, citing Christ’s “without me you can do nothing” and his doctrine was upheld, a century after his death, at the II Council of Orange, in 529. The spiritual consequences of the Pelagian and Semipelagian heresies are the same: they derive from supposing the existence of an ungraced historical humanity.
Biel’s Eucharistic theology envisages two offerings: the cross, and the sacrifice of the Mass. The latter does not repeat, but re-presents the former. However, he offers no explanation of their identity, and considers the Eucharist to be of far less efficacy for our redemption than the cross, thus implicitly distinguishing between them as events whose relation could only be a repetition of the sacrifice of the cross by the sacrifice of the Eucharist, although this requires reversing their temporal sequence.
Biel warns about curiosity in regard to the quantity and the presence of Christ in the Eucharist. He affirms the commonly accepted doctrine of transubstantiation as one of the credibilia, but does so on the grounds of God’s omnipotence and trustworthiness, for he subscribes to the typically Nominalist protest against the intrusion of metaphysics into the content of the doctrinal tradition, especially in his popular sermons and writing.
Luther, who follows him in regard to transubstantiation and the rejection of metaphysics, will accept transubstantiation only as a non-credibilium, a matter of metaphysical theology, not of faith.
Biel uses “credibilia” to designate the elements of the Catholic creed, to deny which is to enter upon heresy. He supposes, in common with the Nominalism of his time, and with contemporary theologians such as Edward Schillebeeckx, that the doctrine of transubstantiation is meaningless apart from its insertion into the framework of some particular metaphysics, which his Nominalism has disapproved a priori.
As a Nominalist, Biel of course rejects all metaphysics, and therefore supposes transubstantiation, which affirms the metaphysical reality of the Real Presence, to be an enlistment in some metaphysical system which may be freely rejected: e.g., Thomism.
If Biel’s Nominalist supposition were true, all sacramental realism would be thus dependent upon holding a given philosophical position, and thus would no longer be a matter of faith. However and in fact, as John Paul II has made clear in Veritatis Splendor, although the Church does not teach metaphysics, this does not prevent her doctrine from having metaphysical implications. The historical realism of the Church’s Eucharistic worship is not governed or controlled by any metaphysical system. Rather, the realism of the Eucharistic liturgy is the transcendent criterion, the norma normans et non normata, of all such metaphysical systems. The faith of the Church is doctrine, not theology: it transcends theology as the knowledge that is faith transcends and grounds the questioning which proceeds from faith: fides quaerens intellectum. While the questioning may be and usually is put in terms of a metaphysical system, the question is only a question; it has no doctrinal value and the metaphysics which the question assumes cannot be read into the magisterium’s response to the question.
Biel sees the establishment of sacraments as already a condescension to the fragility of carnal men. By these visible means, God disposes man for the knowledge and possession of invisible grace. The Mass is a special instance of this condescension. Christ’s Passion is the source the efficacy of all the sacraments, but the Eucharist is particularly connected with the cross, as can be seen in the words of consecration over the Cup: Hic est enim Calix Sanguinis Mei, Novi et Aeterni Testamenti, a sacrifice which is validated and made unchangeable by Christ’s Death.
Biel insists that the Mass is not a re-iteration of the cross; he uses instead the Thomist term, repraesentatio. He considers the Mass to be a true sacrifice, having the same Victim as the cross. In the repraesentatio, the Church partakes of the benefits acquired once and for all by Christ on the cross. The distinction drawn is in some ways similar to the cruente, incruente (bloody, unbloody) distinction which the Council of Trent set between the Sacrifice on the cross and its Eucharistic representation, but this would be in tension with his supposition of a greater salvific effect in the cross than in its Eucharistic representation.[189]
Biel sees the entire Eucharistic liturgy as a repraesentatio (consecration, oblation, communion). He attempts to clarify the relation of the two offerings (of the cross, of the altar) by quoting Augustine’s observation that we call the original and its image with the same name:
Just as when we see a painting or a mural, we say, that is Cicero, that is Sallustius…
De diversis quaestinibus ad Simplicianum, Liber secundus, In caeteras quaestiones quinque vel sex a Simpliciano propositas ex libris Regum. (P. L. 40:0143).
This language anticipates the Tridentine stress upon the identity of the Eucharistic sacrifice with the sacrifice of the Cross: differing only in their mode of offering, they are the same One Sacrifice. This corresponds to Augustine’s insistence that the Mass is not a mere memorial or a merely psychological representation of a past event, for a real participation of the inheritance we possess in Christ is disclosed in the testament signed by the blood of Christ. [190]
Biel holds that transubstantiation effects the Real Presence of the same victim in the Mass as on the cross, so that communion with Christ, whereby one is incorporated into the Mystical Body, can take place. In this, he finds no difference between Scotus and Ockham, both of whom he intends to follow: a degree of escapism has been perceived in this position.
But as to the question of whether the Real Presence is quantified, Biel follows Ockham rather than Scotus: the Real Presence is not quantified, a conclusion consistent with Nominalism. Nonetheless, the Real Presence is of the historical Body of Christ, present definitive (diffinitive) on the altar and circumscriptive in Heaven. Biel wishes to avoid the “spiritualizing” (reducing it to subjectivity) of the Real Presence that is associated with the early Berengarius; he wishes as well to avoid the hyperrealism attributed to the later, post-Humbertus of Candida Sylva inversion of Berengarius’s doctrine. He rejects Berengarius’s subjectivist in signo tantum (in sign only) dismission of Eucharistic realism with very sharp language.
Eucharistic communion is in the inheritance, which is also in the Church triumphant (heavenly Church). Mass is chiefly for participants in this Communion, but it is not offered wholly for them. Its ‘fruits’ can be applied to those present, to those for whom it is specially celebrated, including the dead. Biel is chiefly interested in the unity of the consecration, the offering and the communion in the Eucharistic liturgy; it is communion, together with faith and Baptism, which make one a Christian.
Biel distinguishes easily enough between the two sacrifices, on the cross; and on the altar, but their unity is not clear. His account of it is not sufficiently clarified to avoid the inference of re-iteration or repetition. Thus it is necessary to emphasize that for Biel, the sacrifice of the Mass remains a second sacrifice, proffered ad provocandam dei misericordiam (as invoking the mercy of God) and only temporally related to the sacrifice of Christ on the cross. In the same Nominalist vein, Biel speaks of “similar” rather than “same” effects of the Mass and of the cross, contra the Council of Trent, whose language is “ratione diversa sola offerendi” (i.e., as between cruente and incruente, or bloody as opposed to unbloody). (DS §1743) The Lutheran historian of doctrine, Heiko Obermann, thinks Biel to be close, apart from polemics, to Luther’s insistence on a concrete real presence in the 1529 Marburg colloquy.
Luther acquired his Nominalism, to which he freely admitted, from his student years at Erfurt, upon which John of Wesel had left an imprint, and for whose theological faculty Gabriel Biel, “the last of the scholastics,” provided the standard of Catholic orthodoxy. It is against Biel’s Nominalist version of scholastic theology that Luther would later rebel, while at the same time retaining many of its emphases (e.g., the value of preaching over the sacramental ministry, a “spiritualizing” or reduction to subjectivity, of sacramental worship, a confusion over the relation of the Eucharistic sacrifice to the “once and for all” sacrifice of the cross). Perhaps it is the near-Pelagianism of Gabriel’s Nominalist theology which had the most serious effect upon Luther’s own theological development, for it is this which seems to have caused him the most intense personal suffering: it placed the burden of salvation upon man rather than upon God, a conclusion intolerable to any Christian spirituality.
Biel’s Commentary on the Sentences, published posthumously at Tübingen in 1501, was at any rate the familiar text of Luther’s theological formation, and anyone reading that work cannot but be struck by its resonance with the fundamental concerns of Luther’s later doctrine. Biel’s Nominalism combined an intellectual pessimism, arising out of a despair of metaphysical (transempirical) knowledge, with a voluntarist and rationalist optimism which approximated semi-Pelagianism. This attitude had been common in the late 14th and early 15th century schools, and although by Luther’s time its starveling religious character had prompted a kind of romantic reaction, it was still prevalent at the University of Erfurt in Luther’s day.
Around 1510, Luther turned from this voluntarist optimism to a pessimism regarding the salutary freedom of the will which amounted to a rationalized notion of the Augustinian theology of the Fall; he concluded to the “total corruption” of the human condition and, in this context, refused Biel’s view that the initium salutis was a work of ungraced freedom. While continuing to suppose with Biel that our freedom is ungraced, he restricted its efficacy to nonsalvific actions―the doctrine of the “servile will.” The human will is thus “servile” in the sense that it is submitted in a deterministic fashion to the omnipotence of God[191] In Luther’s view, the will is either given a salutary ‘forensic’ i.e., external grace, or it is not. If graced, it is submitted to the inexorable mercy of God; if it is not graced, it remains in sin, bound to its own corruption and impotence. This view of the interrelation of divine omnipotence and human freedom, which finds the latter extinguished by the majesty of God, is very much that of the Jansenists of a century later, who also rationalized Augustine, although rather under the influence of Calvin than that of Luther.
Luther had been taught by Nominalists such as John of Wesel that there is no essential difference between “spiritual” and sacramental Eucharistic communion; both are thought to give the same res sacramenti, but the former requires no priest. During the latter middle ages, this sort of Eucharistic piety (e.g., a “gazing on” the elevated Host, rather than receiving it) had led to infrequent communion, and to a dislocation of communion from the Mass. Despite such aberrations, the Mass was still very much the center of worship for the medieval Church.[192] It is true that Luther turned in disgust from the Nominalist version of piety; nonetheless, his Eucharistic theology reflects his underlying Nominalism.
Conceding the hazards of such sketches, an overview of Luther’s theology does reveal some architectural features which serve as criteria or normative principles for the entire schema. Primary is his notion of fallenness; it is in the first place an experiential notion, one verified in every human being’s spiritual existence: this is the experience which Catholic theology calls concupiscence. The Catholic doctrinal tradition considers concupiscence a consequence of Original Sin, one which amounts to a continuing temptation to actual sin, but this is held to be in itself the experience of fallenness rather than of sinfulness. Luther refuses this distinction, which is not itself a matter of experience; for him the universality of the experience of “sin” is proof that our intrinsic sinfulness is beyond the reach of God’s grace, at least as concerns his potentia ordinata, for the experience of “sin” is not removed by penitence, penance, or absolution: consequently these are condemned by him as “works,” incapable of any salvific efficacy. For Luther, the Fall has utterly vitiated all historical use of freedom. Salvation is indeed given, but ab extra; it is given in the gift of faith in the forgiveness of our sins by the one sacrifice of the cross. This faith is is ineffable no historical expression of its intrinsic truth is possible. The realm of fallen history is the realm of ambiguity; to forget this is to lapse into reliance upon “works.”
Luther’s Christology is Chalcedonian, although with Nominalist overtones; e.g., he has a strong Incarnatio propter peccatum, sensu negante emphasis (“sensu negante” is the “exclusive sense” of “propter peccatum,” as contrasted to sensu aiente, its “inclusive sense.” Thus, an Incarnation propter peccatum, sensu negante, denotes the Mission of the Son understood as given only on account of sin, whereas the suffix sensu aiente would not limit the ‘motive’ for the Mission of the Son to redemption from sin. In either usage it remains true that Jesus “became flesh” to redeem us from our sins. The basic question raised is whether in the absence of the Fall the Mission of the Son would have taken place. The affirmative view is that of Duns Scotus, who in this rejects the view of St Thomas, although St. Thomas’ preference for the sensu negante reading of the Son’s Mission is not stated apodictically.
This common (medieval and later) sensu negante understanding of Jesus’ Mission insists that the Incarnation took place solely to redeem mankind from sin, and consequently denies that any grace is gratia Christi which would be prior to the Incarnation. Thus Mary’s Immaculate Conception―prerequisite to her unqualified, because sinless, freedom to conceive our Lord―could then not be gratia Christ, which is absurd. Duns Scotus was the first major theologian to have noticed this absurdity, inherent in the propter peccatum, sensu negante explanation of the “motive” for the Incarnation.
As has been seen, Luther’s theology of grace is linked to his theology of the fall: all grace is given extrinsically, i.e., forensically, and the gift does not alter the intrinsic sinfulness of the person to whom it is given. As extrinsic, all grace reaches us by the preaching of the Word, and through the three sacraments: Baptism, Eucharist, and Penance. It is by these that salvation is ‘individualized’ and made personally effective. This effect is the work of the Holy Spirit. The soteriological emphasis is upon the Word: sometimes Luther will say that there is one Sacrament, the Word, of which there are three sacramental signs. Luther’s explanation of sacramental causality has a tendency to reduce the sacrament to an explanation of faith ex auditu, (from hearing it [preached]) so that each sacrament tends to be a special instance of preaching. The logical thrust of this viewpoint is summed up in sola fide, but Luther never lets logic have its way; for him, Scripture has the last word. As the Word of God, it is exempt from fallenness, however fallen we may be who hear it.
Whether Luther’s understanding of the fall owes more to Ockham’s denial of intrinsic (metaphysical) causality, or to Augustine’s use of the already-existing notion of the massa damnata[193] need not delay us. It is enough that its impact upon the traditional understanding of the sacraments as signs be recognized. Luther’s notion of the servile will requires the rejection of any salvific or damnific significance intrinsic to historical human activity, and consequently demands the denial of any causal connection, instrumental or otherwise, between what is done in fallen history and the eschatological reality, the Risen Christ in his Kingdom. Luther understands that the eschatological reality, the physical Body of Christ, is truly, really present in the Eucharist, but his Presence is independent of any human instrumental agency: it is totally, exclusively, the deed of Christ. In sum, Luther dismisses sacramental efficacy outright, which entails a kind of annihilation of human historicity in the order of worship. Given this conviction, its logic concludes to a complete passivity in worship. It is again possible that regarding the causality of grace as always creative (i.e., Christ’s gift of the Spiritus Creator) might furnish a common ground for a re-examination of the sixteenth-century debate between Luther and the Catholic Church. In any event, it is to be remembered that Luther’s faith lives on Scripture, not on reason. For him, the Eucharistic presence is vi verborum. This is the consequence of divine institution or fiat, but it is factual, and consequently something like instrumental causality continues to exist in his doctrine. If this hint of instrumental causality were to be pushed, however, it would undercut Luther’s doctrine without remainder.
Luther developed his sacramental theology, which is equivalent to his sacramental doctrine, in controversies prior to his developed Eucharistic theology, chiefly concerned with Penance, where the emphasis is upon the non-causality of priestly absolution, in the fashion already prepared by the Nominalist theology.
The same theme is carried over in relation to Baptism and the Eucharist. In both of these sacraments, the sacramental deed, and its sacramental efficacy, is simply Christ’s through the Spirit: otherwise some instrumental significance must be lent to human deeds in history, such as the priest’s recital of the words of consecration in the Mass. In Luther’s thought, the function of the minister of the sacraments is entirely extrinsic, and amounts to the preaching or proclamation of the deed of Christ. In this preaching, the minister is the executor of the faith of the community; he is called and ordained to this task by the congregation of the priesthood of the believers, and consequently his priesthood is of the same order as theirs. All this is anticipated in the Nominalist rejection of instrumental causality. When this refusal is applied to the sacraments, their objective efficacy is independent of their minister, and is ascribed entirely and simply to Christ: the alternative, from Luther’s view, is synergism, a blasphemous arrogation to a man of coequality with Christ. Sacraments then become a sort of visible Word, preached rather than confected. There is then no question of a “priestly miracle.” This theology is not simply Lutheran; the Swiss Reformers push its logic further than Luther does.
Luther’s view of the Eucharist is in general agreement with Zwingli’s (and later, with Calvin’s) only in that (1) the Eucharist is instituted by Christ, (2) there is no transubstantiation, (3) there is no propitiatory sacrifice in the Mass, and (4) the chalice should not be denied the laity. Luther’s disagreement over the Eucharist with the other Reformers is over the mode of Real Presence, a Presence which they all in some sort respect. One of Luther’s primary doctrines was from the beginning that of salvation (he prefers to speak of “justification”) by faith alone. Strictly applied, this is fatal to sacramental realism in that it is not the sacrament but faith in the sacrament which justifies. This is primarily a faith in the Word by which the grace of this faith is made available. The sacrament is then an effective sign if you believe, but not otherwise. However, inasmuch as this belief, a matter of faith, is ineffable, incapable of articulation, it cannot be an effective sign; it does not transcend the radical ambiguity of fallen existence.
This failure underlies a fundamental Lutheran premise, or least one hardily maintained: viz., that manducatio impiorum (eating (i.e., reception), by which a sinner (an unbeliever) receives the real Body and Blood of Christ in the Eucharist, but not its grace. This sounds very much like the inference drawn from a Catholic opus operatum doctrine of sacramental causality. It cannot be reconciled logically with justification by faith alone, as Zwingli, Bucer and, later, Calvin were alert to point out.
This emphasis developed during Luther’s confrontation with the “sacramentarians” or Schwärmerei (fanatics), and especially with Karlstadt (Andrew Bodenstein of that city), who denied an objective Real Presence; against this view, Luther held that for the necessary comfort and assurance of sinners, something more than a subjective communion must be given in the Eucharist: this he held to be the literal import of the Words of Institution, This is my Body.
This led him to a doctrine of what has been termed “consubstantiation” (not Luther’s term), the simultaneous presence in the Eucharist of the “earthly body” and the “heavenly body.” Thus, Luther affirmed the sacramental unity of the sign and the Body, in which the sign (the bread) in union with the Body together stand for the Body of Christ, without reference to or dependence upon anything done by the words of the priest, or by the faith of the recipient, in the sense of producing a result which would be the transubstantiation of the elements. Such a “result” would fall under the condemnation of “works:’ i.e., it would be a quasi-blasphemous human effort at self-salvation. For Luther, Christ alone causes our salvation, and thus he alone causes the Real Presence: he does this through the recitation of his own Words of Institution, which Luther understands as a divine command, effective for all time, as was the command given Adam and Eve to increase and multiply.
Luther’s explanation of the coexistence of the sign (bread) and the Body relies upon Ockham’s esse diffinitive, wherein a miraculous exercise of divine power, a corporeal entity is present without its dimensions and hence without reference to a place, and so without the possibility of local motion. This presence diffinitive rather than circumscriptive, is instanced by Christ’s passing through the walls of the closed room after his Resurrection. Luther developed his theory of a real presence by way of “ubiquismus” (everywhereness, i.e., omnipresence) in later controversy with the Sacramentarians and the Swiss. When they held the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist to require local motion he explained it rather by an extension of the communicatio idiomatum (communication of idioms between the human and the divine natures in the Person of Christ), arguing that the omnipresence proper to Jesus divine nature should attributed to His humanity, in such was that the bodily presence of Jesus in the Eucharist was by reason of his divine ubiquity or omnipresence: hence, “ubiquismus.”
This is an illegitimate use of the communication of idioms, which can only support attributions which are historical, not abstract: i.e., “God died on the cross,” but not “divinity died on the cross.” Luther argued that this “ubiquism” was a common patristic datum, one going back to Origen’s use of the image of an incandescent piece of iron to ‘explain’ the simultaneity of the divine and the human in Christ―(Origen felt no need to explain the radical mystery of faith). Luther thus accounted for the presumed simultaneity of the consecrated bread and the Body of Christ in the Eucharist. There are traces of ubiquismus in the twelfth century theology of Hugh of St. Victor.[194]
According to Luther’s reasoning in On the Babylonian Captivity, as the divinity of Christ is not under the accidents of his humanity, so the presence of Christ in the Eucharist is not under the accidents of the bread. He reasons here by analogy between the “hypostatic union” of the Logos with the human nature in Christ, and the simultaneity of the presumed two “substances”, bread and the Body of Christ, in the Eucharist. However, it is the existence of such an analogy which is in issue; to maintain it, his opponents argue, is to employ a Monophysite Christology which is then extended to the Eucharistic presence. It is possible that the discussion might now be taken up again with a greater likelihood of profit; for example, the affinity between the Lutheran ubiquism and the early medieval excogitation of a Eucharistic presence per modum substantiae is worth exploring further, as is the manner in which gratia Christi is to be understood as pervasive of all times and places by reason of the Pauline and Johnnine doctrine of creation in Christ, and the sixteenth century debate thereby transcended. Further, despite Luther’s dissolution on Nominalist grounds of the sign-signified polarity in the Eucharist, by way of the Monophysitical merger of the bread and the Body of Christ, there is a strong Lutheran investment in the meal symbolism of the Eucharist or Lord’s Supper, which again affords a common ground for ecumenical discussion.
At bottom, however, a fundamental disagreement with the Catholic Eucharistic doctrine remains, and it does have to do with the dismissal of the sign-signified polarity in the sacraments. If Luther’s view of the fall is taken with full seriousness, there can be no such causality as the Catholic doctrine attaches to the sacramental sign, for only the Christ is truly a historical agent, and all other historical-salvific agency is absorbed in, rendered insignificant and so nullified, by his One Sacrifice. This, it seems, is the heart of the ecumenical tension between Catholic and Lutheran Christianity.
The question of a Monophysite doctrine of the Eucharist is thus of a more than pedantic interest, and the technical issue is worth some attention. The alleged Monophysite error is that of confusing the attributes and so of providing an inadequate response to the classic problem of the communicatio idiomatum: the Monophysites gave too easy an answer, and did so on the basis of a presumed unity of nature rather than of Person in the Christ; this permitted the ascription or attribution of a divine attribute to human nature. But the communication is within the Person of Christ, not between his natures, which the doctrine of ubiquism forgets. The main interest of Luther’s Christology is in upholding the unity of Christ against the Swiss denial or dilution of that unity. Like the 4th and 5th century Alexandrines, Luther is open to exaggeration in this direction.[195]
The impact of ssalvation sola fide in Luther’s theology is considerable; it is as opposed to a sola ecclesia on the Catholic side, given the necessary nuances to both of these tags. Obviously, either is subject to exaggeration, as witness Leonard Feeney’s reading of extra ecclesiam nulla salus a half-century ago or the de-kerygmatizing of radical Bultmannians such as Fritz Buri.[196] As the former aberration is not Catholic, so the latter is not Lutheran; both arise from the rationalizing of axioms whose meaning is not to be delivered by such simplicities. [197] However, between the two axioms there is a tension approaching contradiction, and that tension becomes most explicit when the two “great sacraments” are referred to each other.
The absorption of the Christian’s historicity by that of Christ concludes to the identification of Christ with his Body in such a univocal fashion as to exclude the marital significance of the Head-Body relation: for Luther, the notion of Church as Sponsa Christi (Bride of Christ) is radically in conflict with his understanding of the Christian’s unity with Christ, a unity by which the Christian is homo sine nomine, sine specie, sine differentia (a man without name, without qualification, without difference) a unity divorced from any external expression by which it might be distinguished from its absence: nulli prorsus uni externo operi sumus alligati (“we are bound to no external work whatever.”[198] Consequently Christ’s sacrifice is dissociated from the nuptial sacramental symbolism , with the result that the polarity by which the One Sacrifice by which we are redeemed is at once related to and distinguished from the Church’s sacrificium laudis simply lapses, and with it, the objective historicity of the mystery of the unity of Christ and the Church. That unity becomes simply eschatological, subsumed to justification by faith alone. This faith has no authentic public ecclesial expression, whether as doctrine or morality: no fallen language or action mediates the truth of Christ.
Luther’s interpretation of the doctrine of the Fall entails a rejection of all salvific agency in history, and consequently, a rejection of the sacramental principle in which the intrinsic freedom of historical worship has effective salvific significance. In brief, Luther understands historical actions, events and structures to be opaque to the grace of Christ and consequently unable to mediate it. His emphasis on the Eucharistic presence vi verborum, and upon the manducatio impiorum are in evident tension with this interpretation of the Fall, and with the sola fide interpretation of worship which it requires.
The tension between the historical objectivity of Christian worship, and the finally cosmological objections to that objectivity, surfaced in Luther’s theology at the time of his confrontation with a former ally, Karlstadt (Andreas Bodenstein), whose earlier association with the Anabaptist movement was reflected in his adoption of a radically dehistoricizing theological hermeneutic, a function of the historical pessimism, the refusal to admit the possibility of the historical mediation of salvation, which marks the Protestant Reform in all its expressions. This denial of sacramental realism had already led Luther, as it had the Anabaptists, as it had led Berengarius five centuries earlier, to reject the historically objective presence of Christ in the Eucharist: he refused to understand the Eucharistic presence as a historical Event, whether the objective representation of the Event of the One Sacrifice, or transubstantiation of the Eucharistic elements of bread and wine. Nonetheless, and despite the controversy caused by his departure from the purity of justification by faith alone, Luther held and continued to hold that, for the necessary comfort and assurance of sinners, something more than a subjective communion must be given in the Eucharist: this he justified, on scriptural grounds, as the inescapable literal import of the Words of Institution, This is my Body. However, he was unable to provide it: his effort to account for a real presence of Christ in the Eucharist by his attribution of the supposed omnipresence of God to the Christ, or to his humanity, was justly described as monophysite, a misuse of the communication of idioms. His denial of transubstantiation together with his affirmation of an objective real presence could only result in the version of impanation which his opponents labeled “companation:” i.e, the simultaneous presence of the Christ in association with unchanged elements of bread and wine At bottom, inasmuch as the Eucharistic change was not in the elements; nor in Jesus the Christ, it could only be a subjective change in the recipient, but this Luther refused to accept.
Thus Luther’s version of Eucharistic symbolism is ambiguous. As had the Proto-Reformers Wycliff and Hus, he rejected the sacrifice of the Mass, but he refused the full dehistorization of the Eucharist which that refusal logically entailed: thus his insistence on a “real presence” which upon examination, was impanationist and inevitably subjective, but he could not admit it to be so. He Eucharistic doctrine was sufficiently realist to make him hesitate before so radical a subjectivizing (“spiritualization”) of the presence of Christ in the Eucharist as Karlstadt and Zwingli proposed. On the other hand, he was unable to explain the objecitivity of the Eucharistic “real presence” upon which he insisted: for him it was not an intrinsically significant and thus concretely historical public event. His rejection of the objective historicity of Eucharistic offering of the One Sacrifice\ could not but entail the rejection of the objective change of the bread and wine of the Offertory into the body and blood of Christ. His Nominalism was doctrinal: his rejection of theological metaphysics was more than a matter of theological method: for him it barred the historical immanence of the risen Lord.
The historicity of the Real Presence depends upon the historicity of the Eucharistic Sacrifice as its corollary, for the Eucharistic Sacrifice is the concrete historical objectivity, i.e., the Event, by which the Real Presence is Real: it has no other reality than that of the One Sacrifice. Deprived of the Event, of the Eucharistic Sacrifice,, the Eucharistic presence of Chjrist is without historical objectivity, and must be subsumed to justification by faith alone, whose symbolist implication Luther could neither accept nor avoid. .
Consequently he doggedly held to a real, non-symbolic reception of the body and blood of Christ by the communicant, and in doing so renewed a medieval controversy over whether sinners did in fact receive the body and blood of Christ: On this issue of the “manducatio impiorum:” i.e., over whether a sinful recipient of the Eucharist nonetheless receives the full reality of the body and blood of Christ, Luther followed Paul in I Cor. 11: 27-29: a sinful Eucharistic reception of the body and blood of Christ incurs the judgment of God on the recipient. On this point Luther found himself also pitted against Zwingli, the leader of the Swiss reformers, and against the yet more radical “Sacramentarians.” A dozen years later, Calvin also would oppose Luther’s insistence upon an objective Eucharistic real presence.
It must be kept in view that the Lutheran version of “Real Presence” is itself ambiguous and on this account is often supposed by Catholics to be the equivalent of the Real Presence of Christ in Catholic Eucharist, which it clearly is not, for that Real Presence which the Church worships is an Event-Presence, that of Christ’s offering of his One Sacrifice. Therefore, on the one hand, Luther’s version of the Eucharistic presence of Christ cannot be an event, for the reasons already spelled out: historical acts, events, structures, fall under the ban of total corruption: they are reducible to “works.” On the other hand, if the “Real Presence” which Luther required is not an occurrence, an event, if it does not happen, but simply exists, its manner of existence, its “objectivity,” cannot be historical. It is then subjective, identical with justification sola fide―the inference that Luther could not accept.
The primacy of faith as the condition of salvation focuses salvation upon the hearing of the preached Word; at root, it is a trusting self-abandonment to the one thing necessary, the salvation worked by Jesus. All reform, all proper worship, is a return to this baptismal faith, by which we, who are fallen, totally corrupt, and thus peccatores (sinners) simply, accept the gift of extrinsic or forensic (juridical) justification (by divine decree) in Christ, a justification which becomes intrinsically effective only in the eschaton. Upon faith follows eschatological membership in the Body of Christ, the nonhistorical ecclesia of those who have the gift of faith. These are the objectively justified, simul peccatores et justi (at once sinners [historically considered] and justified (eschatologically considered). This is the Lutheran dialectic of a radically ambiguous historical existence, precisely as fallen.
This extrinsic justification has no necessary or indispensable or even authentic historical expression. Given the ineradicable ambiguity of history, faith is fundamentally suprahistorical, as the ecclesia is. The center of this Lutheran Church is the sacrament of Baptism; from this sacrament the Church takes its character, for worship and Church are mutually explicatory. Luther is on occasion very close to reducing all worship to faith: salvation sola fide can go very far. Inseparable from this baptismal emphasis is the refusal of the sacrament of orders as the condition of a valid celebration of the Eucharist. When the Church has Baptism as its principle of explanation, there can be no priesthood beyond that of the baptized.
When on the contrary one looks to a sola ecclesia theology, the center or focal point of salvation is the Eucharistic Lord, whose one sacrifice is the cause of the Church, into which one is baptized: baptism does not cause the Church. The emphasis then of all worship is Eucharistic rather than baptismal, for the Eucharist is now the prius of all theologizing, as Baptism is from the Lutheran viewpoint> For Catholics, salvation is not understood in sola fide terms, but rather as continually further incorporation into the unity of the Body of Christ by means of the Eucharistic worship of the Church. Granted the distortions to which this understanding is as open as any other, it nevertheless requires what the Lutheran theology refuses, a visible, historical, and publicly reliable expression of salvation, rather than a distrust of such expression. In the end, the Catholic doctrine requires a theology of salvation history which goes very far, even to the point of identifying the axis of all historical dynamism with the Eucharistic worship, as the locus of the Truth by whose immanence time is qualified by freedom, to become the history of salvation. History has no other free intelligibility than this, a fact demonstrated by the failure of all philosophies of history to reconcile the unity of history with its freedom.
The major source for all of Calvin’s theology is his Institutes of the Christian Religion, first published in 1536 when Calvin was only twenty-seven, and which he revised and augmented continually until its final Latin edition of 1559 (Fr., 1560).[199] His Eucharistic doctrine is set out in Book IV, Ch. 17-18.
Jean Calvin was born about a quarter of a century later than Luther, and survived him by nearly twenty years. If he is to be included within the first generation of the Reformers, it should be kept in view that the Reformation had been underway nearly fifteen years before he became identified with it, and that it had already assumed, in the persons of Luther and Zwingli, a dialectical character, in the sense of holding doctrinal themes which are in evident contradiction, an irrationality which Calvin’s theology could not but recognize, accept, and attempt to resolve.
Although reckoned to be the most systematic thinker among the Reformers, Calvin, like Luther, valued conformity to the scriptural Word above systematic coherence. A variety of attempts to reduce his theology to the systematic implications of a single principle, such as predestination, have not succeeded. In the first place, Calvin was the foremost scriptural scholar among the Reformers; at home with biblical Hebrew and Greek, he displayed an extraordinary knowledge of the Old Testament. He was also well-read in the Church Fathers, particularly in John Chrysostom and, later, in Augustine, with whose doctrine he considered his own to be in substantial agreement.
Calvin accepts, as does Luther, Augustine’s doctrine of the absolute dependence of man upon grace as the consequence of the Fall. However he reads this doctrine within the context of the Scotist-Nominalist emphasis upon the divine omnipotence, the consequent Nominalist absolutizing of that omnipotence, with consequent denials of secondary causality, of all meta-empirical, i.e., intrinsic, truth or unity in history, and of any divine and salvific immanence in history. This denial controls Calvin’s understanding of the economy of salvation; he holds it to be eschatological simply, i.e., sensu negante. Thus Calvin pushes the Nominalist logic further than Luther, which means, in the end, that he must read Scripture differently for, like Luther, he accepts the normative truth of Scripture
In systematic issues Calvin, like Luther, was a follower of Scotus and of Ockham. His doctrine of the distinction between divine predestination and divine foreknowledge is recognizably grounded in the Scotist distinctio formalis ex natura rei. His notions of the Fall and of extrinsic grace, like Luther’s, reflect his dependence upon Nominalist principles, notably the rejection of all metaphysics and the consequent rejection of the intrinsic intelligibility of the historical order. Where Ockham concludes to this unintelligibility as implicit in the absolute reality of God, Calvin, in agreement with Luther, look upon it as the product of the fall of man. In either case, it excludes a priori any sacramental mediation of salvation.
The final implication of such a dismissal of the intrinsic significance of history is a quasi-Buddhist nihilism, although none of the Reformers pushed it so far; its furthest extrapolation, Calvin’s doctrine of predestination ante praevisa merita, is hardly original with Calvin, for Origen proposed a universal predestination to salvation (apokatastasis); the aged Augustine, in the course of his bitter debate with the Pelagian Bishop, Julian of Eclanum, affirmed a predestination doctrine in terms later rejected by the II Council of Orange, which upheld Augustine’s rejection of John Cassian’s proposal of the possibility of an ungraced initium fidei.[200] Four centuries later, one of the Carolingian theologians, Gottschalk of Orbais, a disciple of Augustine, developed a doctrine of ‘double predestination’ (to salvation or to eternal damnation) which was contested by Hincmar of Rheims and Rhabanus Maurus among other contemporaries. In 849 a provincial council of Mainz condemned Gottschalk’s predestination doctrine as heresy.
From its outset, speculation on predestination proceeded under largely cosmological auspices ignoring the economy of salvation; like Ockham, Calvin, invoked the majesty of God the Father in terms of the cosmological Deus Unus rather than of his mission of the Son to give the Holy Spirit. Consequently he understood creation to have been produced by the extrinsic agency of the Deus Unus whose transcendence of the historical order of creation is by way of his absolute Personal immanence, i.e., his alienation from all creation. Calvin therefore understands creation to be ungraced, as natura pura in the pessimistic sense of a massa damnata. Predestination must then refer to the divine bestowal or non-bestowal of an extrinsic grace of salavation upon human beings in this intrinsically ungraced creation. The rationalized, nonhistorical Deus Unus, possessed of a rationalized nonhistorical omnipotence and omniscience, rules his creation ab extra, by inscrutable―i.e., arbitary―divine decrees. As nonhistorical exercises of divine omniscience and omnipotence, God’s decrees are absolute. Although effective in history because they bear upon historical human beings, the divine decrees are incapable being conditioned or qualified by historical considerations of merit or demerit, of guilt or innocence. Becaise the are nonhistorical and consequently immutable, they cannot but be immune to and so to transcend such considerations.
Grace, insofar as discussed in this context, is clearly not understood to be gratia Christi, for the grace of Christ is at once intrinsic, personal, and universal: finally it is our creation in Christ, fulfilled by our baptism into his death and resurrection, and into the Church he instituted by his One Sacrifice. The Protestant speculation upon the salvation of the massa damnata must identify grace with a divine decree of predestination to salvation: this forensic view of grace is typical of Calvinism, but it is quite similar to the Lutheran soteriology, for that also knows no historical grace.
Within a cosmological context, predestination may be to a universal salvation, as Origen proposed, or to a personal eternal salvation, or to a personal eternal damnation. Calvin’s doctrine of universal predestination to eternal damnation is more radical: it is the corollary of the alienation of the absolute Deus Unus from all that is not himself, and is inexorable apart from an entirely arbitrary decree of predestination to salvation, which can only be personal, whether of individuals or groups. A decree predestining all mankind to salvation would undercut Calvin’s description of humanity as a massa damnata. Further, such a decree could hardly be distinguished from a divine Self-denial, a departure from Personal immanence. In any event, Calvin will have no part of it: he has written:
. . . . there is an universal call, by which God, through the external preaching of the word, invites all men alike, even those for whom he designs the call to be a savor of death, and the ground of a severer condemnation. Besides this there is a special call which, for the most part, God bestows on believers only, when by the internal illumination of the Spirit he causes the word preached to take deep root in their hearts. Sometimes, however, he communicates it also to those whom he enlightens only for a time, and whom afterwards, in just punishment for their ingratitude, he abandons and smites with greater blindness.
During the patristic period, and into the medieval, the damnation of the unbaptized was presumed: we find this already in Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho, and we have seen that even Augustine, in his old age, taught a strict predestinationism, rejected by his disciples and by the Church at the Second Council of Orange, in 529. The “double predestineation, either to salvation or damnation, taught by Gottschalk of Orbais, had been condemned in 849
A Christian influence thus far influenced speculation on predestination as to require the salvation of some men, but with the implication of the damnation of all the others. Although the Christian tradition contemplates and perhaps insists upon the damnation of some human beings, for it is difficult to understand in any other sense Jesus’ remark that it would be better for his betrayer not to have been born. Nonetheless, the doctrinal tradition also insists upon the universal application of the victory of Jesus the Lord over sin, death and damnation, although it is also true that the currently regnant theology of grace is still inadequate to that tradition. In his Dare we Hope "that all men be saved"? : with a short discourse on hell /"? H. U. von Balthasar has raised a question which puts in issue the condemnations of Judas recited in Mt. 26:24, ;in Jn. 17:12, in Acts 1:20, and Ps 109:7
Insofar as cosmologically informed speculation on predestination is concerned, it is in any event taken for granted that the grace of predestination to salvation is not universally distributed: it is given sporadically, arbitrarily. To quail before or to refuse this conclusion savors of lèse majesté, an affront to the divine dignity, the divine freedom, the divine transcendence.
The theme of a sporadic distribution of grace was proper to the patristic tradition: Augustine’s treatment of predestination took it for granted, although it is inconsistent with his emphasis upon illumination, upon the trahi a Deo and upon the intus Magister, which are gifts ad salutem, hence grace, and nonetheless can hardly be less than universally distributed. The supposition of a less than universal distribution of the graces necessary for salvation was passed on to the medieval theologians: in St. Thomas’ theology, grace became a metaphysical accidens, although we have seen St. Thomas adopt the Augustinian trahi a Deo―which Augustine had linked to the intus magister―in order to account for the damnation of infidels who, in the problem posed, were by their definition as infidels understood to be universally guilty of refusing the universally offered grace of conversion.
Clearly, justice required that the universality of the possibility of the refusal of the grace of conversion required the universality of the offer, which could not then be a metaphysical accidens, for these are not universally given except insofar as “proper” to human nature: e.g., as faculties of intellect and will. Simply because it is universally distributed, the reality of the grace of Christ must be substantial as opposed to accidental, and therefore a matter of creation ex nihilo, creation in Christ, the work of the Spiritus Creator whom Christ the Son was sent to give. When taken seriously, this inexorable inference requires a reconideration of the Thomist theology of grace, and therefore of theological metaphysics. [201]
The consequences of having postulated a cosmological Deus Unus, an abstract absolute Self whose attributes are radically incompatible with the Christian economy of salvation, have long since been evident. Abstract justice and abstract benevolence have no historical content as a matter of definition. Their application proceeds to dehistoricize the economy of salvation. As in all such cosmological speculation, the Trinity is not invoked and in fact cannot be invoked: the absolute divinity cannot but be monadic, understood as an abstract Self whose rationalized transcendence is radically opposed to any finite exercise of personal moral responsibility.
The Jesuits and Dominicans fought each other to a standstill on this issue. Their dispute de auxiliis remains unresolved. It is in the first place incapable of resolution, and in the second, it is of no theological interest. The Church knows no cosmological divinity, and theologians who insist on cosmologizing her doctrinal and moral tradition in the service of that abstraction waste the time and finally the patience of all concerned. Insofar as the Church’s faith in Jesus the Lord is concerned, the divine transcendence, dignity, omnipotence, omniscience, foreknowledge, mercy, justice, universal salvific will, and whatever other attributes of the One God may be in view, are not abstract but historically concrete in the Father’s sending of the Son to give the Spirit, which Missions terminate in that outpouring of the Spiritus Creator by which exists the nuptially-ordered Good Creation, fallen in the first Adam, redeemed by the second Adam, and in him, as its head, restored to its free unity and integrity, in sacramento. This last is not a deprecative term: it designates the historicity of the economy of salvation, which is concrete and historical, not merely eschatological, as the Reform would have it. The historically actual economy is historically mediated in and by the historical worship of the historical Church, which is radically Eucharistic. A theological inquiry into the divine predestination that ignores the Trinitarian Missions of the Son and the Spirit by which the divine predestination is actual and in which its meaning is revealed, is quite beside the point.
It has been remarked that much of Luther’s theology relies upon a quasi-Monophysite identification of the sign and the signified, i.e., of Jesus’ humanity and divinity, whether in Christology or in the Eucharist. This is illustrated particularly by his recourse to the divine ubiquity to account for the Real Presence, which his literal exegesis of the Institution Narratives required him to insist upon. Calvin can be contrasted with Luther in this connection, in Christology as in Eucharist: between the humanity and divinity of Jesus there is a distinction which is not transcended in history, whether as Real Presence or as Personal unity. The contrast with Luther’s doctrine is of some value, for Calvin assumed a quasi-Nestorian dissociation of the sign and the signified, which is to say, of the historical humanity and the divinity of Christ. However, their contrast should not be pushed too far: each stance arises out the dehistoricizing cosmological postulates of the patristic tradition and of medieval theology, and neither can support a sacramental realism.
Thus, quite as Origen’s descriptive, non-metaphysical (i.e., nominal or descriptive: metaphorical rather than metaphysical) likening of the union in Jesus of the divine Logos with humanity, to the union in incandescent iron of fire and iron, could and did give rise to both Monophysite and a Nestorian interpretations of that image, so the similar Nominalist refusal of a metaphysical understanding of Eucharistic Presence, and its resulting deployment of metaphor, can give rise to either a Monophysite or a Nestorian interpretation of the Eucharist.
For example, the Nominalist elimination of secondary causality with its concomitant denial of any causal link between the Eucharistic bread and the presence of Christ can conclude to their absolute dissociation, à la Zwingli. On the contrary if, with Luther, one insists upon a Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, the Nominalist distrust of intrinsic causality and so of metaphysical analysis can easily merge the empirical presence of the Eucharistic bread with the non-dimensional presence (diffinitive) of the Christ. In this latter Lutheran doctrine, the bread no longer signifies, but is identified with, the Christ: Luther’s Nominalist exegesis of “This is my body” understands them as identifying a material substance, the bread, with a quasi-immaterial one, the Christ, and forces Luther’s “companation” doctrine.
But in Calvin’s theology reading of the Institution narrative, there is no such identification. His thought, like Augustine’s, is phenomenological or experiential, but he passes beyond the liturgically-grounded dialectic of the Augustinian phenomenology of worship (experience in ecclesia of personal existence as at once just and sinful) to its rationalization into a dichotomous (“dialectical”) frame of reference in which the sign and the signified have no intelligible relation to each other. Having rejected any trans-empirical unity intrinsic to historical reality, he could do nothing else: for Calvin as for Ockham, substance is most literally “indivisum in se, divisum ab omni alio.”
With Augustine, Calvin held that true knowledge of God and of man is utterly dependent upon Revelation but, against Augustine, he also held that the Revelation reveals not only the complete sovereignty of God but also the total corruption of fallen man: historical existence is fallen in the sense of indefeasibly alienated from God. As did Luther, Calvin assumed that fallen man is in fact left to himself in history, without intrinsically, i.e., historically, effective grace. All grace must be “forensic,” a divine decree extrinsic to history, incapable of historical mediation, and therefore extrinsic to the person benefited, as would be a judicial acquittal of a guilty defendant in a criminal case, which does not touch his moral standing.
The postulate of justification by faith alone, which opens the Institutes, is fundamental for Calvin’s theology as for Luther’s, and amounts to a flat rejection of Augustine’s understanding of history as intrinsically significant of salvation by the grace of Christ, which Augustine knew to be historically mediated in the historical worship of the historical Church. In sum, Augustine knew history to possess sacramental significance, which the Reformation denied and continues to deny.
Calvin maintained that there is between God and historical man only a void, which Christ’s Spirit alone can bridge, although the bridge can have no historical reality. Thereby he merged Augustine’s doctrine that “without grace you can do nothing,” with the Reformation dogma of the total corruption of the fallen historical order. This latter doctrine cannot be ascribed to Augustine, whose maxim, Nemo habet de suo nisi mendacium et peccatum (No one has anything of himself other than falsehood and sin) does not entail Calvin’s Nominalist supposition that man so described (i.e., as de suo, as simply left to himself, therefore without grace) is historical man, man in the concrete.
Augustine’s phenomenology is of personal human experience in ecclesia, as participating in the Church’s historical worship, as aware of utter personal dependence upon the Church’s sacramental mediation of grace through his personal participation in the Church’s worship, by which alone the worshipper is aware at once of his personal indigence and of the mercy shown him. This is the Augustinian simul peccator et justus, the personal dichotomy revealed and resolved in the Eucharistic worship of the Church. Calvin’s Nominalism dissociates these polarities, relegating justification to nonhistoricity, leaving historical man in his sinfulness without recourse except by submission to an inscrutable divine predestination without reference to merits because, as totally corrupt, he possesses none.
Augustine knew man’s sinfulness to be without remedy apart from the graced reintegration of man’s heart, divided between “two loves” by the fall, but restored to a defeasible free unity by historically mediated grace. Calvin’s rationalization and dehistoricization of the Augustinian anthropology of fallen man, which is to say, Calvin’s consideration of man in abstraction from the historical mediation of grace to him, is consequent upon his Nominalism, which must read Augustine’s “pessimism” as corroborating the Reformation’s “total corruption” doctrine. Calvin’s rationalization of the human condition simply identifies man as “sarx,” thus as devoid of the “pneuma” by which he knows himself to stand before God at once as a sinner and as the object of an unfailing divine love.
Augustine is the first great theologian called upon to defend sacramental realism. It is integral to the apostolic tradition, but in the early fourth century it was denied by the Donatist heresy, which emerged again in the beginning of the fifth century to trouble the African Church. It fell to Augustine to confront its insistence that the efficacy of sacramental signing depends upon the virtue of the bishop or priest uttering, e.g., the words of Eucharistic consecration. This denial of the public character of sacramental efficacy reduced the Church’s worship to a mere interior disposition, whether of the several members of a congregation at Mass, or of the personal affect of the person being baptized, ordained, confirmed or absolved. Having made this entirely clear, and obviously unacceptable, Augustine undercut the Reformation’s view of grace as forensic, as absent in fallen history. Particularly, Augustine’s Eucharistic doctrine cannot be read as symbolist, despite continual efforts to do so, not least by Roger Cardinal Mahony’s recent Pastoral Letters.
Calvin’s Nominalism views the finite world as radically disintegrated, lacking intrinsic unity, goodness and truth: thus the fallen historical creation, as fallen, is simply without intrinsic significance, as are those who live in it. The nullification of the finite world, its utter devaluation, is the necessary implication of understanding God as the Absolute. The Eleatics had grasped this point six centuries before the birth of Christ. Parmenides affirmed the absolute unity of being as necessarily true, thus rejecting the significance of our experience of the world’s dynamic multiplicity; the defensive ‘paradoxes’ of his disciple Zeno were framed to exploit the absurdities entailed in what he supposed to be the sole alternative to absolute unity of being, its absolute disunity.
The fragmenting impact of Zeno’s binary logic led to the mathematicization of the fragmented world, the imposition of an extrinsic rational order upon the otherwise irrational experience of the material world. Under Aristotle, the Eleatic postulate of the intrinsically necessary unity of being remained, but the genius of Aristotle had postulated the indefinite divisibility, not the actual indefinite fragmentation of the finite world. Reality remained intelligible only insofar as necessarily ordered, but Aristotle’s act-potency metaphysics legitimated the literal language which Plato had supposed to be without true significance. Thus revalidated, logically correct language would be a principle of an intrinsically intelligible order for as long as the act-potency metaphysics was sub-understood by the logician: i.e., for as long as the subject and predicate of the literal affirmation or negation were related to each other in an act-potency unity. The metaphysical foundation for literal truth could not survive the Neoplatonic melding of Aristotelian logic with Platonic hylemorphism. With this incongruous application of logically-ordered discourse to a metaphysics whose matter-form dualism had no historical resolution, the logically ordered truth of literal affirmation and negation lacked metaphysical foundation, for the Platonic matter-form analysis could not support literal statements of metaphysical truth.
With Neoplatonism in place, logic became subordinate to grammar rather than, as before, governing it as the expression of the underlying immanent necessities of the act-potency metaphysics of Aristotelianism. The result was a “new logic,” the so called “dialectic,” whose emergence entailed the rediscovery of the Platonic fragmentation of the historical world into entities and concepts each mutually exclusive of all others. With this, “the problem of the one and the many” became again inexorable: absent any metaphysical interest, the binary propensities of logically-ordered discourse soon became evident
Under this Eleatic aegis the more cosmologically-minded Carolingians began a dissociation of the Eucharistic signum and signatum whose final fruit was the Berengarian reduction of Eucharistic realism to subjectivity. Thereafter the primary task of Catholic theologians became the vindication of the realism of the Church’s Eucharistic worship, a task which required the construction of a theological metaphysics. This construction was impeded to the point of impossibility by the unexamined cosmological postulates which Catholic theology had inherited from Plato and Aristotle, chief among them the necessary unity of being and therefore of truth.
Theology cannot but be a free inquiry into the free truth that is the Revelation in Christ; it cannot but be defeated by the cosmological rationality whose highest development was that of St. Thomas’ adaptation of Aristotelianism to theological purposes. The fourteenth century witnessed to this failure; unfortunately, the cosmological postulates of the failed metaphysical theologies survived in Ockham’s effort to protect the dignity of God from the indignity, as he saw it, of the theological ascription to God of theologically confected “divine ideas.”
Ockham’s Nominalist rejection of metaphysics in theology amounted to the imposition of a grammar, a nonhistorical hermeneutic. Like Parmenides, he presupposed the absolute unity of being as divine, as the One God of a Neoplatonizing theology. The One God, as absolute, as potentia absoluta; absolute and unqualified omnipotence, left no remainder: no relative unity could co-exist with God so understood: no relative truth, no relative goodness, no relative causality. God is conceived as the sole agent; no secondary causality, no secondary agency, is conceivable: its existence by divine condescension that is potentia ordinata cannot but be intrinsically unintelligible. In brief, God as absolute majesty, omnipotence, authority and truth can have no analogues. There can be no relative unity, truth, or beauty which would not relativize God by their very existence.
Inasmuch as he was also a Catholic theologian, Ockham affirmed the reality of the Christian economy of salvation: he contravened no truth of the Catholic faith. To save its truth, he posed, as has been seen, over against the divine potentia absoluta, a potentia ordinata by which God concedes a nominal but still extrinsic unity, goodness and truth to the historical order. However the potential ordinata conceded no relative or secondary causality. This denial of all secondary causality includes the denial of personal moral responsibility: hence the absolute predestination of every human being to salvation or damnation without reference to historical conduct would be inescapable, although predestination does not enter into Ockham’s theology.
Equally inescapable is the rejection of sacramental causality: this is at one with the comparable rejection of the intrinsic significance of finite reality. Again, Ockham did not go so far. Similarly, there can be no presence of the divine, of the absolute, in history: the finite realities of the historical order are simply incapable of any mediation of the divine. Further, one must not presume on the concessions granted by the potentia ordinata: God remains the potentia absoluta, and cannot conceivably be determined by his concession to the economy of salvation as potentia ordinata. God as absolute neither is nor can be “bound” by any finite reality. Here we have the ground of that element of Calvin’s theology designated (by Lutheran critics) the “extra Calvinisticum,” viz., Calvin’s insistence that the Church, the sacraments, the economy in short, does not bind the One God, the Absolute.
Finally, it must follow that inasmuch as the finite realities we encounter have no intrinsic significance, their evaluation by ourselves has a merely functional or operational value. Inasmuch as even in a world which of itself has no truth to be asserted, provision must be made for the fact that still one must converse, one must still speak of a world in some sense ordered, possessed at least of a surface intelligibility. This provision is made by the attribution of common names to common phenomena, clearly a work of cultures, not of individuals who, in learning languages, learn the names by which their world has meaning. The naming is of course fictive, but it permits the writing of books such as the Institutes.
It must be remembered that Nominalism understands the transcendence of this world by the One God to be His absence from it, the divine subjection of it to his unqualified omnipotence which establishes no relation of God to the creation. Ockham’s philosophy had presupposed the absolute Deus Unus of the medieval cosmological theology, whose absolute omnipotence is also an absolute immanence: the Deus Unus is incapable of extrinsic relation. There is a nominal compatibility of the Deus unus with the Trinity of Persons, but Ockham’s Trinitarian doctrine is abstract, much as is that of St. Thomas; the Persons are eternal simply: hence the impossible problem posed by the Incarnation of the Son. The divine stance, as absolute, to the world is that of an agent to the object upon which he acts but to which his action neither establishes nor can establish an intrinsic relation, for the object has no intrinsic actuality to which a relation could refer. It is evident that the divine omnipotence, thus viewed, cannot be regarded as benevolent, despite Ockham’s attempted mitigation of this deficiency―in view of the economy of salvation―by positing a factual divinely-imposed limit upon God’s full exercise of his omnipotence, but the mitigation is only extrinsic: nothing is changed by this concession, neither in the world nor in God, for God cannot deny himself.
Ockham, as a Christian, recognized that the Deus Unus is the Trinity: consequently he transferred the attributes of the Personal divinity of the Nominalist “One God” to God the Father, but still understood in Nominalist terms: i.e., as nonhistorical. Consequently, the Father’s absolute, nonhistorical and entirely immanent omnipotence is not fulfilled in his sending of the Son to give the Spirit, simply because that omnipotence is conceived in nonhistorical terms: no exercise of it can terminate in finitude.
We have noted that the Lutheran critics of Calvin’s Christology have detected in Calvinism what they have called the extra Calvinisticum: a practice of applying to the Christ of the Nominalist maxim, finitum non capax infiniti “the finite is not capable of [i.e., of mediating] the infinite” with the consequent recognition that even the Christ is incapable of an adequate mediation of God’s sovereign omnipotent will, which therefore “overflows” into a predestination independent of the Christ.[202]
It is evident that this conclusion is latent in Calvin’s system, but whether it was ever reached by him is debatable, as in fact are most of the inferences to be drawn from his undoubted Nominalism, such as his dissociation of language from realistic significance, in exegesis and in liturgy. His overall Christology is not strictly Nestorian, but only to the extent that he holds to the communication of idioms in the Person of Jesus. Calvin considers this Personal unity in Christ to be effected by the Holy Spirit, whereupon a considerable problem arises. Jesus’ Personal unity is intrinsic and absolutely simple: it cannot be an effect, the product of a cause, for effects are composite: this is particularly true of the works of the Spiritus Creator. This error must contaminate any attempt to provide for the Personal unity of Jesus. It continues today in the “natura humana assumpta” doctrine of the regnant Catholic Christology which, for St. Thomas, requires that Jesus be a persona composita, which amounts to a contradiction in terms. Inasmuch as the Father’s Mission of the Holy Spirit is consequent upon the Mission of the Son, the Spirit can hardly be invoked to provide the communication of idioms in Jesus, the one and the same Son. Such absurdity is prompted by the refusal of the possibility of a Personal communication of idioms in Jesus. It is illustrated by the contemporary tension between Christologies looked upon as “from above,” and those regarded as “from below; each looks to a natural rather than a Personal unity in Jesus: the projected natural unity cannot but be composite. St. Thomas’ notion of a persona composita is similarly prompted by a refusal of the communication of idioms.
Thus Calvin’s assumption that the Personal unity of Jesus is an effect of the work of the Holy Spirit, the preexisting cause of the Personal unity of Jesus the Christ, cannot but undercut that Personal unity. Insofar as Spiritual, i.e., insofar as it is the work of the Spirit, it looks to a unity of natures in Jesus which is impossible to conceive in our fallen history, for they must be distinct in their unity. We have noted that to see in the Holy Spirit the source of Christ’s Personal unity is to reverse the Trinitarian order, in which the Spirit’s economic efficacy, his historicity, is that of Jesus the Son, whose Gift the Spirit is. Prescinding from that matter for the moment, Calvin considers the Holy Spirit’s work to be the building of a bridge between the humanity and the divinity of Christ. Consequently he is concerned for a unity of natures, not a Personal unity. At best, he confuses them, melding them into an inconceivable unity which has no historical foundation. Karl Barth will develop this “dialectic” in his massive Church Dogmatics; it will influence Catholic theology by way of von Balthasar, and has found analogues in the theology of Rahner and Zizioulas.
In no case can the dialectic provide other than an extrinsic unity, a monophysite unity of natures. It fails entirely to provide for the Personal unity of Christ, while at the same time supposing that doing so is an appropriate theological task―which supposition is entirely mistaken. The mysteries of the faith transcend our reason by providing a novel free base from which to undertake the fides quaerens intellectum whose presupposition that Jesus Christ is Lord. Efforts rationally to transcend this mystery can produce only studies in futility.
Calvin’s basic percept of the Personal unity of Jesus the Christ is nonhistorical. When the Personal objectivity of Jesus is thus understood as “spiritual,” i.e., as the work of the Holy Spirit, he has ceased to be a historical reality. Thus to abstract from the historical is Jesus is to dehistoricize his revelation of the Trinity as well.
We have mentioned the further Trinitarian error implicit in Calvin’s Christology, in that it reverses the order of the Trinitarian Missions of the Son and the Spirit, a reversal destructive of the Trinitarian faith as such, for in this error, the Son is not sent to give the Spirit: the Spirit is sent to give the Son. It is then the Spirit who brings salvation; it is the Spirit who is then the Redeemer, the Lord. Calvin certainly intends to affirm the Personal unity of Jesus the Christ, but again, that unity cannot be the object of a historical faith. Although this implication of justification by faith alone troubled Calvin much less than it troubled Luther, nonetheless for both it eliminates the possibility of an authentic doctrinal and moral tradition.
It must then follow that for Calvin the historical Church’s ancient affirmation that “Jesus Christ is Lord” is not literally, i.e., historically true, for Calvin understands the unity of his Person to be eschatological; consequently the reality of his mysterious Personal unity must remain ineffable, literally unutterable. The faith in the Personal unity of Jesus is inarticulate because “spiritual,” the nonhistorical and hence ineffable achievement of the Holy Spirit. It must further follow that the historicity of the Jesus of the New Testament is merely human. This is the Nestorian Christology, the refusal of divine immanence in history. Paul’s affirmation of Jesus’ Lordship in Phil. 2:12 then cannot be literally true, for the Personal unity presupposed by his Lordship is incapable of historical affirmation. “Jesus is Lord” becomes a “spiritual” truth, with that nonhistorical objectivity which “spiritual” imports for Calvin. As the “spiritual” presence of Christ in the Eucharist bars the ancient liturgical understanding of the Words of Institution as identification of the sacramental sign with its signified effect, that of the consecrated bread with the body of Christ, so here the historical Jesus, merely as man, cannot be identified with the Lord. “Jesus” cannot name the Personal unity that is the object of the Christian faith. This anticipates Paul Tillich’s Christology, in which Jesus sacrifices his humanity in order to remain within the “divine Center.”[203]
Finally, even supposing the orthodoxy of Calvin’s Christology, the Trinitarian faith cannot survive the “extra Calvinisticum:” i.e., the principle that God the Father as Absolute is not “bound” by the Christocentricism of the economy of salvation. Insofar as the Incarnation, the eschatological or “spiritual” terminus of the Mission of the Son to give the Spirit, does not “bind” the Father, it cannot be said that Jesus the Christ is the sole Mediator between God and man, in which case it becomes difficult to understand that that, as finite, Jesus mediates the Father at all―whereupon the Trinitarian faith again is put in question, for that mediation is its indispensable source.
The unity of Christ’s Person is the most profound mystery of the faith, and the first to be affirmed in faith. Calvin recognizes that this mystery is unfathomable, beyond comprehension. However, over against the Lutheran tendency to rediscover the monophysite heresy in assigning an attribute of divinity, viz., ubiquity, to the Eucharistic presence of Christ, Calvin insists upon what he supposes to be the proper sense of the communication of idioms, in which the Person of Christ, not one or another of his two natures, is the subject of attribution. Thus he agrees that it is correct to say that Jesus is God, but he does not consider that it is correct to say that Jesus’ humanity Personal, i.e., that his humanity is divine or partakes of, or is mixed with the divine. In short, for Calvin the Personal subject of the Incarnation is the not Jesus, but the “immanent Son.
On the other hand, Calvin does not consider this unity aa concretely actual, as achieved a priori, simply as the presupposition of the faith that Jesus Christ is Lord, i.e., as the unquestionable truth of the faith which, as a free and therefore mysterious, has no antecedent explanation and is incapable of submission to a higher truth, to a transcendent cause, for none can exist.
Rather, over against the Lutheran error, Calvin is so focused upon the complete distinction of the natures in Jesus as to require a prior cause for the transcendence of their distinction in the Personal unity of Jesus. He finds this “cause” in the Holy Spirit. It may be that Calvin’s inability to accept the radical unity of the faith-affirmation that Jesus is the Lord, and thus to accept the unity in his Name of divinity and humanity without mixture, is the corollary of his dialectical hermeneutic―a dialectic which understands the truth of such faith-affirmations to be the joinder of incompatibles in an affirmation whose truth relies upon the historical transcendence of those incompatibilities by a historical reality of a higher order. This explanation is less satisfactory than may appear, since Calvin’s dialectic lacks the necessary historical ground. It is finally no more than an ens rationis which cannot accept the transcendent unity he would account for, which is precisely the Church’s historical faith that “Jesus is Lord,” the Mysterium fidei transcending all analysis.
The dichotomies which Calvin’s theology places between a totally corrupt history and an eschatological salvation, between the misery of fallen man and the omnipotent majesty of God the Father, between human finitude, and the divine infinity, are stressed far more systematically than is the dichotomy that Luther places between the unqualified corruption of the historical order and the redemptive sacrifice of Christ. Calvin’s Nominalism is too rigorous to permit him to affirm the Eucharistic manducatio impiorum (the capacity of the sinner to receive the Body and Blood of Christ). It requires that he also refuse, but more radically than Luther, the conversion or transubstantiation of the Eucharistic bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ.
In the end, Calvin’s exposition of the dialectical resolution of these dichotomies by the Holy Spirit lacks all historical ground. The unity he proposes must be eschatological simply, and cannot be historically signed or communicated in any way by “dialectical” utterance or naming. Karl Rahner and John Zizioulas have redeployed a comparably nonhistorical dialectic: Zizioulas places it between Christ and the Church in preference to de Lubac’s insistence upon their historical union in One Flesh, while Rahner, by his insistence on systematic necessity of understanding grace as “uncreated,” i.e., nonhistorical, has been forced to deny at once the divinity of Jesus and the historical realism of the sacramental worship of Jesus her Lord by which the Church is herself historical. Rahner’s methodological and therefore a priori insistence that grace, as “uncreated” as a matter of definition,, can have no historical objectivity, is a function of his interpretation of God as thus absolute as to be incapable of relation to what is not God. His reliance upon a “dialectical analogy” to unite what his metaphysical monism has thus divided is similarly without historical foundation, as Patrick Burke has pointed out.[204] Here again we return to Gilson’s axiom: upon a painted hook one can hang only a painted hat.
More clearly than does Luther, Calvin assimilates the Eucharistic worship to the preaching of the Word, and in so doing accepts more completely than does Luther the implications of justification sola fide. For Calvin, the metabolé or conversion-event of the Eucharistic worship is the metanoia or personal conversion which is the reception in faith by the members of the congregation of the proclaimed Word as addressed to them. In Calvin’s words, “one does not preach to bread;” consequently, the “This is my Body” of the celebrating minister is addressed to the congregation, which becomes the risen Body that is the eschatological Church, but the Calvinist Church, like the Calvinist Eucharistic reception, has no historically objectivity. Calvin’s rejection of metaphysics, and so of sacramental reality, requires a choice between an empirically available Church, one capable of historical and therefore sacramental worship, and a church simply absent from history. His reference to the Church as sacrament uses that term in a “mystical” sense impossible to reduce to historical objectivity, for Calvin’s rejection of metaphysics is inexorably the rejection of any historically objective, i.e., irreversible, sacramental efficacy: whatever is historical is opaque to the grace of Christ.[205] The nominal relation which Calvin places between the Eucharistic signing or sacramentum tantum and the worshiper’s reception of the Body of Christ, the communio sanctorum which he understands to be the res tantum of the sacrament (equivalently, the invisible Church) is thus one which owes nothing to the inherent efficacy of the sacramental sign―an efficacy whose secondary causality he cannot accept.
Calvin maintains, following Ockham, that a divine (i.e., salvific) effect requires a divine cause; this cause is the Holy Spirit who, by the potentia ordinata of God, makes the sign to be efficacious in representing the Real Presence of Christ, and so in causing the union of the congregation with him in the res tantum of the sacrament, the communio sanctorum. Because his theology leaves no room for secondary causality, for sacramental efficacy, whether of the priestly offering or of the sacramental sign, neither is there room for a sacrificial understanding of the Eucharist. In these matters, Calvin is even more explicit than Luther: whatever is objective in the sacraments, is so by the work of the Holy Spirit. Therefore its objectivity is not historical: its reality is eschatological simply.
The Calvinist liturgy relies on the language which, in the Catholic Eucharist, consists in the Words of Institution, the consecration of the bread and the wine of the Offertory. However Calvin refuses the literal signification of the Words of Institution, he cannot admit the sacramental efficacy, the vi verborum, of the words of consecrartion. He simply denies that Jesus intended to identify the bread and wine with his body and blood. Rather, the words are to be interpreted metaphorically, or, as Calvin preferred, “spiritually,” in the sense that Christ’s Words of Institution at the Last Supper are an instance of metonymy (the metaphorical use of the name of a thing for another thing associated with it or suggested by it). Here of course he rejects Luther’s insistence upon their literal meaning. This entails his rejection of Luther’s attribution of divine “ubiquity” to the body of Christ in violation of the traditional Personal application of the communication of idioms.
Calvin, holding the Words of Institution to be literally false, has on Nominalist grounds dissociated the sign (the consecrated bread) from the body of Christ which it signifies. He then affirms the Eucharistic association of the sign and signified by the work of the Holy Spirit at an ineffable, non-historical level, whose Eucharistic effect does not change the bread into the body of Christ, but rather changes the congregation to whom the Words of Institution are preached: viz., a lifting up of their minds and hearts to a union with the risen Christ who, by reason of his corporeality, is located in heaven and cannot have a location in fallen space and time: i.e., in history.[206]
It is evident that the “spiritual” union of the faithful with the risen Christ thus achieved has no historical objectivity; once again, the contrast is between the Catholic emphasis on the concrete historicity of the nuptial union of Christ and the Church in One Flesh, and the Calvinist rejection of that historicity
Any talk of “Real Presence” in Calvin’s account of the Eucharist must be understood in this context; e.g., his insistence that the Body of Christ is really offered to, but not received by, the impious is not to be understood as implying that there is an antecedent Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist independent of the faith of the recipient, but that the Eucharistic worship, the Lord’s Supper, contains a real representation of the res (effect) it causes by signifying, viz., the congregation’s faith-union with the Risen Lord.
That faith-union with the risen Jesus, understood as the work of the Spirit, is the Spirit’s making to be effective, i.e., to be eschatologically true, and thus causing the otherwise meaningless Eucharistic elements to become the body and blood of Jesus in such wise as to render their reception fruitful for the faithful recipient. However this union presupposes Jesus’ Personal Eucharistic Presence, albeit “virtual” or “spiritual,” which Personal unity is also the work of the Spirit. The whole concern is for Jesus as the victim of the One Sacrifice: there is no Eucharistic offering of the Victim, a notion savoring of the Antiochene theology of the late fourth and early fifth century, which in Nestorius was condemned at Ephesus. The contrary insistence of Cyril of Alexandria upon the Personal unity of Jesus is enshrined in the definition that Jesus’ mother is the Theotokos.
The Nestorian diophysism is consistent with Calvin’s insistence that the risen Jesus’ human corporeality requires that he be “located” in heaven, at the right hand of the Father: here we have an echo of Augustine’s view of corporeality as entailing empirical location. We may suppose this “location” to be Personal: we know it to be human by definition. Thus located, the corporeality of the Christ cannot be other than divine. In Calvin’s theology, the Personal unity entailed is of course eschatological, the work of the Spirit in the eschatological economy which is the work of the Holy Spirit, not of Christ the Lord. It has no historical realization, no historical objectivity.
A number of elements are at work in Calvin’s theology, reinforcing each other. There is first a rationalization of the Augustinian understanding of the fallen condition of man. Where Augustine, following Paul’s anthropology; understands the flesh-spirit dichotomy intrinsic to fallen man to be at once perceived and healed only in ecclesia, by participation in the worship of the Church. Calvin understands fallen man to be flesh simply in the sense of sarx, lacking all intrinsic unity and significance. Much the same rationalization of fallenness has already been encountered in Luther’s doctrine of total corruption, but Calvin carried its logic further than Luther wished to take it. Such rationalizations, whether of the mystery of grace or of the mystery of sin, proceed either monistically, as with Luther, or dualistically, as with Calvin. In either case, a devalorization of history follows: the historical worship of the historical Church is not salvific. We have seen that Luther cannot accept this implication of a rationale which elsewhere he relies upon. This, it may be suggested, is at once the major difference between and the major similarity of the Lutheran and the Calvinist approaches to the Eucharist and to the Church.
Secondly, Calvin, like Luther, accepts the Nominalist dismissal of metaphysical analysis, and with this, also the dismissal of any level of historical reality or truth beyond the empirical or pragmatic. Since the empirical and pragmatic significance of material reality is then entirely this-worldly, no intrinsic sacramental signification of eschatological salvation is possible. Further, the risen Christ, as man, is also material, he cannot be present except by a local motion, with the corollary of a mechanical or Capharnaite fashion in this world. Such a presence, which Calvin identifies as the product of the Catholic doctrine of transubstantion, he regards as having blasphemous connotations; viewing the identification of empirical bread with the Body of Christ as an idolatrous, denoting an identification of God with that which is not God: here he echoes Berengarius.
Calvin’s Nominalism cannot but deform the Catholic transubstantiation doctrine. St. Thomas, relying on the Aristotelian substance-accident analysis. pointed out that the “species” (visible/empirical appearances, which he subsumed to Aristotelian accidents) of the bread or wine cannot symbolize the body or Blood of Christ unless their own correlative substance is absent, for otherwise they would only symbolize their proper substantial reality. St. Thomas pointed out very clearly that the conversio substantialiter of the substance of the bread) into the corporeal substance of Jesus, excludes the the local motion of Christ from heaven to earth which Calvin thinks inseparable from transubstantiation as such. Here as a Nominalist he identifies what St.Thomas’s metaphysics understands as accidental, and designates as “species” (sensible or empirical appearance) with what the Nominalism rejection of all metaphysics must identify as substance. When Calvin, speaking of the bread, says that its substance remains, he is speaking within a Nominalist frame of reference which refuses any meaning to historical substance except that of phenomenon, which is to say, of what Thomas designates as “species,” mere appearance.
There are further ambiguities or paradoxes in Calvin’s Eucharistic doctrine which his “dialectical” methodology does not resolve:
1. He is bound to a kind of eschatological geography: Christ as Risen remains locally in heaven, at some indefinite distance. Yet Christ’s Body is truly given as food. Nominalism knows a material presence diffinitive, which is to say, a dimensionless presence, which is not empirical, but whose reality the Nominalists nonetheless defend. This notion may enter into Calvin’s Eucharistic doctrine, but it is more likely to have been derived from the late medieval piety of the “spiritual communion,” itself nonhistorical and therefore requiring no ecclesial or priestly ministration.
2. Calvine places is a tension between the economic and the immanent Trinitarian functions: only the economic Spirit is redemptive, while the immanent or preexistent Spirit sustains and conserves creation, which is entirely distinct from the economy of salvation. We have seen that St. Thomas also holds a divine creation independent of the Trinitarian Missions, and a consequently nonhistorical Trinitarian theology, in the sense that he abstracts the divine Persons from the historicity of the Father’s sending of the Son to give the Spirit. This leaves his theology with an insoluble problem, that of arranging for the historicity of the One and the same Son, whose Person, or reality, so to speak, is understood in abstract rather than in economical terms: i.e., as the “immanent Son.”
Speaking of the preexistent Christ, Calvin uses the term asarkos, (without flesh) as opposed to ensarkos (enfleshed). But: it is not clear whether he understands ensarkos (1) to designate simply an abstract, i.e., cosmologically-conceived divine immanence of the Second Person in humanity, or (2) to denote the kenotic immanence of the primordial Second Adam in fallen humanity. The influence of the medieval Christology which St. Thomas represents is evident here.
The effect of the medieval rationalization of St. Anselm’s propter peccatum Christology upon medieval theology prior to Duns Scotus is effective also in Calvin, and he, like the medievals, undoubtedly understands the “asarkos” pre-existence of the Christ as that of the divine Logos apart from any reference to his primordial headship of humanity, and therefore understands him as exercising omnipotence only as divine. This is clearly a departure from the communication of idioms. Jesus the Lord is a single hypostasis, a single agent: this parceling-out of his actions as proper to one or the other of his natures is implicitly Nestorian, although not uncommon with the Fathers: e.g., . In a number of places, Calvin regards appears to look upon names of “Logos” and “Christ” as interchangeable, naming the preexistent Logos as the Christ, which naming is consistent with the New Testament, where “Logos” is always a title of Jesus. It is more likely however that, following the medievals, he is using “Logos” nonhistorically, in which case it is is easy to identify the Logos with the nonhistorical Personal unity who is “the subject of the Incarnation.” In any event, Calvin maintains that, insofar as immanent, no Person of the Trinity is bound to the economy of salvation; here the God-man dichotomy is at its maximum, and it requires a minimal communicatio idiomatum, for the salvific mediation of the Christ is not achieved by any intrinsic God-man unity in the Christ, but is given ab extrinseco, by the ordered omnipotence of God. This is Nominalism taken to the extreme limit of a Nestorian refusal of the Incarnation. Calvin has difficulties with the role of Jesus’ humanity in the historical reception of the Eucharist.
3. Calvin uses a kind of eschatological dialectic to solve the problems which his refusal of the ex opere operato doctrine of sacramental efficacy leaves open: God is not bound to space and time, and the Spirit can unify what space and time divide. Calvin has an almost Cartesian and “granular” concept of the radical disunity of time and space. This dialectic is be-tween the divine commitment to the economy, and the divine freedom; as has been seen Calvin holds that the divine freedom is compromised by the ex opere operato doctrine of sacramental realism: it would bind God’s mercy to the sacraments.
Calvin wishes the divine commitment to redemption (potentia ordinata) and the divine immanence or noncommitment (potentia absoluta) to remain in a dialectical tension whose objectivity is provided by the Holy Spirit, and is consequently nonhistorical. However, Calvin thinks he is able, by this means, to avoid the reducibility to each other of faith and sacramental efficacy: i.e., to avoid the mistakes of both Luther and Zwingli.
Some Catholic theologians, notably Kilian McDonnell and Joseph Tylenda, have proposed the possibility or probability of a reconciliation between the Calvinist and the Catholic views of the Eucharist as sacrifice; other Catholic theologians, such as Louis Bouyer and Francis Clark, would disagree. The problem finally comes down to whether the Eucharistic Event is identically the historical sacrifice of the cross, the One Sacrifice of Christ. The affirmation of this identity, viz., that the Mass is the objective offering of the One Sacrifice which, as both Luther and Calvin recognized, the Catholic tradition maintains and has maintained for the fifteen centuries before the Reformation, cannot be reconciled with the justification sola fide emphasis, with its refusal of ex opere operato realism, proper to Calvin as to Luther.
Attempts by Catholic theologians to overcome this difficulty generally follow some such pattern as Edward Kilmartin’s, in which the sacrificium laudis which is the Church’s response to the sacrifice of Christ is identified as the sole sacrifice proper to the Church’s Eucharistic worship. However, this is the Calvinism condemned by the Council of Trent; it is not and cannot be made to be Catholicism, for it is evident that the Church’s sacrifice of praise, her prayer, is efficacious in causing her nuptial union with her Lord.
There is no question that Catholic Eucharistic worship includes the Church’s sacrifice of praise, but, as the Council of Trent taught, the central oblation or sacrificial offering of the Catholic Mass is the sacramental representation of the One Sacrifice of Christ, by a bishop or priest acting in the Person of Christ. Only by Church’s union, in One Flesh, with her Eucharistic Lord is her quite distinct sacrifice of praise acceptable, for it is thus One Flesh with his. Neither Calvinism nor Lutheranism can affirm this and remain itself.
We have several times referred to the Nominalist idea of a presence diffinitive of Christ in the Eucharist. Generally, Calvin places no particular reliance upon this notion, but something of this nominalist rejection of metaphysics does enter into Calvin’s insistence that the res (effect) of the Eucharist is not merely spiritual in the sense of immaterial, but that it includes a bodily influence from Christ’s flesh, which is given us by or through the Spirit. This is the Calvinist doctrine of the “virtual” presence of Christ in the Eucharist, as opposed to a “natural” or physical presence.[207] Nonetheless, Calvin’s unqualified rejection of the actual reception of this bodily influence by a sinner reduces his virtualism to a subjectivism, quite as Luther’s rejection of the event-character of the Eucharistic presence has done.
It is evident that Calvin’s doctrine of a Eucharistic ‘receptionism” is a more radical symbolism than Luther’s, precisely in its denial of the possibility of a sinful reception of the Eucharist. In Calvin’s view, the reality of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist, by reason of its dependence upon the faith of the recipient, is more strictly in function of the principle of justification sola fide. Calvin maintained that the sinner who nonetheless receives communion receives only bread and wine, not the body and blood of Christ: only the faithful receive the reality.
What this reality may have been for Calvin is discussible. In their common rejection of the transubstantiation of the bread and wine of the Offertory, both Luther and Calvin substitute for it a symbolist effect upon the congregation, identical to the worshippers’ justification by faith alone. Calvin’s Geneva liturgy of 1542 adapts, from the ancient introductory verses of the Preface of the Latin Mass, the “Sursum corda,” (Lift up your hearts), removing it from that prayer to the end of the Communion prayers.[208] We have seen that in Calvin’s liturgy the Sursum corda amounts to a consecratory epiclesis of the Holy Spirit: one which consecrates, not the bread and the wine, but the worthy recipients who by their union with the risen Christ become the eschatological church.
Thus transposed, this invocation looks to the union of the faithful with the risen Lord: it is their transformation by this union, rather than the transubstantiation of the Eucharistic elements upon which the Catholic doctrine insists, and which he condemned as blasphemous. In common with many after him, Calvin read a classic source for Augustine’s Eucharistic doctrine, his Sermo 227, as supporting his Eucharistic symbolism.
The impact of the maxim, “Finitum non capax infiniti,” upon his Eucharistic doctrine, as upon his theology generally, is debated. Some Calvinist theologians interpret the maxim sensu negante, i.e., sufficiently literally as to understand the words of consecration to exclude the divinity of Jesus from his Eucharistic presence, maintaining that faithful communicant receives the body and blood of a merely human Jesus who, as human, is a creature incapable of being God. Clearly, the interpretation of this maxim is pivotal for Calvin’s Christology, which is generally regarded as diophysite, although that is to refuse its evidently dialectic exposition: in fact, Calvin does accept a version of the communication of idioms, but not as Luther did, monophysitically, i.e., as permitting the attribution of the divine omnipotence to the body and blood of Jesus the Christ. Calvin’s Christology is closer to the Nestorian dualism: the dialectic of humanity and divinity of Jesus is resolved in the unity of his Person only eschatologically, not historically for, in history, he considers Jesus and the Logos not to identify. It would then follow that for Calvin the historical Jesus is not divine, but this would be difficult to reconcile with the Christological piety pervading the Institutes. Calvin firmly rejected Nestorianism in principle, but his commentators are not entirely persuaded that he avoided it in practice.
The Eucharistic implications of the Nestorian denial of the divinity of Jesus were the basis for Cyril’s indictment of Nestorius and for the subsequent condemnation of his Christology at the Council of Ephesus. However, neither Nestorius nor his mentor Theodore of Mopsuestia were accused of Eucharistic heresy, although it was the Eucharistic implication of Nestorius’ Christology error and, by implication, Theodore’s, that drew Cyril’s attention to Euchristic implications Nestorius’ Christology, but only his Christology was condemned at Ephesus.
Calvin’s rejection of the Sacrifice of the Mass and of sacramental realism generally, connotes a corresponding Christological aberration, for it is accompanied by the cosmologically-inspired supposition that the utterly distinct and irreducible divine and human natures of Christ require some extrinsic cause of their unity in his Person: this agency Calvin ascribes to the Holy Spirit, thereby as has been seen putting in issue the order of the causally prior Trinitarian Procession of the Son from the Father. It did not occur to Calvin, as it had not to his medieval sources, that the affirmation of this mystery, in sum the unity of Jesus as Lord, the utterly radical statement of the Christian faith in Jesus, the Name by which we are saved, is beyond all analysis and explanation. Jesus’ truth, his unity, cannot be transcended by any higher truth, any higher wisdom or deeper insight. The revelation that is the Person of Jesus the Lord is then pure grace, without antecedent possibility or source. As the basic mystery of faith, upon Him rests the entirety of our faith in God the Father. Jesus the Lord stands under no prius other than obedience to the Father’s Mission of one and the same Son, Jesus the Christ, to give the Holy Spirit. Throughout the history of the Church the recipients of that grace have often succumbed to the fleshly temptation to reduce the Mysterium that is Christ the Lord to some a priori rational necessity, but as the fullness of grace, gratia Capitis, he has none.
This mistaken quest for necessary reasons is certainly Calvin’s error, but it has ample antecedents among Catholic theologians, going back at least to Anselm of Bec, Abelard, and Hugh of St. Victor. It is likely that there is no strict relation between Calvin’s dehistoricized Eucharistic doctrine, which he knew to be a departure from the Catholic tradition, and his Christology, which he considered to be that of the ancient tradition. as evidenced by his conventional use of the communication of idioms which, after an initial confusion, he deployed accurately. The same failure to recognize the strict interconnection of Eucharistic and Christological doctrine,, if in reverse, is true of Nestorius and his mentor, Theodore of Mopsuestia. Their denial of the divinity of Jesus was condemned by the Council of Ephesus three years after his death. Neither Theodore nor Nestoriuis were charged with the correlative denial of the Real Presence of the risen Lord Jesus in the Eucharistic elements although, as Cyril insisted, this consequence was inescapable.
This consideration permits, even requires, a further development. Although the rigorous application of Calvin’s Nominalist hermeneutic would leave no Catholic doctrine standing, this logical rigor is not evident in the Institutes. While he there reviles Catholic Eucharistic realism with more enthusiasm than his acquaintance with it warrants, and more than his argument against it supports, he is nonetheless loyal to much of the Catholic doctrinal tradition. Some fifty years ago a Calvinist scholar at Princeton conducted a meticulous examination of the first edition of the Institutes, with excursions into the subsequent editions, and established beyond significant dispute that Calvin’s doctrinal position exhibits a considerable Catholic influence, notably in five strategic areas: Trinity, conscience, the use of the Apocrypha, the doctrine of atonement, and the Christological use of the communication of idioms. He concludes:
The five areas discussed in this chapter in which Calvin’s work manifests the influence of the ancient Church must not be interpreted to mean that all the points of contact have been treated. We have simply tried to indicate five areas in which Calvin agreed with traditional teachings of the ancient Church.[209]
Within Calvin’s lifetime his followers began to fragment over the issue of predestination. While the Socinian Unitarianism does not have discernible origins in Calvinism, the Trinity became of less and less interest to a religious orientation rather reliant upon the Old Testament than upon the Gospel of Jesus the Lord. Thus Unitarianism, especially in the United States, became a tenable default position for some followers of Calvin: once that path is taken, the faith that Jesus is the Lord has been abandoned.
With this the discussion of aberrant Eucharistic symbolism must end: That radical misunderstanding of the Church’s worship rests finally upon the rejection of the historical realism of the Sacrifice of the Mass: this began with Berengarius, was the commonplace of the proto-Reform under Wycliff and Hus, and had its institutional affirmation from Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin. By it, the Church’s worship of Jesus the Lord was deprived of sacramental efficacy and realism, deprived of historical foundation, reduced finally to the sola fide subjectivity which permts no authentic historical expression. Some elements of the ancient Catholic tradition may survive under this impoverishment, but only as inconsistent with the programmatic reduction of the Christian faith to nonhistoricity, to the standing of a private conviction incapable of authentic historical expression. Thereby the intrinsic significance of history as the mediation of the salvation won by the One Sacrifice of Jesus the Lord is overcome, with the consequence that history, and all that is historical, can have only a metaphorical value, a valuation inescapably reduced to what the traffic will bear: finally, to political correctness. A birthright has been traded for the mess of politicized pottage that becomes the daily fare. It is finally found inedible by those discovering anew that man does not live by bread alone, even when accompanied by the consolation of circuses.
The mutuality of ecclesial and Eucharistic realism is inescapable; the historical objectivity of the Εucharistic Sacrifice is the source and cause of the historical objectivity of the Church. When the nuptial union of Christ and the bridal Church is foregone, all that remains is a choice between the dehistoricized dialectic typifying Calvinism, and the dehistoricized Christomonism typifyig Lutheranism.
We have seen de Lubac identify the Pauline ‘line’ in Eucharistic doctrine with the assertion that the Eucharist is the cause of the unity of the Church―“una caro”―and the Johannine ‘line’ with understanding the “panis vitae” to be the principle of the deification of the communicant.[210]
The Lutheran scriptural scholar Joachim Jeremias has seen in the Johannine words of interpretation over the bread (viz., in Jn. 6:51c: “and the bread I shall give is my flesh for the life of the world”―which he had once thought to be a redactional insert into Jn. 6:51-58, itself a Eucharistic homily―an association of “flesh” with sacrifice.[211] Jeremias now maintains this language to be Johannine, probably using already traditional Eucharistic expressions. Thus, Jeremias understands the entire passage (Jn. 6:51-5) to be equivalent to the Pauline proclamation in I Cor. 11:24-26: in fact, Jn. 6:51c corresponds to I Cor. 11:24b (“This is my body which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.”).
In support of this exegesis he points out that sarx is the literal translation of the Aramaic bisra, whose idiomatic Greek translation is soma but whose literal translation is sarx. Jeremias has recognized in the Johannine preference for speaking of the “flesh” of Christ an emphasis upon the sacrificial dimension of the Eucharist, a reference to the flesh and blood of the sacrifice. Jesus identified himself with the flesh (bisra) and the blood (idmi) of the sacrificial lamb, in whose sacrificial death, the flesh and the blood are separated. These nouns therefore bespeak and presuppose a slaying which has separated the flesh and the blood. Jesus thus speaks of himself as a sacrifice: viz., the sacrifice of the eschatological Paschal lamb, in which all the sacrifices of the Old Covenant are resumed and fulfilled.
A Catholic exegete, affirming the historicity of the Eucharistic representation of the sacrifice of the Paschal lamb, would find in the universal priesthood of the baptized a priestly right, rooted in the Old Covenant, to the flesh of the victim as food, as the “panis vitae.” Within the Eucharist, Catholic theology distinguishes the mortal flesh of Christ on the cross and on the altar from the One Flesh, the New Covenant sacrificially instituted in his blood, but cannot dissociate them, for they are joined in a single Sacrifice, a single Event. Clearly enough, the “flesh” of the sacrificial victim in the Old Covenant points only to the mortality of all fallen life, and thus of its availability for sacrifice to Him who gave it life, but the sacrificed flesh of the Paschal Victim is the “medicine of immortality, the remedy that we should not die,” and is so by the sacrificial institution of the One Flesh, the radical restoration of the free unity lost in the Fall by the Head’s “recapitulation” of the “flesh” of the fallen world.
The distinction between the quite different meanings of these two Pauline “metaphors” does in fact appear to have been little understood by the patristic tradition, which often, even generally, assimilates “caro” to “corpus” However, “caro,” (sarx) when used by Paul without qualification, designates the fallen, disintegrating condition of man in the world, imprisoned by the fear of death. “Caro” (sarx) in this unqualified sense lacks all intrinsic freedom, intelligibility and unity: of itself, it profits nothing. However, in Paul’s doctrine, the utter futility of “caro” is redeemed by Jesus the Christ’s institution, on the cross and the altar, of the covenantal, free nuptial unity of Christ and the Church in “Una Caro” (Mia Sarx). This “One Flesh” is the immanent free unity of the New Creation, the sacrificial restoration to the disunity that is “flesh” of the lost freedom, the nuptial unity, proper to the primordial good creation which, having been refused in the primordial sin of the first Adam and first Eve, could be restored from its fallenness only by the sacrificial institution on the cross and the altar of the free, nuptially-ordered covenantal union in One Flesh of Christ, the second Adam, the Head, with the Church, the second Eve, the bridal body. This restoration of nuptial freedom is the redemption of man and of man’s universe from the fall. This redemption of all creation is the terminus of the Mission of the Son, the consequence of his giving the full Gift of the Spiritus Creator, by whose Outpouring upon the Church, Christ, her Head, has made all things made new. This terminus of his Mission is identically the institution of the New Covenant, the fulfillment of Gen. 2:24, from which Paul derives the latter expression, “Una Caro” and, perhaps by reflex, his profound insight into the fallenness of “caro” as well: the “flesh which profits nothing”.
On the other hand, by “corpus” (soma) Paul (1)generally designates the Church as an organized community whose members are freely unified by reason of their baptism, their entry onto the freedom of the metaphysically prior One Flesh, the product of the outpouring of the Spirit upon the Bridal Church, into which they were baptized. Paul (2) also uses (corpus” with reference to the sacrificed body of Jesus the Christ in the Institution Narrative which he had earlier received, probably from the Church at Antioch, and which in I Cor. 11:23-26 he passed on to the Church at Corinth. The patristic confusion of these two entirely distinct Pauline usages of “corpus” was exploited by the Reform, and recently by a number of flawed expressions of “liturgical renewal.”
Thus de Lubac’s reference to the Pauline use of “body” and “flesh” as metaphorical may not carry the stress upon extrinsic denomination that ‘metaphor’ has in English, but it does miss the full metaphysical density of Paul’s language. It is evident enough that only the concretely substantial unity of the One Flesh can justify Augustine’s Eucharistic doctrine which, apart from that substantial and therefore Trinitarian foundation, can only be interpreted as wandering into the ambiguities which major Church historians and now a swelling host of sub-theological liturgists think to have seen in Augustine’s Eucharistic doctrine―even to the point of reading into it a departure from the Catholic tradition, as by Johannes Betz.
We have questioned earlier whether the Eucharistic “res gemina” can be understood to designate merely the risen, eschatological “mystical body,” i.e., a nonhistorical, simply eschatological Church in union with her risen Head, and have shown that it is the historical Church which concerns the patristic and early medieval theologians such as Gandolph of Bologna. Their emphasis upon the Eucharist as the nourishment of the Church parallels their emphasis upon the Eucharistic causation of the Church. The problem unresolved throughout the patristic, Carolingian and medieval periods is that of addressing at once the freedom and the substantial unity of the nuptial union of Christ and the Church, for their One Flesh is not ordinarily seen, whether by the Fathers or the medieval theologians, to be unity at once a free and substantial. Thus it is not seen to be covenantal, and therefore is not seen to be nuptial except within a still-cosmological view of marriage as the woman’s subjection to the man, her assimilation to him in “one person.” Fortunately, the pastoral service of the liturgy does not wait upon theological approval.
De Lubac has described the Pauline use of nuptial symbolism as “métaphores pauliniennes”. Later, in The Splendour of the Church, he continues to refer to this language as “métaphore” but in a clearly historical and realistic context, in sharp contrast to the English use of the cognate term.[212] There are current exponents of Catholic theology who would agree that the scriptural references to the “one flesh” of Christ and the Church are metaphorical in the sense of connoting a merely extrinsic denomination, thereby implicitly denying to the “one flesh” the intrinsic metaphysical unity attributed to substantial reality, and consequently putting in issue its sacramental efficacy. This implication undercuts the New Covenant itself, but the metaphysics of the Covenant, of the One Flesh, has attracted little theological attention. On the other hand, it is not difficult to see that the contemporary programmatic disinterest of Catholic theologians in systematic theology is a tacit anti-sacramentalism, persistence in which is finally a refusal of the radical res Catholica, the Eucharistic institution of the One Flesh of the New Covenant.
This One Flesh is the only historical―because covenantal and therefore free―unity that does in fact “include” Jesus the Christ, but not as a part of a “body;” rather, it includes him as the Head and Source of the free, sponsal and covenantal community that Augustine names the Christus totus. In brief, the One Flesh includes Jesus the Head as immanent in the free community of which he is the head, as the Trinity includes the Father by his immanence in the Trinity, the Community of which he is the Head. This free human substance, the One Flesh, includes the Church as the Bridegroom’s bridal Body in their free, nuptial union, a union distinct both from the historical unity of the sacrificed body of Christ, and the historical community that is his bridal Church. Only in their nuptial distinction and their nuptial union do Christ and the Church, as Head and Body, as second Adam and second Eve, as Bridegroom and Bride, constitute the Christus totus, the One Flesh in the Covenantal freedom of the New Creation, the full Gift of the Spiritus Creator. It is in the institution of this “One Flesh,” the New Covenant, that the Son images his Father, precisely by becoming, like Him, the source of a glory, the Church of whom Jesus is the Head, the source of the freedom of the New Creation, achieved upon the cross and upon the altar by the One Sacrifice of Christ: I Cor. 11:3, Col. 1:15.
On the other hand, references to the ecclesial Body as “le reste du corps, par opposition à la Tête” (:”the remainder of the body, by opposition to the Head”) presuppose the reduction of the Eucharistic representation of the nuptial union of the Head and the Bridal Church to a physical unity merely, a “corps,” a notion we have shown to be alien to the One Flesh of the Christus totus.
Paschasius opposed Amalarius’ tripartite division of the Eucharistic body of Christ, evidently on the same Augustinian grounds as had Florus, the brillian deacon of Lyon, but in so doing Paschasius was intent upon the nuptial unity of the Head and Body, a unity that is neither the quasi-organic unity of a body, nor the hierarchical unity of the various members of the Church, perceived by some analogy between its pastoral articulation and the organic articulation of a living body in the sense of I Cor. 12:12ff. and Rom. 12:4ff. Yet Paschasius also was confused or at least open to confusion on this point, as de Lubac has observed:
Voir cependant infra, “caeterum corpus” appliqué par Paschasius Radbertus au corps historique.[213]
Here, by “corps historique,” de Lubac refers to the body which hung upon the cross, the body which Paschasius had termed “caeterum corpus” in an evident dependence upon Augustine, but referring the “caeterum corpus” language to the body which hung upon the cross, rather than to the mystical unity of Christ and the Church, as Augustine had done in the sentence which de Lubac has cited in the immediately preceding endnote 213.
However, so to speak is to forget that the “corps historique” is precisely Jesus Christ the Head; to refer to him as an “other body” is to confuse the free unity of the ecclesial body, the Church, with the covenantal unity of the One Flesh of Christ and the Church. Paschasius carefully distinguishes these three “bodies,’ as had Amalarius, but in speaking of each of them as a “body,” he loses sight of, even ignores the freedom of the covenantal relation in One Flesh between Christ the Head and his Bridal Church, his Body.
De Lubac’s further analysis and summation of Paschasius’ Eucharistic doctrine follows:[214]
One will observe how the epithet “mystic,” while designating especially the sacramental body, was applied finally to the three bodies, even after a certain fashion to the third, considered by relation to the final and total unity of the Body comprising Head and members, no longer merely the unity in process of becoming, nor only the unity of the Church, the body of Christ, but the achieved unity of Christ and the Church, “in caro una.” This is the ultimate and “solide” reality, the procuring and mystical signing of which all the other aspects of the body of Christ, however real they may be in themselves, each in their order and according to their proper mode, have as their goal, while waiting, so to speak, to be absorbed in it.
Corpus mysticum, at 41, n. 101; cf. p. 34. See also, at p. 81, the reference to the “spirituelle solidité” of the definitive “body,” “le corps total et definitif,” which is the final effect of all Eucharistic signing. The same reality, the same “solidité,” is there in view. This reality can only be the New Covenant, the One Flesh, instituted irrevocably by the One Sacrifice offered once at Calvary and daily on the altars of the Church.
De Lubac has seen in Paschasius’ assertion of the transcendent unity of the One Flesh of Christ and the Church the dogmatic synthesis of the Carolingian Eucharistic doctrine. It is also clear that de Lubac understands the Paschasian “Una Caro” to be within the res sacramenti. He explains at the beginning of the first chapter of Corpus mysticum that the patristic and monastic tradition is thus intent upon the worshiper’s union in and with the Church as the ultimate goal of the Eucharistic worship as almost to ignore the Real Presence, that which the later theology will so identify with the res et sacramentum and so stress as almost to dissociate the Church from her Eucharistic cause. However, de Lubac has then gone on to show that the Augustinian-patristic emphasis upon the res sacramenti as personal union in ecclesia with the risen Christ did not entail a failure to recognize the realism of the mystical Event-Presence of the Christ in sacramento. For the Fathers, for the Carolingians, as for the medieval theologians, the unity of the One Flesh of the risen Christ and the Church is the single effect, the res gemina, the duplex res sacramenti, of the historical Eucharistic signing. The spontaneous reaction of the Carolingian theologians to the threat of its fragmentation by Amalarius testifies to their unanimity on this point, which in fact Amalarius did not dream of contesting.
However, once again, we see de Lubac repeat the patristic and Carolingian misunderstanding of the Head-Body unity of Christ and the Church in One Flesh, which reduces the free unity of the nuptial union in One Flesh to the unity of a “corps”, a physical unity merely (for in this confusion, the stress on the Church as a “body” loses sight of the free and nuptial unity of her members, by which the Church is one: this is the unity of her Eucharistic worship. Thus it is that de Lubac refers to the Head-Body unity in One Flesh as the “Body comprising Head and members.”[215] Although it would appear that Paschasius’ labeling of this ultimate Eucharistic unity as “Una Caro” manifests his subscription to the traditional awareness of its nuptial unity, it is not clear that even Paschasius has recognized that the nuptial unity in One Flesh of Head with the Church cannot be reduced to the contrasting non-covenantal and merely physical unity of a “corps.” De Lubac has pointed out the impropriety of Paschasius’ reference to the Church as an “other body” (autre corps; i.e., “caeterum corpus”); it is a usage reflecting a puzzlement over the free unity of Head and Body that de Lubac does not entirely resolve.[216] In the last word of the passage quoted supra, the feminine pronoun for “réalité” masks the masculinity of the Head as the source of the free unity of the “one flesh.” However, the quotation marks with which de Lubac frames this “one flesh” indicate clearly enough that he has in view Paschasius’ reference to Paul’s quotation, in Eph. 5:31, of Gen. 2:24 from the Yahwist creation account.[217]
It is of course at best misleading to ascribe to this free and nuptial unity the physical unity of “corpus,” rather than the free, covenantal, nuptial unity of the “Una Caro.” This confusion over the unity of the “one flesh” is exhibited by most of the commentators on Augustine’s Eucharistic theology: it infects a good deal of contemporary liturgical “renewal.”
It is also misleading, if not equally so, to speak of this unity as that of “una persona,” as do Gregory the Great,[218] St. Thomas,[219] and many others, including, as has been seen, Augustine himself.[220] However, their literal identification of the Head with the Body is entirely understandable, in that only the Head can speak for the Covenantal “One Flesh;” as we learn from Paul’s encounter with the Christ on the road to Damascus: “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” (Acts, 9:4-5). There, Jesus, the Head of the bridal Church who is the Body, speaks for their One Flesh, viz., “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting,” speaking as her head for his free Bride who is free to be in covenantal union with him only by reason of his headship. Apart from the moment of original sin recited in Gen 3:1-7, we do not find Eve speaking for, or independently of, her Head; still less can she identify herself with Him, as he identifies himself with her. On this, see Augustine’s commentary on Psalm 30, where “una persona” refers to the “whole Christ,” the One Flesh of Head and Body:
I want you to understand that the Head and body together are called one Christ. To make this quite clear he [the Lord] says, when speaking of marriage, They will be two in one flesh; so they are two no longer, but one flesh (Mt. 19:5-5) But perhaps it might be thought that he only means this to apply to any ordinary marriage? No, because listen to what Paul tells us: They shall be two in one flesh, he says. This is a great mystery, but I am referring it to Christ and the Church (Eph. 5:31-32). So out of two, one single person comes to be, the Head and body, Bridegroom and Bride.
Enarr. in Ps. 30: (PL 36:232).
Here again one must keep in view that there is no precedent in the speculative tradition of pagan antiquity that would permit Augustine, or any of the Fathers, to recognize the substantial intelligibility of a free unity nor, à fortiori, that of a nuptially-ordered, Trinity-imaging, substantial unity. The struggle over the Arian denial of the Trinity offers a definitive witness to the incompatibility of the Greek tradition with the Christian revelation. However, even had the Arian dilemma been resolved by the Cappadocians, and when it had in fact been resolved by Augustine, its resolution―by way of recognizing the constitution of a substantial unity in God by the free tri-Personal interrelations―was not understood to have a human application or analogue, which is to say, a human image. Consequently, the uncritical equation of each human person with a unique human substance passed untroubled from antiquity down through the Middle Ages to the modern period. This monism of personal substance could be reconciled neither with the substantial unity of the One Flesh nor with the human imaging of the Trinity, an imaging which could only be substantial and which, were that substantial image understood to be monadic, i.e., to be a substantial human person or monas, could image only a monadic Godhead, a divine Monas. This would immediately invoke a subordinationist denial of the Trinity, for t The Monas is then identified with the Father, who constitutes the divine substance and who consequently cannot be Personally consubstantial with the Son or the Spirit: they are reduced to Platonic or Stoic emanations from a superior source from whom they are not only Personally but substantially distinct.
This view of the divine substance was dismissed only by the Council of Nicaea, whose definition of the consubstantiality of the divine Son with the Father had the inexorable implication of making the Father to be a member of the Trinity: its source indeed, but its immanent source, who is not possessed of a fuller divinity than that entailed in his subsistence in the Trinity, the divine substance, by which he is consubstantial with the Son and the Holy Spirit.
The reservation of human substantiality to the human person did not entail a denial of concrete historical unity of the One Flesh, the Augustinian Christus totus. This unity was not questioned, but it was imagined and referred to as organic, i.e., as the unity of a physical entity. More subtly, the unity of the One God was similarly subjected to the cosmological inability to conceive of a free divine unity. A subordinationism appears in the later Greek Apologists’ Trinitarian theology, but it was rather historical and economic than cosmological or metaphysical, a subordination of order rather than of rank, for tritheism was as unthinkable to them as a denial of the Christ’s divinity had been to Justin Martyr.
Although the unity of the Head and the Body, of the Bridegroom and the Bride, was course recognized as mysterious, it nonetheless had to be given an accurate designation which, to be satisfactory, must be metaphysical: i.e., it must transcend the ancient one-many dilemma which the Greel metaphysical tradition had been unable to transcend. The solution which ascribed the unity of “one person” to the union of Christ and his Church is ancient and, within the hermeneutic of the headship of the Name, is entirely defensible. However, that hermeneutic also required clarification, at least in outline, for without it, a simple-minded identification of Christ with his Church, and of his One Sacrifice with her sacrifice of praise, is practically inevitable. The consequence would have been a more or less uncritical, more or less impromptu, enlistment in the Reform.
Before undertaking the exposition of that hermeneutic, a lesser difficulty requires some discussion. This has to do with meeting the need for an accurate statement of the relation of the worthy reception of Communion to the “growth” of the Church. The dilemma may be simply stated.
In the first place, the Church preexists her members, in the sense that her source, her cause, is her Head, the Eucharistic Lord. She is neither the aggregate of her members, nor the product of their faith. It is evident that all of them, as members, must be baptized into her preexistent unity: only then may they proceed to the fullness of sacramental worship, i.e., Communion in the body and the blood of the One Sacrifice.[221]
Secondly, it is also evident that the Church is in some manner enhanced by the Eucharistic worship of her members. This worship is a participation in the Church’s worship, and so cannot be the cause of the Church, but nonetheless the authentic Eucharistic worship of the Church’s members is her historical enhancement, the cause of her historical growth and the extension of her historical efficacy. The distinction is important today because the Reform understands the Church to be caused not by the Eucharist but either by Baptism or by “faith alone.” From this stance, the church is “the gathered church,” whose reality is not prior to that of her members, but is simply the product of the aggregation of her members by reason of their baptism or their faith or both. A comparable confusion over the cause of the Church, and therefore of her relation to her members, is commonplace among Catholics today, and all too often, among their catechists, whose puzzlement over the doctrine of the sinlessness of the Church can easily reach the level of irony if not sarcasm and outright denial. In this context, one passage written by de Lubac may be read to have implied if not asserted,[222] that the historical Church is in the process of becoming the “one flesh ”
By the unique bread of sacrifice, it becomes clear that each of the faithful, united with the body of Christ, is, by that very fact, united with the Church. On receiving the Eucharist, each person “passes into the body of Christ”. In this way, little by little, the Christus totus, which is the purpose of the sacrament, is realized. (emphasis added) [223]
De Lubac, “Christian Community and Sacramental Communion,” Theological Fragments (San Francisco, Ignatius Press, 1984) at 52.
A literal reading of de Lubac’s language, as given here in translation, cannot be justified for, in the first place, it would ignore the reality of our baptismal entry into the ecclesial body of Christ; further, it would connote a developmental understanding of the Christus totus incompatible with de Lubac’s endorsement of Paschasius’ reference to the Una Caro of Christ and the Church as the “solide réalité,” as earlier cited (endnotes 214, 216, 222, 332, infra) and thus would also be unresponsive to Paul’s doctrine of the nuptial union of Christ and the Church in Eph. 5:21-33, which Augustine summarized in his explanation of the meaning of the Christus totus in Sermo 341.
De Lubac has himself elsewhere written that the One Flesh of Christ and the Church is a unité achevée, an accomplished unity, thus one incapable of development.[224] One must then conclude that, in the passage quoted, he is referring to the growth of the Church by the aggregation to her of all those who have come to her to be baptized and who, by their Communion in the One Flesh, are sustained and nourished in that union, rather than to a supposed future achievement of, or increase in, the nuptial union of Christ and the Church in One Flesh, for he knows well that the One Flesh was instituted by the One Sacrifice, on the cross and on the altar, once and for all.[225] Elsewhere he recognizes Augustine’s testimony to reality of this nuptial union[226] and in fact has asserted the nuptial union of Christ and the Church to be simply non-negotiable.[227]
Following Paul in Ephesians, Augustine finds the central Eucharistic reality in the nuptial union of the second Adam and the second Eve. His “Christus totus” is an expression of the metaphysical unity of this nuptial union, an insight ancient in the patristic tradition, and as close to an assertion of substantial unity as the prevalent cosmological imagination of the time could provide. Augustine’s “una persona” designation of this unity understands the unity of Christ and his Church to be an irrevocable and objective, as well as a personal reality, thus to be a free unity instituted once and for all on the cross and on the altar, the Son’s final gift of the Spiritus Creator, poured out upon the Church who, in nuptial union with him, here Head, is the Good Creation, and thus a unity that, as the terminus of the Father’s creative sending of the Son to give the Spirit, cannot be less than substantial.
It is obvious that creation terminates in substance, not in a process that has no empirical finality and reaches no historical unity. However, an uncritical subscription to the monadic notion of substance barred the Fathers from ascribing substantiality to a free unity of persons in “one flesh.” In these circumstances, “persona” was the best term available to them. In homiletic use from the first half of the second century, it has roots in the Pauline reference to our graced unity as in “one new man.”[228] The “una persona” idiom is thus much older than Augustine, but we must look to his use of it and even more importantly, to his justification of it, if we are to avoid the simplistic misunderstanding of it that haunts the patristic period and beyond.
In the first place, even when pressing an organic view of the Head-Body union, Augustine absolutely bars a literal reading of “una persona” that would assert the personal identification of a worshiper with our Lord; see his Ep. 187, whose c. 40 is worth quoting in full:
What then? Are we to think there is this difference between the head and the other members, that divinity may dwell in any given member however outstanding, as some great prophet or apostle, yet not ‘all the fullness of the Godhead’ as in the Head which is Christ? In our body there also is sensation innate in the individual members, but not so much as in the head, where it is clear that all the five senses are centered; for there are located sight and hearing and smell and taste and touch, but in the other members there is only touch. But perhaps, besides the fact that ‘all the fullness of the Godhead’ is found in that Body as in a temple, there is another difference between that Head and the perfection of any of the members. There is, indeed, in the fact that by a certain unique assumption of humanity He became one Person with the Word. Of none of the saints has it been, is it, or will it be possible to say: “The Word was made flesh’; none of the saints by any supreme gift of grace received the name of only-begotten Son, so as to be called by the name which is that of the very Word of God Himself before all ages, together with the humanity which He assumed. Therefore, that act of becoming man cannot be shared with any holy men, however eminent in wisdom and sanctity. That is a sufficiently evident and clear proof of divine grace. Who, then, could be guilty of such sacrilege as to dare assert that any soul, through the merit of its free will, could succeed in becoming another Christ? How could one single soul, by means of the free will given uniformly to all by nature, have merited to be joined to the Person of the only-begotten Word, unless a supreme grace had granted this, a grace which we may lawfully extol, but of which it is forbidden us to wish to judge?[229]
Nonetheless, once having eliminated the absurdity of a literal identity of the congregation with the Christ, there remains the problem of reconciling the Head-Body unity with Augustine’s frequent of una persona to describe that union. The impossibility of a personal identity of the Church with the risen Christ only heightens the necessity of a free, covenantal and therefore inter-personal, substantial identity; this is the identity of the “whole Christ,” the nuptial union of Christ and his Church, of the Head and the Body, that images the Trinity, as Paul makes clear in the discussion of headship in I Cor. 11, where he teaches that the Father, as Head of the Trinity, is the One God, so Jesus, as Head of the Church, of humanity, of all creation, is the One Man to whom Paul often refers as the source of our free union.
As the Headship of the Father does not suppress but underwrites the full personal distinction and the full divinity of the Son and of the Spirit, so the Headship of Christ underwrites the full personal humanity, the full human dignity, of all the human beings who freely comprise his ecclesial Body; he does so precisely as the Head of the Body, as the source of that free unity. It can only be a free and nuptial unity, than which there is no other unity in our fallen history. Membership in it is inseparable from our personal existence in freedom and our possession of personal dignity.
As has been observed, the Fathers whom de Lubac cites in Corpus mysticum and Exégèse médiévale rarely refer to Sermo 341, preferring Sermones 227 and 272, wherein Augustine’s Eucharistic rhetoric may be read to assert the simple numerical identity of Christ and the Church, a view heavily relied upon by Cardinal Mahony’s pastoral letters to support a near-symbolist reading of Augustine.[230] The texts of neither of these homilies support that reading.[231] Augustine clearly asserts that the Eucharistic Body and Blood of Jesus are the sacrament of the unity that is the Church: this is particularly clear in the longer of the two, Sermo 227, and obviously bars their identification, for he uses “sacramentum” in the classic sense of a sign that is an effective cause. After pointing to its parallel in Sermo 272, Pierre Batiffol remarks of the Sermo 227 that:
Ce texte est un des plus complets qu’on relève chez saint Augustin. L’Eucharistie y est désignée sous le vocable de « mensae dominicae sacramentum ». Les baptisés voient sur l’autel (in altari) le pain et le vin, qui sont les éléments dont est fait le sacrement. Une parole est prononcée et le sacrement est réalisé: l’opération par laquelle est produite cette réalisation est un sanctification. Une fois sanctifié par la parole prononcée, le pain est corps du Christ; le vin une fois sanctifié, de même, est sang du Christ: “Panis sanctificatus per verbum Dei corpus est Christi”. La définition du sacrement se vérifie donc: un élément une parole. Elle est précise: une parole, une sanctification. La chose invisible, la chose intelligible, est le corps du Christ et son sang.
Mais aussitôt l’allégorisme d’Augustin intervient: ce pain signifie l’unité de l’Église. Augustin dit plus fortement encore à ses auditeurs: Vous devenez le pain, qui est le corps de Christ, vous êtes ce que vous avez reçu. [232]
Batiffol limits Augustine’s Eucharistic “allégorisme” to the “species,” the bread and wine whose preparation from many grains of wheat and many drops of grape-juice the Fathers, following the Didache, understand to point, as de Lubac often stresses, to the Eucharistic consolidation of the many members into the unity of the ecclesial body of Christ. The link between receiving the sacramental body of Christ, and knowing themselves to be the ecclesial body, is a continuing emphasis in Augustine’s preaching.[233]
Augustine’s literal identification of cause with effect, of Christ with his Church, thus of the ecclesial Body with the sacrificed Body, is assuredly “allegorical;” however, that poses rather than resolves the difficulty of understanding his incessant insistence upon this identity, an insistence that Batiffol thinks to have invited the consequent confusion between the ecclesial and the sacramental body of Christ.
Augustine’s Eucharistic use of una persona to name the unity of the One Flesh certainly affirms the metaphysical standing of the unity it names; equally assuredly it does not assert a Personal identity of Head with Body, which he has clearly and personally distinguished as bridegroom and bride. We encounter here an instance not so much of allegory as of that phenomenological communication of idioms whose intelligibility is grounded in the Trinity: we are dealing then with the created image of God, the Christus totus, the One Flesh of the second Adam and second Eve, of Christ and his bridal Church. In the first Appendix of Volume II it has been pointed out that the free community, the free substance, names the Head, whether foundationally, in the Trinity, wherein the Father, as Head, bears the substantial Name of God without prejudice to the full possession of divinity by the Personally distinct Son and by the Personally distinct Spirit or, analogously, in the One Flesh, wherein Jesus the Christ, as the head, the Archē of their One Flesh, identifies himself with his bridal Church without prejudice to the freedom of her personal union with him in One Flesh, for her graced nuptial freedom is integral to the New Covenant he has sealed with his blood; it is simply the freedom of her worship of her Lord, with whom she, as proceeding from him as his glory, his bride, is consubstantial. Nonetheless, “una persona” is an inadequate designation of the free substantiality of the One Flesh, as “Una Persona” would inadequately designate the free unity that is the Trinity.
Jesus is of course the Image of the Father, but this Image must be understood historically, not sub specie aeternitatis, as though proper to the “immanent Son,” a very common mistake.[234] Jesus the Christ concretely images his Father by and through his Headship of the Church, which is to say, by himself having, like the Father, a glory proceeding from him precisely as a Head. In the case of the Father, because He is the Archē of the Son and, through the Son, of the Spirit, and thereby of the perichoresis, the dynamoic mutual indwelling of Father, Son and Spirit that is the divine substance, the Trinity. The Father’s Headship refers primarily to Trinity of whose free unity He is the immanent Source: begetting the Son and, through him, the Source of the Spirit Who is their subsistent Love.
The Son images the Father’s Headship primarily as the head of the Church and secondarily, through the Church, as the Head of the One Flesh of the New Covenant, in such wise that, as Jesus the Son is the Personal historical Image of the Father, so the Good Creation is the substantial free unity of the Head, the bridal Church, and their One Flesh, which proceeds from the Head through his glory, the Church. This free, tri-personal, nuptial community, the sancta societas of Augustine’s De trinitate 10, 6, is the substantial historical Image of the Triune God, i.e., of the divine Substance. The Headship of Jesus the Christ is the office of the second Adam, of the Bridegroom; his exercise of that office in the offering of the One Sacrifice is the fulfillment of the prophecy of Gen 2:24[235] by his the institution of the New Creation, the full outpouring of the Holy Spirit, the fullness of the Good Creation whose goodness is its nuptial order, whose radically free unity images the Trinity.
Themes which in the Old Testament are hardly convergent are seen in their true unity by the light which the faith in Christ provides: the good creation, whose marital order images the free unity of God (Gen 1:27, 2:24) and his bridal people (esp. Hos. 2 and 3, and Ezek. 16 and 23); the covenantal sacrifice (Gen. 15; Ex. 24); the New Covenant (Jer. 31); the association of marital fidelity to covenantal worship (esp. in Hosea and Ezekiel, and also in many passages in Isaiah and Jeremiah: (e.g., Is. 47; 62:1-12, 66:7-13; Jer. 3:1-13, 5:7-11, 13:20-27); finally the absolute transcendence of the Lord of the Covenant, whose affirmation is the first and the greatest commandment of the Law.
The convergence of these themes in the New Testament is not speculative but liturgical: it is achieved concretely in the central act of the Church’s worship, the Eucharist. In this thanksgiving, at once memorial, celebration, sacrifice and communion, the fullness of the Gift of the Spirit is sacramentally mediated, poured out upon the Church, the sacrament of the Kingdom, causing her to exist in the free actuality of her worship. This mediation of the Spirit, this New Creation, has the marital order of the Covenant which is mediated; within it, the bridal Church is One Flesh with her Lord, the Eucharistic Lord of history; throughout that history, which is salvific by his Eucharistic immanence in it, her sacrifice of praise responds to his One Sacrifice and its efficacy is utterly dependent upon its union with his One Sacrifice..It is only in the New Covenant that the problematic character of the relation to God of his bridal people is resolved: only this makes it possible to understand a nuptially-ordered covenant which does not place sexuality in God.[236]
As the Church Names the Father uniquely as God, and does so without detriment to the full divinity of the Son and of the Spirit of whom the Father is the Head, the Archē, so this Trinitarian naming of the Father as God warrants the analogous historical Naming of the Son as Lord, as Man (Ecce Homo!), without detriment to the possession of the fullness of humanity by those other distinct subsistences in the One Flesh: the Body and the Covenant, of whom he, as the second Adam, is the source and so the Head, and with whom he is consubstantial, homoousios. We are unaccustomed to the Personification of the nuptial love of Christ and the bridal Church, but without it, their One Flesh would not be the substantial image of the Triune God.
This “Naming” thus attributes to the Son, the Head, the substantial reality of that free community of which he is the Head, viz., the substantial humanity of the New Covenant, which is to say, it attributes to the Head at once the reality of the bridal Church and of the subsistent and irrevocable Covenantal bond between himself as Head and the Church (the subsistent Covenantal Love of Christ and the Church, the created analogue of the Holy Spirit, who is the subsistent Trinitarian Love of the Father and the Son), a Covenant whose subsistence is distinct from that of the Christ and from that of the Church, as the Spirit’s Subsistence, or Person, is distinct from the Person of the Father and from that of the Son while in substantial Unity with them, the Trinitarian unity of the One God: the free. substantial Community of Father, Son and Spirit.
Consequently, the Mission of the Son terminates in the sacrificial Gift of the Spiritus Creator, a Gift that is concrete and actual in the Good Creation, whose goodness is its sacramentally and historically objective free unity, its nuptial order, its substantial free imaging of the Trinity. In our fallen history, this good creation has the objectivity of the Eucharistic One Flesh, by free participation in which Christians enter into their own personal imaging of God, their own covenantal fidelity, responsibility and dignity. There is no other freedom than this, the celebration of the giving of the Gift through the One Sacrifice. It is the freedom for which we have been made free by the One Sacrifice of Jesus the Christ, his victory over death, and are sustained in that freedom and that victory by communion in the medicine of immortality, the body and the blood of the One Sacrifice of the Son to the Father.
It is worth remarking here that Paschasius’ use of “solidius confirmetur” respecting the unity of Christ and the Church as achieved in One Flesh,[237] picked up by de Lubac’s “Telle est l’ultime et “solide” réalité,” quoted above, does not permit this reality, the Una Caro, to be eschatological simply or sensu negante: rather, the Una Caro is historically signed by the very language of the Eucharistic representation of the One Sacrifice: “Hic est enim calix sanguinis mei, novi et aeterni Testamenti.”[238] The One Flesh of the New Covenant is instituted, ex opere operato, which is to say, infallibly, concretely, and historically, by the One Sacrifice of the Eucharist. This is corroborated by I Cor. 10:17, in which the Church is the product (quoniam; ὄti) of the One Bread, and also in the creation account of Eve’s fashioning from the flesh of the sleeping Adam, which the Fathers have seen fulfilled by the event, recited in Jn. 19:34-35, of the blood and water, symbolizing the sacraments of the Church, the second Eve, flowing from the speared side of the dead Christ, the “sleeping second Adam,” upon the cross.
The analogous attribution of headship by Paul in I Cor. 11:3 must conclude to a correspondingly analogous attribution of substantiality, for each head is so as subsisting in a uniquely free substance as the source of its free unity, which is to say, subsisting as the source of its other members in their perichoresis with him as consubstantial with him, as possessing, with him, the fullness of the substantial dignity of which he is the source.
The development of Trinitarian doctrine is the development of the analogous meaning of substance as free, an analogy which presupposes the Trinitarian prime analogate as intrinsically linked to the secondary prime analogates historically realized by the Father’s Mission of the Son and through him, the Father’s Mission of the Spirit, the subsistent love of the Father and the Son. This link is actual in history by the historical offering, by the one and the same Son, of the One Sacrifice by which his Mission, the outpouring of his Gift, the Spirit, the institution of the New Covenant, the new creation whose historicity is sacramental, is fulfilled by his Eucharistic immanence in our fallen history as its Lord, its head, the source of its free unity, its Beginning and its End.
This development cannot but conclude to the analogously trinitarian unity of substance insofar as free, insofar as historical, insofar then as historically intelligible, possessed of a free significance which, as free, cannot be reduced to categorical unity. It is hardly necessary here to remark the futility of the quest by autonomous rationality for that categorical unity. The physical universe contains no necessary unity: even its postulate by Parmenides, accepted the Greek tradition generally, by Christian theologians from the end of the second century, by the patristic, Carolingian and medieval tradition, as by the philosophes of the Enlightenment and their heirs, those physicists in quest of a “theory of everything,” and whose commitment to the Neo-Darwinian evolutionism submits all novelty to physical necessity inexorably contemplates the closing down of the free inquiry crystallized in the scientific method, which cannot survive enclosure in a theory for, were the universe thus deterministically organized, obviously it could support no such curiosity, no such free inquiry.
The Catholic theology, as fides quaerens intellectum, frankly depends upon and so presupposes that the free truth it seeks is objective, intrinsic to everything that is historical, at once fascinating to the mind in the sense of prompting its interest and inquiry, while independent of it, entirely transcending the inquiry while continually responsive to it, prompting an ever deeper inquiry. Further, every such quaerens intellectum must presuppose the freedom at once of the inquirer, as fascinated by the intrinsic intelligibility, the free objective significance, of the historical object of his inquiry while transcending his inquiry as a truth transcends a question, a truth whose pursuit is always pleasing but never satiating, for the object of the fides quaerens intellectum cannot be comprehended in the sense of being exhaustively understood.
Further, the truth intrinsic to all that is historical does not and cannot compel the inquiry that it invites; the quest for understanding cannot be forced: fascination is never compulsion. Finally, the fascination which drives the quest for understanding is not with the abstract truth of mere logical correctness but with truth as the inexhaustible beauty that is the Franciscan tradition has identified with the freedom of truth: the beauty that certifies the freedom of that universe whose truth it is.
We return always to Augustine’s “Sero te amavi, pulchritudo tam antiqua et tam nova, sero te amavi. (Too late have I loved thee, O Beauty, so ancient yet ever new, too late have I loved thee). Because the truth we seek is free, it is also gift: continually offered, continually to be welcomed, the quaerens intellectum cannot but be the mind’s free worship of the Giver, an expression and an experience of the faith of the seeker in truth of the Person who is Truth incarnate: hence all inquiry insofar as free, insofar as historical, finally cannot be other than a fides quaerens intellectum. In sum, substance as concretely historical has only a free unity, simply as created in Christ it could not be otherwise. The source of that objectively immanent free unity, the free unity of all that is historical, is radically Eucharistic: no other possibility exists than that given by Christ as the head of all creation.
Contemporary students of systematic theology are usually introduced to the topic of creation by way of a sketch of its exposition by St. Thomas, in whose day the Aristotelian metaphysics had captured the attention, even the imagination, of the learned world. However, St. Thomas’ major teacher, St. Albert the Great, was rather a Neoplatonist than an Aristotelian; Ulrich of Strasbourg, St. Thomas’ fellow student under Albert, was more taken than was St. Thomas with St. Albert’s preference for Neoplatonism in philosophy and theology, to become perhaps its major theoretician in the thirteenth century.[239] Ulrich denied that in God, as the First Principle, there could be a relation to what is not God, this being the direct implication of the identification of the metaphysical primacy of God with the cosmological absolute, the Neoplatonic One.
Even St. Thomas Aquinas, despite his fascination with Aristotelianism, was heavily influenced by the Neoplatonic vision of the One as Absolute. It is thus that he understands God: the Deus Unus. Out of this postulated dehistoricization of the divine substance, he developed his doctrine of a natural creation which, because ‘natural’ in the sense of ungraced, has nothing to do the Mission of the Son, with the Christian revelation, or with the economy of our redemption. Thus viewed, creation is not “in Christ;” i.e., it is not the terminus of the Father’s sending of the Son to give the Spiritus Creator. Consequently, creatures, as such, are viewed as untouched by the grace of Christ. and thus having nothing to do with the economy of salvation.
The introduction of gratia Christi into a universe thus constituted is in principle impossible for, a priori, it is locked a into a pattern of necessary causes which, as a matter of definition, cannot support the “potentia obedientialis” generally invoked to render that “natural” universe capable of sustaining the “accidental” infusion of grace. St. Thomas understood the created universe to be thus Aristotelian as to be intrinsically capable of existence ab aeterno, and consequently its creation ab aeterno to be entirely possible, although he accepted the dogmatic fact of its creation in time.[240]
In sum, the “natural creation” excogitated by St. Thomas is incapable of freedom whether as a divine act or as the created reality caused by that act: its intelligibility is governed by the intrinsic necessity attending the divine immanence on the one hand, and by the Aristotelian act-potency analyses of form-matter, accident-substance on the other. St. Thomas’ assertion of the contingency of creation, whether as cause or effect, is merely nominal, having no possible metaphysical foundation, whether in the intrinsically necessary Absolute, the One God, or in the intrinsically necessary order of relative reality, the created universe. The determinism inherent in this notion of creation obviously bars its theological use. The metaphysics of the cosmological absolute can have no theological function. The difficulties in which it has placed theology as cosmology are inescapable, and disqualifying. Cosmological rationality cannot serve the theological quaerens intellectum.
“Creation in Christ” is historical: “in the Beginning.” It is the historical act of Jesus, the one and the same Son, the head, the Lord of history, sent by his Father to give the Spiritus Creator. The Mission of the Son, and of the Spirit through the Son, terminates in the good creation, whose goodness is the nuptially-ordered freedom of its unity and its truth, and therefore its beauty: the splendor veritatis, the immanence within creation of its Creator, the “ancient beauty who is forever new.”
The freedom of the primordially good creation is indisputable, for its historical fallenness is the deprivation of that freedom, and the redemption worked by Christ is its recovery, by a recapitulation that is the redemptive recreation, the restoration of its freedom, through the Son’s mission to give the Holy Spirit, by which all things are made new. De Lubac has somewhere written that freedom cannot be imposed. Upon reflection this is so obvious as to require no reflection. It is the index of our fallenness that the obvious is also the obscure; only participation in the Church’s worship in truth of the Truth who is the Light of the world enables the reflection by which the clarté, the illumination, which is ours as “in the beginning,” is restored in that sacramental measure proper to this fallen world―the measure which permits us to recognize and turn to the Christ, Augustine’s intus magister, in such wise that we, who of ourselves are blind, may see.
The a priori data of the theology of creation in Christ are those which the liturgical tradition and its doctrinal development provide. First, that creation is in Christ is taught in Jn. 1:1, in Col. 1:15, and in Eph. 2:10. This doctrine is grounded in the first two chapters of Genesis, and particularly in the Jahwist account of the good creation of the first man and the first woman in “one flesh,” which the Fathers understood as a prophecy fulfilled in the account in Jn. 19:34 of the blood and water of the Church’s sacraments flowing from the speared side of the dead Jesus the Lord on the cross, “the sleeping Adam” of Gen. 2:21. Creation in Christ is Trinitarian: the product of the Father’s historical Mission of the Son to give the Spiritus Creator.
Secondly, the subject of the Mission, and consequently the subject of the Logos sarx egeneto of Jn. 1:14, of the kenōsis to which Paul refers in 2 Cor. 8:9 and affirms in Phil. 2:5-12, and which John asserts in v. 1:14 of the Prologue of his Gospel, is the primordial Jesus, who “became flesh,” i.e., manifested himself as the historical “one and the same Son” of the Father and the Theotokos, as taught in the Lucan narrative of the Annunciation and by Paul in Gal. 4:4.
In Jn 1:1, and throughout the Prologue, “Logos” is a title of Jesus the Lord, who “in the Beginning was the Word (the Logos)” and who in 1:14 “became flesh.” In Col. 1:17 Paul identifies the “Beginning,” with Jesus; throughout the New Testament, “Logos” (Word) does not refer to Jesus’ eternal pre-existence, as so much of I.C.E.L.’s Epiphany liturgy supposes, but takes its meaning from the first word of the first chapter of the Genesis accounts of the creation: bereshith, the beginning: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”
Thirdly, the doctrine of the fall of the good creation in the first Adam and the redemption by the second Adam is taught in I Cor. 15:21-2 and in Rom. 5:12-21. Our consequent twin solidarities, at once with the flesh of the fallen Adam and with the Life-giving Spirit, the risen Christ, are taught in I Cor. 15:45-50, in Gal. 5:15-25, and in Rom. 8:1-17.
Finally, the first Adam, as Paul teaches in Rom. 5:13, was a type of him who was to come: i.e., a type of Christ: this typology is the particular subject of Rom. 5. As will be shown, the typology is intelligible only in terms of the polarity between Jesus the Christ’s exercise of his headship on the cross and on the altar, and the first Adam’s refusal to exercise the headship offered him. In fact, all these themes are integrated solely by the Pauline insight into the masculine headship of the Father, of the Christ, and of the husband, stated with a nuclear density in I Cor. 11:3:
But I want you to understand that the head of very man is Christ, the head of a woman is her husband, and the head of Christ is God. (RSV)
In the foregoing pages it has been pointed out that the meaning of headship is revealed by Christ our Lord in his fulfillment of his own headship, on the cross and on the altar, by his offering of the One Sacrifice. In this Gift of the Holy Spirit to the Church and, through her, to the world, he restores in sacramento the free unity, that of the One Flesh, that is at once proper to and constitutive of the good creation. The Son images the Father in his offering of the One Sacrifice precisely as the head from whom proceeds a glory, the Church. By that One Sacrifice, the radical and inexorable disunity, the continual disintegration unto death of the fallen human substance, “flesh,” (sarx), is overcome by the institution of the free unity of mia sarx, the One Flesh” of the New Covenant, the new creation, the free, substantial, Trinity-imaging nuptial unity in One Flesh of Christ and the Church who is his glory, the bride who proceeds from him in that free union with him which constitutes the new, redeemed creation.
“Head” is thus a highly concrete term: it denotes a relation of personal consubstantiality with the Head in those persons subsisting in the substance of which he is the head, and a reciprocal and responsive personal relation of each of those persons to their head, which is simply their creation in him and, through him, to each other. It is as their head that he is the source of their free unity, which is to say, their creator, for their free unity is substantial. It is unfortunate that the theological tradition has translated the concrete term, “head,” by abstractions such as cause, source, or principle (αἱτία, πηγή, αρχή; causa, fons, principium), which carry no personal denotation and may easily be misunderstood to prevent any. The translation is further inaccurate because “source,” “cause,” and “principle” are of themselves impersonal and denote only an impersonal primacy. E.g. the Father is the source of the free unity of the Trinity, i.e., of the substantial freedom whose divine Origin neither “source,” nor “cause,” nor “principium” convey. The freedom of the Trinity is at one with the subsistence in the Trinity of the Father, consubstantially with the Son and the Spirit, whereas “Archē” (source) can be and long was understood in the subordinationist sense in which the Father does not subsist in the Trinity and consequently is not consubstantial with the Son and the Spirit.
The parallel misunderstanding of the headship of the Son, i.e., as not subsisting in the human substance, forces the same denial of his consubstantiality “with us”, with the result that human substantiality is atomized, individualized, despite the definition at Chalcedon that Jesus Christ the Lord is consubstantial with the members of the human substance in which he subsists. That Jesus the Lord subsists in humanity as Head is clear from I Cor. 11:3. The dogmatic meaning of the term used at Chalcedon to express that consubstantiality, ‘homoousios,” viz., “of the same substance” was settled at Nicaea. There can be no serious doubt that the Fathers at Chalcedon were entirely familiar with its meaning: the parallelism of the definition of Jesus’ subsistence in divinity and in humanity has no other explanation. The commonplace supposition that two distinct meanings of consubstantiality are deployed in the Symbol of Chalcedon has its ground in the Aristotelian cosmology which has long confused the theological enterprise; as will be seen, its postulate of a plethora of human substances, taken for granted by leading theologians, imposes paradox upon the Symbol of Chalcedon.
An understanding of the office of headship is then indispensable to recognizing the reality of our creation in Christ who was sent by the Father to be the head of the new creation, the redeemed substance of whose free unity he is the source. He is its source by his offering to the Father of the One Sacrifice which institutes the One Flesh by whose institution the fragmented flesh of the fallen creation receives the free unity intended for it “in the Beginning” and, thus restored in sacramento to that primordial perfection, “the Beginning,” is made new.
This newly created free unity, i.e., this new creation in Christ, is substantial: the Christ who, by his Gift of the Spirit is its source, cannot but be its Creator, as John affirms in Jn. 1:1, and as Paul teaches, particularly clearly in Col. 1:15-16, and also throughout the Letter to the Ephesians as well: the “recapitulation” taught in Eph. 1:10 is precisely the redemptive deed of the head (caput, capitis). Apart from its explicit reference to the headship of the Christ as his resuming of the office proffered to and refused by the first Adam, “recapitulation” can only denote a cosmologically-conceived subordination of the many to the one, a “summing-up” under some monadic and therefore imposed unity, however abstract, which is to misunderstand Eph. 1:10 and with this, the Pauline Gospel tout court.
We have repeatedly referred to the common patristic reading of the Jahwist creation account in Gen. 2 as prophetic of the institution of the New Covenant, of the good creation in which Adam exults in his communion with his bride, who is as freely, as joyfully, joined to him, to constitute, in their union in one flesh, a creation that is good and very good by its free, nuptially-ordered substantial unity. In the free and sinless union of Adam and Eve in one flesh, as recited in Gen. 2, there is nothing of fallenness; its recital then bespeaks the primordial union of the primordial Adam and Eve, that One Flesh in which the Mission of the Son terminates and which, had Adam not refused it (as in Gen. 3) would include Adam’s exercise of the headship offered him by Christ, whereby he would have bestowed free unity upon the whole of creation, that unity for which it yet longs and will receive in Christ when he comes again(Rom. 8:19ff).
There is an ample evidence in the New Testament of a primordial creation in Christ, a creation that is actual before time began, before the world―in the pejorative sense of flesh―was made, “before” the fall of man. Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians, 1:3-10, introduces this primordial creation as its central theme, to be repeated in Eph. 2:10, 3:8-13, and in the famous summary passage, Eph. 5:31-32 in which, with explicit reference to the “one flesh” of Gen. 2:24, Christ is presented as the bridegroom of the Church. This nuptial title of the Christ is common to the Synoptics, in which Jesus is named the Bridegroom of a prospective bride, over and again. The patristic development of the clear implication of the invocation of Gen. 2:24 in Eph. 5:31-32, viz., that the Church, the bride of the second Adam, is the second Eve, is first recognized by Justin Martyr in the second century, to be resumed before that century closes by Irenaeus; that title would soon be bestowed on the Virgin Mary.[241]
At this point, we enter again upon what may be the most difficult topic of theology, the meaning of Original Sin. It is of the first importance here to keep in view that sin is always what Karl Barth well named “the impossible possibility.” We are dealing with an unplumbable, entirely baffling and, in fact, inapproachable mystery, the mystery of iniquity which, inasmuch as it is a flat rejection of reality and of truth, has no intelligibility, can have no explanation, and can support no theological inquiry. The concern of the theology of Original Sin is not to explain the inexplicable, but to propose an integration of the biblical data bearing upon it. These of course concern the second Adam, not the first, of whom we know nothing except that which is revealed in Christ, that he is in some manner a type of Christ (Rom. 5:14).
The element of the doctrine of the fall of man in the first Adam found most incompatible with the modern mind is our solidarity in his fall and in his sin. Particularly, the interpretation of freedom as personal autonomy, a commonplace since the late middle ages, reduces those solidarities to absurdities: personal autonomy amounts to personal irresponsibility, personal dissociation from humanity, a viewpoint which reduces existence to alienation, from which point d’appui the relation of fallen humanity to Adam is unintelligible. Given the atomization of humanity into the multiplicity of discrete personal substances, autonomous freedom can only be a “freedom from” whatever might relativize it. In sum, the corollary of freedom as autonomy is moral irresponsibility.
The rational alternative to freedom as an autonomous “freedom from” is inevitably a similarly abstract “freedom for,” whether it be conceived as a universal altruism or as universal servility, but in any case, “freedom” as connoting a radically impersonal conformism, an impersonal participation in a common human substance whose immanent necessities are constitutionally normative for those who are its members and who comprise it.
This view of freedom as conformity, even a pious conformity, entails the same dehistoricization of the human condition as its autonomous alternative: where the former freedom is a flight from unity. The latter freedom is centripetal, holistic, romantic: the human substance is no longer the individual but the community. Whereas the corollary of freedom as autonomy is a radical alienation from humanity, the corollary of freedom as conformity is a radical submission to humanity, an impersonal conformity to the immanent necessities which integrate that immanently necessary substantial unity.
Both interpretations of freedom bar outright the institution of marriage, which presupposes the personal exercise of moral freedom, of personal authority and responsibility, and thus the free, nuptially-ordered unity of the historical human community, which both theories exclude a priori. Marriage therefore bars both rationalizations of freedom, and stands athwart their coercive implementation. Consequently, each of these necessitarian and consequently cosmological resolutions of the abstract problem of the one and the many in human society must reject the concretely historical theological problem posed by the revelation of our factual solidarity with the fallen Adam, whose free rejection of the headship of creation given him was not abstract; rather it was an objective, free refusal to exercise the free responsibility of headship, and thereby to impart to all creation that free unity which it can receive only as the Gift of the Spirit, which is to say, as a gift from God the Father, whose grant of freedom to the good creation is precisely his Sending of the Son to give the Spirit, not to impose the Spirit who, as proceeding from the Father and therefore supremely, divinely free, cannot be imposed, but to give Him who is the Gift of gifts.
The “impossible possibility” of Adam’s refusal of the Gift of headship, apart from whose exercise the good creation must lose that by which it is good, its free, nuptially-ordered unity, could but issue in the necessary disunity and pervasive, continuing, dynamic fragmentation of the entirety of the created universe which, apart from the sacrificial institution of the One Flesh, has no unity whatever: it possesses only a dynamic of dissolution.
This is the condition which Paul, following the Old Testament, has named “flesh,” sarx, with particular reference to living things, whose life-span is an inexorable process of disintegration leading to the final disintegration that is physical death. It is this concrete and universal efficacy of the fall, the destructive impact of Adam’s sin upon the whole of creation and most particularly upon every human being, which baffles the modern mind, not so much as unnecessary and arbitrary but as simply impossible, i.e., absurd, for its acceptance requires a rationally impossible conversion: viz., from impersonal submission to cosmological necessity, to the personal exercise of free historical responsibility. Such conversion is of course an a priori impossibility; the “modern mind” must regard the obstinate a posteriori persistence of its historical reality as mere irrationality.
The reality of headship as the personal office of bestowing free unity upon the substance of which he is the head and in which he subsists, and its bestowal consequently upon those who are consubstantial with him by their subsistence in that substance, could only be revealed; for it is a gift of truth at one with the Son’s Gift of the Spirit. The obverse of that revelation is the recognition that the refusal of headship would bar the free unity of the created substance and thus its dissolution into the necessary fragmentation, the dynamic of disintegration that is “flesh.”
A further contributory element in and to the disdain with which the doctrine of the fall has been received is the supposition that a freedom thus dependent upon a head as to be only in his gift is demeaning, inconsistent with the personal dignity of the recipient. This is a quasi-visceral reaction to a perceived denial of the personal autonomy, the personal irresponsibility and alienation that is spontaneously assumed to be the only human freedom, the only human dignity. This equation of autonomy, freedom and dignity can survive critical analysis only as an integrating element of the fallen, ‘sarkic’ consciousness, which is to say, as an intuitively clear truth immune to discussion because it is the a priori of fallen rationality: the logical integration of our intrinsically fragmented intelligence is immanently necessary, and excludes free moral responsibility as incapable of that integration, and hence as irrational.
The fall of the good creation did not defeat the Mission of the Jesus the Son: this is the message of the Protoevangelium, Gen. 3:15. Underlying that cryptic sentence is the continuing obedience of the Son to his mission from the Father. By obedience to his mission, by continuing to subsist in the creation which is “in him” but which, by the sin of the first Adam, lacks the free unity which only the head could provide, Jesus discarded his own primordial immortality, his primordial physical integrity, to become “flesh,” like us in all things save sin. Conceived by the Virgin Mary, he received the “form of a slave,’ while remaining obedient to his Mission from the Father by which he is the head of humanity and of all creation. Thus, dwelling among us, like us in all but sin, he undertook that outpouring of the Spirit that is our redemption, becoming himself the “new Adam,” the “second Adam,” the head of the new creation, overcoming the fleshly disintegration of the fallen world by his sacrificial institution of the free unity, the One Flesh of the New Covenant, the New Creation.
However, his “recapitulation” of the good creation, his reintegration of the disintegrating universe, could not be its immediate reconstitution in that primordial free unity, in that integrity for which it yet longs because, once again, that would have amounted to forcing the good creation to be free.
Instead, by his sacrificial institution of the sacramental Church and her sacramental worship on the night before he died upon the cross, Jesus gave the Gift he was sent to give, the Spiritus Creator, which issued in the objective recreation of the universe in free unity, the renewal of the fallen creation by its liberation from the fleshly imprisonment. Jesus was himself the “first fruit” of this liberation: by his Eucharistic union with his bridal Church, achieved in his offering of the One Sacrifice, we are enabled to appropriate that renewal, that liberation, by entering into the worshiping Church through baptism, and thus into her Eucharistic worship, whereby men can once again possess that free unity whose only objectivity in fallen history is sacramental: henceforth to live in history is to live in Christo, in ecclesia.
It should again be stressed that the renewal, the redemption, achieved upon the cross and upon the altar, our Lord’s making of all things new, is effective at the level of substance, for it is the work of the Spiritus Creator. The disintegration worked by original sin upon the good creation left it without resource: as fallen, it has no intrinsic potentiality for recovery. Of itself, i.e., simply as fallen, the world exists in a continuum of progressive disintegration, an inexorable dynamic of disunity and dissolution: nothing in the fallen creation possesses substantial unity or intelligibility.
The grace of Christ, his Gift to us of the Spiritus Creator, can only be the substantial re-creation ex nihilo of the universe, a redemption lacking all antecedent possibility. Our fallenness possesses no intrinsic capacity, no ‘obediential potency” for salvation. Our only intrinsic significance is the pneuma given all humanity by our creation in Christ, who is Eucharistically immanent in our fallen history as its Lord, its Beginning and its End. His immanence is the only objectivity, the only substantial unity, that fallen history can possess: it is otherwise sarkic, lacking all substantial unity and all substantial intelligibility. Thus its time-line, its secular “history,” is evanescent to the vanishing point by the reason of the inevitable disintegration of its monuments, all of which are subject to the second law of thermodynamics which, since the early nineteenth century, has been named entropy, the ongoing elimination of all physical differentiation. It is only by the Eucharistic immanence of Jesus the Lord in the good creation and thus in history that history has, and has only in him, its Beginning and its End, its intrinsically salvific unity and significance.
Jesus the Christ’s Eucharistic historical immanence pervades and transcends the universe: it effects the liberation of all for whom he died. By him, their minds are freed from the fear of death which otherwise imprisons them. Through him and in him they know the trahi a Deo, the intus magister, of whom Augustine speaks, the Ancient Beauty whom he feared to have found too late―yet knowing that while life lasts it is never too late.
It is from this posture alone, that of an innate hope for a redemption which can only be in Christ, however dimly perceived (as by Balaam: “I see him, but not now; I behold him, but not nigh.”)[242] that the dichotomous consciousness of fallen man, his self-awarenss as polarized between sarx and pneuma, at once just and sinful, can be known to be the product of a primordial moral evil rather than a constitutive element of humanity concretely given in history.
The cosmological or sarkic consciousness cannot attain to this insight, for it has known and yet knows no innate moral freedom, no innate personal responsibility, no innate personal authority, no innate personal dignity. For this mentality, freedom consists in choosing between mutually exclusive alternatives, finally in the choice of one monism over another: to attribute substantial reality either to the concrete individual or the to the collective that is humanity: in sum, to assign substantial unity either to the human one or to the human many, abstractly conceived.
This quest for a rationally necessary unity in the empirical world invariably discovers the abstract irresolvable dilemma of the one and the many. Its juridical version is simply the ancient Greek stasis, the standing polar tension between the ruler and the ruled, lately labeled “Madisonian.”[243] which in the concreteness of salvation history is continually transcended by the concrete liturgical praxis of marriage, the public exercise of freedom by a free people, their authoritative liturgical rejection of the absurd and finally pagan flight from their free, objectively salvific existence in history. This is existence as fallen, simul justus et peccator, and yet known in ecclesia to be redeemed, thus not without hope. This is existence in the good creation, wherein alone the problem of evil can be understood to be a moral problem, requiring a free because moral solution.
The present approach to the theology of original sin takes its cues from Rom. 5:14, where Paul describes the first Adam as a “type of the one who was to come.” The theology of Original Sin must consist in an examination of the results of the fall; these are revealed in their remedy, viz., in the sacrificial institution by Christ of the New Covenant, the free unity of the One Flesh which heals the fragmentation of the “flesh,” and so is revelatory of the nature of the sin that caused our falling into “flesh.” It is uniquely from the Christ’s plenary exercise of his headship upon the cross and upon the altar that we can understand the reality of that Original sin of the first Adam which. precisely as Original, is unique in its radically destructive impact upon the good creation. We have no access to the first Adam except by way of the revelation that is in Christ.
Jesus the Christ could not have been sent, as has earlier been pointed out, simply on account of sin; i.e., “propter peccatum sensu negante.” This is only to stress that our Lord’s Mission from the Father is not the consequence of Adam’s sin, but rather is its presupposition: the good creation in which Jesus the Christ’s Mission terminates is good because it is free, because it is nuptially ordered. As we learn from Gen. 1:31, only with the creation of Adam and Eve in the image of God, i.e., as constituting a free because nuptially ordered substantial image of the Trinity, is the good creation “very good,” its free unity substantially complete in the “one flesh” that is their nuptial imaging of God.
There is a practical unanimity on the meaning of fallenness, i.e., of “flesh;”, chiefly explored by the Pauline tradition, particularly as developed by St. Augustine and rationalized by Descartes, who reduced creation to integration. The fall is a disintegration of humanity and of the human universe, a substantial dissolution inexorably reducing its fragmented “flesh” to the ultimate fragmentation, “the dust of death.” This dynamic of disintegration, inherent in the fallen “flesh,” is most obvious in sickness and death, but already at an early level in Genesis, in the account of the building of the tower of Babel, the disintegration caused by the fall and by our increasingly personal participation in its sinful rejection of nuptial unity is inevitably social because it is personal. The unqualified personal and public ambitions inseparable from personal sinfulness are centrifugal flights from free public unity, which can only be nuptially ordered; thus the personal refusal of free public unity is destructive of public as well as personal freedom and unity.
These considerations indicate that the fall is into the continuing and inescapable disintegration of man and his universe; it consists in a radical loss of spatial and temporal unity―personal, social, cultural―without intrinsic explanation or intelligibility. As the world that should be our home retreats from us by its continual decay, so the time allotted us in which to live in the world passes away into an increasingly fragmented and irretrievable past: “all things pass.” It is thus evident that the first Adam’s sin issued in a loss of free unity at a universal level, and in a spontaneous aversion from each other and from God. No element of the good creation retains its freedom or its unity, for these are inseparable. Creation is fallen from the beginning and as fallen drives continually toward its further dissolution. This is ancient pagan wisdom: Heraclides’ Πάντα ῥεῖ (panta rhei) anticipated the pessimism of Heidegger’s Sein zum Tode by twenty-five centuries.
It must follow that the headship of the first Adam is intrinsic to the goodness of the good creation, the free nuptial unity of the “one flesh” of Gen. 2:24. This in turn immediately suggests that Adam’s sin “in the beginning” was a failure of headship, for the head is the indispensable source of free unity, as we learn from the Christ’s institution of the New Covenant, the One Flesh of his nuptial union with the bridal Church, the second Eve. We may then reasonably propose that the first Adam’s sin is best understood as a refusal of the office of headship given him by the primordial Jesus the Lord, the head, the primordial second Adam, the bridegroom of the primordial second Eve, whose unity in One Flesh is the primordial good creation, by the refusal of whose free unity our fallenness is caused and measured.
That free unity is and can only be nuptial, as has been stressed in the foregoing pages. Adam’s refusal of headship can only be a refusal of a proffered nuptial unity, a proffered free consubstantiality of man and woman, and thus of a proffered imaging of God. It must be remembered that this proffer of the dignity of head could only have been intrasubstantial, i.e., from within the primordially free unity of the One Flesh, the good creation, for it is made by the head, by Jesus the Lord who. as head, subsists in the substance, the good creation, of which he is the head and of whose free nuptial unity he is the source.
The proffer of the gift of headship extended to the first Adam is primordial, thus in “the Beginning” whom Paul identifies with the primordial Jesus the Lord, the head of all men. The gift is on offer; it would not otherwise be gift; thus, the first Adam, in the moment of his creation in Christ, must appropriate in freedom the freedom of that creation if he is to affirm his bride, the first Eve. The second chapter of Genesis limns what that affirmation must be: a recognition of his consubstantiality with her and celebration of his nuptial union with her as her head.
The distinction between the headship of Christ over all creation, as created in him, and the headship given the first Adam, one of his creatures, is of course crucial. The situation of the first Adam, who must freely exercise the gift of headship in order that it be effective, requires that the giver of the gift be the primordial Christ, the head, whose Gift of the Spiritus Creator is the source of the free unity of creation: it is thus that the primordial Jesus is the creator of the free human substance, the free community, whose members could freely comprise the free unity of the new creation only through their head’s appropriation of that free unity by his free exercise of the office of headship over them.
Jesus the Christ, the head of all creation, could not himself fulfill the office of headship given the first Adam, for to do so would be to force the gift of the Spirit upon the humanity created in him: thereby the creation could not be good, for to be so the good creation must freely be free in its acceptance of that free unity. It must follow that the Christ could be the head of all creation, the source of its free unity, only by appointing a secondary head, the first Adam who, in fulfilling the office given him by Christ, would be the merely human source of the free unity of the creation which thereby would be the manifest good creation.
Our unfallen creation in Christ is our membership in a human substance whose unity has its source in its head, the first Adam, the head of the first Eve, “the mother of all living” (Gen. 3:20) who could freely enter into their free union of “one flesh” only by his bestowal upon her of the freedom which constitutes that unity, a gift which she must appropriate in the freedom of that free unity: a gift which could not be imposed but which, if not given, would not exist.
We read in I Cor. 11:3:
But I want you to understand that the head of every man is Christ, the head of a woman is her husband, and the head of Christ is God. (Θέλω δὲ ὑμᾶς εἰδέναι ὅτι παντὸς ἀνδρὸς ἡ κεφαλὴ ὁ Χριστός ἐστιν, κεφαλή δὲ γυναικὸς ὁ ἀνήρ, κεφαλή δὲ τοῦ Χριστός ὁ Θεος).
The English text is taken from the RSV; the Greek is taken from Nestle-Aland, 28th edition, 2012.
Jesus the Christ offers free substantial unity to the man and to his wife by giving him headship over her in order that he and she freely may become “one flesh,” and thus possess the free unity by which creation is good and very good. This sacramental restoration of the nuptial integrity of the primordially good creation entails the redemption of the universe; this is implicit in order then that the humanity created in Christ, together with the world, the redeemed universe, which is implicit in their creation in “one flesh” because it is their habitat. As the second Adam redeems the fallen creation by his institution of the New Covenant, the new creation that is his One Flesh with the second Eve, the Church, so the first Adam, by accepting the headship offered him, whereby he would have been one flesh with the first Eve, would in that nuptial union have exercised his headship of the whole creation as the source of its free nuptial unity. But as this nuptial unity which would have been constitutive of the creation as freely integral and good, so its refusal by the first Adam is the disintegration of the good creation to the extent that this is possible―and that is very far: only the immanence of the Christ in that creation stands in the way of its entire dissolution into nothingness. As it is, the created but fallen universe would drive forever (i.e., asymptotically) to that nothingness were its nihilistic impetus unfettered. Apart from the immanence within it of its Creator, the fall of the primordially good creation would have been its annihilation.
The account of original sin and the fall in Gen. 3 turns on the serpent’s successful temptation of Eve from her free unity with Adam. Her human dignity and authority were no less than Adam’s, and her responsibility for the fall no less.[244] It must be stressed that a head is so by the procession from him of a glory: thus the Son proceeds from the Father as the Father’s glory; the Church proceeds from Christ the Bridegroom as his glory, and Eve proceeds from Adam as his glory: in sum, head and glory are correlative and consubstantial. In a famous passage, Paul concludes from this mutuality of head and glory that, because all glory is veiled in a fallen world, so the woman, as the glory of her husband, should veil her head at worship.[245]
It should be noted here that the prospect of an infinite regress in an unending series of headships, each unable to act by reason of the impossibility of imposing freedom ab extra upon humanity, does not arise. The first Adam’s exercise of headship, as the type of Christ, the second Adam, could only be his acceptance of his nuptial relation to the first Eve. The Original Sin of the first Adam and the first Ever was their free and mutual rejection of their free destiny, their entry into a common disunity, a common fragmentation, a common death.
Adam and Eve are types of the second Adam and the second Eve only by reason of the second Adam’s obedience to his Mission, his sacrificial institution of the One Flesh of the New Covenant, his outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon his bridal Church, the second Eve. who throughout her history celebrates her free acceptance of the Gift of the Spiritus Creator poured out upon her by her Lord, and thereby celebrates the restoration of the good creation as very good, in “one flesh,” the life which, in her, we possess “abundantly.” (Jn. 10:10)
In the latter twentieth century, speculation upon monogenism (the creation of a humanity whose substantial unity was understood to require a unique pair of progenitors) vs. polygenism (the creation of humanity understood as in diaspora, involving multiple pairs of progenitors) proceeded with a confusion of theological with paleontological issues: Teilhard’s invocation of evolution as a theologoumenon had persuaded major theologians that original sin and fall occurred in an evolutionary time-line, which made it effectively impossible to discuss these theological topics theologically. We prescind from that confusion here; the Chalcedonian definition of the double consubstantiality of the Son, and the consequent doctrinal necessity of a consubstantial human creation, coincides with the biblical tradition.
A final point, raised in Chapter Two of the first volume, requires some further development. The Book of Genesis places a continuum between the unfallen primordial good creation of its first two chapters, and the expulsion, in the third, of the fallen Adam and Eve from Eden into the fallen history of the fallen world. This continuity is objective: the fall did not issue in the annihilation of Adam or of Eve, for they were created primordially in Christ together with all the human persons with whom, as their head, he is consubstantial. The subsequent chapters of Genesis recite the disintegration worked upon the fallen world by our personal solidarity with the original sin of Adam and Eve whose effect is solidarity with their personal disunity, their “flesh,” a solidarity manifest in an ineradicable personal concupiscence, which drives always toward a universal personal sinfulness, destructive alike of personal freedom and the human community which can exist only be free, as “pneumatic” rather than “sarkic.”
This is the import of the Pauline anthropology set out in Gal. 5 and Rom. 8. In such a world, i.e., in the world we inhabit, the fallen disintegration of the substantial free unity of the human substance as created in Christ but refused by the sin of the first Adam and Eve effects the dispersion of that disintegrating humanity into the disintegrated time and space of the fallen universe: this is the lesson of the account of the Tower of Babel.
From this stance, that of the universality of the fall of the good creation, the fallen Adam and Eve, whose sin was their undoing and ours, are at one with the rest of us. They are fallen, and enclosed entirely in their fallenness, with no more access to their primordial immanence in the Good Creation, the lost Eden of Gen. 1-3, than any of the rest of fallen humanity. However, a common misreading of Genesis takes literally the continuity of Gen. 3 with Gen. 4 et seq. Thereby Adam and Eve, driven from Paradise and barred from returning, are understood to have settled down to take up their role as our progenitors in the fallen good creation: Eve is so named by Adam as “the mother of all the living,” a title already implicit in Gen. 3:15.
This misreading of Genesis undercuts the radical discontinuity worked by Original Sin between the unsullied, primordially good creation revealed in the first two chapters of Genesis, and the fallen history thereafter, in which, as sinners, we are all immersed, without recourse apart from Christ: The imagination which would relieve the authors of the fall from its consequences is of course entirely naive. As fallen, they and we have no unveiled access to the primordial pre-existence which is ours as members of the humanity primordially created in Christ as the head of all creation, of which primordial humanity, the Christ constituted Adam as the prospective head, precisely in order that it be good, that it be nuptially ordered.
Our utter ignorance, precisely as fallen, of our primordially unfallen reality, of our primordial creation in Christ, apart from its revelation by our Lord, is particularly emphasized in Ephesians: it is thus that the Gospels are so named, as the transcendently “good news” that we have hope in Christ, that our misery here below is the product of sin, not an implacable fate, that the Kingdom of God is restored to us in Christ’s gift to us of the Holy Spirit, poured out upon us by his One Sacrifice, by which all things are made new.
The revelation in Christ, at once of our fallenness in solidarity with the first Adam, and of our redemption from that fallenness by our solidarity with the second Adam, bears upon all those of whom Christ is the consubstantial head, and for whom he died, which includes the first Adam and the first Eve, by whom sin entered into the world, and by sin, death.
As fallen therefore, neither the first Adam and first Eve, nor we, have access to our primordial human reality, created in the primordial beginning, created in Christ, nor any access to the unsullied good creation, other than the redemption worked by Christ: this access, given by his fulfillment of his mission from the Father, is sacramental, radically Eucharistic, given only in ecclesia.
A famous second-century homily of the Christ’s deliverance of Adam from the place of the dead, quoted earlier in these pages, raises the question of the historical awareness by Adam and Eve, i.e., their memory, of their role as perpetrators of the Original Sin, and as responsible agents of the fall. Genesis provides no basis for supposing them to possess any awareness of their overwhelming guilt. Such an awareness or memory of their transgression would require a uniquely privileged position among the fallen, viz., a history-transcending memory of that primeval “pre-fallen” instant of decision which, it must be stressed, could not but be primordial, unfallen and free: the decision in which their nuptially-ordered freedom was refused could not otherwise have been sinful, the Original Sin. That moment of the free refusal of freedom is incapable of reconstitution by way of memory, for the memory of Adam and Eve in that instant became fragmented, discontinuous with itself, without unity, without recollection of a lost integrity.
It follows that the fallen first Adam and the fallen first Eve are by reason of their fallenness unaware, like ourselves, of any primordial past: their free refusal of freedom is totally discontinuous with their consequent imprisonment within the necessary disintegration of fallen history. There is a sufficient evidence that the Apostles such as Paul and John, martyrs such as Stephen and Ignatius Martyr, and the great saints who are their spiritual heirs, were granted insight into the realized Kingdom of God, whose realization is our redemption by Christ; there is no evidence to warrant its grant to Adam or to Eve, and much to discredit it.
Our relation in Christo, to the Kingdom of God is by our Lord’s Eucharistic transcendence of our fallen history: thereby he is the Lord of history, the Alpha and the Omega, the one Gate to the Kingdom: in fallen history, our sole access to his Kingdom is in sacramento. It then follows that the corollary of our solely sacramental access, in Christo, as fallen, to the fulfilled Kingdom of God is in ecclesia, where alone we have access to him.
This places our Lady, the immaculate Theotokos whose personal integrity relieves her of any need for sacramental access to her Lord, and whose union with the second Adam as the second Eve is primordial, “in the Beginning,” in the unique position of possessing a sinless integrity, yet with no memory of her primordiality for, before her Assumption. She did not transcend the fallenness of history, she was not immune to its ongoing disintegration. Like her Lord’s, her existence is pneumatic. In this fallen world the freedom of her primordial union with him in one flesh is realized in her conception of him. Nonetheless, even as created wholly in nuptial union with him and therefore gratia plena, incapable of sin, she yet belongs to the fallen creation, as does her head. We cannot enter here into the mystery of his self-awareness, save that he is like us in all but sin. As to the Theotokos, the Virgin Mary his mother, the account of the Annunciation makes it clear that she had no memory of her primordial dignity, that of the Bride of the primordial Bridegroom.
In the end, the issue of the privileges granted the first Adam and the first Eve is of little moment except insofar as naïve accounts of them such as that ancient homily provide still confuse the theology of the fall.
The analogy of being has been so much discussed in Catholic theological literature especially as have become a recognizable Catholic interest. In these circumstances it is unfortunate that it is routinely presented in cosmological terms, which remove it from justifiable application to the historical faith of the Church. This consideration must suffice to warrant a reaffirmation of the obvious historicity of the Church’s faith and worship.
The preceding chapters of this study have shown the indispensability to systematic theology of recognizing in the Eucharistic Sacrifice the prime analogate of free, historical being, truth, and unity―which is to say, of beauty, the free unity of truth and being that is corollary to the creation of the universe as good and very good “in the Beginning” who is the Lord Jesus Christ, sent by the Father to give the full gift of the Spirit, by which in sign and sacrament its free unity is objectively―i.e., substantially, restored.
Thus it is that the headship of the Father over the Trinity is over the divine Substance which, by his headship, is Trinitarian, free, and therefore beautiful: its unity would not otherwise be free. It is then evident that the divine Substance cannot be named the Deus Unus without further qualification, for that name is ineluctably characterized by its cosmological development as the prime analogate of monadic substances possessed of a necessary and therefore nonhistorical intrinsic, ideal intelligibility discoverable only through a necessitarian analysis, commonly that of the Thomist act-potency metaphysics although others abound.
It is clear that the divine Substance must be the prime analogate of created substance, of created being, but it is so as intrinsically free, as Trinitarian, and as historical: viz., as the Father sending the “one and the same Son,” the Lord Jesus the Christ, to give the Spirit. The Church knows no other God than this, the Trinity as revealed in and by the Mission of Jesus the Christ by the Father to give the Spirit. The Triune God is thereby, as historical, the prime analogate of historical substantiality, of the secondary created substances whose intelligibility―i.e., whose reality―is historical and free, and which therefore have a trans-empirical, sacramental objectivity, an intrinsic, free, historical significance and intelligibility transcending the finally quantitative intelligibility of empirical objects, of “things.”
The historicity of the divine prime analogate can only be that of the created terminus of the Trinitarian Mission of the historical one and the same Son―of the Father from eternity and of the Theotokos in history―to give the Spirit. Beyond question, the Son’s mission terminates in the institution of the New Covenant on the cross and, inseparably, in the Eucharistic representation in persona Christi of the One Sacrifice of the one and the same Son. The Spirit is given in fullness in and through that sacrificial institution of the New Covenant, the Good Creation, whose goodness is its intrinsic freedom: i.e., the nuptial unity of the One Flesh of Christ and the Church.
It must follow that the prime Image of the Trinity is the created union, prophesied by the Jahwist creation narrative in Gen. 2, constituted by the Bridegroom from whom the Bride proceeds, the Bride who is his glory, proceeding from him as from her Head, in their supremely free nuptial union in One Flesh. This freedom characterizes the Beginning: lost in the fall, whereby the good creation, deprived of its free unity, entered upon the necessary fragmentation of “the flesh;” it is restored by the Eucharistic immanence in the fallen world of the One Flesh, whose institution is the redemption of the whole of creation, its restoration to the free nuptially-ordered freedom by which Christ the head images his Father.
The New Covenant, the full outpouring of the Spirit by the Son, can only be the fullness of creation: the Good Creation, whose head is Jesus the Christ: its created freedom is that of the One Flesh, wherein all things are made new by the One Sacrifice, wherein all that is created in Christ subsists as freed from empirical insignificance by the subsistence within it of the head of all creation, Jesus the Christ.
This newness is that to which Rom. 8:9 looks: the liberation of all flesh, of the universe in sum, by the restoration of its freedom through the One Sacrifice of the head, the Gift of the fullness of the Spirit, poured out upon the bridal Church by her Bridegroom, her head, the Second Adam, Jesus the Lord. Through her, the second Eve, all creation is blessed, freed in her by the freedom of her nuptial union with her Lord in the One Flesh whose substantial freedom is the criterion of all created freedom. This restoration is of the universe itself: all historical realities within it are the beneficiaries of the renewed freedom of those for whom Christ died.
The intrinsically free significance, the innately free intelligibility of the living and the non-living creatures which constitute the universe, has long been terra incognita to theologians. However, Duns Scotus who, despite his rejection of illumination as “unnecessary,” yet continued to live and think in terms of an illumined world. He ascribed to the elements of that world the intrinsic and indefeasible significance, which he dubbed “haecceitas”, and which Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J., has translated as “inscape:” an inexhaustible because continually renewed freedom, truth and dignity that is beauty simply, however infinite the variety of its manifestations.
The Scotist “haecceitas,” the “inscape” of Hopkins’ idiom, is the objective sacramental significance pertaining to every creature under heaven: the sticks and stones, the starry universe, the earth in all its splendor, the birds of the air, fish of the sea, the creeping and crawling plants and animals that continually purify the world of its fallen corruption and renew its fertility, and at the same time in their fallenness sicken it, “the cattle on a thousand hills” (KJV)―man in all his glory as redeemed in Christ, all are His: all are imbued by their creator with the truth that is in his gift alone, and has no rivals. By this gift, each creature is unique and irreplaceable: there is nothing fungible in the world which Jesus has redeemed, of which he is Lord and head, and whose full flowering is the fulfilled kingdom of God, the universe made new.
We may prescind here from the angelic creation apart from noting that, like ours, it is in Christ, and that the angelic office relates intimately to our personal salvation and supposes a personal dignity in each of us scarcely less than theirs:
Are they not all ministering spirits, sent forth, for the sake of those who are to obtain salvation?”
Heb. 1:14:
One cannot speak however of the consubstantiality of the sub-human creation, for the subsistence of its members in the Good Creation is less than personal: Adam, in naming the animals, found there no helpmeet, no equal. Consubstantiality can be ascribed only to persons whose free unity is realized in their subsistence in a free and therefore nuptially-ordered substance. By their consubstantiality with Christ, only human persons, men and women in their free unity, can image God.
The lesser creatures are vestiges rather than images of God: in their redeemed beauty they point to and signify their Triune source, their creation in Christ, but they do not image what they cannot know.
It is necessary to recognize the third analogate of substance to account for the freedom intrinsic to membership in the Church: were creation in Christ limited to the One Flesh of Christ and the Church, the personal freedom of the second Eve as the Bride of Christ would exhaust human freedom, whereas in fact Christians are baptized into her free community precisely to enter into the personal exercise of freedom summed up in their covenantal fidelity. This fidelity, as free, is nuptially ordered: its normative expression is in the liturgy of marriage, which is the institution of the irrevocable and substantial unity of their nuptial one flesh, the secondary imaging of the Triune God.
Here it is necessary to drop the objections to analogy thus understood insofar as they arise out of that version of the analogy of being whose prime analogate is the Deus Unus: that analogy of being is incapable of theological application to the mysteries of the faith without their deformation for, as has been sufficiently explained, it cannot but dehistoricize them: that rationalized analysis, that sarkic rationality, inevitably submits them to the one-many dilemma, which can find no relation, thus no analogy, between its terms: this was recognized by the Pythagoreans. The historical worship of the Church requires the theological recognition of three freely interlocked analogates of being: the Trinity, the One Flesh of the New Covenant, and the one flesh of the nuptially-ordered members of the ecclesial Body of Christ.
The further application of the free analogy of being to the physical world removes its unity and truth from mere subjectivity, and thus warrants―and alone warrants―the universal human quest for the objectively beautiful, whose beauty is the freedom of its truth, that by which we are fascinated from our childhood, and which can only be free: the stasis Nietzsche’s aesthetics placed between the Apollonian and the Dionysian is only a rediscovery of the mutual exclusion and mutual inseparability of the one and the many, the fragmentation of beauty by analysis.
Similarly, the rationalization of physics into a quest for the all embracing theory which will obviate the experimental method, immanentize scientific inquiry, and eliminate its freedom, has been proven impossible by Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorems. Those who pursue it nonetheless, faute de mieux, only discover a meaningless universe, an utterly insignificant dynamic of disintegration, an entropic futility.
The reasons for de Lubac’s failure to grasp the Pauline synthesis of the free unity of the ecclesial “Body” and of the “One Flesh” of the Head and Body are worth exploring. Primarily the reason is a failure to recognize the substantiality of the free and nuptial unity of the covenantal One Flesh simply because it is in fact free, together with a consequent attempt to assign it the unfree, determinate―because merely organic―unity of a physical body. This entails a failure to grasp the nuptial order of the freedom of the community that is the Church, although in I Cor. 12 Paul specifically appeals to that moral freedom of the members of the ecclesial body. The recognition of this moral freedom in ecclesia of the members of the Church which, concretely, is their personal exercise of covenantal fidelity, of the imaging of the triune God. By this nuptially-ordered fidelity, this imaging of God, they are ever more closely integrated―agregé―into the transcendent free unity, the substantial community, of the One Flesh into which they were baptized. This ecclesial mediation of the free unity which is ours in Christ is indispensable to Catholic spirituality. However, it obviously incompatible with the supposedly organic unity, the unfree physical unity that is proper to a physical body, and too facilely identified with the Church as the “body of Christ.” This exegesis of the Pauline emphasis upon the bridal Body of Christ, the ecclesial Body, the Church is obviously erroneous: the union in one flesh of the second Adam and the second Eve evokes the unqualified freedom of both. Nonetheless, St. Thomas teaches that it is by its resemblance to a physical body that the intrinsic unity of the Church is intelligible.[246]
From Origen’s third-century Commentary on the Song of Songs down to Pope John Paul’s “Apostolic Letter on the Dignity and Vocation of Women”[247] there has been a powerful tendency in Catholic spirituality, and thus also in Catholic theology, to suppose the individual worshiper, man or woman, to have a bridal relation to the Christ, a relation by which each Christian has the same immediate nuptial relation to Christ the Head that Ephesians 5:31-32, ascribes to the Church alone. Further, neither the Pauline, the Synoptic nor the Johannine traditions know a Bride of Jesus, the Bridegroom, other than the Church, the Body whom, in the second century, Justin Martyr, followed by Irenaeus, will recognize to be the second Eve.
The impossibility of the supposed soul-Church analogy is easily shown. The nuptial relation is immediate as a matter of definition. If the soul qua soul were to possess a nuptial immediacy to the risen Christ, it would an immediacy that is not Eucharistically sustained, for that sustenance bespeaks sacramental mediation of the risen Christ. Consequently, the supposition of a nuptial relation of the soul qua soul to the risen Christ, precisely as immediate, can have no historically objective standing, for all historical objectivity, as has been seen, is sacramental, thus Eucharistically ordered. Lacking a foundation in history, the soul’s supposed nuptial immediacy to the risen Christ―or to God―must be simply ideal, assimilable to a participation in the Platonic eros having nothing to do with the worship of the Church and, in fact, entirely incompatible with that worship. Nuptial symbolism, thus conceived, is inescapably dualist, the erotic flight from history to the Good, the Beautiful, the One, whose transcendence of history is absence from history.
The nuptial symbolism grounded in the Eucharistic One Flesh is radically historical: it is the very ground of history, for it signs the Lordly immanence of the risen Christ in his Kingdom, in the Good Creation, in salvation history, in nuptial union with the second Eve who, by Jesus’ Eucharistic immanence, has been freed from fallenness and fatality through his bestowal upon her of the Spiritus Creator, by which Gift he has made all things new.
The concrete, sacramental-historical foundation of nuptial symbolism is utterly indispensable to it, as de Lubac well knows: he understands it, thus Eucharistically grounded, to be the single alternative to a dualistic pantheism, much to the astonishment of his critic, Paul McPartlan, who fails to grasp the inevitability of a return to the abstract one-many dilemma posed by the refusal of this foundational-historical symbolism. In brief, Eucharistically-grounded nuptial symbolism is the single alternative to the dehistoricizing “dialectic”―Barthian, Rahnerian, Orthodox (Zizioulas)―now tempting Catholic theologians, for this recourse to subjectivity to discover a free unity whose historical objectivity has been denied is at one with the Reform’s denial of the sacramental mediation of the risen Christ.
Therefore the ascription of a comparable if secondary and analogous bridal standing to the human soul is rooted in Neoplatonic dualism rather than in scripture or in the Eucharistic liturgical tradition that grounds it.[248] The dualist origins of the supposition that the relation of the soul to Christ is bridal invoke the insoluble one-many problematic inherent in that pagan tradition. Here it should be stressed that the second-century patristic attribution of the title of “second Eve” to the Theotokos does not trespass on the reservation of this bridal relation to the Church, for Mary and the Church identify at a level never adequately explored by theologians but nonetheless latent in the early patristic ascription to both of the title “second Eve,” an insight that owes nothing to Plato and everything to Paul. Vatican II’s Lumen Gentium explicitly recognized the Church-Mary unity in making Marian doctrine a branch of ecclesiology.
The anthropological implications of the supposedly bridal relation of each member of the Church to Christ make their unity in the Church to be entirely independent of their sacramentally-objective imaging of God, an imaging which, as has been seen, is and can only be nuptially ordered. The imaging of God is substantial: therefore it is not the same for men as for women, contra the univocity of the supposed bridal standing of the soul qua soul and irrespective of the distinct sacramental significance, liturgically underwritten, between historical masculinity and femininity. It is of course impossible to dissociate membership in the Church from the exercise of covenantal fidelity in the Church: the latter is the authentic expression of the former, an expression that is Eucharistically normed, indissociable then from the Church herself, whose historicity is her Eucharistic, nuptially-ordered liturgy.
Covenantal fidelity unites members in the Church; it does not comport with the evident irrelevance of other souls to the individual soul’s bridal union with the risen Christ. Paul McPartlan has rightly criticized de Lubac’s ecclesiology on this point. De Lubac has in fact subscribed to this deficient “bridal” anthropology, despite his continual stress upon the bridal relation of the Church to her Lord.[249] The Platonic dualism inherent in this error troubled the Trinitarian and Christological speculation of the early Church Fathers. The dehistoricizing thrust of its application to the supposedly bridal soul is evident in the consequent failure to recognize the nuptial character of the liturgical unity of the members of the Church.[250] Familiar with the Pauline reference to the unity of the Body as caused by the unity of the Eucharistic worship, the Fathers preferred to visualize this ecclesial unity impersonally, as analogous to that of grains of wheat transformed by art into the bread of the Eucharistic species, or of grapes comparable transformed into the Eucharistic wine: the Didache was routinely levied upon to support this imagery.[251] It was supplemented, as later with St. Thomas, by recourse to a basically Stoic notion of the harmoniously articulated unity of a healthy organism, of a “body” in that sense.
Such devices could only mask the reality of a free, Eucharistically and therefore nuptially-ordered unity of the masculine and feminine members of the body that cannot but reflect the freedom of the nuptial unity of the One Flesh of Christ and the Church. This free unity of the members of the Church, as members of the Church, is simply their imaging of God, their sacramental worship in the Church, their covenantal fidelity, their participation in the history of salvation. This worship is nuptially signed by the One Flesh of Jesus Christ the Head and his bridal Church, of the Head and the Body; it knows nothing of a soul, in the sense of a concrete human person, who would be bridal qua human. Our human imaging of God is nuptial and thereby historical because sacramental, which it could not be were the relation of the human person to the risen Jesus the Christ bridal per se.
A signal factor, contributing to de Lubac’s acceptance of notion that the human soul as in a bridal relation to the risen Christ, is his evident subscription to the Thomist equation of person with intellectual substance, with its corollary: that our personal and ecclesial imaging of God, whose created “image” must be substantial as well as personal, is a consequently mono-personal or monadic human imaging of a Trinity of Persons. This monist interpretation of our imaging of God, which St. Thomas took from St. Augustine and which Augustine had taken for granted, ignores the evident fact that our imaging of God cannot but be identical to our praxis of covenantal fidelity in and through the worship of the Church, in such wise that our imaging must be Eucharistically normed, therefore nuptially ordered, and that consequently the unity of members of the Church is a function of their nuptially-ordered, free imaging of God. This is already implicit in I Cor. 12 and Rom. 12, for Paul insists on the moral responsibility of the members of the ecclesial body for each other, a responsibility little at ease with an organic understanding of their unity as that of univocal members, and still less with the nuptial relation of the worshiper in ecclesia to the risen Lord.[252]
Pope John Paul II, commenting on Gen. 1:26-27 in his “Letter to Families, §§6-8, and later in his Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Collaboration of Men and Women in the Church and in the World,” has clarified the nuptial order, or free unity, of our substantial and personal imaging of God, which can be substantial only if the unity of our substance also is trinitarian and, like the divine substance, constituted in freedom. This human imaging of the Trinity is possible only by a nuptially-ordered creation of man in Christ the Head; see Col. 1:15-18. This nuptial order, the free, moral expression of the covenantal fidelity, is the criterion of the ordered freedom in ecclesia of the members of the Church, a freedom appropriated only in Eucharistic worship, whose order is that of its object and source, the Eucharistic One Flesh of Christ and his bridal Church by which alone creation is good and very good. There is no moral freedom in history other than this. The intellectual conversion implicit in this worship entails recognition of the sacramental objectivity of all that is historical.
Because the preceding centuries had not faced this problem, they had furnished no tools for its resolution. Medieval theologians had to forge these anew in an atmosphere in which the intellectual excitement, the new theological enthusiasm, was for a quasi-Aristotelian logic, a “dialectic” which, with the decline of the Western culture following the fall of the Roman Empire,[253] had forgotten the Aristotelian act-potency metaphysics that underlay and controlled it Aristotle’s logic. The theological debate over the legitimacy of this “new logic,” culminating in the “problem of the universals,” itself no more than a restatement of the ancient dilemma of the one and the many, occupied theologians from the ninth through the thirteenth centuries. In the fourteenth, William of Ockham’s development of a purely conceptual analytical logic triumphed over the analytical metaphysics of St. Thomas’ theology; with that triumph of deracinated rationality over theology and, by implication, over the Catholic tradition, the age of Modernity began to be born: the “double truth” of autonomous reason and of faith, supposedly asserted by Averrhoes and Siger of Brabant, was now in place. Intellectual freedom came to be identified with unconditioned analysis of concepts,[254] while adherence to the doctrinal tradition was associated with a sacrificium intellectus, a servile, voluntarist obedience to ecclesial authority, itself misunderstood by that same conceptual analysis to be a coercive juridical power rather than the liturgically-grounded supreme moral authority, the auctoritas sacrata pontificum, which the Gelasian summary of the Augustinian tradition had asserted it to be. The stage was set for the flat incomprehension that greeted Boniface VIII’s traditional statement, in Unum Sanctum, of the universal range of the moral authority (auctoritas sacrata) of the Church.[255]
Nonetheless the Augustinian theological tradition remained alive; perhaps the most eloquent testimony to its vitality is the excogitation, complete by about 1115, of the revision of the Augustinian-patristic sacramentum, res sacramenti sacramental analysis. This revision is associated with the cathedral school of Laon, then under Anselm of Laon, who―despite Abelard’s contempt―was probably the ablest scholar of his age. His revision responded brilliantly to the analytical demands of the new logic, yet did so without the analytic disintegration of the Eucharistic worship that Berengarius’ challenge to its truth had supposed to be the implication of rationality as such. In short, the revision upheld what Berengarius had not understood to exist, the free historical unity, the free historical significance, the free, historical veritas, which had been presupposed by the sacramentum, res sacramenti paradigm of sacramental realism. Thus the school of Laon provided an analysis of the experienced free truth of sacramental worship which, without isolating from each other the elements thus found to compose the free unity of sacramentum, res sacramenti, was able to distinguish between that which was sign only (the sacramentum tantum), that which was at once the infallible effect of the sign and itself an effective sign (the res et sacramentum), and that final effect of the sacramental signing which was not a sign, but, the ultimate free effect of the Eucharistic sacramentum, whose efficacy terminated in the worshiper’s free union with his Lord, in Christo, therefore in ecclesia, and thus in history, now denominated the res tantum sacramenti or, succinctly, the res tantum..
This revision kept intact the realism affirmed by the Augustinian-patristic sacramentum, res sacramenti analysis, while providing a coherent response to the heresy inherent in Berengarius’ effort to isolate, dehistoricize and reduce to subjectivity the effect of the sacramentum. This early medieval restatement of the ancient doctrine in the context of a novel heresy was little more than its reaffirmation in a time in which the theological imagination have become infected by the novel heuristic device, the quaestio, borrowed from the schools of law: it supposed, naively, the truth of every doctrinal affirmation to be submitted to and judged by the new analytic criteriology of “necessary reasons.” This uncritical postulate had led Berengarius astray, as it would lead many others. The quaestio was thought, from its inception, to be a quest for intrinsically necessary causes of a truth that, to be true, had to be proven to be true, and thus to be necessarily true, a relic of a pagan cosmological consciousness that still haunts speculative theology.
The perdurance of sacramental realism in theology was ensured, not by the quaestio and the responses it elicited in the medieval summae, but by the inclusion of the medieval revision of Augustinian sacramental analysis in Peter Lombard’s Sentences. Even if there it is inadequately understood, it remains available for theological exploitation once its thirteenth-century surrogate, the quasi-Aristotelian matter-form analysis of sacramental realism, is seen to have failed. The major defect haunting the medieval revision of the Augustinian-patristic sacramentum-res sacramenti analysis was the uncritically-accepted postulate, entirely extrinsic to the analysis itself, of a metaphysical monism of substance. Those who exploited it could not but continue the patristic failure to appreciate the covenantal freedom of the nuptial unity of Christ and the Church comprising the res sacramenti of the Eucharist: this in consequence of their uncritical investment in the pervasive monistic and therefore deterministic metaphysics of substance postulated by cosmological rationality as the criterion of truth and reality. The medieval temptation, like the patristic, was to continue to interpret, as though cosmological, the covenantally, because nuptially-free, unity of the One Flesh, reducing it to a non-covenantal, finally cosmological unity of “one body” or “one person.” We have seen that this error was common among the Fathers and to the monastic theologians whom de Lubac has cited, and that it is continued by St. Thomas and the Thomist tradition. Nonetheless, when taken seriously, i.e., critically, by systematic theologians, it bars the development of a truly historical systematic theology, one responsive to and respectful of the free truth of the revelation that is in Christ and the nuptial freedom of the New Covenant he instituted on the cross.
3. The Monist Distortion and the Nuptial Restoration of the Medieval sacramentum tantum, res et sacramentum, res tantum
St. Thomas explains the causality of the Eucharistic signing in another passage in the Summa Theologiae, but here he does so in terms of the post-Berengarius, tripartite medieval paradigm which Peter Lombard, more than a century earlier, had used in his Sentences: [256]
Respondeo dicendum quod in hoc sacramento tria considerare possumus: scilicet id quod est sacramentum tantum, scilicet panis et vinum ; et id quod est res et sacramentum, scilicet Corpus Christi verum; et id quod est res tantum, scilicet effectus huius sacramenti.
S.T iiia, q. 73, a. 6, c.
It would be clear that in this passage “effectus huius sacramenti” has in view personal Eucharistic Communion, not the Church, were it not for St. Thomas’ failure to contest the earlier identification of the Church with the Eucharistic res tantum:
Praeterea, in quolibet sacramento novae legis id quod visibile subicitur sensui, effecit invisibilem effectum sacramenti, sicut ablution aquae causat et characterem baptismum et ablutionem spiritualem, ut supra 5) dictum est. Sed species panis et vini, quae subiciuntur sensui in hoc sacramento, non efficient neque ipsum Corpus Christi verum, quod est res et sacramentum, neque Corpus Christi mysticum, quod est res tantum in Eucharistia 6). Ergo videtur quod Eucharistia non sit sacramentum novae legis.
5) Q. 63, a. 6; q. 66, a. 1, 3, 7.
6)Mag. IV. Sent., dist. 8, cap. Nunc quid ibi.―Cfr. Cum Marthae, de Celeb. Moss.
S. T. iiia 73, a. 1, obj. 2.
In any case, when using the patristic “sacramentum, res sacramenti” analysis, St. Thomas had understood the “effectus huius sacramenti,” to be an effect included within the nuptial union of Christ and the Church, thus within the “duplex res sacramenti” of the Augustinian-patristic paradigm. This is quite consistent with the passage just cited, for in that earlier sacramental paradigm, where there is no separation out of a “res tantum” from the “res sacramenti:” the “effectus huius sacramenti” is upon the worshiper, i.e., the res sacramenti is simply his yet more profound integration into the Church’s covenantal union with her Lord, an effect at once historical and anagogical.
At the same time, it is noteworthy that when using the later, i.e., the medieval sacramental analysis, St. Thomas does not refer to the Church as one of the direct effects ex opere operato of the Eucharistic signing, as he had done earlier in the Summa Theologiae in replying to a the second objection raised in the same quaestio quoted supra.[257] Further, under the later analysis (apart from the two instances cited in endnote 10, where he follows Peter Lombard) neither does he affirm the Church to be the res tantum of the Eucharist: rather, he continues to speaks of the res tantum as “effectus huius sacramenti,” which he understands, as we have seen, to be the participant’s invisible communion in ecclesia with the risen Christ. At the same time, for him, the Eucharistic signing causes the historical Church. Once again, we encounter the ambiguity inherent in reading St. Thomas’ Eucharistic theology as though it entails a dehistoricized Church as the final effect of the Eucharistic sacrifice, in the sense of understanding the Church to be the res tantum sacramenti, an evidently erroneous doctrine inasmuch as it deprives the Church of her historicity, but which he had in fact endorsed in the Commentary on the Sentences and which he neither explicitly corrects nor departs from in the Summa Theologiae. It is hardly to be doubted that in thus describing the Church, he has in view her anagogical dimension, that which the Lombard defined, in the same context, as “Res autem significata et non contenta est unitas Ecclesiae in praedestinatis, vocatis, justificatis, et glorificatis.”
The post-Berengarian stress upon affirming what Berengarius had denied, the transubstantiation of the Eucharistic elements into the body and the blood of the Christ, doubtless has an influence here. It became too easy immediately to limit the effect ex opere operato of the Eucharistic signing to the transubstantiation of the elements: hence the equation of the res et sacramentum with the Corpus Christi verum. But it is not necessary to read this equation sensu negante, as a denial of what St. Thomas has affirmed elsewhere, for we have seen, he did not stop there. For him, the Corpus Christi verum Eucharistiae is “figurativum corporis mystici,” thus affirming the Church, the Corpus Christi mysticum, to be an effect of the Eucharistic signing inseparable from the Real Presence, the Corpus Christi verum, whose signing of the Church is identical with his Headship of her.[258]
This recognition of the Corpus Christi verum as the immediate source or cause of the Corpus Christi mysticum must conclude to the inclusion of the Church within the res et sacramentum of the medieval sacramental analysis, but St. Thomas leaves this unstated. Because he had earlier relegated the Church to the res tantum sacramenti, it is tempting to suppose him still to be of that mind, although the evidence against that inference is compelling. An ambiguity respecting the place of the Church thus remains within his Eucharistic theology. We have pointed out a possible, even probable resolution of that ambiguity: his refusal, with the Fathers, to dissociate the historical from the anagogical Church, and a consequent willingness to look upon the anagogical Church as the res tantum, the final effect of the Eucharistic signing: i.e., as an effect which is not a sign, but the ultimate effect of the historical Eucharistic signing. This patristic contribution to the historicity of the res tantum sacramenti was later lost to sight: its recovery is of the first importance to Eucharistic theology.
This resolution of an apparent ambiguity also is consistent with a solution to the problem of identifying the invisible but historical Eucharistic res tantum, the “effectus huius sacramenti” in the communicant. This effect is without historical expression, and so not itself a sign, for it has only the historical objectivity of participation in the Eucharistic worship by which the historical Church is historical; because this participation is free, it is not infallible: this is of course true of historical worship as such.
Here as earlier it must be kept in view that the Church’s historicity, her sacramental worship of her Lord, is causally prior to the historical participation in that worship by her members. The res tantum of the Eucharist, insofar as referred to the individual worshipers, can only be the personal sustenance of the individual communicants who, by reason of the ecclesial fidelity and union signed and effected by their reception of the “verum corpus,” are within the unitas corporis, the One Flesh that is the duplex res sacramenti, as is clear in the quotation, supra, from S. T. IIIa, q. 80.
This latter phrase also will become obscured by the confusion inserted into theology with the substitution of “contenta” for “significata,” and the later substitution, also accepted by St. Thomas, of “non contenta” for “non significans.” The application of “non contenta” to an effect of the Eucharistic signing is entirely ambiguous for, on the one hand, it can refer to the fact that the Church is not contained in the consecrated species by way of transubstantiation―for the term of transubstantiation is the Corpus Christi verum solely―but is “figured,” signed by the Corpus Christi verum, as we have seen, and thus, while “non contenta” with respect to the consecrated species, is nevertheless understood to be included, i.e., “contenta,” within the infallible effect, the res et sacramentum of the later medieval, analysis of the Eucharistic signing. On the other hand, “non contenta” can refer to the res tantum, the “effectus huius sacramenti” which, as fallible, is distinct from, and thus considered as not contained within, the effect infallibly achieved, the res et sacramentum of the Eucharist: i.e., not contained within the Eucharistic One Flesh whose anagogical reality is the fulfilled Kingdom of God. We have seen that for Peter Lombard the res tantum of the Eucharist is “mystica eius caro,” while the res non contenta is identical, viz., the “unitas Ecclesiae in praedestinatis, vocatis, justificatis, et glorificatis”. This is the final achievement of the Eucharistic signing, the fulfilled Kingdom of God, linked to the historical sign, the Eucharistic worship of the historical Church, as effect to cause: even as anagogic, the Church remains historical while history lasts.
The confusion over the meaning of “contenta” and “non contenta” is easily transferred to the Eucharistic duplex res sacramenti and to its equivalent, the res gemina: they can be read, as de Lubac has read them on at least one occasion,[259] as referring to the res et sacramentum and res tantum as “twin effects;” this confusion has lost sight of the patristic understanding of the term, wherein the res sacramenti. whether named the res gemina or the duplex res sacramenti, cannot but refer to the Eucharistic One Flesh, whether as historically represented or anagogically achieved by that representation: the res sacramenti is indivisible as the One Flesh is indivisible.
However, we have seen the continuity and congruence of the patristic sacramentum, res sacramenti paradigm and the later tripartite paradigm, which de Lubac shows to have been formulated in response to Berengarius’ challenge to Eucharistic realism. It remains to be shown that in St. Thomas’ language there is no real tension between (1) his application of the patristic “duplex res sacramenti” to the Eucharist, and (2) his application to the Eucharist of the medieval tripartite patristic paradigm of “sacramentum tantum, res et sacramentum, res tantum.” The Augustinian-patristic “duplex res significata,” the “duplex res sacramenti” of which Thomas observes that “duo est considerare,” must be shown to be honored by the later tri-partite sacramental paradigm, equally Augustinian in its source, but responsive to a dehistoricizing heresy that Augustine had dealt with, as we have seen, only in its Donatist expression, not as a direct threat to Eucharistic realism.
In the eyes of his eleventh-century contemporaries as well as of the later medieval theologians, Berengarius had collapsed the historicity of the Eucharistic sacrifice into the nonhistoricity of the supposedly subjective personal appropriation of its efficacy in Communion.[260] This device, later to be adopted by the Reform, needed explicitly to be countered. To this end, the early medieval theologians, on the foundation of the patristic duplex res sacramenti, distinguished the Corpus Christi verum, whose historical objectivity Berengarius had put in issue, from the ecclesial, hence public, and in that sense historical, objectivity of communicant’s yet more profound assimilation to the Church, and yet more complete adherence to the risen Lord, by reason of his reception of the “bread of life and the cup of everlasting salvation.”
The conceptual distinguishing of this latter effect as an effect simply, by designating it the ”res tantum sacramenti,” set it off from its proximate cause, the res et sacramentum that is at once the infallible effect of the sacramentum tantum and also a sign freely effecting the free union of the communicant with the risen Christ in his Kingdom. However, during the course of the centuries-long defensive reaction to the Berengarian heresy, there arose a tendency to identify the res et sacramentum simply with the Corpus Christi verum whose objectivity Berengarius had denied. The consequent neglect of the sacramental efficacy of the Corpus Christi verum as the cause of the Church, i.e., as “figurativum corporis mystici” (that efficacious signing by reason of which the Eucharistic res et sacramentum is not merely a “res,” an effect, but is also a visible “sacramentum,” an infallibly efficacious sign) amounted to that “banalization” of the understanding of the ecclesial “body” to which de Lubac has referred. Perhaps its most signal expression is the recourse of the Thomist ecclesiology to the Aristotelian “perfect society” instead of to the Augustinian “sancta societas.” It is not difficult to understand that the apologetic emphasis of the anti-Berengarian theology upon the Corpus Christi verum could easily arrive at the isolation of the res et sacramentum from the Corpus Christi mysticum so as to leave the Eucharistic cause of the Church unnoticed. A good many works in ecclesiology witness to the consequent ignorance of the Church’s Eucharistic foundation, and thus to a reliance upon “models” of debatable heuristic value.
This consequence was to an extent offset by a continuing recognition of the res gemina, the duplex res sacramenti, which remained alive, but now a new problem arose: that of explaining the association of the Church, the Corpus Christi mysticum, with the res et sacramentum, which had been taken for granted rather than thought out. St. Thomas had seen in the Corpus Christi verum the effective sacramental sign, the figura, of the Corpus Christi mysticum, but this was in the context of the patristic sacramentum, res sacramenti paradigm: he does not appear to have placed the Church within the res et sacramentum of the newer, the medieval, sacramental paradigm, and as we have seen, on two occasions, following Peter Lombard, he had placed the Church in the Eucharistic res tantum, which the Lombard knew to denote its anagogical reality, the eschatological fulfillment of the Eucharistic signing. There is no reason to suppose that St. Thomas held otherwise.
De Lubac has prefaced his profound examination of the Latin Eucharistic tradition with a few pages of concrete proof of the unquestioning realism of that tradition prior to the eleventh century. Augustine, the major reliance of that tradition, was well aware that Eucharistic offering of the One Sacrifice must be distinguished from its benefits; he could hardly have failed to realize that his refutation of Donatism as a heresy destructive of the a priori objectivity and historical authenticity of the Church’s sacramental worship bore equally upon the historical realism of the Eucharistic sacrifice, but his largely homiletic writing on the Eucharist understandably does not give the point much attention, for it presented no pastoral problem. Nonetheless, in defending the sacraments of baptism and orders against the Donatist dissent, he was obviously protecting what would later be designated the ex opere operato efficacy of the priestly offering of the Eucharistic sacrifice in persona Christi, for it could not otherwise be offered.
We have seen St. Thomas, in his Commentary on the Sentences, following Peter Lombard’s text, elaborate on the patristic “duplex res sacramenti” by distinguishing the twin effects of the unitary Eucharistic signing, which signing Augustine, following the African tradition set by Tertullian and Cyprian, termed the sacramentum.
In the first place, there is the effect that is the ”Corpus Christi verum,” which St. Thomas, following Peter Lombard, asserts to be “contained” in the consecrated elements, i.e., to be identified with them by their transubstantiation into his sacrificial Body and Blood. The “containing” idiom, most recently used by Paul VI in Mysterium fidei, is a time-honored if potentially misleading expression of the sacramental veiling of the Corpus Christi verum by the “species” of the bread and wine.
Secondly, there is the effect, equally infallible, which is the historical Church as signed, i.e., as caused, by the same unitary sign, the “sacramentum,” but not as “contained,” as the Corpus Christi verum must be, within or by the species of the transubstantiated bread and wine. The Church, as the effect of the Eucharistic signing, is not then “contained” within the Corpus Christi verum, but is simply made present in history by the infallible signing that is the consecration of these elements. The direct effect of their transubstantiation, the “Real Presence” or Corpus Christi verum in the older idiom, is designated by the Lombard and by St. Thomas as the “res contenta,” an expressent latent with the implication, soon given an untroubled acceptance, that the effectus huius sacramenti is a “res non contenta,” in the sense of an effect not identified with the consecrated elements, but one included within the infallible efficacy of the patristic res sacramenti.
This second effect is then distinct from, not to be identified with, the Corpus Christi verum, the Real Presence of Christ as the High Priest and the Victim of the One Sacrifice. The nuptial coincidence and simultaneity of these distinct effects of the “sacramentum,” i.e., the Corpus Christi verum of the Head, at once High Priest and Victim of the One Sacrifice, and the Corpus Christi mysticum that is his glory, the bridal Church proceeding from her Head, the Bridegroom, is the “duplex res sacramenti,” a single effect, or “res,” but a “res gemina,” the complex result of the Eucharistic signing, the One Flesh of the second Adam and the second Eve. St. Thomas does not separate in time the Bridegroom and bridal Church: their union is a single “duplex” effect, a single Event, the institution of the New Covenant. This of course is ancient doctrine: infallibly, the One Sacrifice is the institution of the New Covenant, the One Flesh of Christ and the Church.
When the Lombard published the Sentences in the middle of the twelfth century, the tri-partite medieval paradigm had been in use for some decades. Although, as de Lubac observes, its discursive or analytical distinctions do not well match Augustine’s phenomenological-existential language and viewpoint, neither do they contest it; further, they were at once essential to and effective in the barring of the heretical, implicitly symbolist denial of Eucharistic realism by Berengarius and his followers.
Berengarius’ perceived attack upon Eucharistic realism had made it necessary for orthodox theologians to distinguish the free, fallible effect of the communicant’s personal participation in the Church’s Eucharistic worship from that effect which, as instituted by the Lord, is given infallibly, viz., as the effect of placing the Eucharistic sign in the context of the Church’s worship.
Berengarius’ symbolist reduction of the Eucharist’s efficacy to a subjective change in the communicant had made it necessary clearly to distinguish final effect of the Eucharistic sacrifice, i.e., the communicant’s free, personal union with the risen Lord, from that infallible effect, the duplex res sacramenti, within which that personal union with Christ had been included by the patristic paradigm of the earlier theology in which the res sacramenti is the full effect of the Eucharistic signing, an effect which is simply the historical-liturgical mediation in ecclesia of personal salvation, anagogical membership in the anagogical Kingdom of God. Although the fallibility of the Eucharistic efficacy that is directed to a given communicant’s personal union with the risen Christ is analytically distinguishable from the infallible full effect of the Eucharistic signing, it is only conceptually or analytically separable from the res sacramenti. Because the salvation in which the Eucharistic signing terminates, viz., the fulfilled Kingdom of God, includes personal membership in the Kingdom, that membership is fallible only in the sense of being free, as requiring the free, personal response of the communicant, which the monastic opponents of Berengarius knew to be enabled but not imposed by the Eucharistic signing.
However, because the phenomenological interest of the patristic theology could not support this novel analytic separation of the infallible res et sacramentum from the fallible res tantum, without ceasing to be phenomenological, the monastic reply to Berengarius initiated a departure from the generally phenomenological interest of the Fathers, as systematized in the sacramentum-res sacramenti patristic paradigm of sacramental causality, and began to develop the defensive response of the analytical objectivity of sacramental efficacy that Berengarius’ reduction of sacramental efficacy to subjectivity required. The defense amounted to an analytically constructed apologia for sacramental realism in the sense of analytical objectivity, and could not but focus upon what Berengarius had been heard to challenge, the infallible and historically objective efficacy of Eucharistic signing. To this end, it was necessary conceptually to distinguish that infallible effect, which would come to be called the res et sacramentum, from its free and consequently fallible effect, but by no means was there any intent to separate it from the infallible final or anagogical effect of that signing, the fulfilled Kingdom of God, in which final effect all free personal union with the risen Christ, mediante ecclesia, is included; obviously, it cannot include a sinful refusal of that Eucharistic mediation.
The infallible effect of the Eucharistic representation of the One Sacrifice is of course the New Covenant, the One Flesh of Christ and his bridal Church. Berengarius had made it necessary clearly to distinguish the final effect of the Eucharistic sacrifice, i.e., the communicant’s anagogical union with the risen Lord, from that infallible effect, the duplex res sacramenti, within which the earlier (patristic and monastic) theology had understood it to be included. The reply to Berengarius’ stress upon the fallibility that clearly distinguishes this free effect of the Eucharistic signing from the infallible effect, the New Covenant in his Blood―infallible because instituted by the Lord―forced a theological departure from the phenomenological context of the patristic sacramentum-res sacramenti which recognized, but was not interested in, that fallibility, that possibility of refusing to exist in the Church by participating in her worship, which is to say, refusing to participate in the res sacramenti. Berengarius’ resort to what amounted to a linguistic analysis of the Words of Institution could not be left unanswered: it required that apologia whose necessity de Lubac admits, but whose unintended sequel, the unreflective rationalizing of the free unity of the Eucharistic signing, he properly deplores.
The novel task of theological apologetics required a restatement of the patristic sacramental paradigm: it involved no change in the doctrine which it intended to defend,, nor in the historical unity of the Eucharistic worship, which is to say, of the efficacious Eucharistic signing. As the patristic paradigm of sacramentum - res sacramenti had stressed that unity, so the new paradigm, sacramentum - res et sacramentum - res tantum was not intended depart from it, nor did its proper application entail any such departure.
Nonetheless, a certain dehistoricization of the Eucharistic liturgy followed upon its adoption. The enthusiasm for the new logic, for dialectical analysis, was not merely Berengarian; it had forced the tension we have seen between Paschasius and Ratramnus in the Carolingian period, and which in the twelfth century we find between the young Abelard and his mentors, Anselm of Laon and William of Champeaux, who had been trained in the monastic theology and were not at peace with the new logic―whose latencies Abelard, for all his verve and brilliance, also had not grasped
The Neoplatonic severance of that logic from its metaphysical foundations in the Aristotelian act-potency analysis had made its theological use impossible, for without that foundation it was no more than a grammar. It was not for nothing that Churchmen as eminent as Peter Damien and St. Bernard forbade its study in their monasteries for the abstract logic of the “new dialectic” was not open to a conversion to historicity, while apart from such a conversion, it remained a pure expression of sarkic rationality which could only fragment indefinitely whatever historical unity it encountered.
Thus the final effect―the res tantum―of the Eucharistic signing, is conceptually seperable from the res et sacramentum only because it is the free, personal response of the communicant, which is enabled but not imposed by the res et sacramentum.
The older, pre-Berengarian sacramental paradigm of sacramentum, res sacramenti had included within the res sacramenti this final effect of free personal union in sacramento with the risen Christ, as an element simply indispensable to and integral with the sacramental realism summed up in the patristic tradition’s sacramentum, res sacramenti analysis of sacramental causality.
Personal Eucharistic Communion with the risen Lord could not be dissociated from this concrete unity of sign and effect without forgetting that for which the Eucharistic signing was instituted, viz., the free union of Christians with their Lord in sacramento, in ecclesia. Berengarius’ error was his reduction to subjectivity of the whole efficacy of this sacramental signing, and thus to dehistoricize it, in what amounts to an anticipation of the justification sola fide of the Reform. St. Augustine, in refuting the Donatist heresy, had long since countered this project by distinguishing the infallible from the free effect of the sacramental signing. By the early twelfth century, these effects were designated respectively the res et sacramentum and the res tantum sacramenti; the latter understood as the free effect of the former, which is itself the necessary effect of the proper placing of the sacramental sign, whose efficacy is not man’s but God’s. All sacramental efficacy is the work of Spirit whose Gift by the Son to the Church is the object of his Mission from the Father, a Mission accomplished by Jesus’ “obedience unto death, even the death on the cross.” (Phil. 2:12).
Berengarius’ error collapsed the infallible effect of the Eucharistic signing into the fallible or free effect; this entails a denial of the Sacrifice of the Mass, a denial tout court of the Church’s sacramental realism, and consequently of her historicity, her institutional visibility. Mediated by the enthusiastic anti-institutionalism unleashed by the Gregorian Reform during the same century, Berengarius’ denial of the Sacrifice of the Mass became the linchpin of the Reform.
We have seen St. Thomas, in S. T. IIIa, q. 80, safeguarding the distinction between the fallible and infallible effects of the One Sacrifice. There, still writing within the traditional patristic paradigm of sacramentum, res sacramenti, St. Thomas distinguishes the Eucharistic Corpus Christi mysticum from the Corpus Christi verum as “significata et contenta,” as distinct from “significata sed non contenta,” (i.e., signed by the Corpus Christi verum, but not “contained” within the consecrated species as the Corpus Christi verum is), while the worshiper’s personal Communion is identified with neither element of the res gemina, the Eucharistic res sacramenti, the infallible effect of the Eucharistic signing, later designated the effect ex opere operato, viz., the Sacrificial institution of the One Flesh of the New Covenant, the indefeasible work of God, the terminus of the Father’s sending of the Son to give the Spirit. The patristic tradition took for granted the communicant’s inclusion within the worshiping Church, and here St. Thomas is writing within the patristic context.
A few pages earlier, however, in S. T. IIIa, q. 73, we have seen St. Thomas, writing within the context of the later medieval paradigm, relegate the communicant’s free union with Christ in the Church to the res tantum of the Eucharist, to which the medieval Eucharistic paradigm assigned the effectus huius sacramenti, although we have seen that in the older, patristic paradigm, that “effectus” had been assimilated to the res sacramenti, not as infallibly caused by the sacramentum, but nonetheless as its effect, and so as experientially―phenomenologically―included within the res sacramenti.
De Lubac criticizes the “contenta” and “non contenta” descriptions of the “duplex res sacramenti” (res et sacramentum, res tantum) that St. Thomas uses in this passage (S. T. iiia, q. 80, a. 4, c.), viz., “alia autem et significata et non contenta, scilicet Corpus Christi mysticum, quod est societas sanctorum,”[261] as suggesting a dissociation of the res non contenta (i.e., the communicant’s union with the historical Church) from its effective sign, the Corpus Christi verum, as though union with the Church were dissociable from that sign, in the sense of “not contained” within it, and hence as putatively irrelevant to it.[262]
Summarily, de Lubac fears that the twelfth century substitution, by Peter Lombard and others, of the language of “significata sed non contenta” for Alger of Liège’s “significata sed non significans” with respect to the res tantum, would isolate the res tantum, the worshiper’s union with the risen Christ, from the Eucharistic signing. The “tantum” was intended to stress that, as the final effect of the Eucharistic signing, it is an effect only, hence without further sacramental efficacy of its own. This is entirely consistent with the earlier sacramentum, res sacramenti paradigm, which understood the res sacramenti to be the Church in her anagogical reality, her eschatological fulfillment. This is precisely the res tantum sacramenti of the new medieval paradigm of Alger of Liège, the ultimate complete effect of the Eucharistic signing. As ultimate, it can have no further sacramental significance, no further sacramental efficacy. It is the la realité achevée in de Lubac’s language.
However, the later transformation, in Peter Lombard’s Sentences, of the attribution to the res tantum of the label “non significans” into “non contenta” opened the way to a dissociation of personal Communion with the risen Christ in ecclesia from the Eucharistic worship of the Church which, when regarded as at once non contenta and non significans, began to be thought of as detached from her Eucharistic cause. Eucharistic Communion with the risen Christ began to be seen as private, as not in ecclesia, as not integral with her worship, finally as subjective. The notion of a subjective “spiritual communion,” independent of participation in the Church’s celebration of the Eucharist became common.
As de Lubac here observes, the symbolism became extrinsic: once separated from the Eucharistic Corpus Christi verum as non contenta et non significans, i.e., as res tantum sacramenti in abstraction from its Eucharistic source, the ecclesial Corpus Christi mysticum began to cease to pertain to the Mysterium fidei. Losing sight of her anagogical reality, i.e., of her sacramental historicity, ecclesiology will cease to be a theological interest. The contemporary reduction of ecclesiology to sociology is no novelty. The Church had long since been labeled a “perfect society” in the context provided by Aristotle’s Politics.
De Lubac summarizes the theological isolation of the res tantum from the res et sacramentum as the product of a departure from the original, early twelfth-century language of Alger of Liège, viz., “sacramentum tantum, res et significata et significans, res non significans sed tantum significata” to the Thomist language of “sacramentum tantum, res significata et contenta, res significata et non contenta.” He remarks, and deplores, the consequent effective divorce of the res tantum sacramenti, the communicant’s anagogical personal Communion with the risen Christ in the Church, the historical sign the Kingdom of God, from the historicity of the res et sacramentum.
De Lubac’s habitual theological posture is within the patristic paradigm of sacramentum-res sacramenti, which may explain why he gives less attention to another equally regrettable result of this departure from or revision of Alger’s language. This is the neglect of, or perhaps the apologetic disinterest in, the “quasi res ultima,” i.e., in the Church as infallibly “figured” by the “Corpus Christi verum,” not indeed as “contained” in the consecrated species, but as at once significata and significans, thus as integral to and inseparable from the res et sacramentum, i.e., from the Real Presence of Jesus as the Head of the Church, as well as at once the High Priest and Victim of the One Sacrifice, which the consecrated species signify and, by signifying, cause.
Consequently this revision of Alger of Liège’s formula implies a removal of the historical sacramental Church from the Augustinian-patristic understanding of the res sacramenti as “duplex,” as the res gemina. viz., the union of the historical Church with her historical Eucharistic Lord in One Flesh. Alger’s “res et significata et significans” can and should be read to refer to that efficacious Eucharistic causality by which the Corpus Christi verum, Christ the Head, the Bridegroom, is inseparable from his bridal Body, the Corpus Christi mysticum, who proceeds from him as from her head . This cannot be said of the revision of Alger’s language, wherein the res significata et contenta was heard to refer the infallible causality of the sacramentum tantum solely to the Corpus Christi verum, to the exclusion of his bridal Church, the Corpus Christi mysticum, as though the transubstantiation of the species exhausted the infallible causal efficacy of the Eucharistic signing. This apologetic focus on what Berengarius had been heard to deny, viz., the objective reality of the Corpus Christi verum, ignores the fact that the Corpus Christi verum is within the res et sacramentum of the Eucharist as also a sacramentum, an efficacious sign, i.e., as the infallibly efficacious sign and cause of his union with the bridal Church who, by the signing that is Christ the Bridegroom’s Eucharistic Sacrifice, proceeds from him as from her Head, One Flesh with him and freely inseparable from him in the effect ex opere operato of the sacramentum tantum.
Clearly, de Lubac is very much aware of the unity of Christ and the Church; we shall see that he insists upon the identity of the Eucharistic food with the ecclesial body in union with her Head. He has found full support for this doctrine in Augustine, as in the text below, which is in fact typically Augustinian, a striking instance of Augustine’s frequent exploitation of the Eucharistic communication of idioms:
For my flesh, he says, is truly food, and my blood is truly drink. For, since by food and drink all seek this: that they do not hunger or thirst, nothing truly provides this except that food and drink which makes those by whom it is consumed immortal and incorruptible: that is, the society of the saints itself, where there will be peace, and full and perfect unity. For that reason, just as, even before us, the men of God understood this, our Lord Jesus Christ entrusted his body and blood to those things that are reduced from many things to some one thing, for the one thing [bread] is made from many grains, the other [wine] flows into one from many grapes. [263]
In Joannem, tract 26, c. 6, n. 15 (P.L. 35, 1614).
Of this text de Lubac observes:
Notice the nominative: “the society of the saints itself.” These words are not a complement, but the subject. It is this, the holy society, the blessed state to which our desire tends, that is at the same time our nourishment and our drink: “and therefore this food and drink, he wishes to be understood of the body and its members, which is the holy Church in the predestined.” The final term coincides with the source. The Church rejoins the Christ in perfection. The two effects of the sacrament compose into only one, and in this double and unique participation each finds eternal life. . . “our body is perfected, we are perfected in the body.”―The profound meaning of this doctrine, and its seriousness, have been misunderstood by apologists whose preoccupations are too brief. With more justification, one might charge (this doctrine) with an insufficiency of analysis. But this would be to effect a mistranslation scarcely less serious than to suppose the existence of a confusion, even an exclusion, when actually, according to an habitual mental habit of Saint Augustine, we are dealing with a moving continuity. Clearly, one would not know how to seek for conceptual precision in this astonishing blending of doctrinal exegesis, of familiar preaching, and of lyrical elevation, so perfectly successful, so unified, so little a mere “mélange”. Taken out of context, texts of this genre always defend themselves badly against the deforming interpretations of those whom Rupert, à propos of this same passage, called “exceedingly hurried readers and immature doctors,“ just as they never meet the demands of a didactic exposition. Finally, should one not ask whether these failings are not the price for a plenitude of thought that is not of the order of discourse and whose meaning can be transmitted only by an elliptical and paradoxical use of language?[264]
Augustine’s idiom can be characterized as “elliptical and paradoxical” only by comparison to the non-paradoxical use of language regarded as theologically normative―which is, precisely, to take Augustine’s idiom out of its context, as de Lubac here observes. The context taken for granted by Augustine, as has been seen, is historical, the phenomenology of existence at once justified and sinful, in ecclesia, in Christo. This context is historical because liturgical, and is strange only to those whose training has led them to suppose the act-potency analysis to be criteriological for theological discourse, which of course it is not. The only criterion theological hermeneutics that a Catholic theology can recognize is the liturgy itself, the historical expression of the Church’s worship in truth of the Truth Eucharistically immanent in history as its Lord.
De Lubac’s reading of Augustine’s Eucharistic theology intends the same loyalty to that criterion as did Augustine, and the Fathers before and after him. Nonetheless, de Lubac’s theology of the Eucharist, like that of the patristic, Carolingian and early medieval sources on which he relies, is finally incoherent by reason of its unreflective but nonetheless incongruent submission to another criterion as well, the radically monist cosmological rationality that is simply incompatible with the freedom inherent in the nuptial ordo, the veritas, of the Eucharistic liturgy, viz., the sacrificial institution of the One Flesh of the New Covenant, the New Creation.
However open to paradox, the Augustinian hermeneutic may be, it is too often in some measure opaque to the ultimate paradox: the unity, at once free and substantial, of the nuptial One Flesh of Christ and the Church. This paradox eludes de Lubac as it has eluded and still eludes the Catholic theological tradition. In the West. as von Balthasar has observed, that tradition had become moribund by the fourteenth century, having by then become effectively a quaerens intellectum no longer fed by and focused upon the faith, but simply focused upon the text of St. Thomas. Thus turned in upon itself as a self-sufficient methodology, theology has become nonhistorical, no longer capable of a truly theological inquiry, for a truly theological inquiry is fed only by the Eucharistic liturgy, and finds only there its foundation and its object. Without this firm foundation, the theology of the Eucharistic duplex res sacramenti can all too easily accept a “symbolisme ecclésiastique.”
The doctrinal development inherent in and essential to the liturgical historicity of the Catholic faith entails a continuing conversion from the monist determinism characterizing the cosmological consciousness and the rationality that constitutes the intellectual dimension of the pagan flight from history. Apart from this conversion, the revelation in Christ remains incomprehensible precisely because of its freedom, i.e., its sacramental historicity. The dehistoricization of the Person of Jesus the Christ, the commonplace refusal of Catholic theologians to recognize his Personal humanity as taught by Chalcedon, is an index of the failure of that conversion. The theology consequent upon that mistake ignores the hermeneutics of sacramentally-objective truth that is imposed by the free substantial unity of the One Flesh, a unity which we have seen Augustine, in Sermo 341, name the Christus totus, the free unity effected by the full gift of the Spirit, the unitas corporis. While Augustine tended to assign a monist , i.e., corporeal or personal, unity to this free reality, he never reduced the person and the freedom of the Bride to that of the Bridegroom:
Christ is both the Priest, offering Himself, and Himself the Victim. He willed that the sacramental sign of this should be the daily sacrifice of the Church, who, since the Church is His body, and He the Head, learns to offer herself through Him.
The City of God, 10, 20; E.T. in Jurgens, The Early Fathers III, §1745 at 99.
The Church, “who learns to offer herself through Him,” is personally distinct from her Head, in order that she may learn from him “to offer herself through Him.” .
Their free unity alone supports the historical realism of the Catholic liturgy, and the liturgical exegesis of Scripture. De Lubac does not appear, here or elsewhere, to have recognized that the members of the Church are freely united by their baptismal grace, their nuptially-ordered covenantal fidelity. Thus are explained the failures in his ecclesiology which McPartlan has criticized.[265] Although de Lubac has long and lavishly taught the Eucharistic foundation of the interpersonal mutuality, love and cooperation of the members of the Church, he has not understood their inter-personal mutuality in function of the nuptial order of their sacramental worship and covenantal fidelity―which is to say, of their imaging of God. Doubtless the spiritual vitality of members of the historical Church increases―and doubtless the Church herself does so as well―in consequence of the Eucharistic communion to which their baptismal initiation is ordered, but this says nothing of the transcendent covenantal union of Christ and the Church into which each of them must be baptized in order to receive the Eucharist, whose One Flesh specifies the nuptial order of their existence in ecclesia, in Christo, and therefore specifies their fidelity as nuptially ordered, thus as covenantal.
This defensive and insufficiently examined limitation of the ex opere operato efficacy of the Eucharistic signing, this focusing of the theologian’s interest upon the “content” of the consecrated species (the Corpus Christi verum), rather than upon the full efficacy of the Words of Institution, issued in the dissociation of the historical Church from her cause and source in the Eucharistic signing of the One Sacrifice, and thus also in the dissociation of the worshiper’s reception of the Eucharist from his anagogically achieved union in ecclesia with the risen Christ, which union is in fact identical with that communion..
Under this theological re-interpretation of the early medieval Eucharistic paradigm, whereby “contenta” has replaced Alger’s “significata,” the duplex res sacramenti or res gemina of the older Augustinian-patristic theology was lost from view. The res sacramenti which the Augustinian theology had known as the unitas corporis, the Event of the One Flesh, became simply a statically-imagined Real Presence, the Corpus Christi verum, while the res tantum became the lonely worshiper, lonely because the Eucharistic signing of the sacrificial institution of the Church as integral to the “quasi res ultima,” the One Flesh of the New Covenant, had been forgotten, and the communicant’s union with the risen Christ could no longer be understood to be historical, simply as in ecclesia, for the historicity of the Church had also been put in issue.
This ultimate effect of the Eucharistic signing, the personal union of the communicant with the risen Christ in the Church, the final effect, the res tantum sacramenti, of the Eucharistic offering of the One Sacrifice, was understood to be invisible, dehistoricized by its theological dissociation from the efficacy of the Words of Institution, which now were thought to terminate in the Corpus Christi verum. Therefore it is understandable that the Church should be similarly, if paradoxically, dehistoricized by a comparable theological disinterest, as relegated to the standing of the res tantum by Peter Lombard and St. Thomas in the passages quoted in note 10, infra.
Once the Church was no longer understood to be the infallible effect ex opere operato, of the words of consecration, it was no longer res et sacramentum; its consequent relegation to res tantum standing simply deprived it of the sacramental significance and objective historicity proper to the duplex res et sacramentum, wherein the Church signifies by her Eucharistic worship, her historical union in One Flesh with her Lord. Deprived of that significance, of that objective historicity, the Church loses also her anagogical standing, her objectively historical transcendence of history through her Eucharistically-signed nuptial union with the Lord of history.
That defensive theological stance, so intent on the full historical objectivity of the Real Presence as to forget the sacramental significance, which is to say, the historicity, of the Corpus Christi verum, its causal “figuring” of the Church, also made it impossible to account for the Eucharistic institutionm ex opere operato, of the New Covenant, the One Flesh of Christ and the Church. Although the doctrine itself was never questioned, it was left unexamined. Interest in it had been obviated by the defensive view of the infallible effect of the Eucharistic signing as the transubstantiation of the elements into the Corpus Christi verum, a view which ignored the Christ’s free Event-immanence in the historical One Flesh, therefore that immanence could not be understood to be covenantal, as engaging the sinless freedom of the bridal Church. This was not to deny that the institution of the New Covenant is the infallible effect of the Eucharistic One Sacrifice; rather, the theological displacement of Alger’s historical significata by the nonhistorical contenta, left theologians be baffled by the doctrine itself, in such wise as to prompt them, even require them, to prescind from it.
Theologians thus came to forget that Church has her source and origin in her Eucharistic Lord; whereby alone is her sinlessness assured. Similarly, the communicant’s union with the risen Christ was no longer understood to be the consequence of his participation in her historically visible Eucharistic worship, the signing whereby the Church is the Body of Christ her Head. “Non-contenta,” in the sense of not being the direct product of transubstantiation, could not describe the Church without describing those who worship in her; both were relegated to nonhistoricity by an implication that would lead Nominalist theologians of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to the deprecation of sacramental Communion―a deprecation that contributed to Luther’s denial of the Sacrifice of the Mass. The dehistoricization of the Church was equally the dehistoricization of the Christ, for their free Eucharistic unity in One Flesh is precisely their historicity. Thus the Real Presence of Jesus as dehistoricized could not be his Event-Presence as the High Priest offering himself as the Victim of the One Sacrifice, instituting the New Covenant.
In sum, the effective isolation by medieval theology of the bridal Church from her union with the Bridegroom in the Eucharistic res et sacramentun left the Church without visible means of support: her historicity began to become juridical at best: e.g., de Lubac has cited sources in which the Pope is understood to be her Head in a sense having nothing to do with the nuptial, ultimately Trinitarian sense of the word set out in I Cor. 11:3.[266] This removal of her sacramental historicity, her inclusion in the Eucharistic res et sacramentum, could not but render imperceptible, finally nonsacramental, the Communion of her members with her Lord.
Thus what the medieval theology would term the res tantum, the final effect and goal of the Eucharistic signing, viz., the union of the baptized communicant with his risen Lord in the Church, began to be privatized, to become a purely personal matter between God and the soul, or in a later idiom, between God and the lonely self. The flawed reading of the Song of Songs to which we have earlier referred had prepared the way for this privatization of Catholic worship; the Nominalist theologians would rationalize it further to a degree undreamed of by the patristic tradition. De Lubac has shown that the Augustinian-patristic interest in the Eucharist was intent upon this ultimate goal of all worship almost to the point of ignoring the Corpus Christi verum, i.e., the Real Presence, even risking the appearance of melding the res et sacramentum (the Corpus Christi verum in union with the quasi res ultima, the Corpus Christi mysticum, with the res tantum, the final effect of all Eucharistic signing that is personal Eucharistic Communion with the risen Christ in the Church. De Lubac’s dissatisfaction with the medieval reworking, to the point of a rationalization, of the patristic sacramentum-res sacramenti is easily understood.
Once more, this apparent neglect by the patristic tradition of the Real Presence, which has fed a major misunderstanding of the Augustinian Eucharistic doctrine, rests upon a monadic misunderstanding of the One Flesh of Christ and the Church, one that reduces its free unity to the standing of a mere physical thing, a body in that empirical sense which we have seen St. Thomas himself use―with a good deal of patristic authority behind him. Only a clear recognition of the Eucharistic institution of the One Flesh of the Church with her Lord as the prior condition of our baptism into the Church, and of our free worship of the Christ in the Church, can dispel this confusion, a confusion which cannot be foisted upon the Fathers, whose Eucharistic realism is patent, as de Lubac has shown, and not only he.[267]
De Lubac introduces the first chapter of his classic work with the following statement:[268]
In the thought of all Christian antiquity, the Eucharist and the Church are linked. With St. Augustine, under the influence of the Donatist controversy, this connection is emphasized particularly powerfully, and the same is true of the Latin writers of the seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries. For them as for Augustine, upon whom they all depend either directly or by way of intermediaries, and whose formulae they constantly reproduce, the Eucharist is related to the Church as the cause to the effect, as the means to the end, and at the same time as the sign to the reality. But this passage from the sacramental sign (sacramentum) to the effect of the sacrament (virtus sacramenti), or from the visible sign (species visibilis) to the effect itself (res ipsa) is made by them so rapidly, and the emphasis is so much placed upon the Church, that if in an exposition of the Eucharistic mystery the expression “body of Christ” is found without anything further, it is often not the Eucharist, but the Church, that this expression designates.
Corpus mysticum, at 23.
The patristic use of “body of Christ” to designate the Church is primitive in the sense of Pauline, and thus was the common usage prior to the revision of the sacramenti, res sacramenti Eucharistic analysis forced by the heresy of Berengarius. As de Lubac goes on to prove in the next several pages of Corpus mysticum, there is no implication in this patristic idiom of any diminution of or departure from Eucharistic realism.
This Reformation mistake, the assimilation of the Eucharistic Lord to the Church, and the consequent assimilation of his One Sacrifice to the Church’s sacrifice of praise, opens the way, when the fact of the error is neglected, or when it is accepted and insisted upon as with the Reform, to the desacramentalization and consequent privatization of personal union with the risen Christ, whereas for the Latin patristic tradition, the whole meaning of the Eucharistic worship is focused upon Communion in the Body and the Blood of the Corpus Christi verum as the enhancement at once of the communicant’s baptismal union with the One Flesh of Christ and his Church, and of the Church herself, who is equally nourished by that Communion, for it is the culmination of her worship.
However, de Lubac supposes too easily that Peter Lombard’s “significata sed non contenta,” which was also accepted by St. Thomas as well,[269] refers to Alger of Liège’s slightly earlier “significata sed non significans” i.e., the signed effect which, because it is not itself a sign, can only be the res tantum sacramenti of the revised sacramental paradigm already in use, as we have seen, by Alger. His supposition would also appear to be anachronistic.
In that passage (S. T. iiia, q. 80), St. Thomas, following Peter Lombard, is very clearly writing within the context provided by the pre-Berengarian paradigm of sacramentum-res sacramenti which, as we have seen, knew no res tantum, and which ties Eucharistic union with the risen Christ to incorporation among his members, i.e., in his Church, an incorporation at once historical and anagogical. The effectus huius sacramenti, as St. Thomas understands it in this patristic context, is precisely the intensification of the communicant’s union with the Church.[270] While it had long been commonplace and, in fact, it remains so[271] to speak metaphorically of the Corpus Christi verum as “contained” within the consecrated species of bread and wine, the Church is never said to be thus “contained” within the consecrated Eucharistic species for these, as transubstantiated, solely sign solely, and are solely referred to, the efficacious and therefore historically objective sacramental representation, viz., historical Event of the Real Presence of the Corpus Christi verum, the High Priest and the Victim of the One Sacrifice that infallibly signs and causes the Church, and who, as Priest and as Victim, does so precisely as her Head and source, for the Head and Body are freely and covenantally indissociable and mutually significant in the free unity of their One Flesh, the duplex res sacramenti, the res gemina, of the Eucharistic signing.
Were this strict union not given infallibly by the Eucharistic Words of Institution recited over the bread and wine of the Offertory, the recipients communion in the body and the blood of the One Sacrifice would not carry the immediate consequence of his “aggregatio” to the Church. However, the aggregatio is precisely the patristic commonplace that vanished from view when the defensive exploitation of the tripartite paradigm of sacramentum tantum, res et sacramentum, res tantum lost sight of the duplex res sacramenti, the One Flesh, of the Eucharistic representation by reason of a jejune focus upon affirming what Berengarius had been heard to deny, the objective reality of the Real Presence of the risen Christ. This led to the thirteenth century commonplace, accepted by St. Thomas, which identified the res et sacramentum simply with the Real Presence of the Corpus Christi verum, to the entire neglect of the historical, worshiping Church as the immediate, indispensable and indissociable effect of that Real Presence of the Corpus Christi verum.
It was quite unquestioned by the Fathers that the Church is indissociable from the Eucharistic sacrifice as its immediate and infallible effect. The patristic meditation upon the Eucharist as the “sacrament of unity” and the “unitas corporis” requires no less. But viewing the Church as the infallible effect of the Eucharistic signing raised an evident difficulty, for although her historical reality is as infallible a consequence of the Eucharistic signing as is the Eucharistic presence of the Corpus Christi verum, clearly the Church could not be understood to be “contained” in the consecrated species: i.e., the Church is not an effect signed by the sacramentum tantum as the Corpus Christi verum is signed, but rather is caused by the signing proper to the Corpus Christi verum which, as St. Thomas taught, is “figurativum”―i.e., sacramentally causative―of the Church.
This is elementary, for it is as necessary to the patristic emphasis upon the res gemina of the Eucharist as it is to the medieval analysis wherein the historical Church cannot, as historical, be the res tantum of the Eucharistic signing. Despite St. Augustine’s toying with the Body-body dialectic in such statements as “non ego in te mutaberis, sed tu mutaberis in me”―a matter to which we shall return―the logical (“dialectical”) identification of the Corpus Christi verum with the Corpus Christi mysticum appeared only with the Reformation’s denial of the Eucharistic sacrifice.
It is noteworthy that when, in S. T. iiia, q. 80, a. 4, c, St. Thomas speaks of the duplex res sacramenti of the Eucharist, he speaks of the “Corpus Christi verum” and the “Corpus Christi mysticum” as together constituting that twin effect, an effect that is entirely distinct from that which he terms “effectus huius sacramenti.” When thinking in context of the later paradigm he identifies this “effectus huius sacramenti” with the res tantum sacramenti. Further (with the two exceptions cited in endnote 10), when thus speaking of the Eucharistic effects in the context provided by the later, or medieval, paradigm, and so distinguishing the res et sacramentum from the res tantum as the “Corpus Christi verum” from its effects, he does not mention the Church, referring only to “effectus huius sacramenti,” as in S. T. iiia, q. 73, a. 6, c.
It is more than likely that he associates the Corpus Christi verum with the Corpus Christi mysticum in terms of the organic concomitance of head and body. Within such a merely physical or organic bodily unity which, as “natural,” is also necessary, each part or organ is in a necessary relation to the other parts, and it is entirely appropriate to speak of their physical unity as a concomitance, a term denoting little more than a factual association of parts within a given physical entity. While the abstract term may be used in such wise as not to bar the freedom of the association, neither does it connote it. Certainly, St. Thomas does not have in view the freedom of the nuptial union in One Flesh of Gen. 2:24 and Eph. 5:21-33, nor does he identify this One Flesh with the New Covenant instituted on the cross and on the altar, inseparably.
For reasons finally reducible to his uncritical commitment to a mono-personal human substance which cannot support the communication of idioms in Jesus the Christ, St. Thomas does not appear to recognize the union of Christ with the Church, as Head to Body, to be covenantal, i.e., to be a free and substantial nuptial union in “One Flesh.” That union is free, therefore an event, grounded not in a nominal and static “concomitance” of organic parts of a physical body, but instituted by the One Sacrifice, whereby the Spiritus Creator, whom the one and the same Son was sent to give, is poured out upon the New Creation: in this outpouring, all the fallen creation is “re-capitulated,” restored to its full free unity by the head, the source of the free unity of the substance in which he subsists. The institution of the New Covenant, the outpouring of the Spiritus Creator, cannot be other than substantial, for the One Flesh, the New Covenant, the primordial Image of the substantial Trinity, is the object of creation in Gen. 2, a creation that is in Christ precisely as its immanent head. “Concomitance” does not speak to this free reality, and therefore cannot affirm the Eucharistic communication of idioms, by which the Real Presence can only be that of Jesus the Lord, at once the High Priest and the Victim of the One Sacrifice. The concomitance of the nominally distinct and nominally conjoined head and body of the res et sacramentum can pose no obstacle to their separation.
It is then not difficult to understand that Thomist theologians such as Maurice de la Taille would restrict the immolation of the Christ to his death upon the cross, thereby reducing the Sacrifice of the Mass to a mere anamnesis of the death of Christ upon the cross whose distinction from that death is the distinction between the objective event of the One Sacrifice, and an “anamnesis” which in consequence can only be subjective.[272] This dehistoricization of the liturgy is inescapable once the Eucharistic communication of idioms is foregone as it must be when, with St. Thomas, the Personal unity of Jesus the Christ is taken to be divine, sensu negante, in the sense that, given his divinity, the Son cannot be a human person; his single Personal subsistence, contra the Symbol of Chalcedon, is in the Trinity.
St. Thomas’ Christological mistake is classic: he misread the Chalcedonian definition of the human consubstantiality of the Son as the Cappadocians had misread the Nicene definition of his consubstantiality with the Father: where both Councils taught that Jesus was “homoousios” viz., of the “same substance,” as the Father, St. Thomas, like the Cappadicians, understood “monoousios:” i.e., of the “one substance,” and thereby missed the meaning of the Personal homoousion of the Son: viz., that he is of the same substance as the Father, which affirmation is the doctrinal rejection of the monadic cosmological conception of the divine substance as that of a single Self, and its replacement by the Trinity of consubstantial Selves, of consubstantial Persons. In the same way, St. Thomas did not grasp that Chalcedon had rejected the cosmological anthropology which made of the human substance a single human self, thereby forcing a conversion from that monadology of man to the historical revelation of the communality of the human substance by way of the consubstantiality of the Son “with us,” which St. Thomas’ followers, having subscribed to his monadic anthropology, have rejected as a metaphysical impossibility.
The corollary of St. Thomas’ confusion on this point, and that of the Thomist tradition generally, is the inability to identify the single subsistence of Jesus the Christ as at once fully human and fully divine, and consequently as omnino simplex―for he would not otherwise be divine. It is for this reason that St. Thomas balked at the definition of our Lady as the Theotokos, which requires precisely that absolute simplicity, that utter identity of the One and the same Son in Jesus the Christ, the Son of the Father and of the Virgin.
Fortunately such Eucharistic vagaries as the cosmological Christologies support were vigorously rejected by the documents of Vatican II, notably Sacrosanctum Concilium and Presbyterorum Ordinis. Over the years following its promulgation in those documents, the Eucharistic doctrine taught at Vatican has frequently been reaffirmed by Paul VI, John Paul II and Benedict XVI. While dissidents may continue to dissent, “dissent is only dissent;” it is without liturgical significance and therefore without doctrinal significance; in consequence, it is of no theological interest. The Conciliar and post-Conciliar vindication of the ancient tradition that the bishop or priest ordained to celebrate the Mass offers the One Sacrifice in persona Christi has too often and too authoritatively been taught for that doctrine responsibly to be put in issue by theologians whether Catholic or otherwise. The communication of idioms forbids all division of the Real Presence of Jesus the High Priest as offering himself to the Father as the Victim of the One Sacrifice by which Jesus the High Priest institutes the New Covenant. The One Sacrifice is a single and utterly unique historical Event: the historical objectivity of its Eucharistic offering differs from that of its offering on the cross only modally, in the manner of offering, as was taught at Trent. In sum, The Event of the One Sacrifice, is identically the Event of the sacrificial death of Jesus the Christ on the cross. The One Sacrifice of the Mass is therefore in no sense a repetition of the death of Christ on the cross, nor can it be, for it is offered once and for all in the Person of the one High Priest.
The Eucharistic institution of the One Flesh of Christ and the Church is the foundation of the sacrament of matrimony, as it is of all the sacraments. Errors in Eucharistic theology, notably the failure to grasp the covenantal freedom of the Christ-Church union, will inevitably be reflected in the theology of marriage. The failure to grasp the free unity of the One Flesh of the New Covenant typifies the patristic theology; it is not surprising that St. Thomas should repeat this mistake in his theology of marriage as well.
For St. Thomas, as for Peter Lombard,[273] in marriage the woman is subject to, dependent upon, the man; he is not thus subject to her. The early medieval emphasis upon the mutual freedom of husband and wife in marriage, prompted by a largely pastoral reaction to the dualist “Manichaean” heresies of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, had little impact on theology, then or later.[274] St. Thomas does not understand the woman’s subjection to the man to be free, nor to be a complementary subjection of spouse to spouse, as St. Paul taught in I Cor. 7:4. Neither Peter Lombard nor St. Thomas have seen in the free relation of the woman to her husband an equal dignity; that free union would hardly be possible for as long as their “one flesh” is understood to be the organic union of head and body in which the parts of the body have a necessary relation to each other―a notion which also ignores the irreducibly distinct sacramental significance of masculine and feminine existence in ecclesia. Further, with respect to her nuptial union with her Lord in One Flesh, Peter Lombard and St. Thomas both understand the Church to be “body” only metaphorically, by an extrinsic denomination, viz., because of her intrinsic articulation, not by reason of the nuptial relation to her Head that Paul had stressed in I Cor. 11:3, Col. 1:15 and Eph. 5:23, and as had Augustine in a multitude of places, especially in Sermo 341, as we have seen.
In sum, the development which the endnotes of Covenantal Theology quoted at the outset of this study mistakenly assert to have occurred in St. Thomas’ thought between his Comment. in IV Libros Sententiarum and his Summa Theologiae did not in fact take place for, in the former work, St. Thomas already held the same position later set out in the Summa Theologiae, except that he does not thereafter repeat his early relegation of the Church to the Eucharistic res tantum, perhaps because his analytical method bears rather upon the historical Church than upon her anagogical fulfillment, which had been taken for granted by Peter Lombard:[275] the Lombard was there writing in the context of the patristic-Augustinian phenomenology, whose paradigm of sacramental realism did not easily conform to the new medieval paradigm of that same realism, particularly as later rationalized.
Basic ambiguities remain: many of them arise out of the difficulty in shifting from the phenomenological sacramental theology inherent in the patristic-Augustinian paradigm of sacramentum, res sacramenti to the medieval paradigm with its defensive conceptual and analytic distinctions between the res et sacramentum and the res tantum, with its consequent unintended impoverishment of the res et sacramentum, the ancient res gemina, the Augustinian Christus totus, the nuptial unity that is the New Covenant in his Blood.
As we have seen, under the urgency of defending the Real Presence, the presence of the bridal Church within in the Eucharistic res et sacramentum had been ignored by the defenders of the tradition simply because Berengarius had not attacked it; thereafter the Eucharistic union of Christ and his bridal Church was largely forgotten. Theology proceeded, ever more routinely, under the aegis of the post-Berengarian paradigm, the defense of transubstantiation under the aegis of the new paradigm of sacramentum tantum, res et sacramentum, res tantum, which invited, as has been seen, a departure from a familiar phenomenological theological stance to a poorly understood defense of that stance against the challenge posed by Berengarius’ binary disintegration of its free historicity. .
The consequent focus upon transubstantiation as productive simply of the Corpus Christi verum, without reference to the nuptial relation between the Corpus Christi verum and the Corpus Christi mysticum Christi, i.e., without adverting to the Real Presence as that of the risen second Adam, the High Priest of the One Sacrifice, the Head from whom the second Eve, the Corpus Christi mysticum, ineluctably proceeds, thus without adverting to the historicity, the sacrificial event-character of the Real Presence, contributed further to the theological dissociation of the irreducibly distinct but objectively―i.e., historically―inseparable elements of the duplex res sacramenti, the Eucharistic One Flesh, the infallible effect of the signing that is the sacramentum tantum.
We have seen that St. Thomas recognized their inseparability in asserting that the “Corpus Christi verum” is “figurativum” of the “Corpus Christi mysticum” in an efficacious signing whose infallible effect, the institution of the New Covenant, cannot be relegated simply to the res tantum of the Eucharist, for the medieval theology understood its res tantum to be defeasible, an effect ex opere operantis, in consequence of the fallenness of the communicant. The “figuration” by the Corpus Christi verum of the Corpus Christi mysticum can only be that of the High Priestly offering of the One Sacrifice, for the Church has no other cause than this efficacious signing by the Corpus Christi verum, at once the High Priest and the Victim of the One Sacrifice.
The theological confusion arising out of this theological concentration upon the “Corpus Christi verum” to the neglect of the “Corpus Christi mysticum” could not issue in their liturgical divorce, but surely it led to their theological and catechetical isolation from each other. The conservative reaction to this isolation of the Corpus Christi mysticum from the Corpus Christi verum threatened to become their theological identification, the collapse of the infallible effect of the Eucharistic signing, the res et sacramentum, into a jejune, dehistoricizing interpretation of the res tantum that anticipated the anti-sacramentalism of the Reform.
An examination of the texts of the patristic, Carolingian, and early medieval authors whose theology de Lubac has surveyed in Corpus mysticum supports the conclusion that while the interpretation of St. Thomas’ text in the quoted endnotes of Covenantal Theology is clearly erroneous, the position there taken, that the Eucharist does in fact have a double res et sacramentum, is warranted by the patristic, monastic, and early medieval witness to the Church’s Eucharistic faith and practice, and that consequently, insofar as that witness to the Church’s Eucharistic tradition is concerned, the reader is not misled by the cited error in the text. St. Thomas is praised in the Church before all else as the reliable mediator of that tradition;[276] it is hardly to be supposed that he would wittingly dehistoricize the Church by depriving it of historical significance as the res tantum sacramenti. In one sense, as designating the personal sanctification of the communicant, the res tantum is always a free effect, one that can be defeated by a sinful disposition in the communicant. In a fuller sense, the res tantum sacrameni is the final effect of the Eucharistic sacrifice, that in which the Mission of the one and the same Son terminates: that effect, the full Gift of the Spirit, is infallible and indefeasible: the fulfilled Kingdom of God.
St. Thomas well knew that it is not possible to understand the sinless historical Church as a reality defeasible by human sin, for it can only be an effect ex opere operato of the One Sacrifice, an effect indissociable from the Real Presence of the High Priest offering himself to the Father as the sacrificial Lamb of God, which Offering is the institution of the covenantal union of the Bridegroom with his bridal Church, in the One Flesh of the New Covenant. St. Thomas’ recognition that the Church is not the res tantum of the Eucharist may be regarded as the single advance of the Eucharistic theology of the Summa Theologiae over that of the Commentary on the Sentences, but even in the early Commentary on the Sentences, as already noted, it is more than likely that St. Thomas had in mind the patristic stress upon anagogical dimension of the historical Church, rather than in the Church as eschatological merely, thus as dehistoricized. He was more than familiar with Peter Lombard’s summary of the patristic tradition:
Hujus autem sacramenti gemina est res: una, scilicet, contenta et significata; altera significata et non contenta. Res contenta et significata est caro Christi, quam de Virgine traxit, et sanguis quem pro nobis fudit. Res autem significata et non contenta est unitas Ecclesiae in praedestinatis, vocatis, justificatis, et glorificatis.
The Lombard wrote this passage within the context of the patristic paradigm of sacramentum, res sacramenti, it is obviously in the context of the medieval paradigm that he assigned the Church to the res tantum sacramenti. In doing so, he did not intend to contradict what he had just written of the Church as within the res gemini of the Eucharist. His reference to the unity of the Church as eschatologically achieved is entirely consonant with the patristic tradition, which was so intent upon that final fulfillment as almost to seem to have forgotten the historicity of the Eucharistic One Flesh. We have seen de Lubac amply document that the patristic focus upon the anagogical Church never dissociates her from the historical realism of her sacramental worship.
The theological problem, at once metaphysical and hermeneutic, left unresolved by patristic, monastic and medieval theology, is posed by the covenantal, inter-personal freedom of this nuptially ordered unity, the One Flesh instituted on the cross and on the altar. This nuptial unity, the New Covenant, the New Creation, cannot be less than substantial: i.e., its free reality is at the ontological level of substance, for its standing as the New Covenant, the full Gift of the Spirit, requires no less. At the same time, this nuptial union, as covenantal, cannot but be intrinsically free, and therefore must be a community of persons, the New Adam, the New Eve, in One Flesh, in the New Covenant that is their subsistent love: distinct from each, yet constituted by their free relation to each other, possessing an authority over each of them analogous to that which they have over each other.
The cosmological rationality heretofore pervasive in theology has had no notion of, and no capacity for imagining, an intrinsically free, and freely intelligible substantial unity in history. The entirety of the pagan (Greek and Latin) metaphysical tradition has taken for granted, has never questioned, the intrinsic rational necessity of whatever is truly one in being: i.e., of substance as substance. The strategic departure from this monism was the Nicene definition of the homoousion of the Son with the Father, The cosmological baggage hindering the theological tradition prevented its acceptance of the parallel definition of the homoousios of Jesus “with us,” i.e., with those for whom as their head he died and whom as their head he redeemed. Even in the twelfth century we find Anselm understanding theology, as after him did the Victorines and, in the thirteenth century, St. Thomas, as a quest for the “necessary reasons” which he and they supposed to underlie the truth of being as such, and therefore thought to underlie the historically revealed free truths of the faith. St. Thomas’ recourse to and reliance upon the Aristotelian act-potency analysis of material substance is perhaps the final systematic expression of this theological postulate, native to the cosmological imagination common to all theologians between the second and the thirteenth centuries: thereafter the enormous influence of St. Thomas in theology has prevented any significant challenge to it down to the close of the twentieth century. While Thomism can no longer claim a normative role in theology, its influence can hardly be exaggerated.
The hermeneutical problem now posed by the Church’s Eucharistic worship is neatly summarized by de Lubac in the first pages of the Introduction of Corpus mysticum, where we have seen him observe that:
“To communicate in,” “to participate in, ”“to be consorts and companions” we assert here one last time, conform precisely to the complex meaning of the word “corpus.” These expressions also, in the end, designate not so much two successive object as two things which at the same time make only one. For the body of Christ that is the Church is not other than this body and this blood of the mystery) [277]
Supposing what is evident, that the “deux choses” in this passage refers to Christ and the Church, the Head and the Body who are the Bridegroom and the Bride; this is precisely the doctrine of Augustine, as we have seen. As also we have seen, it entails a reduction of the Eucharistic una caro, i.e., the Augustinian unitas corporis, the Christus totus of Sermo 341, to the category of “body;” Augustine had also spoken of the unitas corporis as una persona, an expression which avoids the fungibility implicit in “body” as corporeality, but is hardly compatible with the nuptial union of Christ and the Church which Augustine stresses in Sermo 341 and from which his reference in the same homily, to its unity as that of una persona is in some sense a retreat.
It is of course evident from the struggles of the Carolingians with the “three bodies” and with Amalarius’ “triforme corpus,” that “corpus” in view cannot be a category, for the unitas corporis is not abstract, but concretely historical, in that it transcends the division between the verum Corpus Christi and the Corpus Christi mysticum without melding them: i.e. without denying their Covenantal cause-effect relation and thus their distinction. Rather, the unitas corporis, the nuptial unity that Augustine named the Christus totus, while not dwelling upon the freedom of their nuptial unity in una caro, or even explicitly recognizing it as the New Covenant instituted by the One Sacrifice, does stress their irreducibility: the bridegroom is not the bride, the head is not the body, and those readings of Augustine that would have it so are at a loss to explain the intellectual energy lavished by the Fathers and the Carolingians upon the mystery that is the unitas corporis, the unity transcending all and comprehending all other effects of the Eucharistic signing.
We have seen that there is a kind of fastidious reluctance among the Latin fathers, found occasionally in de Lubac as well, to follow Augustine in his development, in Sermo 341, of the Pauline nuptial symbolism. One source of this reluctance is still manifest in the commentaries upon Ephesians by Peter Lombard and St. Thomas: viz., the notion of the wife’s unilateral subordination to her husband in the marital covenant and, as we have seen, the notion that marriage is the least of the sacraments, not simply because of Paul’s recommendation that on occasion the married couple abstain from sexual union for the sake of prayer, but because marriage is the most physical of the sacraments. Here an ancient dualist pessimism is quite clearly at work: Paul’s stress upon the mutual submission of the spouses to each other was exegetically evaded, as we have seen.
That pessimism is also at work, if less evidently, in the inability of Catholic theology to free itself from the metaphysical monadism of antiquity, with its dualistic standoff between the abstract unity of the absolutely transcendent divinity and the consequent radical disunity of all that is less than divine: this despite the revelation of the Trinity. The Trinity was soon reduced by rationalistic theological speculation to monadic standing―no notion of the inherent freedom of revealed truth could arise within this still-unconverted cosmological consciousness. This is notably the case with Neoplatonic analogy of being which, in the latter thirteenth century, St. Thomas adapted without noting its impact upon the doctrine of divine creation ex nihilo which, as “natural’ in the sense of ungraced, then ceased to be associated with the Father’s sending of the Son to give the Spiritus Creator.
Under the rigor of the Thomist dependence upon the analogy of being as posited by the Christian development of Neoplatonism, the Trinity became the Deus Unus, and the analogy of being thereby lost all theological interest: that interest depended upon the Judaeo-Christian understanding of the creation as intrinsically good because freely intelligible, attributes which a “natural” creation by the Deus Unus could not support. It could not be otherwise: the Creator God of Catholic theology can only be the God of the Covenant instituted by Jesus the Christ in obedience to his Mission from the Father to give the Holy Spirit. The Thomist Deus Unus, the divinity qua absolute, whose transcendence of creation is by definition his alienation from it, his incapacity to relate to it, is thereby irrelevant to the Catholic faith and to Catholic theology, and certainly is irrelevant to any hermeneutics of the Eucharist, which is to say, the hermeneutics of the good creation.
This is a hard saying: nonetheless, the only analogies pertinent to theology are the uncreated Personal analogies within the Trinity, and those created personal analogies within the nuptial one flesh whose free substantial unity images the free unity of the Trinity. Both require a free, therefore either a Trinitarian or a Trinity-imaging substance, which in either case can only be a free community, whether the Trinity, or its substantial image, the nuptial “one flesh,” instituted by the One Sacrifice. The need for this Trinitarian foundation of the analogy of being is verified by the Neoplatonists themselves, who limit the application of the analogy to the hylemorphic realm of Being. The One of Neoplatonism, utterly transcendent to Being, knows no analogue and can ground no analogy. The Christian Neoplatonists dropped the distinction between the Absolute One and Being, thus conceiving God as the Absolute Being, and rested their use of the analogy of being on the doctrine of a divine creation ex nihilo, wherein the Creator is the free source or cause of all created beings, whose intrinsic unity and intelligibility are a derivative of the divine Unity and Truth. This view of the good creation they uncritically assimilated to a free and positive relation between the divine Absolute and the created order without providing a metaphysics which would render it intelligible: this would have in any case been impossible: the Absolute, whether identified with the Christian Deus Unus or the Neoplatonic One, is an Absolute, incapable of relation.[278]
It is evident that creation, passive spectata, is intelligible only as the singular and unique terminus[279] of a unique creative act, viz., the Father’s sending of the Son to give the Spiritus Creator.[280] This created terminus of the creative Mission of the Son may be variously designated: viz., as the One Flesh, the Whole Christ, the substantial union of the Head and the Body, the New Creation, the primordial Good Creation., the New Covenant, the fulfilled Kingdom of God. However designated, it is evident that this terminus must be substantial for, as the plenary work of the Spiritus Creator, i.e., as creation in Christ, it is the inclusive unity of being. It entails the free association of all that is created with the Creator, Jesus the Christ, precisely as Head, as presaged, in the creation narrative of Gen. 2, by the first Adam’s naming of the animals, an exercise of headship crowned by his exultant naming of the Woman, “bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh,” taken from his side in the culmination of the good creation, that by which is it good and very good.
The terminus of the Mission of the Son must be primordially achieved, for it is indefeasible by sin. By that achievement, the Son is the head of all creation; his immanence in it as head is its creation for, sent to give the Spiritus Creator, by that Gift, that outpouring of the Spirit upon the second Eve whereby she is immaculately free to be his Bride, One Flesh with him, he is the source of the free, substantial and nuptial unity of the Good Creation prophesied in Gen. 2. With the refusal by the first Adam and first Eve of the achieved nuptial unity offered them by the second Adam, the primordially good creation fell into its historical subjection to disintegration and death: the second Adam, its immanent creator, its immanent head, was thus emptied of his primordial dignity and made flesh, imprisoned by the absence of freedom in the fallen world, yet obedient to his Mission to bestow the Spirit: now to be bestowed on all flesh. This he achieved by this institution of the free unity of the restored good creation, the One Flesh of his union with his bridal Church, the second Eve of the New Covenant. This historical fulfillment of his Mission is its terminus: in this fallen world it possesses the only objectivity possible in such a world, that which is sacramentally manifest in the Eucharistic offering of the One Sacrifice, in his Person, by his authority as Head: it cannot otherwise be offered.
Summarily, Original Sin of Adam and Eve, the rejection and the proffer of free nuptial unity in “one flesh,” issued in the fall into “flesh;” a condition of humanly unredeemable fragmentation and disintegration. The restoration of the nuptially-ordered free unity of the primordial Good Creation, achieved by the One Sacrifice offered by Jesus the Christ on the cross and the altar, is the institution of the New Covenant, the One Flesh of the Head and the Body, the second Adam and the second Eve.
It must be stressed that this nuptially-ordered substance, the One Flesh of the New Covenant, is the free immanence of Jesus the Christ, the one Son, the Head, in the Good Creation whose goodness is its free nuptial unity, given by the free and Eucharistic immanence within it of the Head, the second Adam. This is to say that the One Flesh is the effect of his Gift of the Spirit to the second Eve whereby she is free from all taint of sin and thereby able freely to assent to her nuptial union with him, thus freely to celebrate his free immanence, apart from which “Fiat” their covenantal union in the substantial One Flesh would not exist. The created universe subsists without remainder in and by Jesus’ historical immanence in the New Covenant (Jn. 1:1-3) This immanence of the one and the same Son in creation by his subsistence as its head in the human substance that crowns creation (Rom. 8:21), is the creation of the universe in Christ, as taught in Jn. 1:3 and Col. 1:15-17.
However, although the nuptial unity of the Una Caro of Christ and the Church has never been in question nor, at least by implication, has its substantial unity, whether this unity be designated “body” or “person,” it is true that at the same time, the intrinsic, covenantal order and freedom of that substantial unity has not been recognized in Catholic theology. Over and again its unity is explained as physical or mono-personal. Insofar as this human unity has been seen to be free and covenantally ordered, it has not been seen to be substantial, as witness de Lubac’s reliance upon “metaphor” in this context. The unity of the divine Trinitarian Substance was of course acknowledged as the One God, but the free order of the Father, Son and Spirit within the consequently free tri-Personal Community of the Trinity was taken to be an absolute mystery, either inscrutable to the point of irrelevance or deformed by submission to a monadic notion of monotheism, correlative to the human imaging of God by the human person understood as a monadic intellectual substance or supposit.
Before Karl Barth’s return to the subject in the middle of the twentieth century, the free unity of the Trinity had not been perceived, whether by Catholic or Protestant theology, to be the criterion by which the freedom inherent in the Imaging of God might be understood to be historically realized in the nuptial unity of the One Flesh.[281]
Some of this time-honored and time-worn failure to enter more fully into the truth of the Revelation of the nuptial order of our imaging of God, fulfilled primarily and primordially by the One Flesh of Christ and his bridal Church, may have been due to the influence of the traditional misogynism native to the cosmological imagination, expressed, e.g., in the assimilation of the person of the woman to that of her husband or her nearest male relative in the customary law of the Hindu, Greek, and Roman law; and in the metaphysics of Plato and Aristotle, as pointed out in Vol. I, Chapter Four.[282]
Underlying this ancient puzzlement over and consequent depreciation of the full human dignity of the sponsa,[283] and therefore of her covenantal freedom, is the uncritical acceptance by the patristic, monastic and medieval theological tradition of the unconverted cosmological rationality of pagan wisdom, which spontaneously and uncritically identifies the transcendental analogates of being―unity, goodness, truth, beauty―with rational necessity, i.e., with reducibility to intrinsically “necessary reasons.” It is evident that this reduction imposes abstract formal unity upon them: it is not accidental that the last pagan philosophy in the West reduced the transcendentals simply to the ineffable One, transcendent even to being. This reductionist dimension of Neoplatonism is still alive and influential in von Balthasar’s theological aesthetics, as well as in the undoubted influence of its exitus-reditus theme upon the Summa Theologiae.[284]
The liturgical quest for the nonhistorical haven where alone these necessary reasons would be found had driven the pagan soteriology to a flight from the irrationalities of history, a flight objectified by the Greek―i.e., pagan―philosophical tradition which, as Werner Jaeger has pointed out, was always religious. The distinction between theology and philosophy was a product of Christian speculation, not of the Greek genius. Prior to the Judaeo-Christian revelation, the notion of freedom in history, whether as unity, truth, goodness or beauty, had not arisen: the transcendentals of being, as subsumed to necessity, were thereby driven from any historical realization, whether by a Platonic flight to the ideal, or by the Aristotelian attempt to reduce material substance to its immanently necessary causes.
We have seen that even with the revelation of the free unity of the Trinity, whose very bond is Love, the metaphysical impact of this Christian revelation was not grasped. Rather, the tri-Personality of the Trinity was viewed as an exception, a mystery thus transcendent to history as to be irrelevant to it, which did not enter into the theology of the imaging of God prior to the twentieth century.[285] Now that its recovery by Karl Barth has been confirmed for Catholic theology by John Paul II,[286] it may be supposed that theologians, having been freed from the servitude to “necessary reasons” which has so long barred them from recognizing the immanent freedom of the Good Creation, and thus enabled to recognize that freedom also is one of the transcendentals of being, may continue to pursue those conversions of pagan reason to Catholicism which the Fathers long ago undertook, however uncritically.[287]
The “Christomonism,” to which allusion is made throughout this work, is of the first importance to that resistance to or, better, to that hesitation before the full implications of the nuptial One Flesh of the New Covenant which we have seen to be common to the Fathers, the monastic and medieval theologians, and even to be found here and there in the work of Henri de Lubac, who nonetheless has done more to stress the indispensability to the faith of nuptial symbolism than any other theologian of his century, with the paramount exception of John Paul II. The commonplace monist assimilation of the ecclesial Body to her Head, by way of a physical or Personal unity, is simply the consequence of a theological incomprehension of the revelation of the covenantal freedom of nuptial One Flesh of the Christ and the Church, to which the only alternative is some version of theological monism. At the same time, it must be remembered that the very early and persistent patristic references to the union of Christ and the Church as that of “one person” are rather assertions of the substantial unity of that nuptial union, than assertions of a monist absorption of the irreducible personal distinction between bride and bridegroom into a personal unity, an assimilation of the person of the Bride by the Person of the Bridegroom, still less an assimilation of the Person of the Christ by that of the Church.
Augustine’s “whole Christ” has the same sense: the Person in view is always the Head, who “names” the substance by his subsistence in it, which is at once free, and tri-personal. His exercise of headship, whether by the Father in the Trinity, by Jesus in his recapitulation of the fallen creation, or by the husband in sacramental marriage, is that of the Archē, the source, of the free unity of the substance, divine or human, in which he subsists, and whose freedom, by reason of the head’s subsistence in it, is that of an inter-personal perichoresis, a free community, whether Trinitarian, or its primary nuptial image, the One Flesh instituted by Jesus the Christ’s One Sacrifice, or its secondary nuptial image, the “one flesh” of sacramental marriage.
There is no question but that Our Lord, the Head, is a member of the substantial One Flesh; it is axiomatic that he is not a member of the Church. Here the analogy with the Trinity is strict, for the substantial unity of the One Flesh is the prime historical Image of the substantial unity that is the Trinity. When this is kept in view, the relations between Christ the Head, his bridal Body, and their union in One Flesh, which constitute the Good Creation redeemed by the One Sacrifice of its Head, are comprehensible as the created analogues of the relations that constitute the Father, the Son, and the Spirit as the Trinity. This is equally true of the “one flesh” of sacramental marriage, in which the marital bond is personal, the created analogue of the Holy Spirit.
The dehistoricizing, rationalist reduction of plurality to unity is as old as speculative thought: it is in fact an immanent necessity of fallen, i.e., sarkic, fleshly, rationality, avoidable only by an antecedently impossible―because free―graced intellectual conversion to the free unity of being as normed by the nuptial immanence of the risen Jesus the Christ in history. While there can be no question of the Catholic orthodoxy of the Fathers of the Church, nor of that of their monastic successors, nor of the theologians who have succeeded to their task of exploring the Eucharistically-mediated tradition of the New Covenant, the nuptial union of Christ and the Church, there is little evidence across the range of the patristic and the theological tradition of a real grasp of the covenantal freedom of the second Eve vis à vis the second Adam within their nuptial union in One Flesh. This has been the major sticking point in Catholic theology from first to last: the free intelligibility, i.e., the mystery, of the substantial good creation. The loss to Catholic spirituality by reason of the theological hesitation, at best, over the free substantial unity indispensable to our imaging of the Triune God is immeasurable.[288]
With the theological recognition of the Church’s nuptial freedom (its liturgical recognition is at one with the Church’s Eucharistic worship and the liturgical reading of her Scriptures; its dogmatic affirmation is explicit since the Council of Ephesus, its moral appropriation is concrete in the sacramental celebration of matrimony) it becomes necessary explicitly to recognize eo ipso the free and substantial unity of the One Flesh, which is identically the New Covenant, the New Creation, the fulfilled Image of God.
In short, it is necessary that Catholic theology abandon the monism of the philosophers, and accept the full Trinitarian import of the revelation of the Trinity in the terminus of the Mission of the Son to give the Spirit: the sacrificial institution of the One Flesh. In his giving of that Gift, the Son’s Mission is accomplished. The giving is identically his free immanence in fallen history for, by that supreme Gift to our Lady, gratia Christi, of the integrity and the immaculate freedom by which alone could she conceive her Lord in our fallen history, she, the primordial second Eve, become the Theotokos and he, the primordial second Adam, become flesh, her Son, the Jesus the Christ. Their proleptic union in One Flesh in the moment of her conception of her Lord is the covenantal product of the integral and unconditioned free obedience of the Head to Mission, and of the Body, the bridal Church who, proceeding from him, turns spontaneously to him, plena gratia, in the immaculate and unconditioned freedom of the “fiat mihi” in which he was conceived, to become freely immanent in history, to possess a Personally human historicity, to proceed to a Personal offering of himself in the One Sacrifice, instituting the Eucharistic immanence by which, as risen, he is the Lord of history, the King of Kings.
In order to take seriously the sacramental objectivity and historicity of the New Creation, the Catholic theologian requires a metaphysics that is liturgically normed and is thus a valid expression of the Catholic fides quaerens intellectum. This methodological requirement simply eliminates from theological consideration the commonly postulated monadism of substance inherited from the Greeks. The objectivity of substance as sacramental, as Eucharistically objective in fallen history (which has no other objective unity), must be free, and to be free it must be nuptially ordered in an imaging of the Trinity utterly dependent upon the Eucharistic offering of the One Sacrifice, the institution in sacramento of the New Covenant, the New Creation.
This is to say that created substance, created in the image of God, cannot but be nuptially ordered: only that free order provides the free substantial unity which can freely image the Trinity. The Trinity cannot otherwise be imaged, for all imaging of the Trinity is participation in the Church’s liturgical worship which, as worship, cannot but be free, which is to say, communal, finally tri-personal, therefore nuptial. No monadic substance can be free: by definition it is locked into its own immanence.
It is evident that the prevalent monadic notion of substance prevents a theological recognition of the meaning of nuptiality. We have seen that the substantial unity of the One Flesh was taken for granted by the patristic, monastic and theological tradition from the outset, but was understood, qua substantial, to be necessarily monadic: The regnant cosmological consciousness was unable to imagine the unity of being as free. Thus is explained the usual patristic recourse to the notions of the organic or somatic unity of ‘head’ and “body” provided by I Cor. 12 and Roman 12:4, despite their incongruity, rather than to the nuptial unity of head and body set out in I Cor. 7 & 11, and Eph. 5:21-33. Similarly, the human imaging of God, as personal, was understood to be monadic, to be mono-personal rather nuptial: the exegesis of Gen 1:27 and 2:24 was controlled by the uncritical acceptance of this monadism, which entailed a mono-personal imaging of a Tri-Personal God, with the rationally necessary dehistoricization of that imaging and, by implication, of the Church and therefore of the worshiper.
Hence the popularity of the supposition that the human soul is always feminine before the risen Christ, and thus in immediate union with him, a union that needs no mediation by the Church, since each soul is then understood as a Church in miniature, in immediate bridal union with her Lord. It is in this unfortunate context that nuptial symbolism and imagery found its major devotional expression. The free spontaneity intrinsic to this symbolism was rarely applied to Mary as the second Eve, although that title was early given her. Even the nuptiality of her conception of her Son, the supreme expression of her “Fiat mihi,” has caused much theological embarrassment: cf. Vol. I, Chapter Two, note 92.
Although the nuptial unity of the New Covenant is simply undeniable, for its One Flesh is the res et sacramentum (the res sacramenti, in the older usage) of the offering of the One Sacrifice, and Paul’s identification of the New Covenant with the New Creation, Eucharistically represented and sacramentally objective in history, is unquestioned in the theological tradition, nonetheless the indispensable freedom of this nuptial relation, this union in One Flesh,, this substantial unity, was never clearly recognized, although its identity with the New Covenant was as manifest then as now.
Earlier in this work, the monist consequences of this failure have been pointed out, as well as their single remedy: the recognition of the Eucharistic One Flesh as the prime analogate of being as historical and therefore as free (here history is understood in its sacramental objectivity, which is identically the freely appropriated history of salvation), thus the prime Event by which history receives its free salvific order were indicated.[289]. Here it is rather the hermeneutical consequences of this Eucharistic ordering of reality that concern us, for these are generally ignored.
Language, as public per se, must be committed to the public objectivity of being. This commitment must underlie the community of discourse if it is to be free, i.e., if it is to be the ecclesial, historical, liturgically sustained fides quaerens intellectum whose historical object is the free unity and truth of the historical revelation of the Trinity. This revelation is actual in history only by its Eucharistic representation, which is to say, by its ecclesial mediation. We have seen that the substantial objectivity, the factual unity, truth and goodness of being of the creation that is in Christ, can only be sacramentally sustained. The quest of the physical sciences for empirical objectivity has been shown to be impossible, not because the physical universe is irrationally constituted, but because the human mind is incapable of framing an intrinsically coherent rationale, in the sense of establishing the necessary reasons underlying an object of thought, at any serious level. The alternative resort to an intuited nonhistorical objectivity amounts to joining the pagan flight from history.[290] The totalitarian consequences of these rationalist dehistoricizations of the human community devastated the twentieth century, and bid fair to devastate the twenty-first.
At the same time, the sacramentality of historical objectivity poses an evident problem: we live and die by the pragmatic objectivity of sticks and stones, the denial of whose objectivity is fatal. However fallen the world may be, we inhabit it and cannot ignore its empirical impact. The assertion of a sacramentally-grounded hermeneutic can be heard by the practical ear as an invitation to phantasize, to avoid encounter with objective reality. Yet the facts are quite otherwise. Any concrete rejection of the transempirical or metaphysical objectivity of those sticks and stones in favor of an empirical objectivity can only proceed to their analytical disintegration, for in history they have no ascertainable empirical unity, thus no empirical objectivity. There remains only a pragmatic assignment of extrinsic value or disvalue to such objects, a finally utilitarian determination, denying them any intrinsic significance or value.
No free human society can long survive a utilitarian devaluation of its free unity: this would be too obvious to merit remark were not the freedom of the moral consensus of this nation daily diminished by legal decisions of precisely that import. The Supreme Court’s recent imposition of a utilitarian interpretation of eminent domain is a mere flea-bite when measured against the Court’s nullification a dozen years ago of the right of the citizens of Colorado to approve a referendum denying special standing to homosexuals, and far worse, the Court’s consistent absolutizing for over more than forty years of the right of a woman to kill her unborn child, even at the moment of its birth.
The political freedom indispensable to a moral society has given way to political correctness, a transformation accompanied, assisted and under-written by a perversion of language so general as to have invaded the liturgical books of Anglophone Catholics: their sacramental worship in the Church has been subordinated to a hermeneutic so absurd as to defeat discussion, for it is not intended to communicate truth, but to impose a dissent to the liturgical tradition and therefore to the tradition tout court. Moral theologians particularly have delighted in the new idiom; it confirms the political correctness of the capital sins whose radical vice is their contempt for the nuptial symbolism by which the good creation is ordered, and is good, because it is free. As de Lubac has pointed out, this free nuptial order, the covenantal fidelity of a free people, is the single alternative to nihilism.
These poised alternatives are those which, in the Old Testament and the Newm, are designated “spirit” (pneuma) on the one hand, and “flesh” (sarx) on the other. They set the perennial choice between life and death, as taught to the Jews by the Deuteronomist, and to Christians by Apostles and the Evangelists, themselves taught by Jesus the Christ.
The “flesh,” “sarx” in the Greek of the New Testament, statically conceived is the fallen human condition: that by which we are in immediate and unfree solidarity with the fallen first Adam and first Eve. By this solidarity with the fall there is in each of us a continuing physical disintegration which leads to death, and a constant temptation (concupiscence) to turn away from the light that is the risen Christ, and so to do the deeds which emerge from our inner darkness. This situation is humanly irredeemable, for it transcends us: there is no unfallen moment, place or object in the fallen universe. Dynamically conceived, ”sarx” is the process of universal and continuing disintegration of all things created, the return to the dust from which we were made. This determination to dynamic disunity, this innate aversion to the Light, is the product of the original sin of our first parents in their refusal of the nuptial unity offered them. In the fallen Adam, this was his refusal of the headship which alone is the source of the free unity not only of himself and his fallen bride, but of the entire creation, as we read in Romans 8.
The “spirit,” “pneuma” in the Greek of the New Testament, is that by which we are in solidarity with the free unity, the One Flesh (mia sarx), of the second Adam and the second Eve. Unlike our solidarity with the “flesh” of the fallen Adam and Eve, this solidarity in Christ, who as risen is a “life giving Spirit,” is free. Further, it is ecclesial, mediated by the Eucharistic worship of the Church. The offering in the Person of Christ of his One Sacrifice institutes the “One Flesh” of the New Covenant, the restoration to the “flesh” of the fallen world, of its primordial nuptial unity, lost by the sin of the first Adam and Eve. Thus, communion in this One Sacrifice is communion in the risen life, the life eternal, of the risen Christ, the Head who is the source, through the Church, the second Eve, of the One Flesh, the free unity which he bestows upon the humanity redeemed by his Headship over it and his subsistence, as its head, in its free substantial unity. It is thus that he is consubstantial with each of us, and each of us with him, whereby we each, in sacramento, possess the fullness of the humanity whose source he is. The Eucharist, as Ignatius Martyr taught, is the “medicine of immortality,” “the remedy that we should not die.”
We live out our fallen existence in the overlapping intersection of the realms of the “flesh” and the “spirit.” These are the “two cities” of St. Augustine’s theology of history, the product of “two loves.” For as long as we live, we are drawn by the Father to the Light who is Christ. This universally distributed grace, the “trahi a Deo” of Augustine and later of St. Thomas, the absolute ontological dependence upon him by which we are oriented and drawn to the City of God, i.e., to eternal life, is simply our creation in Christ, sent by the Father to give us that Spirit by which we are freed from the determinism of the “flesh,” and thus enabled to return to the Father, to exist “in Christ our Lord,” in ecclesia, where alone he may be found. The consciousness that is responsive to a conversion to this existence in Christ is simply joy; it is veiled, often heavily, by the fallenness of our world, but it is defeasible, as we learn too often but not too well, by sin alone, by the saddening of the Holy Spirit who is within us unless expelled by personal sin.
At the same time, throughout our lives, we are drawn, by our solidarity with the fallen first Adam and Eve, which is to say by our “flesh,” our drive to destruction, to the “City of Man,” best described as the programmatic establishment of our fallenness as criteriological, as normal, from which stance all personal exercise of free responsibility is aberrant, in fact criminal. This is most vividly illustrated by that consciousness which is induced by life in any unfree society, any society directed to and intent upon what C. S. Lewis has well named “the abolition of man.”[291] The consciousness proper to such a life is simply despair conjoined to terror, even horror, as in the protagonist of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. At best, such a consciousness, that of the “unhappy self,” seeks distraction: the “bread and circuses” of the pagan culture. More profoundly, it seeks that ultimate surcease, annihilation, absorption into the Void, into Nada. This is the radical insight of paganism, worked out most clearly in Buddhism, as de Lubac has shown.[292]
The hermeneutic or systematically coherent interpretation of theological language rests upon the postulated unity of substantial being. It is possible to regard this postulate as simply an immanent necessity of thought, in the sense that rationality as such requires, a priori, the unity of being and of truth. As has been sufficiently shown, the rationalist quaerens for objective truth under this postulate is always a flight from history, inasmuch as history in fact possesses no inherent or intrinsically intelligible unity. This also has been sufficiently pointed out, generally by a survey of Mediterranean philosophy from the Pythagoreans and Eleatics down to Plato and Aristotle, but more particularly by reference to Kurt Gödel’s famous incompleteness theorems. Published over eighty years ago, they established the futility of the quest, typified by the Enlightenment philosophes, for progress toward a universe of unsullied rationality. However, because Catholic theology operates under the free postulate of the free unity of being and of truth, viz., the institution of the One Flesh by the One Sacrifice, we need not linger with the deterministic alternatives to that free a priori.
The fifth and sixth chapters of Volume II of this work were devoted to the reconstitution of Thomist and Augustinian metaphysics upon the free prime analogate of being and of truth that is the Eucharistic institution of the One Flesh. Each of these methods of theological metaphysics, under the aegis of the Eucharistic prime analogate, presuppose the free intelligibility of substantial reality. This presupposition is analytically articulated in Thomism, and the corresponding metaphysics must consist in the exploitation of the act-potency composition of predicate and subject of that free articulation. In the most general terms, the Eucharistic application of the hermeneutic consists in the assertion of the literal truth of the Words of Institution: i.e., it understands the liturgical affirmation, “This is my body,” This is my blood” to be literally true as an assertion of the metaphysical identity of the consecrated species with the body and blood of the One Sacrifice. This conversion of Thomism to free historicity intends to offer the theological hermeneutic corresponding to this liturgical literalism
We may find in St. Ambrose the patristic authority for its use. While St. Ambrose: did not develop its metaphysical implications, we would be quite remiss in supposing his literalism to be lacking in sophistication. His familiarity with the Philo, with the Greek and Latin Fathers, and his deep interest in the liturgical tradition, manifest in the De sacramentis and the De mysteriis, bars any simplistic reading of his work. Ambrose’s literalism came into its own in the centuries following Berengarius, whose deformation of the Augustinian dialectical hermeneutic made that tradition difficult to defend, much less exploit, because its phenomenological idiom played into the hands of Berengarius’ misuse of “dialectic” to dehistorize sacramental signing by transforming its efficacy into a sola fide subjectivism.
Nonetheless, the Augustinian theological tradition, the conversion of the Platonic hylemorphic phenomenology to the free historicity of the Catholic tradition by conversion to the central affirmation of the Lordship of Jesus the Christ, is integral with the Catholic quaerens intellectum, the faith’s permanent quest for an ever more profound grasp of the Mysterium fidei, whose concrete historicity is its Eucharistic representation.
De Lubac, whose familiarity with the Latin patristic tradition cannot be challenged, found in Augustine the major theological influence upon that tradition for, in fact, the Augustinian contribution to Western theology is simply immeasurable. However, recent liturgical and subdoctrinal theological aberrations have placed the interpretation of Augustine’s Eucharistic language so in issue that its actual meaning must be set out and defended at some length. As has been noted heretofore, Augustine lived and wrote in an age in which no serious Eucharistic heresy had arisen.[293] The present commentary thus presupposes, as implicit in Catholic doctrine, the identity of the Christus totus of St. Augustine’s Sermo 341 with the following expressions of the free unity of the One Flesh of the New Covenant, instituted on the cross, and consequently presupposes their identity with each other:
(1) the One Flesh instituted by the Son’s sacrificial Imaging of the Father on the cross and on the altar, and the Son’s becoming, by his One Sacrifice, the Head from whom the Glory that is his bridal Church proceeds, as from her Head and Bridegroom, and thus in nuptial union with him, in One Flesh: Jn. 19:34; Eph. 5:21ff.
(2) the One Flesh of the New Covenant, instituted on the cross and the altar; the linkage, in Jn. 19:34, of the cross to the Eucharistic sacrifice, links it thereby to the “New and everlasting Covenant” of the Eucharistic Words of Institution.
(3) the One Flesh of the second Adam and second Eve; Augustine is careful to identify the Head and the Body as the Bridegroom and the Bride, who are presented as in Jn. 19:34 and Eph. 5: 31 as the fulfillment of the prophecy of Gen 2:24.
(4) the One Flesh that is the Eucharistic duplex res sacramenti, the res gemina, the res et sacramentum: the effect, given ex opere operato, of the preiestly offering in persona Christi of the Eucharistic Sacrifice, of the Blood of the Covenant.[294] Again, this is the doctrine of Jn. 19:34 and Eph. 5:31.
These identities, viz., that of Jesus, the High Priest and the Victim of the One Sacrifice, as the Bridegroom vis à vis the Church; and that of Jesus as the Head vis à vis the ecclesial Body that is his glory, and his identity as the High Priest and the Victim of the One Sacrifice, instituting the New Covenant by the blood of his One Sacrifice, are indisputable in the Catholic tradition, as is the identity of Jesus’ sacrificial institution of the One Flesh with his institution of the New Covenant.
The procession of the Body from the Head who is the Christ, at once the actualization and the supreme effect of his Headship―his offering himself as the One Sacrifice―and her free union with him, is identically his institution of the New Covenant, the irrevocable nuptially-ordered Head-Body relation of the bridal Church with her Lord. The Son images the Father, his Head, in his offering of the One Sacrifice on the altar and on the cross, in which offering he is the Head, the Creator and source of the free unity of all of which he is Head, viz., of the Church and thereby of the redeemed creation. His sacrificial institution of the mia sarx, the One Flesh of New Covenant through the One Sacrifice, is precisely the restoration to creation, in sacramento, of that free unity lost by the sin of the first Adam and Eve, whose sin was the refusal of the free nuptial unity (no alternative free unity is conceivable) offered them by the primordial Christus integer.
In freely affirming this exclusive and irrevocable nuptial bond. the first Adam and first Eve would have been, respectively, head and body in one flesh, imaging the One Flesh, the primordial Christus totus, and therefore would be themselves the primordial mediators (“in the Beginning”) of their own freely appropriated, nuptially ordered unity to all the Good Creation―a creation that would be good by their free acceptance of the gift of its goodness, its free nuptial unity―for that unity can only be freely received: it cannot be imposed.
Their primordial refusal of that offer, and the consequent primordial failure of that mediation of free unity, was the fall of the Good Creation into the necessary disintegration characterizing fallen history universally, in all its dimensions. Thereupon the immanence of the Christus totus in the primordially unfallen creation becomes fallen-historical, that of “flesh.” This is the meaning of Jn. 1:14: Jesus the Word’s “becoming flesh” is his entry into fallenness, his kenōsis. This is the necessary preliminary to his becoming the Head of all creation through his triumph over “flesh” and the death that “flesh” connotes. It is effective in his sacrificial institution of the One Flesh of the New Covenant, the recapitulation by which “all things are made new,” restored to the free unity of the Good Creation.
Thus it is that by Jesus the Lord’s sacrificial death on the cross and on the altar, the prime Event of the One Sacrifice, Eucharistically represented and historically immanent to the end of time, that as the new Adam, the new Head, he recapitulates all things, restoring that free unity of which fallen humanity is deprived by its primordial lapse into the necessary disunity of sarx, precisely as sarx. This restoration is precisely Jesus’ sacrificial institution of the mia sarx, the Una Caro, the One Flesh, of the New Covenant, his restoration of the fallen creation in “the beginning:” the “Behold, I make all things new” that is the subject of the Church’s Eucharistic thanksgiving and celebration, her sustenance throughout fallen history by her historically immanent Head, her Eucharistic Lord.
This Eucharistic restoration of fallen history is sacramental: i.e., it is objectively historical, factual but not empirical. Further, because it is historical, it is neither abstract nor ideal. It is concretely and irrevocably given, permanently objective in history, but it is not imposed. That by which it is redemptive and restorative is the work of the Head, is never coercive; rather, it is the office of the Head to liberate that of which he is the head, not to coerce it by the imposition of an extrinsic unity upon a passive object.
Thus it is that the restoration achieved by the One Sacrifice can only be sacramental: only thus can it be free in a fallen world. The restoration of the integrity of creation must be freely appropriated; it is conditioned upon free personal entry, by baptism, into the sacramental worship of the bridal Church.[295] She is One Flesh with her Lord; by his One Sacrifice, we are each free personally to enter into the moral freedom of the One Flesh of her union with her Lord and so are capable of entering ever more profoundly into that community, the pleroma that is her union with him, the holy society by which alone may we belong to God, share his joy, and forever be at peace. This personal entry into the Church is eo ipso entry into covenantal fidelity, the personal undertaking of the nuptially-ordered responsibility that is the love at once of God and neighbor. This exercise of personal responsibility is for each of us a participation in Jesus the Christ’s One Sacrifice, a participation that is historical precisely because it is liturgical, a worship in truth, a personal sharing of his cross.
It has been earlier observed that Modernity, in the sense of the programmatic application of deracinated or autonomous rationality to the encountered world, amounts to the establishment, as though normative for culture as such, of what Paul, writing out of the Old Testament tradition, has named “sarx,” or flesh.[296]
What a sarkic mentality may be is discoverable only by a quaerens intellectum which relies solely upon the revelation given us in Christ. The fall into “flesh” is the mystery of iniquity; as mystery, it is ex nihilo, without an antecedently intelligible cause. The search for such an explanation can produce only dualistic answers; these finally must deny the freedom of Adam’s sin. We must look instead to the redemption worked by Jesus the Christ to discover the evil from which that recapitulation has delivered us. In brief, our redemption is the restoration of primordial free unity to the world by the sacrificial institution of the One Flesh, the New Covenant. This restoration of the freedom lost by original sin is of course in sacramento for it must be freely, personally appropriated in a decision free of subjection to the unfreedom, the “flesh,” of our fallen humanity. Only baptism into the freedom of the One Flesh permits the personal exercise of this freedom, and hence the personal appropriation of the salvation given us in Christ.
The restoration of our free unity is concretely the institution of the New Covenant, the One Flesh. Therefore we must suppose that the freedom and unity lost by the fall is that which was restored by the institution, in the One Sacrifice, of the mia sarx, the One Flesh: i.e., nuptially-qualified freedom, the ‘freedom-for’ by which we at once constitute a free society and enter into its nuptial imaging of the source of all free society, the Trinity.
Thus, the sarkic mentality is that which spontaneously confirms our fallenness as the context of thought as such, and so submits truth to the immanent necessity that specifies our fallenness, discovering thereby that the rational necessity it imposes on reality is enlistment in a culture whose notion of progress, of the quest for salvation, forces an ever further logical fragmentation of reality, and an ever-further flight from the chaos thus revealed.
This “autonomous” rationality always entails subscription to the impersonal determinism which entails the disintegration of all that was human into the dust of death. This absolutizing of rational necessity is simply Modernity’s rediscovery of its a priori enlistment in the pagan anti-historical soteriology, the flight from history which rests upon, and gives liturgical expression to, a radical historical pessimism, whose remedy for the rationally necessary deterministic fragmentation process inherent in sarkic intellectuality is a voluntarist imposition of a coerced order, a utopianism, upon a supposed intrinsically unredeemable disorder.
This sarkic remedy for the sarkic angst: the dread of freedom as disorder amounts to the arbitrary preference of a cage to a jungle: neither is a human habitat, but together they constitute the only available alternatives under sarkic auspices. From that point d’appuis, one must choose either passively to accept the imposition of an extrinsic unity upon an otherwise atomized and chaotic humanity, or to assert one’s personal autonomy over against the coercion seen to underly any given social order. The tension between them is stasis, the classic Greek label for permanent standoff between the irresponsible authoritarian monism of the ruler, and the spontaneous rejection of coercion and thus of unity by the populace which he must subdue in order to rule. Post-modernity has capped Modernity in this respect only by indicting as oppressive, as finally politically rather than rationally justified, the various ideologies by which Modernity would warrant any given version of a coerced social order. Postmodernity refuses to recognize the disinterested moral purity of ideological salvations. Its despair of history is thereby the more explicit, but not for that the more radical: despair knows no comparative.
The Reformation rediscovered this ancient despair of history in rejecting sacramental realism and thereby the immanence of God in history. History as incapable of mediating the grace of the risen Christ became “totally corrupt,” As soon as the impossibility of the efficacious historical mediation of the grace of Christ became an article of faith, concretely realized in the rejection of the Sacrifice of the Mass, history could only be deemed the realm of a total opacity to the light of Christ: its corollary was total condemnation of the historicity of humanity as “works,” any assertion of whose salvific value could not but be blasphemous. Consequently the rejection of the Sacrifice of the Mass implied the dehistoricization of the Christian faith: it had become incapable of authentic utterance in history. Thereupon justification could be by faith alone, devoid of historical expression: any recognition of the authenticity of the historical tradition of Catholicism, whether liturgical, doctrinal or moral, could only sully faith with the abomination of “works.” Justification sola fide, whether sola scriptura or sola gratia or both, became the linch-pin of Protestantism, the “articulum stantis et cadentis ecclesiae;” so it remains. It underlies the Enlightenment historicism: history is intrinsically meaningless in such wise that no person, no institution, can claim free historical significance: submission to the “bar of reason” reveals such assertions to be nonsense. Rousseau and Voltaire were its prophets, Jeremy Bentham became its pundit.
The impact of the Reform upon the public consciousness, particularly in the English-speaking world, has been enormous, upon Catholics as well as Protestants. The object of the Catholic faith is increasingly regarded even in professedly Catholic circles as nonhistorical, merely private, its expression entirely relativized by its ‘historical conditioning,’ i.e., by its submission to sarkic rationality. Upon examination this reduces the Catholic faith to simple subjectivity, without public content, lacking “cash value.”[297] At best, any expression of the Christian faith, thus Protestantized, becomes a matter de gustibus, submitted to social approval. The Church’s insistence upon the public, i.e., liturgical expression of her faith that Jesus is the Lord is then found obnoxious to the sarkic mentality that specifies Modernity, and political correctness supersedes morality..
We can here note but not long dwell upon the accommodation to this mentality exhibited by such liturgical renewal programs as proposed by Cardinal Mahony wherein a dwindling confidence in sacramental efficacy finds consolation in a politicized, community-building view of sacramental efficacy as merely pragmatic, which is to say, as political―and utopian insofar as it would transcend our fallenness. [298] This eliminates participation in the Catholic tradition, in the Eucharistic worship by which the Church exists.[299] This banalization of sacramental worship by way of the devices of social manipulation is effectively eroding from the thus enlightenned Catholic consciousness any awareness of the supernatural, ex opere operato efficacy of the sacraments, particularly of the Eucharist, upon which “liturgical renewal” is of course particularly focused. “Liturgical renewal” under this aegis is not a pretty sight.[300] The liturgical revisionism instituted over the course of more than forty years by the International Commission on English in the Liturgy (I.C.E.L.) has now been snubbed by the Vatican, but the memory lingers: the impact of that travesty will be felt for decades hence [301] and not least in Los Angeles and Chicago.[302]
The sarkic hermeneutic, viz., the submission of the truth of faith to the criterion of analytic necessity, has long been normative in professedly Catholic academic circles, to the point of its identification with intellectual honesty[303]. Resting upon the relativization of the past, such scholarship can have no future; it can only reinforce the decline in Catholic morale whose currency in the contemporary Church needs no further illustration than its educational institutions insist upon providing.
The conversion from cosmological pessimism typified by the Reform to the historical optimism that is at the heart of the Catholic faith in Jesus’ Lordship of history requires a public expression in the language we use in our daily lives: the denotation of our language must be recognized as sacramental if the faith is to flourish, for the alternative acceptance of a commonplace secular denotation of all public expression of the truth is our cooptation by Modernity and its despairing sequelae.[304]
Given that the sarkic mentality, explicit in Modernity and post-Modern-ity, is finally only a rationalization of a profound despair of any immanence of unity or truth in sarkic history, it must follow that the remedy for this despair must be the free affirmation of the free immanence of the free truth in history, an affirmation entirely dependent upon a presence of historical truth that is by definition irreducible to necessity, not submitted to the dynamic of analytic fragmentation and dissolution of historical truth that marks autonomous, i.e., sarkic, reason. Transcending all rational necessity, the truth of the free immanence of Truth in history can only be known by Revelation. Further, it must be received freely, which is to say, as a gift freely given: in short, as grace. There is no other access to freedom than its free appropriation, its reception as a gift ex nihilo. The gift is universally given: it amounts to the trahi a Deo, as we have seen: it is the permanent concrete possibility of conversion to the Truth that is historically concrete in the New Covenant instituted by the One Sacrifice of Jesus the Christ, the ancient beauty who is forever new, and forever drawing us to God.
This optimistic confidence in the reality of free truth in history first finds expression in the graced acceptance of its historical revelation in the two millennia of the Old Covenant history, when Yaweh’s progressive revelation of his historical immanence, in the Law, in the prophets, in the historical books and in the Wisdom literature, wherein the continuing witness of Israel to the purely gratuitous Presence of the Lord of the Covenant to his people is recorded. This salvific, Covenantal Presence of the Lord of history to his chosen people was revealed in a free gift of historical truth, freely to be received and affirmed by a free assent whose personal character became increasingly apparent over the twenty centuries between Abraham’s encounter with the Lord and the final revelation of Jesus as himself the Ego eimi.[305]
This Catholic optimism must dismiss at the outset, as incompatible with the sacramental realism of the Catholic tradition, all attempts to substitute, for the concretely historical nuptial unity in sacramento of One Flesh of Christ and the Church, a nonhistorical “dialectical” identity of the ecclesial body with the crucified body of Christ.[306] This “dialectic” entered theology with Calvin’s Institutes; its classic expression is in Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics.[307] Karl Rahner’s “dialectical analogy” and John Zizioulas’ elaboration of the Christ-Church dialectic in the “corporate Christ” provide contemporary analogues.
The dialectical identity thus asserted rests upon no historical event as its ground and cause, and in consequence can have no historical actuality; it is entirely abstract, an ens rationis simply. Taken seriously, this “dialectical” identity is a rejection of the sacramental realism of Catholic worship in the sense of an efficaciously significant Event-nexus, an anagogue, between our fallen historicity and its eschatological fulfillment. Apart from this sacramental linkage of history to eschaton, the reality of the supposed dialectical identity of Christ and the Church, and consequently its meaning, is entirely abstract, simply eschatological, lacking historical referent and doctrinal content to the point that the assertion of the existence of such an identity is meaningless, nonsensical. As radically nonhistorical, a mere flatus vocis, it cannot account for our historical imaging of God, with the consequence that the resolution it intends becomes merely ideal and thereby subjective, whereas within Catholicism the imaging of God is the liturgically-concrete, covenantal fidelity of sacramental worship and praxis.[308] Further, the Church, when understood to be in a “dialectical” union with the risen Christ, can within that union have no sacramental significance, and consequently can sign no discernible eschatological reality, for the Eucharistic presence of the Christ has become impossible insofar as “dialectical.” This sacrificial Presence, the terminus ad quem of transubstantiation, the Corpus Christi verum of the patristic tradition is, within that tradition, and for St. Thomas as well,[309] the efficacious sign of the Church, the Corpus Christi mysticum. Together, inseparable in their One Flesh, they are the res gemina of the res sacramenti, the veritas sacramenti of the older patristic idiom, and the res et sacramentum in the early medieval paradigm of the Eucharistic signing.
Thus the One Sacrifice of Christ as Eucharistically offered is the cause of the Church: she has no other, nor is his Presence conceivable apart from his covenantal union with his bridal Church for, as the entire patristic tradition testifies, she proceeds from his side as from the side of the “sleeping:” second Adam, i.e., from “the Beginning.” This union is nuptial: the Pauline and the Augustinian testimony to the nuptiality of the union of Christ and the Church as Bridegroom and Bride is incontestable and within the patristic tradition was never contested. We have seen that when this union, the One Flesh of the New Covenant―an Event which, whether as the Eucharistic res sacramenti or as its res et sacramentum, is the infallible consequence of the Eucharistic sacrifice―is forgotten, or ignored, or put in question, or denied, as by a proposed “dialectical” and nonhistorical unity of Christ and the Church, the reality of the res gemina is immediately contested and thereby the infallible efficacy of the Eucharistic signing.
The consequence is a Church that has been radically dehistoricized along with her Lord, for under this dialectical conceptuality both become apophatic simply, therefore indiscussible. In sum, the “dialectic” in view points to mutually exclusive realities whose postulated eschatological unity lacks all historical ground and so can have no theological significance for it is incapable of authentic dogmatic statement. Calvinism accepts from Nominalism the unique power of the Deus omnipotens as Potentia absoluta to effect what is impossible to fallen man in a totally corrupt history, the bridging of the void placed by the fall between God and man. The bridge however does not exist in history: it is inaccessible by definition.
To accept this “dialectic” nonetheless is to affirm the anti-sacramental-ism of Calvin’s version of the Reform: the Kingdom of God, the fulfilled New Covenant, is there understood to transcend history as the pagan philosophies have always understood the divine transcendence: viz., as the absolute alienation of the divine from history. It is evident that the substitution of a “dialectic” unity of Christ and the Church for the sacramental historicity of their Eucharistically objective union in “One Flesh” can claim Augustine as its authority only by a selective misreading of, e.g., Sermo 341 which ignores its emphasis upon the nuptial meaning of the head-body union of Christ and the Church is ignored. This same misreading of Augustine grounds Cardinal Mahony’s dehistoricizing version of liturgical renewal.[310] Its dismissal of the central Event of the priestly offering in persona Christi of the Sacrifice of the Mass leads directly to the politicization of the liturgy, for it then has no other efficacy than that which an ultimately coercive political tactics can supply.
This antisacramental “dialectic” has the further consequence of forcing a “gathered church” ecclesiology, in which the Church is made to be causally dependent upon baptism rather than upon the Eucharistic offering of the One Sacrifice[311]. Within the Catholic tradition Christ is the cause of the bridal Church as her Head; her Source, from whom she proceeds; Christ the Head does not cause the Church by ‘gathering’ the Church. Such an expression cannot but deform the nuptial reality of the Church, which alone accords with the universal patristic application of Eph. 5:31-32 to Jn. 19:34―which de Lubac has stressed.[312] It is an exegesis that sees in the blood and water emerging from the side of the dead (sleeping) second Adam, the Church as the second Eve taken from his side, thus the Church as the bride of Christ, proceeding from him as from her Bridegroom, her Head, in the nuptial union with him that is the “one flesh” of the New Covenant “in his blood,” whose institution by him on the cross is efficaciously represented in the Eucharistic Sacrifice. It is thus and not otherwise that the patristic tradition understands, with Paul, how it is that Church comes to be: she is not a “gathered church” in the sense of having some other cause, source or origin than her Lord from whom she proceeds, as the Glory proceeding from the Head.
The procession of the Church from her Head and her immaculately free nuptial union with him is therefore entirely distinct from “gathering” the Church, or “transforming the assembly,” language evidently derived from a rationalization of a passage from the Didache much cited by the Fathers as well as in at least one ancient canon of the Mass.[313] When encountering a citation of this passage from the Didache in a Eucharistic context, it should be remembered that the next verse (ix, 5), presupposes the Church to be inseparable from her Eucharistic Lord, from her Head, in their irrevocable free union in One Flesh, for that verse forbids the Eucharist to all but the baptized, i.e., to all but Christians who, by their baptism, have become members of the pre-existing Church in order that they may participate in her Eucharistic worship and so enter ever more profoundly into her nuptially-ordered covenantal unity with her risen and Eucharistic Lord. Theology should not presume to separate what God has joined together in his sending of the Son to give the Holy Spirit by his One Sacrifice.
It is thus that the vexed passages in which Augustine appears to identify the Church with Christ must be understood.[314] In them, it is the nuptial union of Christ and the Church that is affirmed, with our Lord speaking always as the Bridegroom, as the Head, whose Eucharistic offering of his flesh, sarx, in the One Sacrifice, is the recapitulation, anakephalaiōsasthai ta panta (ἀνακεφαλώσασθαι τὰ πάντα) the restoration of free unity, to our fragmented fallen flesh by his sacrificial institution of the free unity of the mia sarx, the nuptial One Flesh of the New Covenant, Eucharistically offered us as “the medicine of immortality, the remedy that we should not die.”
In our own day, J. L. McKenzie has provided an illustration of these time-honored monist mistakes. He observes of the Eucharistic body of Christ that
The Body which is present is the glorified body: we seem justified in believing that the NT implies that it is through His resurrection and exaltation that the body of Jesus becomes the Church.[315]
In another article in the same work, McKenzie is emphatic upon the eschatological identity of Christians with the risen Christ:
This exposition (of the meaning of the body of Christ) follows in general the explanation given by J. A. T. Robinson in specifying the body of Christ as the risen glorified body with which the Church is one, and in emphasizing that this union involves physical realism. [316]
Here Robinson and, following him, McKenzie, confuse “physical realism,” in the sense of the physical union of a single organism, a single body, with the nuptial realism of the One Flesh, the free unity of a redeemed humanity with its Head and redeemer, sacramentally actual and objective in the Eucharist. The consequence is the refusal of Eucharistic realism we have seen urged by Cardinal Mahony, Bishop Toyota and Bishop Lynch.
In the latter article, McKenzie has observed of the use of “body” in Ephesians:
Development of language seems apparent: the Church is the “fullness” of the body of Christ, since the identity of the Church and her members with the circumscribed corporal extension of the body of Christ would be a manifest absurdity. But it is Paul’s point that the transformation and glorification of the body of Christ permits an identification of body (and not merely of sentiment and intention) between Christ and his Church which would have been inconceivable before the glorification of Jesus. Hence a new term is introduced: Christ is called the head of His body the Church (Eph. 5:23; Col. 1:8; 2:19). This term does not loosen the identity of Christ and the Church, but preserves the distinction between Christ as the principle and the Church as the term. Effectively, “head and members” means nothing different from the earlier “body and members,” and this is clear from Paul’s explanation: it is Christ the head from whom the whole body is joined and nourished, and grows with a growth from God in love (Eph. 4:16; Col. 2:19). The idea of body is here enlarged to include the idea of growth, correlative with the idea of fullness. The Church and her members obviously have not reached the destiny to which their incorporation in Christ leads, and hence the body of Christ must be conceived in such a way that, while it lacks nothing which belongs to it, it is capable of expansion and perfection through growth in numbers and in the essential Christian virtue of love. Hence one can speak of “the building” of the body of Christ (Eph. 4:12; 16). Finally the union of Christians with the body of Christ is compared to the union of husband and wife; the body of the wife is not her own but her husband’s and so Christ cherishes the Church because we are members of His body. In this application, Paul departs somewhat from the close identity of union which is implicit in other passages. (emphasis added).[317]
McKenzie is certainly correct in asserting a development in Paul’s language: his application, in Eph. 5:31, of Gen 2:24 to the head-body relation introduced in I Cor. 6:16ff. places an emphasis, developed thereafter in Ephesians 5:21-33, upon the covenantal and consequently nuptial order of the Christ-Church union, apart from which the immanence of the Son in history would revert to that of the pagan religions: viz., an imposition of divinity upon a passive non-divine object, with inescapably dualist implications.
In the observations underlined above, McKenzie entirely ignores the Trinitarian foundation of Paul’s development of the meaning of “head” in I Cor. 11:3. His exegesis also ignores Paul’s application of that meaning to the Christ, whose “glory” is the Church who proceeds from him, as he, by proceeding from the Father as his Head, is thereby the Father’s Glory. The development in Paul’s theology, from I Cor. 6 to Eph. 5, is in the understanding of that mystery revealed in Christ, whose final expression is the application of the “one flesh” of Gen 2:24 to the union of Christ and the Church. As the Father, as Head, is the source (Archē) of the free unity of the divine substance that is the Trinity, so the Christ, as Head, is the source of the free, nuptially-ordered, Trinity-imaging substance that is the New Covenant in whose sacrificial institution Jesus’ Mission from his Father terminates. In consequence, McKenzie understands Eph. 5 to compare the union of Christians with the body of Christ to the union of the bodies of husband and wife in a single “body,” in the sense of a single organism in which Christ and the Church strictly identify, but are distinct as “principle” and “term:”
Christ is called the head of His body the Church (Eph. 5:23; Col. 1:8; 2:19). This term does not loosen the identity of Christ and the Church, but preserves the distinction between Christ as the principle and the Church as the term.
McKenzie does not use “principle” and “term” in a sense compatible with the nuptial relation between the Bridegroom and his bridal Church, i.e., between head and body in that free and covenantal sense. That reading of those words is eliminated by the identification between “head and body,” which McKenzie holds to be the same as that of “body and members.” Since the relation between realities which are identical can only be logical, i.e., necessary, we are very much in an Aristotelian-Thomist frame of reference, in which a “principle” insofar as the cause of a “term,” has no relation to it.
In Aristotle’s metaphysics, actio est in passo: agency does not change the agent, for its effect is entirely in the object of the action. Thus an agent, as the unchanged cause of an effect, has established no relation insofar as cause to the object of its action: it is the object that changes, not the agent, or cause, of the change. St. Thomas concludes from this principle the lack of any relation in the Creator to the creature.
When the principle and the term identify, as McKenzie maintains vis à vis Christ and the Church, the action can only be immanent to that identity, however named. Perhaps it is this lack of relation of cause to an immanent effect which permits their identity, but it is certainly an impersonal one: viz., the husband’s exercise, as “principle,” of a monadic authority over a submissive and passive wife who does not cause but is caused. In this way, their distinction may consist with their identity, but McKenzie offers no explanation of that identity which would permit their relation to be free, which is to say, covenantal.
However it may be explained, McKenzie’s version of the Christ-Church unity as identity makes their unity to be an amoral because unfree “corporeal” union in “one body.” This union is that which Paul, in I Cor. 6:16, ascribes to immoral and hence impersonal sexual union (en soma estin) with a prostitute (porne), contrasting it to the sacramentally sanctified free, sexual union of husband and wife in “one flesh.” (hoi duo eis sarka mian).
Therefore McKenzie entirely misses the point of Eph. 5:31 for there the nuptial union of man and woman in one flesh is not likened as by McKenzie to a union between “the body of Christ” and “the union of Christians” but rather images the free, nuptial covenant in One Flesh between Christ the Head, the second Adam, and the Church, the bridal Body that is his glory―a glory whom, from the second century, the Fathers will name the second Eve. McKenzie reads Eph. 5 as a mere Haustafel, but at the cost of ignoring the Pauline development of the symbolism of the “one flesh” from I Cor. 6 through I Cor. 7 and 11 to its recapitulation in the comparison, in Eph. 5:31, to the prophetetic “one flesh” of Gen 2:24, and of ignoring as well the crucial passages in I Cor. 11:3, Col. 1:15, and in Eph. 5:21, wherein the Trinitarian foundation of headship is affirmed, together with its analogous, nuptially-ordered historical application to Christ as the head of the bridal Church, and to the husband as the head of his wife.
The covenantal freedom of the historical immanence, i.e., the historicity, the historical and personal humanity, of the Son, is indispensable to the Church’s worship of her Lord. Absent the unqualified freedom of the consent of the Theotokos to that historical immanence, which is to say, absent Mary’s immaculate sinlessness as the necessary condition of her supremely free conception of her Lord, the historical immanence of the Son would be marked by the dualistic master-slave tension that specifies the pessimism of all pagan religious experience, which cannot and does not speak of a Good Creation, and that knows no redemption which would not be a pantheistic “the abolition of man.”[318]
McKenzie’s view of the unity of Christ and the Church is in flat opposetion to de Lubac’s emphasis upon the indispensability of marital symbolism, as it is to the nuptial stress of Ephesians 5:21-33.[319] For de Lubac has seen what McKenzie missed, that the nuptial symbolism at the heart of Catholic worship is the single alternative to a pantheistic reduction to the One as the sole alternative to the nuptiality of the New Covenant. If, with McKenzie, the Head and the Glory identify in the eschaton, the Trinity is undone, for its only historical Image, consequently its Revelation, is nuptial, the One Flesh. Apart from the authenticity of that Image, a sterile unitarianism is rationally inescapable. Rahner’s Trinitarian theology well illustrates this doctrinal devolution.[320]
We have examined, in the first Appendix of this work, the “naming of God and man” that is consequent upon the Trinitarian headship of the Father and of the nuptial headship of the man; both, qua head, “name” the substance in which they subsist, in that inasmuch as “God” refers at once to the Head and to the substance of the Trinity of which He is the Head; it must follow that “man,” names at once the husband as the head of the human substance, and the substantial free unity, the “one flesh,” human substance in which he subsists, and whose interpersonal unity images the Trinity. This “naming” does not dissolve the Trinity into a monad, nor does it dissolve the nuptial union of the man, the woman and their marital covenant into a comparable univocity. The hermeneutics of the One Flesh instituted by the Eucharistic sacrifice, the primary Image of the Trinity, is thus controlled by the hermeneutics of the Church’s Trinitarian doctrine, her affirmation of her faith in the substantial unity of the Father, the Son and the Spirit which, as historical, is also Christological and ecclesial in the sense that the Catholic affirmation of the Trinity cannot prescind from the concretely historical terminus of the Trinitarian Missions, the One Flesh of Christ and the Church. The historicity of the One Flesh is its Eucharistic imaging of the Trinity: consequently as the doctrine of the Eucharist is governed by the doctrine of the Trinity, so the theology of the Eucharist is governed by the theology of the Trinity.
The hermeneutic problem inherent in Eucharistic worship, a problem perennial as well as current, is posed most clearly by Augustine’s insistence upon the unitas corporis, which he sometimes treats as a physical unity, sometimes as a personal unity and, most powerfully, as the unity that is the whole Christ, the complete Christ: Christus totus, the nuptial unity of Christ and the Church which he asserts and explains in Sermo 341, in full loyalty to the Pauline tradition. He infers from this nuptial unity an identity between the communicant and the Christ, an inference explicit in his “Tu mutaberis in me, “ in which Augustine represents the risen Christ as explaining to the communicant the transformation he will undergo by his Eucharistic communion with his Lord. We have seen de Lubac rebuke any effort to reduce the tension of this axiom by supposing it to be a playing with words, something then less than true or, at least, something trivial. Augustine’s is the voice par excellence of the Latin tradition: his influence is unmatched among the Western fathers, and today in Western theology the tradition he founded is being rediscovered, found again to be a primary resource, a rediscovery owing much to the founding, sixty years ago, by de Lubac and his confrères, of the famous patristic series, Sources Chrétiennes.
Augustine’s Eucharistic doctrine, largely scattered throughout his homiletic works, is integral with all he wrote, inseparable from the Catholic doctrine of grace, of which he is accounted the master: Doctor gratiae. However, a literal reading of his “tu mutaberis in me” has been used to support the view, voiced by some contemporary Catholic scholars, that Augustine’s Eucharistic doctrine fails of orthodoxy. Batiffol and Camelot as well as de Lubac have has shown this notion to be unworthy of serious consideration, despite the many dissenting voices which have thought to find support for it in Augustine’s works.[321] Here we do not intend to repeat the defense of his orthodoxy set forth in the preceding pages; our concern is rather to understand his use of Eucharistic language. Specifically, we wish to show the absence of any foundation in his writing for supposing him to be, on this point, a proto-Protestant on the order of Berengarius.
In this task, our major reliance is of course de Lubac, whose far-ranging discussion in Corpus mysticum of the Augustinian tradition, and particularly of its Eucharistic foundation, we have shown to be prefaced by a careful showing of Augustine’s orthodoxy and that of the Latin tradition largely tributary to him. His Eucharistic realism can be challenged only by a refusal to accept the evidence.
Post-Conciliar European theologians such as Rahner, Congar and Schillebeeckx, and their American affines―Lonergan, Cooke, Kilmartin, and a host of lesser lights such as John Baldovin and John Coleman―have broadcast without serious discussion their entirely uncritical supposition that the Eucharistic realism taught at Trent has been undercut by historical criticism to the point that it can no longer be taken seriously. The result is apparent to the younger scholars who will seek in vain for studies supporting that realism in any of the contemporary issues of the major Catholic theological journals. The impact upon the Catholic laity of this theological disinterest is also evident: the failure of Catholic morale, the decline of Catholic confidence in the res Catholica, needs no exposition.
That this failure of nerve has established itself so widely and deeply among the laity is largely due to the long-deplored disaster that has for decades constituted the catechetical instruction in Catholic schools and parishes, an instruction that in the Anglophone world has been dominated for a quarter-century by Thomas Groome’s inane politicization of Catholic faith and practice. This programmatic corruption of the faith of the young would not have been possible, would not now be permitted to continue, were not the Catholic morale of the bishops themselves seriously compromised. The result is a widespread unfamiliarity, among the clergy as well as among the laity, with the reality of the Church’s Eucharistic worship, an ignorance routinely promulgated under official diocesan auspices devoted to “liturgical renewal”.
In these entirely deplorable circumstances—deplored at length in at least two reports by committees of the N.C.C.B./U.S.C.C.B, responsibility for which cannot be shifted from the Catholic episcopal Magisterium, it becomes necessary, if one is to discuss the hermeneutics of Eucharistic realism, to spell out what that realism actually is. To that we turn.
The Council of Trent was called in response to the challenge of the Luther, Zwingli and, later, of Calvin, to the Sacrifice of the Mass. For Luther, the Eucharistic offering of the One Sacrifice by which we are redeemed had instituted that sesquimillennial “Babylonian Captivity,” out of which he led his followers, and which they, and later the Calvinists, and those who depend either on them, or upon yet more radical expressions of anti-sacramentalism from the followers of Zwingli and those enthusiasts for ecclesial deconstruction whom Luther disdainfully named the Schwarmerei (Fanatics), still consider to be a corruption of primitive Christianity.[322]
We need not here delay upon the Protestant Reform, save to remind the reader that its Protest was focused upon the Sacrifice of the Mass, not on such corollaries as “transubstantiation” or “real presence,” as is so often supposed.[323] The Lutheran denial went to the heart of the res Catholica. Were Luther correct, the Catholic Church could not worship her Lord, the Lord of history who, from the stance of the Reform, cannot, as risen, exist in history for, as implicit in the rejection of all sacramental mediation which defines the Reformation, the risen Christ, by his Resurrection, is no longer present in our fallen history. Luther’s objection was precisely to the Church’s historical worship of the Eucharistic immanence of the Jesus the Lord as at once the High Priest and the Victim of his One Sacrifice. Inevitably, the Lutheran Reformation became a project of ongoing dehistoricization, and after nearly five hundred years remains locked in that posture:”Hier stehe, ich kann nicht anders.”
If Luther did not introduce or urge the radically secular understanding of history now current, he did make his denial of intrinsically salvific significance to history a matter of faith or, as his intellectual heirs and assigns have it, of intellectual honesty. Luther taught the total corruption, the utter insignificance for justification, of all historical acts and institutions: the only justification is eschatological, and between fallen history and the eschatological Kingdom there is no historical link, as a mere matter of definition. The axiomatic sola fide, sola gratia, sola scriptura, was soon by its own logic effectively reduced to sola fide: neither the grace of Christ nor the written Word could have any authentic and reliable historical expression. Inevitably, the faith itself became ineffable, historically inexpressible and imperceptible, without reliable public utterance whether as faith or as morality. The consequence, when the dehistoricizing logic of the total corruption of the historical order is pushed, cannot but be a radical secularism, impatient not only of “works” or, latterly, of “religion,” but finally of any historical institution claiming immunity from the universal solvent that is justification by faith alone. Spinoza, in his Ethics, was the first to recognize that this programmatic dehistoricization implied an explicitly cosmological metaphysics. His Deist pantheism, taken over by the Enlightenment, has since provided the normative notion of history governing the “historical criticism” still dominant in exegetical scholarship.
The devaluation of the salvific significance of all historical institution could not but focus upon the Eucharist, for it is the institution “in his blood,” “the blood of the Covenant,“ of the history-transcending historical reality, the New Covenant, the terminus of the full Gift, the full out-pouring, of the Holy Spirit whom it was the Son’s mission to give. The One Son’s sacrificial institution of the One Flesh of the New Covenant achieves the fullness, the pleroma, of the good creation, never to be transcended, never to be undone, for the gift of the Spirit is complete and irrevocable in the nuptial union, the One Flesh, of the Incarnate Son with his bridal Church. They are joined together by the Son’s obedience to the will of the Father in giving that Spirit to his Bride by which Gift she has the immaculate freedom that alone enables her to assent without reservation to her union with him as her Head. It is with explicit reference to this primordial union of the second Adam with the second Eve, “in the beginning,” that Jesus said of marriage, “What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder.”[324]
The objective, the foundational reality, the cause of the Church and of her worship, the nuptial union of the Head and the Body, of the second Adam and the second Eve, of the Bridegroom and the Bride, constitutes the good creation. Because it is good, and very good, it is nuptially ordered and therefore is free; because it is free, it may be rejected. The rejection always turns out to be single: the refusal of the nuptial symbolism integral to the sacrifice of the Mass. This refusal of the Eucharistic representation of the One Sacrifice undercuts, renders meaningless, the liturgical affirmation of the Lordship, the Headship, of Jesus the Christ, for if that Lordship were of the past only, if its radical exercise, the One Sacrifice, were not objectively offered in the here and the now, daily and perennially, it would be subordinate to the brokenness of time: like all else that is fallen, it would grow old, finally to be lost in the overwhelming welter of instrinsically insignificant, relativized events that would then constitute the irretrievable past. Eucharistic realism and the sacrifice of the Mass are at one: a “real presence” that is not identified with the offering of the One Sacrifice is as “the great Arnauld” once named it, a “real absence.” That absence is unbearable; for it is annihilating.
De Lubac frequently cites as of the first importance for Augustine’s Eucharistic doctrine two of Augustine’s Eucharistic homilies, Sermo 227 and Sermo 272.[325] They are together major resources for any inquiry into Augustine’s Eucharistic doctrine. We have noted Fr. Camelot’s entire agreement with de Lubac’s exegesis, to the point of its clarification. Batiffol is similarly in agreement with de Lubac.
Earlier in this Appendix, we have examined de Lubac’s reading of such texts, and found in that reading a detailed statement of his full adherence to the Eucharistic realism of the Catholic tradition, but at the same time, in common with the Latin fathers, an inadequate appreciation of the covenantal freedom of that Eucharistic “body” which is the union in One Flesh of Christ the Head with his Body, his bridal Church, the second Eve, the unitas corporis of the Latin Fathers. In short, neither the Fathers, nor the Carolingians, nor de Lubac in his study of them, nor the theological tradition generally, has understood the One Flesh of Christ and his Church to be a free substantial reality, the substantial image of the Triune God, and thus to be the criterion, the prime analogate, of created substance as such. \
The conviction that this time-honored viewpoint is mistaken and its implications unacceptable as a matter of doctrine underlies the restatement of theological metaphysics cemtral to this study. This restatement imports a hermeneutics which must then control also the interpretation of Augustine’s language in these two sermons, and his similar expressions elsewhere. This will simply bring their meaning into line with his much more detailed statement of the nuptial union of Christ and the Church that is set out in Sermo 341.
The crucial issue is whether Paul―and Augustine―each affirm the metaphysical identity of Christ and the Church, whether in one Person, or one body, or whether they affirm their nuptial union in One Flesh and one substance, the free and substantial image of the substantial Trinity.[326] This question becomes crucial in Eucharistic Communion. While there is no doubt of the Eucharistic union of the communicant with the Church and therefore with Christ, as with the Christ and therefore with the Church, can it be said that in eating and drinking the body and the blood of the Lord, the communicant eo ipso eats and drinks the Church? This is not the question of whether the Church is also fed by the Eucharistic nourishment of her members, but rather, in the last analysis, whether her Eucharistic reality is the product of the transubstantiation of the elements, in such wise that the Words of Institution bear indifferently upon the physical and the bridal body of the Lord. The negative answer, viz., that the Eucharistic body of the One Sacrifice is not the ecclesial Bride of Christ, will require a re-examination of basic and unquestioned Eucharistic doctrine: that the Real Presence, the Event of the One Sacrifice by the High Priest of himself as the Lamb of God, is the cause of the Church. The priestly recitation of Words of Institution, the Eucharistic sacramentum tantum, is the cause of the Real Presence, but the Real Presence, the res et sacramentum, is the cause of the Church.
In the first of his two Pastoral Letters, Cardinal Mahony has done us the favor of calling to our attention the Tridentine definition of transubstantiation. In the first footnote of his Pastoral Letter of 1997 he cites Paragraph 1376 of the Catechism, in which he quotes the pertinent canon of Trent:
Council of Trent summarizes the Catholic faith by declaring: “Because Christ our Redeemer said that it was truly his Body that he was offering under the species of bread, it has always been the conviction of the Church of God, and this holy Council now declares again, that by the consecration of the bread and wine there takes place a change of the whole substance of the bread into the substance of the Body of Christ our Lord and of the whole substance of the wine into the substance of his Blood. This change the holy Catholic Church has fittingly and properly called transubstantiation.” (DS 1642)
The question before us then is whether the Church, of which we are members by our baptism, is the product of transubstantiation: do the bread and wine of the Offertory become the Church, by becoming the body and blood of Jesus the Christ? It cannot be said that Trent affirms this: neither in fact does Augustine. We have seen de Lubac’s statement that:
Moreover, precision is not lacking to the thought and language of Augustine. Cf. Sermo 227, “If you have well received, you are what you have received,” (P. L. 38:1100) or Sermo 272, “if therefore you are the body of Christ and (its) members, you should receive your mystery.” (P. L. 38:1247)
Corpus mysticum at 199, note 55.
It is evident that the “si bene accepistis” of Sermo 227―language which de Lubac, with no dissenting voices, considers typical of Augustine―is concerned for the communicant’s worthy reception of the consecrated species, whose prior transubstantiation into the body and the blood of the crucified Lord is the condition of that reception, and of the recipient’s consequent personal Communion with the “corpus Christi et membra.” Again, the language of Sermo 272, looking also to Eucharistic communion, is similarly conditional: “Si ergo vos estis corpus Christi et membra―mysterium vestrum accipietis:” clearly the “mysterium” is causally prior to its acceptance. It is useless to look in such statements for the didactic precision of a manual. As de Lubac has said, in these homilies, as in all of Augustine’s treatment of the “unity of the body” (unitas corporis) we have rather to do with a “mouvante continuité;” we have seen de Lubac stress this point from the first paragraph of the first chapter of the Corpus mysticum.[327] Nonetheless the crucial point is clear: the Real Presence of the Christ as High Priest and Victim offering and constituting the One Sacrifice is causally prior to all Eucharistic communion with the “body and members of Christ,” however that phrase is to be understood. We now turn to that issue: the meaning of “body and members of Christ” for Augustine, whose Sermo 341 provides an extended explanation of this matter.
Chapters 11-13 of Sermo 341, already quoted in full (endnote 25, infra), leave no room for doubt. Augustine understands the union of head and body to be the union of bridegroom and bride, of Christ and the Church.[328] Emphatically, he is not speaking of an organic or corporeal union. We quote again from this homily:
Thus it is that in Scripture sometimes Christ is presented in such a way that you are to understand him as head and body, with the apostle himself expounding most clearly what is said of husband and wife in Genesis: They will be, it is said, two in one flesh. (Gen 2:24) Observe that it is he himself who speaks, lest we may seem to you to have dared to invent something of our own. For they will be two, he said, in one flesh: (Gen 2:24) and he added, This is a great sacrament. And lest someone still suppose that this is something found in man and wife according to the natural copulation and corporal mixture of both sexes: Moreover I am saying that it refers, he said, to Christ and the Church. (Gen 2:24; Eph. 5:31.32) Consequently, therefore, what is said elsewhere―They will be two in one flesh: so they are no longer two, but one flesh. (Mt. 19: 5.6) And as they are bridegroom and bride, so also are they head and body: because the man is the head of the woman. Whether therefore I say head and body, or bridegroom and bride, you are to understand the same thing.
Earlier, in Chapter 11, Augustine is persuaded by the authority of Isaiah that “As bridegroom and bride; he calls one and the same (eumdem) bridegroom with reference to the head, bride with reference to the body. They are seen as two, and are one.” For Augustine, Eph. 5:31-32 controls the meaning of the Christ-Church union, the unitas corporis which, clearly, is not the physical unity of a physical body, but the covenantal unity, the “one flesh” of a marriage.
In the same Chapter 11, Augustine has established the relation of head, body, and members with precision:
All of us are at once members of Christ and his body; not only those of us who are in this place, but throughout the whole world, and not only those of us who are alive at this time, but what shall I say? From Abel the just to the end of the work for as long as men beget and are begotten, whoever of the just makes the passage through this life, all that now, that is, not in this place but in this life, whoever will be born in the future, constitute the one body of Christ, while they are each individually members of Christ. So if all constitute the body, and are each individually members, there is of course a head, of which this is the body. And he himself, it says, is the head of the body, the Church, the firstborn, himself holding the first place (Col. 1:18).
Finally, lest it be still thought possible to suppose that Augustine is speaking of a corporeal unity, in which Christ is the head of the body in the organic sense given the head in I Cor. 12, the following quotation from Chapter 12 is decisive and needs to be repeated here:
They will be two in one flesh: so they are no longer two, but one flesh. (Mt. 19: 5.6) And as they are bridegroom and bride, so also are they head and body: because the man is the head of the woman. Whether therefore I say head and body, or bridegroom and bride, you are to understand the same thing. (emphasis added)
Consequently, there can be no doubt that Augustine upholds the transformation of the Eucharistic bread and wine into the body and the blood of the sacrificed and sacrificing Lord. There can be no doubt that he distinguishes the Church as Body from her Head as the wife is distinguished from her husband. There can be no doubt that he understands their union in terms of Ephesians 5:21-33 and Gen 2:24: i.e., they form “one flesh” in the sense definitively given that term by Gen. 2:24 Augustine did not dream of relegating this free and covenantal nuptial union to the status of a thing, a “body.” Only this free unity, dynamic because historical, can provide the “moving continuity” de Lubac asserts of Head, Body, and members of the Body who are thereby members of Christ.
With this established, we are in a position to deal with the “tu mutaberis in me” of Augustine’s Confessions, and with his other comparable statements, whose literal import is incompatible with the clear distinction between Bridegroom and Bride, between Head and Body, which Augustine asserts of Christ and the Church in their nuptial union, instituted by the One Sacrifice. This nuptial union, the Christus totus of Sermo 341, is that of which Augustine has written:
If then, you wish to understand the Body of Christ, listen to the apostle as he says to the faithful. “You are the Body of Christ, and his members” (1 Corinthians 12:27). If, therefore, you are the Body of Christ and his members, your mystery has been placed on the Lord’s table, you receive your mystery. You reply “Amen” to that which you are, and by replying you consent. For you hear “The Body of Christ,” and you reply “Amen.” Be a member of the Body of Christ so that your “Amen” may be true.
Sermo 272 (P.L. 38:1246-48); cf. Moriones, Enchiridion Theologicum Sancti Augustini, 604-05.
How then can Augustine, in Sermo 272, so clearly identify the Church with Jesus’ Body, even with his Blood, as present and sacrificed in the Eucharist when, with Paul, he distinguishes the Church from the Christ as Bride from Bridegroom?
To understand how such language is not inconsistent with that distinction, it is necessary to turn to the biblical hermeneutic, by which the Head alone is named substantially or essentially, whether in the common NT designation of the Father alone as God, or the Genesis designation of Adam alone as man. The reservation of the essential name of God to the Father does not in the least deny the divinity of the Son who, homoousios with the Father, has all that the Father has, and would not otherwise be the Son. Analogously, the naming of the second Adam, the Head of the Church, as the One Flesh does not deprive the Body, the second Eve, of her full nuptial dignity, apart from which full dignity the freedom of the substantial One Flesh, the freedom of the New Covenant itself, would be undone. Her dignity, in analogy with the Son’s, is a received dignity, not an originating one: she is not the Head but, homoousios with the Son, is the Glory of a Head, possessed of no less nuptial dignity than her Head, as He, the Glory of the Father, is in no sense possessed of a lesser Trinitarian dignity than his Head. In neither case is this equal dignity to be rationalized into an identity; this is the burden of the Nicene Creed and of the Symbol of Chalcedon.
Consequently, it is entirely appropriate, within this Pauline context, deploying this Pauline hermeneutic, to affirm the substantial unity of Christ the Head and his Body, the Church, a unity which is strikingly confirmed in Acts, where the risen Christ asks of Saul, “Why do you persecute Me?” Nothing then prevents identifying the Church with the Eucharistic Christ, but this is a substantial unity, as was affirmed by the Council of Chalcedon’s doctrine of the double homoousion of the one Person, Jesus the Christ, who subsists in substantial divinity and in substantial humanity. This question, and its further affirmation, “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting,” is controlled by the Head-Body relation, in which order the Head speaks for the Body, but not vice versa, pace St. Augustine. Our Lord’s Personal plenitude as Head of the Church is his authority to speak for the Church, his Body, without trespassing upon her personal authority, but these personal relations cannot be inverted: the Church cannot include the Chjrist within her plenitude, for she is not the source of the Head: rather it is the reverse that is true.[329] The identity with the Church that is proper for the Christ, the Head, to assert. is not reversible: the Church cannot say to Saul, “Why do you persecute me?”―the very proposition is self-refuting. This is because in the unity of One Flesh of Christ the Head with his Body, the Church, there is no Personal merger of Sponsus with sponsa, no assimilation of the Head to the Body, anymore than there is, within the Unity that is the Trinity, a Personal merger of the Father and the Son or an assimilation of the Son to the Father.
In brief, the order of the Trinitarian Missions controls the naming of God and therefore of man, who is created in the image of God, freely to image God, and whose truth is precisely that imaging.[330] The application of this Trinitarian hermeneutic to the Eucharistic One Flesh, the sacramental representation of the Whole Christ, the nuptial Image of the Trinity, is the key to the orthodox reading of such passages from Augustine’s Eucharistic writings as those which Morione has termed “more obscure.”
Moriones lists eleven of these;[331] the list is not intended to be exhaustive, but it is certainly representative. Among these texts are those which have been considered open to a “symbolist,” i.e., non-historical, reading, a sense incompatible with Eucharistic realism. These stress the distinction between the Eucharistic “signum” and “signatum” and, once that distinction is rationalized by the reader, ( i.e., atomized in the manner of Berengarius, in such wise that the concepts must either identify or mutually exclude each other) are then often read to deny what Eucharistic realism affirms, that the consecrated bread is what the Words of Institution affirm it to be, and what the Council of Trent defined it to be, the historically objective Personal presence of Jesus the Christ. However and in fact, such “obscure” texts are merely applications of Augustine’s phenomenological method, paradoxical when read literally, doubtless obscure to those who insist upon reading them analytically,[332] but which have been shown, in the preceding pages of this study, to be entirely compatible with and in fact dependent upon Eucharistic realism.
Another group of the texts gathered under this heading is instanced by a famous passage in which Augustine is concerned to defend Eucharistic realism against the Capharnaitic simplism which would suppose the Real Presence to be empirical, in such wise that the “trogein, phagein” of Jn. 6:51 would involve a mastication of the risen Lord. In reply to this travesty, Augustine insists upon the recognition of the “spiritual” reality of the Eucharistic elements, and upon a “spiritual” eating and drinking of the consecrated bread and wine: “Spiritualiter intelligete!” However, those who deny his Catholic orthodoxy do so by proceeding to read “spiritual’ as ‘immaterial,’ with a consequent connotations of subjectivity and, again, of a nonhistorical Eucharistic “symbolism.” These efforts to reduce Augustine to a proto-Berengarius have been dealt with already, especially in Chapters Two and Six, and will not be addressed further here.
Our present concern is for those texts which de Lubac has frequently cited, drawn particularly from Augustine’s Sermo 227 and Sermo 272, in which Augustine can be read to identify the Eucharistic Corpus Christi verum, the Real Presence of the sacrificing Christ as at once High Priest and Victim, with the Corpus Christi mysticum, the Church for whom the One Sacrifice is offered. We have pointed out that this symbolist reading of reading of Augustine depends upon an implicit acceptance of a monist metaphysics of substance. This metaphysics cannot but import a dehistoricization of the free substantiality of the Eucharistic One Flesh, reducing its unity to a sola fide or subjective standing. This implication was avoided by the Fathers, as it has been avoided by de Lubac, through accepting the “three bodies” solution despite its metaphysical incoherence. The “three bodies” analysis of the unitas corporis was adopted both sides of the Carolingian dispute, as it has been in our own time by de Lubac, beyond question the greatest Eucharistic theologian of this age. We have shown that this mistake amounts to a failure to grasp the historicity and therefore the covenantal freedom of the nuptial unity of the Eucharistic One Flesh, and thus to entail its reduction to the physical unity of a “body.”[333]
Moriones has gathered together some of these texts under a separate heading,[334] i.e., those which treat of the Eucharist as the cause of the communicant’s incorporation in the Mystical Body. As he notes in the prolegomenon to Caput III of the Eucharistic section of his Enchiridion, the primary emphasis of these texts is upon the Real Presence, the Corpus Christi verum which, as her sacramental sign and source, “figures,” i.e., causes, the bridal Church, the Corpus Christi mysticum. De Lubac has shown, at the beginning of his examination of the Western patristic Eucharistic theology, dominated and crowned as it was by Augustine’s genius, that the Latin Fathers knew no Christomonism, no reduction or assimilation of the Church to the Christ. Still less can any such reductionism be attributed to de Lubac.[335]
In fact, the penchant de Lubac exhibits for speaking as Augustine often speaks, literally identifying Eucharistic reception of the body and the blood of the Real Presence with reception of the Body that is the Church, in such wise that to receive the Corpus Christi verum in Communion is to receive the Corpus Christi mysticum, is in entire agreement with the exultant and prophetic exclamation of Adam at the appearance of Eve: “This at last is bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh.”[336] With this exultant outcry, Adam celebrates her consubstantiality with him, her head; this is, not her personal identity with him, and still less, her impersonal identity with him, but her free unity with him in the freedom of their One Flesh, their substantial Trinity-imagine integrity which, as good and very good, could only be free. The risen Lord said as much to Paul on the road to Damascus. This substantial unity of the Head and the Body is in no way inconsistent with our Lord’s role of Bridegroom of the New Israel, announced, at least parabolically, in the Synoptics, affirmed by Paul in I Cor. 11:3 and 2 Cor. 11:2 and Col. 1:18, and proclaimed several times in the Apocalypse.[337] We have seen Augustine identify the offices of Bridegroom and Head in Sermo 341, as Paul had done; the theme reappears in its final and plenary form in Eph. 5:21-33.
Within the Augustinian hermeneutic, the assertion of the unity of Christ and the Church, as with every assertion of the faith, can only be paradoxical, apparently contradictory from the viewpoint of natural, i.e., unconverted, fallen rationality. Paramount examples of Augustine’s affirmation of religious truth as paradox include his famous account of fallen man as “simul peccator et justus,” whose “intus magister,” the Lord, is “intimius intimo meo”: i.e., “more intimate to me than I am to myself.” De Lubac’s fondness for paradoxes, evidenced by the books he has devoted to the subject,[338] places him firmly in the Augustinian tradition, which regards the literal use of language as false to religious reality. Paul Tillich has provided a detailed account of this hermeneutical stance, whose roots are in Plato’s phenomenology and his consequent ‘universal hylemorphism.[339] It requires that any interpretation of Augustine’s Eucharistic doctrine according to the canons of discursive rationality, governed by formal logical coherence, is therefore essentially wrong-headed, for the aforesaid formal logic rests upon the cosmological postulate of the necessary unity of substance, and therefore of truth. Finding no such unity in history, cosmological rationality entails a flight to a nonhistorical telos, which can be known only with the presupposition of its paradoxical relation to a radically incompatible historicity. The Reform’s reading of Augustine, as by Karl Barth, supposes him to instance this dialectic, which can have no historical foundation as a matter of definition. Yet Augustine is the Latin Church’s most doughty defender of sacramental realism. In fact, the Catholic faith entails conversion from this a priori imprisonment of the mind in its fallen or sarkic rationality, which, paradoxically, must transcend history to understand history. Hegel offers the permanent illustration of this delusion. Granted that in our fallen personal history this conversion―radically, conversion from the sarkic to the pneumatic consciousness―is always incomplete, fidelity to it is nonetheless incumbent upon our reading of Augustine’s witness to the Catholic tradition.
Within the Augustinian expression of Catholic theology, paradox has validity only insofar as the apparent contradiction of its polar terms is historically resolved, a priori, in a free event, in a historical fact wherein, sola gratia, the fragmentation of fallen existence is resolved. Failing the historicity of that graced resolution, paradoxical language reverts to its Platonic standing, that of mere opinion, devoid of inherent truth. The paradoxes which concern the Eucharist, are those which, for de Lubac, find their summation in Augustine’s famous apothegm,
Non me in te mutabis, sicut cibum carnis tuae, sed tu mutaberis in me.
Corpus mysticum, 200, n. 59, quoting the Confessions, I, 7, c. 10, n.16 (P. L. 32, 742).
It is only in consequence of what we have seen de Lubac refer to as the unitas corporis, the una caro, the “ecclesia in praedestinatis,” (cf. endnotes 15, 259, infra) wherein “la terme dernière coincide avec la source,” viz., where “L’Église rejoint en perfection le Christ” that this apothegm is verified. There “Le deux res sacramenti ne font qu’une, et dans cette participation double et unique, chaque trouve la vie eternelle.” But here de Lubac is speaking, not of the eschaton, but of Eucharistic communion, an event in history that is the mediation of the eternal life by the One Sacrifice through personal reception of “the medicine of immortality,” “the remedy that we should not die.” This communion in the “Bread of Life” is eo ipso communion in the ecclesial body, in the free union of these spousal terms, the Bridegroom and the Bride, in their historical One Flesh, whose historicity is its Eucharistic representation, for it has no historicity other than this: the concrete representation of the One Sacrifice with its inseparable, because infallible, eschatological fulfillment of the Father’s sending of the Son to give the Spirit.
It is not Augustine’s intent to return us the futility of the flesh, but to pass the tradition on to us in its purity and fullness, as Paul passed on the Eucharistic paradosis he had received at Antioch. The covenantal unity and free inseparability of the sacrificial Christ and his bridal body, the Church, is basic doctrine. Their identification, whether historically or eschatologically conceived, is the radical corruption of this tradition, for that reductionism entails the destruction of the nuptial order, the One Flesh that is the free substantial unity of the New Covenant, by whose institution on the cross and the altar we are redeemed. Absent the recognition of that nuptial freedom, the return to a sarkic dualism and a consequent nihilism is inescapable. The docetic temptation to return this dualistic refusal of the freedom of the Catholic consciousness is ancient in the Church, antedating the Johannine Gospel. Its hallmark has always been a flight from the salvific historicity of the risen Lord of history, his banishment from history and from the world. Modernity, as has been observed, is merely the institution, the normalization, of that radical pessimism as criteriological for man in his world.
De Lubac’s exhaustive study of the patristic and early medieval development of Eucharistic theology from the fourth through the thirteenth centuries is unified, as has been said, by the liturgy itself, for the Church’s worship in truth, culminating in the Sacrifice of the Mass, is the ultimate paradosis, the ground of all theological inquiry and, a fortiori, of all doctrinal development. De Lubac has traced this development by way of changes rung upon the theological vocabulary of flesh, body, spirit, mystery, virtue, truth, and their derivatives, from Origen, Ambrose, Jerome and Augustine to the controversies of the Carolingian period, the clear prelude of Berengarius’ challenge to Eucharistic orthodoxy, the response to which, in de Lubac’s view, transformed subsequent Eucharistic theology into an apologia for Eucharistic realism. Over the eight and a half centuries between St. Ambrose and St. Thomas, only liturgical communion in Truth Incarnate could sustain the theological consensus that the authority of Fathers is coherent despite their evident idiosyncrasies. Only personal participation in the Eucharistic liturgy itself, in the Church’s worship in truth of the Incarnate Truth, prior to all speculation upon it, could illumine the shifting terminology in and by which the Church’s Eucharistic doctrine not only developed but which, read as with de Lubac, in ecclesia, remains a permanent, extraordinarily fruitful source of doctrinal and theological insight.[340]
This Eucharistic ordering of doctrinal and theological development is a function of the Eucharistic order of history, an order established by the Eucharistic immanence of the One Sacrifice in history, the immanence by which, in Augustine’s famous phrase, the Lord of history is recognized as that “Beauty, ancient and forever new,” fidelity to whom is alone salvific, for this recognition of Jesus as the Christ is the appropriation and the expression in ecclesia of the covenantal freedom which he instituted by offering, on the cross and on the altars of the Church, the One Sacrifice by which we are redeemed.
It must be stressed that Eucharistic communion in the Light who illumines the fallen world through the sacramental worship of the Church is the pre-condition of doctrinal development and therefore of the speculative theology, the fides quaerens intellectum, the always inadequate and fallible expression of the hunger, inherent in the obscurity of the faith, for a yet deeper personal solidarity with the Truth Incarnate in Christ and present in and transcendent to history by his Eucharistic Lordship. Only within this communion can one seek, in freedom from the otherwise implacable determinism of our fallen rationality, the free Truth who can be received only as a gift ex nihilo, for the freedom of the faith has no prior possibility.
It is in this freedom that we can recognize what no pagan knew or knows, that our bifurcated selves, simul justus et peccator, are not by their fallen fragmentation forced to despair of truth for, with its gift, its revelation in Christ, we have received as well the freedom to appropriate its free unity and, with that free unity, the historically objective restoration in sacramento, in ecclesia, in the worship of the Church, of our lost integrity. Any other ground of speculation can only return us to our fleshly and futile immanence as a matter of necessity, for we then have either abjured, or remain in ignorance of, the sacramental objectivity of freedom in our fallen world.
All this St. Paul has taught; his doctrine of man as at once flesh and spirit, imprisoned by the fear of death, restored to freedom by the death of Christ, puts before us, as the Deuteronomist did, life and death: we cannot but choose, in the continuum of choosing that marks our riven existence in Christo, for as in him alone is our unity restored, by him alone is the choice to live in him given.
So much is preliminary to the theological appreciation of de Lubac’s incomparably learned survey of the Latin tradition of the Catholic faith in the Eucharist. He has portrayed the incessant struggle of the Latin Fathers and their early medieval heirs, aided by Greeks such as Origen and Hesychius, over nearly a millennium to transcend the innate immanentism of fallen rationality in order to grasp the freedom of the Revelation, a freedom all too easy to confuse with irrationality: it is this confusion that inspires the quest for “necessary reasons” as the single test of historical truth that still haunts Catholic theology and exegesis.
The struggle against this gnostic illusion is the permanent task of systematic theology. The struggle is the more evident in the more adventurous, the more innovative theologians. In the East, this is verified in Origen above all others, as in the Latin West, it is verified in Augustine, similarly peerless. It is by no means incidental that de Lubac has devoted a major work to the presentation of Origen’s exegesis, whose influence in the Latin West he considers second only to Augustine’s. As for Augustine, de Lubac devotes more attention in Corpus mysticum to him and to his influence than to any other of the Fathers; those subsequent to him, particularly from the seventh through the ninth centuries, de Lubac considers to be directly or indirectly under his influence. That he is thus influential in the Latin Church no one can doubt. De Lubac has pointed to that influence on the first page of the first chapter of Corpus mysticum, and continues so to do throughout this massive study.
The attention de Lubac gives Augustine in this work is often critical: we have instanced its salient points. De Lubac is entirely at home with Augustine’s phenomenological method, more than at peace with its tension between the sign and the signified and with his consequent love for paradox, for this method is also his own. The real problem with Augustine’s theology―and it has been read as acute―is rooted in a relict in his thought of the Platonic assignment of literal truth to the phenomenal order; this is evident in Augustine’s insistence upon Jesus’ phenomenal, empirical, localization, as either in heaven or on earth, simply as corporeal―for Augustine does not question Jesus’ corporeality as risen: since his Resurrection, Jesus is located at the right hand of the Father. Thus he is no longer “located” on earth, in history, in this phenomenal, empirical sense. Specifically, he is not empirically located, not phenomenally available, in the Eucharist. We have indicated the explanation proposed by P. Th. Camelot, quite evidently approved by de Lubac: viz., that for Augustine, whatever is invisible and otherwise unavailable to the senses is not corporeal in Augustine’s sense of empirically available. Consequently, the objective reality of the Real Presence, as liturgically affirmed by the words of consecration, must be “spiritually” understood. This famous admonition, “spiritualiter intelligete,” amounts to a warning to his readers against Capharnaitism, a warning which would not be necessary were he not, as Camelot and de Lubac agree, entirely realist in his Eucharistic doctrine. He does not suppose “location” to be dispositive of metaphysical objectivity: that objectivity is spiritual, in the sense of nonempirical, i.e., sacramental, given objectively, historically, in the mystery of the Eucharist.
This insistent equation of corporeality with visibility in the sense of empirical availability issues in the paradoxes we have noted in Augustine’s Eucharistic doctrine: for example, his stress upon the corporeal absence of the Christ after the Resurrection has been thought by some of his followers to imply a “widowed” Church. This falsification of the Resurrection, as though exclusive of the objective historicity of the Eucharistic Corpus Christi verum, would of course imply Augustine’s dehistoricization of the Eucharist across the board. Nothing could be further from Augustine’s intent. Those passages from his works which appear, by their insistence upon localization, to depart from his injunction, “spiritualiter intelligete,” are not included in his Retractationes: it is then evident that he understood them within the context of that Eucharistic admonition: Augustine asserts as the literal truth the corporeal presence of the risen Christ at the right hand of the Father: it is his Eucharistic presence that is to be “spiritually understood.”
In the end, were Augustine’s assertions of the objective presence of Jesus in the Eucharist not read “spiritualiter,” as he repeatedly insists that they be understood, his Eucharistic doctrine would but conclude to an anticipation of the Reform’s denial of Eucharistic realism and to a general refusal of the sacramental mediation of the grace of Christ―which sacramental realism he famously defended against the Donatists. This supposition of doctrinal schizophrenia in the greatest genius of the Latin Church needs more foundation than has been or can be provided. However, by way of programs of “liturgical renewal” such as that in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles to which we have already referred, Augustine’s alleged refusal of Eucharistic realism has entered into the liturgy of some elements of the Catholic Church―if rather by a wink and a nudge than overtly―as though it were authentic Augustinianism. The sola fide influence of this error is always manifest in the substitution, integral to the “renewed” liturgy, of an emphasis upon the socio-political efficacy of the Eucharistic liturgy: this in lieu of the neglected if not abandoned Catholic reliance upon sacramental efficacy.
We have referred to the absurdity of Augustine’s having supposedly permitted his understanding of the corporeality of the Head to dehistoricize the “whole Christ.” There is no doubt that by this term he designated the nuptial union of Risen Christ and the sacramentally objective historical Church, at once as historical and as eschatologically fulfilled, which he described as pervading history as such, to the point that it is the foundation of the theology of history which the West took for granted until converted to the Enlightenment’s deracination of history itself.[341] With all the Fathers, Augustine looked upon this union is simply irrevocable, as the fulfillment, taught in Eph. 5:31, of Gen 2:24: all that is said in Genesis of the union of the primordial Adam and Eve is fulfilled in this union: its identity with the New Covenant ensures its historicity.[342]
And yet, as we have seen in this same Sermo 341, ch. 12, he is explicit that the head of the Church, whether as historical or eschatological, is the heavenly Christ:
And when, as the preacher of Christ, he (Paul) was suffering from others what he had done himself as a persecutor, that I may fill up, he said, in my flesh what is lacking from the afflictions of Christ (Col. 1:24) thus showing that what he was suffering pertained to the sufferings of Christ. This cannot be understood of the Head, which now in heaven is not suffering any such thing, but the body, that is the Church, the body, which with its head is one Christ.
Tr. by Edmund Hill, O.P., ut infra,, endnote 25.
Were Augustine charged with the Eucharistic implications of this ecclesiology, he would reduce, as some of his followers did, the Eucharistic Presence of Jesus the Christ to that of the historical Church “divorced” from her Head who, as located in heaven, they thought not to be Personally, Eucharistically, immanent in history. At the same time it is evident that the historical Eucharistic body, thus viewed as ecclesiastical merely, i.e., as the bridal Church sensu negante, cannot be the term of transubstantiation, nor the body of the Eucharistic sacrifice. It is similarly clear that the body which is “offered for you” in the One Sacrifice of the Mass cannot be the identified with the Church without identifying the Church’s ‘sacrifice of praise” with the One Sacrifice that causes and institutes the Church, and by which we are redeemed.
It is not too much to describe as an absurdity the attribution to Augustine of this implicit dehistoricization of the Eucharistic Lord. It is then in point here to suggest that if the historical objectivity of the Eucharistic “Whole Christ” is to be spiritually understood, the “spiritualiter intelligete” cannot but bear upon the Body that is the Bridal Church quite as it bears upon her Head: theirs is a single, nuptially ordered, substantial Eucharistic Presence. The necessary effect ex opere operato of Jesus the Christ’s One Sacrifice is the restoration of her procession from her Head, the Bridegroom who is never apart from his Bride. Its historicity is sacramentally objective, whether we speak of the Bridegroom or the Bride; what she is, she receives from Him; her union with him must be spiritually understood in order to be understood at all. Theologians must be alert to that injunction from our Lord not to separate what God has joined together.
Is Augustine’s Eucharistic doctrine aberrant, in denial of the Eucharistic faith of the Church, as Betz and others have asserted? Insofar as his insistence upon the corporeality of the Resurrection and Jesus consequent corporeal presence at the right hand of the Father rather than in this fallen world is understood as meta-empirical i.e., as a metaphysically and historically objective absence of the Risen Christ from history, the inevitability of Jesus’ Personal absence from our fallen history could not but control Augustine’s Eucharistic theology, which would be clearly aberrant, not merely in terms of later doctrinal development, but as simply incompatible with the Eucharistic liturgy which Augustine celebrated from the time of his ordination and, thereafter, throughout his more than thirty years as the Bishop of Hippo. Augustine can hardly be held to have been unaware that he was offering in that celebration the One Sacrifice by which we are redeemed, and by which the Church is instituted. With the other Fathers, Latin and Greek, he recognized in the account of the blood and water flowing from the side of the speared Christ in Jn. 19:34 the fulfillment of Gen 2:24, a fulfillment that is liturgical in that the Church, the second Eve, is identified with her sacramental worship: viz., with the blood of the Eucharistic sacrifice and the water of baptism. We know that his writing and preaching against the major heresies of his day―Manichaean, Donatist, Pelagian―made him one of the four great Doctors of the Latin Church: from his own day down to our own his authority has only increased.
Specifically, he defended the realism of the Church’s sacramental worship by stressing, against the Donatists, the double causality of all sacramental signing. He rejected that dissociation of the Spirit from the Mission of the Son which would become a hallmark of the Reform: in a reply to an Arian contention that the Church can dispense with the Son, inasmuch as it is the Spirit who works in the Church, he replied that “The Spirit indeed does these things, but let it not be said that He does them without the Son.”[343] This statement has earlier been cited in connection with the prevailing exegesis of the descent of the Spirit upon the Apostles, as recited in Acts 2. Perhaps imbued by their training with a Reformation-inspired distaste for “early Catholicism,” Catholic exegetes have displayed little interest in the relevance of the unexamined gathering of the disciples and the Apostles, “all together in one place,” to that descent of the Spirit, although we have seen that Oscar Cullman found it not beneath his exegetical notice. Fortunately, Augustine has resolved these Eucharistic quandaries by having spoken definitively on the Sacrifice of the Mass.[344]
Christ is both the priest, offering himself, and himself the victim. He willed that the sacramental sign of this should be the daily sacrifice of the Church who, since the Church is His body and He the Head, learns to offer herself through Him.
De civitate Dei x, 20 (P.L. 41:0298); tr. Jurgens, The Early Fathers, III, at 99, §1745: cf. ibid., x, 6 (P.L. 41:0283); x, 20 ((P.L. 41:0298); x, 31 ((P.L. 41:0313); xvi, 22 ((P.L. 41:0500), xvii, 5, 5 ((P.L. 41:0535-6; 0551; xx,. 10 ((P.L. 41:0676); xx, 21, 3 ((P.L. 41:0693); xxi, 10 ((P.L. 41:0772); De Trin., 4, 13, 17.
This excerpt is taken from a chapter of The City of God contained within a section devoted inter alia to a comprehensive exposition of the meaning of sacrifice: that exposition converges upon this summary statement of the ancient liturgical tradition of the Church’s Eucharistic Sacrifice. Its clarity could not be improved upon: it offers no room for misinterpretation.[345] Neither could anyone reading it in its context account it an inadvertence, a momentary aberration, nor miss its as-of-course Eucharistic realism. For Augustine, the literal truth of the paradosis of the Eucharistic liturgy grounds all theological speculation: here he, Ambrose, and the Catholic tradition are at one.
We have seen de Lubac identify the Eucharistic sacrifice, as he has identified the Eucharistic food and drink, with the ecclesial Body of Christ, and that this paradoxical assimilation of the Body to the Head is a mainstay of Augustinian ecclesiology and Eucharistic theology. It rests finally upon their free and covenantal unity, in which the Head may speak for the Body according to that Trinitarian unity which their One Flesh images. But the metaphysical unity of the nuptial One Flesh is a standing problem for de Lubac: like Augustine, the Fathers generally and the Carolingian and medieval theologians as well, he has no conception of free substantial unity on the created level, although it is evident enough that only a substantial unity is capable of imaging the substantial Trinity, whose creative deed is the Father’s sending of the Son to give the Spirit, a Gift which terminates in the good creation, in the One Flesh, in the Beginning: our creation in Christ.
When the unity of the Head and the Body in One Flesh is not understood to be a substantial, metaphysical unity, at once nuptial, interpersonal, covenantal and free, the language of the risen Christ to Saul on the Damascus road cannot but be heard as monist, as asserting a personal identity of the Christ and the Church. That this is not how Paul heard his Lord is evident in his treatment of headship in I Cor. 11 and Eph. 5. This Christomonism is at most latent in Augustine’s thought, as in his ascription of an “una persona” unity to the Christus totus, but this inference is barred by his understanding of the nuptial bipolarity of the Christus totus.
De Lubac records the “concordismes” whereby over the seven centuryes during which the Eucharistic vocabulary of the Fathers was consolidated in such wise as to honor the great names of Ambrose, Jerome and Augustine in a harmonization which transcended the disparity of their usages of, e.g., “flesh,” “spirit,” “body.” This “concordisme,” during the Carolingian period, responded to a growing tendency toward the rationalization of the traditional signum-signatum polarity of the Words of Institution. With Paschasius, it amounted to the reassertion of a literal Eucharistic hermeneutic in which the tension between the Eucharistic and the heavenly Christ which Augustine’s phenomenological theology of the Eucharistic worship had recognized and developed was no longer in point, although the Augustinian emphasis upon the distinction between the non-experiential, non-visible presence of the body and the blood of Christ, now transfigured and manifest in glory, at the right hand of the Father, and his visible, palpably experienced presence before the Ascension, had been and remained entirely valid; its rediscovery by theologians such as de Lubac and his students witnesses to its permanent value.
However, the Augustinian stress upon the phenomenological tension between the historically invisible Eucharistic Lord and the risen Lord, visible in glory, had to give way to the apologetic need to affirm what the new “dialectic” deployed by Ratramnus, Rhabanus Maurus, Gottschalk, and perhaps John Scotus Eriugena, was putting in issue, the metaphysical identity of the historical, the risen, and the Eucharistic Lord. Under the rationalizing thrust of the “new dialectic,” Augustine’s famous injunction, “Spiritualiter intelligete,” was beginning to be understood nonhistorically, i.e., subjectively, in a sense remote from the concretely historical objectivity of Eucharistic realism. That is, the liturgical identification of the Eucharistic Christ and the Risen Lord, in which the Words of Institution were uttered and heard as a summons to faith in the Real Presence, the world-constituting redemptive Event of the Eucharistic immanence in history of the One Sacrifice of Jesus Christ the Lord. His objective sacrificial presence, realized by the words of consecration over the elements, was thereby known and proclaimed as the faith of the Church, the Mysterium fidei.
Augustine’s repeated assertions that the Christ, because a man and not a wraith, must be a visible, tangible, physical reality, whether in his fallen sarx or as risen pneuma, and so must be located, whether on earth or in Heaven, in the sense that his visible and sensible presence in one location bars his visible and sensible presence in any other, encouraged the impanationist confusion, by Berengarius, of what Eucharistic theology after him was forced methodologically to distinguish,, viz., the fallible from the infallible effects of the Eucharistic signing.[346]
Ambrose, taught by his literal reading of the Eucharistic liturgy itself, had spoken otherwise than Augustine. As well acquainted as Augustine with the figurative role of the consecrated species, he simply asserted what the Words of Institution literally assert, that the consecrated bread, the sacramental “figura” or sign of the body of Christ, in fact is identically the sacrificed body of Christ. Despite his familiarity with Origen and with the phenomenological tradition of Platonism, Ambrose’s hermeneutic anticipates that of St. Thomas in that his literal realism expresses the metaphysical truth of sacramental realism; it is perhaps less apparent that he speaks sensu aiente of the effect of the words of consecration: he does not exclude the Church from that effect, the res sacramenti of the later Augustinian sacramental analysis. As early as the ninth-century Carolingians, Augustine’s reservation of metaphysical truth to paradox was no longer easily understood by a generation fascinated by the “new logic,” whose potential for an Eleatic disintegration of reality was realized in Berengarius’ attack upon the Words of Institution.
Augustine’s phenomenological hermeneutic, on the other hand, distinguishing but not dissociating the signum from the signatum, the sacramentum from the res sacramenti, was more responsive to the veiling of the Eucharistic reality by the sign which, in veiling that veritas, by that same veiling signified it and, by that signing, caused the sacrificial Eucharistic Presence, the historical immanence, spiritualiter intellectus, of the risen Lord.
Augustine’s exploitation of this paradox of Eucharistic revelation and concealment is at one with his profound entry into Paul’s preoccupation with the fallenness of history, and the paradoxical Catholic experience in ecclesia of the presence of redemption within the desolation of a creation ruined to the point of death and disintegration by sin. The present age, like all others since his, cannot afford to ignore the genius of Augustine who, in ecclesia, knew himself to be, as had Paul, simul justus et peccator, wholly consumed by a drive toward disintegration and death, countered only by the paradoxically simultaneous gratuity of participating in the victory of Christ over sin and death: participating thus in pneuma by reason of a gratuitous solidarity with the second Adam, as well as in sarx, the product of a necessary fallen solidarity with the first Adam. We have examined elsewhere the Eucharistic unification of this disintegrating fallen self: man receives and knows his reality only in ecclesia, in sacramento, by participation in the “medicine of immortality, the remedy that we should not die.”
This radical and universal tension-in-polarity between sarx and pneuma, flesh and spirit, is the heart of Paul’s anthropology of fallen man, and is foundational also for Augustine’s. He saw there also the basis for understanding history itself. History had been dismissed as mere irrationality by the Greek wisdom, which had considered it incapable of intelligible integration. Augustine’s theology of history undercuts the foundation of that Greek pessimism, the uncritical equation of intelligibility and necessity, for he knew history to be salvific, the realm of moral freedom in such wise that the flight from history is the flight from freedom, from personal responsibility and from personal existence. The pagan pessimism had supposed salvation achievable solely by the suppression of the self, to the point of dissolution: for the pagan soteriology, self-awareness and suffering coincide: the unhappy self is an oxymoron. Augustine understood history, whether personal or universal, to be the dynamic intersection of sarx and pneuma, of the City of God and the City of Man, the contested historical realm wherein those for whom Christ died are freed by him to choose between a blessed eternity in the City of God or a damned eternity in the City of Man, a freedom that defines their fallen existence as simul justus et peccator, inextricably. As fallen, we live in the intersection, the overlap, of the City of God and the City of Man. Continually, we are drawn by the interior Magister to the unalloyed freedom of the City of God, and the same time, by our solidarity with the fallenness of Adam by our fatality, we are tempted always by the unalloyed irresponsibility of the City of Man. A choice between these poles is inescapable and, when made, always contested from within, by the innate tension between sarx and pneuma common to all of us for as long as life lasts. A moral existence, for better or for worse, is inescapable, for we are created in Christ, and cannot avoid the Light of the World: we can only turn away from it, or turn toward it: we cannot ignore it.
Augustine’s insight into history as freed by Christ and therefore as salvific is nearly forgotten today, but it was taken for granted in the Latin West for a thousand years as the foundation of a culture no longer pagan, no longer in flight from history, but living in a hope made indefeasible by the faith and worship of the Church. The Enlightenment’s rationalization of that historical optimism reduced its freedom to mere plasticity: the philosophes supposed that history possesses or can be assigned another and autonomous intelligibility. This sunny confidence in progress is generally rejected today in favor of a nihilism parading as relativism, a coldly self-aware paganism, whose consciousness is of personal irresponsibility and futility, imbued with terror and despair mitigated only by the futile flight from history via bread and circuses that specifies the new paganism as it did the old. Meanwhile, the human condition remains as posed by the Deuteronomist: life and death are placed before us, and we cannot but choose: whether we will it or not, we are free in history, and are responsible for it.
With this vindication of St. Augustine’s Eucharistic orthodoxy, and of the permanent value of its phenomenological hermeneutic, we come to the end of an apologia prompted by a misreading of St. Thomas, continually inspired by a re-reading of Henri de Lubac, and informed still by the conviction that only in the Eucharistic One Flesh may we find in our fallen history the sancta societas wherein alone, as Augustine knew, we may be truly happy, here and hereafter.
It is appropriate, in concluding this discussion, so largely devoted to his theology, that Henri Cardinal de Lubac should have the final word. Thus we close with an excerpt from two luminous pages neatly summarizing his Eucharistic doctrine, which is inseparably the doctrine of the Fathers and of the Church:
According to Paul, there is a “mystical identification” between Christ and His Church, and the reality of the Eucharistic presence is a guarantee for us of the “mystical” reality of the Church. Similarly, the latter, witnessed to everywhere in Christian belief, is also in turn a witness to the former; for the Church could not be built up and her members could not be gathered together in an organism which was really one and really alive, by means of a rite which contained only in a symbolic fashion Him whose body she was to be and who alone could be her living unity. In any case, the Eucharistic liturgy follows St. Paul’s line of thought: “. . . that we may be numbered among His members, in whose body and blood we communicate.” Let us listen for a moment to Theodore of Mopsuestia, in his second Homily on the Mass, where he is simultaneously giving a commentary on the liturgical text and the teaching of the First Epistle to the Corinthians: “When we are all fed on the same body of Our Lord, we become the one and only body of Christ,” he says. St. Leo, with his usual forcefulness and profundity, says the same, and in his words we can hear the voice of all the great Catholic Doctors: “The participation of the body and blood of Christ effects nothing short of this, that we pass over into that which we receive.” The head and the members make one single body; the Bridegroom and the Bride are “one flesh”. There are not two Christs, one personal and the other “mystical”. And there is certainly no confusion of Head with members; Christians are not the “physical” (or eucharistic) body of Christ, and the Bride is not the Bridegroom. All the distinctions are there, but they do not add up to discontinuity; the Church is not just a body, but the body of Christ; man must not separate what God has united―-therefore “let him not separate the Church from the Lord.” [347]
*
[1] See Ch. 3, endnotes 46 and 47, at p. 365 in the 1996 edition of Covenantal Theology. Boethius, in his tractate, Contra Eutychen et Nestorium, had set out the classic equation of person with intellectual substance (Persona est naturae rationalis individua substantia); a current edition and translation is provided by H. F. Stewart, E. K. Rand, and S. J. Tester, Boethius: The Theological Tractates; The Consolation of Philosophy; The Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978). Boethius’ authority established the meaning of “person” for the Middle Ages and beyond. St. Thomas accepted it as foundational, S. T. ia, 29, aa. 1-2. The Aristotelian understanding of “person” as a substantial self, a monas, was also taken for granted by Byzantine Christology from the late Middle Ages: see Volume. IV, endnotes 14 and 15 and, for the impact of this monism upon the Filioque controversy, endnote a href="Vol_IV.html#_edn715">715.
This abstract notion of “person’ as a monad exhausting the intellectual substance in which it subsists was denied Trinitarian application at Nicaea. Its Christological application was corrected at Ephesus and again at Chalcedon, but without persuading the theological community which, rather than admit Jesus’ consubstantiality with us, has continued to suppose the subject of the Incarnation to be the abstract non-human Logos of a consequently cosmologized Christology, a mistake ignored well into the twenty-first century. When “person” is concretely identified with the intellectual substance in which the person subsists, as by Boethius and the medieval theological tradition dependent upon him, the person is understood to exhaust that substance, for the identification assumes an intellectual substance to be incapable of sustaining more than a single subsistence. It must follow that the person so defined is substantially complete: “indivisum in se, divisum ab omni alio.” This imputation of substantial self-sufficiency in turn implies that the ‘person’ possesses a completely actuated intellect, having no essential potentiality, and is thus a simply immanent intelligence, incapable of transitive relations, whether ad intra or ab extra, therefore incapable of communication. Such a ‘person’ must be an intellectual monad, radically static, incapable of the free relationships constitutive of free existence. This evident corollary of the Trinitarian and Christological application of the cosmological monism is routinely ignored by Catholic theology.
The consequent radical dehistoricization of the person must conclude to the identification of the “person” with intellect, i.e.: with the nous, in the manner of Philo, whose influence upon Catholic spirituality from Clement through Origen to the Origenism of Evagrius is evident. Origen himself postulated the union (Henōsis) of the created and therefore corporeal Personal nous of Christ with the divine Logos as the implication of the communication of divine and human idioms in Jesus, i.e., by the apostolic tradition that Jesus is Lord. Later, evidently under the influence of Philo or, more generally, of the Middle and Neo-Platonic intellectual culture of Alexandria, Origen was led to posit the nuptial immediacy of the devout human soul to the divine Logos, much as Philo had. By this latter error, the human imaging of God is restricted to the supposedly immaterial soul, and thus is dehistoricized and desacramentalized by its removal from the indispensable mediation of the grace of Christ through the Eucharistic worship of the historical Church. Catholic and Orthodox monasticism have refused the dissociation of spirituality from the sacramental worship of the Church, but that isolation of spirituality from the sacramental mediation of the grace of Christ is latent in the piety which regards the soul as an image of the bridal Church or, worse, as a “bride of Christ.”
The dehistoricizing of our imaging of God can be avoided only nominally when the definition of the person in terms of substantial immanence is given its head, as by Thomas à Kempis in the Imitation of Christ (see endnote 288 infra). Only intellectual conversion to the Trinity-imaging, thus trinitarian, and therefore free intelligibility of the human substance, understood with Gen. 1 and 2 to be gratuitously constituted, i.e., created in free nuptial unity, can free systematic theology from methodologically imposing a metaphysical monism on the concrete, historical reality, viz., the free nuptial unity of the human substance, with a consequent ideological corruption of that objectively free unity and its expulsion from history by its reduction to an abstract “nature,” a ‘second substance’.
The atomizing implications of this rational disintegration of the human substance can be avoided only by a methodological conversion to the sacramental objectivity of human substantiality which, as historical rather than abstract, is its only objectivity. This requires recognizing that the only intelligible unity that is concrete and actual in history is sacramental, is nuptially ordered, and therefore is free. The rational quest for any other unity leads only to the dead ends of empiricism and idealism. Both are cosmological flights from history, driven by the Gnostic longing for the indivisible, monadic and therefore ineffable Absolute, unsullied by the presumptively irrational changes and divisions of history.
While Augustine’s assertion that the imaging of God is fulfilled in worship has inescapably sacramental implications, which Fr. Earl Muller has found to be at least implicit in the De trinitate, they remain without sufficient theological explanation and application. In consequence, the Augustinian phenomenological theology occasionally gives way to the cosmological postulate of the soul’s immediacy to God, most particularly evident in the commonplace ascription of bridal standing to the soul vis à vis the eternal Word. Even Paschasius can speak of the soul in the embrace of the Bridegroom (in his treatise On Faith, Hope and Charity, ch. iii, 14; P. L. 120:1487-90; see A History of Christian Spirituality, II: the Spirituality of the Middle Ages. New York: Desclée Co; London, Burns & Oates), at 91. Although the attribution to the soul of a bridal relation to God has long been understood, as by Origen, Bonaventure, and St. Bernard, to be but a subordinate application of the One Flesh of the New Covenant, this exegesis is entirely incompatible with the sacramental mediation of gratia Christi by personal participation in the Church’s Eucharistic worship. The immediacy of a bridal relation to the Christ is irreconcilable with the sacramental mediation of grace, and generally with existence in Christo, in ecclesia, and thus with the Catholic tradition. It is a relic of the dualist Middle Platonism from which the Christian faith in the Lord of history is a conversion.
Augustine’s interpretation of our creation to the image of God is similarly troubled by the dehistoricizing impact of the cosmological imagination, in that he considers it to be by intellect and rationality that men and women image God:
Nonnulli autem etiam hoc suspicati sunt tunc interiorem hominem factum, corpus autem hominis postea, cum sit scriptum: et finxit deus hominem de limo terrae, ut, quod dictum est: fecit, ad spiritum pertineat, quod autem: finxit, ad corpus, nec adtenderunt masculum et feminam nonnisi secundum corpus fieri potuisse, licet enim subtilissime disseratur ipsam mentem hominis, in qua factus est ad imaginem dei, quandam scilicet rationalem uitam, distribui in aeternae contemplationis ueritatem et in rerum temporalium administrationem, atque ita fieri quasi masculum et feminam illa parte consulente, hoc obtermperante: in hac tamen distributione non recte dicitur imago dei, nisi illud, quad inhaeret contemplandae incommutabili ueritati, in cuius rei figura Paulus apostolus uirum tantum dicit imaginem et gloriam dei; mulier autem, inquit, gloria uiri est. itaque quamuis hoc in duobus hominibus diuersi sexus exterius secundum corpus figuratum sit, quod etiam in una hominis interius mente intellegitur, tamen et femina, quia corpore femina est, renouatur etiam ipsa in spiritu mentis suae in agnitionem dei secundum imaginem eius, qui creauit, ubi non est masculus et femina. Sicut enim ab hac gratia renouationis et reformatione imaginis dei non separantur feminae, quamuis in sexu corporis earum aliud figuratum sit, secundum quod uir solus dicitur esse imago et gloria dei, sic et in ipsa prima conditione hominis secundum id, quod et femina homo erat, habebat utique mentem suam eandemque rationalem, secundum quam ipsa quoque facta est ad imaginem dei, sed propter unitatem conjunctionis, fecit deus inquit hominem ad imaginem dei, ac ne quisquam putaret solum spiritum hominis factum, quamuis secunduim solum spiritum fieret ad imaginem dei, fecit illum inquit, masculum et feminam fecit illos ut iam etiam corpus factum intellegatur.
De Genesi ad Litteram, xxii, 34 (P. L. 34:0294; CSEL 28, part I.) §22. 88-89).
Grillmeier assigns the patristic tradition a “two-stage” Christology: see Christian Tradition, at 115. This view of Christology entails a passage from a nonhistorical first stage, that of the “immanent Logos,” to the historical stage of the “sarx egeneto.” The passage is metaphysically forbidden by the cosmological divinity ascribed to the immanent Logos who, as thus divine, is absolute and cannot “become flesh.” Further, it is doctrinally forbidden as well, for it rests upon the false premise that the Catholic faith, and hence Catholic theology, knows a Son other than Jesus the Christ whose Personal reality is defined by the Symbol of Chalcedon as that of the “one and the same Son,” at once of the Father ab aeterno and of the Theotokos in history. Although defined at Ephesus and again at Chalcedon, this doctrine has been ignored by Catholic theology throughout the intervening fifteen centuries by reason of its incompatibility with the cosmological presuppositions which, since the twelfth century, have confused the Greek cosmological tradition with rationality as such. E.g.: in his discussion of the theological import of Chalcedon, Grillmeier observes:
. . . .whereas the mia physis formula can only express a ‘katagogic’ Christology, the Chalcedonian form is also capable of providing a basis for an ‘anagogic’ Christology. In other words, it is possible to advance from the human reality of Jesus into the depths of the divine person. At the same time, Chalcedon leaves no doubt that the one Logos is the subject of both the human and the divine predicates. We can trace quite clearly in the Chalcedonian Definition the wish of the Fathers to take the Nicene framework as their starting point: de Patre genitum secundum deitatem, in novissimis autem diebus ante saecula quidem eumdem propter nos et propter salutem nostrum ex Maria Virgine Dei genetrice secundum humanitatem. . . .In the view of Chalcedon, Christ is not just a ‘homo deifer’ or a human subject, habens deitatem, but the God-Logos, habens humanitatem, or rather, habens et deitatem et humanitatem. The Person of Christ does not first come into being from the concurrence of Godhood and manhood, or of the two natures, but is already present in the person of the pre-existent Logos. Thus the Chalcedonian picture of Christ, too, is drawn in the light of the Logos.
Grillmeier, Christian Tradition, 552-53.
See also Tertullian’s Treatise Against Praxeas. The Text edited, with an Introduction, Translation and Commentary by Ernest Evans (London: S.P.C.K., 1948), [hereafter Against Praxeas], 74, where Evans, while denying Gruillmeier’s notion that Jesus “has” rather than “is” the two substances which are united in his Person, nonetheless understands Jesus’ Person, i.e., the subject of the Incarnation, to be precisely as Grillmeier supposes, i.e., the nonhistorical, Trinity-immanent eternal divine Word who “assumes” the human substance of Jesus.
Evans’ error is consistent with Grillmeier’s “two-stage Christology” (Christian Tradition I, 115) and therefor rejects the apostolic Spirit Christology taken for granted by Tertullian: Apology, with an English Translation by T. R. Glover; col. The Loeb Classical Library (London: William Heinemann Ltd.; New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1931), [hereafter, Apologeticus]. In the Apologeticus and the De Carne Christi tertullian maintains the doctrine taught by the apostolic tradition and first four Councils, viz., that Jesus, in his Personal unity, subsists in two substances.
Chalcedon affirmed eight times that Jesus is at once a fully divine Person and a fully human Person, “one and the same Son.” "Jesus,” the Personal Name given him by the Angel before his Incarnation, invokes both his Personal primordial pre-existence, that of the Beginning, and his Incarnation-Kenōsis, his conception by the Theotokos, his becoming flesh, his Personal solidarity with our fallenness.
Tertullian’s Spirit Christology identifies the subject of the Incarnation as the primordial Jesus the Lord. This apostolic Christology is distinguished from Origen's insight into Jesus’ Personal unity as the Henōsis of hypostatic (i.e., Personal humanity and divinity in Jesus Christ the Lord) by Tertullian’s use of Persona to designate what is one in Christ, and by Origen’s failure adequately to develop the headship of Jesus over the fallen creation, The Greek equivalent of Tertullian’s “persona,” i.e., , πρόσωπον, was unknown to Origen at the time of his writing of the Peri Archon. This forced him to use ὑπόστασις instead, not only of both the divinity and the humanity who are at one in the Hen or Henōsis, but also of the their free union of the Logos and primordial Jesus, the Henōsis who is Jesus the Lord. As free, the Henōsis can only be historical, an event, and the Event can only be the primordial Mission of the Son, Jesus the Lord, whose terminus is the One Flesh of the second Adam and the second Eve.
The terminology which Origen deployed in the Peri Archon, i.e., ὑπόστασις, Έν and Ένωσις (hypostasis, Hen, Henōsis) sufficed for the hypothetical foundation of his theology of the Trinity and of the Christ, whose point d’appui is the Henōsis, the union of the Personal fullness of humanity and of divinity in Jesus the Lord, the mystery of faith, the Personal object and subject of the Church’s Eucharistic worship. It sufficed to affirm the communication of Names in Jesus the Lord, the bed rock of his Trinitarian and Christological doctrine. Unfortunately, it also invited the cosmological confusion upon which Eusebius of Caesarea relied to read a proto-Nestorianism into Origen’s entirely orthodox Christology; this became the default interpretation of the Peri Archon.
In common with the regnant theological tradition, Grillmeier ignores the fact that the dogmatic subject of the Symbol of Chalcedon is not the eternally-pre-existing and therefore “already present” immanent Son which his “two-stage” Christology supposes. Rather the Symbol is concerned solely with the historical Jesus the Christ, the “one and the same Son,” which language the Symbol borrowed from Irenaeus’ Adversus Haereses to introduce its subject, Jesus the Lord, and upon whose unum eundemque (one and the same) it levies another seven times to stress that its subject is the historical Jesus Christ the Lord. “Jesus” is the human Name of the divine Son of the Theotokos; thereby he is consubstantial with us, according to the apostolic doctrine defined at Ephesus and reaffirmed at Chalcedon. It is he, Jesus the Lord, the Christ, who is the object of the Catholic faith, the subject of the Creeds of Nicaea, I Constantinople, and of the Formula of Union taught at Ephesus, and of the Symbol of Chalcedon. The doctrinal tradition knows no other Son, no other Word, than Jesus the Lord. The italicized Latin passage in the quotation above, excerpted by Grillmeier from the Symbol of Chalcedon (de Patre genitum secundum deitatem, in novissimis autem diebus ante saecula quidem eumdem propter nos et propter salutem nostrum ex Maria Virgine Dei genetrice secundum humanitatem), is an affirmation of Jesus the Christ’s Personal divinity, and of his pre-existence, which, for Chalcedon, is that of the “one and the same Son;” a pre-existence which is historical, human and therefore primordial, as is clear in Jn. 1:1, 6:51, I Jn. 4:2; Eph. 1:3-7, 2:10; Phil. 2:5-11, and Col. 1:15-18.
On this issue of Jesus’ pre-existence, see Larry Hurtado’s massive study of early Christianity, Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Early Christianity (Grand Rapids, MI: Cambridge, UK: Eerdmans, 2003), [hereafter, Lord Jesus Christ], 118-125; 369-373. The Catholic doctrinal tradition, at once liturgical, biblical, and dogmatic, affirms the divinity of Jesus the Christ, of the historical Jesus; it knows and says nothing of a non-historical, non-human, “immanent” Logos. The Church’s historical faith and historical worship have no interest in that abstraction, nor does the historical, Eucharistically-mediated Catholic tradition have anything whatever to do with such a Logos. In brief, the Church’s worship in truth does not recognize the cosmologically-postulated pre-human subject of the ‘two-stage’ Christology, the non-historical subject of a non-historical Incarnation, the Stoic-Platonic Logos who so fascinated Arius and his affines, and too many contemporary theologians.
It is Jesus, the historical Son, the primordial second Adam, the human head of all creation, the Alpha and the Omega, the Word, the Beginning, consubstantial with the Father and with us, who is sent by the Father to give the Spirit. The Church knows no other divine Son than Jesus the Christ. This, the foundation of her worship in truth, is entirely indigestible by the cosmological rationality characterizing the bulk of Catholic theology at the beginning of the “New Millennium.”
The refusal to accept the Church’s affirmation that Jesus is the Lord had found its first expression in the docetism against which John the Evangelist wrote his First Letter; it continued in Marcionite, Gnostic, and Sabellian variants during the second and third centuries, during which the long-established Roman persecution of the Church culminated in the ten years of the Diocletian persecution, from 302-312. With Constantine the persecutions ceased but, within a few years of his accession, Arius, an Alexandrine priest, undertook to preach against the divinity of Jesus, relying upon the cosmological assumption that the divine must be a Monad. He soon found supporters. He and they were condemned by a council called by Alexander of Alexandria in 321, and by the Nicene Council in 325.
Consequent upon his denial of the divinity of the Son, whom he assimilated to the Middle Platonic Logos, as emanating from and thus subordinate to the divine Monad, Arius insisted that his less-than-divine logos had a “beginning” and thus was mutable, a creature to the extent at least that it must be said of him that “there was when he was not.” It is for this denial of the divinity and thus the eternity of Jesus the Lord that Arius was condemned. While the Council’s was called by reason of Arius’ denial of the divinity of Jesus the Lord and his consequent ascription to him of a “beginning,” that condemnation rested, as we have seen, upon the absolute unity of the Trinity and, by implication, upon the irrelevance of cosmological rationality to the faith of the Church in Jesus the Lord, which her bishops had met at Nicaea to defend.
Therefore, the affirmation at Nicaea of the Personal consubstantiality of Jesus Christ the Son with the Father was an affirmation of the consubstantiality of Jesus the Lord, not of an abstract non-human “Logos.” Precisely as Personal, Jesus’ consubstantiality with the Father cannot be dissociated from his Personal consubstantiality with each human person without a denial of his Personal unity, as the Ephesian Formula of Union and the Symbol of Chalcedon recognized, the latter repeatedly citing the “one and the same Son” doctrine taught by Ireneaus two hundred and fifty years earlier. This is the apostolic tradition, firmly in place long before it became formalized in creeds.
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Eustathius of Antioch had been a loyal ally of Athanasius at the Council of Nicaea, and remained a powerful upholder of the unqualified unity of the Trinity, the One God. His post-Nicene emphasis upon the full humanity of Jesus as well as his full divinity rested upon a his recognition, noted by Grillmeier, of his Personal unity.
In the pages following that concession, Grillmeier accepts the diophysite interpretation of Eustathius’ Christology which Theodoret of Cyr had proposed in his Eranistes, and supposes that after the Council of Nicaea Eustathius abandoned the “older tradition,” i.e., the Nicene Creed, which knew the Personal unity of the Jesus to be inherent in his Name. Eustathius’s supposed conversion to a diophysite Christology entirely at odds with the Nicene Creed assumes his belated recognition that the soul of Christ is integral with his full humanity, a discovery which is thought to have forced his rejection of the Logos-sarx Christology and his initiation of the Logos-anthrōpos Christology adopted by the School of Antioch. However, J. N. D. Kelly, Doctrines, 283, disagrees, citing Michel Spanneut, Recherches sur les écrits d’Eustathe d’Antioch: avec une édition nouvelle des fragments dogmatiques et exégétiques (Lille: Facultés catholiques, 1948) [hereafter, Recherches], pp. 114, 116, 118.
Spanneut’s study of the fragments which are all that remain of Eustathius’ Christological works is of particular interest, for the most reliable and pertinent fragments are those warranted by Theodoret of Cyr’s citation of them in his Eranistes to support his own diophysite Christology. Theodoret’s authority is such as to have persuaded most patristic scholars to accept his interpretation of Eustathius’ Christology as diophysite. However, as Kelly’s reference to Spanneut has pointed out, this interpretation is inapplicable to the identifiably pre-Nicene fragments of Eustathius’ works. The concluding paragraphs of Spanneut’s commentary on Eustathius are instructive:
Nous avons ainsi examiné l’héritage eustathien, d’après la qualité de ses témoins et la nature de son contenu. En ce travaille difficile, nous avons laissé une large part à l’hypothèse, mais c’est là le premier pas de la science. Nous nous croyons donc autorisé à présenter au lecteur l’œuvre de l’évêque d’Antioch dans une édition nouvelle.
Mieux que nos discussions de détail, elle montre la varieté de l’œuvre Eustathienne. Les écrits sont d’abord sans rapport avec l’actualité. Ils deviennent ensuite des machines de guerre contre l’héresie. Les idées, malgré le choix partial des florilèges, sont diverses, et les considérer toutes systématiquement comme coulées dans le même moule, le moule antiochien par exemple, c’est une grave erreur. Une étude approfondie de la docttrine de Eustathe doit tenir compte des différentes aspects de cette personnalité forte et vivante.
Spanneut, op. cit., 91.
Some years later Spanneut returned to this topic. After briefly surveying the literature bearing upon the current discussion of Eustathius’ Trinitarian and Christological doctrine, he proceeds to acquit Eustathius of the Sabellianism and subordinationist “physico-économique” Trinitarianism with which he has been charged by pointing to the biblical sources of Eustathius’ Trinitarian doctrine.
De plus cet usage s’appuye sur le Bible (cf. i Cor. i. 25 ou Luc i. 35), parfois soumise à une exégèse particulière. On ne peut donc en tirer qu’Eustathe vit dans le Verbe un simple attribut de Dieu unipersonnel,
“La Position théologique d’Eustathe d’Antioch,” Journal of Theological Studies ns 76 (1954), pp. 220-24, at 222.
Further:
Quelquefois même en commentant des textes bibliques qui comportent le mot Logos, il introduit l’idée de filiation. Il n’a donc aucune prévention contre cette théologie. Au contraire, l’idée de génération revient très souvent. Le Verbe du Père est Dieu, lui qui en est engendré (F. 33 ; cf F. 35), d’une génération inénarrable (F. 67; cf. F. 44). Il est manifestement Dieu par nature, engendré de Dieu (F. 35 ; cf. F. 19), authentique fils de Dieu par nature (O. x = Kl. 31, 1 = 633B) et Eustathe lui applique même les lois de l’hérédité (F. 21 ; cf. F. 44). Est-il possible de douter qu’il n’y voie ce qu’il appelle lui-même une réele théogonie ((). xxiv = Kl. 54, 5 = 663 A) ?
Ibid.
Spanneut proceeds to counter the standard indictment of Eustathius as a Sabellian. Insofar as this charge relies upon Eustathius’ assertion that “l’hypostase de la divinité est unique,” it is baseless. The sentence cited anticipates the Council of Alexandria (362), in whose Tome to the Antiochenes Athanasius recognized the legitimacy of asserting three hypostases in God as well as the Nicene assertion of a single hypostasis, for the terms had different applications, referring to the substantial unity of the Trinity on the one hand, and to the concrete distinctions of the three Members of the Trinity on the other. Spanneut notes that in the same fragment Eustathius’ sufficiently emphasizes the “dualité in singularité” as to exclude any Sabellianism in his theology. He focuses his discussion of Eustathius’ Christology upon two strategic themes:
Nous nous contenterons de deux remarques sur le Christ. La première porte sur le mécanisme de l’Incarnation, l’autre sur la nature humaine dans l’être qui résulte.
He concludes that the fragments require that Eustathius understand the Incarnation as the assumption of the man by the Word.
Pour accomplir sa mission sotériologique, fin de l’Incarnation (F. 14, 23, 43, 49), le Verbe, toujours impassible (F. 15, 30, 31, 46, 47 . . .), se bâtit un temple (F. 20 ; cf. F. 35, 44, 48); en traversant le sein maternel, il porta le membres corporels (F. 18 ; cf F. 30)1, il assuma (ἀναλαμβών) un instrument humain (F. 23) . Le terme assumer revient encore (adsumere) (F. 41; ἀναλαμβáνομαι, F. 14) et l’Incarnation aux yeux d’Eustathe est bien l’assomption d’un homme par le verbe.2
1. Ceci d’après une exégèse connue de Luc i. 35.
2. D’autres fragments se rapprochent davantage du Verbum caro factum de St. Jean, mais ils sont moins fréquents et légèrement douteux (F. 64 et 70).
Cette homme, dans le Christ est généralement mis en face du Verbe, comme sur pied d’égalité. Eustathe l’appelle sept fois l’homme du Christ, expression curieuse que la tradition n’a pas adoptée.3 Il insiste étonnament sur l’intégrité de cette natture humane et, détail tout à fait remarquable, il lui attribue explicitement une âme.
3. Seul le Sermo Major de Fide offre des expression très proches, en particulier le fameux κυριακὸς ἅνθρωπoς ἄνδρως que Msgr Lebon a cependant retrοuvé dans une œuvre de St. Athanase.
Art. cit., 223.
While recognizing that Eustathius used πρόσωπον to refer to this “man,” and noting also his tendency toward an exaggerated dualism, Spanneut insists that in his time the attribution of a not yet technical term to the integral humanity of Christ did not carry a dualist connotation:
Cependant ne donnons pas au terme πρόσωπον qu’il applique parfois à la nature humaine du Christ une valeur qu’il n’avait pas.5 Souvent en effet l’éveque d’Antioch affirme ailleurs l’unité du Sauveur. C’est le même Christ qui a deux naissances (F. 67), qui est dans le sein du Père et séjourne sur la terre (O xvii = Kl. 46, 7-8 = 652cd). Malgré son ardeur à distinguer le propre de chaque nature, il dit de notre Dieu; Quand donc fut-il élevé avec des hommes, si ce n’est lorsqu’il naquit parmi eux d’une Vierge at parmi eux vécut en enfant et grandit et but et mangea kc.? Ne va-t-il pas jusqu’à parler de divini Verbi commistio (F. 53)?
5. M. Richard, « L’introduction du mot « hypostase » dans la théologie de l’Incarnation’, dans les Mélanges de Science Religieuse (Lille, 1947) II année, pp. 5-32 et 243-70.
Ibid.
Spanneut concludes his discussion of Eustathius’ Christology with two paragraphs which reinforce his earlier summary in the Recherches:
Puisque l’insistance dualist n’apparait que dans les fragments, généralement anti-ariens, tout laisse croire que Eustathe fut amené par la polémique. Contre eux qui diminuaient tour à tour dans le Christ l’humain et le divin, il eut à montrer la perfection réciproque de l’homme et du Verbe. Eustathe, en ce sense, ne serait pas né antiochien.
Eustathe d’Antioch nous parait donc peu fondé à servir de témoin pour attester la continuité d’une tradition antiochienne. Ses idées trinitaires ne portent aucune marque spéciale. Elles sont même fortement bibliques. Sa Christologie, très affirmative sur l’unité du Sauveur, ne doit peut-être son dualisme exageré qu’aux circonstances. Mais ces affirmations, grosses de consequences, exigeraient une argumentation plus détaillé et des autres développments. Elles ont permis au moins quelques remarques, à notre sens opportunes, sur la doctrine d’Eustathe d’Antioch.
Those « qui diminuaient tour à tour dans le Christ l’humain et le divin » are the Arians; Eustathius’ assertion in opposition to them of the full humanity and the full divinity of Jesus the Christ brought him to the See of Antioch; he continued it at the Council of Nicaea with an intensity sufficient to earn the comparably focused animosity of the “two Eusebii” who, once restored to imperial favor, would see to his condemnation, deposition and exile. They knew him and condemned him for what he was, a Nicene loyalist. His insistence upon the substantial unity of the Trinity, μία οὐσία (mia ousia) was notorious, to the point of his rebuking Eusebius of Caesarea for denying the faith of Nicaea (thus Socrates, H.E 1, 23 [P.G. 67, 144], as reported by J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Creeds (New York: Longmans, 19911972), [hereafter, Creeds], at 129.
Panneut’s refusal to reduce Eustathius’ Christology to the Antiochene diophysism is repeated by Grillmeier, Christian Tradition I, 301, and by Quasten, Patrology III: The Golden Age of Patristic Literature from the Council of Nicaea to the Council of Chalcedon (Utrecht-Antwerp: Spectrum Publishers; Westminster, Md.: The Newman Press, 1960) [hereafter, Patrology III], 305.
R. P. C. Hanson, in The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God: The Arian Controversy 318-381 (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1988),[hereafter, Search] mentioning the indecision of the “ancient authorities” over the reason for Eustathius’ deposition, authorities which may be supposed to include Philostorgius and Theodoret, ut infra, also affirms what is otherwise evident, that the real motive of Eustathius’ persecutors, Eusebius of Nicomedia and Eusebius of Caesarea, was
of course his championing of the Nicene formula and his opposition to those who disliked it and the theology it seemed to represent, which is mentioned several times by historians.15
15 Socrates HE I, 23, 24 (though Socrates is quite wrong in saying here (23) that Eustathius taught three hypostases); VI.13; Sozomenus HE II.19.1; cf. Athanasius Hist. Arian. 4.
Search, 210-11.
Hanson’s identification of the motive for persecution of Eustathius is confirmed by subsequent scholarship: cf. The Oxford Dictionary of The Christian Church (2005) s.v., 579B.
Eustathius first appears in history as a confessor who suffered under Diocletian, then as the anti-Arian bishop of Beroea (Aleppo) in Syria. (Hanson, Search, 208) Shortly before the Council of Nicaea, he was appointed to the patriarchal See of Antioch by a provincial Council held in Antioch in 324 or 325. This important promotion of a well known anti-Arian bishop reinforced the opposition to Arianism in that most strategic city, and would not have occurred without imperial approval. At that time, prior to the Council of Nicaea, Ossius of Cordoba was Constantine’s theological advisor. Acting as such he convened the council in Antioch in order to select an anti-Arian successor of the deceased bishop Philogonius to the see Antioch, J. N. D. Kelly has summarized the activity of that Council:
The council held at Antioch in the early weeks of 3251 furnishes a much more overt and instructive example of synodal creed-making prior to Nicaea. This gathering of fifty-nine bishops from Palestine, Arabia, Phenicia, Coele-Syria, Cilicia and Cappadocia had Ossius of Cordoba (as H. Chadwick has shown) as chairman, and coincided with the need to fill the vacant see of Antioch. But they took advantage of their meeting together to condemn the Arian heresy and to publish a full-dress declaration of their own position. Possibly they were aware of Constantine’s determination himself to settle a controversy which was becoming a festering sore in the Church’s body, and wanted to anticipate by a fait accompli any chance there might be of the imperial decision going the wrong way.2 A synodal letter announcing their resolutions and settting our their faith in credal form was issued at the same time. It reported that three bishops—Theodotus of Laodicea, Narcissus of Neronias, and Eusebius of Caesarea―had withheld their signatures, and in consequence had been provisionally excommunicated,with an opportunity of changing their minds before the forthcoming “great and hieratic synod” to be held at Ancyra. The letter was given wide publicity, and secured the hearty approval at any rate of the bishops of Italy.
1. For the date (not 324) see H. G. Opitz, Z.N.T.W. xxxiii, 1934, 151.
2. Cf. N Baynes, Journal of Roman Studies, xviii, 1928, 219.
J. N. D. Kelly, Creeds, 208.
Ossius, while presiding over the council in Antioch which he had called primarily in order to select an anti-Arian successor to the see of Antioch, chose Eustathius of Beroea; who by that selection became the bishop of that ancient patriarchal see. The Council then drew up the credal letter.Kelly has described, an extended anti-Arian statement which entailed the excommunication of three bishops who refused to accept it, notable among them Eusebius of Caesarea, whom the Council condemned for a Trinitarian subordinationism echoing the Arian denial of the divinity of the Son.
At that time, Eusebius of Caesarea was well established as the leading scholar in Syria, at once the author of the Ecclesiastical History, and the best-informed commentator upon the works of Origen well before becoming, about 313, the bishop of Caesarea, Eusebius had inherited Origen’s library at Caesarea from the martyred Pamphilus. With this unique resource at his disposal, he made himself familiar with the works of Origen, but was unable to accept Origen’s doctrine of the eternal generation of the Son, for it contradicted his own subordinationism, and the diminished Christology which he held, in common with Arius.
The Council of Antioch had convicted Eusebius provisionally for his Arian proclivities, but left the final decision in the hands of the Council of Nicaea, which met a month or two later. There, as the patriarch of Antioch, Eustathius was one of the senior anti-Arian bishops, together with Marcellus of Ancyra, Alexander of Alexandria, Ossius of Cordoba, and Macarius of Jerusalem. Their condemnation of the Arian denial of the divinity of the Son carried the day at the Council of Nicaea, and assured its approval of the condemnation of Eusebius of Caesarea by the Council of Antioch a month or two earlier. Eustathius was particularly eloquent, at the Council of Nicaea and thereafter, in upholding its doctrine of the substantial unity, mia ousia, of the Trinity, which directly contradicted Eusebius’ subordinationist interpretation of Origen’s use of “mia ousia,” which designated the monadic unity of divinity, with a consequent rejection of the Trinity. Origen’s Trinitarian doctrine of one substance comprising three hypostases was entirely incompatible with the cosmological convictions which Eusebius held in common with Arius, to the point of denying the eternity of the Son, and thereby his divinity. At the Council of Nicaea, Eusebius continued to insist upon the subordination of the Son to the Father but failed to persuade the Council, which condemned him for his quasi-Arianism.
Nonetheless, soon restored to favor by Constantine, probably due to the influencer of Constantine’s half-sister Constantia, a convinced Arian, Eusebius and his close ally, Eusebius of Nicomedia, sought revenge upon those who had defeated them, and worse, embarrassed them at Nicaea, notably Marcellus of Ancyra and Eustathius of Antioch. Within about five years after the Council, and perhaps as early as 326, the two Eusebii convened a council at Antioch which condemned as Sabellian Eustathius’ loyalty to the Nicene definition of the substantial unity of the Trinity. The indictment was garnished with a charge of adultery, an accusation revelatory rather of the character of the bishops who judged Eustathius than that of their victim. Accepting it nonetheless as true, Constantine deposed and exiled Eustathius, who died in exile ca. 337.
According to Photius, Epitome of the Ecclesiastical History of Philostorgius. Tr. Edward Walford (London: Henry G. Bohn, York Street, Covent Garden, 1855), [hereafter, Photius, Epitome], book 2, chapter 7, Philostorgius records that Eustathius was charged with adultery at his trial. Photius’ condensation of Philostorgius’ History of the Church, which exists otherwise in fragments (see Vol. IV, endnotes 511 and 512), does not mention Eustathius’ indictment as a Sabellian heretic; neither, curiously, does Theodoret, whose countervailing account of the trial and condemnation of Eustathius exculpates him.
Secondly, it is passing odd that the Eustathians under Paulinus, who were thus designated by reason of their unflagging loyalty to Eustathius, knew nothing of his supposed departure from “the old tradition.” They knew that it was precisely for loyalty to the Nicene Creed that the Arian bishop, Eusebius of Nicomedia, and the Arian sympathizer, Eusebius of Caesarea, had condemned him as a Sabellian, and they refused to recognize the Arians appointed as his successors to the see of Antioch. Had he recanted, they would have been the first to be informed, if only by their own persecutors.
Eustathius was an opponent of Origen, whom he appears to have considered a precursor of Arius. As Bishop of Beroea he had anticipated the Nicene condemnation of Arianism and continued his unrelenting condemnation of it as the Patriarch of Antioch. He continued that opposition at the Council of Nicaea and vigorously defended the condemnation of Arius and Arianism after the Council of Nicaea closed. Condemned by an anti-Nicene conspiracy led by the two Eusebii ca. 328-330, he died in exile, probably within a year. Athanasius, on a visit to Antioch in 346, had recognized the Nicene orthodoxy of the anti-Arian, pro-Nicene “Eustathians” and when he visited Antioch again in 363, had recognized as valid the irregular consecration of their leader, Paulinus, by Lucifer of Cagliari a year earlier. Paulinus had sent two delegates to the Council of Alexandria in 362; they had both signed that Council’s Letter to the Antiochenes. The Eustathians knew nothing of any conversion of their revered Bishop Eustathius from the faith of Nicaea to an anti-Nicene diophysism. His “mia ousia” was precisely defensive of and indissociable from the Nicene Creed’s affirmation of the Personal unity of Jesus the Lord. One of the fragments embarrassing the diophysite interpretation of the remaining fragments of his Christology is his ascription of ‘Theotokos’ to our Lady; in another, he refers to the crucifixion of the Word.
On the other hand, Eustathiius’ Christology is troubled, as had been Origen’s in the Peri Archon a century earlier, Eustathius’ by the cosmological postulate of the impassibility of the divine, insisting over and again upon dissociating the Son from the redemptive suffering and death of Jesus. Only rarely does he remember the incongruity of this dissociation with the flat affirmation by Creed of Nicaea of the Church’s faith that it is Jesus who is the Lord. A century later, we find Theodoret sharing this confusion, for he too, intent upon the immutability of the Son, intended nonetheless to uphold the faith of Nicaea.
Finally it is necessary to examine the evidence adduced by Theodoret’s collection of fragments to justify Eustathius’ post-Nicene conversion to diophysism. The authenticity of those fragments has been warranted by Spanneut’s Recherches sur les écrits d’Eustathe d’Antioch and, a quarter century later, by Gérard Ettlinger’s critical edition of the Eranistes (Theodoret of Cyrus. Eranistes. Critical Text and Prolegomena (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1975) hereafter, Eranistes. In his Theodoret of Cyrus: Eranistes; col. The Fathers of the Church (Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 2003) [hereafter, Eranistes, ET] Ettlinger has provided an English translation of his critical edition of the Eranistes ut supra Ettlinger's translations of the fragments of Eustathius’ Christology preserved by Theodoret’s Eranistes appear on pp. 73-75, 139-141, and 225-229 of his Eranistes., ET. Read at the letter, they permit Theodoret’s interpretation of them as diophysite. It is their selection and their interpretation that require examination. Spanneut, in the excerpts supra, has spoken to both, and has acquitted Eustathius of the diophysism with which.he has been charged.
Theodoret’s reading of these fragments relies, in sum, upon a begging of the question. He reads his diophysism into any affirmation of the full humanity of Jesus, which reading itself relies upon his supposition that the subject of the Incarnation is the ‘immanent Logos.’ This had become a universal postulate among the Oriental theologians in the mid-fifth century when Theodoret composed the Eranistes. Early in the fourth century, Eusebius of Caesarea had persuaded all of the Oriental bishops, apart from Athanasius and Marcellus, to dismiss the ecclesial authority of the Council of Nicaea in favor of the political authority of the emperor. With the calling of I Constantinople by the pro-Nicene Emperor Theodosius, this support, indispensable to the Eusebian rationalization of the Church’s faith,, had failed, but by 448 it had produced its fruits, the stand-off between diophysism and monophysism that only the Symbol of Chalcedon would resolve.
The Eusebian imposition of subordinationism upon Origen’s theology during the half-century between the deposition of Eustathius and the First Council of Constantinople triumphed over the historical apostolic tradition. The demolition of the apostolic Christology of the Peri Archon by Eusebius after inheriting Pamphilius’ library was accepted as normative by the Oriental Patriarchies of Antioch and Jerusalem: Only Alexandria, under Athanasius, remained loyal at once to Origen and to Nicaea. Thus, apart from Alexandria, Oriental theology became Eusebian, which is to say, cosmological qua tale.
However, by the middle of the fifth century neither the Alexandrines nor the Antiochenes were able to accept the Ephesian Formula of Union, nor were they able to accept its reaffirmation by the Symbol of Chalcedon. It would have been unthinkable for Theodoret to have understood Eustathius otherwise than he did, for his sole alternative would have been to read into those fragments the monophysism which he opposed root and branch. This cosmological dismissal of the faith of Nicaea in Jesus the Lord precluded any interest in the historical question, viz., whether the fragments witnessing to the post-Nicene Christology of Eustathius of Antioch were compatible with his subscription to the Nicene Creed. Eustathius had at most five years in which to write between the Council of Nicaea and his trial, his condemnation as Sabellian, his deposition by Constantine, and the exile from which he would not return.
Grillmeier understands “sarx” (flesh) of the Logos-sarx formula to be the equivalent of “soma,” (unsouled body) on which ground he denied to Athanasius any theological recognition of the soul of Christ. “His Christ is only Logos and sarx.” (op, cit., 310) However, he does not consider that Eustathius, like Athanasius, understood “soma” as the equivalent of “sarx,” which in Jn. 1:14 as elsewhere, denotes the Personal unity of the Name, the Word, the Christ, who did not assume flesh but became flesh.
Grillmeier forgets that the subject of the Nicene Creed, the Catholic faith in the divine Trinity, rests upon and affirms the faith in the Revelation who is Jesus the Lord, not the eternally pre-existent “immanent Logos” which he regards as one of the two “natures” taken for granted by Eustathius’ supposed conversion to the Logos-anthrōpos Christology. This conversion could not but become diophysist, for the “immanent Logos,” simply as immanent, is incapable of relation to humanity. Grillmeier’s supposition that the ‘immanent Logos” is the subject of the Incarnation transposes the inexhaustible mystery of the faith into a flat contradiction in terms, incapable of supporting the quaerens intellectum inseparable from the apostolic faith that Jesus Christ is Lord.
The Nicene Creed does not attempt to explain the Mysterium fidei; it simply affirms it: Jesus is the Lord. Grillmeier labels this the “older tradition,” defined at Nicaea, from which Eustathius, according to Theodoret, is thought to have been converted to the diophysism typifying the Antiochene tradition that Theodoret defends in the Eranistes against the monophysism of Dioscorus who then, in 348, was about to call the “Robber Council” of Alexandria.
Only by rejecting that the Nicne Creed for loyalty to which he had been condemned by Eusebius of Caesarea and deposed, could Eustathius be the source of the anti-Nicene diophysite tradition. Its major defender, Diodore, whose Christology Grillmeier believes to have remained in the Logos-sarx format (op. cit., 356), was a homoiousian, a Eusebian loyal to Meletius of Antioch rather than to the faith taught at Nicaea. His naïve dehistoricization both of the “logos” and the “sarx’ of the Johannine “logos sarx egeneto” would finally issue in the denial by Nestorius of the divinity of Jesus the Christ, for which he would be condemned by the Council of Ephesus. The defense by the Council of Nicaea of the Church’s faith in the divinity of Jesus the Christ focused upon the Arian denial of his divinity by way of the ascription of a “beginning” to the Son, and the consequent assigning to him of a creaturely standing. This focus upon the most signal element of the Arian heresy, the denial of the Son’s divinity fully met the responsibility of the Conciliar fathers, which was simply to uphold the faith that Jesus Christ is Lord; their defense of his divinity did not prescind from his humanity.
Eustathius was the first to perceive the heretical corollary of the Arian denial of the divinity of the Christ: viz., the denial of his full humanity, in which the Arian “logos” became the “ruling principle,” the hegemonikon of Jesus’ humanity, displacing his human soul. Arius understood Jesus to be preserved from sin precisely by his lack of a human soul, As already noted, Grillmeyer’s supposition that Eustathius’ condemnation of the Arian monophysism and his insistence upon the full humanity of the Christ, led him to depart from the “older tradition” defended and defined at Nicaea and, following that defection, to proceed to dehistoricize the subject of the Incarnation, transforming Jesus the Christ into the “immanent Logos,” makes no sense at all. As presented by Grillmeier, it relies upon St. Thomas’ failed Christology as though it were a necessity of thought and attempts to impose it upon the patristic tradition.
Arius’ cosmologized Christology entailed as well the dehistoricization of the Logos, but the Council had not been called to deal specifically with that error. It met to defend the faith of the Church in the divinity of Jesus the Christ against Arius’ denial of his divinity, and in affirming his personal homoousions with the Father, defined the substantial unity of the Trinity. The Nicene Fathers understood Jesus the Lord to be fully human and historical, but the Council’s attention and consequently its doctrine, the Nicene Creed, affirmed what Arius had denied, the historical faith of the historical Church in the divinity of Jesus the Lord, not the divinity of a cosmological Logos. Neither the Nicene Creed nor its forebears expressed any interest in a dehistoricized Logos/Son, and it is obviously incorrect to read that interest into the Nicene definition of the consubstantiality of the Son with the Father. The Nicene Creed is not a theological statement, submitted as such to further theological scrutiny. The bishops who gathered in council at Nicaea met to meet their liturgical responsibility for the historical Church's worship in truth of the historical Jesus the Christ. The Creed they composed is foundational for all subsequent theological inquiry and thereby is open to the theological quaerens intellectum, but it is not open to debate.
Given the definition by the Council of Nicaea that Jesus the eternal Son has no beginning, it is then obvious that the opening verse of the Prologue of John’s Gospel, “In the beginning was the Word”, cannot have for its subject the “immanent Son,” the dehistoricized Logos: neither could any such liturgically-inspired assembly of bishops as constituted the First Ecumenical Council be concerned for a dehistoricized Logos. The faith they convened to defend is that Jesus is the Lord, which they had heard Arius deny.
It is unlikely that the Fathers at Nicaea had misunderstood the “in the beginning” of Jn. 1:1, thinking it to mean “from eternity,” for Arius had already insisted on the creaturely standing of the Johannine Logos, and therefore upon his having a “beginning,” and so understood Jn. 1:1. There was no room for confusion on the point, as the Conciliar rejection of the effort of Eusebius of Caesarea to induce that confusion evidences. In any case, the Nicene condemnation of Arius’ denial of the divinity of the Son, the Logos, neither depended upon nor approved the implication of the dual-stage Logos-sarx Christology which had prompted that denial in the first place; i.e., that a nonhistorical Logos who could “become flesh” had to be less than absolute. In sum, the Nicene condemnation of the Arian denial of the divinity and thus of the eternity of the Logos was not theological but doctrinal, an exercise by the bishops of their liturgical responsibility for and authority to affirm the therefore soteriological and finally doctrinal faith that Jesus is the Lord.
The Church does not teach theology. The Fathers at Nicea were there as bishops, not as theologians, and as bishops were there to uphold the historical faith of the historical Church. They and the Nicene Creed must be understood in that radically liturgical context, for a Council of bishops has no other reason for meeting and, once met, no other authority than that to which they have succeeded, the apostolic authority to confirm the faith of their brothers, and so to uphold the Church’s worship in truth of the Truth who is Jesus the Lord.
Grillmeier’s ‘two-stage” Christological analysis prresupposes in its subjects a nonhistorical subject, an eternal Logos, of a prospective incarnation who, in the second stage, becomes incarnate and consequently historical. From his first application of this analysis in his discussion of Hippolytus, Grillmeier postulates the radically dehistoricized Logos of the Thomist Christology, whose reading of the Johannine logos sarx egeneto, understands the Logos of Jn. 1:14, the subject of the Incarnation, to be not the primordial Jesus, but the “immanent Word,” who does not become flesh, i.e., personally fallen, but becomes man. Louis Bouyer agrees; see Vol. IV, endnote 15. It must here be noted that, this cosmological, ‘two-stage’ Christology was already implicit in the Eusebian rejection of the authority of the Council of Nicaea in favor of the unqualified authority of the emperor.
The Nicene definition of the consubstantiality of Jesus the Son was the first doctrinal statement of the Church’s Trinitarian faith, which had been given concrete expression in the baptismal liturgy from the outset. The Nicene Creed was a defensive statement, addressing a particular infidelity to the tradition. It provided the foundation for all further development of Trinitarian and Christological doctrine. Initially, i.e., at Nicaea, the affirmation of the consubstantiality of Jesus with the Father was understood to be indispensable to Jesus’ Personal unity as the Lord. At Ephesus and Chalcedon it would be seen to be equally indispensable to his Personal unity that he be consubstantial with the human persons for whom he died, of whom he is the Head, the Lord. This is no more than the immediate implication of his Lordship. As Jesus is consubstantial with his head, the Father, those of whom he is the head, those for whom he died, cannot but be consubstantial with him.
Jesus’ primordiality as the second or last Adam (Rom. 5:12, I Cor. 15:45: Eph. 5:), as the Alpha and the Omega (Rev. 1:8, 21: 6, 22:13), as “the Beginning” (Jn. 1.1; Col. 1:17), the Head of all creation (Col. 1:15-17), was not discussed at Nicaea, for it had not been attacked and so had not directly been put in issue. Its rejection was implicit in Arius’ denial of a human soul in Jesus, but of the Nicene Fathers only Eustathius seems to have grasped the full Christological implication of that denial. His insistence upon the full humanity of Jesus would soon come to characterize the diophysite Antiochene Christology, but Eustathius’ Christology was that of the Nicene Creed. As a senior member of the Council, he contributed to its formulation, together with the comparably senior anti-Arian bishops, Alexander of Alexandria, Ossius of Cordoba, Macarius of Jerusalem and, not least, Alexander’s secretary, the deacon Athanasius, who would soon succeed Alexander to the See of Alexandria.
For Arius, the subject of the Incarnation, i.e., of Jn. 1:14, was the emanated Logos proper to a cosmology which could admit no plurality within the divine unity and no divinity within history. For Arius’ doctrine, this cosmologized, less-than-divine Logos was in principle nonhistorical. Only as the subject of the Incarnation was the Logos historical, and this only by substituting for the intellectual soul of Jesus who, thus monophysitically constituted, could be neither divine nor human. However, the Nicene Fathers were chiefly intent upon affirming what they heard Arius to deny, viz., the divinity of the Son who is Jesus the Lord, but upon whose full divinity their defense of the faith was focused, for it is this which Arius denied. The Arian critique of the divinity of Christ rested upon the postulated reduction of the ‘immanent Son” to the cosmologized Logos, whether Stoic or Platonic a divine emanation from the monadic divinity. As an emanation, the Logos is subordinate to his divine source as a matter of definition. He must then be less than his source, and consequently can not be identified with the Monad who is alone divine.
The Nicene definition of the consubstantiality of the Son with his Father was a flat rejection of this Middle- or Neoplatonic subordinationism. The Council affirmed that which is cosmologically impossible, viz., the absolute unity of the divine substance, and the unqualified full divinity of the Son, the Joannine Logos. whose divinity was again challenged on the same subordinationist grounds within two or three years after Nicaea by the “two Eusebii,” of Caesarea and of Nicomedia. .
The abstract divinity of the Son, and his consequent absolute standing, his immunity to historicity, had taken for granted by the development of a “two stage” Christology which inherent in the Middle Platonism sources of the theological vocabulary in the second century whose dehistoricization of the “Logos,” whether Stoic or Platonic, was rejected only by men of genius such as Justin, Theophilus, Athenagoras, Tertullian, Hippolytus, and Origen. It was taken for granted by the rest of the learned class, which accounts, at least in part, for the triumph of the Eusebian condemnation of the Nicene Creed throughout most of the fourth century. Thereafter, and particularly from the death of Athanasius (373), the last great Oriental bishop to refuse to negotiate the apostolic tradition, down to the Council of Chalcedon (451), the relation of the “immanent Son” to his humanity, whether diophysite or monophysite, became the single issue facing and dividing orthodox Oriental theologians.
Whether formulated as “Logos-sarx” or “Logos-anthrōpos,” the impossible relation of the nonhistorical Logos to history was presupposed by the contrapuntal cosmological theological analyses of the Incarnation dividing the Oriental theologians prior to Chalcedon. Rooted in the eclectic Middle Platonism of the second and third century Orient, the dehistoricization of the Mission of the Son forced an impossible choice between putting in issue the Personal unity of the Christ by the assertion of his full humanity, and putting in issue the historicity of the Christ by denying his full humanity. When it is taken for granted that the non-historical Logos, the ‘immanent Son,’ is the subject of the Incarnation, this dilemma is inevitable; in fact, the basic task of Christology is now widely understood to be the discovery of the prior possibility of the Incarnation, rather than the methodologically-controlled exploration of the historical implications of this Event, at once the Christian Revelation of the Mysterium fidei, and the celebration of the Eucharistic Sacrifice.
The inevitable result of this “two stage Christology,” invoking a transitus of the Logos from eternity to history, was and remains a Christological dualism, an inability to accept the Personal unity of Jesus the Christ. It is the commonplace of the contemporary Christology, whether of the East or of the West, that Jesus is either a human or a divine Person, despite his defined subsistence in the human substance, and despite his defined Personal consubstantiality with every human being who subsists in that substance, which is created in him as its head.
This pseudo-theological cosmologizing of the Son cannot be ascribed to the Fathers at Nicaea: they were there to uphold the Church’s faith in Jesus the Christ, the Logos of Jn. 1:14; Alois Grillmeier’s notion of a Logos “habens et deitatem et humanitatem” can be maintained only if, with Chalcedon, he were to identify the subject of this habens et deitatem et humanitatem with the historical Person of Jesus the Christ, “subsistens et in deitate et in humanitate,” which cannot be said of the ‘immanent Son” whom Grillmeier confuses with the subject of the Incarnation. It is he, Jesus, “subsistens et in deitate et in humanitate,” who is the subject of the Kenōsis of Phil. 2:6-7, and who is the “Logos,” the subject of the Prologue of the Gospel of John, and thus of Jn. 1:1 and 1:14, and I Jn. 4:2: see Vol. IV, endnote 23.
[2] The nuptial imaging of the Triune God, and consequently the nuptial substantiality of humanity, has been given magisterial standing by John Paul II; its explicit affirmation appears in the "Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Collaboration of Men and Women in the Church and in the World," published over the Pope’s signature by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith on July 31, 2004, §§ 5-8; see endnotes 247, 286, and 308 and, in Vol. IV, endnotes 36 and 320, for its further discussion.
Karl Rahner, in The Trinity; tr. Joseph Donceel, S.J. (New York: Herder and Herder, 1970) has condemned as “tritheism” the traditional ascription to the Trinity of three divine Persons in the sense of the three distinct divine Selves, the three distinct Self-consciousnesses, the three objectively distinct intellectual Supposits, or Subsistences, or Persons whose perichoresis constitutes the free unity of the Trinity. Rahner finds it incomprehensible that, e.g., the Son might pray to the Father, or that we may pray to the Father through the Son in the unity of the Holy Spirit. Rahner’s a priori identification of the unity of a self, whether human or divine, with the unity of an intellectual substance, has as its corollary his imputation of tritheism to those who understand the Persons of the Trinity to be distinct Selves. Under his postulated monism of substance, he could not avoid equating an assertion of three Trinitarian Selves with a “tritheist” assertion of three divine substances. Whether Rahner’s metaphysics has a ground in the metaphysics of St. Thomas is discussible, but it has no foundation in the apostolic tradition.
The Trinity is a translation of a section of a work which Rahner published in the latter 1960s: “Der dreifaltige Gott als transzendenter Urgrund der Heilsgeschichte,” Mysterium Salutis, Grundriss heilsgeschichtlicher Dogmatik, edited by Johannes Feiner and Magnus Löhrer, v. 2, Die Heilsgeschichte vor Christus, ch. 5 (Einsiedeln, Benziger Verlag, 1967). During the remaining fourteen years of his life, Rahner offered no correction of the text of The Trinity, which has been very widely distributed in the Unites States as well as in other Anglophone countries. Commentaries on it have been uniformly respectful and, despite its radical rejection of defined sacramental and Trinitarian, Christological, and sacramental doctrine, it has never been subjected to ecclesial censure. Its influence is difficult to assess; now, more than thirty years after his death in 1984, fewer theologians rely upon his work than did at the height of his influence during and immediately following Vatican II. Nonetheless, he has had a profound impact upon the understanding of professedly Catholic theologians of their position in and responsibility for the Church. His normalization of doctrinal dissent is now theirs. John Paul II famously observed that dissent is only dissent, but spoke rather too late; Rahner had already succeeded in making it the default stance of contemporary theologians. In this, he was notably assisted by the Thomist rejection of the doctrinal tradition taught by the four Great Councils of Nicaea, I Constantinople, Ephesus and Chalcedon. St. Thomas dehistoricized the Mission of the Son. He dehistoricized the subject and the text of Jn. 1:14; and consequently was unable to accept the definition at Ephesus that Mary is the Theotokos, the Mother of Jesus who is God. His metaphysical monism contradicted the consubstantiality of Jesus with us, taught at Ephesus and Chalcedon, and finally, having dehistoricized the Incarnation, could not accept the doctrine of Irenaeus, confirmed over and again at Chalcedon, that Jesus is “one and the same Son. His Trinitarian doctrine is either subordinationist or modalist, and his dehistoricization of Jesus the Lord leaves him hovering between a Monarchianism modalism and an alternative subordinationism.
Rahner’s modalism thus has distinguished antecedents. In an early work, Joseph Ratzinger pointed to the acceptance by St. Thomas of a notion of the “Personal God” which has a markedly Monarchian character:
Ad primum ergo dicendum quod, quia in divinis idem est quo est et quod est, quidquid eorum quae attribuuntur Deo in abstracto secundum se consideretur, aliis circumscriptis, erit aliquid subsistens: et per consequens persona, cum sit in natura intellectuali. Sic igitur nunc, positis proprietatibus personalibus in Deo, dicitur tres personas: ita, exclusis per intellectum proprietatibus personalibus, remanebit in considerationa nostra natura divina ut subsistens, et ut persona. Et per hunc modem potest intelligi quod assumat naturam humanae ratione suae subsistentiae vel personalitatis.
S. T. iiia, q. 3, a. 3, ad 1.
Commenting on this passage, Ratzinger observed:
The turn brought about by Thomas through the separation of the doctrine of the one God and the theological doctrine of the Trinity was more incisive. It led Thomas to consider the formula “God is one Person” legitimate, although it had been considered heretical in the early Church: see S. T. iiia, q. 3, a. 3, ad 1.
Joseph Ratzinger, “Concerning the Notion of Person in Theology,” Communio 17/3 (Fall, 1990) 439-54; n. 12, at 454.
An editor of the Marietta edition of the Summa Theologiae (1948) appends the following note to the text, quoted supra, to which Ratzinger refers.
6. Ea sententia communis est inter thomistas, ait Billuart, quia agnoscunt in Deo subsistentium communem et absolutam, per quae constituuntur personae.
This note is intelligible only with the supposition that the divine Personal subsistences in the mono-Personal God, as presented supra in S. T. iiia, q. 3, a. 3, ad 1, and thereafter approved by Billuart for the Thomists, do not include the Father, whom Thomas identifies with the divine substance from whom the Son and the Spirit are emanations and in whom they subsist. The alternative implications of this supposition, ineluctably either subordinationist or modalist, are discussed in Vol. IV, endnotes 11 and 641.
Another instance of quasi-modalism, due rather to an uncritically monist use of metaphysical language than to any modalist persuasion, is provided by John Henry Cardinal Newman:
No one is to be called a Theist, who does not believe in a Personal God, whatever difficulty there may be in defining the word "Personal." Now it is the belief of Catholics about the Supreme Being, that this essential characteristic of His Nature is reiterated in three distinct ways or modes; so that the Almighty God, instead of being One Person only, which is the teaching of Natural Religion, has Three Personalities, and is at once, according as we view Him in the one or the other of them, The Father, the Son and the Spirit―a Divine Three, who bear toward Each Other the several relations which those names indicate, and are in that respect distinct from Each Other, and in that alone.
This is the teaching of the Athanasian Creed; viz. that the One Personal God, who is not a logical or physical unity, but a Living Monas, more really one even than an individual man is one―He ("unus" not "unum" because of the inseparability of His Nature and Personality),―He at once is Father, is Son, is Holy Ghost, Each of whom is that One Personal God in the fullness of His Being and Attributes; so that the Father is all that is meant by the word "God," as if we knew nothing of Son, or of Spirit; and in like manner the Son and the Spirit are Each by Himself all that is meant by the word, as if the Other Two were unknown; moreover, that by the word "God" is meant nothing over and above what is meant by "the Father," or by "the Son," or by "the Holy Ghost;" and that the Father is in no sense the Son, nor the Son the Holy Ghost, nor the Holy Ghost the Father. Such is the prerogative of the Divine Infinitude, that the One and Single Personal Being, the Almighty God, is really Three, while He is absolutely One.
J. H. Newman, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, with an introduction by Étienne Gilson (Garden City, N.Y., Doubleday, Image Books, 1955), pp. 111-112.
This excerpt from the Grammar of Assent cannot represent the whole of Newman’s subtle witness to the Church's Trinitarian faith. However, the Sabellian thrust of the first paragraph of the excerpted Trinitarian statement is evident: it speaks of Almighty God as a “Him” who possesses three “Personalities;” more, “we view Him in one or another of them.” There is no intimation in this language that the Trinity is a community of Persons: the only unity possessed by the Father, the Son and the Spirit is that which they have as modalities of the divine Substance, the divine Self or “Monas.” The second paragraph is similarly defective by reason of its identification of the Divine Substance―understood by Newman as the Personal “Monas”―with each of the Persons in such wise as to make each Person to be the Absolute, “the One Personal God.” In this context, the doctrine of the divine Missions becomes unintelligible, since the Missions presuppose the Trinitarian Community of Persons. In short, the introductory clause, “whatever difficulty there may be in defining the word "Personal"” renders merely nominal the orthodoxy of the concluding assertion “that the Father is in no sense the Son, nor the Son the Holy Ghost, nor the Holy Ghost the Father.”
There is a corroborative passage in Newman’s The New Eve:
But surely when He became man, He brought home to us His incommunicable attributes with a distinctiveness, which precluded the possibility of our lowering Him merely by exalting a creature. He alone has an entrance into our soul, reads our secret thoughts, speaks to our heart, applies to us spiritual pardon and strength. On Him we solely depend. He alone is our inward life: He not only regenerates us, but (to use the words appropriated to a higher mystery) “semper gignit:” ”He is ever renewing our new birth” and our heavenly sonship. In this sense He may be called, as in nature, so in grace, our real Father.
The New Eve; edited by Patrick Radcliffe (Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1952), [hereafter, The New Eve], at 49. (emphasis added). This small book (96 pp.), a compilation of excerpts from Newman’s works, was published with the approval of the Fathers of the Birmingham Oratory. It contains no language other than Newman’s except when he is quoting one of the Fathers.
This Christological statement can be understood only of the “Monas,” the divine substantial Self “who became man:” Newman accepts this near-universal misreading of Jn. 1:14 as though said, not of the primordial Son of Man, Jesus the Christ (Phil. 2:5-11), but of the eternal or “immanent” Son. Thus read, it defies discussion. Surely it is preferable simply to affirm that each Divine Person possesses, by reason of his unique subsistence in the Trinity and by reason of his unique relation of Personal consubstantiality to the other Persons, the fullness of the divinity whose source is the Father, the Head, the Archē, of the divine Trinitarian Substance, but only by reason of the Father’s Personal subsistence in it as its Head. Neither the Father, nor the Son whom he begets eternally, nor the Spirit who is the eternally subsistent Love of the Father and the Son, can be identified with the Trinitarian Community, the divine Substance, which is constituted by their perichoresis, their dynamic subsistence, their free Personal intercommunion, within the Trinity which they constitute.
Cardinal Newman’s identification of each Person with the Divine Substance bars the identification of each of the Persons with one of the three Subsistent Relations who constitute the Trinity: i.e., Who, in their substantial Unity, are the Triune God. This is shown by the impossibility of identifying the Father, the Son, or the Spirit, with the Trinity, or with Each Other. In short, the Divine Substance is not “a Personal Monas,” but the Trinitarian Community. This cannot be said of any of the Divine Persons, none of whom is the divine Trinitarian substance, and none of whom is a divine Monad, a “Personal Monas.”
Newman's Trinitarian mistake arises out of his typically Western point d’appui. The Athanasian Creed is generally accepted as a Latin composition of the fifth or sixth century. It stresses the unity of the Godhead, as opposed to the prior emphasis of the Greeks and Syrians upon the distinction of Persons. This latter starting point, which sees in the Father the Archē of the Son, and through the Son, of the Spirit, makes the Monarchian mistake unlikely for an Oriental, although Theodore of Mopsuestia presents an exception to the rule, as earlier had Paul of Samosata.
A more recent instance of latent Monarchianism is found in W. F. Albright's classic, From the Stone Age to Christianity:
There is still only one God, as in Israel, but the acute danger of polytheism is over and He appears in three complementary hypostases. In one hypostasis He has drawn even closer to man than Yahweh could in earliest Israel, when He was still father and brother and kindred to his own (see above, p. 246). In another hypostasis He is the eternal Creator and Lord of the universe, as He was to Deutero-Isaiah. In still another He is the Holy Spirit, alternately conceived as the Divine Wisdom or as the Paraclete.
From the Stone Age to Christianity: Monotheism and the Historical Process. Second Edition with a Νew Introduction (New York: Doubleday; col. Anchor Book A100, 1957) at 394.
In this passage, Albright, like St. Thomas and Newman, uses metaphysical terminology quite uncritically; thereby envisaging the One God as having the unity of one Person, viz., the "He" who from this viewpoint appears variously hypostasized as Father, Son, and Spirit. Albright, by identifying the substantial, Tri-Personal, unity of God with the unity of one Person, accepts Rahner’s monism of substance and, like Rahner, cannot avoid a modalist understanding of the relation of the One God (i.e., God understood as possessing the unity of a monadic Self who, as absolute intellectual subsistence, lacking all relation, cannot be a Person, but only an immanent Self) to the divine Hypostases whom, since Chalcedon, the doctrinal tradition has named Persons (personae, prosōpa). On the vexed point of the Personal “naming” of the One God as the Father, see the Appendix (1996 edition). 670-676.
At about the same time, Karl Barth, in an early volume of the Church Dogmatics, wrote in an idiom reminiscent of Newman’s:
God is He who is, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Creator, Reconciler and Redeemer, supreme, the One true Lord. He is known in His entirety, or He is not known at all.
Church Dogmatics, II: The Doctrine of God, I (first half-volume) (Edinburgh, T & T Clark, 1957) at 51.
This language is even more clearly monarchian than Newman’s, equivalent to St. Thomas’ clear identification of the divine Substance with the divine Person but, unlike St. Thomas, without any ad cautelam with respect to the prior separation of his philosophical development of the Personal unity of One God from the Catholic doctrine of the Trinity. In fact, Barth invokes a prior knowledge of the Trinity in support of any knowledge whatever of the Personal Unity of God, declaring the latter unknowable apart from the former, which is certainly accurate: apart from its revelation in Christ, the Triune God is inconceivable. Further, Barth has here in view the reaffirmation of his well known rejection of any supposedly ‘natural’ knowledge of God, and consequently of any ‘natural theology,’ although something closely resembling natural theology creeps into Barth’s association of the divine substance with a “He.” However it is otherwise clear that for Barth, the Trinity is not a transcendent Person comprised by other Persons.
Rahner’s Trinitarian doctrine is so clearly modalist as to put his own orthodoxy in issue, although theologians of rank are in basic agreement with it. For example, eighteen years after The Trinity was published, Stanley Jaki, whose academic qualifications are comparably stellar in theology and the history of science, agreed with Rahner’s denial of the subjectivity of the Trinitarian “Persons.” With reference to the Moslem emphasis upon the absolute unity of God, Stanley Jaki has written:
For that “purism,” the Christian doctrine of the Trinity was a cryptic form of polytheism to be exterminated from the face of the earth. The classic Christian answer (which insists on the One God in three Persons, while denying separate personal or “psychological” consciousness to Persons defined as relationes substistentes and begs Muslims to correct their misperceptions) is too well known to be developed here.
Stanley L. Jaki, O.S.B., The Savior of Science (Washington: Regnery Gateway, 1988) at 72.
Jaki’s conviction that the denial of “separate personal or “psychological” consciousness” to the Trinitarian Persons is the “classic Christian answer” is underwritten by perhaps the majority of contemporary Catholic theologians, for the orthodoxy of Rahner’s statement of his theology of the Trinity was not seriously questioned when Jaki wrote, nor has it been since. Rahner’s Christology and Trinitarian theology have of course been challenged by theologians who even ascribe to them the names of classical heresies, i.e., adoptionism, modalism. However, Rahner’s persistence in his views is accounted less a failure in orthodoxy than in theology. The consequence is that subscription to Rahner’s Trinitarian theology passes without reproof although it entails, quite evidently, a Nestorian Christology and a modalist interpretation of Trinitarian doctrine.
A certain fastidiousness akin to a Lutheran subjectivism has entered the theological conversation of late: “heresy” is being read to impute personal sin as well as doctrinal error in the theologian, with the corollary that “orthodoxy” is taken to impute personal virtue as well as doctrinal authenticity. In such an atmosphere, it is understandable that both words are avoided. However, following Rahner’s well-known article ("What is Heresy?" Theological Investigations.V, 468-512), wherein his rejection of sacramental realism is apparent in a sola fide distrust of the capacity of history to mediate the doctrinal tradition with a clarity sufficient to permit one to speak either of heresy or orthodoxy, a similar disdain for doctrinal orthodoxy is apparent in much current Catholic theological publication. Nonetheless, the sacramental realism of Catholic worship is the liturgical-historical mediation of the “whole Christ.” The refusal of that mediation is a refusal to participate in that worship. The theological imputation of heresy, as of orthodoxy, is academic and abstract, not moral: it bears directly upon theologies, not upon theologians. A theologian may easily fall into material heresy without being for that a formal heretic. However, as John Paul II has reminded us, “dissent is only dissent.” Whether it be consequent upon or coincident with an open departure from the Church’s worship, or betoken a merely nominal participation in its sacramental realism or, more commonly, only an inadequate comprehension of one or another element of that tradition, dissent as a matter of definition can have no foundation in the historical Church’s liturgical mediation of the Truth. Apart from personal participation in that concretely historical and mediation of the truth of the faith, neither doctrine nor theology can exist: to this the fragmentation of the fides quaerens intellectum, whether of the Protestant Reform or of the dissent now current among Catholic theologians, bears sufficient witness.
It is in any case not really possible, pace St. Thomas, to prescind from the divine Processions and retain a Personal God. A Monas is locked in essential immanence, and therefore cannot be in free relation to other selves as persons must be, simply in order to be recognized, to be named. Prayer to a divine Monas is an absurdity: even pagan worship of the nonhistorical, cosmological divinity requires a personal deity, one who can be named as the pre-condition of being worshiped: this condition inexorably demands community in god, and pagan worship therefore must construct a pantheon. But the Church’s Trinitarian prayer is liturgical and therefore at once Personal and historical, totally dependent upon the Father’s Mission of the Son to give the Spirit: a prayer then to the Father, through the Son whom he has sent, in the Holy Spirit poured out upon the Church, that she may worship the Truth in truth.
When, with Rahner (in The Trinity), one identifies “person” insofar as a self, in the sense of a “center of subjectivity”, with intellectual substance rather than with subsistence in an intellectual substance, and so refuses to see in the divine Persons distinct “centers of subjectivity” because of the supposedly tritheistic consequences of that expression of the Church’s Trinitarian faith, it must follow that the divine Substance―God as One God―must be a center of subjectivity,” a substantial “Self” in Rahner’s language, a “Monas” in Newman’s, a “He” in Albright’s idiom. It then becomes impossible to understand, for example, how the Son is sufficiently distinct from the Father to be able to obey the Father, or sufficiently distinct from the Spirit as to name him “another Paraclete,” without recourse to a Nestorianism in which it is Jesus simply as a man who is obedient, not Jesus as the Incarnate eternal Son who is identically, “one and the same,” the eternal Son of the Father and the historical Son of Mary, Jesus the Lord, the Person at once divine and human who is the object of the Church’s faith.
Clearly, even with this recourse to a Nestorian Jesus, Rahner leaves the giving of the Spirit unaccounted for, since the Holy Spirit’s historical Mission is not a human Mission: the Spirit’s historicity is that of the one Son’s One Sacrifice, whereby the Spirit is poured out upon the bridal Church. Similarly unaccountable is the Son’s salvific obedience to his Mission from the Father: the Symbol of Chalcedon insists over and again that it is Jesus who is the Son, "one and the same," the eternal Son of the Father and the historical Son of Mary: One Son―only thus is Mary the Theotokos. Rahner, following St. Thomas, does not accept the Chalcedonian affirmations that Jesus is the One and the same Son, at once the human Son of Mary and the divine Son of the Father, one Son.
A final instance of a cosmological influence, subordinationist in its orientation and reducible to a modalism, is provided by the learned Oratorian, Fr. Louis Bouyer. Like Rahner, he supposes the divine Essence to be monadic, and to be identified with the Father. It is not necessary to dwell on the modalism inseparable from this monist interpretation of the One God as a monadic essence, in contrast to the perichoresis of the Father, the Son and the Spirit. In a translation approved by the author, we read:
There can however be in God nothing which is not his essence and eternal existence, an essence and existence that can be considered the very nature of the Father, who transmits it consubstantially to the Son and the Spirit. And the Spirit is this transmission.
Cosmos: The World and the Glory of God. (Petersham, MA: St. Bede's Publications, 1988), at 191.
The impact of this identification of the Father with “his essence” upon the theological interpretation of homoousios, whether as affirmed in the Nicene Creed, the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, the Ephesian Formula of Union, or in the Symbol of Chalcedon, is evident. Within the Catholic doctrinal tradition, “homoousios” is said of Trinitarian Persons with respect to the other Trinitarian Persons: e.g., the homoousios of the Son is with the Father, not with the divine Essence which, concretely, is the Trinity. The doctrinal tradition understands each Trinitarian Person to be divine by reason of his unique, i.e., Personal, subsistence in the divine Substance, whereby he possesses the fullness of divinity and is consubstantial with the other two Persons but always as Named, for, each of the Names, the Persons, possesses uniquely the fullness of divinity by reason of his subsistence in the Trinity. This is true of the Father as well as of the Son and of the Spirit who proceeds from the Father through the Son. This order of Trinitarian Naming was first taught by Athenagoras of Athens, as will be seen, but it was integral with the Church’s liturgy from the outset.
The Father possesses the fullness of divinity, which is to say, of Personal subsistence in the divine substance. He subsists in the divine substance as its Head, as the Source (Archē), of the free, uncreated and eternal unity of the Trinity: The Father does not transcend the Trinitarian substance simply because, simply as consubstantial with the Son and the Spirit, he subsists in the divine substance as a member of the Trinity, not as constituting it. The heart of the mystery of the Trinity is that its cause, its source, does not transcend the Trinity, but is a member of it.
However Fr. Bouyer’ understanding of the homoousion of the Son and the Spirit is less than clear for, once the identity of the Father with the divine substance is affirmed, the Son’s consubstantiality with the Father must be substantial if it is Personal, i.e., with the Father whom Fr. Bouyer understands to constitute the divine essence. Fr. Bouyer clearly distinguishes the Father and the Son, but his identification of the Father with the divine essence or substance imposes a choice between subordinating the essence which the Son receives from the Father as a distinct because qualified divine essence, and accepting the distinct full divinity of the Son’s essence, with a consequent doctrine of “two Gods.”
Bouyer’s Trinitarian doctrine is nominally orthodox: i.e., he affirms the consubstantiality of the Son and the Spirit. However his attribution of the divine essence to the nature of the Father is not orthodox, for it implies a substantial rather than a Personal notion of consubstantiality: the essence or divine substance of the Father which the Son and the Spirit receive from the Father. Bouyer’s language here lacks a necessary precision. According to the Catholic tradition the Father’s possession of the divine nature is Personal: he possesses it relatively to the Son who proceeds from him, and to the Spirit who proceeds from him through the Son, in such wise that his reality, his Person, that of the Head, cannot be separated from his begetting of the Son and his outpouring of the Spirit through the Son.
The final sentence of the excerpt supra, viz., “And the Spirit is this transmission” is similarly unfortunate inasmuch as it identifies the Spirit with an operation, to the detriment of his standing as a Person consubstantial with the Father and with the Son, and so as a constitutive Member of the Trinity. This is consonant with the binitarian doctrine of Hilary of Poitiers (De Trin., VIII, 19ff.) and puts in issue Bouyer’s interpretation of the Nicene homoousios for the same reasons.
For a treatment of the associated issue of the “Naming” of the One God, see Covenantal Theology. Revised edition (1996), 670-676: “Image and Analogy: The Naming of God and Man.” It suffices here to observe that prayer to the Trinity, the One God, can only be Trinitarian, to the Father, through the Son, in the Spirit. When this is forgotten, our prayer invokes a Monas, not the Trinity.
[3] Over fifty years ago, in Church Dogmatics III/1, ed. G. Bromiley and T. Torrance; tr. J. W. Edwards, O. Bussey, Harold Knight (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 1961), at 183-206, esp. 197-8, Karl Barth surveyed the history of the accepted exegesis of Gen. 1:27, and rejected it in favor of the scriptural linkage of creation of man as male and female to the creation of man to the image and likeness of God.
In the second of his weekly catecheses, given at General Audience on September 26, 1979, Pope John Paul incorporated in his “theology of the body” a particular emphasis upon the Genesis doctrine of marriage as the primordial covenant of God with man:
Answering the question of the unity and indissolubility of marriage, Christ referred to what was written about marriage in Genesis. In our two preceding reflections we analyzed both the so-called Elohist text (Gen. 1) and the Yahwist one (Gen. 2). Today we wish to draw some conclusions from these analyses.
When Christ referred to the “beginning,” he asked his questioners to go beyond, in a certain sense, the boundary which in Genesis passes between the state of original innocence and that of sinfullness, which started with the original fall.
Symbolically, this boundary can be linked with the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which in the Yahwist text delimits two diametrically opposed situations: the situation of original innocence and that of original sin. These situations have a specific dimension in man, in his inner self, in his knowledge, conscience, choice and decision. All this is in relation to God the Creator who, in the Yahwist text (Gen. 2 and 3) is at the same time the God of the covenant, of the most ancient covenant of the Creator with his creature, man.
Then, on the next page of the same catechesis (33):
According to Chapter 19 of Matthew, when Christ referred to the “beginning,” by this expression he did not indicate merely the state of original innocence as the lost horizon of human existence in history. To the words which he uttered with his own lips, we have the right to attribute at the same time the whole eloquence of the mystery of redemption. Already in the Yahwist texts of Genesis 2 and 3, we are witnesses of when man, male and female, after breaking the original covenant with the Creator, received the first promise of redemption in the words of the Proto Gospel of Genesis 3:15 7 and begin to live in the theological perspective of the redemption.
7. Already the Greek translation of the Old Testament, the Septuagint, which goes back to about the second century B.C., interprets Genesis 3:15 in the Messianic sense, applying the masculine pronoun autós in reference to the Greek neuter noun sperma (semen in the Vulgate). The Judaic tradition continues this interpretation.
Christian exegesis, beginning with St. Irenaeus (Adv. Haer. iii, 23, 7), sees this text as the“proto-gospel,” which announces the victory won by Jesus Christ over Satan. In the last few centuries scripture scholars have interpreted this pericope differently, and some of them challenge the Messianic interpretation in recent times. However, there has been a return to it under a rather different aspect. The Yahwist author unites prehistory with the history of Israel, which reaches its peak in the Messianic dynasty of David, which will fulfill the promises of Genesis 3:15 (cf. 2 Sam 7:12).
The New Testament illustrated the fulfillment of the promise in the same Messianic perspective: Jesus is the Messiah, descendant of David (cf. Rom. 12:; 2 Tim. 2:8), born of woman (cf. Gal. 4:4), a new Adam-David (cf. I Cor. 15), who must reign “until he has put all his enemies under his feet” (I Cor. 15:25). Finally Revelation 12:1-10 presents the final fulfillment of the prophecy of Genesis 3:15. While not being a clear and direct announcement of Jesus as Messiah of Israel, it leads to him, however, through the royal and Messianic tradition that unites the Old and the New Testament.
John Paul II, The Theology of the Body: Human love in the divine plan. With a foreword by John S. Grabowski, Ph.D. (Boston: Pauline Books and Media, 1997), 32, 33. Cf. pp, 142-46 of Michael Waldstein’s fine new edition of the 135 catecheses comprising John Paul II’s ‘theology of the body:’ John Paul II: Man and Woman He Created Them. A Theology of the Body. Translation, Introduction and Index (Boston: Pauline Books and Media, 2006) [hereafter, Man and Woman].
It should be noticed that the Pope here identifies original sin in Gen. 3 with the breach of the primordial covenant that is the “one flesh” of marriage, the free substantial unity of the good creation, offered to the first Adam and Eve, and rejected by them. Prof. Joyce A. Little has profoundly developed this theme in an unpublished monograph, The Patrick Papers. The further discussion of the significance of the “theology of the body,” developed by John Paul II throughout his pontificate is diffused throughout this Appendix; see also Vol. I, Chapter Two, endnotes 173 and 174.
Pope John Paul II first taught the nuptially-ordered covenantal integrity of the primordially good creation in the nuptial image of God in a series of weekly catecheses beginning in the autumn of 1979, at the end of the first year of his pontificate, and concluding, after some interruptions, five years later, in November, 1984. The first of these catecheses were collected and published in pamphlet form as The Original Unity of man and Woman: Catechesis on the Book of Genesis (New York: St. Paul Books and Media, 1981). The same material is now available as the first section of Part One of Theology of the Body, 25-102, esp. 45ff. Earlier in the same work the Pope had identified this primordial creation in the nuptial image of God, in innocence, naked and unashamed, with the primordial Covenant, broken by the original sin: see Theology of the Body, 51-54 et passim; Man and Woman, 169-170, et passim.
[4] Heiko Obermann, Harvest of Medieval Theology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963).
[5] Johann Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages: A study of the forces of life, thought, and art in France and the Netherlands in the XIV and XV centuries (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1956).
[6] Henri de Lubac, Corpus mysticum: L'Eucharistie et l'Église au moyen âge. Étude historique; 2e édition, revue et augmentée; col. Théologie 3 (Paris: Aubier, Éditions Montaigne, 1949), at 33, note 66. De Lubac devotes the pages following to an introduction of this theme, central to this, his master work. “Unitas corporis” is an expression of some complexity, for it quite properly refers to two distinct realities, indissociable from each other. Insofar as it is referred simply to the Church, it refers to the intrinsic free unity which she, as the bridal body of Jesus the Christ, receives from her head. This is her personal unity, that by which she is free to be in nuptial union with her Head as the second Eve who is One Flesh with the second Adam. More concretely, it refers to that nuptial union, in and by which alone the Church exists and is freely one Church. Insofar as “unitas corporis” is used by the Fathers and the Carolingians, the later analytical distinction between the unity of the Church and the unity of her nuptial union with her Lord is without theological interest. The Fathers understand “unitas corporis” phenomenologically, as expressing personally salvific participation in that free unity, which participation is liturgical. It is only in that participation, in that experience of free unity in ecclesia, that the dichotomies of fallen existence are transcended and resolved. Our recognition that our personal existence is simul justus et peccator is the produce of a graced personal integration, not of our fallen disintegration.
After Berengarius, theological approaches to the “unitas corporis” began to be analytical and, under the destructive impact of Berengarius’ deployment of the “new logic,” actually the ancient binary logic of the Eleatics (Parmenides, Zeno) which reduced intelligibility to the absolute unity which can have no historical realization, the Church’s freedom and unity began to be rationalized, and thereby were inevitably seen to exclude each other. In this context, freedom is sacrificed to a rationally necessary unity. Because our fallen history has no unity other than that which is sacramental, the quest for it, as driven by the “new logic,” is always a flight from the sacramental significance of history. The historicity of the Church is her liturgy, her sacramental worship in truth of the free Truth that is Christ. Her historicity as free is therefore sacramental, possessing an efficacious significance which is not pragmatic, not empirically verifiable, but is nonetheless concretely visible in the lives of those who participate in her historical worship of her Lord, the risen Christ.
[7] Henri de Lubac’s major exegetical works are: Corpus mysticum, ut supra, Histoire et ésprit: L'intelligence de l'Écriture d'après Origène; col. Théologie 16 (Paris: Aubier, Éditions Montaigne, 1950), and Exégèse médiévale; les quatres sens de l'Écriture, I-IV; col. Théologie 41 (vol. I and II), 42, & 59 (Paris: Aubier, Éditions Montaigne, 1959, 1961, 1964); the first two volumes of Exégèse médiévale are now in English translation; see endnote 35, infra.
[8] De Lubac, Corpus mysticum, 190ff.
[9] The two early passages in which St. Thomas speaks of the Church as the Eucharistic res tantum are as follows:
Tertio est eo quod est res tantum, quod est Corpus Christi mysticum.
in iv Sent., d. 9, a. 3, ad 1. (Moos, 377.) All quotations of St. Thomas’ Commentary on the Sentences are taken from the Scriptum super Libros Sententiarum Magistri Petri Lombardi, recognovit et iterum edidit R.P. Maria Fabianus Moos, O.P. (Paris: Lethielleux, 1947), iv.
Praeterea, in specie panis significatur totum id quod est res tantum sine sacramento, scilicet unitas corporis mystici, et similiter in vinis, ut ex dictis 8.d, (6) patet.
in iv Sent., d. 10, a. 2, ad 2, sed contra. (Moos,407).
In so writing, St. Thomas follows Peter Lombard’s “Res et non sacramentum, mystica ejus caro;” see de Lubac’s commentary on this text in Corpus mysticum, 197, n. 44, quoted in endnote 92, infra. However, an ambiguity was already present for, in his mention in the second passage of “ex dictis (6) id patet”, St. Thomas refers to a passage in which he has already spoken of the Eucharistic res tantum in language corresponding to “effectus huius sacramenti” in a sense difficult to identify with the Church. In his Comm. in iv Sent., at the end of Distinctio 8, in the concluding Expositio textus―a theological explanation of the language of the Mass itself―St. Thomas had already spoken of the effects of the Eucharist; there we read:
286: Illa autem pars quae perfectionem sacramenti continet, in tres dividitur, secundum tria quae sunt de integritate huius sacramenti, scilicent aliquid quod est sacramentum tantum, aliquid quod est res et sacramentum; aliquid quod est res tantum.
In prima ergo parte continetur benedictio oblata, materiae quae est tantum sacramentum; in secundo, corporis et sanguinis Christi consecratio, quod est res et sacramentum, ibi: “Quam oblationem”; in tertio, effectus sacramenti postulatio quod est res tantum, ibi: “Supra quae propitio, etc.” (editor’s emphases)
Moos, 356.
[10] The text from Peter Lombard’s Sentences upon which St. Thomas’ comment bears should be before us:
1. Si autem quaeritur de accidentibus quae remanent, id est, de speciebus et sapore et pondere, in quo subjecto fundentur, potius mihi videtur fatendum existere sine subjecto, quam esse in subjecto, quia ibi non est substantia, nisi corporis et sanguinis dominici, quae non afficitur illis accidentibus. Non enim corpus Christi talem habet in se formam, sed qualis in judicio apparebit. Remanent ergo illa accidentia per se subsistentia ad mysterii ritum, ad gustus fideique suffragium; quibus corpus Christi habens formam et naturam suam tegitur.
De fractione et partitione
2. Solet etiam quaeri de fractione et partitione quae ibi videtur fieri, utrum vera sit; et si ibi vera fractio est, cujus rei sit, vel in qua re fiat. Cumque non sit ibi alia substantia quam Christi, si in aliqua substantia est illa fractio, in corpore Christi videtur esse. Sed e contra, cum ipsum corpus incorruptibile sit (quia immortale et impassibile), in ipso non posse esse videtur. Nam et Christus redarguit carnalem sensum discipulorum, qui putabant carnem Christi sicut aliam in partes dividendam, et morsibus dilacerandam. Ideo quibusdam placet quod non sit ibi fractio sicut videtur; sed dicitur frangi, quia videtur frangi. Quibus objicitur quod ait Ambros.: Nihil falsi putandum est in sacrificio veritatis; vel sicut fit in magorum praestigiis, ubi delusione quadam falluntur oculi, ut videant esse quod non est. Ad hoc illi dicunt: Non fallit nos visus, nec fallitur; quod esset, si crederetur ita frangi, ut videtur. Nec illusio est, quia ad utilitatem fidei, non ad deceptionem. ita fit; sicut et Christus se ostendit duobus discipulis in via in specie peregrini; nec in eo tamen talis forma erat, sed oculi eorum tenebantur ne eum agnoscerent.
Aliorum opinio.
3. Alii vero dicunt quod sicut ibi species panis est, et non est ibi res cujus vel in qua sit illa species; ita est ibi fractio quae non fit in aliqua re, quia nihil ibi frangitur; quod mirabiliter Dei potentia fieri dicunt, ut ibi sit fractio, ubi nihil frangitur.
Aliorum opinio.
4. Alii tradunt corpus Christi essentialiter frangi et dividi, et tamen integrum et incorruptibile existere. Quod se colligere asserunt ex confessione Berengarii, qui confessus est coram Nicolao papa et pluribus episcopis panem et vinum quae in altari ponuntur, post consecrationem non solum sacramentum, sed etiam verum corpus et sanguinem Christi esse; et sensualiter non solum sub sacramento, sed in veritate manibus sacerdotum tractari et frangi, et fidelium dentibus atteri.
Sententia probabilior.
5. Sed quia corpus Christi incorruptibile est, sane dici potest fractio illa et partitio non in substantia corporis, sed in forma panis sacramentaliter fieri, ut vera fractio et partitio sit ibi, quae fit non in substantia corporis, sed in sacramento, id est, specie. Ne autem mireris vel insultes si accidentia videantur frangi, cum ibi sint sine subjecto; licet quidam asserant ea fundari in aere. Est ibi vera fractio et partitio, quae fit in pane, id est, in forma panis. Unde Apostolus ait, 1 Cor. 16: Panis quem frangimus, quia forma panis ibi frangitur, et in partes dividitur, Christus vero integer manet, et totus est in singulis. Unde Aug., in sermone de Verbis Evangelii: Quando Christus manducatur, vita manducatur. Sed quis audeat manducare Dominum suum? et tamen Veritas invitans nos ad manducandum ait, Joan. 6: Qui manducat me, vivit propter me. Nec occiditur Christus ut manducetur, sed mortuos vivificat; quando manducatur, reficit, non deficit; vivit manducatus, quia surrexit occisus; nec quando manducamus, partes de illo facimus, et quidem in sacramento sic fit. Item, de Consecr., dist. 2: Norunt fideles quomodo manducent carnem Christi; unusquisque accipit partem suam: unde et ipsa gratia partes vocantur. Per partes manducatur, et manet integer totus; per partes manducatur in sacramento, et manet integer totus in coelo, manet integer totus in corde tuo. Ideo ista dicuntur sacramenta, quia in eis aliud videtur, et aliud intelligitur: videtur panis et calix, quod et oculi renuntiant; quod autem fides instruenda postulat, panis est corpus Christi, calix est sanguis. Ex his datur intelligi quod fractio et partes quae ibi videntur fieri, in sacramento fiunt, id est, in specie visibili. Ideoque illa Berengarii verba ita distinguenda sunt, ut sensualiter non modo in sacramento, sed in veritate dicatur corpus Christi tractari manibus sacerdotum; frangi vero et atteri dentibus, vere quidem, sed in sacramento tantum. Vera ergo est ibi attritio et partitio; sed in singulis partibus totus est Christus. Unde Hieron., in sermone quodam, et habetur de Consecr., dist. 2, c. Singuli accipiunt: Singuli accipiunt Christum Dominum, et in singulis portionibus totus est; nec per singulas minuitur, sed integrum se praebet in singulis. Item Hilarius: Ubi pars est corporis, ibi est et totum.
IV Sent., Dist. XII, Ubi Illa Accidentia Fundentur. (P. L. 192:0865-66).
[11] Th. Camelot emphasizes the same point as that stressed by St. Augustine:
De même que le sacramentum de l’Écritures lui fait apercevoir, au delà de la lettre des psaumes, le Christ et son Église, rassemblée dans l’unité : hujus rei sacramentum, id est unitatis corporis et sanguinis Christi, in dominica mensa praeparatur et de mensa dominca sumitur ; res vero ipsa, cujus sacramentum est, omni homini ad vitam. (In Joh. Tr. XXVI, 15 ; P .L. XXXV, 1614). La res de ce sacrement, c’est le corps du Christ, qui est l’Église, c’est l’unité de l’Église : hoc quod videtis, sacramentum est unitatis.
Th. Camelot, O.P., « Réalisme et symbolisme dans la doctrine eucharistique de S. Augustin, » Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques 31 (1947) 394-410 at 405. The full text of Camelot’s invaluable article appears in this volume as Appendix III
It must always be kept in view that the res sacramenti of the Eucharist, which for Augustine is “hujus rei sacramentum, id est unitatis corporis et sanguinis Christ” is not the Church simply, but the unity of the Church, which is hers by her union in one flesh with Jesus Christ, her head and, as head, the source of her free unity, as he is the source of the free unity of all creation, of which he is the head through his headship of the Church. As de Lubac and Camelot have emphasized, the Latin Fathers understood the Church’s unity anagogically, i.e., as the final effect of the Eucharistic sacrifice, the res sacramenti in its plenitude, as fully achieved by the Eucharistic signing, the Eucharistic representation, of the One Sacrifice. The medieval paradigm, in distinguishing between this ultimate reality as the infallible effect of the sacramental signing, and our free and therefore fallible participation by it in the Kingdom of God, did not at all intend the isolation of the Church from the sacramental signing, the Eucharistic sacrifice, upon which the Church, and the redeemed creation, wholly depends.
[12] It must be stressed that the “sancta societate inhaereamus Deo” of De civitate. Dei x, 6 can be only the nuptial unity instituted by the One Sacrifice: the New Covenant, the union in One Flesh of the second Adam and second Eve who are thereby inseparable, in history as also in its anagogical fulfillment. More often than not, as de Lubac has noted (Corpus mysticum, at 23), the patristic focus is upon the ecclesial aspect of this union, but the irrevocability of the Church’s union with her Lord is never in issue: “there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by whom we must be saved” (Acts 4:12). The Church proceeds forever from her Lord, her head, the second Eve from the second Adam. As he is “ancient, yet forever new,” in Augustine’s famous phrase, so also is the Church, as his glory.
[13] Corpus mysticum, 190ff. The patristic Eucharistic theology stressed at once the res sacramenti that is the unity of the Church, most often as in her eschatological fulfillment, and that virtus sacramenti, scarcely distinct from the res sacramenti, which is understood as the sacramental efficacy whereby the communicant’s Eucharistic unity with the Church effects his free unity with the risen Lord. As de Lubac has stressed from the outset of Corpus mysticum, there is here no departure from Eucharistic realism. For example, at 80-81, ibid., he describes the “Ecclesial Body” in terms which are clearly applicable only to the fulfilled Kingdom of God, the absolutely final effect of all Eucharistic signing, the eschatological res tantum that is quite distinct from the communicant’s sacramental and therefore historical union with the risen Lord, which effect we have seen St. Thomas describe as “effectus huius sacramenti.” Nonetheless, this distinction is not a dehistoricization of the Church. De Lubac never dissociates the Church from her Eucharistic cause and ground in history. Thus, in this very dense text, which merits a close study, de Lubac points to the patristic linkage of the Eucharistic fractio panis to the “breaking,” i.e., the revelation, of the meaning of Scripture at Emmaus, as well as to the Gospel accounts of the multiplication of loaves and of course to Eucharistic Communion: these are inseparable in patristic theology.
[14] Again, the passage from Peter Lombard’s Sentences should be at hand:
4. Nunc quid ibi sacramentum sit, et quid res, videamus. Sacramentum est invisibilis gratiae visibilis forma. Forma ergo panis et vini quae ibi videtur, est sacramentum, id est, signum sacrae rei; quia praeter speciem quam ingerit sensibus, aliquid aliud facit in cognitionem venire. Tenent ergo species vocabula rerum quae ante fuerunt, scilicet, panis et vini. Hujus autem sacramenti gemina est res: una, scilicet, contenta et significata; altera significata et non contenta. Res contenta et significata est caro Christi, quam de Virgine traxit, et sanguis quem pro nobis fudit. Res autem significata et non contenta est unitas Ecclesiae in praedestinatis, vocatis, justificatis, et glorificatis. Haec est duplex, caro Christi, et sanguis. Unde Hieron., comment. ad cap. 1 Epist. ad Ephes.: Dupliciter, inquit, intelligitur caro Christi et sanguis ejus: vel illa quae crucifixa est et sepulta, et sanguis qui militis lancea effusus est; vel illa spiritualis ac divina, de qua ipse ait, Joan. 6: Caro mea vere est cibus, et sanguis meus vere est potus, et: Nisi manducaveritis carnem meam, et biberitis meum sanguinem, non habebitis vitam in vobis. Sunt ergo hic tria distinguenda: unum, quod tantum est sacramentum; alterum, quod est sacramentum et res; et tertium, quod est res et non sacramentum. Sacramentum et non res, est species visibilis panis et vini; sacramentum et res, caro Christi propria et sanguis; res et non sacramentum, mystica ejus caro. Porro illa species visibilis, sacramentum est geminae rei; quia utramque rem significat, et utriusque rei similitudinem gerit expressam. Nam sicut panis prae caeteris cibis corpus reficit et sustentat, et vinum hominem laetificat atque inebriat, sic caro Christi interiorem hominem plus caeteris gratiis spiritualiter reficit et saginat. Unde, ps. 22: Calix meus inebrians, quam praeclarus est! Habet etiam similitudinem cum re mystica, quae est unitas fidelium: quia sicut et multis granis conficitur unus panis, et ex pluribus acinis vinum in unum confluit, sic ex multis fidelium personis unitas ecclesiastica constat. Unde Apostolus, 1 Cor. 10: Unus panis et unum corpus multi sumus, etc. Unde Aug., de Blasph. Spiritus sancti: Unus panis et unum corpus Ecclesia dicitur, pro eo quod sicut unus panis ex multis granis, et unum corpus ex multis membris componitur, sic Ecclesia ex multis fidelibus caritate copulante connectitur. Hoc mysterium pacis et unitatis nostrae Christus in sua mensa consecravit: qui accipit hoc mysterium unitatis, et non tenet vinculum pacis, non accipit hoc mysterium pro se, sed contra se. Cujus etiam sacramentum est corpus Christi proprium de Virgine sumptum; quia ut corpus Christi ex multis membris purissimis et immaculatis constat, ita societas ecclesiastica ex multis personis a criminali macula liberis consistit. In cujus rei typo facta est arca Domini de lignis sethim, quae sunt imputribilia, et albae spinae similia.
IV Sent., Dist. VIII, 4: De Sacramento et Re (P.L. 192:0857-58: emphasis added).
[15] In Corpus mysticum:, at 123, de Lubac notes that by the middle of the thirteenth century “Corpus Christi mysticum,” is said of the Church, united to Christ by a “bond of charity;” the Church is by then habitually distinguished from the “Corpus Christi verum,” which term refers to the body of the sacrificing and sacrificed Christ, present on the altar under the species of bread and wine. “The bond of charity” is a rather weak expression of the nuptial relation of Christ and the Church in the One Flesh of Eph. 5:31; it hardly evokes the New Covenant constituted precisely in and by the inter-personal free unity of their One Flesh. Nonetheless, it does preserve the covenantal freedom of that union; the organic unity of a physical body is not effected by bonds of charity.
[16] Corpus mysticum, 128, note 64. The Latin texts of the two passages cited there are as follows:
Corpus Christi verum figurativum corporis mystici –
S. T. iiia q. 82, a. 9, 2.
Significat etiam quasi rem ultimam, Corpus Christi mysticum, scilicet Ecclesiam, qua propter distinctionem officiorum habet similitudinem cum toto corpore ratione distinctionis membrorum.
In IV Sent., d. 8, q. 2, a.1, ad 4, 3. (Moos, 335)
Thomas here does no more than repeat a tradition summarized in Peter Lombard’s Sentences: see Corpus mysticum, 117-119. It is evident in this passage as elsewhere that St. Thomas did not recognize the bridal reality of the Corpus mysticum; his account of the unity of the ecclesial body echoes the language of Paul in Rom., 12:4 and I Cor. 12:21. rather than that of I Cor. 11:3 and Eph. 5:23. The failure to recognize the bridal significance of the Church as inseparable from the Real Presence of the Bridegroom who as her head is inseparable from her as her source, tends to the depersonalization of both. The Real Presence begins to be that of the impersonal corporeality of the Christ, which is seen to bear some metaphorical similarity to the Church and in this sense only to “signify” her.
[17] The expression “unitas corporis Christi,” like “unitas Ecclesiae,” is ambiguous in that at the letter it can refer simply to the intrinsic unity of the Church, the ecclesial body, and also can refer to the nuptial unity of the One Flesh of Christ and the Church, a unity which the patristic tradition insisted on speaking of as the unity of a body or, in the alternative, as often with Augustine, of a Person: the Christus totus, integer. De Lubac, in Corpus mysticum at 202, approves Gerhoh of Reichersberg’s identification of the Eucharistic food as the Christus integer, but notes that Gerhoh elsewhere uses Christus integer in the Personal rather than the nuptial sense, without giving any reason for supposing that he does not so use it here. It may be added that this confusion is rather widespread.
In fact, “unitas corporis Christi” always invoked the Christ-Church union of Head and Body, even if the union is understood, as by St. Thomas, not as nuptial but as physical and organic. In the ninth century, nothing in the patristic tradition prevented Amalarius from speaking of the “three bodies” as though it were a Pauline usage, although Paul’s invocation of Gen. 2:24 and Eph. 5:31 should have barred the way. For the Fathers, the unitas corporis was the res sacramenti as joined to the virtus sacramenti, the final goal of all Eucharistic worship, thus of worship as such: viz., personal union with the risen Christ in his Kingdom, i.e., in the Church as eschatologically fulfilled. This union is historically given, by worthy participation in the Church’s worship: the Fathers knew no Eucharistic effect that would not be ecclesial, a gift given historically in ecclesia, therefore sacramentally, in signo.
It should be noted that de Lubac is well aware that the “triforme corpus” of Amalarius is not a development of the “Christus in Scripturis dictus tribus modis” prefacing Augustine’s Sermo 341, 1. In Corpus mysticus, at 145, he quotes a passage in which Ambrose distinguishes the physical body of Christ from the Eucharistic body and from the ecclesial body, as a more appropriate source of Amalarius’ notion of the “three bodies” of Christ. Augustine’s association of visibility with corporeality did not entail a denial of the physical presence of Christ in the Eucharist, but he could not term it corporeal, which for him meant empirical, in principle available to the senses, and therefore it was not applicable to the sacraments. Rather, he spoke of the Eucharistic Real Presence as “spiritual,” by which term, once more, he did not mean immaterial, but invisible: i.e., not empirical, but no less objective for that. De Lubac points out that Augustine’s followers were less clear on the point (at 177). It is not without interest that Rupert of Deutz, whom de Lubac names in this connection, was accused, as Berengarius had been, of holding an impanationist doctrine: see Vol. I, Chapter 6, endnote 45.
[18] Augustine confirms the identity of the ecclesial body with the bride:
You to whom I am speaking, you are the members of Christ. Who has given birth to you? I hear the voice of your heart: it is the Mother Church, this holy, honored Church who, like Mary, gives birth and is virgin. She gives birth to nations, but they are the members of one alone, of him of whom she is the body and the spouse.
Sermo Denis 5, c. 8 (Misc. Agost. 1:163), quoted by de Lubac, The Motherhood of the Church, followed by Particular Churches in the Universal Church and An Interview Conducted by Gwendoline Jarczyk; tr. Sr. Sergia Englund, O.C.D. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1982) at 57.
De Lubac quotes Paschasius to the same effect:
. . . les “tria vocabula corporis” ne lui voilaient pas “l’unum corpus” Il devait y renvenir quelques années plus tard, vers 851, en commentant le chapitre xxvi de saint Matthieu. “Ut manifestius cognoscant quod est unitas corporis,” dira t’il alors et, “qui vult vivere in unitate corporis, haec tria unam sentiat esse corpus.”
Corpus mysticum, at 41. An extended excerpt from the Latin text of Paschasius’ Expositio in Euangelium Matthei, XII appears in endnote 213, infra.
Augustine states clearly the free conjunction of Head and Body in the nuptial unity of the Christus totus:
This is the whole Christ, head and body, one formed from many . . . whether the head or members speak, it is Christ who speaks. He speaks in his role as the head (ex persona capitis) and in his role as body (ex persona corporis). What does this mean? "The two will become one flesh. This is a great mystery, and I am applying it to Christ and the Church."240 And the Lord himself says in the Gospel: "So they are no longer two, but one flesh."241 They are, in fact, two different persons, yet they are one in the conjugal union, . . . as head, he calls himself the bridegroom, as body, he calls himself "bride."
240 Eph 5.31-32
241 Mt 19.6
St. Augustine, En. in Ps. 74:4; (P.L. 36:948-949); tr. Catechism of the Catholic Church, §796.
Augustine’s supposition that it is Christ who speaks for the “conjugal union” in one flesh both as head (ex persona capitis) and as body (ex persona corporis),to the suppression of any voice for the Church, leads to a rather odd dialectic. The Bridegroom as head can hardly be his own head qua bride. This language induces a confusion of the consubstantiality that is proper to the members of the nuptial union, with the communication of idioms that is proper to the union of divine and human natures in the Person of one and the same Son. This confusion will trouble de Lubac, as will be seen, and not only him.
In the last passage quoted supra, Augustine stresses the irreducible distinction between the two persons, i.e., of the Head and the Body, the Bridegroom and the Bride, who in their nuptial union constitute the Christus totus. At the same time, in reliance upon the revelation of their unity in Paul’s vision of the risen Lord, who announced himself as “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting” (Acts 9:4-5; cf. 22:8, 26:15), Augustine stresses equally the unity of the Whole Christ, revealed in the risen Lord’s identification of himself with his bridal Church. In a number of places, he refers to this latter unity, that of the Whole Christ, as that of “one person.” This is obviously at odds with his clear assertion of the personal distinction between the Bridegroom and the Bride. The resolution of this paradox requires recognition of the free substantial unity of the One Flesh of Christ and the Church, as the New Covenant, the New Creation, that images the free substantial unity of the Father, Son and Spirit. Augustine intimates this substantial unity in a number of places, but it does not reach an explicit expression in his work: the tension between the two unities, the one hypostatic or personal, the other free, covenantal, and substantial, remains. In his century, the Nicene definition of the Personal homoousion of the Son with the Father was still not clearly understood to entail the Son’s Personal humanity, and thus to require the free unity of the human substance, as created in the image of the Trinity, although Tertullian had affirmed it in the Apologeticus. This doctrinal development waited upon the recognition of the Son’s consubstantiality with every human person as taught in the Ephesian Formula of Union and the Symbol of Chalcedon. The distinction between Jesus’ Personal unity as Lord and head, and the free tri-personal substantial unity of the head, body, and covenant that is the “whole Christ,” could hardly be more clearly stated than by Augustine, famously:
And as they are bridegroom and bride, so also are they head and body: because the man is the head of the woman. Whether therefore I say head and body, or bridegroom and bride, you are to understand the same thing. That is why the same apostle, while he was still Saul, heard: Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me? (Acts 9:4), for the body is joined to the head in their One Flesh.
Augustine, Sermo 341, 12.
It should also be noticed that in the same sermon, in saying “Whether head or members speak, it is Christ who speaks,” Augustine makes it clear that the head as Bridegroom is not a member of the bridal body, as the Fathers, in reliance upon I Cor. 12:21, often understood him to be. It is well to recall here that in I Cor. 11:3 “head” denotes the source at once of a glory, and of a free substantial community, whether it be the Trinity, the Eucharistic One Flesh, its marital image, or the nuptially-ordered good creation whose Archē is the Eucharistic Lord of history.
[19] Corpus mysticum, at 98: there the confection-transubstantiation of the Eucharistic elements is asserted to be eo ipso the confection of the Church, simultaneously. It must follow that the Church is within the res et sacramentum of the later sacramental language: i.e., within the res sacramenti, the infallible effect of the sacramental signing, which can only be the One Flesh of the corpus verum (the Real Presence) and the Corpus Christi mysticum, the bridal ecclesial Body infallibly proceeding from and irrevocably joined to her Head in nuptial union. Quite evidently the reference to confection-transubstantiation concerns the worship of the historical Church, not a dehistoricized res tantum; thus it bears upon the res gemina; see also Corpus mysticum at 197. Elsewhere, at 232, de Lubac cites the observation of Gilbert of Nogent that the Eucharistic chalice contains all the grace of the New Covenant. In fact of course, its consecration is the institution of the New Covenant “in his blood,” as is evident from the formula of consecration uttered over the chalice: “Hic est enim calix sanguinis mei, novi et aeterni testamenti …”
[20] Ibid., at 28ff., de Lubac cites early patristic sources witnessing to their understanding of unitas corporis, unitas ecclesiae as having its source in the Eucharist, the sacramentum unitatis. Elsewhere in Corpus mysticum (e.g., at 69 and 282) and in Catholicism: A study of dogma in relation to the corporate destiny of mankind (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1958), at 28 et passim, de Lubac finds in this free unity, in the Augustinian Christus totus, the One Flesh, the basis for the communication of idioms by which it can truly be said that “Christus translatus est in ecclesiam.” However, the Christ may be said to have been “translatus est in ecclesiam” only as the Head, the Bridegroom of the Church, not as in the personal identity with the second Eve which the communication of idioms between them would require. De Lubac’s application of the communication of idioms to the union between the Christ and the bridal Church requires a literal reading of their unity as that of “una persona,” which would make nonsense of their free, covenantal interrelation as Bridegroom and Bride. In Sermo 341, Augustine has Jesus the Head speaking sometimes as the Church and sometimes as himself, but the subject of Sermo 341 is always Jesus the Lord.
In brief, the communication of idioms is personal, not covenantal: it cannot explain what de Lubac, in his application of it to the nuptial union of Christ and the Church, wishes to explain, for the freedom by which “Christus translatus est in ecclesiam:” looks to Christ’s headship of their “One Flesh,” and therefore their personal consubstantiality, for the head and members subsist in the same substance as a matter of definition. The Event of the communication of idioms is radically Eucharistic, the celebration of the One Sacrifice by which Jesus the Christ fulfills his mission by the Father in that outpouring of the Gift of the Holy Spirit which redeems the fallen world by the institution of the New Covenant. This in turn implies and requires the Eucharistic prime analogate of historical objectivity and truth for which this work has argued, and which has effectively governed de Lubac’s exegetical studies from his first and still classic statement of his theology in Catholicism, as it has governed his Corpus mysticum and his Exégèse médiévale, works whose commitment to and development of the free unity of the four senses of Scripture is a recognition of their Eucharistic unity: that of sacramentum tantum, res et sacramentum, res tantum, wherein the exegetical corollary of the res et sacramentum, as res gemina, is the free inseparability of the doctrinal (allegorical) from the moral (tropological)senses.
Nonetheless, in applying the communication of idioms to the unity of Christ and the Church in One Flesh, de Lubac assumes that unity to be analogous to the Personal union of human and divine natures in Christ, whereas in fact it is covenantal, a mutual free fidelity of bridegroom and bride, irreducibly distinct hypostases whose unity is their imaging of the Trinitarian perichoresis. To repeat: de Lubac’s application of the communication of idioms to “Christus translatus est in ecclesia” relies finally upon the reduction of the One Flesh to One Person, language which, however time-honored, asserts what is impossible, for: the Bridegroom is irreducible to his bridal Church, as she is not assimilable to her Lord: their union is a free fidelity, not a merger of two persons into one.
[21] See Vol. I, Chapter Two, esp. endnotes 56 and 157. In critical retrospect, it must be recognized that these endnotes, intent upon the historicity of the Christ as the foundation of the communication of idioms, also mistakenly insist, as de Lubac had done, but as had not been noticed heretofore by the present writer, upon its covenantal character, to the point of supposing the communication of idioms to be constitutive, not of the Person who is Jesus the Christ, but rather of his free, substantial union in One Flesh with the Church. As is pointed out in endnote 20, supra, the attribution of the communication of idioms to the One Flesh is without foundation. The Personal union of the fullness of humanity and divinity in Jesus the Lord has no analogue in the covenantal union of Christ and the Church in One Flesh.
[22] This translation of the Migne text of Sermo 341, 1 & 11-13, is for the most part taken from The Works of St. Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century; tr. & notes by Edmund Hill, O.P.; editor, John E. Rotelle, O.S.A. Part 3, Sermons: Vol. 10, Sermons (341-400) on Various Subjects (Hyde Park, N.Y.: New City Press, 1995) 19, 26-28. Its more formal use of English departs on occasion from Fr. Hill’s translation: viz., contracted verb forms are dropped, e.g., “is not” replaces “isn’t. Also, “fratres” is translated as “brothers” rather than as “brothers and sisters” and “person” is omitted where the Latin does not support it. The translation of the Latin in c. 12 is occasionally more literal than that provided by Fr. Hill.
The Migne text of Sermo 341, the pertinent chapters 1 & 11-13:
1. Christus in Scripturis dictus tribus modis. Dominus noster Jesus Christus, fratres, quantum animadvertere potuimus paginas sanctas, tribus modis intelligitur et nominatur, quando praedicatur, sive per Legem et Prophetas, sive per Epistolas apostolicas, sive per fidem rerum gestarum, quas in Evangelio cognoscimus. Primus modus est, secundum Deum et divinitatem illam Patri coaequalem atque coaeternam ante assumptionem carnis. Alter modus est, cum assumpta carne jam idem Deus qui homo, et idem homo qui Deus, secundum quamdam suae excellentiae proprietatem, qua non caeteris coaequatur hominibus, sed est mediator et caput Ecclesiae, esse legitur et intelligitur. Tertius modus est quodam modo totus Christus, in plenitudine Ecclesiae, id est, caput et corpus, secundum plenitudinem perfecti cujusdam viri, in quo viro singuli membra sumus. Quod credentibus praedicatur, et prudentibus agnoscibile offertur. Non omnia testimonia Scripturarum tam multa angusto tempore sive recolere sive explicare possumus, quibus omnia tria ista genera probemus: sed tamen non omnia possumus improbata relinquere, ut quibusdam commemoratis testimoniis, caetera quae commemorare non sinimur propter angustias temporis, per vos ipsos jam observare in Scripturis et invenire possitis.
11. Tertius modus est quomodo totus Christus secundum Ecclesiam, id est, caput et corpus praedicetur. Etenim caput et corpus unus est Christus: non quia sine corpore non est integer, sed quia et nobiscum integer esse dignatus est, qui et sine nobis semper est integer, non solum in eo quod Verbum est unigenitus filius aequalis Patri, set et in ipso homine quem suscepit, et cum quo simul Deus et homo est. Verumtamen, fratres, quomodo corpus eius nos sumus, et nobiscum unus Christus? Ubi invenimus hoc, quia unus Christus est caput et corpus, id est, corpus cum capite suo? Sponsa cum sponsus sua quasi singulariter loquitur apud Isaiam: certe unus idemque loquitur; et videte quid ait: Velut sponso alligavit mihi mitram, et velut sponsam induit me ornamento (Is 61, 10). Ut sponsus et sponsa: eumdem dicit sponsum secundum caput, sponsam secundum corpus. Duo videntur, et unus est. Alioquin quomodo membra Christi sumus? Apostolo opertissime dicente, Vos estis corpus Christi et membra (I Cor. 12,27). Membra Christi et corpus sumus omnes simul; non qui hoc loco tantum sumus, sed et per universam terram; nec qui tantum hoc tempore, sed quid dicam? Ex Abel justo usque in finem saeculi quamdiu generant et generantur homines, quisquis justorum per hanc vitam transitum facit, quidquid nunc, id est, non in hoc loco, sed in hac vita, quidquid post nascentium futurum est, totum hoc unum corpus Christi: singuli autem membra Christi. Si ergo omnes corpus, singuli membra; est utique caput cuius hoc sit corpus. Et ipse est, inquit, caput corporis Ecclesiae, primogenitus, ipse primatum tenens (Col 2, 10), adjungitur ista Ecclesia, quae nunc peregrina est, illi caelesti Ecclesiae, ubi Angelos cives habemus; cui aequales nos futuros post resurrectionem corporum impudenter nobis arrogaremus, nisi Veritas promisisset, dicens: Erunt aequales Angelis Dei (Lc 20, 36); et fit una Ecclesia, civitas Regis magni (Ib 9, 11).
12. Christus in Scripturis enuntiatus tribus modis. Christus et Ecclesia unus Christus. Sic ergo aliquando in Scripturis insinuatur Christus, ut intelligas Verbum aequale Patri. Sic aliquando, ut intelligas mediatorem; cum Verbum caro factum est, ut habitaret in nobis (Joan. I, 14): cum ille unigenitus per quem facta sunt omnia, non rapinam arbitratus est esse aequalis Deo, sed semetipsum exinanivit, formam servi accipiens, factus obediens usque ad mortem, mortem autem crucis (Philipp. II, 6-8). Sic autem aliquando, ut intelligas caput et corpus, exponente ipso Apostolo apertissime quod dictum est de viro et uxore in Genesi, Erunt, inquit, duo in carne una. Videte ipsum exponentem, ut non conjecturis nostris aliquid ausi dicere videamur. Erunt enim, inquit, duo in carne una: et addidit, Sacramentum hoc magnum est. Et ne adhuc putaret quisquam in viro esse et uxore secundum naturalem utriusque sexus copulationem corporalemque mixturam: Ego autem dico, inquit, in Christo et Ecclesia (Gen II, 24; Ephes. V, 31, 32). Secundum hoc ergo quod in Christo et Ecclesia accipitur quod dictum est, Erunt duo in carne una: non jam duo, sed Una Caro est (Matth. XIX, 5, 6). Et quomodo sponsus et sponsa, sic caput et corpus: quia caput mulieris vir. Sive ergo dicam caput et corpus, sive dicam sponsus et sponsa; unum intelligete. Ideoque idem apostolus, cum esset adhuc Saulus, audivit: Saule, Saule, quid me persequeris (Act. IX, 4)? quoniam corpus capiti adjungitur. Et cum jam Christi praedicator pateretur ab aliis, quae persecutor ipse fecerat, Ut suppleam, inquit, quae desunt pressurarum Christi in carne mea (Coloss. I, 24): ad pressuras Christi ostendens pertinere quod patiebatur. Quod non potest intelligi secundum caput, quod jam in coelo nihil tale patitur; sed secundum corpus, id est, Ecclesiam: quod corpus cum suo capite, unus Christus est.
13. Sponsa Christi agat ut sit sine macula et ruga. Exhibete ergo vos dignum corpus tali capite, dignam sponsam tali sponso. Non potest habere caput illud, nisi condignum corpus; nec ille vir tantus, nisi condignam ducit uxorem. Ut exhiberet sibi. inquit, gloriosam Ecclesiam, non habentem maculam aut rugam, aut aliquid ejusmodi (Ephes. V, 27). Haec est sponsa Christi, non habens maculam aut rugam Non vis habere maculam? Fac quod scriptum est; Lavamini, mundi estote, auferte nequitias de cordibus vestris (Isai. I, 16). Non vis habere rugam? Extendere in crucem. Non enim tantum opus est ut laveris, sed etiam ut extendaris, ut sis sine macula aut ruga. Per lavacrum enim auferuntur peccata: per extensionem fit desiderium futuri saeculi, propter quod Christus crucifixus est. Audi ipsum Paulum lotum: Non, inquit, ex operibus justitiae quae nos fecimus, sed secundum suam misericordiam salvos nos fecit, per lavacrum regenerationis (Tit. III, 5). Audi eumdem extensum: Ea, inquit, quae retro sunt oblitus, in ea quae ante sunt extensus, secundum intentionem sequor ad palmam supernae vocationis Dei in Christo Jesu (Philipp. III, 13 et 14).
St. Augustine, Sermo 341 (P.L 39:1493; 1498-1501
[23] See the passages excerpted by Franciscus Moriones, Enchiridion Theologicum Sancti Augustini (Madrid: Biblioteca de Auctores Cristianos, 1961), [hereafter, Enchiridion], §§1223-1230).
[24] This prototypal exegetical error is discussed in “The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us (Jn. 1:14),” Studia Missionalia , v. 51 (2002), 23-53. It presupposes a “two-stage” Christology (Grillmeier’s term: op. cit., 115) i.e., a passage from non-humanity and non-historicity to humanity and historicity via the Incarnation. This uncritical postulate has no scriptural foundation and cannot be given a systematic statement, for it imports a change in the unchangeable Absolute, the cosmological divinity.
[25] Insofar as Augustine’s understanding of the Incarnation is controlled by a mediante anima postulate seeking a prior possibility of the Incarnation―which can have none―he cannot but suppose, as later would St. Thomas, that the hypostasis of Jesus the Christ, i.e., the subject of the Incarnation, is the Word qua “immanent Son,” a view irreconciliable with the Chalcedonian Symbol, which teaches that Jesus, the one and the same Son of the Father and of the Theotokos, is the subject of the Incarnation, a single subsistence in two substances, the Triune God and humanity. This was defined at Ephesus, coincident with the death of Augustine, and again at Chalcedon twenty years later, nearly eight centuries before St. Thomas’ birth. However, that Augustine’s Christology is thus controlled is less than obvious: see John A. McGuckin, “Did Augustine’s Christology Depend on Theodore of Mopsuestia,” Heythrop Journal xxxi (1990), pp. 39-52. On the other hand we read in the Breviary, in an excerpt from Agustune’s Sermo 25:
Mary heard God’s word and kept it, and so she is blessed. She kept God’s truth in her mind, a nobler thing than carrying his body in her womb: the truth and the body were both Christ: he was kept in Mary’s mind insofar as he is truth, he was carried in her womb insofar as he is man; but what is kept in the mind is of a higher order than what is carried in the womb.
The Litany of the Hours, IV: Second Reading for the memorial of the Presentation of Mary, 1572-74: Sermon 25, 7-8; (P.L. 46:937-938), at 1573.
Further on in the same homily, arguing that every Christian is able to be the mother of Christ, Augustine speaks as follows:
Now having said that all of you are brothers of Christ, shall I not dare to call you his mother? Much less would I dare to deny his own words. Tell me how Mary became the mother of Christ, if not by giving birth to the members of Christ.
Ibid., at 1574.
One need not look for Christological rigor in a homily, especially in one given well before the Council of Ephesus proclaimed Mary the Theotokos. Nonetheless, the diophysite flavor of Augustine’s Christology at this point is evident, as is its impact on his spirituality―yet as we shall see, its diophysism did not touch his Eucharistic realism. The early Augustine is no pupil of Theodore. See the extended discussion in Vol. I, Ch. 2, endnote 92. Neither, as the Libellus Emendationis shows, does it touch that final expression of his Christological orthodoxy.
The Libellus, as translated in Jurgens, Early Fathers, III, 196-97, maintains the full unity, full humanity and full divinity of Jesus the Christ, for it affirms particularly, after anathematizing Leporius’ former contrary opinion, that “it is not allowed to be said that, even as Man, the Lord was ignorant of the Prophets.” Leporius’ former tendency to divide the natures and to speak of them as though agents―i.e., to speak of Jesus “even as Man”―is overcome by the acknowledged unity of the Lord whose knowledge it is, and who is “the Man”, the expression which Albright prefers to translate the Hebrew-Aramaic intensive expression more usually rendered as “the Son of Man.” It was this language, later endorsed at Chalcedon, which had Dioscorus refused to accept at his “Robber Synod” at Ephesus in 449.
[26] De Lubac, The Splendour of the Church. Translated by Michael Mason (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1956). The assertion that the Word married humanity in the womb of the Virgin (p. 265) is accurate insofar as "W,rd" and "Son" are understood historically, i.e., as Names of Jesus the Lord, in which case the "humanity" which Jesus married is the fallen but immaculate humanity of the Virgin, in that union which is her conception of her Lord, as taught in Lk. 1:35, and his becoming flesh, his kenōsis, as taught in Phil. 2:7. De Lubac's exegesis is profoundly historical; to read it otherwise is without warrant. Further, the patristic theme of the womb of the Virgin as the "thalamus" of her conception of her Lord is entirely valid. For further discussion of this most essential point, viz, that Mary is the Mother of Jesus the Christ, the eternal Son of the Eternal Father, the primordial second Adam and she the primordial second Eve, not the merely nominal mother of an impersonal and necessarily abstract human nature, see endnote 118, infra.
Origen's reading of the Canticle of Canticles makes of the soul a Church in miniature, a bride of Christ. Henri Crouzel has summarized this theme:
There is one conclusion to be drawn from these three nuptial themes. First, in the presence of God and his Christ, every human soul is feminine, Wife and Mother. Its role is to receive in order to procreate. In spite of certain expressions which later theologians were to find awkward, counterbalanced by others which respect all the delicacy of the relation between grace and freedom, Origen is a long way from Pelagianism or even semi-Pelagianism. As for the "synergism” of which there is sometimes talk in his case as with other Greek Fathers, the word scarcely seems appropriate to Origen’s doctrine of grace. It gives the impression that divine grace and man work together like two men pulling a cart together. As the themes which we have been studying show, it is God and his Christ who are working; man's role is to let God act in him or to stop him doing so.
Crouzel, Origen, 125-26/
The first conclusion, the radical femininity of every human soul with respect to Jesus the Bridegroom, and its corollary, i.e., a completely passive spirituality, must govern all that follows. That immediacy of the soul to 'her' Lord is incompatible with personal participation in the sacramental mediation of the grace of Christ through the Eucharistic worship of the Church, This feminization of the soul, which is of humanity as such, is indefensible, as Crouzel's further commentary manifests.
De Lubac has shown some sympathy with this spirituality, but his life-long concentration on the Eucharist as the cause of the Church, acquits him of any deprecation of the sacramental mediation of salvation,
[27] De Lubac discusses the passage from the patristic to the medieval paradigm in Corpus Mysticum, 184-85, and develops it further in Ch. 9, “Verité et verité,” 210-247; e.g.
C’est que la théologie de l’Eucharistie devient de plus en plus une apologétique et s’organise de plus en plus autour d’une défense de la « présence réelle ». L’apologie du dogme succède à l’intelligence de la foi. Cette évolution, cette contraste, les malentendus et les problèmes en porte à faux qui en résultent, les incompréhensions qui sont la rançon des lumières nouvelles, tout cela trouve son résumé symbolique dans le deux successive sens successifs de veritas.¨
Corpus mysticum, at 241; cf. ibid., 61-64
The distinction he places between apologetics and the properly theological understanding of the faith is perhaps too neat, but the point de Lubac is making, that the apologetic focus on the real presence was a narrowing, even an enfeebling, of the fides quaerens intellectum, is as pertinent now as when those lines were written. Theology cannot assume a defensive posture and yet remain intent upon the mysterium.
[28] Corpus mysticum, 128, n. 64. See endnote 16 supra for the Latin texts of the passages from St. Thomas which de Lubac there cites.
[29] It is evident, from Paul’s warning in I Cor. 11:29-30 against the unworthy reception of the Eucharist, that “effectus huius sacramenti” is not limited to “gratia quae confertur;” for the effect of a sacrilegious reception of the Eucharist is punitive. This possible effect has its own interest, but it is one not pertinent to either the patristic or the medieval development of Eucharistic theology. It is clear that St. Thomas understands the res tantum to be the Eucharistic grace received by the communicant:
Nam in sacramento Eucharistiae id quod est res et sacramentum, est in ipsa materia; id autem quod est res tantum, est in suscipiente, scilicet, gratia quae confertur. In baptismo autem utrumque est in suscipiente: et character, qui est res et sacramentum, et gratia remissionis peccatorum, quod est res tantum. Et eadem ratio est de aliis sacramentis..
S. T. iiia, q. 73, a. 1, ad 3.
This passage replies to an objection which would reduce the Eucharistic res et sacramentum to that of baptism, i.e., a grace in the recipient. St. Thomas’ response contrasts the Eucharist with baptism; in that in the former both effects, i.e., character and grace, are in the recipient, while in the Eucharist, the res et sacramentum is effected independently of the recipient, while only the res tantum is in the recipient. This last is to be identified with the “effectus huius sacramenti,” as St. Thomas makes clear in the body of the same article:
Respondeo dicendum quod in hoc sacramento tria considerare possumus: scilicet id quod est sacramentum tantum, scilicet panis et vinum; et id quod est res et sacramentum, scilicet corpus Chriusti verum; et id quod est res tantum, scilicet effectus huius sacramenti. (emphasis added)
S. T. iiia, q. 73, a. 6, c.
The same article, in response to an objection offers further confirmation of the meaning of “effectus huius sacramenti:”
Sed alimentum spirituale convertit hominem in seipsum: secundum illud quod Augustinus dicit, in libro Confess.10 quod quasi audivit vocem Christi dicentis: Nec tu me mutabis in te, sicut cibum carnis tuae: sed tu mutaberis in me.
10 L. vii, c. 10.
S. T. iiia, q. 73, a. 3, ad 2.
Consequently, there can be no doubt that here St. Thomas teaches that the Eucharistic res tantum, to which he refers as the “effectus huius sacramenti,” is the grace of Eucharistic Communion received by the worthy communicant: “gratia quae confertur.” It is possible that his designation of the Church as the Eucharistic res tantum, later on in q. 73. as also in his Commentary in IV Sent., reflects the anagogical emphasis which the Fathers frequently placed upon the res sacramenti, especially upon the virtus sacramenti. It is not likely that St. Thomas would ever understood the Church to be the res tantum in a nonhistorical sense, any more than the Fathers so understood the virtus sacramenti.
[30] Corpus mysticum, 183-85.
[31] In 314, Pope Sylvester confirmed the decision of the Council of Arles, the largest yet held, condemning the Donatist practice of “rebaptizing” Christians who had become “lapsi” or “traditores” during the persecutions (DS § 123). The Council required instead only their sacramental absolution. The Council further held that clerics who had been “traditores” might be deposed from their offices, but not deprived of their Orders, and those priests and bishops whom they had ordained were to retain their offices. The Donatists refused to obey this decision, and began to claim to be the only true Church, maintaining that a serious sinner had never been baptized..
When Augustine became the Bishop of Hippo eighty-two years later, the Donatist heresy was resurgent. He spent much of his early years in office combating it, to its final defeat at Carthage in a quasi-synod called by imperial authority. There Augustine’s arguments left the Donatist leadership with no recourse. Condemned by Church and Emperor alike, the fragments of the schism still remaining at the time of the Moslem occupation of North Africa vanished in it.
In his controversy with the Donatist schismatics, Augustine reaffirmed what had been taught by the Council of Arles in 314, and yet earlier by Irenaeus and Origen, viz., the double causal efficacy of the sacramental sign: i.e., with respect to Baptism and Orders, causing the baptismal or priestly character, and enabling the recipient of a sacramental character freely to fulfill the responsibilities of his sacramental office. For Irenaeus’ and Origen’s intimations of a double Eucharistic signing, see endnote 50, infra. Augustine the Bishop had no Eucharistic heresy to confront.
[32] In Corpus Mysticum, at 31, de Lubac notes the indissociability of Eucharistic Communion from membership in the Church, citing Augustine and Cyril of Alexandria. This is a constant theme throughout his work, as it is throughout the patristic tradition.
[33] See endnote 268 infra, quoting de Lubac, ibid., at 23. In next chapter of Corpus mysticum, at 52, n. 56, de Lubac cites R. P. J. Bonsirven’s article “”Hoc est corpus meum: Recherches sur l’original araméen,” Biblica 1958, 205-219, to the effect that the Aramaic used by our Lord at the Last Supper corresponds to the Greek sarx (flesh) rather than to soma (body). De Lubac finds in the Fathers a tendency to prefer sarx, caro to designate the Eucharistic body, reserving soma, corpus, rather for the Church. Joachim Jeremias has pointed out the specifically sacrificial implicaions of the Eucharistic usage of sarx, over against soma: see The Eucharistic Words of Jesus [Tr. of Die Abendsmahlworte Jesu, 3rd ed., 1964] (New York, Scribners, 1966), at 230ff; cf. Corpus mysticum, 139-140. The Fathers do not appear to have given much attention to the recapitulation of our mortal dust to the free unity of eternal life by the sacrificial institution of the free, covenantal unity of the “One Flesh,” in contast to the otherwise inexorable fatality, the dynamic of fragmentation of the “flesh” unto dust, although their contrasting significations, viz., of the free unity of the redeemed creation on the one hand, over against the unfree fragmentation of the fallen world on the other, would seem obvious enough in the light of Rom. 8:12-25.
Obvious also is the strict association of gratia capitis with the “recapitulation” (Eph. 1:10) of all things by Christ, the Head, in the nuptial union wherein he is One Flesh with his bridal Church. However the nexus between recapitulation and the bestowal of that free historical unity upon mankind by the One Sacrifice of the Head is rarely mentioned by the Fathers. However, see the discussion of Irenaeus use of I Cor. 11:3 in endnote 70, supra and of Origen’s “caput enim Christi Deus” in Vol. IV, endnote 157.
[34] See Corpus mysticum, at 38-40, where de Lubac notes the assimilation of caro to corpus by Paschasius; he observes (at 38) that this quasi-Amalarian language was used in the twelfth century by Hugh of St. Victor. De Lubac’s text is quoted in endnote 107, infra. This naïve reduction of nuptial to bodily unity cannot but undercut the freedom indispensable to the nuptial unity that Augustine, following Paul, assigned the Una Caro, and which the Synoptics had assigned to the Bridegroom. Further on, at p. 139, n. 1, de Lubac remarks that “caro” is said of the Church rather as spouse than as body, citing Gottschalk, who poses the paradox of Christ’s giving his bridal Church, who is his flesh, his own flesh to eat, which presupposes a sinful Church in need of sacramental nourishment, and ignores the Eucharistic use of caro in Jn. 6: 53-56:
Dixit ergo eis Jesus: Amen, amen dico vobis: Nisi manducaveritis carnem Filii hominis, et biberitis eius sanguinem, non habebitis vitam in vobis. Qui manducat meam carnem, et bibit meum sanguinem, habet vitam aeternam: et ego resuscitabo eum in novissimum diem. Caro enim mea, vere est cibus; et sanguis meus, vere est potus.
In accepting Gottschalk’s application of caro to the Church as sponsa rather than as corpus, de Lubac denies what Augustine affirms, that head-body means the same as bridegroom-bride (Sermo 341, 12). Thus de Lubac does not appear here to understand the spousal relation of Christ as Head to the Church to be his relation to her precisely as the Bridegroom to his Bride. his Body―which Gottschalk’s paradox supposes in the passage cited supra (Corpus mysticum, page 139, n. 1). In the passage quoted in endnote 115 infra, we find de Lubac, with reference to the una caro of Christ and the Church, citing a passage from Paschasius in which (at n. 78), following Augustine, Paschasius identifies the head-body unity with that of the bridegroom-bride, describing both unities as una persona. Read at the letter, as we shall see de Lubac reading the patristic una persona, this is an incoherent melding of the communication of idioms in Christ with the consubstantiality of Jesus with the Church.
It is perhaps not surprising that the Augustine’s Sermo 341 should be little noted in Eucharistic discussion, for it at least puts in question the patristic and Carolingian assimilation of the free unity of the una caro to the organic unity of corpus. De Lubac does not advert to this difficulty; he assigns different senses to these words, viz., caro in patristic usage is commonly said of the sacrificed Christ, with corpus more generally reserved for the Church, but he does not address the incongruity of assimilating the free unity of the One Flesh to the organic unity of a body or to the personal unity a human person. See also endnotes 21 and 22, supra..
[35] See de Lubac, Medieval Exegesis: The Four Senses of Scripture, Vol. I: Tr. Mark Sebanc. Foreword by Robert Louis Wilken; ser. Ressourcement: Retrieval and Renewal in Catholic Thought (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1998); Vol. II; tr. E. M. Macierowski. Ser. Ressourcement: Retrieval and Renewal in Catholic Thought. (Grand Rapids , MI; Eerdmans; Edinburgh, T&T Clark, 2000) [hereafter Medieval Exegesis I, II], Ch. Four, “The Latin Origen,” at 161-224,
[36] De Lubac devoted an essay to a mid-twelfth century appreciation of the Augustinian sacramentum, res sacramenti analysis in “The res sacramenti in the writings of Gerhoh of Reichersberg,” Theological Fragments; tr. Rebecca Howell Balinski (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989), 77-84. Gerhoh was interested in the repristination of the ascetic ideals of monastic common life by their application to the communities of cathedral canons of his time: see Bihlmyer-Tüchle, Church History, 12th ed., (1936) II, §117.1, and Handbook of Church History (New York : Herder and Herder, 1965), Vol. I, 19-20, note 23.
[37] The publication of Hegel’s Phenomenologie des Geistes (1807) lent currency to the phenomenological method, whose antecedents are as remote as Heraclitus. Today that method is for the most part understood in the abstract, rationalistic context given it by Kant. Theologians of Augustinian predilection such as Newman, Kierkegaard, and Benedict XVI, provide the salient exceptions, but only by refusing rationalizations of Augustine’s theology, the phenomenology of existence in ecclesia, in Christo. The methodological rationalization of the dialectical method native to secular phenomenological inquiry began only with Plotinus, who locked Plato’s fatalism into a rational and hence systematic determinism: see Elmer O’Brien, S.J., The Essential Plotinus: Representative Treatises from the Enneads, selected and newly translated with introduction and commentary (Indianapolis: Hackett, 19751964), and R. T. Wallis, Neoplatonism. Second Edition; Foreword and Bibliography by Lloyd P. Gerson (London: Gerald Duckworth & Co., Ltd., 19951972; & Indianapolis, Indiana: Hackett Publishing Co., 19951972) Wallis’ very careful study of the leading Neoplatonist schools confirms O’Brien’s assessment of Plotinus as a rigorous determinist.
Whether or not Husserl’s effort to establish phenomenology as a "strict science," a rationally indefeasible, abstract law of consciousness controlled by immanent necessity, requires the “bracketing” of concrete existence that he prescribed, clearly it must prescind from the irrationality of existence that marks our fallenness. Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty, for all their disagreements, agree in seeking methodologically to transcend and so to unify the universal experience of dichotomous and therefore unhappy consciousness. Their quest for philosophical self-salvation via the study of the immanent structure of consciousness, like the parallel Marxist quest for an eschatological political salvation via discovery of the immanent laws of economics as the corollary of class warfare, has nothing in common with Augustine’s “Two loves have built two cities” or, more radically, with his “Sero te amavi.” Augustinian phenomenology is authentically historical solely because it bears upon and is governed by the illumined experience of worship in the Church. It has no other interest, knowing that only there, freed from our personal darkness by the light of Christ, may we recognize our personal dichotomy as existence simul justus et peccator, a personal fragmentation rooted in sin but redeemed in Christ by his institution of the substantially free unity of the One Flesh of the New Covenant, wherein we are made capable of personal reintegration in sacramento, in Christo. This free sacramental reintegration is given in experience as conversion to the authentic historicity of covenantal fidelity, a historicity finally sacramentally and liturgically objective, without which grace we can do nothing—wherefore the nihilism that is the inescapable telos of immanent rationality as such.
[38] De Lubac, Corpus Mysticum, at 61-66, points to the patristic interpretation of “mysterium” as connoting an action while in the same Eucharistic context “sacramentum” refers rather to the effect of that action: hence cause and effect are given together in a mutual relation between sign and signified, and also between aptitude to reveal, and aptitude to be revealed. These are given together in the “mysterium,” which is also at once the “virtus sacramenti” and the “veritas sacramenti.” De Lubac sees the same relation to be given between “typos” and “aletheia;” see also 189ff. There is here a latent reference to their consubstantiality, for their unity is at the level of substance.
[39] See the reference to Alexander Gerken, “Dogmengeschicht liche Reflexion über die heutige Wende in der Eucharistielehre," ZKTh 94 (1972) 199-226, and Theologie der Eucharistie (München: Kösel-Verlag, 1973). in Vol. II, Ch. 6, endnote 60.
[41] As has been noted, the subjectivism implicit in Berengarius’ denial of the literal truth of the Eucharistic Words of Institution was summed up as ‘impanationism;” by Guitmund of Aversa in his De corporis et sanguinis Domini veritate libri tres, 1 (P.L. 149:1430). This appears to be the first use of that term, although de Lubac finds the indictment anticipated by Durandus (Corpus mysticum, at 164, n. 12.), Jurgens, Early Fathers I, 212, n. 6) has found a hint of impanation in Origen’s Eucharistic theology, but withdraws that reading in the next sentence.
De Lubac is more generous to Berengarius than were his orthodox contemporaries: he is unwilling to find a heretical intent where the evidence may be read as pointing rather to theological confusion than to a deliberate denial of the faith. See his discussion of Berengarius’ error in Corpus mysticum, ch. x, “Concordismes et Rechange,” 163-64, and ”Du symbole à dialectique,” ibid., 251ff. However de Lubac’s citation (at 164, n. 11) of M. Amann’s assessment of Berengarius’ Eucharistic doctrine as “beaucoup moins aberrante qu’on ne l’a dit de la doctrine officielle telle que l’a formulée le Concile de Trente” (“L’Église au pouvoir des laïques,” p. 529, note 6) offers no support for a meliorative reading of Berengarius, but rather provokes a certain interest in the reasons prompting de Lubac’s citing of so provocative a criticism of the “la doctrine officielle.” i.e., the Eucharistic doctrine of the Council of Trent.
[42] De Lubac has dismissed this starveling view of “objectivity” in The Motherhood of the Church, ch. vii, “The Impersonal World,” 141-52.
[43] In Corpus mysticum, at 76-83, de Lubac has pointed to the patristic commonplace, the indissociability of memorial, anticipation, and presence in the Eucharist, which thereby provides the liturgical-historical unification of the fragmented consciousness of fallen man, and is the foundation of the theology of history, whose free, salvific significance cannot be other than liturgical and finally sacramental: the free and salvific unity of the past, the present, and the future, viz., of the Old Covenant, the New Covenant, the Kingdom of God. This unity is obviously Eucharistic.
[44] Pierre Batiffol, Études d'Histoire et de Théologie Positive, Deuxième série: L'Eucharistie; la présence réelle et la transsubstantiation; 10e édition (Paris: Librairie Lecoffre: J. Gabalda, 1930) hereafter, Études d'Histoire II, [L’Eucharistie], 428..
[46] This dilemma is typified by Augustine’s “spiritualiter intelligete” (Enarr. in Ps xcviii, 9), for he poses the simply Capharnaitic alternative: “quomodo in cadavere dilaniatur aut in macello venditur.” (Tract in Joann. xxvii, 5) to the properly ”spiritual” and therefore intelligent understanding of Christ’s Eucharistic presence. Augustine’s Eucharistic doctrine is unintelligible unless one accepts at the outset his entirely accurate postulate that Jesus the Christ, by reason of his concrete humanity, must be physically located: i.e., in the company of his disciples until the crucifixion, in Galilee after the Resurrection and before the Ascension and, after his Ascension until he shall come again, at the right hand of the Father. At the same time, he affirms, too often to be gainsaid, the “fieri” of the body and blood of the One Sacrifice at the recitation of the Words of Institution over the bread and the wine on the altar. He knows Jerome’s doctrine that the body and the blood that are consumed are in some manner distinct from that body and blood that is Jesus raised to the right hand of the Father, and yet are salvific. We have seen Jerome, as quoted by Peter Lombard, state the distinction: “Dupliciter, inquit, intelligitur caro Christi et sanguis ejus: vel illa quae crucifixa est et sepulta, et sanguis qui militis lancea effusus est; vel illa spiritualis ac divina, de qua ipse ait, Joan. 6: Caro mea vere est cibus, et sanguis meus vere est potus, et: Nisi manducaveritis carnem meam, et biberitis meum sanguinem, non habebitis vitam in vobis.”
[47] De Lubac’s defense of the Eucharistic unity of the Church, esp. in Les églises particulières dans l'Église universelle, suivi de La maternité de l'Église, et d'une interview recueillie par G. Jarczyk; ser. Intelligence de la foi (Paris: Éditions Aubier-Montaigne, 1971); The Motherhood of the Church, followed by Particular Churches in the Universal Church and An Interview Conducted by Gwendoline Jarczyk; tr. Sergia Englund (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1982), over against those upholding ecclesial standing of the national conferences of bishops, has recently been underwritten by the Vatican; see “Apostolos Suos,” the Apostolic Letter of His Holiness Pope John Paul III, issued motu proprio, “On the Theological and Juridical Nature of Episcopal Conferences,” presented at a press conference held in the Vatican City on July 23, 1998. Of itself, no national conference can bind a bishop unless its proceedings are unanimously approved, not merely by those attending it, but by all the bishops of the nation. A national conference lacking that exceedingly unlikely unanimity may nonetheless, by a two-thirds majority, pass binding legislation provided it receives the Vatican's recognitio, as with the institution of the new Roman Missal in 2011. This papal motu proprio quite evidently undercuts the authority of the ad hoc U.S.C.C.B. meeting at Dallas in 2002, although no one there seems to have noticed apart from Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz of Lincoln, NE, whose dissent shook the sensitivities of the Voice of The Faithful, a.k.a. VOTF.
[48] De Lubac, Surnaturel; col. Théologie 8 (Paris: Aubier, Éditions Montaigne, 1946).
[49] Thus must be understood Innocent III, who is not suspect of a dehistoricization of the Church:
De duobus modis eucharistiam comedendi.
Accipite et manducate.― Non est intelligendum, quod sumptum corpus de manu Domini sibi discipuli ministrarent, sed qui consecravit et ministravit ac si diceret: Comedite, iterumque comedite, utramque hujus sacramenti comestionem insinuans. Dupliciter enim corpus Christi comeditur, quia dupliciter intelligitur. Verum, quod de virgine traxit et in cruce pependit, et mysticum quod est Ecclesia Christi spiritu vegetata. De vero corpore Dominus ait: Hoc est corpus meum quod pro vobis tradetur (Luc. XXII). De mystico dicit Apostolus: Unus panis et unum corpus multi sumus (I Cor. X).
Verum corpus Christi comeditur sacramentaliter, id est sub specie. Mysticum autem comeditur spiritualiter, id est in fide sub specie panis, in fide cordis. De comestione sacramentali Dominus ait: Accipite et comedite, hoc est corpus meum quod pro vobis tradetur, hoc facite in meam commemorationem (I Cor. XI). Hoc modo tam boni quam mali corpus Christi manducant. Sed soli boni comedunt ad salutem, mali vero comedunt ad judicium. Nisi enim mali corpus Christi comederent, non dixisset Apostolus: Qui manducat indigne, judicium sibi manducat et bibit, non dijudicans corpus Domini (ibid.). Nam et Judas traditur cum aliis eucharistiam accepisse. De spirituali comestione Dominus ait: Nisi manducaveritis carnem Filii hominis, et biberitis ejus sanguinem, non habebitis vitam in vobis (Joan. VI) Hoc modo corpus Christi soli boni comedunt. Unde: Qui manducat carnem meam et bibit sanguinem meum, in me manet et ego in eo (Joan. VI). Nam qui manet in charitate, in Deo manet, et Deus in eo (I Joan. IV). Unde: Quid paras dentem et ventrem? Crede et manducasti. Qui credit in Deum, comedit ipsum; qui incorporatur Christo per fidem, id est membrum ejus efficitur, vel in unitate corporis ejus firmius solidatur. Alibi quod manducatur, incorporatur; et qui manducat, incorporat. Hic autem quod manducatur incorporat, et qui manducat incorporatur. Utrumque modum Christus edendi insinuat, ubi dicit: Spiritus est qui vivificat, caro non prodest quidquam Joan. VI). Quia caro Christi nisi spiritualiter comedatur, non ad salutem, sed ad judicium manducatur. (emphasis added)
Innocent III, De duobus modis eucharistiam comedendi, Opera Omnia, Innocentii III Romani Pontificis Operum Pars Altera, Sermones, Opuscula, II. Opuscula Innocentii III Romani Pontificis Mysteriorum Evangelicae Legis et Sacramenti Eucharistiae Libri Sex (Edit. Opp. Innocentii III, Colon., 1575, in-folio.) De sacro Altaris Mysterio libri sex, Liber Quartus, Caput xiv (P. L. 217: 866B-867A). This reference is owed to Fr. Roland Teske, S.J., of Marquette University.
This is ancient doctrine. Both Irenaeus and Origen clearly held it. For Irenaeus, see Adversus Haereses, 4, 18, 4, & 5, 2, 2; §249, tr. Jurgens, Early Fathers I; 95, §234, 99, §234. As for Origen, see his Commentaries on Matthew, excerpted and translated by Jurgens, Early Fathers I in §504, translating a long passage in from the Commentaries on Matthew in which the double causality of the Eucharistic sign is recognized and puzzled over: viz., the sinner is not sanctified by his unworthy reception of the Eucharist; here Origen has Paul’s admonitions in I Cor. 11:30 in view. Cyril of Jerusalem, in the fourth of the Mystagogic Catecheses (4:3-6), dealing with the Eucharist, is explicitly realist: under the figure of bread the body of Christ is given, under the figure of wine, his blood. The first epiclesis invokes the Holy Spirit, by whose power the change in the elements is effected; see W. A. Jurgens, Early Fathers I, §§ 845, 845a, 846, at 360-61. In Gregory of Nyssa’s Eucharistic theology Christ becomes our food in order to assimilate us to himself, in such wise that the Eucharistic change in the bread and wine is the presupposition of the change in the recipient. Here we have the double causality of the patristic and medieval tradition. Christ changes (metapoiei) the elements into his flesh and blood by a sort of digestion, by the intervention of the divine Word in the Eucharistic prayer: see Gregory’s Great Catechism, ch. 37 (Jurgens, Early Fathers II, §1035, at 49. John Chrysostom takes for granted the change (μεταβολή --metabolē) of the Eucharistic elements into the Body and Blood of Christ; see Jurgens, Early Fathers II, §§1118, 1157, 1183, 1192, 1194, 1207, 1221, 1222: see also the Eucharistic texts of Chrysostom cited by de Lubac: In Mattheum, hom. 82, n. 5 (P. G. 58, 743-744), In I Cor., hom. 30, n. 2 (P. G. 61, 251), In Hebr. (P.G. 63, 124), to which may be added his Hom. 24 in Ep. ad Corinth., 1 (P.G. 61, 194). At the end of the patristic period, John Damascene, in De Fide Ortho. 4:13, summed up the Eastern patristic tradition of Eucharistic realism by denying impanation, affirming a metabolic change of the elements into the body and blood of Jesus the Christ (metapoiountai), and affirming this change to be the work of the Holy Spirit; ET in Jurgens’ Early Fathers III, at 339, §2371.
[50] See the texts collected by Franciscus Moriones, Enchiridion, De Sacramentis in Genere, Caput III, §§1943-1945, et passim.
[52] This image of the Christian alone before “her” God is latent in the patristic and medieval interpretation of the Song of Songs as the feminization of the soul by “her” union with “her” risen Lord. Read literally, the communion of the feminized soul with the risen Christ or the Verbum would need no ecclesial mediation, for the supposition of the femininity of the soul qua bridal is indissolubly linked to envisaging the soul as a “microcosmic” Church, the Church in miniature, thus as in immediate nuptial relation to her Lord. In such guise, the community of the faithful in the Church is unexplained and thereby is in danger of becoming a merely extrinsic aggregation, lacking any free, intrinsic, interpersonal unity. Thereby the free nuptiality of the One Flesh is degraded to the merely physical unity of a “body” in the sense of an organism, or of “one person” in a sense which would with difficulty avoid a Christomonism. The Catholic faith would then lack any historical expression, covenantal fidelity would have no historically discernible content, and Christianity would become simply an ineffable state of consciousness. A famous early medieval expression of this piety is found in The Liturgy of the Hours, I, 251-52: The Second Week of Advent, Saturday, Office of Readings. Second Reading. from a sermon by Blessed Isaac of Stella, Abbot:
In the inspired Scriptures, what is said in a universal sense of the virgin mother, the Church, is understood in an individual sense of the Virgin Mary, and what is said in a particular sense of the virgin mother Mary is rightly understood in a general sense of the virgin mother, the Church. When either is spoken of, the meaning can be understood of both, almost without qualification.
In a way, every Christian is also believed to be a bride of God's Word, a mother of Christ, his daughter and sister, at once fruitful and virginal. These words are used in a universal sense of the Church, in a special sense of Mary, in a particular sense of the individual Christian. They are used by God's Wisdom in Person, the Word of the Father.
Sermo 51 (P.L. 194, 1862-63, 1865); tr. from The Liturgy of the Hours I, at 252. The inclusion of this passage in the Breviary instances the impact of a false spirituality upon an official prayer of the Church.
De Lubac early indicates his subscription to the notion of personal membership in the Church as entailing an inherently feminine relationship to the risen Lord: see his Catholicism, 102ff., The Motherhood of the Church, 79ff. and, later, Medieval Exegesis II at 153ff.; cf. The Splendour of the Church, 268-75. Despite its ample patristic, medieval, baroque and contemporary warrant, this interpretation of the soul as feminine eliminates, even bars, the historical, sacramental significance of the nuptial imagery upon whose importance de Lubac has so much insisted. Once again, it is the monadic notion of the substantial person that underlies and even forces this confusion: it is only when the nuptially ordered substantiality and intelligibility of the human imaging of God is recognized, and with it, the intra-substantial, nuptially-ordered relationality of the human person―the person whose sacramental significance as either masculine or feminine is inherent in the sacramentality of marriage―that the highly personal spirituality upon which much of de Lubac’s writing is intent can be understood to be radically Eucharistic, an ever more profound personal entry into the nuptial Communion of the supersubstantial One Flesh. De Lubac has continually insisted on the patristic tradition that Eucharist as the cause of the intrinsic unity of the members of the Church and so of the Church: e.g., Corpus mysticum at 23, 27, 275, 282. There can be no question of attributing to de Lubac an individualistic, nonsacramental spirituality; nonetheless, the feminization of the soul by its likening to a “Church in miniature,” in the passage from Origen which he quotes approvingly in The Splendour of the Church, at p. 272, carries unacceptable connotations. However, he acknowledges (in Splendour of the Church, at 275) that the “literary canonization” of the allegorical reading of The Song of Songs over the centuries “is not in any way to be confused with the weight of a doctrinal tradition.”
[53] S. T. iiia, q. 73, a. 3, c.; cf. Corpus mysticum, at 23, 27, 275, where de Lubac identifies the unitas corporis mysticum with the res sacramenti of the Augustinian sacramentum, res sacramenti paradigm wherein the res sacramenti simply includes the res tantum of the later medieval paradigm. In Corpus mysticum, at 276ff., de Lubac takes up the cost of the later theological separation, as res sacramenti non contenta, of our union with the risen Christ from our historical existence in ecclesia.
[54] Ibid., at 128, n. 64. We have seen the Latin text of the quotation:
Sicut tota Ecclesia dicitur unum Corpus Christi mysticum per similitudinem ad naturale corpus hominis … (emphasis added).
S. T. iiia, q. 18, a. 1
[55] Ibid., at 27, n. 28.
[57] Wilhem Gessel, op. cit., at 153, where, in n. 74, Gessel emphasizes that, for Augustine, the Eucharist and the Church are inseparable. This affirmation of their inseparability is incompatible with any supposition of their identity. The inference must be that the historicity of the Eucharistic Real Presence of Christ the Bridegroom is inseparable from the historicity of the presence of his Bridal Church. It is obvious that the Church’s radically free Eucharistic worship of her Eucharistic Lord is as inseparable from her objective sacramental historicity as it is inseparable from his Eucharistic immanence in history. Christ and the Church are indissociable in their free and irrevocable nuptial-covenantal unity, their One Flesh, the single and unique object of the Catholic theological inquiry. Cf. endnotes 1 and 2, supra.
[58] De Lubac, Corpus mysticum, 43 ff.
[59] So the Church Fathers have commonly read the flow of blood and water from the speared side of the dead Jesus on the cross, recited in Jn. 19:34-35. They have understood it as the taking of the second Eve from the side of the “sleeping” second Adam, and thus as the fulfillment of the creation narrative in Gen. 2:20-25: cf. Tertullian, De Modestia, xxii; De Anima, c. 10; Origen, Contra Celsum, ii, 69; Cyril of Jerusalem, Catecheses xiii, 21; Augustine, In Joannem, cxx, 2 and The City of God, xxii, 17. De Lubac has gathered more than twenty other such citations in Corpus mysticum, p. 205, n. 85. This patristic tradition has entered into the doctrinal tradition: see Mystici Corporis, §28 and CCC §1225. We have seen the citation at the beginning of this volume, in the excerpt from ch. vi, note 139, of Wilhelm Gessel’s Eucharistische Gemeinschaft bei Augustinus with its emphasis upon the free inseparability of the One Flesh of the second Adam and the second Eve. It is a scriptural and patristic commonplace that, where the second Adam is present, there also is the second Eve. Augustine is eloquent:
Ascendat sponsus noster thalami sui lignum, ascendat sponsus noster thalami sui lectum. Dormiat moriendo, aperiatur ejus latus, et Ecclesia prodeat virgo: ut quomodo Eva facta est ex latere Adae dormientis, ita et Ecclesia formetur ex latere Christi in cruce pendentis. Percussum est enim ejus latus, ut Evangelium loquitur, et statim manavit sanguis et aqua, quae sunt Ecclesiae gemina sacramenta. Aqua, in qua est sponsa purificata: sanguis, ex quo invenitur esse dotata. In isto sanguine sancti martyres amici sponsi stolas suas laverunt, candidas eas fecerunt, ad nuptias Agni invitati venerunt, ab sponso calicem acceperunt, biberunt, eique propinaverunt. Sanguinem ejus biberunt, sanguinem suum pro illo fuderunt.
Augustine, Sermones de Symbolo 15 (P. L. 40:645). Cf. Corpus mysticum at 222, where de Lubac, commenting upon a passage from Hugh of St. Victor, observes: « L’Époux et l’Épouse sont unis déjà, mais dans l’obscurité de la foi. C’est encore le temps du “speculum et aenigma,” non celui de la “visio facie ad faciem et summi boni plenitudo. »
Clearly we have to do here with the historical union of Christ and his Church in One Flesh, at once and inseparably in cruce, in sacramento, in Eucharistia. The contrast between this passage, and Augustine’s dehistoricizing interpretation of the una caro quoted on p. 31, supra, as excerpted from his treatise, In Joann. Ep. Ad Parthos, could not be more complete.
There are other errors in the exegesis of Jn. 19:34, particularly that which would understand the soldier’s spear to have opened a womb in the side of Christ via which he gave birth to the Church: e. g., Josef Jungmann, “Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy” Commentary on the Documents of Vatican II, Volume I, Ed. Herbert Vorgrimler (New York: Herder and Herder, 1967), [hereafter, “Constitution”], op. cit., at 12. Jungmann’s notion that the Bridegroom gives birth to the bride could not be more absurd: it is without possible foundation, for it flatly excludes the indispensable nuptial symbolism of the Eucharistic celebration of the One Sacrifice, on the Cross and on the altar, by that sacrificial exercise of headship whereby the one and the same Son images his Father, viz., the Head from whom, as his Glory, he eternally proceeds. A created glory proceeds from the second Adam, as prophesied in Gen. 2: that created glory is the second Eve, the bridal Church, joined to the second Adam in One Flesh, the New Creation wherein all is made new.
[60] De Lubac’s writing of the Corpus mysticum was prompted, at least at its primary level, by his interest in accounting for early medieval reversal of the meaning assigned to Corpus Christi mysticum, corpus spirituale, as a result of the eleventh-century Berengarian refusal of Eucharistic realism. Prior to that event, there had been no overt challenge to the objectivity of the Eucharistic Presence of the risen Christ. Recognized to be mysterious, to be “spiritually understood,” given per speculum in aenigmate, his corporeal presence was aptly termed Corpus Christi mysticum, corpus spirituale, terms which were seen to have taken on an aura of subjectivity after Berengarius. It then became necessary to stress that which prior to Berengarius had not been questioned, viz., the objectivity of the Eucharistic sacrifice and thus of the Real Presence. It was during this time that Corpus Christi mysticum was dropped as a designation for the Real Presence, and became attached to the Church instead. Henceforth, with reference to the Eucharist, “corpus,” without a modifier, would be understood to refer to the sacrificed body of Christ, while the Church, which Paul had termed “body of Christ” without prejudice to the realism of the Eucharistic sacrifice, became known as “Corpus Christi mysticum;” see Corpus mysticum, esp. ch. ix, “Verité et verité,” 210-247, and “Conclusion,” 279-94 To avoid confusion, “Corpus Christi mysticum” will be used to name the Church throughout these volumes.
[61] Athanasius supposes the Incarnate Son, as uncreated Wisdom, to be speaking for created Wisdom in the Book of Wisdom in a way similar to that in which, as Head of the Church, the risen Jesus addressed Saul:
Wisdom himself is not created, because he is the Creator; by reason of the created image of himself found in his works, he speaks as though he were speaking of himself.
Oratio 2, 78, 79; PG 26, 311, 314. ET from Liturgy of the Hours IV, 456-57.
Athanasius here may be read to have anticipated the Head-Glory hermeneutic argued for in Volume I, supra: see “The Naming of God and Man.” On the other hand, his supposition that “Wisdom himself is not created, because he is the Creator” reflects a to take seriously Paul’s doctrine of creation in Christ. For Athanasius “Wisdom” is the historical Son, who is identified as the Creator, whose creation is the terminus of the Father’s historical Mission of the historical Son, Jesus the Christ, to give the “Spiritus Creator” by which Gift all things are made new.
[62] Summa Theologiae iiia, q. 73, a. 6, c. In this article of the Summa, “effectus huius sacramenti” is at least ambiguous, inasmuch as article 1, objection 2 of the same question identifies the Eucharistic res tantum with the Church. In his responsum, St. Thomas does not contest that identification. As earlier remarked, it is probable that he has here in view the One Flesh of Christ and the Church, the res gemina sacramenti of patristic theology, to which de Lubac refers in the passage quoted in endnote 117, infra.; as has been seen, it reflects a perspective quite different from that of the medieval emphasis upon defending, against Berengarius the objectivity and historicity of what after him would be named the Eucharistic res et sacramentum.
[63] In IV Sent., d. 12, q. 1, a. 3, ad 2, 3. (Moos, 521) cf. S. T. iiia, q. 73, a. 6, c.
[64] The Latin texts of the excerpts from S. T. iiia, q. 60, a. 3, q. 73, a. 3, and q. 80, a. 4, c:
Sed contra est quod in sacramento altaris est duplex res significata, scilicet Corpus Christi verum et mysticum, ut Augustinus dicit, in libro Sententiarum Prosperi.
S. T. iiia, q. 60, a. 3, c.
Respondeo dicendum quod in hoc sacramento duo est considerare: scilicet ipsum sacramentum, et rem sacramenti. Dictum est autem quod res sacramenti est unitas corporis mystici, sine qua non potest esse salutis.
S. T. iiia, q. 73, a. 3, c.
Respondeo dicendum quod in hoc sacramento, sicut in aliis, id quod est sacramentum est signum eius quod est res sacramenti. Duplex autem est res huius sacramenti, sicut supra dictum est: 5) una quidem quae est significata et contenta, scilicet ipse Christus; alia autem est significata et non contenta, scilicet Corpus Christi mysticum, quod est societas sanctorum. Quicumque ergo hoc sacramentum sumit, ex hoc ipso significat se esse Christo unitum et membris eius incorporatum. Quod quidem fit per fidem formatum 6) quam nullus habet cum peccato mortali. Et ideo manifestum est quod quicumque cum peccato mortali hoc sacramentum sumit, falsitatem in hoc sacramento committit. Et ideo incurrit sacrilegium, tanquam sacramenti violator. Et propter hoc mortaliter peccat.
5. Q. 60, a. 3, arg. Sed contra; q. 73, a. 6.
6. Fides formata ea est quae per caritatem operatur eique coniungitur; fides vero informis ea est quae sine caritate existit. (Editor’s note)
S. T. iiia, q. 80, a. 4, c.
[65] See de Lubac, Medieval Exegesis II, at 183-184; Corpus mysticum, 217-225. It is curious that de Lubac, in his profound exposition of the unity of the Eucharist and of the New Testament, does not preface his monumental investigation of the Eucharistic foundation of the “four senses of Scripture,” with a recognition that the medieval exegesis is the application of the sacramentum tantum, res et sacramentum, res tantum analysis of sacramental realism to the liturgical preaching of the Scripture, an exegesis inseparable from the Eucharistic worship of the Church. This medieval analysis is loyal, as he recognized, to Augustine’s sacramental doctrine, even to the res gemina or duplex res et sacramentumi, which is verified in the inseparability of the allegorical (doctrinal) and tropological (moral) senses, as the indispensable intermediary between the literal and anagogical senses. However, it may not have occurred to him that something so obvious to him needed statement.
[66] See the Vol. I, Introduction, endnote 38, for a survey of current scholarly exchange of views over the Eucharistic quality of this passage. The question is moot for the purposes of the present study, since the Latin fathers exploited it without hesitation. However that exploitation was largely confined to the language of the epiclesis in Didache. ix, 4.:
As this broken bread was scattered upon the mountains, but was brought together and became one, so let thy Church be gathered together from the ends of the earth into thy kingdom, for thine is the glory and the power through Jesus Christ for evcr.
Didache ix, 4. The Apostolic Fathers I; tr. Kirsopp Lake; Col. Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard University Press; London: William Henemann, Ltd., 19751912)), at 323.
Augustine develops this theme in the two famous sermons, Sermo 227 and Sermo 272. the following lines are excerpted from the Migne edition of the former.
Unus panis, unum corpus, [Col. 1100] multi sumus (I Cor. X, 17). Sic exposuit sacramentum mensae Dominicae: Unus panis, unum corpus, multi sumus.
Commendatur vobis in isto pane quomodo unitatem amare debeatis. Numquid enim panis ille de uno grano factus est? Nonne multa erant tritici grana? Sed antequam ad panem venirent, separata erant: per aquam conjuncta sunt, et post quamdam contritionem. Nisi enim molatur triticum, et per aquam conspergatur, ad istam formam minime venit, quae panis vocatur. Sic et vos ante jejunii humiliatione et exorcismi sacramento quasi molebamini. Accessit Baptismum et aqua; quasi conspersi estis, ut ad formam panis veniretis. Sed nondum est panis sine igne. Quid ergo significat ignis? Hoc est Chrisma. Oleum etenim ignis nostri, Spiritus sancti est sacramentum.
The commonplace patristic references to this passage with reference to the Eucharistic “gathering of the Church” do not imply the Reformation’s “gathered church” ecclesiology, which finds the constitutive cause of the Church in baptism instead of in the Eucharist, as Catholicism does. Rather, the Corpus Christi mysticum of the medieval Latin tradition is eo ipsa the second Eve, proceeding from her Head as from her source, and therefore caused and sustained by her Eucharistic Lord because One Flesh with him. It is into this Church, pre-existing all its members, that each member of the Church has been baptized, in order to enter into her fullness by participating personally in her Eucharistic worship of her Lord. When de Lubac, as in Corpus mysticum at 122, describes those who receive the Eucharist worthily as by their Communion “aggregatus” to the historical Church i.e., “corpus Christi quod est ecclesia designantur” he understands that “aggregatus” as did Simon of Tournai, who, writing about 1200, understands the Eucharistic prayer, “Jube haec praeferri in sublime altare tuum”, to be addressed to the historical Church, rather than to the risen Christ present in the consecrated species. This is an odd exegesis, but it witnesses to the belief in the Eucharistic cause of the “aggregatio” to the Church of those who worship in the Church.
[67] De Lubac, Corpus mysticum, at 30.
[68] Notably, in Sermo 341, 9-12. Sermo 341 is perhaps Augustine’s most explicit affirmation of the nuptial union of Christ and the Church, there we also find him stressing the distinction between the una caro of Christ the Bridegroom in nuptial union with the bridal Church, and the personal or hypostatic unity of Jesus Christ the Bridegroom. Augustine speaks of of these Christological unities with a careful distinction between the completeness of the Personal unity of Christ (Chrisus integer) and the completeness of the nuptial or sponsal unity of the one flesh of the Christ and the Church, the “Christus totus” Augustine carefully notes the distinction between the Personal semse of completeness, that of the “Christus integer,” and the covenantal or sponsal meaning of “completeness” to which “Christus totus” refers. On the other hand, Augustine uses una caro to describe each of these integrities, as earlier noted (endnotes 21 and 22, supra, and 70, infra). An English translation of Sermo 341 is provided in the text to which endnote 23, supra, refers, where the Latin text of the Migne edition also appears.
[69] This a priori impossibility is perennially rediscovered in the rationally insoluble problem of the one and the many, whose logical insolubility on any non-trivial level, formally asserted by Kurt Gödel, whose “incompleteness theorems,” published in 1931, have never been successfully challenged: see Ernest Nagel and James R. Newman, Gödel's Proof (New York: New York University Press, 1958); Stanley Jaki provides a brief description of the importance of Gödel’s theorems in The Relevance of Physics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 127-130, and in several of his later books. The classic posing of the problem of the one and the many takes for granted the submission of truth to logical necessity: i.e., it ignores, therefore dismisses a priori, the possibility of a free intelligible unity, which is to say, dismisses the possibility of freely coherent historical objectivity. That there is a free logical coherence is a matter of revelation; thus its prior possibility is foreclosed by the classic pagan tradition. It is evident that, as free, it is a gift to be received, and can have no prior possibility, i.e., no intelligible potentiality from which that free coherence would ineluctably emerge.
Gödel did no more than prove what Plato had known, that the material order lacks the necessary logical coherence which the philosophes of the Enlightenment and their adepts require that it have. Gödel’s theorems bear upon the quaerens of autonomous rationality for ideal rational coherence at its most abstract level, that of mathematical symbolism. Thus they have no relevance to the free order of sacramental historicity, wherein rationality is the free quest for further entry into the Truth which, as a free gift and therefore mystery,, the historical quaerens can never possess comprehensively in a manner that would foreclose the quest itself. The conviction that an ultimate necessary reason underlies all reality and that its formulation is the raison d’être of physics is simply taken for granted by most contemporary physicists: Sheldon Lee Glashow, in "Toward a Unified Theory of Physics," Michigan Quarterly Review 23 (Spring, 1984) at 220, states it clearly: "Beyond the grand unified theory lies "the Theory," which unifies all the forces of nature. This is the greatest challenge of physics."
Only the recognition of the sacramental objectivity of historical reality will resolve this dilemma. We need not expect a recognition of that salient fact by the scientific community within the foreseeable future, burdened as most of that community is by a dogmatic secularism whether internalized or imposed, although the free intelligibility of physical reality is presupposed by the experimental method itself, and cannot be accounted for as other than sacramental, for physical reality, simply as fallen, has no intrinsic significance, as the current fascination of physical scientists with Buddhism manifests Neither can it have any intrinsic interest; with the result that the goal envisioned by the contemporary Copenhagen school of physics is the methodological transcendence of the physical universe, an a priori intuition incapable per se of verification and heedless of any need for it.
[70] Dominic Unger provides a careful exposition of Irenaeus’ understanding of the Christ’s recapitulation of all things; see “Christ’s Role in the Universe According to St. Irenaeus, Part II”, Franciscan Studies 26 (1945), at 3-20, 128-135. Unger cites a passage in the Adv. Haer. (l. 3, c. 16, n. 6) wherein Irenaeus implicitly links the recapitulation theme of Eph. 1:10 to the Pauline doctrine of headship set out in I Cor. 11:3 and Col. 1:18. Irenaeus reads the latter passage as Christ’s “making himself the head” (apponens seipsum caput) of “the body, the Church,” thus linking Eph. 1:10 to Col. 1:18. In agreement, see Daniélou’s account (Vol. IV, endnote 117, infra) of Irenaeus’ recognition of the interrelation between I Cor 11:3 and Paul’s use of headship in Ephesians, citing Adv. Hær., V, 18, 2. Daniélou ascribes this insight also to Irenaeus’ near contemporary, Clement of Alexandria. The apostolic “Spirit Christology” is common to both.
It has been noted that the Fathers show remarkably little interest in I Cor. 11:3. The index of patristic scriptural references in the three volumes of Msgr. Jurgens’ The Faith of the Early Fathers contains a single reference to that strategic verse, and that instance is its misreading by Pseudo-Ambrosius, who infers from the headship of the husband the inferiority of his wife. The biblical dictionaries and the current commentaries on Ephesians unanimously ignore the foundation of the reference to “recapitulation” in Eph. 1:10 in the doctrine of headship intimated in I Cor. 6:15-16. taught in I Cor. 10-11 and deployed in Col. 1:15, Eph. 1:10 and 5:21-33, preferring instead a derivative use of term wherein, as in Rom. 13:9-10, the Ten Commandments are resumed or summed up in the NT command to love one’s neighbor as oneself: see Margaret Y. McDonald, Colossians, Ephesians; ser. Sacra Pagina, vol. 17 (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2000), at 201-03.
In the first volume of his brilliant commentary on Ephesians, Ephesians: Translation and Commentary on Chapters 4-6; ser. Anchor Bible 34a (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1974) [hereafter, Ephesians], at 91, Markus Barth denies that there is a “theory of recapitulation” in the Pauline letters. This is said in function of his highly nuanced analysis of the meaning which Paul has given ἀνακεθαλώσασθαι in Eph. 1:10.. Barth is here choosing between three possibilities, and has arrived at a synthesis which dismisses as unwarranted the etymology proposed by the present writer, viz., that the "anakephalōsasthai" of Eph. 1:10 is inescapably linked to headship doctrine of I Cor. 11:3.
Barth's resolution of this problem begins with a postulate:
c. The meaning of the ambiguous Greek verb is to be derived exclusively from the context of Eph 10, and is "to make Christ the head.". According to the context, Jesus Christ is made by God the head of the universe and of the Church. There is no growth except toward him and from him.(4:15-16). He is to fill all (4:10). Thus the verb that seems to be inexplicable has been given a new meaning by the author of Ephesians––if only his own later words in the same epistle are permitted to serve as a dictionary and commentary. God "makes Christ the head over all" It is certainly hazardous to ascribe to the Greek verb such a novel meaning. Nevertheless, Paul may have been aware of the true etymology and meaning of the word and yet have used it as a suitable indication of matters which were to be unfolded later on.
None of these three interpretations, taken in isolation from one another, is strong enough to be persuasive. But since Ephesians contains no trace of a recapitulation theory, it is advisable not to make use of the second alternative. Thus the first and third choices remain. They have been blended into the compromise translation offered above, which holds together the method and purpose of Jesus Christ's commission: by becoming head he will prove himself as head; by his rulership he is to unite what was divided and hostile. Headship is the means, reconciliation the purpose, of his appointment. The words "all things. . . those in heaven and upon earth" reveal that the rule of Christ is not restricted to his government over men and the Church. Angels and other powers are among his subjects (1:21, 23). Thus, this part of the message of Ephesians has sometimes been summed up by the term "cosmic Christ."
Markus Barth, Ephesians I, 93-94.
This cogent analysis opens the door to a further examination of the Mission of the Son, Jesus the Christ the head, which in turn requires an exploration of the nuptial meaning of his headship, for he is the bridegroom of the bridal Church, the second Eve. In short, Jesus' mission from the Father is historical, and abstraction from that history defeats inquiry into his mission, for his authority as head becomes merely juridical: rulership, governance—in short, power. Christ has warned his disciples that "It shall not be like that among you." Barth explores the historicity of Jesus’ headship at length in Ephesians II, pp. 714-87; see endnote 236, infra.
The New Dictionary of Theology, (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1997), at 827-28, does recognize that recapitulation is a restoring of unity, but this again in the general sense of “fulfilling all OT prophesies and types, of bringing back into unity all that sin has scattered, and of realizing God’s original plan for humanity.” There is here no linkage of recapitulation to Christ’s historical headship. Nonetheless, if in fact the sin of Adam is the refusal of a proffered headship as this work has proposed, following John Paul II and Joyce A. Little (cf. endnotes 3, supra, and 328, infra), Adam’s consequent loss of his free integrity and that of the world which fell into necessary disunity by his refusal of headship can be restored only by a second Adam whose office is the “re-heading” of the fallen creation, the restoration of free, nuptial unity to it, by his obedience to his Mission from the Father to give the Spiritus Creator. The commonplace notion that the Christ’s redemptive restoration of unity is discussible in abstraction from his institution, as Bridegroom and Head, of the One Flesh of the New Covenant is the dehistoricization of both. Nonetheless, exegetical scholarship has long been troubled, even baffled, by I Cor. 11:3. Raymond Collins, surveying that scholarship, proposes that Paul here resorts to punning, a “playing on the multiple meanings of “head;” he does not inform the reader as to what these “multiple meanings” in fact may be: the pun is taken to be self-evident:
Paul’s rhetorical argument is constructed on the basis of a pun. He plays on the multiple meanings of “head.” The pun is all the more striking in that Paul does not often write about the “head.” Apart from 12:21, where “head” appears in his allegory on the body, he uses the word only in Rom. 12:20, where it appears in a citation of Prov 25:22.
Raymond Collins, First Corinthians; ser. Sacra Pagina, vol. 7 (Collegeville: The Liturgical Press, 1999), at 396.
This is simply false. see The New Jerome Biblical Commentary (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, New Jerseu. 1990), at 799, col. a: “The authenticity of I Corinthians is undisputed.”
Collins takes for granted the non-Pauline authorship of the Captivity Epistles, notably Ephesians and Colossians, and consequently their irrelevance to I Corinthians. By this device he holds himself absolved of any need to relate I Cor. 11:3 to the passages in those Epistles, clearly in the Pauline tradition, in which Jesus is named the head of creation and of the Church, the latter in a nuptial context, that of the “great mystery,” hardly a subject for punning.
Had Collins been less intent upon imposing a rhetorical form upon the obscurities which the sancta simplicitas of his exegesis has imposed upon the text, he might have seen there the Pauline development of the intrinsic analogy Paul has taught between the headship of the Father over the Trinity, of Jesus over the humanity that is created in and by him, and of the husband over his nuptial union with his wife. Thereby he might have understood the office of headship to be the source of the substantial freedom of the substance in which the head is immanent. Thus there is no subordination of Persons within the members of the Trinity, nor is there any within the members of the human community redeemed from their imprisonment in sin precisely by the liberating headship of Christ, nor is there any subordination of persons within the nuptial one flesh, wherein the husband’s headship of his wife images the headship of the Christ, freeing his union with his wife’s nuptial response to him of all personal subordination..
In sum, those under headship are homoousios with their head, each possessing in its fullness the free perfection of the substance of which the head is the source by reason of his subsistence within it. As it is, Collins’ recourse to the methodological fragmentation of the biblical tradition into intrinsically insignificant particles open to an arbitrary reconstruction is neither novel nor of interest to theological scholarship. His ascription to Paul of a punning reference to the Father’s Headship does not merit discussion, nor do its sequelae.
Such delicts as Collins’s notion of exegesis do not explain why the Anchor Bible Dictionary has nothing to say of ‘head’ or ‘headship,’ nor why the Harper Dictionary of the Bible should dismiss the subject with a brief and uninformative paragraph.
[71] Corpus mysticum, at 34. In the second paragraph, de Lubac refers to the totus Christus as “cet unique et total Corpus Christi”:
Ainsi doit se réaliser, peu à peu, le « totus Christus »73, qui est la fin, toujours présente a l’esprit, du mystère. Si bien que, dans cette perspective de totalité et unité, on n’éprouve guère le besoin de chercher des formules ou des épithètes pour distinguer « corps » et « corps. »
En ce unique et total Corpus Christi, on pourra, par ailleurs, s’attacher à discerner plusieurs aspects; on pourra au contraire insister exclusivement où plus fortement sur son unité. Ce sera, par exemple, dans le première partie du IXe siècle, le duel d’Alamaire de Metz et de Florus de Lyon. Quelques années plus tard à propos d’un autre genre de distinction qui nous occupera plus loin, ce sera la longue et assez confuse discussion soulevée autour du traité de saint Paschase Radbert. Mais toujours le corpus par excellence, celui auquel on pense en premier lieu, celui qu’il c’est pas nécessaire de désigner autrement, c’est l’Église.
73 La chose se vérifie même pour Paschase Radbert, comme l’a bien remarqué M. H. Peltier, Pascase Radbert, abbé de Corbie (1938), pp. 215-216. Cf. l’oraison pour la consécration du nouveau prêtre: « … cujus corpus, Ecclesiam tuam., crescere dilatarique largiris ». (P. L., 73, 221).
Clearly enough, it does not here occur to de Lubac to identify the “totus Christus” as the “Una Caro,” still less as the New Covenant. Augustine had made the first identification, but we look in vain in de Lubac’s exegesis of the Fathers for an explicit recognition that the Una Caro of Christ and the Church is a free because a covenantally-ordered unity.
[72] De Lubac’s text:
Bien que, d’un certain point de vue, l’Église puisse être l’un des trois corps habituellement dénombrés, elle n’est donc pourtant pas en réalité, par rapport aux deux premiers, un « autre corps. » Ainsi envisagée, elle est seulement « caeterum corpus » 75, « reliquum corpus » 76, c’est à dire le reste du corps, par opposition à la Tête. Que si on l’envisage en sa totalité, c’est à dire avec sa Tête, alors elle est elle-même le Corps qui, en dernière analyse, contient en soi tous le corps dont on peut dire qu’ils sont du Christ.
75. Augustine, Sermo 361, n. 3), « Ille qui suscitavit carnem suam, caetero corpori, quod est ecclesia, in capite demonstravit exemplum. » (P. L. 39:1600)
76. Jérôme, In Psalmum 7: « et caput et reliquum corpus » [Morin, Anecdota Maredsolana, vol. 3, P. 2, p. 24]). Joannes Monachus (P. L., 166, 1514 C). Helinandus (212, 522 D). Cf. Origène, In Ephes. I, 23 (Journal of Theological Studies, t. III, p. 401). Hésychius, In Psalmum 39 (P. G., 93, 1191-1192 D).
Corpus mysticum, at 35.
Thus envisaged, the head-body union is not understood as nuptially-ordered, therefore not as a free and covenantal union. A bit further on de Lubac observes: ”Voir cependent infra, « caeterum corpus » appliqué par Paschasius Radbertus au corps historique ». In this context, the text of I Cor. 6:15 is controlling; see endnote 122, infra.
[74] Augustine’s many texts affirming the marital order of the Christ-Church relation include Enarr. in Ps. 9, 6 (CCL 38:61; ACW 29:115; PL 36:119), Enarr. in Ps. 18, 2, 2 (CCl 38:105-106; ACW 29:102; PL 36:158), Enarr. in Ps. 18, 2, 6 (CCL 38:109; ACW 29:189; PL 36:161), Enarr. in Ps. 18, 2, 10 (CCL 38:110; ACW 29:191; PL 36:161), Enarr. in Ps. 26, 2, 2 (CCL 38:155; ACW 29:262; PL 36:200), Enarr. in Ps. 30, 2, 4 (CCL 38:193; ACW 30:13-14; PL 36:231), Enarr. in Ps. 101 s. 1, 3 (CCL 40:142; PL 37:1295), Enarr. in Ps. 127, 12 (CCL 40:18; PL 37:1685), Enarr. in Ps. 138, 2 (CCL 40:1990; PL 37:1784); Sermo 12 (Denis 3) (Misc. Ag. 1:18-21); Selected Easter Sermons of St. Augustine, ed. Philip T. Weller, S.T.D., with Intro., Text of 30 Sermons, Notes and Commentary (St. Louis: B. Herder, 1959); (PL 46:827-828); Sermo Denis 12 (Misc. Ag. 1:52); Sermo Denis 25, 8 (Misc. Ag. 1:156); Sermo 22, 10, 10 (CCL 41:300-301; PL 38:154); Sermo 46, 29-30 (CCL 41:556; Liturgy of the Hours IV, 307: Office of Readings, 2nd Reading, Friday, 25th Week; PL 38:280-281); Sermo 91, 7, 8 (PL 38: 571); Sermo 121, 4-5 (PL 38:679-680); Sermo 161, 1 (PL 38:878); Sermo 341, 9-12 (PL 39:1499-1500); De civ. dei 17, 16 (CCL 48:581; FC 24:64; PL 41:548-550); De civ. dei 17, 20 (CCL 48:589; FC 24:77; PL 41:556); De civ. dei 22, 17 (CCL 48:835-836; FC 24:465; PL 41:778); De Doctrina Christiana I, 16 (P.L. 34:25); De Ev. sec. Mat. 18 (P.L. 34, 977); De fide rer. invis. 8 (CCL 46:19; FC 4:469; PL 40:175); De divers. qq. oct. trib. 59 (CCL 44A:117; FC 70:108-114; PL 40:45-48); De divers qq. oct. trib. 69 (CCL 44A:195-196; FC 70:176-177; PL 40:79); In Jo. ev. tr. 8, 4 (CCL 36:84; Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series 7:58; PL 35:1452); In Jo. ev. tr. 9, 10 (CCL 36:96; NPNF/1, 7:66; PL 35:1463); In Jo. ev. tr. 21, 8 (CCL 36:216-217; NPNF/1, 7:140; PL 35:1568); In Jo. ev. tr. 65, 1-3 (CCL 36:491-492; Liturgy of the Hours II, 788: Office of Readings, 2nd Reading, Thursday, 4th Week of Easter); Contra Faust. Man. 12, 8 (CSEL 25:336-337; NPNF/1, 6:158; PL 42:258); Epist. 140.18 (CSEL 44-45:168; PL 33:145); Contra Donat. Ep. 4, 7 (CSEL 52:238; PL 43:395-396); Contra Donat. Ep. 7, 17 (CSEL 52:250-251; PL 43:403); cf. Moriones, Enchiridion, §§1215-1159.
[75] The double sacramental causality taught by Augustine in his anti-Donatist writings focused upon defending the doctrine that Donatism had refused: the validity of the baptism and the ordination of a subsequent sinner. Donatism did not rise to the level of a Eucharistic heresy, and the early recognition by Origen of double sacramental causality in the Eucharist remained latent until the twelfth century, when the School of Laon provided the final paradigm of sacramental causality under the stimulus of the Berengarian controversy.
[76] Cf. St. Augustine, Concerning The City of God against the Pagans. Edited by David Knowles; A New Translation by Henry Bettenson. With an introduction by David Knowles. (Baltimore: Penguin Books; col. The Pelican Classics. 1972) x, 6, at 379-80. The now commonplace, Reform-inspired translation of Augustine’s “sancta societate” by “fellowship,” even “holy fellowship,” ignores Augustine’s emphasis upon the nuptial union of Christ and the Church as the sine qua non of our salvation: Augustine knows no other “sancta societate inhaereamus Deo, relatum scilicet ad illum finem boni, quo”. than the nuptial union of Christ and his Church, the res sacramenti of the One Sacrifice, offered daily on the altars of the Church.
[77] Concordism” no longer suffices to translate “concordisme;” the English term is now rarely used except pejoratively, i.e., to label futile efforts to accommodate the doctrine of creation with comparably dogmatic evolutionary accounts of the origin of life and-or of the universe. Through this polemic usage, ‘concordism’ has lost its abstract meaning: viz., that of a deliberate academic effort to effect an agreement between logically incompatible scholarly assertions. As between the ‘creationist’ proposition that the universe is the free creation of a free reality, and the ‘evolutionist’ proposition that it is not, no such attempt appears to have been made by either side. Flat contradictories do not invite such discussion: see, e.g., the treatment of creationism, sic dicta, in “The Latest Face of Creationism,” in Scientific American, vol. 300, no. 1, 92-99.
[78] De Lubac’s text:
Plus laborieux devait être l’achèvement de ce nouveau concordisme par l’unification parfaite des deux derniers termes de chaque série: la caro spiritualis―devenue entre temps chez quelques-uns caro mystica―et le corpus-Ecclesia―lui-même en passe de devenir chez quelques autres Corpus Christi mysticum. Si l’ancienne caro spiritualis, avant de céder la place à une caro materialis, avait jadis fusionné sans trop de peine avec le Corpus Christi mysticum de Raban Maur et de Paschase Radbert, maintenant il n’en allait plus de même: la nouvelle acception de caro spiritualis ne coincidait pas aussi facilement avec le Corpus Christi mysticum en sa nouvelle acception. N’étant plus simplement l’Eucharistie, la « chair spirituelle » du Christ ne se trouvait pas être, ipso facto, l’Église.
L’unification fut néanmoins tentée. Elle devait s’opérer, non sans tâtonnements, dans le cadre de la théorie sacramentaire qui distinguait dans le mystère eucharistique un triple élément: sacramentum-tantum, res-et-sacramentum, res-tantum. La théorie était d’inspiration augustinienne, quoiqu’il ne répondait pas exactement au langage habituel de saint Augustin.1 Si son conceptualisme aux allures un peu scolaires tranchait aussi avec la pensée fluide de saint Augustin lui-même, elle permettait du moins―et c’était un grand avantage―du dissiper l’équivoque dont était grevés le deux mots de sacramentum et de res sacramenti, et d’échapper de la sorte aux interprétations contradictoires, l’une et l’autre intenables, des textes où le grand Docteur usait les mots.
1 Pour celui-ci, la res sacramenti, c’est encore le plus souvent la res gesta (ou gerenda) dont le rite est le mémorial (ou le figure annonciatrice, l’anticipation). Dans le cas du sacrement chrétien, il s’agit naturellement de cette res gesta qu’est le mort et résurrection du Christ; le sacrifice quotidien de l’Église est le sacrement de cette chose qui fut le sacrifice du Calvaire. Cf. De civitate Dei 1. 10, c.20 (P. L. 41, 298); Contra Faustum 1. 19, c. 13-14 (42, 355); Sermo 22 (38, 1256); Epist. 35, no. 1 (33, 105); Enchiridion, c. 42 (33, 253), etc. Cependant, In Joannem, tract. 26 (35, 1614); Sermo 227 (37, 1100), etc. Cf. Pseudo-Bède, In Joannem: « tanta rei sacramentunm » (P. L., 72, 1719A; il s’agit de la Passion). Voir supra, ch. ii.
Corpus mysticum, 189; cf. endnote 36, supra.
[79] The Latin text of Amalarius’ much disputed “triforme corpus Christi,” as well as the French text of de Lubac’s rendition of Florus’ attack upon it, appear in endnote 93, infra. Paschasius’ agreement with Amalarius’ reduction of the freedom of the nuptial Una Caro to that of a physical corpus has been pointed out in endnotes 1 and 18, supra, and in endnotes 90, 93, 100, 102, 107, and 115, infra.
[80] De Lubac, Corpus mysticum, at 145.
[81] Ibid., 152. Th. Camelot had used the same expression, op. cit., at 403, 404, understanding it as entirely compatible with what he has termed the “realisme rigoreux” of Augustine’s Eucharistic doctrine. In Corpus mysticum, at 177, n. 102, de Lubac points to Augustine’s emphasis on the corporeal absence of the bridegroom from the bride (In Joannem, tract. 50). The inference there of an actual ecclesiastical symbolism, viz., one in which Augustine substitutes the presence of the Church for the presence of the absent Christ in the Eucharist, would be tenable only were the corporeal absence of the head from the body the real, concretely historical absence of the bridegroom from the bride, which would ignore what Augustine, stressing the unity of the Christus totus, asserts apodictically, the inseparability of the bridegroom and the bride, the head and the body, in their nuptial union, a unity that for Augustine is certainly sacramentally objective because it is Eucharistically instituted. Their unity is therefore metaphysically objective, not metaphorical, for it is divinely instituted; cf. endnote 121, infra. The attribution of a dehistoricizing symbolism to Augustine’s Eucharistic doctrine is in any event incompatible with de Lubac’s defense and appreciation of Augustine’s hermeneutic cited in endnote 268 infra. Augustine certainly speaks of the corporeal absence of the risen Christ from the Church:
… Sermo 235, commentant la disparition de Jésus à Emmaüs: « Abcessit ab eis corpore, qui tenebatur fide. Ideo Dominus absentavit se corpore ab omni ecclesia et ascendit in caelum, ut fides aedificetur. Si enim non nosti nisi quod vides, ubi est fides?. Aedificetur fides, quia reddetur species ». (P.L., 38, 119). Cependant, In Joannem, tr. 50 (35, 1759).
Corpus mysticum at 177, n. 102.
At the same time, however, he identifies the Eucharistic food, very simply, with the ransom offered for his redemption, a ransom which cannot include the Church, because the Church, caused by that offering, obviously cannot constitute it:
Your only Son, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge, redeemed me with his blood. Let not arrogant men speak evil of me. For I meditate on my ransom, and I eat it and drink it and try to share it with others; though poor I want to be filled with it in the company of those who eat and are filled, and they shall praise the Lord who seek him.
Confessions, 10, 68-70; CCL 39, 1351-1353; tr. from The Liturgy of the Hours IV, at 534.
Thus, Augustine’s assertion of the bodily absence of the risen Christ, an empirical separation of Christ from the Church, is entirely consistent with his assertion of a Eucharistic presence of Christ that is not empirical, not sensible, not visible, but which nonetheless, as spiritual and non-empirical, non-corporeal,, is entirely historical and objective, for it is affirmed by the faith of the Church, which for Augustine is absolutely normative: famously, it is only by his historical participation in the historical faith of the historical Church that he himself believes:
Ego vero Evangelio non crederem, nisi me catholicae Ecclesiae commoveret auctoritas.
Augustine, C. Epistulam Manich. 5, 6 (P. L. 42:176); v. Moriones, Enchiridion, p. 57, §187.
It is evident enough that here Augustine reads ‘body’ and its cognates empirically, in the sense of available to sensory knowledge: he frequently contrasts “corporaliter” with “spiritualiter,” without detriment, as de Lubac acknowledges, to the concrete reality of a “spiritual” presence of the bridegroom to the bridal Church. It is also evident that Augustine knows that the Eucharistic presence of the Jesus the Christ is an object of faith, not of experience. He contrasts visiible, sensible bodily presence, i.e., that of Christ to his disciples before the Ascension, with a concrete Eucharistic presence that is intelligible, knowable, by faith alone, but this faith is the historical faith of the historical Church, not a personal vagary, not a dehistoricized sola fide. There is no basis for reading his language as symbolist: it is only necessary to take Augustine at his word, ”Spiritualiter intelligete!” instead of reading him in a context provided long afterword by Berengarius’ anticipation of the Reformers, whose willingness to read him as anticipating their denial of Eucharistic realism is patent. Nonetheless de Lubac is emphatic that for Augustine, after the Ascension,
Il n’y avait plus depuis lors qu’une « presentia spiritualis », non moins réele à la vérité. C’était de l’Église, corps du Christ, qu’on avait appris du même saint Augustin à entendre la promesse evangélique: « Voici que je suis avec vous jusqu’a la consommation du siècle » (emphasis added).
Corpus mysticum, 177. See endnote 268, infra, for de Lubac’s full appreciation of “la presence réele.” He properly objects to its conceptual dissociation from the full effect of the Eucharistic signing, that fulfillment to which the Church’s worship looks, the full gift of the Spirit: cf. endnote 108, infra, for a mention by de Lubac of the Carolingian recognition of the “la présence.”
Here Augustine’s literal identification of the Church with the Christ must be read in the context he himself supplied, that of their union as Head and Body, Bridegroom and Bride, in One Flesh. In Sermo 341 Augustine contrasts the personal integrity of Jesus the Bridegroom as at once human and divine( the Christus integer) with the nuptial integrity of the Christus totus, the One Flesh of the second Adam and second Eve. With respect to this nuptial union of the Bridegroom and the bridal Church, Augustine can hardly be held to have ignored the evangelical admonition of Mk. 10:9 and Mt. 9:6 ”What God has joined together, let not man put asunder.” It must be remembered that for Augustine and for the Fathers under his influence, the Church is a transhistorical or anagogical reality, which is to say that her historical objectivity can only be sacramental, that of the One Flesh, whose historical immanence is its Eucharistic representation, the visible worship of the historical Church, visible indeed, and thus corporeal, but only as a sacramental sign is visible and corporeal. In this union, the Church has the same historical objectivity as has her Lord, the objectivity of her sacramental union with him in the Eucharist. The Church is then no more “corporeal” than is her Lord: her sacramental historicity is the product of his. Like him, she is an object of faith, not of sensible experience: “Spiritualiter intelligete” applies to her as well as to him. In short, Augustine’s Eucharistic discourse must be read in terms of its Eucharistic a priori, not vice versa.
[82] De Lubac, Corpus mysticum, at 178.
[83] Pierre Batiffol, L’Eucharistie, 447, and Johannes Betz, Eucharistie in der Schrift und Patristik,[hereafter Eucharistie],486-87; see DS †874 (*1636).
[84] Thus W. Gessel, op. cit., L. Grandgeorge, Saint Augustin et le Néo-Platonisme (Paris: Minerva, 1896) and M. F. Sciacca, Saint Augustin et le Néoplatonisme: La possibilité d'une philosophie chrétienne (Louvain: Publications Universitaires de Louvain; Paris: Béatrice Nauwelaerts, 1956); see also endnotes 206 and 223, infra. Sed contra, see de Lubac, Corpus mysticum, at 147, n. 44, citing De Civitate Dei l. 13, c. 20: “Non quia in spiritum convertetur, sicut nonnulli putant.” (P. L., 41, 393). Retract., 1, 17 (32, 613). However, this passage concerns the resurrection of the body, and uses “spiritum” in the sense of ‘immaterial,’ as the context requires. Consequently it is quite irrelevant to Augustine’s “Spiritualiter intelligete” by which he distinguishes the empirical objectivity of material things from the sacramental objectivity of Christ’s Presence in the Eucharist.
[85] The concentration upon the corpus verum, spiritualis in this early period leads to its identification with the Eucharist, as a summary statement indicates by de Lubac indicates:
L’Eucharistie est donc corpus spirituale, comme elle est Corpus Christi mysticum. La première expression se maintiendra presque longtemps que la seconde.
Corpus mysticum, 159-161, at 160..
[86] Corpus mysticum, 189; cf. endnote 79, supra. “Caro spiritualis” is a paradoxical expression, for “flesh” and “spirit, whether in the Old Testament or the New,” simply oppose each other as principles respectively of fragmentation and of free unity, in a mutual exclusion that is resolved historically and uniquely only by our Lord’s sacrificial institution, the restoration on the cross and on the altar, of the free unity of the One Flesh, the New Covenant, which institution is, eo ipso, his full Gift of the Spiritus Creator, the restoration of the free unity whose loss, with the consequence of immanently necessary disunity and fragmentation, marks the “flesh” and the fallen creation: The Augustinian imagery of the radical consequence of fallenness always looks to the fragmentation of creation; see Enarr. in Ps. 95, 15 (CChr.SL 39:1352-1353) cited by de Lubac in his early work, Catholicism: A Study of Dogma in Relation to the Corporate Destiny of Mankind; trans. Lancelot C. Sheppard (New York: Sheed and Ward, 19581947), at 7 and 231.
The institution of the New Covenant, the terminus ad quem of his mission from the Father, required of Jesus the “obedience unto death” that led him to Golgotha and to his sacrificial exercise of headship, his “recapitulation” of the fallen creation, a creative work possible only to the head, to Jesus the Christ, sent to give the Spiritus Creator. There is no non-historical, simply eschatological resolution of this historical surd, the fallen fragmentation of historical man in his historical world. Only the creation, by the Son’s gift of the Spiritus Creator, of the free, fulfilled unity of the One Flesh, the New Covenant, the New Creation, is responsive to the fatality of the fleshly dynamic of disintegration. This theme is developed further in “The Relation of Nuptial Symbolism to Eucharistic Realism,” The Pacific Journal Of Theology, II/21 (1999), 88-119; see also ”Bāśār-Nepeš: Sarx-Pneuma; Body-Soul: Death-Resurrection: An Essay in the Pauline/Johannine Anthropology,” in Robert Brungs, Ed., Christianity and the Human Body; ser. I.T.E.S.T. Proceedings, October, 2000 (I.T.E.S.T. Faith/Science Press, 2001), 105-52.
[87] De Lubac, Corpus mysticum, at 65.
[88] De Lubac, “Communio Sanctorum,” Theological Fragments, 11-34. De Lubac has spoken similarly in Corpus mysticum, at 96, n. 36 where, citing Yves de Chartres, he asserts that membership in Church is prerequisite to worthy reception of Christ’s body, thus establishing a clear distinction between the ecclesial body and the sacrificed body of Christ, while affirming at the same time their inseparability.
[89] St. Thomas is very clear on this point:
Ad primum ergo dicendum quod matrimonium, secundum quod ordinatur ad animalem vitam, est naturae officium. Sed secundum quod habet aliquid spritualitatis, est sacramentum. Et quia minimum habet de spiritualitate, ultimo ponitur inter sacramenta.
S. T. iiia, q. 65, art. 3, ad 1.
So also was Augustine, as we have seen in Vol. I, Ch. 2, endnote 93:
Beata Maria, quem credendo peperit, credendo concepit, prius mente quam ventre concipiens.
Serm. 25, 4 (PL 38:1074) ET in The rgy of the Hours, IV, at 1573.
Beatior Maria percipiendo fidem Christi quam concipiendo carnem Christi. Sic et materna propinquitas nihil Mariae profuisset, nisi felicius Christum corde quam carne gestasset.
De sancta virg. 34 (PL 40:398).
Underlying this deprecation of marriage is finally the Platonic dualism which hindered the patristic appreciation of nuptial symbolism, a symbolism of which St. Thomas also was apparently ignorant, consistent with his subscription to the cosmological supposition that the sanctity of sacramental worship is in inverse proportion to its corporeality. Thus he can say of marriage that “quia minimum habet de spiritualitate, ultimo ponitur inter sacramenta.” There is evident here a correlative ignorance of the meaning of spirituality which, in his case, is reduced to immateriality. The same cosmologically-induced fastidiousness marks Augustine’s notion of Mary‘s conception of her Lord: it was achieved “prius in mente,” i.e., subjectively, before it was historically realized in her physical conception of her Son. This failure to appreciate the nuptial order of the New Covenant that grounds the sacramentality of marriage afflicts also much of current Eucharistic theology, for celebration of the Eucharist has the order, the free unity, of a single unique Event: cf. endnote 146, infra. The remedy for this Platonizing of the Church’s sacramental realism lies in a comparison of the corporeality of the Eucharistic reception of the Body of Christ to which Jn. 6:53-54 refers as τρώγων, φάγετε (chew, munch, devour: eating in a sense common to beasts as well as to men) with the corporeality of the consummation of the “one flesh” of sacramental marriage. The one is quite as corporeal, quite as spiritual, as the other. Both are grounded in the sacrificial institution of the One Flesh of the New Covenant by the One Sacrifice of Jesus Christ the Lord who, at the request of Our Lady during the marriage feast in Cana, changed water into wine.
[90] Paschasius’ Latin text:
Et sicut sanctus testatur Cyprianus, nec aqua in calice sine sanguine esse debet, nec sanguis sine aqua; quia per aquam populus ablutus una baptismatis significatur, et per sanguinem Christus, qui ex eo nos redemit: ac per hoc intelligitur et formatur Christus et Ecclesia unum corpus. Itaque nec Christus sine Ecclesia pontifex in aeternum, nec Ecclesia sine Christo Deo Patri offertur. Haec quippe mystica sunt in quibus veritas carnis est et sanguinis, non alterius quam Christi, in mysterio tamen et figura.
Epistula de Corpore et Sanguine Domini ad Frudegardum (P. L. 120:1352C-1353A) (emphasis added).
[91] De Lubac’s French text:
Néanmoins, les deux métaphores pauliniennes de l’union du Christ et de son Église en une seule chair et de l’union des membres du Christ en un seul corps ne se recouvraient pas.
Corpus mysticum, at 196; see endnote 115 for the full text of the paragraph from which this sentence is excerpted.
[92] De Lubac’s French text:
Or chez Perre Lombard, que va bientôt suivre Pierre de Troyes,43 tout écartement se trouve brusquement supprimé. L’effet du mystère apparaît unique, la virtus s’identifie à la res. Comme tout le monde, Pierre Lombard juxtapose les deux symolismes d’espèces: nourriture de l’homme intérieur, confection de l’unité ecclésiastique.44 Mais, dans l’unité des membres de l’Église rassemblés en un seul corps, ou unitas fidelium, il n’hésite pas à voir la mystica caro Christi in quoi consiste la “chose” dernier du sacrament. Res-et-non-sacramentum, mystica ejus caro. La terminologie est ainsi unifiée. Mystica caro et Corpus Christi mysticum vont devenir interchangeables. La premère expression aura efficacement frayé la voie à la seconde.
43 Sententiae de sacramentis (Martin, pp. *35-*36.)
44 Sentences, 1, 4, d. 8, n. 4 (Qaracchi, p. 792. D, 9, c. 3 (p. 796): rerum veritatem… ipsam efficientiam”, In I Cor.: “rem, id est unitatem fidelium et gratiae augmentum” (191, 1643).
Corpus mysticum, at 197.
The Lombard’s “brusque” suppression of the virtus-res distinction, has as its corollary in the relegation of the “mystica ejus caro” to the standing of “res-et-non-sacramentum.” That is, he refers the patristic res sacramenti of the Eucharist, understood as unitas corporis, equivalently the historical Church at worship, looking to the eschatologically achieved anagogical fulfillment of her historical reality, to the res tantum of the medieval analysis.
The analytical distinction thus placed between cause and effect within the patristic res sacramenti, requiring its division between res et sacramentum and res tantum, was at one with the analytical distinction between the infallible effect of the initial sacramental signing by the sacramentum tantum, viz., the res et sacramentum, and the still historical but fallible sacramental effect of the res et sacramentum, i.e., the final effect of sacramental signing that is not itself a distinct sacramental sign: the res tantum understood, as by St. Thomas, as the recipient’s personal Eucharistic union with the risen Lord in ecclesia. The clear conceptual distinction between the infallible and the fallible efficacy of Eucharistic signing had become necessary after Berengarius. It had its own problems.
The novel distinction between the res tantum sacramenti, the fallible personal and anagogical fulfillment of the recipient’s Eucharistic communion in ecclesia, and the infallible effect of the sacramentum tantum, viz., the res et sacramentum, entailed the analytic dissociation of the elements held in a phenomenological unity by the patristic res sacramenti. Unfortunately, as de Lubac has stressed, from the middle of the eleventh century, the apologetic interest in defending against Berengarius the objective realism of the corpus verum, as the product of transubstatiation, led theologians, including Peter Lombard and his commentators, such as St. Thomas, to neglect the unitas ecclesiae as the infallible effect of the sacramentum tantum: the Church was increasingly seen, as by the Lombard, to be noncontenta with respect to the consecrated species, the verum corpus, and, by a yet more unfortunate assoication of ideas, was soon dissociated from the infallible effect of the Eucharistic signing, to become non significata: i.e., not signed by the words of consecration. The patristic unitas ecclesiae, the res gemina, the res sacramenti of the patristic theology was now imaginatively disjunct from the One Flesh of her Eucharistic union with her Lord. An imaginative dehistoricization of the Church was inevitable: she became, as with Peter Lombard, the Church eschatological: “Res autem significata et non contenta est unitas Ecclesiae in praedestinatis, vocatis, justificatis, et glorificatis. Haec est duplex, caro Christi, et sanguis.” the Church of the eschaton, her infallible union with her Lord, her fulfillment as the Bride, one flesh with her risen Lord, was no longer seen as the anagogical fulfillment of her historical existence in sacramento: she was no longer “caro Christi;” that term now referred to the consecrated species, the “real presence” the corpus verum of the medieval theological parlance. St. Thomas will restore her to the res et sacramentum of the Eucharist, recognizing that the corpus verum is intrinsically “figurative” of the Corpus Christi mysticum, thus restoring the identification of the Eucharistic res et sacramentum with the One Flesh of Christ and the Church..
In endnote 14, we have seen Peter Lombard, within a single paragraph, make this transition from a post-Berengarian reading of the patristic sacramentum-res sacramenti Eucharistic analysis (i.e., with the inclusion of the res contenta, res noncontenta distinction ) to an inadvertently dehistoricized version of the medieval analysis, sacramentum tantum, res et sacramentum, res tantum:
Hujus autem sacramenti gemina est res: una, scilicet, contenta et significata; altera significata et non contenta. Res contenta et significata est caro Christi, quam de Virgine traxit, et sanguis quem pro nobis fudit. Res autem significata et non contenta est unitas Ecclesiae in praedestinatis, vocatis, justificatis, et glorificatis. Haec est duplex, caro Christi, et sanguis. Unde Hieron., comment. ad cap. 1 Epist. ad Ephes.: Dupliciter, inquit, intelligitur caro Christi et sanguis ejus: vel illa quae crucifixa est et sepulta, et sanguis qui militis lancea effusus est; vel illa spiritualis ac divina, de qua ipse ait, Joan. 6: Caro mea vere est cibus, et sanguis meus vere est potus, et: Nisi manducaveritis carnem meam, et biberitis meum sanguinem, non habebitis vitam in vobis. Sunt ergo hic tria distinguenda: unum, quod tantum est sacramentum; alterum, quod est sacramentum et res; et tertium, quod est res et non sacramentum. Sacramentum et non res, est species visibilis panis et vini; sacramentum et res, caro Christi propria et sanguis; res et non sacramentum, mystica ejus caro.
St. Thomas did not follow Peter Lombard in his relegation of the Church to the res tantum elsewhere than in his Commentary on the Sentences, ut supra. In endnote 17, supra, we have quoted the texts in which St. Thomas speaks of the Eucharistic body of Christ, the corpus verum as signing the Church, whose historicity, like that of her cause and source, is infallibly sacramentally objective, and thus not that of a res tantum unless that expression be itself understood as de Lubac understands it, i.e., as anagogical, thus indissociably --- causally --- dependent upon the res et sacramentum, rather than abstracted from the historicity of the Church’s Eucharistic worship, to become simply eschatological and thus nonhistorical.
[93] The Migne text of Amalarius’ doctrine of the “triforme corpus”:
Triforme est corpus Christi, eorum scilicet qui gustaverunt mortem et morituri sunt. Primum videlicet, sanctum et immaculatum, quod assumptum est ex Maria virgine; alterum, quod ambulat in terra; tertium, quod jacet in sepulcris. Per particulam oblatae immissae in calicem ostenditur Christi corpus, quod jam resurrexit a mortuis; per comestam a sacerdote vel a populo, ambulans adhuc super terram, per relictam in altari, jacens in sepulcris.
Idem corpus oblatam ducit secum ad sepulcrum, et vocat illam sancta Ecclesia viaticum morientis, ut ostendatur non eos debere qui in Christo moriuntur deputari mortuos, sed dormientes. Unde et locus sepulcrorum Graece vocatur κοιμητήριον, id est, dormitorium. Unde et Paulus ad Corinthios: Mulier alligata est He legi, quanto tempore vir ejus vivit; quod si dormierit vir ejus, liberata est (I Cor. VII). Remanetque in altari ipsa particula usque ad finem missae, quia usque in finem saeculi corpora sanctorum quiescent in sepulcris. Munditiam mentis docet corporale quod remanet in altari post Domini resurrectionem, cui debet unusquisque semper studere accipiens corpus Domini, sed praecipue in fine.
Caput xxxv. De parte oblatae quae remanet in altari. Symphosii Amalarii Metensis Presbyteri et Chorepiscopi De Ecclesiasticis Officiis Libri Quattuor ad Ludovicum Pium Imperatorem (P. L. 105:1154D-1155A).
The text of de Lubac’s account of Florus’ attack upon Amalarius:
En ce texte, Florus a découvert le talon d’Achille… Il le vise avec un fureur opiniâtre et finit par l’atteindre. Déjà en 835 il avait écrit aux évêques rúnis a Thionville pur leur dénoncer l’allégorisme d’Amalaire 13. La démarche ne semble pas avoir alors produit d’effet. Mais en septembre 838, au Concile de Quierzy, à la suite d’un réquisitoire enfiévré,14, il obtient la condamnation du corpus triforme. Cependaant, malgré l’intervention successive dans la querelle d’Agobard en personne, puis de son second successeur sur le siège de Lyon, Remi 15, l’autorité d’Amalaire, due à la fois à la valeur scientifique de son œuvre et au goût de l’époque pour le symbolisme, ne fut point sérieusement ébranlé. La victoire du purisme lyonnais avait été sans lendemain. Le corpus triforme devait connaître un long succès.―Mais, comme il arrive souvent en pareil cas, tandis que la forme allait se répétant, sa signification allait se modifiant peu à peu. Il peut y avoir intérêt a suivre ces vicissitudes, et d’abord à préciser le sens originel de l’expression, celui qu’Amalaire même y attachait. Car elle fait à plusieurs l’effet d’un hiéroglyphe, et tous les historiens qui s’en sont occupés ne la comprennent pas de même.
13 Il concluait: « Claudendus est plana juxta legis praeceptum bos cornipeda et os ejus sempiterni freno silentii constringendum, imo… divinarum sententiarum lapidibus obruendus!: » (P. L. 119, 76 B-C).
14 M.G.H. Concilia, t. II, pp. 768-778. C’est le début de ce discours qui forme dans P. L., 119, l’Adversus Amalarium iii (col 94-96).― On ne connaît d’ailleurs la décision du concile que par le récit de Florus (M.G.H., ibid., pp. 778-782; c’est la première partie de l’Adversus Amalarium II dans P.L. 119, 80-85.) On est in droit de penser que son objectivité n’est pas beaucoup plus parfaite que celle dont il se vantait dans son discours (p. 770). Cf. 82 C: « Deliberatum est doctrinam hanc esse omnino damnabilem, et ab omnibus catholicae fidei cultoribus funditus respuendam. »
15 Liber de tribus epistolis, c. 40 (P. L. 121, 1054). Ce traité pourrait bien être aussi de la main de Florus, qui survécut Amalaire et ne désarma pas.
Corpus mysticum, 299.
[94] Despite the contrary views of Florus and his allies, Amalarius never questioned the unity of the “triforme corpus Christi;” de Lubac has shown, in Corpus mysticum, at 38, that the Latin tradition had affirmed the transcendent unity of the “One Body” from the ninth through the thirteenth century, when Innocent III asserts it in language equivalent to Gottschalk’s. In the page following (39), in examining Amalarius’ “three bodies” language, de Lubac shows that the “bodies” form a unity which cannot be that of the corpus verum, the sacrificed body of Jesus the Christ, as Florus supposed it to be in condemning Amalarius’ alleged division of that unity. De Lubac has contended that Amalarius’ “triforme corpus” can only refer to the unity of the body of the sacrificed and risen Christ with the members of the Church, living and dead. This union must transcend the distinction between the three “parts” or “bodies” comprising the “triforme corpus.” The only unity thus transcending the “three bodies” is the free nuptial unity, the One Flesh of Christ and his bridal Church, the New Covenant instituted on the cross. This is simply the unitas corporis constituted by the Church’s Eucharistic worship. This was never questioned, however inadequately analyzed by the Fathers.
[95] De Lubac's reading of Amalarius is controverted by Joseph Geiselmann and F. Vernet, who prefer to understand "body" of the physical human organism of Christ rather than of his nuptial “body:” see Geiselmann, Die Eucharistielehre der Vorscholastik; ser. Forschungen zur Christlichen Literatur- und Dogmengeschichte XV Band, 1/3 Heft (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1926) at 107, citing Amalarius' De eccles. offic. 3, 55 (PL 105:1154 ff.); F. Vernet, "L'Eucharistie du ixe à la fin du xie siècle," Dictionnaire de Théologie Catholique [hereafter, DTC] V/2 (1913) 1209-1233, at 1211-1212.
[96] Geiselmann makes this criticism of Laidrad’s Augustinian Eucharistic theology, ibid., at 129. He finds the same fault in Rhabanus Maurus, and generally throughout the Augustinian theology of the period: ibid., at 104, 115, 142. Geiselmann has little confidence in Augustine’s Eucharistic realism; see Vol. II, Ch. 6, endnotes 16, 39, and 95.
[97] See Corpus Mysticum, at 81-82, where De Lubac cites the Council of Elvira (ca. 300) as authority for this reinterpretation of the téleion; cf. Cor. 13:10, (where the RSV translates “téleion” as “the perfect”), i.e., as the anagogical communio sanctorum. For a discussion of the primitive significance of the basic liturgical ceremony, the conjugal telos of Greek paganism, see Numa D. Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City. A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome, with a new Foreword by Arnoldo Momigliano and S. S. Humphreys (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press; Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Anchor Books, 19551901), at 34-40, esp 36. Téleion was used by pagan rites and later by the Gnostic sects in the same sense of a ritual symbolization of a trans-temporal completion or fulfillment, although it also had a more general application. The Fathers at Elvira, probably the first Church council held before the Diocletian persecution, inasmuch as the Council ignores it, used the word six times to designate full personal participation in the anagogical effect of the historical Eucharistic signing. This may have been in reaction to the Gnostic dehistoricationization of the term.
[98] In his invaluable Enchiridion, Franciscus Moriones has distinguished between the clearly realistic Eucharistic passages he has excerpted from Augustine’s works (Caput I, pp. 590-599, §§2044-2070) and those “more obscure” excerpts which have often been read as symbolist (Caput II, pp. 599-603, §§2071-2083). In a preliminary footnote to the latter division, he admits the difficulties posed by those passages, but refuses the facile solution that would read St. Augustine as contradicting himself. Thus also de Lubac; cf. Corpus mysticum at 287.
[99] The Augustinian phenomenology is an account of the fragmented, “fleshly” consciousness, simul justus et peccator, of fallen man, but only as integrated and sustained in personal unity by personal participation in Eucharistic worship. For Augustine, authentic experience, experience as integrated in freedom, is experience in ecclesia, and only in ecclesia. The justice of his insight into experience as freely and formally integrated in and by the Eucharistic worship of the Church is evident in the struggles of later phenomenologists to rationalize, under the deterministic canons of causality, the consciousness whose unity Augustine knew to be free and therefore a gift, to be freely appropriated only by participation in the freedom of the historical worship of the Church.
The Ambrosian sacramental idiom was not phenomenological, but expressed the appropriation in faith of the literal and objective truth of the Church’s worship in truth, i.e., the truth of the Eucharistic Words of Institution, which simply identify the consecrated species with the body and blood of the One Sacrifice.
Today these differences may be seen to be systematic, but no systematic theology then existed, other than in ovo, i.e., in sacramento. The profoundly realistic theological appreciation of the historicity of sacramental efficacy, inherent in Tertullian’s signum-signatum analysis of sacramental causality, was further developed by Augustine in his controversy with the Donatist refusal of the possibility of post-baptismal sin. Augustine countered this anti-sacramentalism by asserting a dual efficacy in the sacramental sign. Cyprian’s lack of that insight had forced him, a century and a half earlier, into an anticipation of Donatism. However, Augustine does not appear to have applied his defense of dual sacramental efficacy to the Eucharist, for no Eucharistic heresy existed in his time. The result was that his insight found its full expression only in the early medieval revision of the paradigm of patristic sacramentum, res sacramenti, into the more nuanced analysis of sacramentum tantum, res et sacramentum, res tantum. Grounded in the patristic concern for sacramental realism, this early medieval paradigm of sacramental historicity is criteriological for Catholic systematic theology, which cannot avoid metaphysical inquiry into the free historicity of being except by prescinding from, finally denying, the primary datum of Catholic worship, the ex opere operato efficacy of sacramental signing which, as Luther knew, was never seriously in issue until the Reformation: Berengarius’ anticipation of the Reform’s anti-sacramentalism was met by a development of Eucharistic theology culminating in the magisterial affirmation of transubstantiation at Lateran IV. The Berengarian heresy went underground, into a plurality of Catharist and proto-Reformation heresies, and fed into the anti-sacramental enthusiasm of the radical forms of humanism in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
[100] See the excerpt from Augustine’s Sermo 341, 1 in endnote 22, supra. In Corpus mysticum, at 142-43, de Lubac mentions an interpretation of a text of Paschasius which mistakenly assimilated the latter’s’ understanding of the “three bodies” to the “three modes by which (Jesus the Christ) is understood and named” in Sermo 341, ch. 11.
[101] De Lubac, Corpus mysticum, the Introduction and first chapter, esp. the discussion, pp. 36ff.. of Gottschalk’s effort to reconcile Ambrose’s literal identification of the Eucharistic species with the risen Christ, with Augustine’s dialectical distinction, originating with Tertullian, between the sign and the signified.
[102] Paschasius Radbertus' Liber de corpore et sanguine Domini, CChr.CM 16:1-131; (P.L. 120:1267-1350.
[103] De Lubac’s text:
Lorsqu’il (Florus) parle de l’Église dont le Christ a voulu sceller l’unité par sa mort, ou de ce mystère d’unité ineffable qui fut figuré jadis en Adam et Éve, il ne dit rien sans doute qu’Amalaire ne soit disposé à admettre aussi bien que lui, et en ce sens son paroles sont vaines, mais elles ne sont pas hors du sujet.
Corpus mysticum, at 305.
In his Medieval Exegesis, de Lubac cites many patristic and medieval authors to this effect: see e.g., Vol. II, at pp. 90-95.
[105] Corpus mysticum, pp. 258-339.
[106] S. Grabowski, The Church: An Introduction to the Theology of St. Augustine (St. Louis and London: B. Herder Book Co., 1957) at 13.
[107] We have already seen de Lubac describe the unity of the Church as “organique:”
Car si le corps que nous formons, nous le membres du Christ, est le corps qui appartient au Christ, le corps dont le Christ est la tête―corpus Christi―il est aussi le corps en quoi consiste l’Église, il est l’unité organique, la totalité qui la définit: corpus Ecclesiae. (emphasis added)
Corpus mysticum, at 100
De Lubac is dealing here with the patristic confusion wherein the Head-Body relation of Christ and the Church, although also that of sponsus-sponsa, is treated as a “corps” and thus as having an organic unity, not the free unity of the nuptial “one flesh.” Elsewhere however we will see de Lubac recognizing the clear metaphysical distinction between head and body: e.g., in the long quotation from Paschasius: op. cit., at 40. This confusion of the Church’s tradition by a persistently cosmological imagination is typical of the patristic tradition; it persists in theology to our own day.
[108] See endnote 215, infra. De Lubac understands Paschasius and Amalarius to agree as to the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, although Paschasius rejects any division or partition of that real presence, such as that which Florus had charged Amalarius with having asserted. Speaking of Paschasius, de Lubac observes:
Il dira dans son commentaire sur saint Matthieu: « Christus exiens de corpore suo, in mysterio non divisus a se, neque tripartitus » (P.L., 120, 962 B) et dans sa Lettre à Frudegard: « Ne sequaris ineptias de tripartito Christi corpore » (1365 A).― Ce qui reste vrai, c’est qu’Amalaire a, comme Paschase, quoique d’une autre façon et à une moindre degré, une conscience de la « présence réelle » qui trouve quelquefois pour s’exprimer des formules en avance sur son temps. Cf. De ecclesiasticis officiis, I, 3, c. 25, et Epistula 4, ad Ranarium (P.L., 105, 1141 et 1334-1335). C’est ce dont, arrêtés par le détail extérieur de son symbolisme, les historiens ne lui accordent peut-être toujours assez le bénéfice, comme s’il était entendu d’avance que plus il y a de symbolisme chez un auteur, moins il s’y trouve de réalisme… La Perpetuité disait avec plus de justice, quoique non sans quelque exagération en sens inverse: « Jamais personne n’enseigna plus formellement la présence réelle » (Ed. Migne, i, II). Florus n’est il pas un peu, par rapport à Amalaire, comme Ratramne par rapport à Paschase, quoique le premier proteste au nom de l’unité et le second au nom de la distinction?
Corpus mysticum, at 39, n. 96.
[109] Ralph McInerny, in Aquinas and Analogy (Washington, D.C, Catholic University of America Press, 1996), has pointed out the deformation of St. Thomas’ doctrine of analogous predication presented by Cajetan (Thomas de Vio Gaetani de Cajetan, O.P.) in the De nominum analogia. Unfortunately, the analogy as such, insofar as Thomist, relies upon the Absolute, the Deus unus, as its prime analogate, whereas the Absolute is without analogues, by definition. The attempts of Christian Platonists to finesse or transcend this dilemma are finally pantheistic: John Scotus Eriugena was the first to expose this implication. Its Aristotlian (Averroistic) counterpart can only invoke the same impossible problem of the one and the many.
[110] The ancient speculative traditions of the East and West are at one in denying the existence of any rational unity in history. Fallen rationality, incapable of conceiving of a free unity, seeks and can seek only a necessary unity. This search, invariably, is a flight from history or, as its exegetical expression has been named since Bultmann, a demythologization of history as such, under which proscription nothing histrorical is permitted any intrinsic significance The freedom of every free historical object, when submitted to critical inquiry, is rationalized into the randomness characteristic of history as such, therefore as intrinsically unintelligible, incapable of rational justification and, insofar as finding concrete expression, as finally oppressive. The changes rung on this absurdity are unnumerable, unanimous and absurd. History is open to inquiry only as intrinsically significant and freely so. The inquiry itself must be free, focused upon a free and interesting object which it does not control and from which it can learn. In the end, history whether as the object of study or as the study itself, can only be free and, therefore, sacramental, finally Eucharistic. No freedom exists except that which is liturgically sustained.
[111] Speaking of the full meaning of the Church’s catholicity, de Lubac observes:
The word thus implies an active, dynamic and intensive emphasis, while “universal” is rather passive, static and extensive. A quality intrinsic to the Church, catholicity is expressed in a universal apostolic enthusiasm; it is the active force of this fertile olive tree that is the new Israel.11 It is, in principle and in development, the unity of fullness, not totalitarian but totalizing, as expressed perfectly by the Constitution Lumen Gentium:
The Catholic Church tends toward the recapitulation of all humanity, with all the goods that it contains,under Christ the Head, in the unity of his Spirit. In virtue of this catholicity, each part contributes the benefits of its own gifts to others and to the whole Church, so that the whole and each of its parts are increased by a mutual exchange and by a common effort toward a fullness in unity.
11 Lumen Gentium, c.2, n. 13, 2 and 3.
De Lubac, The Motherhood of the Church, at 174-75. De Lubac’s reference to Christ the Head as the source of the Church’s tendency “toward the recapitulation of all humanity” is not casual: her “totalizing” dynamism is simply her historical union with her Head, her source.
[112] Cf. D. J. Keefe, S.J., “Liturgy and Law: the Marital Order of Community,” Church and State in America; Catholic Questions. Ser. Fellowship of Catholic Scholars Proceedings, Fourteenth Annual Convention, Denver, 1991: Ed. Msgr. George A. Kelly (New York: St. John’s University Press, 1992), 1-68.
[113] See the discussion of the commentaries on Ephesians by Peter Lombard and Thomas Aquinas in endnote 273 infra.
[114] In the Office of Readings for Holy Saturday, we find an excerpt "from an ancient homily" upon the descent of Christ into Hell, which represents the Christ as speaking to Adam:
Rise, let us leave this place, for you are in me and I am in you; together we form only one person and we cannot be separated.
From An Ancient Homily on Holy Saturday (PG 43:462-463), tr. The Liturgy of the Hours II, 497-498.
The obvious dogmatic fact of the nuptial union of Christ with the Church is sedulously ignored by those projects of “liturgical renewal” which intimate a monistic identity of Christ with the Church. Their persistent avoidance of the nuptial symbolism inseparable from the Church’s worship condemns them on their face.
[115] The enigmatic character of I Cor. 6:16 arises out of its juxtaposition of the “body” (soma) formed by sinful union with a harlot, and the nuptial “one flesh” (una caro) whose final exemplification is the union of Christ and the Church. Clearly, the association is one of contrast, not of similitude, for sexual union with a harlot is elsewhere condemned by Paul as a work of the “flesh,” which is so by loss of that intrinsic, free unity, the “one flesh, » which could be restored only by the death of the Head, by his One Sacrifice, his redemptive anakephalaiosis of the flesh that has no unity of its own, but which by that One Sacrifice is restored to sacramental integrity, that of the “One Flesh” of the New Covenant.
Thus the “body” of that sinful union is akin to that “body of death” from which Paul knows himself to be delivered by the redemptive deed of Christ, the institution of the One Flesh of the New Covenant by his One Sacrifice. The only unity the flesh possesses, as flesh, is solidarity with the sin of Adam, solidarity in sein zum Tode, in the inexorable dynamic of fragmentation whose end is total dissolution, the “dust” of death. Augustine contrasts the Christian’s union with the Church and his union with a prostitute in De civ. Dei, 21:25 (P.L. 41:0742-43) as does Amalarius in the presentation of the “triforme corpus” doctrine quoted in Corpus mysticum at 40, and later Paschasius: see endnotes 214 and 215, infra. It is worth noting that the contradiction which Paul and, following him, Augustine, find between membership in the Church and union in “one body” with a prostitute implies and in fact requires that membership in the Church be nuptially signed, which signing must depend upon the Eucharistic representation of the New Covenant, which is Jesus the Christ’s nuptial union with the Church. This conclusion is underwritten by Paul’s equation of lust with idolatry (Col. 3:5), with its implication that worship in the Church is thus nuptially-ordered that violations of that sacramental reality are departures from covenantal fidelity, and thus entail the worship of a false god. Ritualized lust was a common feature of the Canaanite idolatry—and not only the Canaanite, as the tabloids daily remind us.
[116] This is the present writer’s translation. De Lubac’s text with its included notes follows:
En ces deux dernières exemples―et l’on en pourrait citer beaucoup d’autres―la ligne johannique est déja rapprochée de la ligne paulinienne, grâce à l’explication de la doctrine contenue dans le discours sur le Pain de la Vie par la doctrine contenue dans le discours après le Cêne. L’union de Christ et du fidèle, devenant « unio capitis et membrorum »38, comport au moins une allusion à l’idée du « corpus ex plurimis membris adunatum ». La allusion se trouve renforcée dans les textes―très nombreux aussi―où le sujet qui reçoit le sacrament n’est plus l’âme individuelle, même comme membre, mais l’Église elle-même.39 Sacrificia quibus Ecclesia mirabiliter pascitur et nutritur40―Ecclesia vitae, caro Salvatoris41. Car, du moment que l’Église est une réalité sociale, il y a une correspondance manifeste entre sa vie et sa unité: n’est-ce pas l’union de ses membres, union résserré par le sacrement, qui mesure l’intensité de sa vie?― Néanmoins, les deux metaphores pauliniennes de l’union du Christ et de son Église en une seul chair et l’union des membres du Christ en un seul corps ne` se recouvraient pas. Le double symbolism des espèces, joint à l’opposition naturelle de sens entre caro et corpus, maintenait un écartement entre la ligne eucharistique de saint Paul et celle de saint Jean. Quoique rapprochées, elles demeuraient plutôt parallèles que convergentes. Comme le dira encore un peu plus tard Gandulphe de Bologne, l’effet de l’Eucharistie était res gemina.
38 Étienne de Baugé (P. L., 172, 1295-1196, Speculum Ecclesiae: « Haec unio est… virtus sacramenti ». (177, 365 B-C). Baudouin, (204, 716-718), etc. Cf. les sacramentaires gélasien (W., p. 18) et grégorien (L., p. 36).
39 Exemples très nombreux. Ainsi Alger (P. L. 180, 749), Hervé (181, 1268 B). Epistula de sacramentis haereticorum (Libelli de lite, t, III, p. 17), etc.
40 Gregorianum (L., p. 58), Augustin, Sermo 90, n. 6 (P. L. 38, 563). Frédégise de Tours, Epistola de nihilo et tenebris: « Universa Ecclesia, … quae, e Christi latere orta, sacratissimae carnis ejus pabulo pretiosique sanguinis poculo educata ». (105, 753 A), etc.
41 Guitmond, 1, i (P. L., 149, 1435-1436). Renallo de Barcelone: « Sponsa suo Sponso jungitur Ecclesiae » (147, 601 A), etc.
Corpus mysticum, 196-97.
We have seen St. Thomas identify the duplex res sacramenti, as had the patristic tradition, with the unitas corporis mystici, which can only be covenantal. This understanding of the term is at some remove from the sense given it by de Lubac when, with specific reference to Alger of Liège, he associates the duplex res sacramenti with the interrelation of the Eucharistic res et sacramentum and the res tantum in the medieval revision of the older sacramental paradigm, prompted by the Berengarian heresy: see Corpus Mysticum at 276, 282. In the latter place, de Lubac invokes once more the communication of idioms to account for the unity that obtains between the ecclesial body, the Church, and the sacramental body of Jesus the Christ, which figures or signs the Church. It is not clear in this passage that de Lubac understands the Christ’s Eucharistic signing to be that of the head of the Church, signing the glory, the ecclesial body, who proceeds from him as the Bride from the Bridegroom, as the second Eve from the second Adam:
Ce corps mystiquement signifié par le sacrement, il sera tout naturel de l’appeler bientôt corps mystique. D’autres diront: corpus significatum17, et ce sera la même chose. En vertu de la loi du transfert des idiomes, l’épithète qui désignait l’Eucharistie signifiante peut passer à l’église signifiée―du sacrum signum et sacrum secretum 18. Si l’on veut trouver à ce nouvel emploi quelque intention de nuance restrictive, cell-ci consistera seulement in ce que, tandis que le corps individuel du Christ est présent « en verité » dans le sacrement, le corps mystique n’y est qu’ « en mystère. » 19. Mais il ne s’agit pas là d’une restriction apportée à l’affirmation de sa réalité. Au surplus, lors même que toute référence à l’Eucharistie aura disparu, l’expression continuera d’être adaptée a son objet, car, ainsi que le disait le cardinal Du Perron, « le mot mystique n’est pas toujours employé par les autheurs pour en exclure la realité de la chose, mais pour l’enclure l’évidence et la comprehensibilité 20 ». L’Église, corps du Christ, est une mystère, et, contre la plate conception émise au siècle des lumières et reprise par quelques adaptes du protestantisme libérale, on doit maintenir que le mystère est ce qui, même une fois designé, signifié, « revelé », demeure toujours obscur, caché, « mystique ».
17. Sicard de Crémone (P.L.,. 213, 132). Pierre de Tarantaise (cité par Botte, Recherches de théologie…, 1929, pp. 306-307. Somme d’Alexandre, iva, q. 10, m. 5, a. 2. Cf. Nicolas Cabasilas, Explication de la divine Liturgie, c. 37: “L’Église est également signifiée par les saints mystéres, elle qui est le corps du Christ », (Salaville, Sources chrétiennes, 4, P. 208. Cf. St. Thomas, In Joannem, c. 6, 1. 7, n. 3 et 5.
18. Odon d’Ourscamp, Questiones, P. 2, q. 266 : « dicimus speciem illam et corpus Domini esse sacramentum unitatis Ecclesiae, quae solummodo sacrum est secretum, et non sacrum signum ».(Pitra, p. 92)
19. C’est ce qui explique encore Grégoire de Bergame, c. 19 : « Res vero ipse, quarum hec sacramenta sunt, non in veritate sed tantum in significatione utrobique geruntur ; quia et la baptismate sacra mors Christi ac resurrectio non proprie sed mystice celebratur, et in eucharistia nihilominus corpus Christi, quod est Ecclesia, non essentialiter super altare locatur, neque proprie a participantibus manducatur, sed mystice solummodo vel sacramentaliter intimatur… » Hurter, pp. 79-80).
20. Traité de l’Eucharistie (1622), p. 590. Après coup, une autre raison fut trouvée encore pour légitimer cet emploi de Corpus Christi mysticum : il contiendrait une allusion au « sacramentum (mysterium) magnum » dont parle l’Epître aux Éphésiens. Ainsi Wyclif, De Ecclesia, c. 5 : « Corpus Christi vocatur Corpus Christi mysticum, propter mysterium caelestis conjugii inter Christum et Ecclesiam Christi » ; cf. c. 6 et 18 (Loserth, pp. 102-103, 133, 440).
De Lubac, Corpus mysticum, at 282-83.
It should be recalled that the communication of idioms, whose dogmatic application is solely to the Person of Christ, whether Eucharistic, incarnational-kenotic, or primordial, relies upon the concrete Personal unity in Christ of the fullness of humanity and of divinity, which unity alone validates reference to him as at once man and God, for concretely Personal humanity and concretely Personal divinity are at one in the Person of Jesus the Christ. It is by this unique and utterly mysterious union of humanity and divinity in his Person that he is Named Jesus the Lord, the head of the Church, the head and source of the free unity of the redeemed creation which is to say, following Paul, that all creation is in him.
On the other hand, the nuptial union of the Church and her Eucharistic Lord is a free covenantal unity precisely by reason of Jesus’ headship of the Church. De Lubac’s application of the communication of idioms to the Eucharistic One Flesh relies upon his misunderstanding of its nuptiality as neither covenantal nor free, but as “una persona;” see endnotes 222 and 223 infra. This mistake confuses the substantial human unity, the One Flesh which, as covenantal, is interpersonal, with the unity of one Person, the una persona who in this context can only be the Jesus the Christ, the Bridegroom―who cannot be identified with the Person of his Bride, the Church, from whom he is freely inseparable in their One Flesh, as is she from him; cf. endnotes 21 and 22, supra.
The communication of idioms presupposes, conforms to, and is dependent upon the Personal union of humanity and divinity in the Person of Jesus the Christ whom Irenaeus Named “one and the same Son,” the oldest statement of the Church’s faith that Jesus, the Son of Mary, is indeed the Lord, the Son of the Father. The first four ecumenical Councils underwrite this faith.. Cyril of Alexandria defended it against Nestorius, invoking the communication of idioms in Jesus the Lord, and writing it into the Formula of Union, the doctrinal summary of the Council of Ephesus, naming the Virgin Mary the Theotokos. In confirming this language, the Conciliar Fathers affirmed that Jesus, her human Son, is the Lord, the Son of the eternal Father, consubstantial with us.
De Lubac’s application of the communication of idioms to the head-body union of Christ and his Church is therefore mistaken: it confuses the covenantal, free nuptial unity of the One Flesh of Christ and his bridal Church―the substantial, covenantal, nuptial unity of Head with the Glory which proceeds from her Head―with the Personal unity of the Head. The “mystique” which for de Lubac distinguishes the Eucharistic presence of Corpus Christi mysticum as « en mystère » from the presence «en verité»” is proper to the corpus verum in such wise as to account for the fact of the Eucharistic reception in signo of the latter, but not of the former, citing Gregory of Bergoma’s language of “proprie”as opposed to “mystice:” viz., “non essentialiter super altare locatur, neque proprie a participantibus manducatur, sed mystice solummodo vel sacramentaliter intimatur…”.
Thus used, “intimatur” needs some unpacking. The Eucharistic Presence of the Risen Christ, at once as High Priest and Victim of his One Sacrifice, by that Event-Presence, that Offering, causes the Church, the second Eve whose free nuptial union in One Flesh with her head is instituted by the One Sacrifice. In that institution the Son’s Mission from the Father is achieved: the Gift of the Holy Spirit is poured out upon the Church in the new creation, sacramentally realized in the fallen world and in fallen history.
The celebration of the Eucharist is the celebration of that union, Eucharistically represented. As the Eucharistic Lord, Jesus, the second Adam is there present in signo, as corpus verum, as the effective source, the Head, of the Bridal Church, the second Eve. He is there proprie, as the Bread from Heaven, “ut manducatur,” the second Eve is there “mystice,” “ut intimatur:” as the implication of the Presence of her Lord: she is the Daughter Zion, the Temple in which the Lord has chosen to dwell.
It has been stressed throughout this study that this indwelling of the Christ, the Event of his Kenōsis and of his Sacrifice, is single: at once the One Flesh that is the Theotokos’ conception of her Lord, and the One Flesh of bridal Church’s Eucharistic celebration of his Presence as her Lord and source. This Event is wholly the work of Jesus the Lord, by his transubstantiation of the offering of the second Eve, whereby, as Theotokos and as the Church, she is One Flesh with the second Adam.
In de Lubac’s novel application, the unity which the communication of idioms asserts ceases to be Personal, to become substantial, whether as applied to the uncreated Trinity or its created image, the New Covenant, the substantial One Flesh of Christ and the Church. By extending its application to the substantial union in One Flesh of Christ and the Church, de Lubac has confused the Personal unity of humanity and divinity in Jesus the Christ, to which communication of idioms refers, with the consubstantiality of the Members of the free Substance that is the Trinity, and the with consubstantiality of the members of the Covenantal substance that is the One Flesh.
In the classic usage of the communication of idioms, Jesus the Lord is understood to speak as at once the Son of the Father and the Son of Mary because of the coincidence in his Person at once of humanity and divinity. In de Lubac’s usage, Jesus speaks to Saul, not as the head of the Church, as the source of the free unity, the One Flesh, the substantial union of the Christ and the Church, but as the Church: Paul’s persecution of the Church is thus a persecution of the One Flesh in which the Church is personally identified with her Head by reason of the supposed communication of idioms between them..
However, when as recounted in Acts 9:3-6, Saul encounters the Lord, he appears as the Bridegroom, the Head of the Church with whom he is nuptially joined in the One Flesh of the New Covenant, the redeemed New Creation, and therefore the head of all creation, by whose headship the universe is at once created and redeemed. In that revelation of himself to Saul, he does not identify himself with the Church; rather he informs Saul that his persecution of the Church is his persecution of himself, her Bridegroom, who cannot be identified with his Bride, but who is inseparable from her, his glory, and for whom he speaks as her head It is in that sense that Jesus, who proceeds from the Father as his Glory, affirms that he and the Father are one, for as possessing the same substance, they are Personally consubstantial, but Jesus does not speak for the Father, rather, as the Father’s glory, he reveals him to the Church, who is his glory, and through her to all humanity.
The significant element in de Lubac’s application of the communication of idioms to the unity of Christ and the Church is that by it he recognizes the metaphysical reality of the “achieved” unity of Bride and Bridegroom, of Head and Body. The unity of this nuptial reality cannot be that of one Person; it must therefore be substantial. However, de Lubac continues to understand that substantial unity in monist terms of a Thomism which does not distinguish the human “person” from the human “substance:” this ancient mistake is evident in his application of the communication of idioms to the substantial unity of the One Flesh, which collapses it to the unity of one Person; its analogous application to the Trinity would be Sabellian.
Alger of Liége played an important part in the early medieval development of the sacramentum tantum, res et sacramentum, res tantum paradigm. In the passage cited (de Lubac, Corpus mysticum, at 276), de Lubac uses this tag in the eschatological sense we have already seen, wherein he understands the Eucharistic doctrines of Paul and John finally to converge. Until then he had seen them as parallel, unable to meet. See also endnotes 75 supra, 120 and 122, infra, where he accepts the concrete duality in unity of the Eucharistic res et sacramentum, the union of Christ and the Church. This, the infallible effect of the Eucharistic signing, is the res gemina sacramenti of the patristic tradition, often if not generally perceived as the eschatological culmination of the Church’s Eucharistic worship, at once historical and transcendent to history. The later theology differs only in its defensive emphasis upon the historical efficacy of the Eucharistic worship.
In any case, a few pages later, at 203-04, in the eschatological sacramental synthesis to which attention has already been drawn, de Lubac again points out the harmony, transcending the noncovergence, i.e., the parallel, earlier affirmed, between the Pauline and Johannine Eucharisitic symbolism.
However, this synthesis leaves unresolved the tension between the “métaphores paulinnienes,” the “body” and the “one flesh.” While de Lubac recognizes the application of the Adam-Eve symbolism of Jn. 19:34 to the “one flesh” of Paul’s invocation of Gen. 2:24 in Eph. 5, he treats this affinity rather as that of comparable literary allusions to mystery (allégorie in the case of John, métaphore with Paul) than as a common reference to a free and substantial reality. As we have seen, he identifies the ecclesial “être réel” with “corps,” not with the “un seul chair.” Once again, his avoidance of the metaphysical standing of the One Flesh appears to be rooted in a failure, evan an inability, to recognize this free union as substantial. The influence of St. Thomas is apparent here. Elsewhere, (endnotes 120 and 121121), it is apparent that he recognizes the nuptial union of Christ and the Church to be the sole alternative to nihilism. Paul McCartlan, a critic of de Lubac, nonetheless cites to this effect de Lubac’s “Mystique et mystère,” Théologies d’occasion (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1984) 37-76, at 66/
[117] Ibid., at 207.
[118] De Lubac develops this insight from a passage taken from Hugh of St. Victor:
Aliter cogitanda est caro illa, vel corpus, quod pependit in ligno et sacrificatur in altari, aliter caro ejus, vel corpus, quod qui manducaverit habet in se vitam manentem, aliter caro, vel corpus, quod est ecclesia.25
25 C. 12 (P.L.180, 361-362) Ainsi à l’interieur même de l’Eucharistie, se trouve distingué pour ainsi dire un double corps. Entre les deux derniers terms, rapport analogue au rapport de la natura naturans à la natura naturata.
De plus, avant d’apparaitre comme le principe unifiant des âmes, cette seconde chair, qu’on l’appelât spirituelle ou mystique, était pour chaque âme la chair vivante et vivifante, et son nom même de caro l’empêchait d’évoquer l’idée d’organisme, essentielle à la res sacramenti. Double raison qui, en l’identifiant à la virtus et en l’écartant de la res, semblait décourager toute tentative pour la confondre avec le Corpus Christi mysticum. D’où une sort de concurrence entre les deux expressions, entre cette caro et ce corpus, selon que dans la théorie générale on mettait l’accent sur la virtus ou sur la res, sur la vita spiritualis ou sur l’unitas Ecclesiae. Mais comme l’une et l’autre étaient également traditionelles, également essentielles, ceux mêmes qui ne parvenaient point à les organiser ou à fondre ne se décidaient pas le plus souvent à sacrificer l’une à l’autre. Aussi cette concurrence aboutissait-elle presque toujours à une juxtaposition.
Ibid., at 193-94.
We see again de Lubac’s stress on the organic unity of the res sacramenti, which elsewhere he affirms to be the nuptial unity of Christ and the Church. Yet again this failure induces confusion, both in Hugh of St. Victor and in de Lubac’s commentary. When it is ignored or forgotten that the free unity of Christ and the bridal Church is the infallible effect, the res, of the Eucharistic signing, it becomes possible for Hugh to suppose the ecclesial body to be the nourishment of the faithful, and possible for de Lubac to enter into and further develop that confusion.
[119] Ibid., 129, 207. De Lubac also uses “métaphor” to describe usages that are truly metaphors in the sense of extrinsic denominations: e.g., as where the ascription of “body” to the Church is described as a “métaphore banale” because it is understood in a quite nominalist and juridical sense.
Car, si le corps qui appartient au Christ, le corps dont le Christ est la tête,―corpus Christi―est aussi le corps in quoi consiste l’Église, il est l’unité organique, la totalité que la définit: corpus Ecclesiae.
Seulement, ce corpus Ecclesiae pourrait n’être autre chose qu’un vaste ensemble, appelé corps par une métaphore banale.
Ibid., at 100, n. 69; cf. n. 66; (emphasis added.).
De Lubac presents as “banale” a conceivable and indeed factual distortion of the true meaning of “corpus” in “corpus ecclesiale” by its reduction to merely empirical dimensions, viz., sociological, political, juridical, etc. De Lubac‘s “Seulement” i.e., “However”, sets off this banalization of the designation of the Church as a juridical “body” from Paul’s quite different use of “corpus” to designate the Church’s bridal relation to her Head, Jesus the Christ, in contrast to the merely nominal deployment of “body” as a sociological or juridical metaphor in the strict sense: e.g., corpus juris. Such a sociologizing of a liturgical and scriptural expression is certainly its banalization, in sharp contrast to Paul’s use of “corpus” to name the Church in her nuptial relation to her Head. Intent upon rescuing “corpus” from misuse and restoring to the word its properly Eucharistic content, that of designating the ecclesial body as caused by the Eucharist and vivified by the Spirit of Christ, de Lubac concludes:
Mais pour dépasser ainsi l’ordre sociologique and devenir en tout vérité ce « corpus Ecclesiae Spiritu vivificatum. »88 le corps ecclésial doit devenir in toute réalité corps du Christ: « corpus ecclesiae conficiatur »89, « Corpus Christi effecta »90. Or, l’Eucharistie est le principe mystique, agissant d’une façon permanente au coeur de la société chrétienne, qui réalise cette merveille. Elle est le lien universel, elle est la source de vie incessamment jaillissante. Nourris du corps et du sang du Sauveur, les fidèles sont ainsi tous « abreuvés d’un seul Spirit » qui fait d’eux véritablement un seul corps91. À la lettre, donc, l’Eucharistie fait l’Église. Elle en fait une réalité intérieure. Par sa vertu sècrete, les membres du corps achèvent de s’unir entre eux en devenant davantage membres du Christ, et leur unité réciproque est solidaire de leur unité avec l’unique Tête. Cette unité de la Tête et de tout le reste du corps, unité de Christ et de son Église,―ipse caput ejus, ipsa corpus suum92,―est plus que ce qu’on appelle ordinairement « totum Ecclesiae corpus » ou même « universale Christi corpus »93. Elle constitue un être réel. Elle est qu’un Alger de Liége désignera comme « universum Christi corpus », « totum dominicum corpus. »
88 Anselme d’Havelberg (P. L. 188, 1144 A-C).
89 Odon d’Ourscamp (Pitra, p. 38). Cf. Fulbert, d’après Fauste de Riez (P. L. 141, 203 C). Supra, n. 44.
90 Placidus (Libelli de lite, t. II, p. 576). Arnaud de Bonneval (P. L. 189, 1644) , etc.
91 Cf. Chrysostome, In I Cor., hom. 30, n. 2 (P. G. 61, 251).
92 Alger (P. L. 180, 747 C et 749 B).
93 Leonianum (F., p. 20). Saint Léon, Sermo 4, c. 1 (P. L. 54, 149 A). Nicolas Ier, Epistula 35: « Totum Ecclesiae corpus, cujus caput est Christus, redemit Ipse Christus. » (Libelli de lite, t. II, p. 191). Bruno de Segni (P. L. 165, 335 C). Jean le Moine (166, 1513 B). Hervé (181, 1325 A). Isaac d’Étoile (194, 1801), etc.
Ibid., 103-104. Underlineation added.
This use of “metaphor” does not at all imply a Eucharistic symbolism: with reference to such descriptions of the Church as Paul’s “body of Christ,” de Lubac has elsewhere written:
If we are to understand how to interpret them, “what elements to retain, and how they are to be extended,” then we must acquaint ourselves with the living commentary on them given by the Church herself; it is she whom we must take as our guide.1 And it is just that expression, the “body of Christ”, which the Church points to as of special value—in close connection, of course, with the image of Bride. You do not have to look far to see why. No one who reads St. Paul’s Epistles can miss the fact that by this metaphorical expression he means a certain organism which he thinks of as real—very much so—and whose members are at one and the same time diverse and united. . . . The Pauline metaphor thus gives condensed expression to a twofold meaning, and in consequence it is possible to link up with it the two complementary teachings which are to be found not only in the writings of St. Paul but also in the Gospels and throughout the New Testament. It is, so to speak, the stretto where all the biblical themes on the subject of the Church interweave.2 The body of Christ is the house built by God upon the rock of the faith of Peter; in it every man finds his home and his work.3 But it is also the vine in which one and the same sap runs alike through stem and branches. Viewed from one standpoint, it is “the unity of a totality”,4 for all the Christians who go to make it up, “being assimilated to Christ, are the same One” 5 etc.
2 Louis Bouyer, « Où en est la Théologie du Corps Mystique ? » 1948, pp. 328-9, a study written in reaction against Wikenhauser’s Die Kirche als der mystiche Leib Christi nach dem Apostoli Paulus, 1937.
3 Cf. Louis Bouyer, “Jérusalem, la Sainte Cité », VS, April, 1952, p. 376.
4 Matt. xvi. 18-19 ; Eph. ii. 20-22 ; cf. I Tim. iii, 15. For an exegesis of the conciliar definition see A. Chavasse, “La Veritable Conception de l’Infaillibilité Papale d’après le Concile du Vatican », in Église et Unité, pp. 57-81.
5 Dom Jacques Dupont, O.S.B., Gnosis: Le Connaissance Religieuse dans les Epitres de Saint Paul, 1949, p. 426. There is a particular insistence on the unity of the body and the Spirit which animates it in Ephes. iv. 4.
De Lubac, The Splendour of the Church, 82-3.
The realistic import of de Lubac’s allusion to the Pauline application of Gen. 2:24 to Christ and the Church as “métaphore” has already been remarked. De Lubac has provided still another key to the meaning he assigns to “métaphore” in a passage in Théologies d'occasion where he quotes a Pseudo-Primasius whom he has quoted with some frequency in Corpus Mysticum: we use here the English edition of the Théologies d'occasion, cited in 38, supra: the Latin text of Pseudo-Primasius is as follows:
Dedit regulam Apostolus, quomodo allegorizare debemus: scilicet ut, manente veritate historiae, figuras intelligamus.
Here, he is simply summarizing the patristic tradition, which sees in the Old Testament history prefigurations of the New Testament: their warrant for doing so is Pauline: Gal. 4:21-7. The English edition of de Lubac’s Théologies d’occasion renders the Latin “figuras” as “metaphors:”
“The Apostle gave us the norm for allegorizing: namely, that while we maintain the truth of history, we should understand its metaphors.” In Epistolam ad Galatas (PL, 68, 536 D); cf. In epistolam primam ad Corinthios: “Ipsis tunc veritas erat, sed nostram figuram praeferebant” (529 D); cf. Gregory of Elvira (Tractatus Origenes, Batiffol-Wilmar: 27, 80), etc.
De Lubac, “Typology and Allegorization,” 129-64, Theological Fragments (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989), 135, n. 36.
The apostolic norm, Paul’s interpretation in Gal. 4:21-27 of the two wives of Abraham as types of the Old and New Testaments provides the universal warrant for the Fathers’ preference for allegorical exegesis. De Lubac prefers to refer to this patristic understanding of the events of Old Τestament history to those of the New Testament as the relation of types to antitypes, prefigurations to realizations, as metaphorical. By “metaphor,” de Lubac does not intend the common English meaning of that word, that of an extrinsic denomination without historical foundation. In his usage it rather represents a graced insight into the intrinsically salvific significance of history, a significance which, as intrinsic, is finally Eucharistic, for only in the Eucharistic representation of the One Sacrifice does the Old Testament receives its fulfillment, and in that liturgy the allegorical exegesis of biblical history has a more than Pauline warrant. Clearly, the biblical use of metaphor is not “banale.” The article in which the above quotation appears is an extended summation of the patristic exegesis detailed and defended in the four volumes of his Medieval Exegesis: it is remote from contemporary exegetical scholarship precisely by its finding in biblical history an intrinsic salvific significance whose warrant is the Church’s worship of her Lord.
Given the realism of the Pauline “métaphore,” if this “universum Christi corpus” is identically the Eucharist, as we have seen Augustine insist, the question arises as to how we may preserve the faith-conviction that the Eucharist is the concrete Event-Presence of the one High Priest offering himself as the Victim of this One Sacrifice, viz., the sacrificed body and blood, soul and divinity of Jesus the Christ, the Head of the ecclesial Body who, as Head, is distinct from the Church as bridegroom from bride, albeit within the free unity of their One Flesh.
The theological response to this conundrum, created by de Lubac’s mistaken reference to the One Flesh as though a physical body (“Cette unité de la Tête et de tout le reste du corps”) but seen by him to be nonetheless inescapable, requires the development of the hermeneutics of the “whole Christ,” the covenantal union in One Flesh of the Head and the Body, the Bridegroom and the Bride, proposed elsewhere in this volume. In the texts cited supra, de Lubac affirms the non-metaphorical, i.e., intrinsic, unity of Christ and the Church, of the Head and the Body―“un être réel”―but he continues to speak of that union as that of a “corps.” We will also see him cite Augustine’s comparably ambiguous description of the una caro of Christ and the Church as “una quaedam persona.” In neither case does de Lubac expressly recognize the theological significance of that nuptial union insofar as it is free, In short, he does not understand it to be a covenantal union. Thus the nuptial freedom of the una caro does not achieve theological significance in his analysis of the Head-Body unity.
In this de Lubac is at one with Augustine, with the patristic tradition as summarized by the Sentences of Peter Lombard, and with St. Thomas, whose monist metaphysics still dominates most of current Catholic systematic theology. Like the Fathers, he is burdened by the cosmological imagination which cannot assign substantial unity to a reality ("une être réelle”) that is free. Nonetheless, the Eucharistic institution of the New Covenant is in fact the sacrificial restoration of freedom to the fallen world, by which supreme exercise of his Headship, Jesus the Christ redeems from its imprisonment the Good Creation of which he is the Head and source; see Rom. 8:19ff. This universal restoration of freedom, by which in our fleshly fallen fragmentation we are continually offered the free unity of the One Flesh, is the work of the Head: hence Paul’s designation of it as “anakephalaiōsasthai” (recapitulation) in Eph. 1:10 is yet another Pauline term that should be preserved from the banalization ordinarily attending its exegesis: see endnote 70, supra. In sum, it is that full Gift of the Holy Spirit through the Mission of the Son whose terminus is, inter alia, the Good Creation, the Kingdom of God, whose sole mediation in history is sacramental and finally Eucharistic. This terminus of the redemptive Mission of the Spiritus Creator by the Father through the One and the same Son is the plenary good creation: it cannot be less than substantial.
[120] Paul McPartlan’s comparison of John Zizioulas’ dialectical theology, esp. his Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church. With a Foreword by John Meyendorff. Ser. Contemporary Greek Theologians 4 (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985), with de Lubac’s Augustinian counterpart, esp. his Corpus Mysticum, later pointed out de Lubac’s stress upon the indispensability of nuptial symbolism: see The Eucharist Makes the Church: Henri de Lubac and John Zizioulas in Dialogue [Oxford diss., 1989] (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1993) where, at 29, and again at 52, McPartlan cites de Lubac’s “Mystique et mystère,” Théologies d’occasion (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1984) 37-76, at 66.
There de Lubac takes up a recurrent theme, little grasped by his critics, which he has raised particularly in his discussion of Buddhism: viz., that nihilism is the single alternative to the free creation in Christ taught by the Catholic tradition. De Lubac clearly gives metaphysical weight to nuptial symbolism. He considers the sole alternative to that symbolism to be the pantheistic and finally nihilistic failure to distinguish between God and what is not God. While de Lubac’s use of nuptial symbolism does not always have directly in view the nuptial union of Christ and the Church for, as we have seen, he also upholds the nuptial union of the soul with the risen Christ, he certainly agrees with the tradition which, from Origen onward, stresses that the One Flesh of Christ and the Church is the primary reference of the nuptial symbolism in, e.g., the Song of Songs, and obviously in I Cor. 7 and 11, and in Eph. 5. He quotes Fénelon to this effect:
Christ’s bride is unique: and it is one Church “which we see, which we hear, which we believe, which teaches, which gives judgement and which baptizes.”1
1.Fénelon, Lettres sur l’Autorité de l’Église, i and v, 3.
De Lubac, The Splendour of the Church, at 59.
[121] De Lubac’s text is as follows:
Grâce à ce Pain de Vie promis au chapitre sixième de saint Jean se trouve effectué le « unus panis, unum corpus » de la première Épître aux Corinthiens. Car la vie spirituelle est un unité sociale:
Virtus enim ipsa quae ibi intelligitur, unitas est, ut redacti in corpus ejus, effecti membra ejus, simus quod accipimus.75
Grâce à ce Pain de Vie promis au chapitre sixième de saint Jean se trouve effectué le « unus panis, unum corpus » de la première Épître aux Corinthiens. Car la vie spirituelle est un unité sociale:
Virtus enim ipsa quae ibi intelligitur, unitas est, ut redacti in corpus ejus, effecti.
Le principe de cette vie n’est autre que l’Esprit du Christ, lequelle est un Ésprit d’unité, en sorte que vivre dans le corps du Christ, c’est être alimenté par son Ésprit.76 N’est ce pas là encore l’enseignement du discours d’adieu dans saint Jean?77 Commençant par l’allégorie de la vigne et s’achevant dans la prière sacerdotale, rien ne saurait mieux sugérer que l’intimité du communicant avec le Christ est un élargissement aux dimensions de l’Église.―Aucune concordisme en cela. Commenté par saint Paul, saint Jean l’est aussi bien par lui-même, s’il est vrai que l’allégorie de la vigne et tout le récit de cette dernière soirée ne sont pas moins eucharistique que l’annonce du Pain de Vie. Saint Paul, de son côté, n’avait-il pas aussi rappelé le manne, ”aliment spirituel” des Hébraux au désert? Et n’offrait-il pas encore une autre base au rapprochement des deux points de vue lorsque, à propos d’une autre “grande mystère”, il évoquait l’union du Christ et de l’Église, union si intime que l’un et l’autre ne formaient plus qu’une seule chair?78 Unus panis, una caro . . . (emphasis added)
Ce dernier trait devait frapper d’autant plus que saint Jean, lui aussi, montrait à sa manière―sur le Calvaire, à l’emplacement du premier paradis―les noces de Christ et son église; nouvel Adam et nouvelle Eve… On pouvait observer encore en exploitant le symbolisme paulinien de l’unus panis, que dans la fabrication de la pâte l’eau joue le rôle indispensable de liant: aquae coagulum 79, cette eau n’était-elle celle du baptême 80, qui commence en effet l’oeuvre d’unité que l’Eucharistie doit approfondir? 81 Dès le temps de saint Irénée, 82 l’enseignement de saint Paul avait commencé de récevoir ce commentaire imagé mais authentique, et saint Augustin se plaisait à en pénétrer l’esprit des néophytes. Unus panis, panis dominicus omnes effecti.83 La correspondence des symboles n’arrétait pas là. Car cette eau de baptême, n’était-ce pas saint Jean encore qui la montrait coulant avec le sang―synbole de l’Eucharistie―du côté de Jésus ouvert par la lance?84 Bibitur quod de Christi latere manavit. 85 Les liturgies ne manquaient pas de la rappeler, au moment où le prêtre joint l’eau au vin dans le calice. 86 Or, ce mélange mystique ne figurait-il pas en même temps, comme saint Cyprien l’avait longuement exposé 87, l’union nécessaire du Christ et du peuple chrétien racheté par le Passion du Christ dans le sacrifice de l’Église? 88 Qui separat aquam, negat unionem Christi et ecclesiae. 89 Puisqu’il a fallu l’un et l’autre, au Calvaire, pour former l’Église, le sang et l’eau demeurent l’un et l’autre également nécessaires pour opérer notre salut. 90 D’ou la nécessité de l’eau e//t du vin pour le sacrement, 91 nécessité souligné son tour par les oraisons liturgiques plus recentes. 92
75 Augustin, Sermo 57 (P. L., 38:389); Epistula 185 (33, 815); Honorius d’Autun, c. 4: « Sicut enim corporalis in substantiam nostri corporis vertitur, sic Ecclesia per hunc cibum in corpus Christi vertitur, et una caro cum eo efficitur… » (172, 1252).
76Augustin, In Joannem, tract. 27, no. 11: « ut carnem Christi et sanguinem Christi non edamus tantum in sacramento, quod et multi mali, se usque ad spiritus participationem manducemus et bibamus, ut in Domini corpore tanquam membra maneamus, ut ejus spiritu vegetemur » (P. L. 35:1621); cf. n. 6 (1618). Raban Maur (107, 318 B); Alger (180:885 D).
77 Le lien entre la cène des Synoptiques et le dernier discours de saint Jean est marqué, par exemple, dans Manegold, contra Wolfelmum (P. L., 155, 166 B).
78 Augustin, Sermo Denis 3, n. 4 (Morin, p. 20); In psalmum 127 (37, 1679), etc. Chrysostome, In Mattheum, hom. 82, n. 5 (P. G. 58, 743-744). Paschase (P. L., 120, 1286 A, 1304 B). Hériger (139, 186 A); Glose in Ephes.: « Quomodo sponsus et sponsa dicuntur, sic caput et corpus. Sive ergo dicatur quasi una quaedam persona » (114, 599 B).
79 Walafrid Strabon, De rebus ecclesiasticis, c. 10, (P. L., 114, 936).
80 Augustin, Sermo 229 (P. L., 38, 1103). Maxime de Turin, Homilia 111 (57: 513-514, Césaire d’Arles (67, 1055-1056. Fauste de Riez (30, 275) Isadore (83, 3212 C, 323 D). Etherius et Beatus (96, 938 B). Liber mozarabicus sacramentorum (F., p. 638). Bède (P. L. 91, 334 A; 92, 595). Amalaire (105, 1131 B). Raban Maur (107, 320 B; 108, 257 A; 111, 131-132; 112, 94-95). Walafrid Strabon (114, 936 C). Paschase (120, 830-831). Remi d’Auxerre (131, 260 A). Pierre Damien Sermo 38 (144, 709 A-B). Durand de Troarn (149, 1414 C-D). Guitmond (149, 1460). Yves de Chartres (161, 135; 162, 543 C). Anselm de Laon (162, 1471 A). Franco (166, 777). Alger (180, 704 D). Honorius (172, 554 C; 790 D, 1556 C, etc.). Gilbert le Universel (Smalley, Recherches, 1936, p. 57). Commentaire abélardien, In I Cor.; x (L., t. ii , p. 259). Hervé, (P. L., 181, 917 C). Gratien, De consecratione, d.2, c. 36 (Fr., 1326). Maître Simon (W., pp. 27-28). Traité de Madrid (W., p. 91). École de Laon, De corpore Domini (W., p. cxxxviii). Sicard de Crémone, (P. L., 213, 117) etc.
Nous ne retenons ici qu’un des traits du symbolisme complexe grâce auquel l’oeuvre du baptême est exprimée par les différentes opérations de la fabrication du pain.
81 Fulgence, Epistula 12, n. 24 (P. L., 65, 390-391).
82 Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses, 1, 3, c. 17, n. 2 (P. G.,7, 930).
83 Augustin, Sermo 6 (P. L., 40, 835); Sermones 227 et 272 (38, 1110 et 1247), etc.
84 Ce qu’on traduit encore, symétriquement, en évoquant les eaux de la mer Rouge. Augustin, In Joannem, tract. 11, n. 4 (P. L., 35, 1477), tract 45, no. 9 ((1723); Sermo Wilmart 5 (Morin, p. 687). Hésychius (Pseudo-Athanase) In psamum 136 (P. G., 27, 1271 B). Jérôme, In psalmum 105 (M., p. 174). Pseudo-Primasius, In Hebr.: « Allegorice autem, mare rubrum baptismus est, robore sanguinis Christi consecratus » (P. L. 68, 769 B). Remi d’Auxerre, (131, 225 C; 715 A). Atton de Verceil, In Hebr., (134, 809 D), etc. Cf. Chrysostome, In Hebr. (P.G. 63, 124)
85 Ambroise, In Lucam, I, 10, n. 135 (P. L,. 15, 1838 C). Pseudo-Ambroise, De sacramentis, (16, 447 A-B). Augustin, Contra faustum 42, 265). Cyrille d’Alexandrie, In I Cor., x, fragm. (P. G., 74, 880 B-C). Hésychius, In psalmum 35 (93, 1189 C). Historia mystagogica (The Journal of Theological Studies, t. IX, p. 264). Liber sive definitio ecclesiasticorum dogmatum, c. 41 (ibid., t. VII, 97). Fauste de Riez (P. L., 30, 274 B-C. Raban Maur (107, 320 A). Florus, Expositio missae (Duc., p. 136). Pseudo-Augustin, Ad neophytos, cité par Paschase (120, 1352 C; 1354 A, 1355 A). Hincmar (125, 927-928). Jean de Fécamp, 101, 1091 A). Rupert (169, 520 D). Werner de Saint-Blaise (157, 910 D). Honorius (172, 555 A). Hughes de Saint-Victor De sacramentis (126, 425 D). Herman, Epitome (178, 1472 A). Speculum Ecclesiae (177, 367 C-D). Hervé (181, 935 C). Anselme d’Havelberg (188, 1243 B-C). Pierre de Blois (207, 1145 B-CD), Sicard de Crémone (21, 117 et 146). Étienne Langton (Geiselmann, Die Abendsmahlslehre …, p. 85) etc.
86 Liturgies ambrosienne, mozarabe, gallicane: « De latere Domini nostri Jesu Christi exivit sanguis et aqua. » Formule conserée à Lyon et chez les Chartreux.
87 Epistula 63 (Bayard, t. II, pp. 205-208). Les deux epplictions sont données par le Pseudo Germain de Paris: « Aqua autem ideo miscitur, vel quia decet populo unitum esse cum Domino, vel qui de latere Christi in cruce exivit sanguis et aqua » (P. L. 72, 93 B). De même par Théodulphe d’Orléans, Liber de ordine baptismi, c. 18 (105, 240), par le Concile de Tribur en 895, canon 19 (Mansi, t. VIII, 131), etc.
88 Fauste de Riez (P. L., 30, 274-275). IVe Concile de Braga, canon 2 (Mansi, t. XI, 155-156). Etherius et Beatus (96, 941 B-D). Alcuin (M.G.H., Epistularum, t. IV, p. 212). Raban Maur (107, 320 A-B). Amalaire (105, 1131 A). Paschase (120,1308 et 1353). Christian de Stavelot (106, 1477 A). Strabon (114, 903 C et 904 D). Expositio “Spiritus Sancti” (147, 202 B). Haimon, Homilia 64 (118, 363-364). Réginon de Prüm ((132, 204-205). Burchard, « ex decretis Julii papa » (140, 753). Yves de Chartres, (161, 163 A-D et 1079 A-B). Anselme de Laon (159, 255 C). Sententiae Anselmi (Bl., p. 116). Gilbert l’Universal (Smalley, p.58). Commentaire Abélardien, In I Cor., x: « Sanguini autem aqua admiscetur in significatione gentium, etc. » (Landgraf, t. II, p. 258). Humbert, Contra Nicetam, c. 19 (P. L. 143, 991 B). Honorius (P. L., 172, 556 A, 557-558, 1256 D). Étienne de Baugé (172, 1285 A). Othon de Lucques (176: 145). Sermo de excellentia (184, 988). Robert Puyllen (126, 962 B). Gratien, De consecratione, d. 2, c. 7 (Fr., 1316). Anselme d’Havelberg (188, 1242 B). Pierre Lombard (191, 1642-1643). Maître Simon (W., p. 29). Traité de Madrid (W., p. 91). Pierre le Mangeur (M., pp. 38-39). Pierre de Blois (P. L. 207, 1144-1145)., etc. Cf. saint Thomas, In IV Sent., d. 8, q. 1, a. 2 (Moos, p. 314).
89 Speculum Ecclesiae (P. L., 177, 367 C). Alger (180, 795-796 et 820))
90 Pseudo-Haimon, In Isaiam (P. L. 116, 1034 A); Homilia 64 (119, 363-364). Cf. Vincent de Beauvais, Miroir historique, I, 8, c. 29: comme l’eau est absorbée par le vin, « Ecclesia mutatur in Christum. »
91 Burchard, “ex decretis Alenandri papae” (P. L. 140, 763). Cf. Isadore (83,1227 et 1242 B).
92 L’oraison de notre messe actuelle: « Deus qui humanae substantiae… » est une ancienne collecte de Noël (gélasien et grégorien), a laquelle on a ajouté les mots: « per hujus aquae et vini mysterium ». Autre oraison citée par Grancolas, Les anciennes liturgies, t.I (1697), p. 553, d’après les Notes sur la liturgie de saint Pierre de Lindanus: « Domine Jesu Christe, qui in cruce positus de latere tuo sanguinem et aquam, unde tibi Ecclesiam consecrares, manare (sic) voluisti, suscipe hoc sacrificium. »
Corpus mysticum, 203-06.
This passage must provide the interpretative context for the otherwise puzzling passage from Corpus mysticum, 196-97, quoted in endnote 91 supra. The failure of synthesis which de Lubac finds in the passage there cited is here transcended in the eschatological One Flesh, the res gemina Eucharistically signified but, for de Lubac, apparently not objectively realized in history. This eschatologizing of the anagogical One Flesh offers a further evidence of de Lubac’s failure to perceive the sacramental substantiality, which is to say, the historical objectivity, of the Eucharistic institution of the Covenantal una caro of Christ and the Church. He emphasizes the clear witness of the Johannine imagery of the vine and the branches to the inseparability of the growth of the Church from Eucharistic communion, insisting that “Aucune concordisme en cela”. He is of course correct: however, he might also have said, of the supposed “métaphores paulinnienes” of head-body and bridegroom-bride, “aucune métaphore en cela.” Nothing is realized in the eschaton that is not anagogic, i.e., that is not efficaciously and objectively signed by the Eucharistic worship of the Church: no one has put this more clearly than de Lubac. The Eucharistic res sacramenti is objectively historical: it is eschatologically achieved only by its sacramental historicity, whose efficacy transcends history to its ultimate realizarion in the Kingdom of God.
[122] John Paul II has identified the nuptial union of Adam and Eve in Gen. 2 with the primordial Covenant: see John Grabowski, Theology of the Body, at 138-142. It is unfortunate that this rendition of the Pope’s lecture, “Blessed are the pure of heart” translates the mian sarkan of the quotation of Gen. 2:24 in Eph. 5:31 as “one body,” which obscures the entire point Paul makes in the latter text, the human consubstantiality in the substantial acme of creation that is the “one flesh,“ not the “one body” thus not the concorporeality, of the man and the woman “in the beginning.” Their free consubstantial unity is affirmed in the exultant “bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh” of Gen. 2:23 , which celebration of consubstantiality is the principium quo of the “one flesh” of Gen. 2:24 and of Ephesians 5:31-2. See Blessed are the Pure in Heart: Catechesis on the Sermon on the Mount and the Writings of St. Paul; tr. L'Osservatore Romano, preface by Donald W. Wuerl (Boston: St. Paul Editions, 1983). Fortunately, this all too common mistranslation of the Pauline use of “flesh” is corrected in Michael Waldstein’s edition of the lectures comprising John Paul II’s ‘theology of the body:” see Michael Waldstein, Man and Woman, § 51.1, at 330-31, notes 59 and 60.
[123] Paul’s exposition, in I Cor. 11:3, of the Trinitarian headship of the Father, with its analogous application to Christ’s headship of humanity, and to the headship of the husband in marriage, must be read in conjunction with his ascription, in Eph. 5, of the One Flesh of Gen. 2:24 to the nuptial union of the second Adam with the bridal Church, together with his analysis of the Fall in Rom. 5 and his identification of redemption by Christ as the “recapitulation of all things” (anakephalaiōsasthai-- ἀνακεθαλώσασθαι) in Eph. 1:10: a recapitulation which Paul, in Rom. 8:19-23, sees to be eagerly awaited by the whole of creation, imprisoned by the fall and longing for the free unity proper to creation in the Beginning, in Christ...
These key passages makes it clear that the office of the head is his gift of free unity to the substance that is free by reason of having its source in him, and in which he subsists as the head. Here the Trinity becomes the prime analogate of being as such, but only as historical, viz., as the primordial Event, the Beginning, Father’s sending of the Son to give the Spirit, which gift terminates in the free unity of the New Creation, the primordial One Flesh, whose free, nuptially-ordered, substantial unity was lost in the first Adam’s denial, and the first Eve’s refusal, of that primordially nuptial unity offered them by the primordial Christus totus, the Alpha and the Omega, the second Adam. Its restoration was achieved by the One Sacrifice of Christ who, wih that institution of the One Flesh of the new Covenant, “for freedom has made us free”.
[124] For Batiffol's reading of Augustine, see endnotes 321 and 340 infra. De Lubac twice cites T. Camelot, O.P., “Réalisme et symbolisme dans la doctrine Eucharistique de S. Augustine, « Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques, t. 31 (1947), 394-410, in Corpus mysticum, pp. 200 and in footnote 58 of the text quoted in endnote 263, infra. While rejecting Batiffol’s assertion of a « confusion » in Augustine’s use of « analogie, » Camelot freely admits the difficulty of Augustine’s idiom. His brief and brilliant article admirably summarizes Augustine’s Eucharistic theology; he is in full agreement with de Lubac and, in the present writer’s opinion, deals more adequately with what both he and de Lubac refer to as « symbolisme ecclésiastique » in Augustine’s Eucharistic theology, than does de Lubac himself. Camelot’s article is of such value as to require preservation. Inasmuch as it is now difficult to access, its full text is appended to this volume.
[125] In the article cited by de Lubac in the preceding endnote 124, “Réalisme et symbolisme dans la doctrine Eucharistique de S. Augustine,” Camelot stresses Sermo 227 as a key Eucharistic text. However, his reading of it, like de Lubac’s, entails no recognition of the substantial and covenantal standing of the free unity of One Flesh of Christ and the Church, apart from which the Eucharistic interrelation of Bridegroom and Bride, of Head and Body, is incapable of a theological statement adequate to its historical objectivity, which both de Lubac and Camelot affirm without reservation.
In sharp contrast to Batiffol, Camelot and de Lubac, Cardinal Mahony’s Pastoral Letters of 1997 and 2000 on “liturgical renewal” rely upon a naïve reading of Sermo 272 to justify his Calvinistic interpretation of transubstantiation as pertaining not to the elements of the Offertory, i.e., to the Church’s sacrifice of praise, but to the congregation, whose supposed Eucharistic transformation is finally attributable to faith alone, not to the words of consecration of the elements. See also Vol. II, Ch. 6, endnotes 96 and 169, both discussing this mistake as implicit in Johannes Betz’ advocacy of an Aktualpräsenz in his Eucharistie in der Schrift und Patristik; ser. Handbuch der Dogmengeschichte; eds. Michael Schmaus, Aloys Grillmeier, Leo Scheffczyk und Michael Seybold: (1 Teil) Band IV, Faszikel 4a; (Freiburg, Basel, Wien: Herder, 1979), [hereafter, Eucharistie]:
In diesem Zusammenhang gebraucht unser Autor das verhältnismäßig blasse Verbum fieri. Deutlichere, speziellere Wandlungstermini sucht man bei ihm vergebens. Er spricht aber von der Konsekration der Elemente durch das mystische Wort und den Heiligen Geist63a. Die ontische Verwandlung der Elemente liegt ihm fern. (emphases added)
63a De Trin. 3, 4,10 (CChr 50,136); vgl.. Sermo 227 (PL 38,1099).
Betz, Eucharistie, 150. of Augustine’s Eucharistic orthodoxy relies, does not refer to the epiclesis,
As for Betz’ reference supra to the De Trinitate, Batiffol has pointed out that the reference to De Trin. 3 on which Betz’rejection of Augustine’s Eucharistic orthodoxy relies does not refer to the epiclesis , much less to the consecration. Even if read as a consecratory epiclesis, the Latin tradition did not regard the epiclesis of the Spirit as consecratory, and still less would have Augustine, who famously insisted that any invocation of the Spirit must presuppose the presence of the Christ:
L’allusion relevée plus haut (p. 29) à une operation invisible de l”Esprit de Dieu, si l’on tient compte du contexte, n’implique pas l’épiclese proprement dit.3
3 In 370, Optat, evêque du Miléve in Numidie, compose son De schismate Donatiste qui renferme (VI, 1) un donnée très intéressante pour notre sujet. Il réproche les Donatistes d’avoir brisé des autels catholiques :« quid tam sacrilegium quam alteria Dei in quibus et vos aliquando obtulistis, frangere, radere, removere, in quibus et vota populi et membra Christi portata sunt, quo Deus omnipotens invocatus sit, quo postulatus descenderit spiritus sanctus, unde a multis et pignus salutis aeternae et tutela fidei et spes resurrectionis accepta est? Quid est enim altare nisi sedes et corporis et sanguinis Christi? Quid vos offenderat Christus, cuius illic per certa momenta corpus ut sanguis habitabat?…Quis fidelium nescit in peragendis mysteriis ipsa ligna linteamine cooperavi? » (ed. Ziwsa p. 142-145). La phrase «…quo postulatus descenderit spiritus sanctus » vise la sanctification des oblats. Par ligna, entendez la table de l’autel, par linteamen la nappe qui la recouvre. F. Wieland, Altar und Altargrab (Liepzig, 1912), p. 12.
Batiffol, op. cit., at 431.
Even if read as a consecratory epiclesis, the Latin tradition did not regard the epiclesis of the Spirit as consecratory; still less would have Augustine, who famously insisted that any invocation of the Spirit must presuppose the presence of the Christ, apart from the sacrificial fulfillment of whose Mission the Spirit is not given.
A few pages farther on, Betz continues:
Ein Rückblick bringt uns zum Bewußtsein, daß Augustinische Fragestellungen und Gedanken auch bei seinen Nachfolgern spürbar sind, daß diese aber bis auf wenige Ausnahmen, nämlich Fulgentius und Facundus, seine Reduzierung des Sakraments nicht mitmachen, sondern seinen Symbolismus realpräsentisch auffüllen. Die Tradition der Kirche erweist sich mächtiger als die Genie Augustins.
Ibid., at 159 (emphasis added).
The same Rückblick at the same evidence could have seen, with far more reason, that Augustine’s disciples, understanding his Eucharistic theology realpräsentlich, understood him correctly, i.e., spiritualiter, as he stressed over and again. \
In reply to Betz’ widespread misreading of Augustine’s Eucharistic doctrine, it is enough to quote a few of the passages which Betz’ reading of fieri would disparage:
Fit corpus, et sanguis Verbi.
Sermo 6 (P. L. 46:835); cited by Batiffol as especially significant: op. cit., at 429, n. 1.
Non enim omnis panis, sed accipiens benedictionis Christi, fit corpus Christi.
Sermo 234, 2 (P. L, 38:1116) (also cited by Batiffol, ibid.
Noster autem panis et calix, non quilibet, … sed certa consecratione mysticus fit nobis, non nascitur.
Contra Faustum xxxiii, 13 (P. L. 42:0379). Cited by Batiffol, ibid., n. 2.
Corpus Christi et sanguinem dicimus, sed illud tantum quod ex fructibus terrae acceptum et prece mystica consecratum rite sumimus ad salutem spiritalem in memoriam pro nobis dominicae passionis. Quod cum pro manus humanum ad illam visibilem speciem perducatur, non sanctificatur ut sit tam magnum sacramentum nisi operante invisibiliter Spiritus Dei, cum haec omnia quae per corporales motus in illo opere fiunt Deus operetur, movens primitus invisibilia ministrorum, sive animas hominum, sive occultorum spirituum sibi subditas servitute.
De trin. iii, 10. Batiffol observes of this passage that Augustine uses conficere, consecrare and sanctificare as equivalents: loc. cit., n. 3.
Et inde iam quae aguntur in precibus sanctis quas audituri estis, ut accedente verbo fiat corpus et sanguis Christi.” Nam tolle verbum, panis est et vinum; adde verbum, et iam aliud est. Et ipse aliud: quid est? Corpus Christi et sanguis Christi. Tolle ergo verbum, panis est et vinum; adde verbum, et fiet sacramentum.
Sermon inédit, Denis, 6, 3; Misc. Ag. I, 30-31.
Hoc quod videtis, carissimi, in mensa Domini, panis est et vinum; sed iste panis et hoc vinum accedente verbo fit corpus et sanguis Verbi.
Ibid., Misc. Ag. I, at 29.
Ita nobis Verbum incarnatum factus est receptibile.
En. in Ps. 109, 12 (PL 37:1455).
Batiffol has collected other passages to the same effect in Études d'histoire et de théologie positive II, 428-34. We have already referred to the collections of Eucharistic texts edited by Hugo Lang, O.S.B., André Hamann, O.F.M., Anton Hänggi and Irmgard Pahl, Johannes Quasten, and Francisco Moriones.
These passages are thus typical that Moriones, op. cit., has entitled the first part of the Eucharistic section of his Enchiridion “panis accipiens benedictionem Christi, fit corpus Christi.” One may regret, as Batiffol has indicated (op. cit., at 422-23), the absence in Augustine’s Eucharistic language of terms such as metabolé, metapoiesis, transubstantiatio, and conversio, but his use of fieri, fit, simply asserts the same reality which these terms describe: see Batiffol, op. cit., 503.
De Lubac remarks of such usage:
La formule « consecrare in substantiam corporis » tenait son rang à coté des formules similaires qui disaient soit seulement « in sacramentum, » « in mysterium »70 « in dignitatem »71 soit « in carne »72 « in corpus ».
70 Isadore (P. L., 83, 755 B). Etherius et Beatus (96, 941 B).Bède (94, 75 A). Raban Maur (107, 319 A; 109, 992). Paschase (120, 1294 C). Gelasianum (W., pp. 30 et 220, etc. Encore Honorius d’Autun: « in sacramentum corporis et sanguinis sui transtulit » (172, 579 B) « substantiam panis et vini commuto vobis in corporis mei edulium » (1251) ; et Gerhoh, In psalmum 3 : « Tu benedixisti panem et vinum, atque tua benedictione convertisti ea in tui corporis atque sanguinis ineffabile sacramentum » (193, 676 B).
71 Théodulphe d’Orléans (P. L., 105, 240 A).
72 Ainsi déja Raban Maur, Liber de sacris ordinibus, c. 19 (P. L., 112, 1185 D). Paschase, Liber de corpore, c. 9, n. 2 (120, 1287 C). Cf. Hildebert , Versus de mysterio missae :
Nam res cui panis prodem substantia mansit,
In Christi carnem deitatis munere transit…
In Christi carnem panis substantia transit.
(P. L., 171, 1193 C et 1194 D; cf. 1202 A). Cardinal Humbert, Fragm. disputationis contra Graecos (143, 1216 D). Yves de Chartres (161, 158 D) Alger (180, 755 b ET 825 d), etc.
Corpus mysticum, 171.
The later language of “transubstantiation” is continuous with these texts, as with Augustine’s “prece mystica consecratum” upon which in large measure they depend.
The technical language of metaphysics, however indispensable to theology, is entirely subordinate to the historical truth of the Eucharistic liturgy and therefore of the Words of Institution. The Catholic tradition is radically liturgical; it judges theology and is not judged by it. It cannot credibly be denied that Augustine affirms the truth and the sacramental efficacy of those words. The African tradition had been insistent upon that efficacy to the point of heresy; Augustine stands in and defends that tradition of sacramental realism against the Donatists, but by distinguishing the necessary effect of sacramental signing (i.e., those caused by the placing of the sign: later designated the effect ex opera operato) from its free effects, i.e., those invoking their free appropriation by the recipient. No one might be supposed less likely to lapsed into a symbolism, but in an early treatment of the Incarnation he may appear to have done so; see endnote 288, infra, where the following language appears:
: “The Bed of this Husband was the womb of the Virgin, because in her virginal womb, they were united as husband and wife, the Word husband and the flesh wife.”91
91. St. Augustine, In Primam Joannis, tr. 1, n. 2; trans. Agaesse, SC, 75, 116-117; In ps. 41, 9, 10, 17, 18 (Pl, 36, 469-71, 474.
Were Augustine here speaking of the “immanent Word” as the “husband” i.e., the subject of the Incarnation, the charge might hold, but for Augustine, the “husband” is the Bridegroom, as is amply clear in Sermo 341:
Et quomodo sponsus et sponsa, sic caput et corpus: quia caput mulieris vir. Sive ergo dicam caput et corpus, sive dicam sponsus et sponsa; unum intelligete. Ideoque idem apostolus, cum esset adhuc Saulus, audivit: Saule, Saule, quid me persequeris (Act. IX, 4)? quoniam corpus capiti adjungitur. Et cum jam Christi praedicator pateretur ab aliis, quae persecutor ipse fecerat, Ut suppleam, inquit, quae desunt pressurarum Christi in carne mea (Coloss. I, 24): ad pressuras Christi ostendens pertinere quod patiebatur. Quod non potest intelligi secundum caput, quod jam in coelo nihil tale patitur; sed secundum corpus, id est, Ecclesiam: quod corpus cum suo capite, unus Christus est.
Sermo 341, 12.
It is therefore appropriate here to quote again Augustine’s classic affirmation of the Euchistic sacrifice.
Every work which effects our union with God in a holy society is a true sacrifice; every work, that is, which is referred to that final end, the ultimate good, by which we are able to be in the true sense happy. As a consequence even that mercy by which aid is given to man is not a sacrifice unless it is done for the sake of God. Sacrifice, though performed or offered by man, is something divine; that is why the ancient Latins gave it this name of "sacrifice," of something sacred. Man himself, consecrated in the name of God and vowed to God, is therefore a sacrifice insofar as he dies to the world in order to live for God. This too is part of mercy, the mercy that each one has for himself. Scripture tells us: Have mercy on your soul by pleasing God.
Works of mercy, then, done either to ourselves or to our neighbor and referred to God are true sacrifices. Works of mercy, however, are performed for no other reason than to free us from wretchedness and by this means to make us happy (and we cannot be happy except through that good of which Scripture speaks: It is good for me to cling to God). It clearly follows that the whole redeemed city, that is, the assembly and society of the saints, is offered to God as a universal sacrifice through the great high priest, who in the nature of a slave offered even himself for us as his passion, in order that we might be the body of so great a head. He offered this nature of a slave; he was offered in that nature, because in that nature he is the mediator, in that nature he is the high priest, in that nature he is the sacrifice.
The Apostle urges us to present our bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God, and as our spiritual worship, and not to follow the pattern of this world but to be transformed by the renewal of our minds and hearts, so that we may discern what is the will of God, what is good and pleasing and perfect, the total sacrifice that is ourselves. By the grace of God that has been given me, he says, I say to all who are among you: Do not think more highly of yourselves than you should, but judge yourselves with moderation according to the measure of faith God has given to each of you. As we have in the same body many members, yet all the members do not have the same functions, so we are many, but are one body in Christ; we are each of us members of one another, having different gifts according to the grace that has been given us.
This is the sacrifice of Christians, the many who are one body in Christ. This is the sacrifice which the Church celebrates in the sacrament of the altar, that sacrament known to the faithful; in that sacrament it is made clear to the Church that in the sacrifice she offers, she herself is offered.
De Civitate Dei, x, 6 (CCL 47: 278-79). Italicization as in the translation from the Liturgy of the Hours IV, 397-398, but departing from that translation in reading "sancta societas" as "holy society," instead of the Breviary’s uncritical adhesion to Dod’s "holy fellowship." As has elsewhere been pointed out, the “sancta societas” can only refer to the One Flesh of the New Covenant, hardly recognizable in “holy fellowship.”
[126] Augustine’s Eucharistic realism which Betz, inter alia, has denied, is defended in some detail in Vol. II, Ch. 6, 167-169, et passim. The defense of Augustine’s Eucharistic realism in these pages is ancillary to that in Vol. II, Ch. 6.
[127] The post-Berengarian stress upon the sacramental reception of the “Real Presence,” particularly in its Thomist development, has had the unfortunate effect of diverting theological attention from the Eucharistic Real Presence as the Presence of the Event of the High Priest’s offering of himself to the Father as the one Victim of the One Sacrifice. This Real Presence of Christ the High Priest is inseparable from the priestly Eucharistic offering, in Persona Christi, of the One Sacrifice by which we are redeemed. To prescind from the Eucharistic offering of the One Sacrifice in Persona Christi is to prescind from the historicity of the Eucharistic Real Presence, which is an Event only insofar as it is the Real Presence of the High Priest offering Himself as the Victim of the One Sacrifice. The emphasis which Augustine placed on the One Sacrifice is sufficient to render Betz’ criticism beside the point.
[128] Johannes Quasten, Patrology, III: at 375.
[129] See the discussion of Joachim Jeremias’ Eucharistic theology in endnote 33, supra. Harnack’s discovery and critique of an “Urkatholizismus” in the New Testament presupposed the rationale which Jeremias has developed: the fall of a romantically-conceived and consequently nonhistorical church into the sacramental worship by which the Roman Catholic Church is objectively and permanently historical and therefore inevitably corrupt insofar as the Reform is concerned. We shall see that this romantic notion of an evolving Church which passes from a inarticulate infancy into sacramental worship has found its way into official documents of the Roman Catholic Church, most recently, the General Introduction to the Roman Missal (2011). When sacramental realism is foregone, its mediation of the grace of Christ is lost, and worship of him becomes immediate, as played out in the Origen’s Commentary on the Son of Songs.
[130] In Mediator Dei, Pius XII asserted first the Eucharistic Presence of Christ to the Church (¶ 18) and then linked that Real Presence to the entirety of the Church’s liturgical worship (¶ 20), a worship whose primary end is the giving of glory to God (¶ 79): “where the Church worships, Jesus the Christ is present. »
Fr. Joseph A. Jungmann’s commentary on the proceedings at Vatican II which issued in Sacrosanctum concilium reveals that the Conciliar Liturgical Commission, under the nominal leadership of Dom Cipriano Vagaggini, OSB, a liturgical scholar of international repute, was under the effective leadership of Fr. Annibale Bugnini, a professor of liturgy at the Lateran University, who wrote the preparatory “Schema,’ a document purporting to be the basis of the liturgical reform intended by Sacrosanctum concilium.
Bugnini’s Schema dismissed as “scholastic” the Catholic doctrinal emphasis upon the salvific efficacy of the sacraments, which had been reaffirmed by Pius XII in Mediator Dei. “In an ecumenical spirit” the Schema replaced this now contested doctrine with “a reference to the Presence of the word in Scripture.” Jungmann approved the substitution:
In article 7 the liturgy is now presented in its relation not only to the mystery of Christ but to Christ himself. For he is present and active in it in manifold ways. The individual statements were already included in their essence in the schema and they had been taken over from Mediator Dei.4 It had already been stated in the schema that Christ is present not only in the Eucharist elements, but also in the person of the priest and, further, through his power, in the sacraments and even in the congregation at prayer. In an ecumenical spirit, while speaking of the sacrament, the scholastic statements contained in the encyclical of Pius XII describing them as instruments of sanctification have been dispensed with and a reference to the Presence of the word in Scripture inserted.5 Nevertheless (sic!) there arose critical objections in the assembly, which, however, in part mutually contradicted one another. It was maintained by some that one ought not to combine together the various manners of the Presence, the Presence in the Eucharistic being of a wholly different kind―this objection also appeared in various amendments proposed during the final vote on the chapter―and that one ought to adhere more closely to the text of the Pope. Now, not only did such a combination exist in the text of the encyclical: it was found there more strikingly than in the schema, that is, through the fourfold praesens adest , which was now incorporated in the text. In the same way, the present operation of the Lord in the sacraments was explained in the well-known words of St. Augustine. The thus altered text was approved by 2049 votes against 66. As a number of proposed amendments during the above-mentioned final vote (on 30 September, 1962) showed, the resistance was caused principally by the anxiety that faith in the eucharistic presence (sic) could be belittled. The resistance evidently sprang from a theological school of thought little accustomed to conceiving the continued existence of the Lord in his transfigured humanity in the glory of the Father as his primary manner of being, which operates fully in all other modes of his presence, even though in different ways.
4 AAS 39 (1947) p. 528.
5 Cf. Vagaggini in EL 78 (1964), pp. 257.
Jungmann, “Constitution” on the Sacred Liturgy” (Commentary on the Documents of Vatican II, Volume I, Ed. Herbert Vorgrimler (New York: Herder and Herder, 1967), , Art. 7, at 13 (emphasis added).
While Fr. Jungmann’s assessment of the mind of the Fathers at the Council is hardly definitive, his interpretation of the proceedings which produced Sacrosanctum concilium may be of value to historians, as having that authority which his scholarship may supply. His field is the history of the Eucharistic liturgy; certainly it is not theology and, most certainly, not Eucharistic theology. The distinction he would pose between “the mystery of Christ” and “Christ himself” is meaningless, while that which he fails to find between the substantial Eucharistic Real Presence of Christ and the insubstantial ”Presence of the word in Scripture” is hardly “scholastic,” as he supposes; rather it is the distinction between, respectively, the Catholic Mass and the liturgy of the Reform, and thus between the Church’s sacramental worship and the Protestant position that justification is by faith alone.
In sum, Fr. Jungmann’s account is driven by the antisacramental agenda of periti led by Annibale Bugnini who, as Vagaggini’s immediate assistant, wrote the preparatory Schema which so pleased Fr. Jungmann. That agenda for the next three decades inspired the ongoing liturgical “translations” authorized by the International Commission on English in the Liturgy. As became clear in 1992 with the publication of I.C.E.L.’s Third Progress Report on the Revision of the Roman Missal, the goal of the International Commission was simply the suppression of the sacrifice of the Mass, and the reduction of the Eucharist to a commemorative meal, dining upon a nonhistorical, insubstantial body and blood of Christ.
The admirers of Fr. Jungmann whose articles were published as Source and Summit: Commemorating Josef A. Jungmann, S.J.; Joanne M. Pierce and Michael Downey, eds.; Foreword by Balthasar Fischer (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1999), clearly share that anti-sacramental animus: it is particularly explicit in John Baldovin’s “The Eucharist.” Although its fautores finally failed to persuade the Fathers at Vatican II, and while in John Paul II and Benedict XVI it has found its definitive riposte in “the reform of the reform of the liturgy,” nonetheless, as noted by Edward Schillebeeckx’s The Real Achievement of Vatican II, they came close to achieving their goal: the sola fide dissolution of the sacramental worship of the Roman Catholic Church. This ambition, traveling as “the spirit of Vatican II,” has since dominated the Catholic academy, its publication and its catechesis. It constitutes, at best, a standing schism in the Church, a dissent to the apostolic liturgical tradition distinguished from heresy only by those reliant upon “the spirit of Vatican II.”
The “ecumenical spirit” which Fr. Jungmann reports as having prompted the authors of the schema for Sacrosanctum concilium to dismiss the stress on salvific sacramental efficacy characterizing Pius XII’s Mediator Dei in favor of “a reference to the Presence of the word in Scripture” was obviously a retreat from the doctrine defined at the Council of Trent to that which the Council had condemned, the denial of the Eucharistic Sacrifice, and the consequent anti-sacramentalism which specifies the Protestant reform. This concession is obviously entirely incompatible with the Catholic tradition, the paradosis whose Event-foundation is the Eucharistic Sacrifice, the historical Presence of the Incarnate Word as at once the High Priest and the Victim of his One Sacrifice: in fine, the Eucharistic Real Event-Presence of the institution of the New Covenant, that outpouring of the Spirit upon the bridal Church in which terminates the Father’s sending of the Son to give the Spirit. The retreat of the “ecumenical spirit” from the Catholic tradition can be considered “ecumenical” only by those ecumenists who have been persuaded that the sacramental realism of Catholicism is an obstacle to ecumenical union. The product of ecumenism thus understood is the romanticist flight from historical identity that lately has been afflicting the Anglican Church. Eucharistic realism is the sole obstacle to this flight, as has long been evident.
It remains that the Son’s Mission from the Father is achieved in Jesus, the High Priest’s offering of the One Sacrifice of himself, the unique Victim of his One Sacrifice. In this event, on the cross as on the altar, Jesus, the one and the same Son, institutes the New Covenant, which is his union in One Flesh with his bridal Church, upon whom he poured out the Spirit for the salvation of those for whom, as their consubstantial head, he died and rose again. This is the Catholic liturgical and doctrinal tradition. It is not negotiable.
Jungmann’s approval of Bugnini’s decision to displace in the Schema the papal emphasis upon the Event by which humanity is freed and the universe renewed, in favor of a metaphorical “Presence of the word in Scripture” which, apart from that Event, is nothing at all, has deep roots. As Baldovin reports, Jungmann, in an early article, expressed concern over what he considered to be an excessive liturgical emphasis upon the divinity of Christ, which emphasis he traced to the abreaction to Arianism after Nicaea. Worries over the attribution of divinity to Jesus are clearly Nestorian: they are given their head in Calvinist version of the Protestant rejection of the Sacrifice of the Mass, echoed throughout the current liturgically-driven enthusiasm for a “Christology from below.” Jungmann’s understanding of the Eucharistic Presence is similar to and perhaps influenced by that which Johannes Betz, a few years prior to Vatican II, had termed an Aktualpräzens, in which there is no Eucharistic offering of the One Sacrifice, but rather an inevitably subjective memorial (anmnesis) of Jesus’ death on the cross, which has no Eucharistic representation.
While there is an ample evidence to the contrary (cf. endnote 50, supra), Betz’ believes he has found a warrant for his Aktualpräsenz theology in John Chrysostom’s preference for a dehistoricized Eucharist, in which the risen and no longer human Logos offers his Sacrifice from his place at the right hand of the Father, semper interpellando. Clearly, so understood, the offering is not historical: no history-transcending Event attends the Eucharistic celebration thus viewed. Rather, the Eucharist is then simply the congregation’s nonhistorical “anamnesis” of Jesus’ death on the cross. That this is Jungmann’s view as well is clear from his own language: he supposes it to be beyond discussion that “the continued existence of the Lord in his transfigured humanity in the glory of the Father (is) his primary manner of being.” This amounts to the dehistoricization of the Church’s Eucharistic worship for, under that aegis, the Eucharistic Presence of Jesus the Christ is not as defined at Trent, the Event-Presence of the High Priest offering himself as the Victim of the One Sacrifice. Rather, the risen and transfigured Christ, whose Transfiguration Jungmann identifies with his absence from history, has his nonhistorical presence “in the glory of the Father.” Jungmann implies the nonhistorical impersonality of this “primary manner of being of Christ,” referring to it as that “which (sic) operates in all other modes of his presence, even though in different ways.” It could hardly be otherwise: all the “Presences” are metaphorical, nonhistorical, except insofar as integrated into the Eucharistic Offering of the One Sacrifice, which integration Jungmann and Betz refuse. We hear nothing of that liturgical integration in Fr. Jungmann’s review, nor in the volume which his admirers have dedicated to his memory. Baldovin in particular displays the standard uncritical commitment of the contemporary academic to the secular historical-critical method which disintegrates its object a priori, in this case the Church’s liturgy, presupposing its intrinsic insignificance, in order that the exegete may to reintegrate the meaningless fragments into narrative suo modo, by the application of his personal version of “historical consciousness.” The results are as might be expected. A method of inquiry which presumes to create its object is a banality, a hobby of interest only to hobbyists, .
Fr. Jungmann concludes his discussion of Sacrosanctum Concilium’s Article 7 with a summary of what he supposes to be the Conciliar understanding of the Catholic liturgy:
It embraces the priestly act of Christ, which forms its backbone and animates it and is its visible sign. And like this act itself, it embraces a twofold movement: on the one hand, the sanctification of man, descending from above, which occurs in a remarkable manner in the sacraments, and on the other hand, the entire worship, ascending from the sanctified congregation, which is offered to God by the Church. Both aspects penetrate each other. In other words, liturgy is determined in that broad circle, for which the medieval exponents employed the expression officia ecclesiastica. It embraces Scripture-reading and the proclamation of the Word insofar as they are associated with worship as their basis; for it is thus that the sanctification of man begins. But if finds its fulfillment in the glorification of God, in the prayer and sacrifice of the Church. Thus understood, the liturgy is called in the fourth paragraph―in the words of Pius XI―“a sacred action surpassing all others”, and to it―or, to be more precise, to its efficacy (the limitation to efficacitas was only undertaken by the Council Commission)―the first rank in the action of the Church was adjudged, a statement which had been anticipated by the German Catechism of 1955 when it described worship as “the most sacred function of the Church” Question 100). The rank thus ascribed to the efficacy of the liturgy was, to be sure, questioned by individual Fathers, who pointed to the heroic virtues practised by saintly men in the Church. The relator nonetheless replied that in the case of the liturgy it was not a question of gaining merits for good works but of the operation of the sacraments ex opere operato. It was not the act of the individual but that of the whole Church which was here involved.
Ibid., at 14.
There is not a line in this excerpt to which a Lutheran might not subscribe, including the final sentences, which nullify the ex opere operato efficacy of the sacraments by the attribution of that efficacy to Church instead of to the Eucharistic Sacrifice, just as earlier it had reduced the Church’s worship to her glorification of God and her prayer and sacrifice. Unfortunately, the “worship” of the Church, so described, is nonhistorical: it does not have its source and ground in the Event of the priestly offering in the Person of Christ the High Priest of his One Sacrifice of himself, the Lamb of God, for the life of the world: only that Event sustains the Church in history. It is manifest in the documents of the Second Vatican Council the Council did not accept Bugnini’s program for the dehistoricization of the Catholic liturgy. It is equally evident that Fr. Jungmann and those who, entranced by Bugnini’s Schema for Sacrosanctum concilium, hoped to impose its “ecumenical” agenda upon the Church, did accept it and still do. They prevailed upon the American bishops to underwrite the absurd “Call to Action” assembly of dissidents at Detroit in 1976, whose papers, collected and published as Toward Vatican III: the Work that Needs to Be Done. Ed. David Tracy with Hans Kúng and Johannes Metz (New York: Seabury Press, 1978) looked with confidence to a Conciliar endorsement and implementation of their program for the demolition of the Church, but the project turned out to have no momentum and their enthusiasm no future. Its survival in the academy, as instanced in the resistance spelled out in Source and Summit to the “reform of the reform of the liturgy” led by John Paul II and Benedict XVI, is eloquent of a continued alienation from the worship of the Church.
[131] See Vol. II, Chapter 6, endnote 161.
[132] Stephen Neill, a well-known historian of the Anglican missionary activity in India, proposed that the Church of South India, whose existence owes much to his ecumenical efforts, possesses an immanent dynamism whereby in the course of time it would “become episcopal.” For a sketch of the ecumenical negotiations involved, see The Story of the Christian Church in India and Pakistan (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970), 147-54. This evolutionary notion of ecclesial development owes more to Hegel’s immanentization of the eschaton than to the Protestant tradition, as is apparent in its reduction of sacramental realism to an immanent necessity instead of regarding it, with Protestant theologians generally, as the product of a fall of the church into Urkatholizismus, i.e., into sacramental history. However, the difference between the Protestant tradition of a fall of the church and the Hegelian submission of the Church to an immanent eschaton is theologically inconsiderable: both views reject the sacramental-historical objectivity of the Eucharistic immanence of the risen Christ with the result that for both the Christian faith is in principle radically unable to support a doctrinal or moral tradition.
[133] Edward Schillebeeckx, Ministry: Leadership in the Community of Jesus Christ. Tr. John Bowden (Crossroad Press, 1981). See Vol. 1, Introduction, endnote 114, for further details.
[134] The Catholic version of this dehistoricization of the liturgy consists in the same condemnation, as "religion," of the supposedly dispensable sacrificial realism of the Catholic Eucharistic liturgy, freedom from which is taken to be the index of the secular and therefore "mature" Catholic faith whose alternative is lately described as fundamentalism. See, e.g., Edward Schillebeeckx, The Real Achievement of Vatican II; tr. H. J. J. Vaughan (New York: Herder and Herder, 1967, and Eucharist (New York, Herder & Herder, 1967), Tad Guzie, Jesus and the Eucharist (Paulist Press, 1974), Raymond Vaillancourt, Toward a Renewal of Sacramental Theology (Liturgical Press, 1979), Colman O'Neill, Sacramental Realism (New York: Glazier, 1983), Joseph Martos, Doors to the Sacred (Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1981) and, John W. O'Malley, What Happened at Vatican II, Harvard University Press, 2008. The same themes inform the Latin American liberation theologians: e.g., Juan Segundo, Theology for the Artisans of a New Community IV: The Sacraments Today (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1974) 81 ff.; for the alternative of "fundamentalism," see, e.g., John Coleman's "Who are the Catholic Fundamentalists?" in Commonweal 116 (27 January, 1989) 42-45. Finally, the Alberigo-Komonchak editions of History of Vatican II should not be ignored: see endnote 141, infra.
The fundamentalist label is now used in quasi-Catholic circles to include whatever theological position refuses to drift before the winds of change emanating from the editorial offices of such journals of conventional opinion as Commonweal, America and the U.S. Catholic Conference "news service," the weekly Origins whose editors, sensitive to creeping infallibilism, have seen fit thus to index Cardinal Ratzinger's address, "The Ecclesiology of Vatican II," Origins 15 (1985) 370-376: see Origins 15 (1986) at 781, s.v. "fundamentalism." In "The Rise of Catholic Fundamentalism," America (April 11, 1987) 297-302, the late Patrick Arnold set out in more detail his confused advocacy of the doctrinal relativism which must damn as fundamentalist all theological alternatives to the uncritical historicism his criticism exemplified.
In nominally Catholic liturgical circles since the late 1960s, "secularism" became fashionable by way of the not particularly high vulgarizations of the critiques of “religion” by Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer as served up by Harvey Cox and J. A. T. Robinson. It reached a full flowering in Edward Kilmartin's article "Apostolic Office: Sacrament of Christ," Theological Studies 36 (June, 1975) 243-264. In the previous decade Schillebeeckx's The Real Achievement of Vatican II, and his The Eucharist had anticipated that wholesale surrender of Eucharistic realism. Schillebeeckx went on to detail its impact upon priestly orders in Ministry. The quondam Jesuit priest, Bernard Cooke, earned the presidency of the C.T.S.A. and the chairmanship of the Theology Department of the College of the Holy Cross by publishing his Ministry to Word and Sacraments (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1976), anticipating by five years Schillebeeckx’ assault upon the priesthood and the Eucharist, although Cooke’s extended study lacked the impact of Schillebeeckx’ far more concise work.
One of the latest of these expressions of retreat from the concrete historicity of the Church’s Eucharistic worship by conceding it to be a possible product of development, brought to my attention by the Australian theologian Eamonn Keane, appears in a minor work of Avery Dulles:
The New Testament does not provide all the information we would require to ascertain who presided at the liturgy, the church's most priestly activity. The Catholic tradition has generally assumed that the apostles designated bishops, presbyters, or their equivalents to perform this function. Perhaps in the very early stages, when the permanent structures of the church were still in the process of formation, persons without priestly ordination may have had the capacity to preside at the eucharist, but if so these practices are not normative for the church of later ages.
The Priestly Office: A Theological Reflection (New York: The Paulist Press, 1997), at 9.
Here again we encounter the unreflective supposition that the New Testament was written independently of the Eucharistic liturgy, and thus that the apostolic succession to the authority to offer the One Sacrifice of Jesus the Lord may be explained as the product of development within the early Church, with the implication that at an earlier level that the apostolic liturgical authority did not exist. Dulles here supposes that the Eucharistic One Sacrifice may be a product of evolution from a pre-existent “Catholic tradition” which, in the absence of a Eucharistic worship warranted by apostolic succession, can only be that of the romantic “primitive Church” envisioned by Loisy and Harnack as prior to its fall into Urkatholizismus― a church devoid of structure, thus nonhistorical, to which historicity is corruption. Such an imperceptible church can hardly be expected to have provided scriptural evidence of its existence, a matter of some convenience to historians of ecclesial evolution.
It is further here in point to emphasize that the apostolic succession is to an office, not to a “function.” The ascription of “functions” to the priestly office by the Vatican’s English translation of Lumen Gentium, notably in paragraphs 7. 21, 28, and 30, where “function” serves as the general, one-size-fits-all, designation of the priesthood, whether that of the laity, of the priest, of the bishop, or of Jesus the Lord, offered a sufficiently clear opportunity for, if not an invitation to, dissenting theologians to concoct a theology of the “functional priesthood.” That enthusiasm was a bit passé by 1997, when the Dulles used “function,” ut supra, to name the liturgical office of the ordained priest, but the error that term embodies evidently has a life of its own.
Finally, the dissociation of the New Testament from its liturgical source and mediation, in the first sentence of the paragraph excerpted supra, is a nostalgic echo of that waning post-Conciliar confidence in the authority of New Testament scholarship whose faded wish-list finds echoes in Bishop Trautman's dyspeptic assaults upon the Vatican's Liturgiam authenticam. His summoning of the faithful to the barricades to block this affront to the freedom of I.C.E.L.’s nameless exegetes to rewrite the liturgical books would be amusing had not its insolence worked so well for so long.
Replies to this sub-Catholic anti-sacramentalism have not been lacking: see Karl Lehmann and Joseph Ratzinger, in "Luther and the Unity of the Churches," Communio 11 (1984) 198-226, contra Karl Rahner's version of that unity. Schillebeeckx's Ministry was dealt with in Review of Contemporary Perspectives on the Ministry (Washington: National Conference of Catholic Bishops, 1983), a collection of English translations of reviews of Schillebeeckx's travesty of historical scholarship by Henri Crouzel, S.J., Walter Kasper, and Albert Vanhoye, S.J. Pope John Paul II, speaking to seminarians at the North American College in Rome, affirmed yet again the ancient tradition:
The proclamation of God's word reaches its summit in the celebration of the Eucharist. Indeed, all your personal endeavors and all activities of the seminary community are bound up with the Eucharistic sacrifice and directed toward it.
John Paul II, "The Proper Focus of Seminary Life," The Pope Speaks 25 (1980) 178-182, at 180; emphasis added.
[135] Incidentally, contrary to the assertion in Bishop Tafoya’s Pastoral Letter, there is no "doctrine of concomitance." The term, "concomitance," entered into the Eucharistic Canons at Trent only as an assertion, not an explanation, of the inexhaustible mystery of the Personal unity of Jesus the Christ, to whose depth it adds and can add nothing; see DS §*1640.
[136] See “Bishop Tafoya's rules: Legitimate variations? Agree to Disagree?” Adoremus Bulletin, Vol. IX, No. 1: March 2003.
[137] The quotations of Cardinal Mahony’s pastoral letters of 1997 and 2000 are taken from Gather Faithfuly Together: Guide for Sunday Mass, Cardinal Roger Mahony. Ed. Gabe Huck (Chicago: Liturgy Training Publications 1997) [hereafter Gather Faithfully Together], and from As I Have Done for You: a Pastoral Letter on Ministry Cardinal Mahony and the priests of the Archdioces of Los Angeles. Eds. Gabe Huck and Tod Tamberg (Chicago: Liturgy Training Publications, 2000), [hereafter As I Have Done For You]. The first named letter is focused upon ecclesiology, the second on the relation of the priestly liturgical office to that of the laity, but their subject is the same: a dissident notion of liturgical renewal as reliant upon baptism rather than upon the Eucharistic Sacrifice proper to the Catholic tradition, and a consequent sola fide conception of Christianity promoted by our more 'progressive' theologians.
[138] See Covenantal Theology (1996) II, “First Appendix,” §6, “The Naming of God and Man,” for a analysis of the office of the head as source of the glory, the free unity, which proceeds from him within the substance in which he subsists, and which, as its head, he names.
[139] This crucial distinction is brilliantly developed by Lon Fuller in The Morality of Law. Rev. ed. (New Haven: Yale Univesity Press, 1969).
[140]Apostolos Suos was published in 1998, three years after Bishop Lynch’s departure for St. Petersburg. After another three years the amorphous U.S.C.C./ N.C.C.B. underwent a sea-change into the far more responsible United Sates Conference of Catholic Bishops (U.S.C.C.B.). The bishops’ liberation from bureaucratic subservience was prompted by the summary concluding section of Apostolos Suos:
IV Complementary Norms Regarding the Conferences of Bishops
Art.1– In order that the doctrinal declarations of the Conference of Bishops referred to in No. 22 of the present Letter may constitute authentic magisterium and be published in the name of the Conference itself, they must be unanimously approved by the Bishops who are its members, or receive the recognitio of the Apostolic See if approved in plenary assembly by at least two thirds of the Bishops belonging to the Conference and having a deliberative vote.
Art. 2. – No body of the Episcopal Conference, outside of the plenary assembly, has the power to carry out acts of authentic magisterium. The Episcopal Conference cannot grant such power to its Commissions or other bodies set up by it.
Art. 3. – For statements of a different kind, different from those mentioned in article 2, the Doctrinal Commission of the Conference of Bishops must be authorized explicitly by the Permanent Council of the Conference.
Art. 4. – The Episcopal Conferences are to review their statutes in order that they may be consistent with the clarifications and norms of the present document as well as the Code of Canon Law, and they should send them subsequently to the Apostolic See for recognitio, in accordance with canon 451 of the Code of Canon Law.
His Holiness Pope John Paul II, Apostolic Letter issued “motu proprio” Apostolos Suos on the theological and juridical nature of episcopal conferences.
[141] A palmary instance of this abdication of episcopal responsibility is the 1990 document, “Criteria for the Evaluation of Inclusive Language in the Liturgy, As Established by the N.C.C.B. Joint Committee [Liturgy and Doctrine] on Inclusive Language,” which granted plenary authority to anonymous I.C.E.L. translators to prepare liturgical translations of Scripture. This license soon issued in the publication (1992) of the triumphalist Third Progress Report on the Revision of the Roman Missal, prepared by the anonymous minions of the Secretariat of the International Commission on English in the Liturgy [hereafter I.C.E.L], a Joint Commission of the Catholic Bishops’ Conferences. The I.CE.L. program for the imposition of “inclusive language” on the English-speaking members of the Church encountered its first signal obstacle in the refusal by Cardinal Ratzinger, then Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, of the request, made by a group of American cardinals, that he authorize its application to the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Thereafter “inclusive language” was a lost cause, despite the involuntary enlistment in it of every U.S. bishop, and its intensive and sustained advocacy by, e.g., the local ordinaries of Erie, PA, Cincinnati, OH, Los Angeles, CA, St. Petersburg, FL, and St. Augustine, FL, loyally supported by the editors of America, Commonweal, and the National Catholic Reporter.
[142] Carl Armbruster, “Priesthood and Ministry from the New Testament to Nicaea” (Proceedings: of the Twenty-Fourth Annual Convention of the Catholic Theology Society of America (Yonkers, NY: St. Joseph’s Seminary, 1970), at 74. Armbruster’s destructive analysis of the doctrinal tradition relies heavily―e.g., in its second footnote--- upon that of John O’Malley, who had recently discovered in the irrationality of secular historicity the foundation and meaning of the Church’s freedom: viz., her dehistoricization, her severance from her past. O’Malley gave this ancient pagan insight further expression in "Reform, Historical Consciousness, and Vatican II's Aggiornamento," Theological Studies, 32 (Dec., 1971) 573‑601; see endnote 134, infra. Its rationalist elimination of the Church’s free historicity, with the corollary of the imposition of an ex parte synthesis of the “discontinuities” which would deprive the Church of her sacramental realism, her indefeasible historical significance, is currently elaborated in the five volumes of the Alberigo-Komonchak editions of History of Vatican II (Maryknoll: Orbis; Leuven: Peeters, 1995-2005).
[143] Its most complete expression is the "theology of discontinuity" which interprets the documents of Vatican II as constituting a breach within the Catholic tradition. Its implication and without much doubt its goal is the relativization of personal human significance, with the corollary of a homogenized humanity, incapable of the personal responsibility and dignity whose only sustenance is Eucharistic. Benedict XVI has recognized this "theology" for what it is, a radical infidelity which can be countered only by the "reform of the reform," the restoration of the Eucharistic and thereby Catholic tradition which the advocates of ecclesial discontinuity have made the first object of their animus. See endnotes 133, 134, and 135, supra
[144] Johannes Betz, Die Eucharistie in der Zeit der griechischen Väter I/1: Die Aktualpräsenz der Person und des Heilswerkes Jesu im Abendmahl nach der vorephesinischen griechischen Patristik; II/1: Die Realpräsenz des Leibes und Blutes Jesu im Abendmahl nach dem Neuen Testament; zweite, überarbeitete und erweiterte Auflage (Freiburg: Herder, 1955, 1976), [hereafter, Eucharistie I, II].
Betz has been cited more than thirty times in this work as a reliable authority on the patristic doctrine of the Eucharist: ten times in Vol. II, Chapter 5, and over twenty in Chapter 6. The present study rejects his charge that St. Augustine’s Eucharistic doctrine is symbolist,, which nonetheless agrees with the bulk of the Catholic historians of doctrine. Betz’ argument for a Eucharistic Aktualpräsenz is badly flawed. This criticism is theological. It does not bear upon his personal orthodoxy, nor upon the service which his scholarship has offered to the Church. His summary statement of his Eucharistic theology was published in “Eucharist,” Sacramentum Mundi. An Encyclopedia of Theology; General Editor Adolph Darlap (New York, Herder and Herder; London, Burns & Oates, Ltd: 1968) 6 vols: vol. 2, 257a-267b. It incorporates his Aktualpräsenz assimilation of the Eucharistic Sacrifice to a Eucharistic meal-anamnesis, which he sharply distinguishes from the Lutheran Eucharistic doctrine. Without here entering into a discussion of Luther’s doctrine as a flight from history, it is enough that the Aktualpräsenz of the crucified humanity of Jesus can only be comparably abstract. Jesus’ humanity is historical and concrete only as Personal, as fully human, as that of “the one and the same Son,” Jesus the Christ, whose sacrifice is Personal, offered by Jesus as the High Priest who offers not his “humanity,” but himself, the Lamb of God prophesied in Gen. 22:8.
Only this Event-Presence of the High Priest offering himself to the Father as the Lamb of God is historical, and thus capable of the anamnesis which, as Eucharistic, is the efficaciously historical Offering of the One Sacrifice of Christ our Lord by a priest or bishop acting in the Person of Christ, who alone can offer it. The refusal to recognize the Eucharistic Presence of Christ as historical, as Event, is the basis of the Protestant Reformation, basically a flight from the sacramentality of history.
[145] This supposition underlies Edward Schillebeeckx’ The Eucharist, wherein the Tridentine definition of the Eucharistic “Real Presence” is reduced to a function of a contemporary world view. This submission of the Church’s liturgy to a facile historicism simply dismisses the sacramental realism of the Catholic worship and, with it, the Church’s historicity. Schillebeeckx concludes that inasmuch as the Aristotelian metaphysics supposedly informing the conceptuality of the Tridentine bishops has been superseded by the current influence of existentialism and phenomenology, a reinterpretation of the dogmatic affirmation of the Real Presence in terms of the later secularized consciousness has become necessary. This humanistic hermeneutic supposes the liturgical tradition of Catholic doctrine to be intelligible only insofar as theologically mediated, a postulate once familiar to a Thomist theology thus persuaded of its own orthodoxy as to dub its more confident assertions “proxima fidei.” At bottom, such inference rests upon the supposition that the intelligibility of the ecclesial mediation of the truth of the faith, i.e., the doctrinal tradition, waits upon accreditation by an academic consensus. Apart from the problems inherent in this subordination of the Catholic magisterium to the academy, Schillebeeckx’ presumption that the Tridentine definitions were written under the influence of Aristotelian metaphysics, or indeed of any academic metaphysics, is without foundation. Were it justified, the Church would have been teaching metaphysics at the Council of Trent, not doctrine. The Catholic Eucharistic doctrine affirms the realism, the historical objectivity, of the Church’s worship and thus has metaphysical import, but as foundational, not as derivative. No metaphysics predicated on another basis can accommodate Eucharistic realism, while only a Eucharistically grounded metaphysics is adequate to a Catholic fides quaerens intellectum.
[146] Fr. Joseph A. Murphy, S.J., of the Pontifical College Josephinum in Columbus, OH, has reminded the present writer of Msgr. James O’Connor’s fine study, The Hidden Manna: A theology of the Eucharist. Second Edition (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 20051988), in which are surveyed the views of several famous representatives of dehistoricized versions of Eucharistic theology; see pp. 236-46. Particularly, St. Robert Bellarmine, St. Alphonsus Liguori, Cardinal Franzelin, Maurice de La Taille and Abbot Vonier have severally identified the Sacrifice of the Mass with the destruction or immolation of the Victim understood as the dead body of Christ, thus not with Jesus the Christ’s High-Priestly offering of himself, the Personal Victim, the eternal Son of the Father and the historical Son of Mary. In this context, discussion of how this offering may be understood to be the Sacrifice of the Mass becomes impossible. The Catholic faith that Jesus Christ the Lord instituted the Eucharistic Sacrifice by offering his Body and his Blood at the Last Supper and instituted the priestly offering of that One Sacrifice in his Person is not open to negotiation: “dissent is only dissent.”
Maurice de la Taille understood the Eucharistic Sacrifice to be “passive,” reasoning that inasmuch as the Sacrifice on the cross cannot be repeated, Jesus does not offer the Sacrifice of the Mass― this despite the Council of Trent’s definition of the identity of the Sacrifice of the Mass and the Sacrifice on the cross, and the consequent irrelevance of such suggestion of a “repetition” of the One Sacrifice by its Eucharistic offering. The Eucharistic Presence of the risen Christ is that of the Lord of history; he has transcended the fallen fragmentation of earthly time and space by his institution of the One Flesh of the New Creation, the New Covenant, of which as risen he is the .Alpha and the Omega.
Were a “repetition” of the One Sacrifice sufficiently discussible to be controversial, one might instance the theological development responsive to Berengarius’ eleventh-century denial of the truth of the Words of Institution. This development has its beginnings in the ninth century with Paschasius’ insistence upon the literal truth of the Words of Institution and upon a real change in the Eucharistic elements. In so speaking, he rejected the doubts cast upon the truth of the Words of Institution by enthusiasts of the “new” (i.e., Eleatic) binary logic, such as Ratramnus of Corbie. Centuries later Berengarius would assail Paschasius’ refusal to accept the same primitive binary logic which underlay his own reduction of Eucharistic realism to subjectivity. Berengarius was confronted in the eleventh century by Lanfranc of Pavia, one of his former auditors who by 1049 had become his major adversary. In that year, Lanfranc published his De corpore et de sanguine Domini, in which he asserted an “essential” change in the Eucharistic elements caused by the Words of Institution. In 1075, Guitmund of Aversa published De corporis et sanguinis Christi veritate in Eucharistia tres libri, in which he spoke of the change in the Eucharistic elements as “substantial” in preference to Lanfranc’s use of “essential.” Guitmund also condemned Berengarius for impanationism, inventing a name for implications of Berengarius’ refusal of the literal truth of the Words of Institution which Durandus of Troarn’s condemnation of Berengarius in 1053 had suggested. Alger of Liège, in De Sacramento Corporis et Sanguinis Dominici, published about 1120, built on the work of Lanfranc and Guitmund to write of a “substantial presence” of Christ in the Eucharist, the prelude to St. Thomas’s development of a Eucharistic presence of Christ “per modum substantiae.” This development was completed, perfected, by Gregory of Bergamo, who about 1135 published his Tractatus de veritate Corporis Christi; following Alger of Liége, he concentrated on the substantial Real Presence, providing the Eucharistic elements with that independence of temporal and spatial locality which Paschasius had intimated and which St. Thomas would explore: see S. T. iiia, aa. lxxv-lxxxiv. St. Thomas deals specifically with presence per modum substantiae in Article 6: Utrum corpus Christi sit mobiliter in hoc sacramento.(Whether Christ is movable in this sacrament). He answers that:
Christus, per se loquendo, immobiliter est in hoc sacramento. Ad primum ergo dicendum quod hoc ratio illa procedit de motu per accidens, quo ad motum nostri moventur ea quae in nobis sunt. Aliter tamen ea quae per se possunt esse in loco, sicut corpora: et aliter ea quae per se non possunt esse in loco, sicut formae et spirituales substantiae. Ad quem modum potest reduci quod dicimus Christum moveri per accidens secundum esse quod habet in hoc sacramento, in quo non est sicut in loco.
Christ, here speaking of him as he is in himself, is immobile in this sacrament. In the first place, it must be said that this reason bears upon motion accidentally, as by our motion those things which are in us are moved. Otherwise are those things which can be in a place, such as bodies, as distinct from those things which cannot be in a place, such as forms and spiritual substances. This latter sort includes our saying that Christ is moved accidentally according to the being he has in this sacrament, in which he is not in a place: i.e., he is not located where the species are located (this simply because as a spiritual substance he does not occupy our fallen space or time).
A few editorial notes may remove some difficulties from the reading of this text:
5. Ex his patet corpus Christi sub speciebus contentum non loco moveri, nisi ad earum motum localem. Unde Concil. Trid. dicit corpus Christi in processionibus circumferre (sess. 13, cap. 5, et can. 6).
From this it is evident that the body of Christ contained in the species is not moved in place apart from the local motion of the species (the consecrated bread or wine) Thus the Council of Trent permits the body of Christ to be carried about in processions (session 13, ch. 5, and canon 6).
6/ Ex his sequitur quod Christus, prout in sacramento existens, non posit nutriri, augeri vel minui.
From this it follows that Christ, insofar as existing in the sacrament, cannot be fed (nourished), cannot be enlarged or be diminished in size.
7. Hinc dicitur corpus Domini elevari, deferri, recondi, manducari.
Hence it is said that the body of the Lord is elevated, carried, stored (as in the tabernacle), and eaten (sacramentally, in receiving communion)
l l l
It remains only to be remarked that terms by which this development was expressed, such as Lanfranc’s “essential,” and Guitmund’s “substantial,” rely on no received metaphysics, for none was then available in the Latin West. They rely instead, as Paschasius had, upon the transempirical, and in that sense metaphysical truth of the historical-liturgical tradition. This reliance supplies the intellectual resources needed to refute Berengarius’ challenge to the truth of Words of Institution by showing how it is that Eucharistic elements are immune to the mutation and finally the corruption incident to all physical existence in fallen space and time.
The solution, the Real Presence per modum substantiae, is entirely novel, with implications undreamed of in the thirteenth century, and unexhausted in the twenty-first. For Presence per modum substantiae does not merely explain why the mutation of the consecrated elements (species) in space or time does not move the Real Presence of the risen Christ. Certainly it does that, for thereby it defeated Berengarius’ eleventh-century challenge to the truth of the Words of Institution. But the implication of Presence per modum substantiae, i.e., of the substantial Eucharistic Presence of the Risen Christ, of his transcendence of fallen space and time, is finally his Eucharistic Lordship of history, as its Beginning and its End.
In brief, with Paschasius, followed by Lanfranc, Guitmund, Alger and Gregory, the theology of history, i.e., of intrinsically significant existence in time, was given its foundation, as was intimated by Justin Martyr in the second century. History, existence in time as thus intrinsically significant, is so by the Eucharistic immanence within it of Christ the Lord, its Alpha and its Omega, its creator and its redeemer. Absent his transcendence of history from within history, Jesus the Lord would not be the Lord. The Catholic faith that he is the Lord is the radical Mysterium fidei whose implications and corollaries it is the task of theology to seek out.
When that task, faith seeking understanding, is undercut, made unintelligible by supposing the Eucharistic offering of the One Sacrifice to be a “repetition” of the One Sacrifice, the task of theology has been foregone, abdicated. It is Jesus the Lord’s institution of the One Sacrifice of the Eucharist at the Last Supper, and his provision then and there for its offering in his Name throughout history―”Do this in memory of me”―, that makes the Mass a Memorial of the Crucifixion, preserving the Christ’s death upon the Cross from the oblivion which overcomes all merely temporal events. To distinguish the Event of the Sacrifice of the Cross from the Event of its Eucharistic Memorial, the Sacrifice of the Mass, is to abandon the apostolic tradition, which alone knows history to be significant because it knows Jesus is the Eucharistic Lord.
Maurice de la Taille understood the Eucharistic Sacrifice to be “passive,” reasoning that, inasmuch as the Sacrifice on the cross cannot be repeated, Jesus does not offer the Sacrifice of the Mass: this despite the Council of Trent’s definition of the identity of the Sacrifice of the Mass and the Sacrifice on the cross, and the consequent irrelevance of the Nominalist supposition of a “repetition” of the One Sacrifice by its Eucharistic offering.
Here it is well once more to stress that the well-tested inability of a cosmologized metaphysics to provide for the prior possibility of the truth of defined doctrine cannot pose a theological problem. De La Taille’s famous formula provides a useful illustration of this inability. The systematic application of his theologoumenon of “created actuation by uncreated Act,” to the doctrines of creation, of the Incarnation, and of Eucharistic transubstantiation reduces them to members of a category. It has its foundation in the Thomist analyses of those realities, in each of which the doctrinal tradition is adjusted to meet the implications of a cosmological metaphysics whose basic postulate is that divinity is absolute as a matter of definition.
Being thus incapable of relation, the divine is incapable of historicity and therefore becomes abstract, i.e., Monarchian. The impact of this postulate upon Trinitarian theology and Christology has been detailed and exploited by Karl Rahner and need not be further examined here. De la Taille’s reading of this postulate as reducing creation, the Incarnation, and the Eucharistic metabole to instances of the category, “created actuation by uncreated Act,” states concisely the impact upon theology of the cosmological notion of God as absolute, as “uncreated act,” incapable of relation to what is not himself. The final development of that rationalization of the One God is is the Nominalist theology out of which arose the Reformation.
“Created actuation” connotes an agent, the agent of the “uncreated Act.” The Aristotelian tradition accepted by St. Thomas holds that an agent is not related, by reason of his action, to the object of his action. This axiom compresses an insight deeply rooted in the historical pessimism intrinsic to all paganism: divinity as absolute is demonic, demanding an absolute submission, an abdication of all intrinsic significance, by whatever is not divine. The logic of this conviction, which controls the Thomist theological metaphysics, is pushed to its extreme in the “kismet” (unqualified personal submission to the divine) which, with “mektoub,” (‘it is written’) sums up the fastidious refusal of personal responsibility that grounds the Moslem moral code. It also underlies St. Thomas’ flawed notion of a “natural” creation, upon which, qua “natural,” the revealed truth of the Trinitarian Mission of Jesus to give the Holy Spirit has no bearing. However, St. Thomas would provide for the reverse relation of the creation to the Creator by way of a Neoplatonic intimation of the “great chain of being” as the basis of an analogy of being which, in predicating ‘being’ of what is not God, simply asserts what the Aristotelian analysis, in common with all cosmologies, was unable to provide, a necessary relation between the One and the many, and between the many and the One―which is to say, between the absolute and the relative―that could justify the analogous predication of being at once to God and to creatures. A metaphysics that can know nothing of moral freedom as historical, i.e., as the gift of covenantal fidelity, cannot but lock the Catholic tradition into its own immanent necessities.
Neoplatonism understands the unity of the divine and the finite as necessary and thus as pantheistic. The Neoplatonic axiom, bonum diffusivum sui, submits the divine to an abstract necessity which is criteriological for reality as such. This determinism is evident in the Periphyseon of John Scotus Eriugena, and yet more so in Spinoza’s Ethics. We meet it again in the historicism of Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Mind. Understood as free, the relation between the Creator and his creation lies outside the range of the quest for intrinsically necessary causes proper to the Thomist metaphysical analysis, and to cosmologies as such. St. Thomas rationalized freedom into contingency, mere random happenstance. Thus, in regarding the created order as contingent, not as free, he leaves it open to the immanent necessities of the act-potency analysis. De la Taille’s “created actuation by uncreated Act,” ignores this surd and so does not resolve it. For this he cannot be blamed: it has no resolution.
Turning from the philosophy of being to the theology of the Incarnation, the application of de la Taille’s axiom to the hypostatic union only repeats St. Thomas’ inability to accept the communication of idioms; he ignored the definition at Ephesus of Mary’s motherhood of God, the doctrine of the Formula of Union of the Council of Ephesus and the Symbol of Chalcedon, in which the Church’s Christology received its definitive statement. Specifically, it taught that Jesus the Lord is consubstantial not only with the Father and the Spirit, by reason of his subsistence in the divine substance, the Trinitarian Community, but is also consubstantial “with us,” by reason of his subsistence in the same human substance as ourselves, thus homoousios with each member of the one human community, in which each of us also subsists.
This, our personal subsistence, is in the free, nuptial ordered community which, as John Paul II has taught in his last doctrinal statement, images the Trinity precisely by reason of that free and substantial nuptial unity: see endnote 285, infra.
Nonetheless, de la Taille, following St. Thomas, denies that Jesus subsists in the same human substance as that in which we subsist. The Thomist anthropology insists upon the substantial unity of each human person: to be a human person is to be a human substance, with the consequence that a human consubstantiality is impossible, quite as, for the same reason, a divine consubstantiality was impossible for Arius. In brief, for de la Taille as for St. Thomas, if Jesus is a divine Person, he must be so sensu negante: he cannot be a human Person, with the consequence that what is said of Jesus’ as a man cannot be said of him whom Chalcedon seven times named “one and the same Son,” which is to say, one and the same Person. Similarly for de la Taille: the eternal, eternally nonhistorical Son is the uncreated Act: Jesus is the created actuation, which assertion ignores the fact that between God as the divine absolute and Jesus the Lord, the one and the same Son, there can be no cosmological unity. De la Taille’s axioms obviously require the Nestorian Christology, in which the Jesus is not the one and the same Son, nor the agent of our salvation, nor is he the Personal Son of Mary, nor even her merely human son. Nestorius was a disciple of Theodore of Mopsuestia, who died three years before Nestorius’ condemnation. He personified the late Antiochene reliance upon Aristotle’s metaphysics, whose understanding of substance barred the communication of idioms in Jesus the Lord. St. Thomas, similarly reliant upon Aristotelianism, was also unable to accept the communication of idioms in the Christ; from his standpoint Mary is the mother of a human nature, not of a man. Human nature, unless concrete in the Person of her Son, can be no more than an abstraction, an ens rationis.
It should not be necessary to dwell upon the Eucharistic consequences of the radical diophysism of Theodore, of Nestorius, and of St. Thomas. Cyril’s three Letters to Nestorius made these consequences clear long ago. The uncreated Act who is the non-human “immanent Son” can have nothing to do with the concretely human Real Presence, the body and the blood of Jesus understood as the product of transubstantiation. Under the diophysite aegis, Jesus becomes the impersonal entirely passive victim which is not a human person, still less the divine Person, Jesus the Lord. It is evident that the Eucharist so viewed cannot be as Ignatius Martyr understood it, “the medicine of immortality, the remedy that we should not die.”
Msgr. O’Connor considers Abbot Vonier to be representative of the contemporary Eucharistic theology. For Vonier, the Victim of the Sacrifice of Mass is the body of Christ on the cross, the Real Presence, while the High Priest of the Sacrifice of the Mass is the heavenly Christ, whose ”heavenly offering, immolation and priestly activity in heaven become effectively present for us.” His attribution of “priestly activity” to the Son, whose Resurrection Vonier thinks to be his removal from history, is equivalent to that which Johannes Betz has found in John Chrysostom. This dissociation of the one and the same Son from his historical humanity, and thereby from us, by way of the Resurrection which, not incidentally, the Nicene Creed attributes to Jesus, would appear to need further explanation if it is to avoid Calvinism. The Eucharistic Offering of the One Sacrifice is “heavenly” only sensu aiente, for it is sacramental, therefore historically objective as well as “heavenly” in its anogogue, its res tantum, the final created effect of the priestly Eucharistic offering in persona Christ, of the High Priestly Offering of the One Sacrifice which only the risen Christ can offer, and which offering is inseparable from its Eucharistic signing by a priest or bishop acting in Persona Christi.
It is understandable that Betz would cite Vonier in support of his Aktualpräsenz theology for his Eucharistic theology agrees with Vonier’s in denying the objectively historical Eucharistic Presence of the risen Christ as the High Priest offering the One Sacrifice: the errant doctrine which Betz thinks to have found in Chrysostom. Between Vonier’s assertion of an “effective” Eucharistic presence” of the nonhistorical High Priest, and Betz’ notion of an Aktualpräsenz, there is nothing to choose. Both deny the historical objectivity of the priestly offering of the Eucharistic Sacrifice, which is to deny the objectively historical efficacy of the Church’s sacramental worship, an efficacy radically Eucharistic, whose denial is radically Nestorian and, in our day, Calvinist.
Abbot Vonier’s limiting of the Real Presence to that of the humanity of Christ as Victim denies the Real Presence of Jesus as the High Priest of the One Sacrifice, and thereby denies the Real Presence of the “one and the same Son.” The Real Presence is again reduced to that of an impersonal human substance, the “passive” victim, whereupon the risen Son of God is not immanent in history, does not transcend history by his Eucharistic immanence within it as its Lord, consequently has no historical objectivity, and thus is available only by a radically subjective and consequently incommunicable, unutterable anamnesis. Here John Chrysostom (insofar as read by Johannes Betz to warrant the reduction of the historicity of the Real Presence to an inevitably subjective anamnesis, which Betz has designated “Aktualpräzens”), and Maurice de la Taille, Abbot Vonier, are at one with the Reformation.
This de-Personalized version of the Eucharistic Real Presence is the Calvinist extrapolation from the Christological diophysitism proper to the Antiochene tradition as represented by John Chrysostom, Theodore of Mopsuestia, and Nestorius. Nestorius’ Christology was condemned at Ephesus; his Eucharistic doctrine could not survive that condemnation, nor could it survive the Conciliar proclamation that Mary, the mother of Jesus, is the Theotokos. John Chrysostom’s diophysite Christology and his correlatively diophysite Eucharistic theology anticipate the Nestorian denial of the Personal unity of Jesus and, with the condemnation of Nestorius by the Council of Ephesus, ceased to conform to that defined doctrine, by which time Chrysostom had long since died.
The Church’s historicity is identically her celebration of the Personal unity of Jesus the Lord: that celebration has been Eucharistic from the outset, despite the misgivings recited in the G.I.R.M. (2000), §7, copied from G.I.R.M. 1975, Introduction, §7. At Chalcedon, the Personal unity of Jesus was made yet more explicit: He is one and the same Son, at once human and divine, one Person: only his Personal unity supports the communication of idioms in the Eucharistic celebration of the faith that Jesus is the Lord: a proclamation whose permanent truth is that of the Church’s Eucharistic worship.
The baroque and contemporary theologians whose views of the Eucharist Msgr. O’Connor reports in The Hidden Manna appear to suppose that the Tridentine assertion of the identity of the Real Presence with the Event of Jesus’ High Priestly offering of himself as the Victim of the One Sacrifice, requires that the Sacrifice of the Mass be a repetition of the unrepeatable One Sacrifice which they uniformly identify as that of Jesus on the cross, in relation to which his prior institution of the Eucharist at the Last Super becomes for them something of a surd.
It is curious that this temporal priority of the Jesus’ institution of the Sacrifice at the Last Supper to his crucifixion is ignored in this discovery of “repetition;” for the logic of the argument must regard the Cross as the repetition, not the Eucharist. But in fact, these theologies are infected with the anti-sacramentalism of the Reform: i.e., nothing really happened at the Last Supper, certainly not the institution of the Eucharist, clearly not the transubstantiation of the elements, surely no offering by the High Priest of himself as the Lamb of God prophesied by Abraham (Gen. 23:8): thus the dismissive article by Robert J. Daly, cited in endnotes 150 and 161, infra. Daly’s distaste for the Eucharistic liturgy has an early expression in “Sacrifice in Origen,” Studia Patristica 11 (1967), 125-29; he concludes to Origen’s complete disinterest in that topic. The Preface which Origen provided for the De Principiis insists upon the historicity of Jesus the Lord.
At bottom the absorption of these theologies in a “repetition” problem is the consequence of their Nominalist supposition of the intrinsic insignificance, the mere accidenttality, of the death of Jesus. They suppose his crucifixion to be submitted, like all the events of secular historicity, to the inexorable flow of fallen temporality, to the process of disintegration governed by the laws of thermodynamics which reduced termporality to entropy, and thus impose on all temporal events a finally irretrievable absorption into cosmic indiscernibility, to become part of an unavailable past. . Their notion that the Eucharistic realism taught at Trent entails a “repetition” of the death of Jesus on the Cross witnesses to a complete failure to grasp what the Council of Trent taught concerning the Eucharist. Specifically, they fail to understand that the Council denies precisely this submission of the One Sacrifice to the fragmentation, the insignificance of sarkic temporality by affirming the identity of the Event of the Eucharistic Sacrifice with the Event of the death of Jesus the Christ whereby the one and the same Son offers One and the same Sacrifice on the altar and on the cross. It is by the Eucharist institution of the One Flesh of the New Covenant, the mia sarx of the Bridegroom and his bridal Church, that Jesus the Christ is immanent in history as the Lord of history, the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End, defeating its sarkic dissolution by making all things new in such wise that history is intelligible only as sacramental sign of Jesus’ salvific renewal of all things. His historical immanence is thus transcendent only as Eucharistic and, as the Eucharistic anamnesis of the Event of the One Sacrifice, his Eucharistic immanence in history also transcends his death upon the cross; this is the meaning of the institution of the Eucharist at the Last Supper; by that institution solely Jesus is the Lord of history, its Beginning and its End.
Inasmuch as their work is subsequent to the Council of Trent, it is evident that the theologians whose Eucharistic doctrine Msgr. O’Connor cites as typified by Abbot Vonier, and as generally prevailing today, suppose their cosmologically-inspired quandary to trump the Tridentine identification of the Sacrifice on the altar with the Sacrifice on the cross, which differ not as events, but only in the modes of the one Event of the Offering of the One Sacrifice, whose historical unity is the substance of Catholic worship.
It should be evident that the Conciliar definition of the numerical identity of the Sacrifice of the cross with the Sacrifice of the Mass simply eliminates the possibility of a Eucharistic repetition of the One Sacrifice, and obviates all efforts to avoid such supposed repetition. The proposition that the priestly offering in Persona Christi of the One Sacrifice in the Mass is a repetition of the One Sacrifice of the cross can form no part of the Catholic fides quaerens intellectum. In fact, Gabriel Biel was widely criticized for having made this mistake: it was inherent in his Nominalism as it is in the Nominalism of Abbot Vonier and his affines.
Emphatically, this Nominalism does not arise out of the Catholic faith, whose dogmatic affirmation, as liturgical, transcends all theological speculation, affording it a new basis for theological inquiry by eliminating the legitimacy of that determinist cosmological rationality upon which such theological aberrations are always founded. It is evident that subscription to the Catholic faith is free; it is not the product of a congeries of necessary reasons proper to a rationality governed by immanent necessities of thought. The freedom of the faith is not rendered incoherent by reason of its freedom; that deterministic inference fuels the pagan flight from the history which, as created in Christ, knows nothing of the immanent necessities sought by the pagan quaerens intellectum. The freedom of the faith is the indispensable foundation of authentically Catholic theological inquiry, which is always historical, for by his One Sacrifice Christ is immanent in history as its Lord, its Beginning and its End..
Too many systematic theologians have long supposed that Conciliar doctrine waits upon their verification of its antecedent possibility: thus their resistance to the historicity of the Nicene definition of the Personal homoousios of the Son with the Father, the Son whom they suppose to be, not the Jesus of the Church’s faith, but the eternal Son sensu negante of their cosmological speculation, whose corollary is their resistance to the promulgation of the Theotokos of our Lady by the Ephesian Formula of Union and to its Chalcedonian elaboration in the affirmation of her Son’s consubstantiality with us as once again posing cosmological impossibilities.
The cosmological confusion concerning the Eucharistic Sacrifice evinced by the theologians examined here need not be interpreted as evidence of any personal departures from Eucharistic orthodoxy. Their lives may well evince that their Eucharistic worship is latria simply. In celebrating the Eucharist their recitation of the Words of Institution and their genuflection at the Elevation of the Host and the Chalice with no arrière pensée overrides any theological confusion. A comparable confusion is easily discovered throughout the patristic record, and in the writings of the great doctors of the East and the West. Confusion does not triumph over faith: the reverse is and has been true, perennially throughout the Church’s history. The liturgical-doctrinal tradition is the continuing triumph of the free truth of the Church’s historical worship over its cosmological surrogates.
Nonetheless, it is finally the office of Catholic theologians to affirm the inexhaustible truth of the Mysterium fidei as the historical object of their inquiry. The a priori methodological submission of the Magisterium to a supposedly higher nonhistorical criterion, whether of Greek cosmology, or the Enlightenment’s “demands of reason,” or to the product of baroque puzzlement over what “immolation” may mean, or to the insouciance of “the modern mind,” is an abdication of that office: perhaps for the most part uncritical, but nonetheless an abdication, for it cannot but affect their exercise of their preaching office.
[147] Session xiii, 11 October, 1651: “Decretum de ss. Eucharistiae” Canon 1: “De reali praesentia D. N. J. Christi in ss. Eucharistiae sacramento» (DS *1636; pp. 385-6); Session xxii, 17 September, 1662: a) De Doctrina de ss. Misssae Sacrificio, Canon 1: “De institutione sacramenti Missae sacrificii” (DS *1739-*1742; pp. 407-8); Canon 2: “Sacrificium visibile esse propitiatorium pro vivis et defunctis” DS *1743; pp. 408).
[148] It is unfortunate that the language of the XXIIe Session’s Canon 2, "Una enim eademque est hostia idem nunc offerens sacerdotum ministerio, qui seipsum tunc in cruce obtulit, sola offerendi ratione diversa" has been recognized by few Catholic theologians to be the clear and objective identification of the historical Eucharistic offering of the One Sacrifice with the historical offering of the One Sacrifice of the Christ on the cross at Calvary two thousand years ago. The contemporary historical criticism is consequently irrelevant to this definitive assertion of the numerical identity of the Sacrifice of the Mass instituted at the Last Supper with the Sacrificial death of Jesus on the cross. By the authority of Christ at the Last Supper, they are the same event, differing only in the manner of offering, which does not touch their historical identity. It is must follow that the affirmation of their identity is the affirmation of the objective historicity of the One Sacrifice of the Mass. The rather obvious implication of the Church’s Eucharistic worship is the sacramentality of historical objectivity, a consequence that must affront the contemporary academic consciousness despite the impossibility of finding any coherent alternative.
[149] Nearly sixteen centuries ago St. Cyril of Alexandria saw in Nestorius’ refusal of the Theotokos the rejection of the communication of divine and human idioms in Jesus that is explicit in the Church’s liturgical expression of her faith that Jesus is the Lord. In Laudetur Caeli, the fathers of the Council of Ephesus taught that Mary, the mother of Jesus, is thereby the Mother of God: Theotokos. Although the Antiochene bishops, in subscribing to this doctrine in the Formula of Union, rejected the Aristotelian theology of Theodore of Mopsuestia, who had been Nestorius’ mentor, St. Thomas, upon whom most of the contemporary Eucharistic theology is dependent, was unable to transcend his own Aristotelian methodology in order to affirm that Jesus is a human Person.
In consequence of this mistake, St. Thomas was able to affirm Mary to be the Theotokos only insofar as she is the mother of Jesus’ humanity. In this scenario, given St. Thomas’ emphasis upon the impersonality of the humanity of Jesus, Mary is not the mother of even a human person, much less of the divine Person, the “Jesus” whom the Council of Chalcedon affirmed eight times to be the one and the same Son, a Name whose designation of a unique human Person cannot be challenged without departing from the faith of the Church. For the followers of St. Thomas, moreover, Mary, the designated Theotokos, is unique in having given birth to a human substance who is not a human person, quod est absurdum, given the Thomist identification of each human substance with a unique and exhaustive human subsistence in that unique human substance. Inasmuch as mothers, like fathers, are thus named with reference to their progeny who, with the sole exception of the Thomist Jesus, are human persons bearing human names, it must follow that within the Thomist format, Mary is not a mother in any sense at all, for an impersonal humanity is an abstraction simply.
The Christological definitions of the Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon leave St. Thomas’ Eucharistic theology in much the same position as that of Nestorius, for Thomas holds that the High Priest of the One Sacrifice is the nonhistorical, nonhuman ‘immanent Son” who, as the agent of our salvation sacrificed not himself (for the cosmological absolute who is taken to be the divine Son cannot die: as absolute, he can do nothing in history) but, in lieu of offering himself as the One Sacrifice, sacrificed his humanity, the human nature which St. Thomas considered to be the instrumental cause of the grace of the Eucharist: unfortunately this is left in total disarray, for it is the death of Jesus the Lord that the Eucharist celebrates, for by that alone are we redeemed. Jesus the Lord is defined, eight times, at Chalcedon as “one and thed same Son, the eternal Son of the eternal Father and the historical Son of the Theotokos.” That he is the Redeemer cannot be put in question by Catholic theology.
[151] The historical-critical methodology of the patristic research underlying Betz’ “Actualpräsenz” Eucharistic theology has prompted subsequent ventures in the dehistoricization of the Church’s Eucharistic worship; these proceed, as have those engaged in a comparably methodological dehistoricization of Scripture, to the analytical disintegration of the free unity of their object, and then to its arbitrary reassembly into a confection conformable to their critique, which recognizing no unity in history, are in flight from it: e.g., Robert J. Daly, “Eucharistic Origins from the New Testament to the Liturgies of the Golden Age,” Theological Studies 66/1, (March, 2005), 3-20. Daly’s methodological rejection of the free historical unity and significance of the liturgical tradition renders his work theologically irrelevant. In this he was anticipated inter alia by John O’Malley (see endnote 134), Joseph Jungmann, whose inluence is discussed in endnote 130, supra, and by Alexander Gerken, an early advocate of the Aktualpräsenz interpretation of Eucharistic realism; cf. Vol. II, Ch. 6, endnote 40.
[152] The affirmation of the Catholic faith that the Eucharistic Words of Institution are objectively and historically true requires an utterly radical intellectual conversion, for their truth is an impossibility from any prior world view: no extant system of thought can accommodate their truth, which is radically de novo, a gratuity ex nihilo sui et subjecti. Their free truth transcends all necessity, and by that transcendence liberates reason from its age-old submission to “necessary reasons:” the unity of truth, its rational coherence, is now free, not necessary, which in turn imports a free a priori, viz., a free prime analogate of being which in the last analysis cannot be other than the Eucharistic representation of the New Covenant.
In fact, the impossibility of a rational coherence governed by the necessities of logic was first intimated in the West by the Pythagorean discovery of such irrational numbers as the square root of 2, and relation of the circumference of a circle to its diameter; the discovery of the irrationality of mathematics as such was waiting in the wings. Plato rested his philosophy upon the perceived incompatibility of the unity of the supernal World of Forms and the empirical fragmentation of the physical world, while the effort of the young St. Thomas to overcome the irrationality of the ideal order itself failed of coherence; in reducing the species to an abstraction, his De Ente et Essentia simply denies the problem of the one and the many. Early in the last century (1931), Kurt Gödel’s publication of his incompleteness theorems denied the possibility of intrinsically consistent non-trivial rational constructs. Catholic theology, under the sway of St. Thomas and his followers, has been slow to accept the radical character, the universality, of the intellectual conversion required by the Catholic faith in the Eucharistic Lord. The range of this conversion is developed in volumes I and II of the present writer’s Covenantal Theology: The Eucharistic Order of History. Two volumes in one. Revised edition, with an Appendix (Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 19961991).
[153]The Catholic theology of tradition has long been limited to a debate over the merits of the two-source reading of Trent’s Decretum de libris sacris et de traditionibus recipiendis (DS §§*1501-*1505): for a discussion of that debate from Franzelin to Vatican II, see J. P. Mackey, The Modern Theology of Tradition (New York: Herder and Herder, 1963). J. N. D. Kelly, the eminent Anglican patristic scholar, discusses Scripture and Tradition in Ch. 2 of his Early Christian Doctrines. G. L. Prestige, D.D., has discussed the meaning of tradition from an Anglican viewpoint in Fathers and Heretics: Six studies in Dogmatic Faith with Prologue and Epilogue, being The Bampton Lectures for 1940 (London: S.P.C.K. Press, 1963), 1-23 (Lecture I: Tradition: or, The Scriptural Basis for Theology). Jaroslav Pelikan has examined the Catholic tradition from a Lutheran viewpoint in The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition, 100-600 (Chicago; University of Chicago Press, 1971) and more particularly in The Vindication of Tradition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984). These historians, Catholic and Protestant, all ignore the Eucharistic ground and, by implication, the consequent sacramental, liturgical historicity of the Catholic tradition. This tradition alone possesses intrinsic unity; every alternative is an immanently necessary flight from the empirical fragmentation of time to its nonempirical, nonhistoricl unity in a timeless empirion. .
[154] Nestle-Aland, Novum Testamentum Graece et Latin; ed. vicesima secunda (Stuttgart: Württembergische Bibelanstalt, 1964), at 444-445.
[155]It must be remembered always that this Eucharistically-represented Truth is that of the “Whole Christ,” the Christus totus, of Augustine’s meditation upon the historical Christ, One Flesh with his bridal Church: viz., the second Adam who is never apart from the second Eve.
[156] Sacrosanctum Concilium, Intro; §10; Vatican II: The Conciliar and Post Conciliar Documents; General Editor Austin Flannery, O.P. Study Edition (Northport, NY: Costello Publishing Co., 1975) [hereafter, Flannery], 6; Presbyterorum ordinis §§5, 6 (Flannery 871, 874); Lumen gentium §26 (Flannery 381).
[157] This Pauline-Lucan understanding of history as salvific was developed first by Augustine; its Eucharistic center has been pointed out by Henri de Lubac above all others: see Corpus mysticum:, 75 ff. The Eucharist was understood in the early Middle Ages to be the actual union of the Old and New Testaments:
Pour toute l'ancienne tradition de l'Église, l'idée des deux Testaments, de leurs oppositions et de leurs inclusions mutuelles est une catégorie fundamentale. Elle intervient partout, et, plus qu'ailleurs, dans la doctrine sacramentaire
De Lubac, Corpus mysticum, 77
[158] It is easier to speak of the logical implications of Luther’s denial of the historical mediation of salvation than to speak of Luther’s actual doctrine, which in a number of cases did not accept those implications, generally on the ground of fidelity to Scripture. His theological criteria, sola fide and sola scriptura, were not entirely at peace with each other. A famous illustration of this tension is the issue of the “manducatio impiorum,” the Latin tag identifying the dispute between Luther and the more radical Reformers over whether a sinner in fact receives the Body of Christ in the Eucharist. Augustine’s distinction between the necessary and the free effect of sacramental signing had already resolved the difficulty, although the problem continued to be discussed throughout the Middle Ages. The response to this question became a touchstone of orthodoxy as between the Lutherans, who held to their version of the Real Presence of Christ regardless of the dispositions of the recipient, and the Calvinists, together with the left wing of the Reformation, who did not; see G. Ladner, op. cit., 311, note 32, citing Sermo 131, 1 [PL 38:729]; G. Lecordier, La doctrine de l'Eucharistie chez S. Augustin (Paris: Thèse; Université de Strasbourg, Faculté de Théologie Catholique, 1930) 125 ff.; Pierre Batiffol, L’Eucharistie, 151, citing Augustine's De bapt. c. Don. 3, 10, 15 (CSEL 21:205).
[159] Denziger-Schönmetzer, Enchiridion Symbolorum, Ed. xxxiii (1965), *1740-1741, at 407-08; the Latin text follows:
Quoniam sub priori Testamento (teste Apostolo Paulo) propter levitici sacerdotii imbecillitatem consummatio non erat, oportuit (Deo Patre misericordiarum ita ordinante) sacerdotum alium “secundum ordinem Melchisedech” [Gen. 14, 18; Ps 109, 4; Hebr 7, 11] surgere, Dominum nostrum Jesum Christum, qui posset omnes, quotquot sanctificandi essent, consummare [Hebr 10, 14] et ad perfectum adducere. Is igitur Deus et Dominus noster, etsi semel se ipsum in ara crucis, morte intercedente, Deo Patri oblaturus erat, ut aeternam illis [illic] redemptionem operaretur: quia tamen per mortem sacerdotium eius exstinguendum non erat [Hebr 7, 24 27], in Coena novissima, “qua nocte tradetur” [I Cor. 11, 13], ut dilectae sponsae suae Ecclesiae visibile (sicut hominum natura exigit) relinqueret sacrificium, quo cruentum illud semel in cruce peragendum repraesentetur eiusque memoria in finem usque saeculi permanaret, atque illius salutaris virtus in remissionem eorum, quae a nobis quotidie commituntur, peccatorum applicaretur: “sacerdotem secundum ordinem Melchisedech se in aeternum” [Ps 109, 4] constitutum declarans, corpus et sanguinem suum sub speciebus panis et vini Deo Patri obtulit ac sub earundem rerum sympolis Apostolis (quos tunc Novi Testamenti sacerdotes constituebat) ut sumerunt, traddidit, et eisdem eorumque in sacerdotio successoribus, ut offerent, praecepit per haec verba, “Hoc facite in meam commemorationem”, etc. [Lc 22, 19; I Cor. 11, 24], uti semper catholica Ecclesia intellexit et docuit [can. 2]. Nam celebrato veteri Pascha, quod in memoriam exitus de Aegypto multitudo filiorum Israel immolabat [Ex 12,2 ss], novum instituit Pascha, se ipsum ab Ecclesia per sacerdotes sub signis visibilibus immolandum in memoriam transitus sui ex hoc mundo ad Patrem, quand per sui sanguinis effusionam nos redemit “eripuitque de potestate tenebrarum et in regnum suum transtulit” [Col 1, 13].
[160] E.g., see The Christian Faith in the Doctrinal Documents of the Catholic Church. Revised edition. Edited by J. Neuner, S.J. and J. Dupuis, S.J. (New York: Alba, 1981), [hereafter, The Christian Faith], at 413. This work is of no value for scholarly purposes.
[161] For the exegesis of I Cor. 10:17, the primary New Testament source for the doctrine of the origin of the Church in the Eucharist, see Josef Hainz, Strukturen paulinischer Gemeinde-Theologie und Gemeinde-Ordnung; ser. Münchener Universitäts Schriften, Katholisch-theologische Fakultät (Regensburg: Friederich Pustet, 1972) 73ff, 264ff, and Hans Konzelmann, Der erste Brief an der Korinther, übersetzt und erklärt von Hans Konzelmann; ser. Meyer Kommentar 5 (Gottingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 1981) 210 ff.
[162] DS §*1740, §*1742, §*1751, §*1753, §*1754 (Mass as the sacrifice of Christ); §*1550-§*1555, §*1640, §*1642, §§*1651-*1652 (transubstantiation). The sessions of the Council of Trent in which these topics were discussed are separated by eleven years. For the older theology, see M. Lepin, L'idée du sacrifice de la Messe d'après les théologiens depuis l'origine jusqu'à nos jours (Paris: Beauchesne, 1926), esp. 238-44. More recent works are Joseph Lecuyer, Le sacrifice de la nouvelle alliance (Lyons, Le Puy, Éditions Xavier of Mappus, 1962); Stanislas Lyonnet, Sin, Redemption, Sacrifice. A Biblical and patristic study; ser. Analecta Biblica 48 (Rome, Pont. Biblical Institute, 1970), esp. 245-268; Robert J. Daly, Christian Sacrifice. The Judaeo-Christian Background before Origen; ser. Catholic University of America Studies in Christian Antiquity 18 (Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 1978), esp. 219-224, 237 ff., and Klaus Gamber, Sacrificium Missae, Zum Opferständnis und zur Liturgie der Frühkirche; ser. Studia Patristica 9 (Regensburg: Friederich Pustet, 1980) 42-46.
[163] This translation is taken from Concerning the City of God against the Pagans; a new translation by Henry Bettenson with an Introduction by David Knowles, Penguin Books, Hammondsworth, 1972. Bettenson's translation here of the sancta societate of X, 6, follows that of The City of God; tr. Rev. Marcus Dods (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1884), which is followed also by the Modern Library edition, in rendering the phrase as "in a holy fellowship," language which is now found also in both the English and American breviaries: e.g., in the translation of this passage by the editors of the Liturgy of the Hours, IV, at 397, for Friday of the 28th week of the year.
This unsatisfactory translation is perhaps improved upon by Jean Guitton's The Modernity of St. Augustine (Baltimore: Helicon, 1953) where one reads "in a sacred bond," (53), and still more so by Gerald Walsh and Grace Monahan, the translators of the Fathers of the Church edition, who prefer "in a holy communion," which at least leaves intact the Una Caro ordering of the Church at worship. William Maitland, the English legal historian, maintains that the only possible legal sense of the word “societas” is "partnership:" this in his Introduction to Otto von Gierke's The Political Theories of the Middle Age; tr. with an Introduction by William Maitland (Boston, Beacon Press, 1958). "Fellowship," "partnership," "bond," even "communion" miss the Augustinian emphasis within that passage upon the palmary instance of “sacrifice” the marital union between Christ and his Bride, the Church. It is this that is the Christus totus, the marital union of the Head and the Body. Language which ignores the nuptially free order of the New Covenant does no justice to St. Augustine's mature thought, still less to St. Paul’s.
[164] See endnote 74 for a listing of Augustinian texts affirming the marital order of the Christ-Church relation. De Lubac mentions (Corpus mysticum, 207) that Peter Lombard, whose Sentences transmitted the Augustinian theological tradition to the High Middle Ages and later, combed the works of Augustine for passages such as these and included them in his Commentary on Ephesians (PL 192:215-216).
[165] Presbyterorum Ordinis; §2, §5; Flannery, 864, 865; 871. The Migne text of De Civ. Dei x, 6 may be found in Moriones, §2111, pp. 612-613.
[166] Some indication of the many instances in the Vatican II documents of this emphasis on the priority of the Eucharist to the Church is provided here. This list―which is not exhaustive―provides the paragraph number of the cited document and the page in Flannery's 1975 edition of the documents of Vatican II in which it may be found:
Sacrosanctum concilium (Intro.) Flannery 1-2
Sacrosanctum concilium, §10; Flannery 6
Lumen gentium, §2 Flannery, 350
Lumen gentium, §3 Flannery, 351
Lumen gentium, §11 Flannery, 362
Lumen gentium, §6 Flannery, 381
Lumen gentium, §26 Flannery, 382
Lumen gentium, §48 Flannery, 407-8
Lumen gentium, §50 Flannery, 412
Christus dominus, §31-2 Flannery, 582-4
Ad gentes divinitus, §9 Flannery, 823
Ad gentes divinitus, §14 Flannery, 828
Presbyterorum ordinis, §2 Flannery, 864-6
Presbyterorum ordinis, §5 Flannery, 871
Presbyterorum ordinis, §6 Flannery, 874
Presbyterorum ordinis, §13 Flannery, 888
[167] Pope John Paul II, in the series of lectures delivered weekly from Sept. 5, 1979 through April 2, 1980, now collected in The Original Unity of Man and Woman (Boston: St. Paul Editions, 1981) associates marriage to our imaging of the Trinity and to the primordial covenant of God with humanity: see pp. 36, 38, 51, 62, 73-4. In the apostolic exhortation entitled Familiaris Consortio the Pope is explicit:
The Eucharist is the very source of Christian Marriage. The Eucharistic sacrifice, in fact, represents Christ's covenant of love with the Church, sealed with His Blood on the cross.
The.Role of the Christian Family in the Modern World; Vatican tr. of Familiaris Consortio from the Vatican Polyglot Press (Boston: St. Paul Editions, n.d.) §57 at 86.
John Paul II’s writings developing his “theology of the body” over a period of more than twenty years have been gathered together and published: in 1997, by John Grabowski, as The Theology of the Body: Human Love in the Divine Plan, and more recently by Michael Waldstein, as Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body: both are first cited in endnote 4, supra.
[168] This Augustinian-Gelasian theme in is developed in "Liturgy and Law: The Marital Order of Community," Church and State in America: Catholic Issues; ser. Proceedings: The Fourteenth Convention of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars, Denver, 1991; ed. Msgr. George A. Kelly (New York: St. John's University, 1992) 1-68.
[169] Lanfranc of Pavia, (d. 1089), although at one time at least an auditor of Berengarius’s lectures, was (from 1049) his first major adversary. Their debate began when Lanfranc was the prior of the great Benedictine monastery of Bec in Normandy and, until 1063, the director of its school. In that year he became the abott of a new Benedictine monaster of St. Stephen, in Caen. In 1070, following the Norman conquest of England, Lanfranc became the first Norman Archbishop of Canterbury (Anselm, who studied under him at Bec, would also become the Archbishop of Canterbury).
Lanfranc remained the major opponent of Berengarius during most of the latter’s active life. In 1068, Lanfranc published his De corpore et de sanguine Domini, upholding, against Berengarius’ denial, an "essential" change in the Eucharistic elements. Berengarius replied to Lanfranc’s De Corpore et de Sanguine Domini (Concerning the Body and the BLood of the Lord) about 1070, publishing De sacra coena (Concerning the Sacred Meal), the definitive statement of his heresy: In it he attacked Lanfranc’s Eucharistic theology, repeating his denal of any objective change in the Eucharistic elements. It is on this account that he is generally reckoned a symbolist: for him the Eucharistic signing changes only the consciousness of the worshiper. Guitmund of Aversa, a student of Lanfranc, invented the term, “impanationist” to describe his subjective Eucharistic doctrine, the “impanationist” presence of Christ in the Eucharistic elements being only a meliorative labeling of Berengarius’ denial of any objective change in them. The supposed Eucharistic presence of Christ “in” the consecrated bread and wine connoted by “impanation” is not realized by any objective event of change. Consequently the impanationist “presence” of Christ is not historical; the consecrated elements are for Berengarius subjective symbols: their consecration has no historically objective effect.
Lanfranc’s assertion of an “essential” change of the bread and wine into the body and blood of Jesus the Lord was the first clear metaphysical assertion of the historical objectivity of that change: by that term he affirmed the intrinsic and therefore metaphysical character of that change: the subsequent discussion preferred “substantial” to “essential,” but only as further developing Lanfranc’s doctrine.
Guitmund, later the Bishop of Aversa, a former student of Lanfrance at Bec, and fellow-student of Anselm, later the Bishop Canterbury, published in 1075 De corporis et sanguinis Christi veritate in eucharistia tres libri (Three Books Concerning the body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist). He spoke of the "substantial change" of the elements, and condemned Berengarius for the "impanationism" which contradicted this doctrine. Guitmund’s use of “substantial” to name the change in the Eucharistic elements effected by their consecration paved the way for the elevation of Eucharistic transubstantiation to the level of doctrine by Innocent III at Lateran IV in 1215 (DS *802). In 1087, Guitmund became the Bishop of Aversa (Apuleia) in Italy and wrote no more. About 1120, forty-five years after the publication of Guitmund’s Three Books, Alger of Liège published De Sacramento corporis et sanguinis dominici (Concerning the Sacrament of the body and blood of the Lord) in which he affirmed a "substantial presence" of Christ in the Eucharist―a development of Guitmund’s “substantial change” and the prelude to St. Thomas’s development of a Eucharistic presence of Christ “per modum substantiae”. Finally, about 1135, Gregory of Bergamo published his Tractatus de veritate corporis Christi. Following Alger, his theology centered upon the substantial Real Presence.
Peter the Venerable, Abbot of Cluny in the first half of the twelfth century, surveying the exposition and development of Eucharistic theology by Guitmund of Aversa, Alger of Liège, and Gregory of Bergomo over the period of nearly 80 years from Lanfranc's assertion of an “essential” change in the Eucharistic gifts in De Corpore et de Sanguine Domine, down to Gregory of Bergamo’s Tractatus de veritate corporis Christi, ranked these developments of Lanfranc’s realism as respectively, "bene perfecte," "melius perfectius," and "optime perfectissime" (which may be translated as "quite perfect;" "yet more perfect," "most perfect"). The work of these upholders of Eucharistic realism caused “transubstantiation” to become the term of preference for the change in the Eucharistic elements by the latter half of the 12th century.
At this late date, “substance” had not yet achieved a systematic theological meaning. The choice of the term by Guitmund and those who followed him owed nothing to Aristotle, whose Metaphysics would not be available in Latin until the latter half of the thirteenth century. Nonetheless, the term as mediated by Boethius denoted concrete objectivity, and the theologians who in the eleventh and twelfth centuries affirmed the change of the Eucharistic to be at the level of substance intended to assert the objectivity, viz., the historicity, of that event of change. The term was in universal use in the West well before the receiving formal doctrinal standing at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215. By then it was clear that a systematic theology of Eucharistic realism must be a metaphysics. The effort to transform the Aristotelian metaphysics into a systematic theology would begin with St. Thomas. The Augustinian phenomenology of the illumined mind informed by the worship of the Church would not begin to find adequate systematic expression much before the end of the nineteenth century, with Blondel.
De Lubac considers precisely this difficulty sufficient to place in grave doubt the usual attribution of heresy to Berengarius; see his defense of Berengarius’ archaic expressions of orthodoxy in Corpus mysticum, at 164, developed further in p. 255ff., pointing out Berengarius’ role as the leader of the passage from the contemplative phenomenology of the Augustinian tradition to the questioning intelligence which already during the Carolingian period, with Ratramnus, Rhabanus Maurus and Gottschalk, had begun to rely upon the appeal of “new logic” to “necessary reasons,” to put in issue the intelligibility of the free unity of the patristic-Augustinian sacramental paradigm of sacramentum-res sacramenti. From this beginning, the “new logic” triumphed over the Augustinian phenomenology of personal participation in the Church’s liturgical worship, and went on to flourish with Anselm, Hugh of St. Victor, and Abelard in the twelfth century to question the truth of the res Catholica which the patristic-Augustinian tradition had taken for granted.
The earlier exploitation of the intrinsically dehistoricizing rationality of the “new logic” by Berengarius, however fumbling, at least accelerated the theological adoption of an objectivizing mentality already discernible in Ratramnus and his affines in the ninth century. The new theology corresponded to the intellectualism of Augustine, but in a context which had replaced the freedom of the illumined mind’s quaerens intellectum with the deterministic rigors of an ever more secularized analytical rationality: Anselm himself supposed his fides quaerens intellectum to be at least compatible with the quest for necessary reasons. We have already had occasion to remark the unconscious irony of Duns Scotus’s final dismissal of illumination as “unnecessary.”
[170] George Weigel, Witness to Hope: The biography of Pope John Paul II (New York: Cliff Street Books, 2001), 295-99. The confusion complained of was not simply papal: a now standard translation of Gelasius letter of Pope Gelasius to Anastasius I, correcting his notion of the imperial jurisdiction over the Church, begins as follows
There are two powers, august Emperor, by which this world is chiefly ruled -
Translated in J. H. Robinson, Readings in European History, (Boston: Ginn, 1905), pp. 72-73.
That the Latin “Duo sunt quippe” of the sentence opening the letter does not support “there are two powers” needs no stress, but the confusion of power with authority which this mistranslation exemplifies has over the centuries spawned those further confusions to which Weigel adverts.
[171] The theological use of the “quaestio” is discussed in Vol. II, Chapter 6, endnote 128, and in the “Epilogue” comprising Chapter 7.
[172] A recent advocacy of nihilism is David Benatar’s Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence (Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). However esteemed at Oxford, the promotion of nihilism by a major university press falls somewhere between the pernicious and the absurd, perhaps leaning to the latter.
[173] Cf. C. S. Lewis’ classic, The Abolition of Man: Reflections on education with special reference to the teaching of English in the upper forms of schools (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1943), whose first chapter labeled the products of the value-free education then being promoted in England, as “men without chests,” invoking by this expression the tripartite Platonic understanding of the soul, in, which the λογιστικόν is the rational part, the θυμοειδές is the irascible, the spirited, the courageous part , and the ἐπιθυμητικόν, the appetitive part. These are associated associated respectively with the head, the chest, and the body below the chest, the abdomen or belly. Only the λογιστικόν is immortal: it is this which separates the souls of men from those of beasts. The θυμοειδές is more difficult to explain: under the governance of the mind it accounts for the personal commitment to what is good and honorable through which intelligence, impetus, and appetite are integrated in conformity with the good, the true and the beautiful. Lewis fears that a troubling movement in modern education, spelled out typically in a work that he labels The Green Book, which would eliminate that “chest” by which a man is manly, a movement then toward “the abolition of man.”
The Chest-Magnanimity-Sentiment—these are the indispensable liaison officers between cerebral man and visceral man. It may even be said that it is by this middle element that man is man: for by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal.
The operation of The Green Book and its kind is to produce what may be called Men without Chests. It is an outrage that they should be commonly spoken of as Intellectuals. This gives them the chance to say that he who attacks them attacks Intelligence. It is not so. They are not distinguished from other men by any unusual skill in finding truth nor any virginal ardour to pursue her. Indeed it would be strange if they were: a persevering devotion to truth, a nice sense of intellectual honour, cannot be long maintained without the aid of a sentiment which Gaius and Titius could debunk as easily as any other. It is not excess of thought but defect of fertile and generous emotion that marks them out. Their heads are no bigger than the ordinary: it is the atrophy of the chest beneath that makes them seem so.
And all the time—such is the tragi-comedy of our situation—we continue to clamour for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilization needs is more 'drive', or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or 'creativity'. In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.
A few years later, in The Great Divorce (London: Macmillan, 1946) Lewis presented a grim vision the personal damnation consequent upon the atomization of humanity inherent in “chestless” existence: a centrifugal flight from all community to an ever-greater isolation. Nearly coincidentally with Lewis’ publication of The Abolition of Man, Jean-Paul Sartre, the very personification of “chestless man,” wrote in No Exit that “hell is other people.”
[174] Lutz Kälber, “Weavers into Heretics? The Social Organization of Early Thirteenth-Century Catharism in Comparative Perspective,” Social Science History, vol. 21, 1, 1997, pp. 111-137, further developed in Schools of Asceticism: Ideology and Organization in Medieval Religious Communities (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), has persuasively argued that the spread of Catharism in southern France and northern Italy was dependent upon a proselytizing organization of private residences in which the Catharists offered training to young men at once in crafts such as cobblery and weaving, and at the same time instruction in the Catharist religion: once thus trained, these young men were enabled and motivated by their acquired competences to act as Catharist missionaries, preaching their new faith and gaining converts to it. However, Kälber’s evident scholarship is marred by his uncritical adherence to Weber’s assimilation of the Church’s sacramental realism to “magic,” and by subscription to Weber’s correlative supposition that, at bottom, asceticism is the rationalization of moral conduct: see Schools of Asceticism, ch. 3, also pp. 18-25 and 46-57. This not the place for a critique of these quite dated postulates. It suffices to point out their evident influence upon Kälber’s scholarship, which in this respect echoes the liberal Protestantism of the nineteenth century, whose ignorance of and scorn for the sacramental realism of Catholic worship and for its sustenance of Catholic spirituality, in or out of the monasteries, can provide no basis for the objective assessment of Catholic asceticism, whether patristic, medieval., or contemporary, whether monastic or lay. For a more balanced view of the Catharist movement, see Malcom Lambert, Medieval Heresy. Popular Movements from the Gregorian Reform to the Reformation. Second Edition (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers, 1996), 44-61; 105-46, et passim.
[175] Steven Runciman, The Medieval Manichee. A study of the Christian dualist heresy (Cambridge: The Cambridge University Press, 1981); see also the survey of early medieval heresies, notably Waldenisian and Catharist, by Ronald Knox, Enthusiasm, 71-116.
[176] Peter the Venerable, Abbot of Cluny, charged de Bruys with having rejected infant baptism, opposition to the building of churches and cathedrals, the desecration of crucifixes, the denial of sacramental grace and of the efficacy of prayer for the dead. In 1131, while engaged in building a bonfire of crucifixes seized from churches and shrines in Nîmes, de Bruys was killed by townspeople infuriated by his desecrations. His followers merged with a similar group, the "Henricians," led by Henry of Le Mans (Lausanne). Henry and his Henricians met a comparably vigorous opposition in Languedoc, especially from St. Bernard of Clairvaux, but they remained active there until suppressed by the Albigensian Crusade. Their anti-sacramentalism made them the natural allies of the Berengarian heretics and, similarly, of the Catharists, for the Petrobrusian-Henrician dehistoricization of Catholic sacramentalism expressed an entirely comparable historical pessimism:
The Waldensian or Vaudois heresy further developed that historical pessimism, proselytizing by the same paradoxical imitation of the Church’s hierarchy as was practiced by the Catharists. Waldensianism originated in the middle of the twelfth century as an itinerant lay-preaching movement, inspired by the same Christian romanticism which would be given theoretical expression by Joachim of Fiore, and which shortly thereafter infected the Order of Frairs Minor, under by St. Francis of Assisi. The Waldensian preaching, like that of the radical “Spiritual” Franciscans, so emphasized evangelical poverty as to rationalize it into a metaphysical dualism: they came to understand poverty to require not only abstention from the personal ownership and control of temporal goods, but also to bar all positive association with the material goods of earthly existence. The dualist implication is evident: matter is the cause of evil in the world. This is simply a return to the Gnosticism characterizing the Catharist doctrine and soteriology
Some of the early Waldensians accepted as true a legend of the apostolic foundation of their sect by St. James the Greater and St. Paul; in fact the sect was founded by a wealthy merchant of Lyons named Waldo (Valdès) who, concerned for his salvation, informed by translations of the New Testament and most probably by consulting clergy more learned than he, committed himself to evangelical poverty. In 1176, he renounced his wealth and distributed it to the poor. Later, gathering followers, mostly from the middle classes, but also from the poor and the very poor, he commissioned them to preach apostolic poverty and penance. The followers of Waldo, called Sabbati from the wooden shoes typically worn by the poor, spread throughout southern France and northern Italy: they were joined by the Humiliati (the Poor Men of Lyons), and a similar Italian group, the Poor Lombards. Their preaching, theologically untutored in the main, aimed at the all too evident abuses of evangelical poverty by the wealthy medieval Church, evident in the lavish ornamentation of its churches and its liturgy, and by the luxurious lives of too many of its clergy and religious. Lutz Kälber has shown that few of the early the members of this movement, as also of the Catharists associated with it, were recruites from the peasant class; the Waldensians and the Cathars were not recruited from the impoverished, but from the artisan and commercial classes, and from the petty nobility.
Given their lack of theological education, the preaching of the Waldensians and their allies could hardly avoid heretical simplicities, which the hierarchy felt called upon to rebuke finally to the point of forbidding them to preach. The Waldensians paid little attention to such injunctions: they had begun to rely upon their reading of the Scriptures as the warrant for their rejection of ecclesial authority. Soon their criticism of the Church became extreme: they made violent attacks upon the clergy, which cost them the sympathy of a public still at least eighty percent Catholic. Consequently they had to flee from Lyons, but representatives of the Waldensians appeared at the 3rd Lateran Synod of 1179, where they were blessed by the assembled bishops in recognition of their piety but, by the same bishops, were forbidden to preach without episcopal sanction; which injunction they disobeyed. The Waldenses were excommunicated at the Synod of Verona, 1187, along with similar movements: Catharist, Arnoldist (followers of Arnold of Brescia), and the Humiliati, most of whom then went into hiding, some migrated to Austria, to establish a version of Waldensianism there.
Under evident Catharist inspiration, the Waldensians divided into two ranks: the perfect, and the faithful; the perfect took vows of poverty, chastity, obedience, under Waldo as praepositus et pontifex maximus. He developed a hierarchy of bishops, priests, and deacons, ordained by a laying on of hands, forming an ecclesial organization generally imitating the Catholic hierarchy Relying upon an anticipation of sola scriptura, the Waldensian preachers developed a strong anti-dogmatic emphasis. Later, the Waldensians began to break up into national units: the Italian or Lombard wing gradually renounced what remained of their original Catholic belief and practice and became bitterly hostile to the Church. The French unit remained more friendly to the Church: some of them continued to worship as Catholics.
The Inquisition fought the Waldensians throughout the Middle Ages. In the fifteenth century, some of the remaining Waldensians merged with followers of John Hus in Bohemia, and later with the Calvinists and Lutherans elsewhere in Europe. The Waldensian sect now exist chiefly in Italy; there is a Waldensian church in Rome.
[177] Kälber’s study is discussed in the preceeding endnote.
[178] Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1952); Science, Politics and Gnosticism. Chicago: Henry Regnery Press, 1968); cf. Henri de Lubac, La posterité spirituelle de Joachim de fiore; 2 vols. (Paris: Lethieux, 1979-1981). De Lubac finds in Joachim a far richer mind than has Voegelin; so also has Josef Ratzinger, whose “Habilitationschrift, » Die Geschichtstheologie des heiligen Bonaventura, presented to the University of Munich in 1959, and published in its original form by Schnell & Steiner, München, 1959, and in English translation as The theology of history in St. Bonaventure; tr. Zachary Hayes. (Chicago, Franciscan Herald Press, 1971) found Joachim to have had a notable influence upon Bonaventure. Such positive interpretations of Joachim fail to come to terms with his dualist vision of the third and final phase of Christianity as radically unstructured and hence desacramentalized. Whatever the influence of Joachim upon St. Bonaventure, the Spiritual Franciscans who accepted Joachim’s dualism would have destroyed the Order of Frairs Minor had not Bonaventure stood in the way.
Voegelin is not a reliable defender of political freedom; in "Two Replies to Alfred Schutz: on Christianity (1 January, 1953)," The Philosophy of Order, eds. Peter J. Opitz and Gregor Sebba (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1981), at pp. 449-457, Voegelin objects to the failure or refusal of Catholicism to subject its symbols, particularly that of the Church qua historical, to the "critical clean-up" which would be their "clear interpretation." For further comment upon this commitment to the Modernist critique of free historicity, see Vol. I, Introduction, endnote 35.
[179] See the critique of the exegesis of Eph. 5 by Peter Lombard and St. Thomas in endnote 273 infra.
[180] See Vol. I, Introduction, endnote 83. Daniel Maguire’s intuitively clear insight into the reality of marriage as perceived by Planned Parenthood and the A.C.L.U., has lately been supplemented by Daniel Harrington and James Keenan, S.J., in Jesus and Virtue Ethics. Building bridges between New Testament studies and moral theology (Lanham, MD: Sheed & Ward, 2002). Fr. Keenan has become well known by reason of the testimony he presented to the Joint Committee on the Judiciary of the Massachusetts Legislature on 28 April, 2003, in connection with Legislature’s consideration of Massachusetts Amendment H. 3190, which affirmed that:
… only the union of one man and one woman shall be valid or recognized as a marriage in Massachusetts. Any other relationship shall not be recognized as a marriage or its legal equivalent.
Fr. Keenan began his testimony by stating that: “
I am here today to testify against H. 3190 because it is contrary to Catholic teaching on social justice.
He summed up his testimony as follows:
In this light, as a priest and as a moral theologian, I cannot see how anyone could use the Roman Catholic tradition to support H. 3190. On the contrary, the Catholic theological tradition stands against the active and unjust discrimination against the basic social rights of gay and lesbian persons. For these reasons, I urge you to recommend a no vote on H. 3190.
Fr. Keenan’s assumption that the Church recognizes homosexual marriage as a “basic social right” would be rather a stretch had he any acquaintance with the Catholic tradition of sacramental realism; his ignorance of it is the more poignant when, as here, the legislators are willing to uphold the traditional public decencies against those who would impugn them. One of the latter, Charles Curran, has long since proclamed the competence of legislatures to set the content of the moral law: (see his "Cooperation: Toward a Revision of the Concept and its Application," Linacre Quarterly 41 (August, 1974), 152, 167; 169, and the present writer’s response, "Church, State, and Charles Curran," Communio 4 (Summer, 1977) 112-136). Professor Curran would be puzzled by Fr Keenan’s unwillingness to honor the secular foundation of the legislature’s concern for the content of the public decencies. However, his puzzlement may be mitigated and his anxiety assuaged by the peculiar features of Fr. Keenan’s appeal to the “Roman Catholic tradition” for, in the sentence following, that appeal has undergone a metamorphosis into an appeal to the “Catholic theological tradition,” whose published literature has for forty years been controlled by editorial policies in open dissent to the Roman Catholic tradition, liturgical, doctrinal, moral and canonical.
The editors of these sub-fusc Catholic journals suppose, with Fr. Keenan, that the Catholic tradition is sociologically rather than liturgically normed, thus indefinitely to be debated rather than appropriated by free personal participation in the Church’s worship. Dissent has of late taken on a Calvinist theological posture; see Volum IV, p. 694, Cardinal Kasper’s commentary on the Protestant reading of the Mission of the Holy Spirit by the Son as betokening a sort of servility, which they tend to identify with adherence to the apostolic tradition.
St. Ambrose once observed that it has not pleased God to make his people safe by dialectic. Given the Western “Catholic theological tradition” of unrelenting dissent to the Symbol of Chalcedon and, more recently, to the Council of Trent, to Vatican I and Vatican II, St. Ambrose’s epigram is reassuring, as is also the similarly dismissive observation by John Paul II that “dissent is only dissent.”
[181] This ancient maxim expresses an essentially pagan condemnation of the free personal exercise of historical responsibility, thus a flight from history. Its sole alternative is the Euchristically-underwritten optimism, the faith that the risen Christ is the Lord of history, dissent to which is now mere political correctness.
[182] Erasmus’ hasty Greek edition of the New Testament, published in 1516 with an accompanying Latin translation, was intended as a correction of Jerome’s Latin Vulgate: it was immediately seized upon by the Reformers. Luther translated it into German, Tyndale into English: it is the basis of the King James’ version of the New Testament, which is the basis of the Revised Standard Version. Pope Leo X had granted Erasmus’ edition a four-year exclusive publication privilege, which for two years barred the requisite papal authorization of the publication of the massive six-volume “Complutensis” edition of the Old and the New Testaments completed in 1517 by a group of scholars financed by Cardinal Jiménez de Cisneros and led by Diego Lopez de Zúñiga at the Spanish University of Alcalá which Cardinal Jiminéz had founded in Henareses, whose Latin place-name, Complutensis, became the label for Cardinal Jiménez’ Bible. The Cardinal died in 1517, shortly after its completion. The announcement by the Gregorian University of a facsimile edition thus described the original:
The first of the great polyglot versions of the Bible, financed by Cardinal Jiménez de Cisneros (1435-1517), edited and translated under the direction of Diego Lopez de Zuniga. . .The Biblia Complutensis received (papal) sanction only in 1520. it came six years too late. A contemporary account of the “Complutensian Polyglot” notes that work on it began in 1502; that it was printed between 1514 and 1517, and goes on to observe of it that
The NT Greek in vol. 5 was the earliest ever printed (1514), but prob. it was the 4-year privilege granted to the Greek Testament of Erasmus (1516) that held up the circulation of the whole Complutensis Bible until c. 1522.
The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, Third Edition Revised (Ed. F. L. Cross & E. A. Livingstone (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2005),[hereafter, The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, (2005)] at 392b.
Had Pope Leo X been less fascinated by the ‘humanism’ represented by his protegé, Rabelais, and properly concerned for a scholarly, reliably edited version of the Greek New Testament, he could hardly have been unaware of Cardinal Jiménez’ edition, which was completed two years before Pope Leo foreclosed its publication by granting Erasmus an exclusive four-year license to publish what turned out to be a defective edition of the Greek New Testament. By reason of this papal insouciance, Cardinal Jimez’ “Complutensian Polyglot” was ignored from the day of its publication. The detailed “Preface to the Revised Standard Version” knows nothing of Cardinal Jiminez and his Biblia Complutensis. What remains of the 1589 Douay-Rheims Bible after Challoner’s revision has also vanished from the scene except, perhaps, in England and Ireland. The currently standard English-language Catholic editions of the New Testament published in the United States all depend upon the Revised Standard Version, which derives from corrected versions of Erasmus’ edition of the Greek NewTestament. The loss to Catholic biblical scholarship is irretrievable. This need not have been.
[183] Frederick Copleston has surveyed Ockham’s Nominalism, see A History of Philosophy III (Westminster, MD: The Newman Press, 1953), ch. 2 - 4. Ockham’s works have been collected and published as Guillelmi de Ockham opera philosophica et theologica. Gedeon Gál et al. ed.; vols. i-xvii. (St. Bonaventure, N.Y.: St Bonaventure University: The Franciscan Institute, 1967-1986).
[184] This disagreement particularly characterizes the contrasting evaluations of Nominalism by Heiko Obermann in The Harvest of Medieval Theology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963) to an extent countered by his The Harvest of Medieval Theology: Gabriel Biel and Late Medieval Nominalism (W. B. Eerdmans, 1967), and by Johann Huizinga in The Waning of the Middle Ages: A study of the forces of life, thought, and art in France and the Netherlands in the XIV and XV centuries (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1956). Obermann points out (p. 5, in the 1963 edition of The Harvest of Medieval Theology, that both “harvest," and "decline," translate the same word Dutch word, Herfsttij, whose literal translation would be ”harvestide.” Obermann chose “harvest” for the title of this work in specific opposition to Huizinga’s earlier choice of “waning” in the title of his work, to mark their respectively positive and negative assessments of the Nominalist contribution to theology: a contrast cited also in endnotes 4 and 5, supra.
Obermann’s praise of the Nominalist theology as the “harvest of the Middle Ages” is thus consistent with his own rejection of theological metaphysics in favor of the modernist rationalization of history which travels as historical-critical scholarship―a scholarship which distinguishes between Historie and Geschichte as between a congeries of objective facts in the sense of von Ranke’s “was eigentlich gewesen,” and their extrinsic, subjective interpretation, the latter amounting to an arbitrary re-integration of the results of a historical-critical disintegration of historical institution qua tale. The product of Geschichte is thus narrative, not history. Historical criticism in this guise proceeds to the methodological transcendence of whatever free reality it touches: in this case, the Church’s historical tradition, whose history is at once liturgical, doctrinal, moral, and free. Under “critical” analysis, personal and institutional freedom are alike reducible to the rational necessities invoked by the historical-critical method, and therefore cannot be regarded as historical.
[185] The Nominalist appeal to divine omnipotence enters into St. Thomas’ reply to an objection to the transubstantiation of the Eucharistic elements:
3.: Praeterea, quae sunt secundum se divisa, numquam unum eorum fit alterum: sicut albedo numquam fit nigredo, sed subjectum albidinis fit subjectum nigredinis, ut dicitur in I Physic4. (n. 4: c.5, no. 2, c. 6, n. 2; S. Th. Lect 10, 11.) Sed, sicut duae formae contrariae sunt secundum se divisae, utpote principia formalis differentiae existentes, ita duae materiae signatae sunt secundum se divisae, utpote existentes principium materialis divisionis. Ergo, non potest esse quod haec materiae panis fiat haec materia qua individuatur corpus Christi. Et ita non potest esse quod substantia huius panis convertatur in substantiam corporis Christi.
Ad tertium dicendum quod virtute agentis finiti non potest forma in formam mutari, nec materia in materiam. Sed virtute agentis infiniti, quod habet actionem in totum ens, potest talis conversio fieri: quia utrique formae et utrique materiae est communis natura entis; et id quod entitatis est in una, potest auctor entis convertere ad id quod est entitatis in altera, sublato eo per quod ab illa distinguebatur.
S. T. iiia, q. 75, a. 4, ad 3.
The same appeal to cosmologically-conceived divine omnipotence renders irrelevant St. Thomas’ discussion of the possibility of the salvation of a person who, having expressed the desire for baptism, is prevented by his untimely death from being baptized:
Talis autem sine baptismo actuali salutem consequi potest, propter desiderium baptismi, quod procedit ex fide per dilectionem operante, per quam Deus interius hominem sanctificat, cuius potentia sacramentis visibilibus non alligatur (emphasis added).
S. T. iiia, q. 68, a. 2, c.
In these abstract assertions it is evident that St. Thomas has not understood the exercise of the divine omnipotence to be concrete and actual in the historical mission by the Father of the Son to give the Spirit, which mission terminates in his One Sacrifice, the institution of the sacramental economy of salvation by which the whole of creation is redeemed, made new, no longer subject to the fragmentation of fallenness. Rather, the divinity he has in view is not the Trinity as revealed in the Father’s sending of the Son to give the Spirit, but the cosmological and consequently impersonal Deus Unus, of whom the doctrinal tradition knows nothing. Consequently the sacraments, dissociated from the Mission of the Son, deprived of the intrinsic significance by which they are efficacious, cannot serve as a basis for a response to the difficulty posed. All that remains is the divine omnipotence, cosmologically conceived, whereby all salvation is forensic, not historically mediated but a matter of divine decree. This is entirely inconsistent with St. Thomas’ commitment to sacramental realism and sacramental efficacy.
[186] See David Knowles, Thomas Becket (Stanford University Press, 19711970) for a vivid account of the Church-State tension in medieval England; see also the summary statement of that tension in John T. Noonan, Jr., The Believer and the Powers That Are (New York: Macmillan, 1987), 21-31.
[187] Marsilius of Padua, The Defender of Peace: The Defensor Pacis. Translated with an introduction by Alan Gewirth (New York: Harper and Row, 1956).
[188] For surveys of Gabriel Biel’s theology, especially with respect to his influence upon Luther, see Jedin-Dolan’s Church History IV, 585-603; Obermann, op. cit., 271-280. and Hasting's Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, VIII, 198-99.
[189] DS §*1743.
[190] Obermann, op. cit., at 274.
[191] See Johann Huizinga, Erasmus and the Age of the Reformation (New York, Harper and Row, 19571924), 161 ff., for a balanced discussion of the debate with Luther over the freedom of the will.
[192] Hastings' Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, V, 562-3. For a broad defense of the orthodoxy of medieval Eucharistic piety, see Francis Clark, "Bleeding Hosts and Eucharistic Theology," Heythrop Journal 1 (1960), 214-228, and Eucharistic Sacrifice and the Reformation [Westminster, MD: The Newman Press, 1961])/
[193] See J. N. D. Kelly, Doctrines, 361-66.
[194] Hugh of St. Victor, one of the early twelfth century advocates of the application of the new dialectic in theology to literal biblical exegesis nonetheless opposed Abelard’s dialectical development of an adoptionist Christology. However he himself appears to have been tempted by an alternative monophysitical melding of Jesus’ divinity with his humanity:
Ex quo Deus coepit esse homo, et homo coepit esse Deus. Deus coepit esse homo subjectus, et homo coepit esse Deus perfectus. Si Deus humiliatus est quantum potuit in homine, homo sublimatus non est quantum potuit in Deo? si Deus in eo quod homo esse coepit, passibilis et mortalis esse coepit, et homo in eo quod Deus esse coepit, justus et bonus et perfectus esse coepit. Sicut enim Deus quando homo esse coepit quod hominis erat accepit, sic et homo quando Deus esse coepit quod Dei erat accepit. Quapropter sicut Deus perfecta sapientia et potestas et bonitas est, ita homo ex quo Deus factus est, perfecte potens et sapiens et bonus in Deo factus est.
De sacramentis Christianae fidei (P.L. clxxvi:371C-415A) 386A-B.
Hugh and Abelard were confronting the New Testament’s attribution of a human as well as a divine character to Jesus as, e.g., at once the Lord and the son of Mary―a communication of idioms in the historical Jesus the Lord incapable of reconciliation with their joint and entirely uncritical subscription to the “two-stage” interpretation of Jn. 1:14, by which the subject of the incarnation is dehistoricized, no longer Jesus the Christ, but the immanent Logos. Much of the Christology developed in Book II, Part One of Hugh of St. Victor’s masterwork consists in a foredoomed effort to reconcile that dehistoricization of the Incarnation with the critical and literal exegesis of Scripture upon which he was intent. The same dilemma had faced the Antiochenes in the fifth century; their Aristotelian predilections, inter alia, led to a critical and literal exegesis of Scripture, which forced a “two sons” Christology, whose Eucharistic consequences alerted Cyril of Alexandria to the underlying Christological heresy. The ensuing condemnation of that Christology at Ephesus did not directly touch its Eucharistic corollary, but the Church’s faith in Jesus the Lord is indivisible: a failure to accept the communication of idioms in Jesus the Christ issues in a Eucharistic Presence that is merely human and which, as merely human, cannot be the sacramental representation in persona Christi of his One Sacrifice. The ready acceptance of that consequence underlay the I.C.E.L. project for “liturgical renewal,” whose bumptious dismissal of the Sacrifice of the Mass was published in its ‘last hurrah,’ the Third Progress Report on the Revision of the Roman Missal: see endnotes 140, supra, and 300, infra.
Hugh’s “semi-Apollinarist” Christology: (thus Edward Myers, “Hugh of St. Victor,” The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 7 [New York: Appleton Co., 1910]), is the inverse of Abelard’s Christological diophysism. The justice of Myer’s criticism is apparent in Hugh’s discussion of the immortality or not of Jesus’ humanity in the context of the Real Presence: there, after admitting that the question might better be left open, he proceeds to develop his own views, in which the following appears:
Propter hoc fortassis melius est, ut neutrum definire praesumamus, quamvis tamen alterum fuisse credamus. Sic itaque non dicatur hoc vel hoc fuit, quamvis tamen credatur quod alterum fuit. Quod si alterum dicendum est ergo absque praejudicio veritatis magis sensu ad illud accedo, ut illud impassibile et immortale, quantum scilicet pertinet ad sanctificationem sacramenti tradidisse dicatur. Si quis autem objiciendum putet, quod ante resurrectionem Dominus Jesus Christus corpus mortale portabat, et hoc ipsi indubitanter profitemur mortalem fuisse Dominum Jesum secundum susceptam humanitatem; quia si mortalem fuisse non crederemus, mortuum negaremus. Humana ergo natura in Christo mortalis fuit, sed voluntate, non necessitate. Ex eo enim quo per gratiam ab omni peccato munda verbo Dei in unitatem personae juncta est, ab omni mortis necessitate et debito libera facta est, ut nihil morti deberet pro eo quod peccati nihil haberet. Sustinuit tamen sponte mortalitatem, quia mortem sustinere volebat; qui si mortalitatem non sustinuisset mori omnino non potuisset. Sic ergo sponte mortalitatem portavit,
Ibid., Pars octava, cap. iii (P. L. 176:463A-B).
The impasse between Hugh’s critical literal exegesis and his dehistoricizing, proto-Lutheran reading of the communication of idioms is apparent. With Luther, he understands the subject of the Incarnation to be the nonhistorical Son, whose consequent Personal union with humanity Hugh affirms, but explains in the Apollinarist sense condemned at I Constantinople. Given the two-stage reading of the Incarnation implicit in the dehistoricization of its subject, the pressure to choose between diophysitism and monophysism is inexorable: Hugh of St. Victor chose the latter, very tentatively, in choosing to suppose the historical Jesus, whether on the cross or on the altar, to possess a divine impassibility and immortality. Here his literal exegesis of the Kenōsis as taught in Phil. 2:6-7 is led astray by the unrecognized dehistoricizing impact of the cosmological assumptions which have variously led astray patristic, Carolingian, medieval, and modern Christology.
[195] A good discussion may be found in Werner Elert's The Structures of Lutheranism: the theology and philosophy of life of Lutheranism especially in the 16th and 17th centuries. Tr. by Walter A. Hansen; Foreword by Jaroslav Pelikan (St. Louis: The Concordia Publishing house, 1963), 300-320.
[196] Fr. Feeney’s teaching was condemned in a Letter of the Holy Office, Suprema haec sacra, whose English translation was published unofficially in the American Ecclesiastical Review, v. 127 (Oct., 1952), 308 ff. The Letter is excerpted in Denziger-Schönmetzer's Enchiridion Symbolorum, §§3866-3873. Philip Lawler, in The Faithful Departed: The Collapse of Boston’s Catholic Culture (New York and London: Encounter Books, 2008), esp. 48-52, has shed a welcome light upon the circumstances leading to Fr. Feeney’s condemnation.
Buri’s early “dekerygmatizing” theme is dealt with sympathetically by Harold H. Oliver in “Fritz Buri: A Chronology of His Theologizing,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion xxxiv (1966), at 346-357.
[197] The later Eucharistic doctrine of Philip Melancthon, labeled “Philippian” by its opponents, tended toward a rejection on symbolist grounds of the objective Real Presence upon which Luther had insisted. However in 1577, Art. VII of the Concord of Union vigorously rejected this “crypto-Calvinism.” See B. W. Teigen, The Lord’s Supper in the Theology of Martin Chemnitz (Brewster, MA: Trinity Lutheran Press, 1986) esp. 1, 167, 173, 188. Chemnitz, once a pupil of Melancthon, was the main author of the Concord of Union. The other signers were Andrae, Chytraeus, Koerner, Musculus, and Selnecker. In his definitive statement on the subject, De Coena Domini, Chemnitz cites two passages from Melancthon, both in favor of an objective Real Presence, but these are from the early Melancthon; only after Luther’s death did he turn to the quasi-Calvinisit receptionism which the Concord rejected: see The Lord’s Supper: De Coena Domini, by Martin Chemnitz. Translated by J. A. Q. Preus (St. Louis: The Concordia Publishing House, 1979), at 89. Chemnitz’ opposition to “crypto-Calvinist” denial of the non-sacrificial Real Presence stressed by Luther led him to uphold the monophysist alternative earlier proposed by Luther, the omnipresence (“ubiquismus”) of the body and blood of Christ.
[198] See Karin Bornkamm's Luthers Auslagen der Galatersbrief, Berlin, 1963, 277-80; comparable readings of Luther's exegesis of Gal. 3:28 are found in D. A. Oepke, Der Brief des Paulus an die Galater (Berlin, 1957), 90-91, and 0. Cullmann, Baptism in the New Testament [London, 1950], 65. Cullmann is explicit: "Every difference between men and women here disappears." This exegesis underlies the Lutheran rejection of the sacramental value which the Catholic doctrine places upon masculinity and femininity in marriage; as Franz Mussner observes: "Mann bleibt Mann und Frau bleibt Frau, auch nach der Taufe, aber sie haben jegliche Heilsbedeutung vor Gott verloren." (Man remains man, woman remains woman, even after baptism, but these distinctions have lost every salvific significance before God." Der Galaterbrief, ser. Herder Theologischer Kommentar zum Neuen Testament ix (Freiburg, 1974), 264.
The moral validation of the homosexual “life-style” implicit in this anti-sacramentalism had been anticipated by the Catharist condemnation of marriage. Forty-three years ago the right to personal privacy was discovered by Justice Douglas, the author of the majority opinion in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), to be among the “penumbra formed by the emanations” of the Federal Constitution. The inclusion of sodomitical intercourse in the newly confected Constitutional “right to privacy” was then inevitable. With the sacramental foundation of the public decencies of the Western civilization foregone, it is no longer possible to gainsay the “I don’t see why not” jurisprudence underlying Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s majority opinion in Lawrence v. Texas (2003).
[199] The Eucharistic doctrine of the final (1559) edition of the Institutes has its preliminary statements in “A Confession of Faith Concerning the Eucharist” (1537), and “Summary of Doctrine Concerning the Ministry of the Word and the Sacraments” (1537): it is summarized in “The Clear Explanation of Sound Doctrine Concerning the True Partaking of the Flesh and Blood of Christ in the Holy Supper” (1561). These are available in English translation in Calvin: Theological Treatises John T. McNeill, ed.; J. K. S. Reid, trans. Col. The Library of Christian Classics, Vol. 22 (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1954).
[200] DS §§ *373-75.
[201] See the discussion of Augustinian themes of illumination, trahi a Deo, and intus magister, and of St. Thomas’ misuse of the trahi a Deo, in endnotes 22 and 24 of Vol. I, Ch. 1, supra. For the biblical foundation of these themes see the present writer’s ”Bāśār-Nepeš: Sarx-Pneuma; Body-Soul: Death-Resurrection: An Essay in the Pauline/Johannine Anthropology,” cited in endnote 86, supra.
[202] For the Lutheran critique of this maxim, see Louis Bouyer, The Spirit and Forms of Protestantism; trans. A. V. Littledale (Westminster, MD.: The Newman Press, 1956), and Arthur Carl Piepkorn, Profiles in Belief (New York: Harper & Row, 1977); cf. Carl Braaten, Principles of Lutheran Theology; 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 2007) at 121. It is not be surprising that a contemporary Catholic theologian, Edward Kilmartin, should have reached Calvinist conclusions from a similar starting point. Kilmartin first outlined his revisionist theology of the Eucharist and of the Church in “Apostolic Office,” Theological Studies, vol. 36, no. 2 (June, 1975) 243-264, developed it further in a number of articles and monographs, and in a book, Church, Eucharist, and Priesthood: A theological commentary on ‘the mystery and worship of the most holy eucharist” (New York: Paulist Press, 1981), a work prompted by John Paul II’s Apostolic Letter, Dominicae Coenae, translated as “The Mystery and Worship of the Most Holy Eucharist,” and published under that title in Origins 9 (1980) 653-666.
Kilmartin’s reference to it in the title of his book ut supra edits out its capitals. His doctrine is further developed in a posthumously published article, "The Catholic Tradition of Eucharistic Theology: Towards the Third Millennium," Theological Studies 55 (1994) 405-457, and in a posthumously published book, Eucharist in the West, edited by Robert J. Daly, S.J. (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1998). Kilmartin’s rejection of the Sacrifice of the Mass has made his theology a major reliance of the movement for women's ordination; see Proceedings, the C.T.S.A. 33rd Annual Convention (1978) at 270.
[203] This dehistoricization is implicit in Paul Tillich’s statement of the “Protestant principle.” It issues in a Christology which understands the historical Jesus of Nazareth to have been sacrificed to the eschatological Jesus the Christ: this sacrifice is the latter’s victory over the temptations of the historical Jesus to become a human person, a “centered self” in Tillich’s idiom. Jesus of Nazareth sacrifices his personal humanity in order to become transparent to his divinity, the Logos. See Systematic Theology I, at, e.g., 136; ibid., II, at 114: we read that faith “guarantees a personal life in which the New Being has conquered the old being. But it does not guarantee his name to be Jesus of Nazareth.” In fact, within this stance, every historical expression of the faith is submitted to the razor of Ockham as brandished by historical criticism. This is consistent with the radical historical pessimism of the Reform, in itself only the obverse of its anti-sacramentalism. Nothing historical can bridge the infinite disparity between history and the Kingdom of God, which inevitably requires the dehistorication of Jesus the Lord.
[204] Patrick Burke, Reinterpreting Rahner: A Critical Study of His Major Theories ( New York: Fordham University Press, 2002). For the present writer’s analogous criticism of John Zizioulas’ dialectic see “The Relation of Nuptial Symbolism to Eucharistic Realism,” The Pacific Journal Of Theology, II/21 (1999), 88-119.
[205] Kilian McDonnell’s careful study of Calvin’s Eucharistic doctrine, John Calvin, The Church and the Eucharist (Princeton: the Princeton University Press, 1967) has remarked upon the difficulties attending an attempt by a Catholic theologian to understand Calvin, whose rejection of metaphysics requires him to deploy a vocabulary using terms borrowed from a variety of contexts. The consequence is that their meaning and interrelation are less than clear to a theologian intent upon a precision of statement which, insofar as bearing upon historical reality, can only be metaphysical. This is not to acquit Catholic theologians of confusion, but rather to point out that their quest for understanding presupposes the analogy of faith, which is to say, an intrinsic coherence of doctrine which cannot but be historical because grounded in the historical worship of the Church, the offering in persona Christi of the Eucharistic sacrifice.
Lacking that ground, the dialectical theology must proceed from an a priori rejection of the intrinsic coherence of the historical articulation of the faith. It follows that its dialectic has no historical ground, no constitutive Event, upon which to rest. The free rational unity of the analogia fidei, the concrete intelligibility intrinsic to the Church’s faith in Jesus the Lord, is finally her sacramental worship in truth of Truth incarnate. Only on this basis can theology be a fides quaerens intellectum.
McDonnell devotes nine pages (213-20) to an exposition of Calvin’s Christology within the Eucharistic and ecclesial context in which it developed, concluding to a final ambiguity carried over into his Eucharistic doctrine and his ecclesiology. Like the authors upon whom he depended, Calvin undertook the hopeless task of providing for the possibility of the union of divinity and humanity in the Person of Jesus the Lord. That false dilemma had been resolved at Chalcedon by its rejection, but the basic doctrine of the Symbol of Chalcedon―i.e., that Jesus, the one and the same Son of the Father and of Mary, subsists in the divine substance, the Trinity, and in the human substance, humanity and thereby is consubstantial with the Trinitarian Persons, the Father and the Spirit, and also with ourselves, the members of the one human substance for whose salvation, as their head, he died―was received neither by the medieval theologians whether Latin or Greek, nor by their current successors in interest. Whether under monophysite or diophyite persuasions, they denied the human substance a unity sufficient to warrant Jesus’ consubstaniality with the members of the human community. This remains the default position among contemporary theologians, Catholic as well as Protestant. It is of course a denial of the faith that Jesus the Lord is the agent of our redemption; it induces hesitation over naming Mary the Theotokos, and entails a dehistoricization of the redemption. Absent Jesus’ consubstantiality with us, he cannot be our head, cannot be the source of our free unity, and consequently cannot redeem us by his one sacrifice. See endnote 358, infra.
[206] Augustine’s stress upon the corporeal location of Christ at the right hand of the Father is perhaps the focal point of the indictment of Augustine’s Eucharistic doctrine as symbolist. For Augustine, Jesus’ corporeality requires his empirical location in heaven; it is thus that he insists that the Eucharistic presence of the Christ in the consecrated elements of bread and wine be “spiritually understood,” which does not at all conclude to a symbolism: rather, it is a rejection of Christ’s empirical location in the consecrated elements. He insists upon a real eating of the body and the blood of Christ, but it is not empirical, not “capharnaitic.” Camelot points out that this distinction needed an emphatic statement to the congregations to whom Augustine preached: thus his repeated admonition, “Spiritualiter intelligete.”
[207] Institutes iv, 17, 18.
[208] For the background of Calvin’s adaptation of the ancient liturgy’s “Sursum corda”, see Jack Kinneer, “Calvin’s use of the Sursum Corda,” The Echo Hills Christian Study Center: Educational Resources for Biblical and Liturgical Studies: Essays on Worship, available from the Christian Study Center’s web site.
[209] Walter G. Hards, A Critical Translation and Evaluation of the Nucleus of the 1536 Edition of Calvin’s Institutes. A Princeton Theological Seminary dissertation, 1955 (Ann Arbour, MI: University Microfilms, A XEROX Company, 1973), pp. 262-287.
[212] De Lubac, The Splendour of the Church. Translated by Michael Mason (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1956), 111-112, 152-53.
[213] Corpus mysticum, at 35, n. 75, quoting Augustine, “Ille qui suscitavit carnem suam, caetero corpori, quod est Ecclesia, in capite demonstravit exemplum.” (Sermo 361, n. 3: [P.L. 39:1600]). De Lubac then goes on to observe: “Voir cependant infra, “caeterum corpus” appliqué par Paschase Radbert au corps historique.” See endnotes 72, 78, 79, and 80, supra.
Paschasius’ borrowing, in his classic study, Liber de corpore et sanguine Domini, from Augustine’s reference to an “other body” to which de Lubac refers, is set in the context of his own Eucharistic transformation of Amalarius’ “triforme corpus“:
Quibus modis dicitur corpus Christi.
Tribus sane modis in Scripturis sacris corpus Christi appellatur; profecto quia generalis Christi ecclesia corpus eius est, ubi Christus caput, et omnes electi membra dicuntur, ex quibus unum colligitur cotidie corpus in uirum perfectum in mensuram plenitudinis Christi. Corpus autem Christi sponsa uidelicet Dei ecclesia jure dicitur: juxta illud quod Apostolus ait: Et erunt duo in carne una. Hoc, inquit, sacramentum magnum est [in Christo et in ecclesia. Quod si Christus et ecclesia in carne una sunt, utique unum corpus ubi sponsus caput, singuli autem electi alter alterius membra. Ex quibus (quo) uidelicet quisquis tollit membrum Christi et facit membrum meretricis, aut certe per quodlibet graue delictum membrum diaboli, hic profecto jam non est in corpore Christi, quia factus est alterius membrum.
Idcirco ei jure non licet edere de hoc mystico corpore Christi. Quod sane corpus ut uera caro Christi sit, pro mundi uita cotidie per Spiritum Sanctum consecratur ex qua non habent potestatem edere qui ex aduerso sunt. Vescuntur autem eum condigne qui sunt in corpore illius, ut solum corpus Christi dum est in uia, ipsius carne reficiatur et discat nihil aliud esurire quam Christum, nihil sitire nisi Christum, nihil aliud sapere quam Christum, non aliunde uiuere ,non aliud esse quam corpus Christi.
Caeterum illud corpus quod natum est de Maria uirgine, in quod istud transfertur, quod pependit in cruce, sepultum est in sepulcro, resurrexit a mortuis, penetrauit coelos, et nunc pontifex factus in aeternum, cotidie interpellat pro nobis. Ad quem si recte communicamus mentem dirigimus, ut ex ipso et ab ipso nos corpus eius carnem ipsius illo manente integro sumamus. Quae nimirum caro ipse est et fructus ipsius carnis, ut idem semper maneat et uniuersos qui sunt in corpore pascat.
Si enim hidria farinae uel letitus olei seu panes secundo crescunt et non minuuntur dum satiant, quid putas caro Christi? Arbor quidem ligni uitae Christus nunc in ecclesia est cujus imago in paradiso arbor illa fuit. Idcirco scire conuenit quod ueritas hinc completur quam prius figura praemisit. Nam si homini ex illa semper Dei seruatis mandatis edere licuisset, nunquam mori potuisset (mortalis esset). Sic itaque ex hoc ligno corporis quicumque spiritaliter comedunt, si mandata obseruauerint, nunquam in spiritu mortales erunt. Alioquin praecidendi sunt, ut melius reinserantur.
Vnde et lignum uitae jure dicitur, quia sicut illud immortalitatem corporis sumptum praestitisset, ita istud imo solidius uitam praestat cum obseruatione mandatorum Dei aeternam. De quo in laude sapientiae: Lignum uitae est his qui apprehenderint eam. Et in Apocalypsi Joannes: Qui uicerit, dabo ei edere de ligno uitae, quod est in paradiso Dei mei. Quia profecto non aliis largitur etiam in mysterio quam uincentibus.
Sed quoniam de tribus uocabulis corporis Christi diximus, restat etiam intelligere Scripturas Sanctas doctrinamque Christi quam saepe tipice corpus Christi interpretari debere, ut unum corpus ex omnibus perficiatur. Quia haec sunt dotalia, haec mystica, ut Christus et ecclesia unum corpus solidius confirmetur. Alioquin quomodo auderet apostolus Christi ecclesiam de carne et de ossibus eius constare? Vtique hoc sacramentum uelint nolint inimici, magnum in Christo et in ecclesia, quod erunt duo in carne una. Et si una caro Christus et ecclesia, jam unitas naturae amborum plenius commendatur. Quapropter illo integro agni carnes nostra ut tollat peccata mundi accipiamus; quatignus per hoc Christus in nobis maneat et nos in ipso renati unum efficiamur. (underlining added).
Paschasius, Liber de corpore et sanguine Domini, ch. 7, 1-3. (CChr.CM 16:37-40; cf P. L. 120:1284C-1286A) [underlineation added].
[214] The French original of de Lubac’s text:
P. L. 120, 896 C et D. On notera comment l’épithète « mystique », tout en désignant surtout le corps sacramentel, est appliquée en fin de compte aux trois corps, même d’une certain façon au troisième, considérés par rapport à l’unité derniere et totale du Corps comprenant Tête et membres; non plus seulement l’unité en train de se faire, ne seulement l’unité de l’Église corps du Christ, mais l’unité achèvée du Christ et de l’Église, « in caro una ». Telle est l’ultime et « solide » réalité que tous les autres aspects du corps du Christ, si réels qu’ils soient in eux-mêmes chacun dans leur order et selon leur mode propre, ont pour fin de procurer et de signifier « mystiquement », en attendant de s’absorber pour ainsi dire en elle. (emphasis added)
Corpus mysticum, at 41, n. 101.
It is well to have before us also the pertinent text of Paschasius’ Expositio, a most concise statement of the free, covenantal and “social” character of the “unitas corporis: for Paschasius, Amalarius’ third “body” of Christ is most clearly the Church, but only as in nuptial union (sociatur) with her Head:
Eia fratres, ut cum uenia loquar, ideo in hac cena Christi prolixius elaboraui quam breuitas poscat tractatoris, quia in his misticis rebus plures aliud sapiunt et ecutiunt multi, dum panis iste et calix nihil aliud eis esse uidetur, quam quod oculis cernitur et ore sentitur. Idcirco ut manifestius cognoscant quanta est unitas corporis intelligant quibus modis dicitur corpus Christi quia est illud Dominicum corpus in quo passus est Deus, sed non secundum quod Deus est. Et est hoc corpus in hoc mysterio quod creatur in spiritu et uirtute Verbi ut Christi sit corpus et non aliud quam id quod passum est, et proprium corpus. Est et corpus Christi omnis sancta Dei ecclesia, de carne et de ossibus eius, in carne una formata, et in unitate corporis eius sociata. Quapropter ueritas est in utroque et unitas corporis. Et ideo hoc corpus quod medium est quo pascimur in uia, non diuiditur ab unitate corporis Christi. Neque quia caput est Christus ecclesiae, recte a suis pre<c>i<d>itur membris, sicut nec membra diuiduntur a capite ut membra et caput unum sint corpus quod \ sacramentum juxta Apostolum magnum est in Christo et ecclesia. Et ideo qui uult uiuere in unitate corporis haec tria, mistice unum sentiat esse corpus quoniam testamentum Dei aeternum de his firmatum est in sanguine Christi.
Et ideo jure non ait, hic est panis aut corpus Noui Testamenti, sed hic est calix Noui Testamenti in sanguine meo qui pro uobis fundetur. Nec immerito igitur hoc misterium jure dicit testamentum, quod morte testatoris firm|atur.
Paschasius Radbertus, Expositio in Euangelium Matthei, XII (CChr.CM 56B:1288-129, at 1296-97) cf. P. L. 120:896B-D [underlineation added].
De Lubac had earlier set the stage by summarizing the Carolingians’ unitary Eucharistic doctrine:
Par le pain unique du sacrifice, il est donc clair que chaque fidèle, communiant au corps du Christ, communie par le fait même à l’Église. En recevant l’Eucharistie, chacun « passe dans le corps du Christ », chacun prend part au corps du Christ, c’est à dire toujours à l’Êglise:
Sicut enim de uno pane et de uno calice percipientes, participes et consortes corporis domini.
Ne nous y trompons pas: ce « corpus Domini » dont parle ici Raban Maur n’est pas, ou du moins exclusivement ni même principalement, ce que nous appelerions le corps sacrementel. C’est déja le corps ecclésial, lequel d’ailleurs inclut le premier. Si le « uno pane », emprunté à saint Paul, ne nous en avertissait assez clairement déja, si la formule qui suit: « socios corporis Christi », ne tendait à nous le confirmer, nous en recevrions au besoin l’assurance de la formule parallèle plus explicite, que est encore de saint Augustin, at qu’Amalaire lui emprunte par l’intermédiare du Bède:
en dépendence d’Isadore de Seville: cendit.
De Lubac, Corpus mysticum, 32-33. (emphasis added)
De Lubac’s central stress is upon the unity of the effect of the Eucharistic signing: thus the unitas corporis Christi. Within this concrete reality, the ecclesial and the sacramental body are inseparable in a unity that transcends but by no means annuls their distinction: the analogy here is of course Trinitarian. It could not be otherwise, for it is on the cross and on the altar that the Head, in offering the One Sacrifice, institutes the One Flesh of the New Covenant, by entry into which we undertake our covenantal fidelity, our imaging of God. We do this in his Image, for by the offering of the One Sacrifice, he is the Head, the Image of his Father’s Headship: as he, proceeding from his Head who is the Father, is the Glory of the Father, so the Church, proceeding from Jesus, the second Adam, as her Head, is his Glory, the bride with whom he is consubstantial in the one flesh of the New Covenant―flesh of his flesh, bone of his bones―, as he is consubstantial with his Head, the Father who as Head of the Son and, through the Son, of the Spirit, is the source of the free unity of the Trinity.
[216] De Lubac observes, of the “three bodies” of the Carolingian theology, that they “achieve” their ultimate unity in the One Flesh of Christ and the Church: he then goes on to say of this final unity of the diverse aspects of the unitas corporis, that:
Telle est l’ultime et « solide » réalité que tous les autres aspects du corps du Christ, si réels qu’ils soient in eux-mêmes chacun dans leur order et selon leur mode propre, ont pour fin de procurer et de signifier “mystiquement”, en attendant de s’absorber pour ainsi dire en elle.
He is speaking here of the anagogical fulfillment of the sacramental signing, that to which all Eucharistic worship is directed. This final unity, which he has described as “achieved” is yet in history not fully realized and in that sense, not yet actual. While de Lubac’s language here is not clear, one must avoid any inference from it that he regards the “achievement,” while sacramentally signed, as having only an eschatological objectivity: the “achievement” of sacramental efficacy is historical. It is of course the case that in history this achievement is veiled, not manifest: its objectivity is sacramental. Nonetheless, that sacramental objectivity is historical. It appears yet again that the reality of this free union in One Flesh remains, for de Lubac, rather metaphorical than metaphysical. However, over against this inference is his repeated emphasis upon the achieved standing of this ultimate realization of the Eucharistic signing. That it is the res sacramenti is not in question, but its historicity, that which the medieval theology ascribes to the res et sacramentum, poses a problem in de Lubac’s treatment only if one puts in issue, as it is clear that he does not, the historicity of the patristic res sacramenti.
[217] The Greek texts of the New Testament quotations of Gen. 2:24 have been much abused by the translators and editors of the current Bibles. E. g., the editors of the Revised Standard Version, Catholic Edition (London: Catholic Truth Society, 1966) unaccountably render the sarka mian of Gen. 2:24 quoted in Eph. 5:31 as “one” rather than literally, as “one flesh;” the same error occurs in its rendition of I Cor. 6:16 (i.e., “one body” also becomes “one), a mistake which effectively identifies the consequence of union with a prostitute and of union with a lawful spouse. The mistake is repeated in the Jerusalem Bible’s fastidious and dogmatically impossible reading of “one body” in Gen. 2:24 and in Eph. 5:31 but not, oddly enough, in I Cor. 6:16, doubtless because in that passage Paul had already referred “one body” to illicit sexual union with a prostitute. Although New American Bible also translates the Gen. 2:24 text as “one body,” it avoided imposing this solecism on the quotation of Gen. 2:24 in Eph. 5:31, returning there to the literal sense of the “sarka mian” viz., “one flesh.” The later 1973 Oxford edition of the RSV has opted for “one flesh” both in Gen. 2:24 and in Eph. 5:31.
The late Msgr. William B. Smith, for many years the academic dean of St. Joseph’s Seminary, Dunwoodie, once mentioned to the present writer that Paul Ramsey, informed by Roger Shinn, pointed out this exegetical befuddlement among the editors of the earlier edition of RSV in his Fabricated Man: The ethics of genetic control (Yale University Press, 1970), at 132ff., and had there dwelt upon its monist implications which, however resonant to the temper of our age, are eminently counter-Pauline. While the earlier edition of the RSV inserts the error into I Cor. 6:16, rendering Paul’s citation of Gen. 2:24’s sarka mian (one flesh) as “one” (reserving to a footnote, for no discernible reason, the correct translation of the Greek), once again the New American Bible corrects this mistranslation although, rather oddly, in translating Gen. 2:24 as “one body,” the NAB notes that “classic Hebrew,” whatever this may be, does not have a lexical distinction between “flesh” and “body,” although this distinction pervades the Old Testament, as any dictionary of the Bible points out in detail: see e.g., Dictionary of the Bible, Edited by James Hastings; Revised Edition by Frederick C.Grant and H. H. Rowley (New York: Charles Scribibner’s Sons, 1963) at 299, or the more extended discussion in John L. McKenzie’s Dictionary of the Bible (Milwaukee: Bruce Publishing Co;, 1965) at 280-82. In any case, such pedantry cannot ground an objection to Paul’s reading of Gen. 2:24 in I Cor. 6 and Eph. 5. Finally, the notion that Paul’s sarx-pneuma anthropology misreads Genesis is a rejection of the apostolic tradition, and thus an abdication of the task of Catholic theology. The present writer’s examination of the Pauline anthropology is cited in endnote 86.
[218] Christus et ecclesia, una persona est”: thus Gregory the Great, Moralia, bk. xiv, c. xlix, n. 57 (P.L. 75:1068b), cited by de Lubac in Medieval Exegesis II, at 319, n. 42.
[219] See Corpus mysticum, at 127-28, esp., nn. 60 & 61, for de Lubac’s discussion of this usage by St. Thomas, citing his Comm. in Coloss. V; S. T. iiia, q. 48, art. 2; ad 1, De veritate q. 29, a. 7, ad 1 & 10, q. 49, a. 1, and In iii Sent., d. 18, a. 6, sol. 1, ad 2. His attribution of “quasi una persona” to the union of Christ and the Church has its roots in St. Paul’s encounter with the risen Christ on the road to Damascus (Acts 9:4-5; cf. 22:8, 26:15), in which Jesus literally identified himself, as Jesus, with the Church whom Paul was persecuting. Augustine uses “una persona” only in the context set out in Sermo 341, where he details the nuptial and therefore inter-personal covenant in One Flesh that is constitutive of the “personal” unity, the integrity, of the Christus totus, Christus integer; see endnote 22 supra for the Migne text. Augustine very carefully distinguishes the personal integrity of Jesus the Christ from the nuptial integrity proper to the One Flesh of the Christus integer. Unfortunately this crucial distinction is ignored in the patristic reduction of the unity of the una caro, the nuptial One Flesh, Augustine’s “Christus totus” to the physical unity of “one body.” When this naïve Christomonism is read into Augustine’s Eucharistic texts, a Eucharistic symbolism, viz., de Lubac’s reference in Corpus mysticum at 152 to a “symbolisme ecclésiastique,” is inescapable. St. Thomas, following Peter Lombard, relies for his interpretation of the nuptial “one flesh” rather upon his assumption of the woman’s unilateral subjection to the man in marriage, a notion hardly Pauline and certainly alien to Gen. 2:23-25, which knows nothing of any inferiority of Eve to her spouse who, having learned that it is not good for man to be alone, in that passages celebrates her presence as “This at last is bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh.” However we have seen that St. Thomas qualifies their personal unity as “quasi una persona” and “quasi persona mystica;” see Corpus mysticum, 127, ut supra. The “quasi” in his use of “quasi res ultima” to describe the Church in her Eucharistic unity with her Lord intimates some unease over this denial of the free, covenantal unity of the nuptial “one flesh” which, whether Eucharistic or matrimonial, is finally anagogical,.
[220] In Corpus mysticum, at 200, de Lubac cites Augustine’s “non me in te mutabis, sicut cibum carnis tuae, sed tu mutaberis in me,” where “me” is the totus Christus, which Jesus identified with himself to Saul on the road to Damascus, speaking as the Head of his Body, the Church, in that sense of “Head” as the source of a free substantial unity (in the Trinity, in the One Flesh) that Paul sets out in I Cor. 11 and in Eph. 1:10 and 5:21-33. As the Father alone, as Head of the Son and through the Son, of the Spirit, is named “God” in the New Testament, so it is the Father to whom one prays, but in the Son and through the Spirit: the prayer to the Father is thus always Trinitarian.
The Father, as Head, is alone named God, precisely as the Head and Archē of the free, substantial Unity of God, the Trinity. It is by his imaging of the Father’s Headship that the primordial and historical head of the human substance, Jesus the Lord, is “the one new man,” the perfect man,” of Eph. 3:15 and 4:13: Pilate’s “Ecce Homo” belies the mockery of his “What is truth?” It is as sent to give the Spirit that Jesus is the head of humanity and of all creation, for it is only by his Gift of the Spirit, his outpouring of the Spirit upon the Church, that he is the source of the created free unity of the good creation, a free unity whose sacramental objectivity is Eucharistic, for it is only within that worship and sustained by it that we are capable of the exercise of free, nuptially ordered responsibility that, in sum, is our covenantal fidelity.
That fidelity is radically nuptial. It is by the husband’s imaging in, marriage, the headship of the Christ vis à vis the bridal Church, that the human substance, “man,” has the free substantial unity that is the marital imaging of God, an imagine which must be understood to be nuptially substantial. Our imaging of the Triune God is of course personal; it is an exercise of personal responsibility, not as monadic, but as a consubstantial member of “lonely self,” but is a nuptially ordered exercise of covenantal responsibity within and for the free substance, the marital “one flesh” created in the Image of the Trinity and therefore substantially triune, whose free unity is its sacramental imaging of the Image (the primordial One Flesh of the second Adam and the second Eve who transcend fallen history, through their Eucharistic immanence in history) of the free unity of the Triune God. From the standpoint of Genesis, creation―created substance―is “very good” only in the sixth day, when seen to be grounded in the nuptial freedom of the second Adam and the second Eve. Creation “in Christ” is creation in the “whole Christ” who is “the Beginning,” the head, the Bridegroom, in primordial union with the second Eve: it is thus that he is primordial, the second Adam.
As the Father, immanent in the Trinity as its head, as the eternal source of its eternal freedom, is by his immanence in the Trinity consubstantial with the Son and the Spirit of whom he is the Head, so Jesus, the one and the same Son, sent by the Father to give the Spirit, by the sacrificial outpouring of that Gift to his bridal Church, and through her to all creation, images the Father in being the source of a glory, his bridal Church, and through her, of their subsistent love, who in this trinitarian union, this nuptial-y ordered perichoresis, constitute that nuptially-ordered created substance, the good creation, the New Covenant in his blood.
As Jesus, immanent in the good creation as its head, the Personal source of its created freedom, by his immanence in our humanity is creative of it and consubstantial “with us,” so the husband, in the sacramental marriage which images the primordial One Flesh, images the Lord Jesus in having a glory, the woman whose procession from him is her affirmation of him, for both are a single freedom, of which the husband is the source but, as with the Father and the Christ, his headship is not his transcendence of the glory proceeding from him, but rather his consubstantiality with that glory, who possesses humanity in its fullness, as Jesus, proceeding from his Head, the Father, possesses his divinity in its fullness. The woman’s dignity, her exercise of free, personal responsibility and authority in her marriage, is not less than that of her husband, and does not entail a personal subordination to him: as Trinitarian subordinationism is heretical, so also must be an analogous subordinationism in the nuptial imaging of the Trinity. In fallen history, that nuptial subordinationism exists as the product of sin (Gen. 3:16). The commonplace cosmological reading of authority identifies it with power, but “in the Beginning it was not so” not will it be in the End, which also is in Christ. By participation in the Church’s sacramental worship we live in Christ, hence “in the Beginning” as, please God, we shall live in Christ “in the End. But now, existing in fallen history, yet also in ecclesia, in Christo, we live in him as “in the Beginning;” where his union in One Flesh with the bridal Church, the New Covenant, underwrites the intrinsically effective covenantal expression of personal freedom. It is by the sacrament of marriage, i.e., the marriage of the baptized, that free societies exist. There the personal exercise of free responsibility is manifest, public and political. Marriage is the political sacrament in the sense that is the efficacious sign of the free society. The fierce opposition to it that is now so familiar is simply that of the ancient Gnosticism whose only significant opponent on this earth was and is the worship of the Church, in which marriage is the permanent public and consequently politically effective expression of Catholic worship, before which no tyranny can stand. Of this every ideologue since is well aware.
[221] See endnote 120, supra. Because baptism into the ecclesial body, the Church, is prerequisite to the worthy reception of his Eucharistic Body, there is an evident distinction between them. See Corpus mysticum at 80 for the same emphasis in a discussion of the meaning of “Communio Sanctorum.”
[222] De Lubac recognizes the necessary distinction between the unity that corresponds to the continual enhancement of the Church, and that constitutive, substantial unity which the Church has from her Head alone, the intrinsically free covenantal unity which she utters in her union with him in One Flesh. We repeat his citation of Paschasius’ Commentary on Matthew, where we have seen him observe:
101 P. L. 120, 896, C et D. On notera comment l’épithète « mystique », tout en désignant surtout le corps sacramentel, est appliquée en fin de compte aux trois corps, même d’un certain façon au troisième, considérés par rapport à l’unité dernière et totale du Corps comprenant Tête et membres: non seulement l’unité en train de se faire, ne seulement l’unité de l’Église corps du Christ, mais l’unité achèvée du Christ et de l’Église, « in caro una » « Telle est l’ultime et « solide » réalité que tous les autres aspects du corps du Christ, si réels qu’ils soient in eux-mêmes chacun dans leur ordre et selon leur mode propre, ont pour fin de procurer et de signifier « mystiquement », en attendant de s’absorber pour ainsi dire en elle. (emphases added)
Corpus mysticum, at 41, n. 101 (emphasis added).
In that Eucharistic ordo of salvation history, priestly ordination to offer the One Sacrifice in persona Christi grounds the very existence of the Church and so of everything that Christians may do to build up what is lacking to the Body of Christ.
[223] In Corpus mysticum, at 97, de Lubac emphasises the simultaneity of worthy Eucharistic reception and incorporation into the Body of Christ, citing William of St. Thierry’s use to this effect of Augustine’s paradoxical “manducando Christi corpus fiunt Christi corpus.” Th. Camelot, op. cit., cites a comparable passage from Augustine (see n. 58 of the text of de Lubac quoted in endnote 264, infra); both are comprehensible when the Eucharistic One Flesh, Augustine’s Christus totus, integer, is understood as Augustine understood it, viz., as the nuptial union of Christ and his bridal Church (Eph. 5:21-33), but with all that the personal freedom of their Head-Body covenant entails: otherwise the paradox would present, for Augustine and all the Fathers who rely upon him, an insoluble hermeneutical problem. No more than de Lubac does Camelot engage in a Thomistic rationalization of Augustine’s subtle phenomenology of Eucharistic worship. However, while like de Lubac he refuses any simplistic reduction of the subtleties of Augustine’s Eucharistic doctrine to symbolist terms, Camelot attempts no resolution of the hermeneutic problem posed by that subtlety, and the boldness with which it is exploited.
[225] Ibid., at 192. Interpreting the Johannine Eucharistic doctrine, de Lubac observes, “toute l’Église se préparant et s’achevant dans ce Pain.” See also Corpus mysticum, 204ff. for the corroborating Pauline symbolism.
[226] E.g., ibid., at 84, n. 32.
[228] Cf. the second-century homily cited in endnote 113, supra. Eph. 2:15 reads:
«ἴνα τοὺ δὺο
κτίσῃ εἰς ἑνα
καινὸν ἀνθροπον» :
“that he might create out of himself one new man (humanity) in place of the
two,”:
Paul is writing here of the ecclesial unity in ecclesia of converts, both from Judaism and from paganism. This is the unity the Latin patristic traditions termed unitas corporis Christi. It is a unity unthinkable apart from the free nuptial unity of Head and Body in their substantial One Flesh, for it is into this unity that converts are baptized, the unity of the Augustinian “Whole Christ,” Head and Body: cf. Sermo 341, infrequently cited by de Lubac; see endnote 100, supra.
[229] Augustine’s Latin text:
Quid ergo est? Hoccine interesse arbitramur inter caput et membra caetera, quod in quolibet quamvis praecipuo membro, velut in aliquo magno propheta aut apostolo, quamvis divinitas habitet, non tamen sicut in capite quod est Christus, omnis plenitudo divinitatis? Nam et in nostro corpore inest sensus singulis membris; sed non tantus quantus in capite, ubi prorsus omnis est quinque partitus: ibi enim et visus, et auditus, et olfactus, et gustus, et tactus; in caeteris autem solus est tactus. An etiam praeter hoc quod, tanquam in templo, in illo corpore habitat omnis plenitudo divinitatis, est aliud quod intersit inter illud caput, et cujuslibet membri excellentiam? Est plane, quod singulari quadam susceptione hominis illius una facta est persona cum Verbo. De nullo enim sanctorum dici potuit, aut potest, aut poterit, Verbum caro factum est (Jn. I, 14): nullus sanctorum qualibet praestantia gratiae, Unigeniti nomen accepit, ut quod et ipsum Dei Verbum ante saecula, hoc simul cum assumpto homine diceretur. Singularis est ergo illa susceptio, nec cum hominibus aliquibus sanctis quantalibet sapientia et sanctitate praestantibus, ullo modo potest esse communis. Ubi divinae gratiae satis perspicuum clarumque documentum est. Quis enim tam sit sacrilegus, ut audeat affirmare aliquam posse animam per meritum liberi arbitrii, ut alter sit Christus efficere? Ut ergo ad personam Verbi unigeniti pertineret, quo pacto per liberum arbitrium communiter omnibus et naturaliter datum una sola anima meruisset, nisi hoc singularis gratia praestitisset; quam fas est praedicare, de qua nefas est velle judicare?
Ep. 187, 40 ( P.L 33: 847-48); emphasis added.
[231] The briefer of the two is Sermo 272; its Migne edition is given here:
Hoc quod videtis in altari Dei, etiam transacta nocte vidistis: sed quid esset, quid sibi vellet, quam magnae rei sacramentum contineret, nondum audistis. Quod ergo videtis, panis est et calix; quod vobis etiam oculi vestri renuntiant: quod autem fides vestra postulat instruenda, panis est corpus Christi, calix sanguis Christi. Breviter quidem hoc dictum est, quod fidei forte sufficiat: sed fides instructionem desiderat. Dicit enim propheta: Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis (Isai. VII, 9, sec. LXX). Potestis enim modo dicere mihi: Praecepisti ut credamus, expone ut intelligamus. Potest enim in animo cujusquam cogitatio talis suboriri: Dominus noster Jesus Christus, novimus unde acceperit carnem; de virgine Maria. Infans lactatus est, nutritus est, crevit, ad juvenilem aetatem perductus est, a Judaeis persecutionem passus est, ligno suspensus est , in ligno interfectus est, de ligno depositus est, sepultus est, tertia die resurrexit, quo die voluit, in coelum ascendit; illuc levavit corpus suum; inde est venturus ut judicet vivos et mortuos; ibi est modo sedens ad dexteram Patris: quomodo est panis corpus ejus? et calix, vel quod habet calix, quomodo est sanguis ejus? Ista, fratres, ideo dicuntur Sacramenta, quia in eis aliud videtur, aliud intelligitur. Quod videtur, speciem habet corporalem, quod intelligitur, fructum habet spiritualem. Corpus ergo Christi si vis intelligere, Apostolum audi dicentem fidelibus, Vos autem estis corpus Christi, et membra (I Cor. XII, 27). Si ergo vos estis corpus Christi et membra, mysterium vestrum in mensa Dominica positum est: mysterium vestrum accipitis. Ad id quod estis, Amen respondetis, et respondendo subscribitis. Audis enim, Corpus Christi; et respondes, Amen.
Esto membrum corporis Christi, ut verum sit Amen. Quare ergo in pane? Nihil hic de nostro afferamus, ipsum Apostolum identidem audiamus, qui cum de isto Sacramento loqueretur, ait, Unus panis, unum corpus multi sumus (Id. X, 17): intelligete et gaudete; unitas, veritas, pietas, charitas. Unus panis: quis est iste unus panis? Unum corpus multi. Recolite quia panis non fit de uno grano, sed de multis. Quando exorcizabamini, quasi molebamini. Quando baptizati estis, quasi conspersi estis. Quando Spiritus sancti ignem accepistis, quasi cocti estis. Estote quod videtis, et accipite quod estis. Hoc Apostolus de pane dixit. Jam de calice quid intelligeremus, etiam non dictum, satis ostendit. Sicut enim ut sit species visibilis panis, multa grana in unum consperguntur, tanquam illud fiat, quod de fidelibus ait Scriptura sancta, Erat illis anima una, et cor unum in Deum (Act. IV, 32): sic et de vino. Fratres, recolite unde fit vinum. Grana multa pendent ad botrum, sed liquor granorum in unitate confunditur. Ita et Dominus Christus nos significavit nos ad se pertinere voluit, mysterium pacis et unitatis nostrae in sua mensa consecravit. Qui accipit mysterium unitatis, et non tenet vinculum pacis, non mysterium accipit pro se, sed testimonium contra se. Conversi ad Dominum Deum Patrem omnipotentem, puro corde ei, quantum potest parvitas nostra, maximas atque veras gratias agamus; precantes toto animo singularem mansuetudinem ejus, ut preces nostras in beneplacito suo exaudire dignetur; inimicum quoque a nostris actibus et cogitationibus sua virtute expellat, nobis multiplicet fidem, mentem gubernet, spirituales cogitationes concedat, et ad beatitudinem suam perducat: per Jesum Christum Filium ejus. Amen.
W. A. Jurgens, Early Fathers III, 32, 34.
Msgr. Jurgens has also provided a translation of the first paragraph, ut supra, of Sermo 272:
What you see in the bread and in the chalice, that is what your own eyes report to you. But what your faith obliges you to accept is that the bread is the Body of Christ and the chalice is the Blood of Christ.This has been said very briefkly, which may be sufficient for faith, yet faith does desire instruction. . . . How is the bread His Body? And the chalice, or rather, what is in the chalice, how is it his Blood? Those elements, brethren, are called Sacraments, because in them one thing is seen, and another is understood. What is seen is the corporeal species; but what is understood is the spiritual fruit. If, then, you wish to understand the Body of Christ, hear the Apostle speaking to the faithful: “You however are the Body of Christ and His members.(27).” If, therefore, you are the Body of Christ and His members, your mystery is presented at thetable of the Lord: you receive your mystery. To that which you are, you answer: “Amen, and by answering, you subscribe to it. Be a member of Christ’s Body, so that your “Amen” may be the truth.
27 See I Cor. I2 :27.
Sermo 227 is more diffuse: the Migne edition of its parallel portion is as follows:
Memor sum promissionis meae. promiseram enim vobis, qui baptizati estis, sermonem quo exponerem mensae Dominicae Sacramentum, quod modo etiam videtis, et cujus nocte praeterita participes facti estis. Debetis scire quid accepistis, quid accepturi estis, quid quotidie accipere debeatis. Panis ille quem videtis in altari, sanctificatus per verbum Dei, corpus est Christi. Calix ille, imo quod habet calix, sanctificatum per verbum Dei, sanguis est Christi. Per ista voluit Dominus Christus commendare corpus et sanguinem suum, quem pro nobis fudit in remissionem peccatorum. Si bene accepistis, vos estis quod accepistis Apostolus enim dicit: Unus panis, unum corpus, [Col. 1100] multi sumus (I Cor. X, 17). Sic exposuit sacramentum mensae Dominicae: Unus panis, unum corpus, multi sumus.
Commendatur vobis in isto pane quomodo unitatem amare debeatis. Numquid enim panis ille de uno grano factus est? Nonne multa erant tritici grana? Sed antequam ad panem venirent, separata erant: per aquam conjuncta sunt, et post quamdam contritionem. Nisi enim molatur triticum, et per aquam conspergatur, ad istam formam minime venit, quae panis vocatur. Sic et vos ante jejunii humiliatione et exorcismi sacramento quasi molebamini. Accessit Baptismum et aqua; quasi conspersi estis, ut ad formam panis veniretis. Sed nondum est panis sine igne. Quid ergo significat ignis? Hoc est Chrisma. Oleum etenim ignis nostri, Spiritus sancti est sacramentum. In Actibus Apostolorum advertite, quando legitur. Modo incipit liber ipse legi: hodie coepit liber qui vocatur Actuum Apostolorum. Qui vult proficere, habet unde. Quando convenitis ad ecclesiam, tollite fabulas vanas: intenti estote ad Scripturas. Codices vestri nos sumus. Attendite ergo, et videte, quia venturus est Pentecoste Spiritus sanctus. Et sic veniet: in linguis igneis se ostendit. Inspirat enim charitatem, qua ardeamus in Deum, et contemnamus mundum, et fenum nostrum exuratur, et cor quasi aurum purgetur. Accedit ergo Spiritus sanctus, post aquam ignis: et efficimini panis, quod est corpus Christi. Et ideo unitas quodam modo significatur.
Msgr. Jurgenshas also provided a translation of the underlined portion, ut supra, of Sermo 227:
I am mindful of my promise. For I promised you, who have now been baptized, a sermon in which I would explain the Sacrament of the Lord’s Table which you now look upon and of which last night you were made participants. You ought to know what you have received, what you are going to receive, and what you ought to receive daily. That Bread which you see on the altar, having been sanctified by the word of God, is Body of Christ. That chalice, or rather, what is in the chalice, having been sanctified by the word of God, is the Blood of Christ. Through that bread and wine the Lord Christ willed to commend his Body and his Blood, which he poured out for us unto the forgiveness of sins. If you receive worthily, you are what you have received. For the Apostle says, “Because the Bread is one, we, though many, are one body (22).” Thus he explained the Sacrament of the Lord’s Table: “Because the Bread is one, we, though many, are one body.” Thus, by that Bread, you are taught how you must love unity. For is the bread made of but one grain of wheat? Were there not in fact many grains? But before they became bread, they were separate; by water they were joined together, and that was after a certain contritio (23).
22. I Cor. 10 :17
23. This passage really defies translation, since contritio means borh contrition and grinding, and both meanings are implied. After contrition we are baptized, and in the water are made one. After grinding the wheat into flour, water is added, and in the loaf becomes one.
Early Fathers III, 30, 34
The reference to the theme of the Didache pervades the consideration in the texts cited in endnotes 222-230 of the dynamic Eucharistic unity of the Church.
[232] Batiffol, op. cit., at 425.
[233] Augustine’s linkage of reception of the Eucharistic Body of Christ, and the communicants’ becoming the ecclesial body is explicit in the two homilies here under discussion, as also in the homily In Tract. Joann. 26, often cited by de Lubac in this connection. Batiffol cites Epistul. 185 and De civ. Dei 22, 19 in the same connection: op. cit., 427.
[234]The commonplace character of this view is largely due to its having been underwritten by St. Thomas ( e.g., S. T. iiia esp. q. 50, a. 2-5) who identifies the subject of the Incarnation, i.e., of the logos sarx egeneto, with the divine Son, sensu negante, not with Jesus the Christ, as Paul has it in Phil. 2:5-11, and as Chalcedon teaches. This dehistoricizing postulate controls St. Thomas’ Christology: e.g., the Logos thus understood is incapable of identification with the “one and the same Son” whose consubstantiality “with us” is taught in the Ephesian Formula of Union (D.S. *272) and again in The Symbol of Chalcedon. However, this mistake was no part of the patristic tradition: Ernest Evans Against Praxeas, 37-38, points out that Tertullian’s identification of the Logos with Jesus Christ the Lord is the presupposition of his theology, and his positive contribution to Christian theology.
[235] The universal patristic interpretation of Jn. 19:34 as the fulfillment of Gen. 2:24, wherein the New Eve is taken from the side of the “sleeping” New Adam, is at one with Paul’s recognition of the fulfillment of the “great mystery” of Gen. 2:24 in the union of Christ and the Church in Eph. 531, but, but also stresses, as Eph. 5:31 does not, the sacrificial cause of that nuptial union. The nuptiality of the covenantal relation of Yahweh to the People Israel, first asserted in Hosea, is further developed after the Exile in Isaiah and Ezekiel.
[236] Marcus Barth, Ephesians:II, 614-787, esp. 614-19, 630, 645, 669, 687-88, 707, 720, 723, 729 ff., 782. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/1, ed. G. Bromiley and T. Torrance; tr. J. W. Edwards, O. Bussey, Harold Knight (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 1961), 183-206 esp. 197-8, where the elder Barth refers to marriage as the supreme manifestation of God's covenant. G. von Rad, Old Testament Theology I, tr. D. G. M. Stalker, (New York: Harper and Row, 1963 137-39, 150, and Wisdom in Israel (Nashville and New York, Abingdon Press, 1972) 163-175, 305-311, associates the feminine symbolism of the prophetic and of the Wisdom traditions with the goodness of the created order, an order which is also historical and covenantal. See also M. Barth, op. cit., 709. K. Barth has been much criticized for his insistence that the Pauline description of the relation of wife to husband as "submission" refers to "order in history" and does not involve any inferiority: e.g., Paul Jewett, Man as Male and Female: A Study in Sexual Relationships from a Theological Point of View (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1975, 69-82, and The Ordination of Women (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1980). The "theological point of view" from which Jewett speaks is the usual rationalization of equality which reduces all differentiation to quantitative distinctions of more or less.
[237] In Paschasius’ Commentary on Matthew we read:
Sed quoniam de tribis vocabulia corporis Christi diximus, restat etiam intelligere Scripturas sanctas, doctrinamque Christi, quam saepe typice corpus Christi interpretari debere, ut unum corpus ex omnibus perficiatur, quia haec sunt dotalia, haec mystica, ut Christus et Ecclesia unum corpus solidius confirmetur; alioquin quomodo auderet apostulus Christi Ecclesiam de carne et de ossibus ejus constare? Utique hoc sacramentum velint nolint inimici, magnum est in Christo et in ecclesia, quod erunt duo in carne una, et si una caro Christus et ecclesia, jam unitas naturae amborum plenius commendatur. Quapropter illo integro, Agni carnes, nostra ut tollat peccata, mundi accipiamus; quatenus hoc Christus in nobis maneat, et nos in ipso renati unum effeciamur.
C. 7, 3 (P. L. 120:1285 E - 1286 A);. p. 41, note 101, of Corpus mysticum refers to this passage.
[238] Although the copula is absent from the Greek texts of the Institution Narratives, the liturgical exegesis of the words of Christ at the Last Supper is not subject to a higher criterion than the liturgy that has preserved them, in his memory, in his memorial, in the Mass.
[239] See endnote 1, “Appendix,” Covenantal Theology I (1996), at 677.
[240] An example of the inescapably tedious exposition of the created universe thus nominally conceived, i.e., as “placed outside its causes,” is afforded by Peter Coffey, Ontology, or the theory of being: an introduction to general metaphysics (New York: P. Smith, 1938), esp. 104ff. The medieval debate over the possibility of the creation of an eternal world is presented in St. Thomas, Siger of Brabant and St. Bonaventure On the Eternity of the World (De aeternitate mundi); tr. from the Latin, with an introd., by Cyril Vollert, Lottie H. Kendzierski [and] Paul M. Byrne (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1964). The present writer has discussed St. Thomas’ theory of creation elsewhere at some length: see endnote 279.
[242] Num. 24:17 (RSV); see Hastings’ Dictionary of the Bible (1963), at 84A-85B.
[243] In The Tempting of America. The Political Seduction of the Law (New York & London: Macmillan [Free Press], 1990), Robert Bork spoke of the “Madisonian dilemma” with reference to the early American recognition of the rational incompatibility of the public exercise of personal responsibility with the preservation of political unity: see endnote 1033, infra. The present writer, in “Liturgy and Law,” Church and State in America: Catholic Questions; ser. Fellowship of Catholic Scholars: Proceedings, Fourteenth Convention (New York: St. John’s University, 1991), 1-68, has proposed the historical resolution of that cosmologically-posed dilemma in the free praxis of sacramental marriage. In sum, this praxis is “the rule of law,” the dynamic foundational principle, the sine qua non, of the free society.
[244] .See the references in endnotes 4 and 70 supra, and 328, infra, to Joyce Little’s unpublished monograph, The Patrick Papers, a profound exploration of the Fall via the tempting of Eve by Satan.
[245] I Cor. 11:7-10.
[246] The following texts from St. Thomas’ In IV Sent. are quoted also at the beginning of this volume:
Quod sicut in hoc sacramento est duplex res sacramenti, scilicet Corpus Christi verum et mysticum; ita etiam fractio duo significat, scilicet ipsam divisionem corporis veri, quae facta est in passione, et haec significatio tangitur in Littera; et distributionem virtutis redemptionis Christi per diversa membra Ecclesiae; et hanc significationem tangit Dionysius in 3. cap. Eccl. Hierar. Et secundumn hac accipitur significatio partium secundum diversum membrorum statum. Etc. (Emphasis added.)
In IV Sent., d. 12, q. 1, a. 3, ad 3.(Moos, 521)
(Corpus Christi verum) Significat etiam quasi rem ultimam, Corpus Christi mysticum, scilicet Ecclesiam, qua propter distinctionem officiorum habet similitudinem cum toto corpore ratione distinctionis membrorum. (Emphasis added.)
In IV Sent., d. 8, q. 2, a. 1, ad 4, 3. The text of the Sentences upon which St. Thomas here comments is set out in endnote 9, infra. (Moos, 335).
[247] Henri Crouzel , the pre-eminent Origen scholar over the last half-century, has summarized Origen’s views on the femininity of the soul:
There is one conclusion to be drawn from these three nuptial themes. First, in the Presence of God and His Christ, every human soul is feminine, Wife and Mother. Its role is to receive in order to generate.
Crouzel, Origen. Translation by A. S. Worrall (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989), at 125.
This theme appears in Pope John Paul II’s encyclical, “On the Dignity and Vocation of Women : Mulieris dignitatem) Theology of the Body, at 479ff. E.g.,
In the Church every human being - male and female - is the "Bride", in that he or she accepts the gift of the love of Christ the Redeemer, and seeks to respond to it with the gift of his or her own person
Taken at the letter, this statement assumes a depersonalized church: when understood to be a mere aggregate, the Church is no longer the pre-existent Bride of Christ: thus we read that
According to the Letter to the Ephesians, the bride is the Church, just as for the Prophets the bride was Israel. She is therefore a collective subject, and not an individual person. (original emphasis)
John Paul II, The Theology of the Body, at 479.
The view of the bride of Christ, the Church, the second Eve, as a “collective subject” derogates from the personally sinful standing of the first Eve, and from the reality of original sin, and also from the immaculate sinlessness, solemnly defined, of the second Eve. It would be difficult to justify attributing sin or sinlessness to a collective subject.
Another instance of confusion over nuptial symbolism occurs in a text of a catechesis by John Paul II given at a General Audience on April 18, 1982:
Before undertaking the analysis of the further passages of the text in question (Eph. 5:21-33) we must note that within the range of the fundamental Pauline analogy―Christ and the Church, on the one hand, and man and women as spouses on the other, there is a supplementary analogy: the analogy of the head and the body. This analogy confers a chiefly ecclesiological significance on the statement we analyzed: the Church as formed by Christ; it is constituted by him in its essential part, as body is to the head. The union of body with the head is above all of an organic nature. To put it simply, it is the somatic union of the human organism.
Ibid., 314-315. Emphasis added
With all due respect to His Holiness, the ‘head-body” analogy is founded on the Father’s headship of the Trinity (I Cor. 11:3), of which the headship of Christ over the Church, and of the husband over the wife, are created, historical analogues. This latter analogue has nothing to do with physiology: Augustine identifies it with the union of bride and bridegroom (Sermo 341, 12, and many other places), where the bridegroom is the head in a sense given substance by our Lord’s exercise of headship over humanity and over the Church in the offering of the One Sacrifice: viz., as the source of the free unity of the Church and consequently of mankind which, as its head, and precisely by the Sacrificial exercise of his headship, he has redeemed.
Fortunately, this error need be pursued no further for, a dozen years later in his “Letter to Families” (1994) John Paul II effectively distanced himself from its confusion. Ten years thereafter, less than a year before his death, in the "Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Collaboration of Men and Women in the Church and in the World” (2004), he did so definitively, affirming our nuptial imaging of God in a context unmistakably sacramental and Eucharistic. It is similarly unfortunate that a comparable confusion afflicts two recent encyclicals of Benedict XVI, in both of which Jesus the Lord is said to have generated (genuit) the Church. .
[248] Philo describes in sponsal terms the unity of the noetic and aesthetic dimensions of the mind; Origen follows him in this, but emphasizes the Spirit’s role in providing the freedom of that unity: see Henri Crouzel, Théologie de l'image de dieu chez Origène; col. Théologie 34 (Paris: Aubier, Éditions Montaigne, 1956), and "L'anthropologie d'Origène," Archē e Telos (Milano: Vita e Pensiero, 1981) 36-49. De Lubac reveals evidence of this Platonizing influence in St. Bernard’s use of nuptial imagery:
With Bernard, the figure of Jesus is rendered more concrete (than with Origen); nevertheless his sensible humanity does not halt the movement to traverse it to reach the Word.73 With him, as with Origen, if Christ is the Bridegroom of the Church, it is the Word that is the bridegroom of the soul.
73 This point has been recalled by Dom A. Le Bail and Dom J. Leclercq (Revue bénédictine 63, 829.) The “new religious sensibility” which one sometimes explains by attributing it to Bernard is later. This reputation of Bernard “rests in part upon apocrypha issued in the 13th and 15th centuries” (Leclercq).
De Lubac, Medieval Exegesis II, at 161.
In “L'anthropologie d'Origène," here cited, Crouzel disagrees with de Lubac, writing that for Origen it is “in the Presence of God and His Christ”―not of the nonhistorical Word as distinguished from the historical Christ, which distinction Crouzel finds alien to Origen’s Christology―that “every human soul is feminine, Wife and Mother.” Origen understands the Logos to be in a primordial, created, and irrevocable union (Henōsis) with the one created nous who, alone, by reason of that union, does not fall but retains his primordial integrity, his Henōsis with the Logos. However, with the Fall, and the degradation of the primordially good creation that constitutes the fallen terrestrial world, this uniquely created and therefore corporeal nous becomes the soul of Christ at the time of his Kenōsis, his Incarnation, his salvific entry into our fallen history. Origen’s grip on the communication of idioms is very firm. He is not to be enlisted in the later Logos-sarx or Logos-anthrōpos Christologies, which cannot sustain the communication of idioms. In fact the seventeen hundred and fifty years since his death has found no adequate statement of the communication of idioms other than that which Origen has provided: the free unity in Jesus Christ the Lord of the Personal fullness of divinity and the Personal fullness of humanity in that unique subsistence in both substances who is the primordial Jesus Christ the Lord, as was affirmed eight times by the Symbol of Chalcedon.
Origen’s Christology of the Henōsis has been much criticized by those who wish to read it as an analysis of the condition of possibility of the communication of idioms, but from the outset of his composition of the Peri Archon, Origen refused such cosmological endeavors as simply futile; they correspond to nothing in history. He built his theology on the faith of the historical Church, i.e., the apostolic tradition that Jesus Christ is Lord. Those scholars who confuse those quests for necessary reasons with theology immediately discover that their project is impossible, for theology thus understood is then immobilized ab initio: We have seen J. N. D. Kelly and John A. McGuckin, Cyril of Alexandria: The Christological Controversy: its history, theology, and texts (Leiden, New York: E. J. Brill, 1994), [hereafter, Cyril of Alexandria] agree that the standing task of Christology thus conceived is that of accounting for the Incarnation―the mysterium fidei which, radically ex nihilo, has no prior possibility and can be given no explanation.
The subject of Augustine’s Sermo 341 is always the historical Word, Jesus the Christ, who is mentioned in Scripture in three ways, as divine, as the man Jesus who is God, and as the bridegroom, the head, who is one flesh with the bridal Church. He speaks of his assumption of the flesh, but is careful to affirm that Jesus is fully man and fully God. He distinguishes very carefully the Personal unity of Jesus the Lord, and the nuptial unity of the One Flesh instituted by his sacrificial fulfillment of his office of headship of the Church on the cross and on the altar, the latter theme spelled out with brilliant precision in De Civitate Dei x, 6. (6, x??). His view of the Jesus the Bridegroom agrees with that of the Symbol of Chalcedon, and with a common patristic insistence that the entire subject of Scripture is the mystery of the union of Christ and the Church in One Flesh. Augustine has no notion of a disincarnate eternal Word available to become the “subject of the incarnation.” In short, his Christology anticipates the solemn definitions of the Ephesian Formula of Union and the Symbol of Chalcedon.
It is dogmatically defined and settled at Chalcedon, that the Personal unity of Christ as at once that of God and man: Jesus is Personally consubstantial with the Father in his divinity and with us in his humanity. The Catholic tradition, at once liturgical, scriptural, doctrinal and moral, has no other subject; particularly, the Church’s tradition knows nothing of a non-human Word, a Word not consubstantial with us in our humanity. However time-honored, the nonhistorical reading of Jn. 1:14 cannot be maintained in the face of Chalcedon’s stress, over and again, upon the Personal unity, the single subsistence in two distinct and unmixed natures, of the Eternal Son of the Eternal Father who is the human, historical Son of the Theotokos, whose Son has the human Name of “Jesus,” and who cannot but be a human Person.
The one and the same Son subsists in the substantial Trinity, and in the substantial One Flesh which is its Image. There is no other Son than this Jesus, at once the Son of the Father and of Mary. The persistent effort of speculative theologians to transcend the historicity of the revelation that is in Christ, to reach an ideal status quo ante, prior to all history, proceeds from the cosmological mindset, the sarkic consciousness that is entirely pagan, which spontaneously flees from history as incapable of mediating the divine kalokagathon, the ideal unity of the beautiful and the good.
The Symbol of Chalcedon turns the Catholic consciousness away from that perennial historical pessimism, which consequently has no theological legitimacy. The excogitation of a pre-human Word, an immanent Son, is theologically forbidden, as false to the historical tradition, liturgical, scriptural and doctrinal. of the Catholic Church. The Johannine Logos, like the Synoptic Logos, is Jesus the Christ, the dogmatic affirmation of whose Personal unity is the product of four centuries of struggle to free the faith of the Church from the cosmological imagination formed by Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics. The Symbol of Chalcedon was known to St. Bernard, although he did not understand its application to nuptial symbolism, nor did St. Thomas, to whom the Latin translation of the first four Councils was available only from ca. 1260: see J.-P. Torrell, O.P., Saint Thomas Aquinas: vol. 1, The Person and His Work; tr. Robert Royal (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1996), at 101, 103. In our own time, de Lubac, Camelot and Bouyer display a similar failure, with far less excuse, to grasp the implications of the Son’s consubstantiality “cum nobis.”
[249] See Paul McPartlan, op. cit., esp. 92ff. McPartlan would resolve the problem he poses, that of the personal interrelation of the members of the Church, by substituting John Zizioulas’ notion of a “corporate Christ,” for the nuptial union in “One Flesh” of Christ and the Church that grounds de Lubac’s ecclesiology, rather than by developing the latencies of the nuptial symbolism which Zizioulas rejects. “Corporate” can no more connote or account for the free community of the members of the Church than can “corpus.” The Trinity is the unique model of the free community: its created image cannot be other substantial, nor other than nuptial, for no other free historical substance exists.
[250] In this matter, de Lubac is simply inconsistent. In the first place, he does not accept the monist notion of “person” implicit in his supposition that the soul, feminized as such, has an immediate bridal relation to the Lord. It is possible that his view of the soul as bridal is no more than a veiled intimation of the nuptial quality of the intercommunion of the members of the Church with each other and with the risen Lord within the worship of the Church. However this may be, de Lubac sees very clearly the liturgical ground of the unity of the members of the Church: he insists in many places upon this patristic datum,: e.g.:
Pour que l’homme pût manger le Pain des anges, le Roi des anges s’est fait homme68, et comme il avait assumé notre corps fragile, maintenant il nous assume en son corps immortel69. Or, puisqu’il est la tête de ce corps unique dont les communiants sont autant de membres, l’incorporation de ces membres réalise tout la fois l’union de chacun à la tête et leur union à tous entre eux. D’un mot, elle est “unio corporis in capite70 ”.
68 Augustin, Sermo 194, n. 2 (P. L., 38 1016). Prosper, In Psalmum 110 (51, 322 a). Césaire, Sermo 202, n. 2 (Morin, p. 272), Pseudo-Bède, In Psalmum 49 (P. L., 93, 699 A), Remi d’Auxerre, Enarrationes in psalmos (131, 155 a-b et 312 c). Cf. Hériger, (139, 188 a-b). Bonavenure (sic) In cena Domini, Sermo 1: « Ipse secundum divinitatem fuit cibus angelorum, et ideo necesse fuit quod fieret nobis agnus per assumptionem nostrae humanitatis, ut sic in sacramento fieret cibus noster. ». (Q., t. ix, p. 248)
69 Fauste de Riez, homélie Magnitudo, in fine: « et qui corpus fragilitatis nostrae assumpserat, nos in corpus suae immrtalitatis assumat » (P. L., 30,176 a). Pseudo-Primasius, In Hebr.: « Sicut communicavit Christus nostrae substantiae per assumptionem hominis, sic et nos participes ejus sumus per assumptionem corporis et sanguinis ejus. » (68, 702 c).
70 Werner de Sainte-Blaise, (?) Sermo in cena Domini: « In specie vero panis invisibile de caelo descendit, et unionem cororis in capite, in specie panis voluit designari, sicut ait Apostolus: Unus panis, unum corpus sumus omnes. » (P. L., 157, 911 b), Cf. Sermo de resurrectione: « Idcirco voluit Christus a nobis manducari, ut nos sibi incorporaret: hoc est sacramentum corporis Christi, et res sacramenti corporis Christi… » ( 929 a).
Corpus mysticum, at 202.
On the other hand, de Lubac’s ecclesiology makes no clear provision for “leur union à tous entre eux”, a union which he has earlier (at 196) described as a “union résserré par le sacrement.“ The union is factual; but it is a fact inconsistent with an immediate, because bridal, relation of each soul to “her” Lord. It may be that de Lubac links the supposed failure by Paul to synthesize the “Pauline metaphors” to a failure fully to appreciate the nuptial union of the soul to Christ. It is more likely that it is rather his own reading of Paul, his own failure fully to grasp the substantial level of the metaphysical unity (l’unité réelle) of the One Flesh, that underlies his inability to recognize the Pauline Head-Body synthesis for what it is, the free substantial unity of the One Flesh of Christ and the Church; see the excerpt from Corpus mysticum, pp. 103-04, in 118, supra.
[251] For an example of the standard patristic reference to Didache ix, 1-5, see the text of Augustine, excerpted from Corpus mysticum, in endnote 66supra.
[252] Origen’s reading of the Song of Songs supposes that the soul is a Church in miniature and a bride of Christ in a secondary sense of the term, and also presupposes the immateriality of the soul qua spiritual, to the point of its irrelevance to the masculinity or femininity of its associated body. This dehistoricized anthropology is accepted on occasion by Augustine and systematically by St. Thomas, but it finds no support in the Church’s liturgy, in scripture or in the doctrinal tradition. In the second article cited in endnote 86 supra, the present writer has contrasted the Thomist anthropology with its biblical corrective.
[253] In the third century, Plotinus systematized the Neoplatonism of Philo and Ammonius Saccas by a rigorously deterministic and entirely incongruous application of Aristotelian logic to the Platonic hylemorphism of the Philonic tradition. The consequent meld of Platonism and Aristotelianism could understand “dialectic” neither as Plato had, viz., as the historical association faute de mieux of mutually exclusive concepts to form affirmations of merely practical value―concepts whose adequate reconciliation, basically that of the one and the many, could only be ideal and therefore historically ineffable, nor as Aristotle had done, as a metaphysically underwritten act-potency analysis of logically correct affirmations and negations of a discourse whose concepts were not mutually exclusive but related as act and potency. Under the aegis of Plotinus’ conversion of Plato’s fatalist historical pessimism to historical determinism, the Neoplatonic dialectic began, inevitably, to lose its transcendent reference, and thus began to be understood in binary terms, as logical reasoning had been understood by the Eleatics, viz., as the association of mutually exclusive concepts in a format that could be governed finally only by their reduction to the cold abstractions of mathematical symbols. This return to the ancient mathematical notation of understanding, perhaps anticipated by Plato’s late identification of the “forms” with “numbers,” would henceforth form the consciousness which we now label Modernity. With the decline of the Latin West from the fifth century onward, and the nearly universal breakdown of the Latin culture, the dialectical link that Neoplatonism had precariously maintained with the transcendent was lost. From the Carolingian revival of learning to the high Middle Ages, the Latin West knew no metaphysics, with the solitary exception of the lonely and unavailing effort of John Scotus Eriugena to systematize the Christian Neoplatonism of the Pseudo-Dionysius.
Insofar as the Latin quaerens intellectum was ordered systematically in this period, the system in view was juridical under the thrust of the revival of the study of the Roman Law at Bologna in the tenth century, and at Montpellier and Oxford in the twelfth. From this time juridical methodology began to influence the organization of theology in the cathedral schools in the form of the quaestio, which inadvertently introduced into theology a paradoxical quest, typified by Anselm of Bec’s Cur Deus Homo, for antecedently necessary reasons which might ground the free truth of the faith, and also by Abelard’s .Sic et Non, which posed the same question of the integration of the plurality of doctrinal affirmation in the absence of any metaphysical resource. The influence of Abelard upon the Victorines introduced the “scholasticism” of the High Middle Ages, which culminated in St. Thomas’ application of the Aristotelian act-potency analysis to Catholic theology.
[254] St. Thomas had anticipated this conceptualism in principle: for example, in his merely logical, non-metaphysical analysis of the relation of substance and accident in the Eucharistic species:
Obj 3.: Praeterea, quae sunt secundum se divisa, numquam unum eorum fit alterum: sicut albedo numquam fit nigredo, sed subjectum albedinis fit subjectum nigredinis, ut dicitur in I Physic4. (n. 4: c.5, no. 2, c. 6, n. 2; S. Th. Lect 10, 11.) Sed, sicut duae formae contrariae sunt secundum se divisae, utpote principia formales differentiae existentes, ita duae materiae signatae sunt secundum se divisae, utpote existentes principium materialis divisionis. Ergo, non potest esse quod haec materiae panis fiat haec materia qua individuatur corpus Christi. Et ita non potest esse quod substantia huius panis convertatur in substantiam corporis Christi.
Ad 3: dicendum quod virtute agentis finiti non potest forma in formam mutari, nec materia in materiam. Sed virtute agentis infiniti, quod habet actionem in totum ens, potest talis conversio fieri: quia utrique formae et utique materiae est communis natura enties; et id quod entitatis est in una, potest auctor entis convertere ad id quod est entitatis in altera, sublato eo per quod ab illa distingueabatur.
S. T. iiia, q. 75, a. 4, ad 3
It may be worth remarking that nonetheless the Eucharistic resolution of the one-many dilemma perennially posed by this arid rationalism had long since been recognized: de Lubac quotes a couplet by Odo, second abbot of Cluny, dating from the first half of the tenth century:
… Hinc
placet hoc munus quod fit de pluribus unum,
Corpus huic capiti, caput inde cohaeret et illi 99
99 P.L. 137: 376 A.
Corpus mysticum at 208, quoting Odo’s Liber de corpore.
[255] Boniface VIII’s denial (quoted in the headnote of Denziger-Schönmetzer §*870) of any theocratic content in Unam Sanctam rests upon his subscription to the Augustinian-Gelasian distinction between the “two that rule the world,” (DS §*347) The same may be said of the assertion of the unlimited moral authority of the papacy by Innocent III. viz., the moral authority of the Holy See relative to the coercive power of the imperial throne. Boniface’s critics are less than clear on that crucial distinction between moral authority and political power It had long been confused, at least in imagination, by the common reference to these irreducibles as members of a single category, i.e., as “duae potestates,” a labelling which, if read at the letter, could not but put a coercive papacy at odds with the coercive empire. The confusion is aided by the equation of authority with power in Roman law, however mitigated in practice. The subject is surveyed magisterially by de Lubac in “”Political Augustinism?,”” Theological Fragments, 235-386.
[257] St. Thomas’ response to this objection does not deny that the res tantum is the Corpus Christi mysticum, but may seem rather to confirm it, observing,
Sicut autem se habet virtus Spiritus Sancti ad aquam baptismi, ita se habet Corpus Christi verum ad species pani et vini. Unde species pani et vini non efficiunt aliquid nisi virtute corporis Christi veri.
S. T. iiia, q. 73, a. 1, ad 2. But see S. T. iiia, q. 73, a. 1, ad 3, .in endnote 28, supra, exerpted here for the reader’s convenience:
Nam in sacramento Eucharistiae id quod est res et sacramentum, est in ipsa materia; id autem quod est res tantum, est in suscipiente, scilicet, gratia quae confertur. In baptismo autem utrumque est in suscipiente: et character, qui est res et sacramentum, et gratia remissionis peccatorum, quod est res tantum. Et eadem ratio est de aliis sacramentis.
S. T. iiia, q. 73, a. 1, ad 3.
On the other hand, although there is here no explicit reference to the Church as an infallible product of the Eucharistic signing, neither is this language inconsistent with the “duplex res sacramenti,” wherein the “Corpus Christi mysticum” is caused by the signing of the “Corpus Christi verum,” thus, caused “virtute corporis Christi.” Similarly, in his response to the next or third objection in q. 73, St. Thomas asserts that the res tantum of the Eucharist is “in suscipiente, scilicet gratia quae confertur.” Although here St. Thomas again appears to limit the res et sacramentum to the “Corpus Christi verum,” and the res tantum to the grace given the communicant, equivalently the “effectus huius sacramenti” of q. 73, a. 6, thus saying nothing of the Church as an effect of the Eucharistic signing, it may nonetheless be argued that one is then free to ignore, as the sacramentum, res sacramenti paradigm does, the later distinction between the Church and the communicant’s free aggregration in the Church. Unfortunately, in this passage, the reference is explicitly to the later tri-partite medieval paradigm.
While it must also be remembered that over against a meliorative interpretation of these texts stands the forthright relegation of the Church to the res tantum which we have seen St. Thomas accepting from Peter Lombard’s Sentences in endnote 10, supra; St. Thomas does not explicitly depart from this position where one might expect him to do so. But, once more, the link between the anagogic Church, viz., the fulfilled Kingdom of God, and its cause, the Eucharistic representation of the One Sacrifice, is such as to warrant understanding the anagogic Church (the “unitas Ecclesiae in praedestinatis, vocatis, justificatis, et glorificatis”) to be the res tantum of the Eucharist, its final and eternal effect: we have seen de Lubac interpreting the same passage from the Sentences in precisely this fashion (see endnote 96, supra.). The causal linkage is obviously historical, because it is sacramental: it does not entail any dehistoricization of the Church. That would follow only were the historicity of the Eucharistic representation of the Sacrifice denied, but that error is not in issue here.
While one may regard as abstract and artificial the later, post-Berengarian, metheologically expressed conceptual distinction (as between res et sacramentum and res tantum) of the communicant’s Communion in the Eucharist from the Church through whose integrating worship his union with the risen Christ is achieved, that distinction does prevent the otherwise all-too-facile assignment to the historical Church of the imperceptibility proper to the communicant’s personal Communion with the risen Christ, and it thus prevents as well the dehistoricizing of the Church, along with the dehistoricization of personal participation in the Church’s historical worship that their literal identification would entail. The historical and visible Church is presupposed in personal Eucharistic Communion: only thereby is personal Eucharistic worship historical, while the converse is not true. Consequently, there is no alternative to the Augustinian duplex res sacramenti, the One Flesh, in which the Church, as the second Eve, is the immediate effect of the efficacious signing by the Eucharistic corpus verum: therefore, in the language of the later tri-partite sacramental paradigm, the Church must be included within the Eucharistic res et sacramentum as an effect ex opere operato of that signing. At the same time, a simple identification of the One Flesh of Christ and his Church with the res et sacramentum of the Eucharist, thus as distinct from the res tantum that is the fruit of personal participation in that worship, entails the risks of the logical dissociation of Church from communicant that de Lubac has pointed out. The solely possible resolution of this quandary is a resolute, methodologically rigorous emphasis upon the phenomenological, and therefore historical, Eucharistically ordered, free unity of sacramentum tantum, res et sacramentum, res tantum, and a consequent rejection of any rationalization of their meaning. This methodological rigor cannot avoid concluding to the sacramental objectivity of history precisely as Eucharistically ordered.
[258] This is a patristic commonplace: see Corpus mysticum, 80.
[259] Corpus mysticum, at 196-197, citing Gandulph of Bologna.
[260] Perhaps the clearest analysis of the Berengerian error is summed up in the description of it as “impanationist,” proposed by Guitmund of Aversa. As is pointed out inVolume II, Ch. 6, impanationism entails a denial of the objectivity, the historical efficacity, of the Eucharistic representation, and thus a reduction to subjectivity of the res of that representation; only the sacramentum remains, which has lost its historical efficacity. This had progressed far enough under the Carolingians to prompt Paschasius’ defense of Eucharistic realism.. We have seen de Lubac’s defense of Berengarius’ basic orthodoxy (Corpus mysticum, 164-65) ; Guitmund, in describing Berengarius’ Eucharistic doctrine as impanationist, may be read to confirm that judgement by regarding Berengarius reduction of objective sacramental efficacy to interiority as an error rather than a heresy. De Lubac’s acute analysis of Berengarius’ situation allows for a devolution of an initial error into a heresy during the controversy following upon his publication of De Sacra Coena in 1073.
[261] Ibid., at 276ff.
[262] See the discussion in Covenantal Theology, vol. II, Ch. 6, endnote 173, pp. 630-31 of the 1996 edition; cf. Corpus mysticum at 276.
[263] De Lubac, quoting and commenting upon Augustine’s In Joannem:
« Caro enim mea, inquit, vere est cibus, et sanguis meus vere est potus. » Cum enim cibo et potu id appetunt omnes, ut non esuriant nec sitiant, hoc veraciter non praestat nisi iste cibus et potus, qui eos a quibus sumitur immortales et incorruptibiles facit; id est, societas ipsa sanctorum, ubi pax erit et unitas plena atque perfecta. Propterea quippe, sicut etiam ante nos hoc intellexerunt homines Dei, Dominus noster Jesus Christus corpus et sanguinem suum in eis rebus commendavit, quae ad unum aliquid rediguntur ex multis, nam aliud in unum ex multis granis confit, aliud in unum ex multis acinis confluit51.
51 In Joannem, tract. 26, c. 6, n. 17 (P. L. 35, 1614). Cité notamment par le Pseudo-Bède (92, 718-719), Alcuin (100, 845 C), Raban Maur (110, 494 A), Haimon, Homilia 62 (118, 349 A-B), Rupert (169, 482), Alger (180, 794, 795 ; underlineation added.
Remarquons le nominatif : « societas ipsa sanctorum ». Ces mots no sont pas complément, mais sujet. C’est elle, cette societè sainte, état bienheureux, où va notre désir, qui est en même temps notre nourriture et notre breuvage : « Hunc itaque cibum et potum, societatem vult intelligi corporis et membrorum sorum, quod est sancta Ecclesia in praedestinatis52. »
52 In Joannem, tract. 26, c. 6, n. 15 (P. L. 35, 1614). Augustin ajoute: « huius rei sacramentum, id est unitatis corporis et sanguinis Christi… de mensa dominica sumitur… Res vero ipsa cujus sacramentum est, omni homini ad vitam (sumitir) » ; cité par Abelard (178, 1532) et par la Glose (114, 384 A) Cf. Fulgence, Epistula 12, n. 24-26, à propos des enfants qui mourent sans avoir reçu L’Eucharistie. – Et c’est encore cettte même « Congregatio societasque sanctorum » qui constitue le sacrifice offert à Dieu par son Grande Prêtre : De Civitate Dei, 1 . 10, c. 6 (41m 283-284) .
De Lubac, Corpus Mysticum, at 198.
In this connection, Paul McPartlan cites de Lubac’s use of Augustine’s Enarr. in Ps. 68 (P.L. 36:859) in support of his contention, which is also that of de Lubac, that Augustine was interested less in the Eucharistic consecration of the species than in the effect of Eucharistic reception upon the communicant, but that in the post-Berengarius situation this Augustinian emphasis was not responsive to the new theological interest in countering Berengarius’ perceived denial of Eucharistic realism:
What distinguished the second phase was the separation of terms which Augustine distinguished only subtly, namely ‘sumere Christum' and ‘sumi a Christo’, and the substitution of a static view of the Eucharist for Augustine’s dynamic view centered upon the fruitfullness of communion. In this changed context, the problem of interpreting Augustine’s texts became ‘insoluble’, because they were asked questions which they could not answer. With regard to the communion of the unworthy (e.g. ‘schismatics, heretics [and] the excommunicated’), the question asked was whether they truly consecrated the elements. ‘Do they have the Body of the Lord upon their altars?’ If so then their reception of him automatically followed. Augustine looked rather to Christ’s action in communion. ‘They approach the holy table, they receive the sacrament. What, however, does the Lord do?’ His answer is simple: Christ does not receive them. ‘Non admittit ad corpus suum.”
McPartlan, The Eucharist Makes the Church (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1993), at 85.
Augustine’s Eucharistic doctrine, as has frequently been noted, was phenomenologically rather than analytically oriented: he was concerned for the experienced effect of Eucharistic worship, a concern which took for granted the realism upon whose defense the theologians after Berengarius had need to be analytically intent. But Augustine certainly did not suppose the sinful recipient of the Eucharist, whose baptism was not in issue, to be no longer a member of the Church: He is not to be read as inadvertently reinventing the Donatist error whose correction had cost him such labor: he well knew the Church to be a Church of sinners. McPartlan notes (op. cit., at 73, n. 128) that de Lubac definitively rejected any equation of the Eucharist with the Church: the corpus de Lubac has here in view here is the corpus verum of the later theology, i:e:; the contested “real presence” of the High Priest and the Victim of the One Sacrifice. Yet neither is Augustine to be read as a ‘receptionist’ in the Calvinist pattern: there are too many passages in which he asserts the conversion of the elements to be vi verborum, effected by the words of consecration. In the passage McPartlan cites, Augustine must be read as ‘following his pen.’ He has been writing of the action of the Eucharistic Lord upon those who worship in the Church: they become one with him; their baptismal membership in the Church is continually nourished and enhanced by their reception of the Eucharistic food and drink. McPartlan’s question as to the sinner’s reception of the Eucharistic is analytic: it arises out of an entirely distinct interest from that first expressed in I Cor. 11:29-31: Paul’s comment on the sinner’s sinful reception of the Eucharist is also phenomenological: such a recipient of the Body and Blood of Christ brings a judgment upon himself, death rather than life. Augustine made a comparable observation in remarking that the blessed and the damned have the same vision of the risen Christ: ‘as you see him, so you have him.’ Neither statement responds to an analytical interest, for both refer to the experienced vision of the risen Lord as either salvific or damnific.
[264] The text here referenced is the present writer’s translation of the continuation of McPartlan’s quotation of de Lubac’s comment upon Augustine’s In Joannem, tract 26, c. 6, n. 15., ut supra, endnote 262. De Lubac’s text reads as follows:
Remarquons le nominatif: « societas ipsa sanctorum. » Ces mots ne sont pas complément, mais sujet. C’est elle, cette societé sainte, état bienheureux où va notre désir, qui est en même temps notre nourriture et notre breuvage: “hunc itaque cibum et potum, societatem vult intelligi corporis et membrorum suorum, quod est sancta Ecclesia in praedestinatis ».52 La terme dernier coincide avec la source. L’Église rejoint en perfection le Christ. Les deux res sacramenti n’en font qu’une, et dans cette participation double et unique, chacun trouve la vie éternelle… « Perfectum est nobis corpus, perficiamur in corpore53 ». Le sens profond de cette doctrine, et jusqu’à son sérieux, ont été méconnues par des apologistes aux préoccupations trop courtes. C’est ainsi que le Cardinal du Perron, exagérant la portée d’une remarque d’ailleurs exact, n’y voit qu’un expédient auquel Augustin aurait eu recours pour déguiser le mystère de la présence réele en s’adressant à des auditeurs non initiés.54 On peut y dénoncer, avec plus de fondement, une insuffisance d’analyse. Mais ce ne serait guère commettre un contresens moins lourd que de croire à un confusion, encore plus à un exclusion, alors que, selon une conduite mentale habituelle à saint Augustin, il s’agit d’une mouvante continuité55. Sans doute on ne saurait demander certaines précisions conceptuelles à cette étonnant mélange― si parfaitement réussi, si un, si peu “mélange”,― d’exégèse doctrinale, de predication familière et d’élévation lyrique56. Les textes de ce genre se défendront toujours mal, à eux seuls, contre les interprétations déformantes de ceux que Rupert,à propos de ce passage même, appelait “nimium festini lectores et immaturi doctores, »57 de même qu’ils ne suffiront jamais aux besoins d’un exposé didactique. Encore faudrait-il se demander si ces déficits ne seraient pas la rançon d’une plenitude de pensée qui n’est pas de l’ordre du discours et dont seul un tour elliptique et paradoxal peut transmettre le sentiment.58 (emphasis added).
52 In Joannem, tract 26, c. 6, n. 15 (P.L. 35, 1614). Augustin ajoute: « Hujus rei sacramentum, id est unitatis corporis et sanguinis Christi… de mensa dominica sumitur… Res vero ipsa cujus sacramentum est, omni himini ad vitam (sumitur) »; cité par Abélard (178, 1532) et par la Glose (113, 384 A). Cf Fulgence, Epistula 12, n. 24-26, à propos des enfantrs qui meurent sans avoir reçu l’Eucharistie (P.L. 65, 390-392).― et c’est encore cette même « congregatio societasque sanctorum » qui constitue le sacrifice offert à Dieu par son Grand Prêtre: De Civitate Dei, I, 20, c. 6 (41, 283-284).
53 In Psalmum 39, n. 12, sur les mots « corpus autem perfectisti mihi » (P. L. 36, 442.) Adrévald de Fleury (134, 952 A).
54 Examen du livre de sieur du Plessis (les diverses œuveres…, 3e ed., 1633, p. 1100
55 Toute précision n’est d’ailleurs pas absente de la pensée et du langage d’Augustin. Cf. Sermo 227, « Si bene accepistis, vos estis quod accepistis, » (P. L. 38, 1100) ou Sermo 272: « Si ergo vos estis corpus Christi et membra, … mysterium vestrum accipietis. » (38, 1247).
56 Un tel texte illustre à merveille l’appréciation de Fénelon dans la Lettre sur les occupations de l’Academie , ch. iv: « Saint Augustin est tout ensemble sublime et populaire; il remonte aux plus hauts principes par les tours les plus familiers » (œuvres, Paris, t. VI, 624).
57 In Joannem, 1, 6 (P. L. 169, 482). Hughes Métel, Ad Gerlandum (188, 1273-1274).
58 Certes, nous ne voudrions pas dire que dans sa synthèse explicite Augustin intègre avec la même bonheur tous les éléments scripturaires et traditionels….L’Église, en toute cas, reconnait sa doctrine dans la passage que nous commentons, et elle lui fait un place de choix dans sa liturgie, le faisant lire au 3e nocturne de l’Office du Saint-Sacrement.―Cf. P. Th. Camelot, Realisme et symbolisme dans la doctrine eucharistique de saint Augustine (Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques, 1947, pp. 394-410).
Corpus mysticum, at 198-200.
De Lubac anticipates this commentary in an earlier passage:
Car le corps du Christ qu’est l’Église n’est point autre que ce corps et ce sang du mystère. Il n’y a point là, à proprement parler, de jeu de mots.69 Par l’Eucharistie chacun s’insère in toute réalité dans l’unique corps. Elle en unit entre eux tous les membres, comme elle les unit tous à leur commune Tête.
69 Cf. M. Comeau, Les Prédications pascales de Saint Augustin (Recherches de Science Religieuse, 1933, p. 268) : « Cest donc en jouant sur le mot corps, pris successivement en des sens différents, qu’Augustin construit son sermon » : Sur communicare » dans l’antiquité chrétienne : H. Pétré, « Caritas » étude sur le vocabulaire latin de la charité chrétienne, pp. 267-269.
De Lubac, Corpus mysticum, at 33.
He is surely correct in denying that there is here a “play on words” for that would reduce what is said to triviality. Nonetheless, it is evident that Amalarius and those who disputed with him had something other than mere univocity in view they spoke of the corpus Christi: it is beyond discussion that the Eucharistic body of Christ, which is “given for you” cannot be identified with the Church, which is instituted by that One Sacrifice. This does not at all defeat the unity of Christ with his Church: their nuptial union, the personal irreducibility of bridegroom to bride, as of bride to bridegroom, is the prerequisite of their free unity in One Flesh, which is a substantial unity, that in which Jesus subsists as its head, the source of its free nuptial unity, and in which the Church subsists as the glory of that head. The hermeneutical problem arises when Paul’s usual use of this term with reference to the ecclesial “body” is assimilated to the liturgical use of “body” in the Eucharistic Words of Institution which he recites in I Cor. 11:24. This confusion induces the further confusion of assimilating the “one flesh” of Christ and the Church to the unity of a “body.” Neither de Lubac nor Camelot entirely avoid this confusion: short of a systematic recognition of the free substanitiality of the One Flesh, it has no resolution.
[265] See endnotes 119 and 248, supra, and the quotation from Corpus Mysticum, 35, in endnote 72, supra.
[266] See Corpus mysticum at 129ff., where de Lubac has noted the intrusion into theology of the juridical sense of Head of Church in its application to the Pope.
[267] It is curious that it is the German Catholic historians of Eucharistic doctrinal development, viz., Karl Adam, Eucharistielehre des heiligen Augustinus; ser. Forschungen zur Christlichen Literatur- und Dogmengeschichte, VII Band, 1 Heft (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1908), Joseph Geiselman, Die Eucharistielehre der Vorscholastik; ser. Forschungen zur Christlichen Literatur-und Dogmengeschichte XV Band, 1/3 Heft (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1926)], Burkhard Neunheuser, O.S.B., Eucharistie im Mittelalter und Neuzeit; ser. Handbuch der Dogmengeschichte; eds. Michael Schmaus, Aloys Grillmeier, Leo Scheffczyk und Michael Seybold: (1 Teil) Band IV, Faszikel 4b (Freiburg, Basel, Wien: Herder, 1963), Johnnes Betz, Eucharistie in der Schrift und Patristik; ibid., Fazikel 4a; (Freiburg, Basel, Wien: Herder, 1979), and Wilhelm Gessel, op. cit., who have most doubted Augustine’s Eucharistic orthodoxy, while the English Anglican scholar, J. N. D. Kelly, affirms it without reservation; see his Doctrines, 446-50, 454f. A survey of the relevant texts confirms Kelly’s judgment. Reference has been made to F. Morione’s collection of Augustine’s Eucharistic texts; see also the earlier writers cited in Vol. II, Ch. 6, endnote 22, and Ch. 4, endnote 39, also Pierre Batiffol’s resumé of Augustine’s Eucharistic doctrine, reported in endnote 320, infra, and its classic summation by Th. Camelot, O.P., cited in endnote 11.
[268] De Lubac’s text:
Dans la pensée de toute l'antiquité chrétienne, Eucharistie et église sont liées. Chez saint Augustin, sous l'influence de la controverse donatiste, cette liaison s'accentue avec un force toute particulière, et il en va de même chez les écrivains latins des VIIe, VIIIe et IXe siècles. Pour eux comme pour Augustin, dont ils dépendent tous directement ou par intermédiaires, et dont ils reproduisent incessamment les formules, l'Eucharistie est rapportée à l'Église comme la cause à l'effet, comme le moyen à la fin, en même temps que comme le signe à la réalité. Or, ce passage du sacramentum à la virtus sacramenti ou de la species visibilis à la res ipsa1 se fait chez eux d'un si rapide élan, l'accent est tellement mis sur l'église que si, dans un exposé concernant le mystère Eucharistique, se rencontre sans plus le mot « corps du Christ, » c'est souvent non l'Eucharistie, mais l'église que ce mot désigne.2
1Ainsi Alcuin (P. L., 100, 834A), Leidrade (99, 867B), Hetton (105, 763B), Raban Maur (107, 317-318; 112, 89A), Florus (119, 78A), Ratramne (121, 150A et 161), Adrévald de Fleury (124, 950C), etc. Cf. Bède, In Ioannem: « Sed quod pertinet ad virtutem sacramenti, non quod pertinet ad visibile sacramentum » (92, 717D).
2Ainsi Bède, In Leviticum (P. L. 91, 334A), Raban Maur De clericorum institutione (107, 318B), In evangelia, hom. 64 (110, 269-270), Walafrid Strabon, De rebus ecclesiasticis, c. 16 (114, 936C) etc. Encore, S. Thomas, In Ioannem, c. 6, 1, 6, n. 7.
Corpus mysticum, at 23.
This programmatic paragraph is followed by a currently highly significant clarification:
Voici par example saint Ildefonse de Tolède (d. 669). Au chapître cxxxvii de son De cognitione baptismi, il entreprend de commenter cette affirmation de la foi: “Panis est corpus Christi.” Cherchant l’intelligence, la foi se demande: “Quomodo est corpus eius?” Ildefonso alors de repondre:
Quod videtur, speciem habet corporalem: quod intelligitur, fructum habet spiritalem. Corpus ergo Christi si vis intelligere, Apostolum audi dicentem fidelibus: Vos estis corpus Christi et membra. Unus panis, unum corpus multi sumus.
What is seen appears to be corporeal : what is understood has spiritual fruit. Therefore if you wish to understand the body of Christ, listen to the Apostle telling the faithful: You are the body of Christ and its members. We, the many, are one bread, one body.
Non pas qu’Ildefonse―ou l’écrivain dont il s’inspire et qui lui-même reprend une formule augustinienne 5―songe à contester la présence sacramentelle d’où résulter ce “fruit spirituelle”, pas plus qu’il n’entend par le moyen de l’ « intelligence » éliminer la foi. Aussi bien que saint Augustin lui-même, aussi bien que son maître plus prôche, saint Isidore de Séville, » 6 aussi bien que son compatriote Grégoire d’Elvire7, il sait que pour demeurer dans ce corps du Christ qu’est la saint Église, on doit participer en toute vérité, par le sacrement, à un premier corps du Christ8. Mais, pas plus qu’eux, il ne s’arrête à la présence pour s’en former un concept indépendant9. « Il découvre l’union réelle avec le Christ, non pas tant à travers la présence réelle mais à travers le signe, et cette union n’est pas tant l’union individuelle que celle des individus entre eux dans le Christ. » 10 (emphasis added).
4 Le De cognitione baptismi serait une adaptation du Liber responum (perdu) de Justinian de Valence (vers 640). Séjourné, Saint Isidore de Séville, pp. 372-373.
5 St. Augustine, Sermo 272 (P. L. 38, 1247).
6 De ecclesiasticis officiis, I, 1, c. 18, n. 8: « non se debet a medicina dominici corporis separare, ne… a Christo corpore separetur… Manifestius est enim eos vivere, qui corpus ejus attingunt. » (P. L. 83, 756B). Formules qui viennent de saint Cyprien, De oratione dominica, c. 18 (Hartel, pp. 280-281). Pierre Chrysologue (P. L. 52, 297B). Etherius et Beatus, Ad Elipandum (96, 942 A-B), Jonas d’Orléans, De institutione laicali, I, 2, c. 18 (106, 203B, 953-954). Burchard de Worms (140, 756 B et 757 C), etc.
7 Tractatus 17: « Caro corpore ac sangune Christi vescitur et potatur ut anima de Deo saginetur. » (Batiffol-Wilmart, pp. 187-188).
8 Op. cit. c. 136 (P. L. 96, 168-169). Augustin, In psalmum 39, n. 12 (36, 441-441); Sermo 351, n. 7 (38, 1542); Contra duas epistolas Pelagianorum I, 2, c. 4, n. 7, « Sine participatione corporis et sanguinis Christi »…” (44, 576).
9 Pour saint Augustin, voir Karl Adam, dans Theologische Quartalshrift, 1931, p. 490-536. Pour des premiers siècles du moyen âge vaut encore généralement la remarque fait par Bernald de Constance, De sacramentis excommunicatorum, à propos des Pères (quoique le mot « sacramentum » soit équivoque, Bernald entendant par là la réalité du sacrement, la présence objective et substantielle du Christ); « Huiusmodi distinctionem inter sacramentum et ejus effectum cum quidam ex antiquis Patribus minus attenderont… » (P. L. 148, 1064 C-D).
10 F. van der Meer, Sacramentum chez saint Augustin, dans La Maison Dieu, 13, p.61.
Corpus mysticum, at 24ff.
[269] S. T. iiia, q. 80, a. 4, c., citing q. 60, a. arg. Sed contra, Q. 73, a. 6. See endnote 64, supra, for the Latin text.
[270] Cf. de Lubac’s emphasis on this point in Corpus mysticum, at 27.
[271] For example, this usage appears in Pius XII’s Mediator Dei (1947) and in Paul VI’s Mysterium Fidei (1965), as well as in the Council of Trent’s Decretum de Ss. Eucharistiae, Cap. 1:
Principio docet sancta Synodus et aperte ac simpliciter profiteretur, in almo sanctae Eucharistiae sacramento post panis et vini consecrationem Dominum nostrum Jesum Christum verum Deus atque hominem vere, realiter ac substantialiter sub specie illarum rerum sensibilium contineri.
DS *1636. (Emphasis added)
[272] See endnote 147, supra. A collection of three strategic articles by Maurice de La Taille, summarizing the Christological and consequently Eucharistic application of his “created actuation by uncreated Act) was published as The Hypostatic Union and Created Actuation by Uncreated Act; ser. West Baden College: Readings in Philosophy and Theology (West Baden Springs: West Baden College, 1952). The first of the three articles, largely a discussion of Billot’s Christology, which is foundational for his own, was presented in English at a conference held at Cambridge University in 1925, whose papers were published by Fr. Cuthbert Lattery, S.J. in The Incarnation; the other two, published in French journals in 1928 and 1929, and translated by Cyril Vollert, S.J., extend the brief introduction of de La Taille’s Christology as found in the first article. De la Taille’s major work is his Mysterium fidei: de augustissimo corporis et sanguinis Christi sacrificio atque sacramento; elucidationes L in tres libros distinctae (Paris: G. Beauchesne, 1924), translated as The Mystery of faith: regarding the most august sacrament and sacrifice of the body and blood of Christ I: The Sacrifice of our Lord; II; The Sacrifice of the Church. (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1940-1950).
De La Taille’s Eucharistic theology aroused a considerable criticism, to which he replied in Esquisse du mystère de la foi, suivie de quelques éclaircissements (Paris : Beauchesne, 1924); ET The Mystery of faith and human opinion, contrasted and defined (Sheed and Ward, 1930). An editor’s note informs us that this work consists of several articles: “The first is an abridgement of the author's Mysterium fidei; two following are previously unpublished; the final three appeared earlier in other publications.”
[273] For St. Thomas, see Super Epistolas S. Pauli Lectura, cura P. Raphaelis Cai, O. P., Edition VIII revisa, Vol. II, (Taurini; Romae: Marietta, 1933),1-87, esp. Ch. V, Ll. vii-x, pp. 72-77; also Commentary on St. Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians, by St. Thomas Aquinas. Translation and Introduction by Matthew L. Lamb, O.C.S.O.; Aquinas Scripture Series Vol. 2 (Albany, N.Y.: Magi Books, Inc. 1966). For Peter Lombard, see In Epistolam ad ephesios, Ch. V. (P.L. 192:0208C - 0216 D).
In their commentaries on the Pauline Letter to the Ephesians, Peter Lombard and St. Thomas each uncritically suppose marriage to entail the woman’s ontological subordination to the man in a sense difficult to reconcile with the covenantal freedom indispensable to that sacrament, and yet more difficult to reconcile with the role of the husband as her head, which office is precisely to liberate those under his authority, thus those “subject” to him. St. Thomas and his predecessor both understand the Pauline emphasis upon the wife’s subjection to her head to connote in her a lesser dignity and a lesser authority than the husband’s. Neither exhibits any interest in the covenantal dimension of the Head-Body relation of husband-wife, although they both stress the nuptial union of head and body in one flesh: De Lubac mentions (Corpus mysticum, 207) that Peter Lombard, whose Sentences transmitted the Augustinian theological tradition to the High Middle Ages and beyond, combed the works of Augustine for passages bearing upon the nuptial unity of Christ and the Church, and included them in his commentary on Ephesians (In Ep. ad Ephesios, P.L. 192:215-216). Peter Lombard and St. Thomas both use “una persona” to describe the unity of the One Flesh; neither understands that unity to be free: i.e., neither understands the Head to be the source of the free unity of the Body with the Head. E.g., the Lombard will observe:
Unde subdit, sacramentum hoc magnum est, ego dico in Christo et in ecclesia, id est conjugalis copula signum spiritualis unitatis Christi et Ecclesiae. Verumtamen. Quasi dicat: Etsi hoc non solum ad litteram dicitur, sed est signum alterius rei, verumtamen et vos singuli, scilicet unusquisque vir, secundum litteram, diligat uxorem suam sicut seipsum sequens moralitatem historiae. Uxor autem, non solum diligat, sed etiam timeat virum, id est subdita sit viro. (underlineation added)
Peter Lombard, In Epist. ad Ephesios (P.L.192:216 C-D).
It is evident that in Peter Lombard’s theology, the outpouring of grace upon the bridal Church does not issue in that perfect freedom, the love that casts out fear, enabling the second Eve to enter upon a covenantal relation with her Lord; neither then does it free her members to live in covenantal fidelity to each other. While this view of the interrelation of bridegroom and bride is certainly not that of master-slave, neither is it that of those whom, in Eph. 5:21, Paul admonishes to be “subject to each other.” Rather, the language of v. 21 is here thought to be directed to a general audience, and thus not to bear upon the marital relation. Earlier in Peter Lombard’s commentary, we read:
Et estote subjecti invicem, non solum auditores praelatis, sed etiam praelati subditis, in charitate eis serviendo, et humiliter curam gerendo; nam et si dignitas major, administratoria tamen est. Unde Apostolus: Omnium me servum feci (I Cor. IX). Est ergo majorum salva tamen dignitate servire, sicut minorum est obedire. Haec autem tam minorum quam majorum ordinata subjectio debet esse in casto timore Christi, qui humilitatem mandavit. Mulieres. [Ambrosius.] Hucusque communiter de omnibus egit, nunc singulis ordinibus suadet. Quasi dicat: Hucusque communiter monui, et praeter communia specialiter dico, ut mulieres viris suis sint subditae, sicut Domino, id est ea simplicitate qua Domino subjectae sunt, sicut Sara subdita erat viro, quae dominum vocabat Abraham. Et bene utique debent esse subjectae, quoniam vir caput mulieris, id est rector et auctor, a quo mulier sumpsit initium, sicut Christus caput Ecclesiae, qui est rector et auctor Ecclesiae: (underlineation added)
Ibid., 5:21ff. (P. L. 192:0213C-0213D.
Here the Lombard explicitly distinguishes the addressees of v. 21, whom he considers to be Christians in general, from the women who are the specific addressees of vv. 22ff. This supposition has no warrant in the text, whose stress on subjection in both verses rather obviously links the exhortation to “Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ” to the following admonition, whose meaning it cannot but control: “Women, be subject to your husbands, as to the Lord.” In fact, the RSV begins a new paragraph with “Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ”, as does the New American Bible; standard commentaries such as Peake’s Commentary on the Bible, 984; The Jerome Biblical Commentary, II, 348, and J. L. McKenzie’s Dictionary of the Bible (Milwaukee: Bruce, 1965), 240, do likewise.
Nonetheless, the division Peter Lombard sets between v. 21 and v. 22 is evidently a standard patristic and early medieval exegesis, which we will see St. Thomas follow. Contemporary exegesis is divided as to whether v. 21 concludes the foregoing exhortation, or introduces the so-called Haustafel that concludes with Eph. 6:9. The question is not so much disputed as left undecided, even ignored. If it be conceded that the text alone is indecisive of the matter, it is in point examine the doctrinal pertinence of the foregoing division of v. 21 from v. 22 and to find within the Catholic doctrinal tradition the resolution of the problem it poses. For the point at issue is doctrinal: quite simply the sacrament of marriage presupposes the dignity, the free moral responsibility, of the wife vis à vis her husband, her head. Her sponsal authority and dignity are as indispensable as his to their unity in one flesh. However, the patristic tradition summed up in the Lombard’s Sentences, and accepted by medieval theology, tended to ignore the authority of the woman in marriage, and thus to regard the husband, the “head” of the wife, as equivalently the sole authority within the marriage. Thereby Paul’s admonition to the woman, viz., that she be subject to her husband as to the Lord, was understood in a non-reciprocal sense: the mutual subjection “in timore Christi” urged in the previous verse was thought to be addressed to a different audience and so to be of doubtful pertinence to the marriage relation, if not simply irrelevant, while Paul’s assertion in I Cor. 7:4 of the mutual and equal authority of the husband and wife within the marital relation is left unremarked in this context, as we have seen. Peter Lombard recognized that the husband’s headship of his bride is distinct from that of the Lord’s Headship of the Church in that the husband is not the savior of the wife, while Jesus’ headship of the Church is effective of her salvation but, in asserting this distinction, the Lombard fails to recognize that, in the husband as in the Christ, the office of the head is to free those under his authority by his exercise of that authority. The result of this commonplace patristic and medieval misunderstanding of the authority of the head is that the authority of the head is assimilated to that of the paterfamilias of Roman and Greek law―an authority which, if no longer capital, was certainly single, i.e., patriarchal; no other personal authority existed within the family, and such dignity as was ascribed to the members of the family was merely an expression of the assimilation of their personae to his, and thus the assimilation of their freedom, authority, and responsibility, very nearly if not quite, to functions of his.
St. Thomas’ commentary on Eph. 5 reveals the same emphasis. Like Peter Lombard, he does not understand the union of husband and wife to be free, to be specified by their free and sacramental transcendence of the unfreedom of the flesh in the free union in the one flesh of their marriage: i.e.,transcended by their sacramental imaging of the Triune God, in the Image of the One Flesh of Christ and his bridal Church. Thus, like the Lombard, St. Thomas refers Eph. 5:21 to a general addressee, therefore as not bearing upon the nuptial relation explicitly addressed by v. 22. He concludes his Lectura vii on Ch. V by applying Paul’s exhortation in v. 21, “Subjecti invicem in timore Christi,” to the “neighbor” (proximum), as though it were a summary or “complement” of the preceding matter rather than the introduction to what follows:
Sed quantum ad proximum, ponit modum repletionis, dicens subjecti invicem in timore Christi, id est, non propter timorem humanum, sed Christi. (Lec. vii, § 315, at 73). (underlineation added)
The continuity of the injunction of v. 21, “be subject to one another in fear of the Christ,” with v. 22 is yet more evident in the command to the wife to be subject to her husband as to the Lord, for this command invokes the husband’s office of headship, an office whose authority, as is clear from its grounding in I Cor. 11:3, has a Christological and Trinitarian criterion. Paul is urgent that Christ the Head “for freedom has made us free;” it is idle to suppose that Paul has recognized a autocratic authority in the husband over the wife, as though the equal dignity assigned the “neighbor’ (proximum) were inappropriate to her standing as wife.
Both Peter Lombard and St. Thomas accept from Boethius the traditional Greek philosophical equation of the person with an intellectual substance and, consequently, they accept the Greek and Roman assumption that personal authority as substantial is the monadic exercise of power insofar as not submitted to a greater power: the Roman law’s assimilation of authority to “power over” still haunts the canon law. This entirely pagan postulate simply bars the admission in marriage of a covenantally-ordered authority in the spouses analogous to the covenantal, Trinity-imaging order of authority in the One Flesh of Christ and the Church, although obviously both Peter Lombard and St. Thomas accept the doctrine, inseparable from the Words of Institution and unanimous among the Fathers, that identifies the New Covenant with the Eucharistic institution of the One Flesh of Christ and the Church, and consequently grounds the covenantal, Trinity-imaging order of sacramental marriage. They both recognize the unity of the man and the woman in the one flesh of sacramental marriage, but describe that unity as the unity of a person: una persona. That “person” is the head, the husband, with an implicit retrogression to the pagan paterfamilias. J. L. McKenzie agrees, to the point of reading Paul to have limited the imaging of God to men.
Paul limits the image of God to the male; the female shares in the glory of the image only by reflection. From this he adduces an argument for the authority of man over woman.
McKenzie, Dictionary of the Bible, at 385A. McKenzie provides no reference to Paul’s text to support this proposition, nor could he.
It is worth noting that Augustine did not exclude women from the imaging of God, nor did St. Thomas: both look upon the image of God in man as grounded in the intellectual soul, common to women as to men For Augustine, see endnote 1, supra; for St. Thomas, see S. T. Ia, q. 93, a. 6.
In sum, sacramental marriage is integral to the prayer of the Church, which presupposes the full human freedom and dignity of those who participate in it. This is a covenantal freedom whose foundation is the One Flesh of Christ and the bridal Church. Marriage is the practice of covenantal fidelity, the imaging of the Trinity: the woman in marriage cannot but thus subject to her husband, or vice versa, as to preclude her covenantal and therefore personal responsibility in that imaging, as the lingering Platonic dualism of the commentaries on Ephesians by Peter Lombard and St. Thomas requires.
[274] See Jean Leclercq, Monks on Marriage: a Twelfth-Century View (New York, Seabury, 1982), esp. ch. 5 & 6. The Judaeo-Christian development of the praxis and doctrine of marriage is carefully explored in the articles comprising Christian Marriage: A Historical Study; Glen W. Olsen, ed., sponsored by the Weatherfield Institute (New York: Crossroad Publishing (Herder and Herder, 2001). The developing appreciation of the sacramental significance of marriage, of its grounding in the primordial good creation, and of the woman’s nuptial exercise of freedom and responsibility, is coincident with a continuing failure of theologians to recognize the free substantiality of the “one flesh” of the nuptial union, whether the One flesh of Christ and the Church, or of the spouses in sacramental marriage. Only the clear recognition by John Paul II of the free (because sacramental) nuptial imaging of the Trinity has finally broken with the time-honored and long normative monadism of the cosmological imagination heretofore controlling Catholic theological speculation, for the Pope has taught that the free divine Community, the substantial Trinity, must be imaged by its free analogue: the created substance that also is a freely constituted and substanially unified community. In brief, the human image of God cannot be understood by theology, as in the recent past, to be monopersonal: its nuptial freedom is now a doctrinal datum. In this context, it is worth noting that this same Pope has definitively deprived the Thomist theology, or any other, of the quasi-doctrinal authority long attributed to it: see Veritatis Splendor, AAS 85 (1993), 1133-1229, at 1157, quoted by José Pereira, “Thomism and the Magisterium: From Aeterni Patris to Veritatis Splendor,” Logos 5:3 (Summer, 2002), 147-183, at 183. Pereira has here detailed the history of the decline and fall of the Thomist theological ascendancy, from its supposed establishment by Pope Leo XIII in Aeterni Patris in 1879 to its explicit disestablishment by Pope John Paul II in Veritatis Splendor in 1993. It is nonetheless noticeable that a considerable element of the metaphysical rationalism exemplified by classic Thomism recommended by Aterni Patris and embodied in the “twenty four theses” continues to pervade the work of such Augustinian thinkers as de Lubac and von Balthasar. As has been observed, it is particularly manifest in their acceptance of the monadic interpretation of the substantial One Flesh of the New Covenant.
[276] Pope John Paul II has praised St. Thomas as the authentic bearer of the Catholic tradition in Veritatis splendor, in Evangeliae vitae and particularly in Fides et ratio, §§ 12, 43-45, 74 and 78. However, on September 20th, 1995, in the context of the Filioque tension with the Greek Orthodox Church, , L’Osservatore Romano published a lengthy document entitled “The Vatican Clarification of the Filioque. Greek and Latin traditions regarding the “Procession of the Holy Spirit,” which dismissed the Thomist theology of the procession of the Holy Spirit and returned to the doctrine of I Constantinople. St. Thomas had relied upon a subordinationist reading of the Trinity: see endnote 1053, infra .
[277] See endnote 264, supra, citing Corpus mysticum, at 33: the French text:
“Communicare,” “participare,” ”consortes et socios esse”: le sens complexe de ces formules, constatons-nous une dernière fois, se calque exactement sur la sens complexe du mot “corpus.” Elles aussi, au fond, désignent moins deux objets successifs que, à la fois, deux choses que n’en font qu’une. Car le corps du Christ qu’est l’Èglise n’est point autre qu ce corps et ce sang du mystère. (emphasis added).
[278] D. J. Keefe, “Creation as Existential Contingency,” The Saint Anselm Journal, vol. 1, no. 1 (2003). The assimilation of the Johannine Logos to this notion of divinity as Absolute and consequently as nonhistorical is at the root of the Christological and Eucharistic controversies which continue to trouble the Church.
[279] Karl Rahner made this point long ago: see "Theological Reflections on Monogenism," Theological Investigations I, 229-296. at 289, and “Monogenism," Sacramentum Mundi 4, 105-107. Creation cannot be piecemeal, by definition; however this principle attains theological significance only insofar as creation is properly understood as consequent upon the Mission of the Son to give the Spirit.
[280] St. Thomas’ dictum that the Son’s Mission terminates in the hypostatic union dehistoricizes the event-character of the Mission of the Son. As is pointed out earlier in this work, the hypostatic union is an abstraction, it is not an event, and therefore cannot be the free historical effect of the historical Mission of Jesus, the historical Son. The Event-terminus of the Son’s Mission is the One Flesh of the second Adam and the second Eve, the New Covenant, the plenary Gift of the Spirit, given proleptically in the free conception of her Lord by the Theotokos, fully and finally in the One Sacrifice on the cross and on the altar, inseparably. This is the outpouring upon the Church of the Spiritus Creator whose Mission terminates in the redeemed and consequently good creation, sacramentally objective in the One Flesh of the New Covenant.
[281] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/1, ed. G. Bromiley and T. Torrance; tr. J. W. Edwards, O. Bussey, Harold Knight (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 1961) 183-206, esp. 197-8; see Vol. I, Chapter Two, endnote 174, for further discussion. As a Calvinist theologian, Barth did not enter into the Eucharistic dimension of his insight. His dialectical theology attempts to compensate for his denial of sacramental realism: Karl Rahner and John Zizioulas use variants of it for the same purpose, with the same lack of success; as Étienne Gilson has remarked, on a painted nail one can hang onlya painted hat.
[282] Numa D. Fustel de Coulanges, in The Ancient City, 34-40, has spelled out, with the persuasiveness that has kept his masterwork in print across a century and a half, the paradoxical exaltation of marriage as “the ceremony,” (telos - τό τέλοs) in which the religious indispensability of the wife was amply recognized in the ancient Mediterranean and Indic liturgies. This liturgical recognition of indispensability of the personal freedom, dignity, responsibility and authority of women remained otherwise implicit. Juridically, their liturgical significance was suppressed by their personal assimilation to the persona of their nearest male relative. This was merely a standing social resolution of the permanent paradox of ‘the one and the many’ inseparable from the historical pessimism native to the pagan cosmological consciousness: its Eucharistic conversion to the free nuptial unity of the One Flesh is set out in Vol. I, Ch. Four, passim.
[283] See Vol. I, Chapter Two, endnote 92, for its further examination.
[284] This point is developed by the present writer in "A Methodological Critique of von Balthasar's Theological Aesthetics," Communio 5 (Spring, 1978) 23-43 and finds further development in reviews of H. U. von Balthasar’s Theological Aesthetics in “The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, I: Seeing the Form, by Hans Urs von Balthasar,” The Thomist 48/4 (Oct., 1984) 663-667; “The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, II: Theological Styles: Clerical Styles, by Hans Urs von Balthasar,” ibid., 51/1 (Jan., 1987) 178-186; “The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, III: Theological Styles: Lay Styles, by Hans Urs von Balthasar,” ibid., 51/4 (Oct., 1987) 710-714, “The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, V: The Realm of Metaphysics in the Modern Age, by Hans Urs von Balthasar,” ibid., 57/2 (April, 1993) 308-316, and “The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, VI: Theology: The Old Testament, by Hans Urs von Balthasar,” ibid., 58/2 (April, 1994), 139-46. See also the monograph by Catherine Rohutny, Aesthetics and History: The Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar; M.A. thesis, May, 1988, Marquette University, Milwaukee, WI. J.-P.Torrell, O.P., has reviewed the scholarship concerning the influence of the Liber de Causis and of Pseudo Dionysius upon St. Thomas’ theology; op. cit., esp. pp. 127-29, 151-55, 222-23; see also M.-D. Chenu, Toward Understanding St. Thomas; ser. The Library of Living Catholic Thought. Tr. with Authorized Corrections and Bibliographical Additions by A.-M Landry, O.P. and D. Hughes, O.P. (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1963), esp. 304 ff. Recently Fergus Kerr has touched upon this subject in Twentieth Century Catholic Theologians: From neoscholasticism to nuptial symbolism (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2007), a work brought to my attention by Fr. James V. Schall, S.J., of Georgetown University.
[285] See endnote 3, supra. We have seen Cardinal Ratzinger, in "Concerning the Notion of Person in Theology," 439-454, also cited in endnote 3, criticize Augustine for not extending to the human situation the consubstantial relationality of Persons which he had affirmed of the Trinity. This human, intrasubstantial interrelationality, sacramentally realized, is the free, substantial, nuptial imaging of God: the freely constitutive substantial interrelation of husband, wife, and marital covenant, grounded in the One Flesh of the New Covenant instituted by the priestly offering of the Eucharistic Sacrifice.
If Augustine, with the entire philosophical tradition, always identifies “person” with intellectual substance insofar as humanity is concerned, he also had the insight to know that what he labeled the una persona of the One Flesh is the nuptial union of two persons, the Bridegroom and the Bride, the Head and the Body, in a concrete, historical, covenantal unity, their One Flesh, which can only be substantial. In Sermo 341, c. 12, he refers this unity to its Trinitarian analogue, the unity of the Father and the Son; see endnote 22, supra, for the Migne text. A century and a half later Boethius would pass on the ancient monist notion of person and, with it, the notion of a monistic, mono-personal imaging of the Trinity, to the Western theological tradition which, as Ratzinger has shown, has not yet recovered from this classic mistake. Augustine’s identification of the una persona of our imaging of God with the nuptially-unified substance of the Christus totus offers the means of egress from this classic impasse/ vice his una persona, una substantia should be read.
Against this stands the persuasion, constant from Augustine to St. Thomas, that the sexual intercourse between man and woman, between husband and wife, is without religious significance. Only as in some manner “spiritualized” does it have the value assigned it in the first three chapters of Genesis and by Paul in Eph. 5:23ff.. Short of that ”spiritualization,” understood in Platonic terms as its ideal separation from carnality, i.e., its dehistoricization, it is considered to be merely natural, the physical commixtio or conjunctio of male and female. For St. Thomas, see In IV Sent, d. 27, q. 1, a. 1: “Ergo matrimonium est in natura conjunctionis”; ibid., d. 41, q. 1, ar 1: “efficiuntur in carnali copula una caro per commixtionem”; Super I ad Cor. I-VII, L.2, CP-6 L, C. 3: “in carne una, id est, per mixtionem”. In this conjunction or mixture, it is the woman who is conjoined to the man: ibid., d. 42, q. 1, a. 3: “sicut uxor efficitur una caro cum ipso”. S. T. iia iiae, q. 26, a. 11: “quia uxor coniungitur viro ut una caro existens”. Gen. 2:24 reverses this dynamic: “Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother, and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh.”
It is evident that the notion of a religiously insignificant sexual intercourse leaves unexplained the biblical recognition that all unhallowed sexual intercourse is a moral evil. Beyond that, as Fustel des Coulanges and more recently, Mircea Eliade, have shown, pagan sexual symbolism is always cosmogonic, and therefore always liturgically mediated; see Eliade’s.A History of Religious Ideas, 2 vols; I: From the Stone Age to the Eleusinian Mysteries. Tr. Willard R. Trask (Chicago, The University of Chicago Press; London, William Collins Sons & Co., Ltd: The University of Chicago Press, 1978), 75 ff. , and Patterns in Comparative Religion, tr. Rosemary Sheed (Cleveland and New York: Meridian Books, no. 155,The World Publishing Co., 1965), passim, but especially chapters II, VII, & IX.
[286] John Paul II has taught that:
Human fatherhood and motherhood, while remaining “biologically similar” to that of other living beings in nature, contain in an essential and unique way a "likeness" to God which is the basis of the family as a community of human life, as a community of persons united in love (“communio personarum”).
In the light of the New Testament it is possible to discern how “the primordial model of the family is to be sought in God himself,” in the Trinitarian mystery of his life. The divine "We" is the eternal pattern of the human "we", especially of that "we" formed by the man and the woman created in the divine image and likeness. (emphasis added)
Letter to Families (Gratissimam sane, 1994), §6.
The theology of the image set out in the foregoing excerpt from John Paul II’s Letter to Families is further developed in the "Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Collaboration of Men and Women in the Church and in the World," published by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith on July 31, 2004: see esp. §§ 5-8 where, in §5, we read, with reference to Gen. 1-3:
From the very beginning therefore, humanity is described as articulated in the male-female relationship. This is the humanity, sexually differentiated, which is explicitly declared “the image of God.”
The “divine We” is the Trinity, the Triune Community that is the divine Substance. The ‘human we”, revealed to be created image of the “divine We”, must be similarly, i.e., analogously, substantial, with the substantiality of a community constituted by freedom―which is to say, by love. It follows that the human substance is analogously substantial and trinitarian in its free nuptial tri-unity. In their free unity, the man, the woman, and their covenant are the created, substantial analogue of the substantial Trinity of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit that is their subsistent Love This nuptial imaging of God is also covenantal fidelity, which exists only as Eucharistically sustained. This sustenance is the radical ground and thus also the criterion of all morality, for all of it, simply as covenantal fidelity, is nuptially signed by the One Flesh.
[287] It may not be too much to look upon Fides et Ratio as a programmatic rediscovery or perhaps restatement of the second-century patristic insight that saw in Greek philosophy what Augustine confirmed in De doctrina Christiana 2, 40, 60-61, i.e., its inclusion within the "spoils of the Egyptians," and thus as legitimately available for Christian use, a use which could only be an at least tacit recognition of the Christian latency of pagan wisdom under the universally distributed grace of the trahi a Deo, therefore of the openness of that wisdom to conversion, and finally, the recognition of the missionary task of the conversion to the faith of its adherents as a permanent theological obligation, inherent in the faith that seeks always a fuller understanding.
[288] Here we may cite Thomas à Kempis’ classic, The Imitation of Christ, the number of whose published editions is said to have been exceeded only by those of the Bible. Its understanding of the soul of the Christian as in a bridal relation to the Word or to the Christ, reliant upon a tradition extending from Origen through Augustine, St. Bernard, St. Thomas, and the late medieval devotio moderna, to John of the Cross, C. S. Lewis, de Lubac and von Balthasar, issues in a spirituality simply detached from and uninformed by the sacramental worship of the Church. Despite the “pious exhortations for holy communion,” in the fourth book, the spirituality of The Imitation of Christ, is one of immediacy: how else, if each soul is in bridal relation to the Christ? For a warrantable statement of the spirituality of the bridal soul, see St. John of the Cross, “A Spiritual Canticle of the Soul and the Bridegroom Christ,” translated by Rhina P. Espaillat, in First Things, November, 2003, No. 137, pp. 46-50.
Fr. Earl Muller, S.J., former professor of theology at the Sacred Heart Seminary in Detroit, and now a professor of theology on the faculty of the Kenrick School of Theology in St. Louis, has kindly referred me to Joseph de Guibert’s commentary upon the absence of this version of spiritual union in the spirituality of St. Ignatius of Loyola. Remarking upon St. Ignatius’ entire disinterest in the supposedly bridal relation of the soul to the Christ, de Guibert, the pre-eminent historian of the spirituality of the Society of Jesus, has written:
One noteworthy and very clear characteristic of Ignatius’ diary, as of all the documents we have about his interior life, is the total absence of what could be called the “nuptial” aspect of the mystical union. In the Spiritual Exercises (nos. 353-365) he presents the Church as the spouse of Christ, but nowhere does he represent the individual soul as the spouse of God or of Christ. Ignatius’ union with the Trinity and with Jesus is described in multitudinous ways and is presented as something intensely intimate, yet nowhere is it envisaged as a “spiritual marriage.” There is nothing in Ignatius which resembles the lyricism of the Spiritual Canticles and The Living Flame of St. John of the Cross.
Joseph de Guibert, S.J., The Jesuits: Their Spiritual Doctrine and Practice: a historical study. Ed. George E. Ganss; tr. William J. Young. (Chicago: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1964), 55-56. Hugo Rahner, S.J., cites this passage approvingly in The Spirituality of St. Ignatius Loyola: an account of its historical development. Tr. Francis John Smith (Westminster: Newman Press, 1953), at 14.
[289] De Lubac stresses the indispensability of nuptial symbolism to Catholicism in “Mysticism and Mystery,” Theological Fragments, at 60ff., where he points out that, without it, a Christomonism, and ultimately an absolute monism, would be inevitable: only the nuptial order of creation in the image of its Trinitarian Creator, can make creation itself to be intelligible: see endnote 119, supra.
However, de Lubac dissociates this indispensable nuptial symbolism from the creation of man in the image of God. With the Thomist tradition, he understands the order of creation to be ungraced, therefore “natural,” independent of the Father’s Mission of the Son and of the Spirit through the Son, contra the doctrine of creation in Christ taught in the Gospel of John and the Letters of Paul. Consequently, again with St. Thomas, he assimilatates the creation of man in the image of God to the ungraced creation of the individual human being, ignoring the account in Gen. 1-2 of the graced nuptial order of creation in the image of God upon which John Paul II’s ‘theology of the body’ has been intent. De Lubac has understood the “likeness” to God upon which, as he maintains, all Catholic mysticism depends, to be itself nuptial, a substantial, sacramentally achieved, trinitarian imaging of the Trinity by the man and the woman freely united in their marital covenant. Were it not a complete waste of time, we might enter here into that recondite discussion of the distinction between ‘image’ and ‘likeness which has preoccupied the exegetes of Gen. 1: Karl Barth’s mid-twentieth century survey of this exegesis is cited in endnote 3, supra.
Thus de Lubac rejects as latently immanentist the supposedly ungraced mysticism that would rest simply upon our factual capacity to image God. This is to ignore the nuptial order of Catholic mysticism, intent as it is upon the mysterium of God’s nuptially ordered immanence in history. De Lubac has written:
A mysticism based on image alone would be an awareness of self, at the deepest part of one’s being, without the gracious intervention of God in giving the mystery. Therefore, it would fall short of the exercise of freedom and the blossoming of moral virtue. By its logic, it would tend toward quietism.
Op. cit., at 57: original emphasis.
The “logic” to which de Lubac appeals is that of the Thomist anthropology, thus a retreat to the personal immanence implicit in a monadic person’s “natural”, i.e., ungraced, imaging of God. It is at one with the notion that the created person, i.e., the human soul, is thus monadic in his relation to the Christ. It is remarkable that de Lubac would accept this consequence, and then proceed to alleviate it by supposing that a monadic person need not be “alone.” From his earliest writing, de Lubac has insisted upon the twin evils of individualism and collectivism: well before C. S. Lewis’s wartime condemnation of totalitarianism as the “abolition of man”, he saw that the dignity of the human person was given him in the Church, wherein at baptism, he is “named” by God and by that naming is given freely the freedom of a child of God and of the Church. the irrevocable warranty of his personal dignity. To look elsewhere for that warrant is idle: the meaning of personal dignity is a Christian discovery, a revelation given in ecclesia, per ecclesiam. But two pages later de Lubac went further:
…Christian mysticism is still, necessarily, an ecclesial mysticism, since the Incarnation achieves first of all in the Church the marriage of the Word and humanity: “The Bed of this Husband was the womb of the Virgin, because in her virginal womb, they were united as husband and wife, the Word husband and the flesh wife.”91 Anything that can be said about the Christian soul applies as well to the Church as a whole: she is the “admirabile commercium et connubium” that the liturgy proclaims, and that is why the Christian soul must be called anima ecclesiastica. This is the basis for the long tradition of commentaries on the Song of Solomon that we referred to earlier.92
91. St. Augustine, In Primam Joannis, tr. 1, n. 2; trans. Agaesse, SC, 75, 116-117; In ps. 41, 9, 10, 17, 18 (Pl, 36, 469-71, 474.
92. St. Gregory, In evangelia, hom. 38, n. 3 (PL, 76, 1283 B-C); In Cantica, I, 1, c. 3 (PL, 79, 479 B-C), etc.; innumerable texts. Origenian theme par excellence.
Op. cit., at 59
The Catholic liturgical and doctrinal tradition knows nothing of a marriage of the Word with humanity; this notion of the Incarnation has arisen out of the commonplace dehistoricization of John 1:14 and Phil. 2:6-7, out of which arises the impossible problem of providing for the prior possibility of the passage of the dehistoricized Word into fallen history. It must be kept in view that for Paul and for John, for the Apostolic Fathers, for Justin Martyr, for Tertullian, Hippolytus and Origen, it is the primordial Jesus, the second Adam, who becomes flesh through his kenotic conception by the Virgin, the second Eve. Only thereby is she the Theotokos; otherwise, following St. Thomas, her offspring is reduced to an impersonal human substance, which can only be an abstraction. Taken at the letter, this is a denial of the doctrine taught at Ephesus and Chalcedon, that the Virgin Mary is the mother of God, the Theotokos.
De Lubac’s reads into St. Augustine’s Christology, whose presentation in Sermo 341 he ignores, pre-human Word who marries humanity in the womb of the Virgin in order thet he may become flesh, which amounts to a departure from the apostolic tradition, whose Christology, Pauline, Johannine and evangelical, knows the subject of the Incarnation to be the primordial Jesus, the primordial second Adam, who is the subject of Jn. 1:14 and of Phil. 2:6-7. Augustine defends this tradition throughout Sermo 341, whose subject from its outset is Jesus the Christ, who by his One Sacrifice is One Flesh with the Church, the primordial second Eve. He knows the Christ to have one Bride, and she to have one Bridgroom, her Head, Jesus the Christ, from whom she proceeds with the unfallen, integral, immaculate freedom by which she alone is free to enter into the union of One Flesh with him, her Lord, her Son. It has earlier been noted that the fallen and thereby fragmented feminine offices, e.g., Mother and Bride, are unified in her integrity.
There can be no doubt that Catholic mysticism is ecclesial: it could not otherwise be Catholic. Catholic spirituality is sacramentally nourished and sustained through personal participation in the Catholic liturgy, which can only be irrelevant to a spirituality in which the dehistoricized and thereby monadic human “soul” seeks a nuptial union with the Word, a union which, as nuptial and consequently immediate, is unique, reserved solely to the bridal Church, the second Eve, and impossible to her members, whose union with the risen Lord is historical, ecclesially mediated because sacramentally signed and caused. The spirituality which de Lubac describes as “Origenian,” developed in Origen’s Commentary on the Song of Songs, understands the human soul to be feminine, the bride of Christ, and consequently, is precisely non-ecclesial and nonhistorical: its soteriology bypasses the Church. Its femininization of the monadic soul is an echo of the ancient pagan dualism which, as Platonism, had misled Origen. It can find no support in the Catholic liturgical and doctrinal tradition.
[292] Henri de Lubac, Amida: aspects du Bouddhisme (Paris éditions de Seuil, 1955) ; Aspects du Bouddhisme (Paris : Éditions de Seuil, 1951) :ET Aspects of Buddhism ; Tr. by George Lamb (New York : Sheed & Ward, 1954) ; La rencontre du bouddhisme et de l'Occident (Paris: Cerf, 2000); see also Le drame d'humanisme athée (Paris: Éditions Spes, 1945): ET The Drama of Atheist Humanism; tr. Edith M. Riley (Cleveland, New York: World Publishing Co., Meridian Books, 1963).
[293] As de Lubac has shown, and as J. N. D. Kelly has agreed, Augustine and the Fathers before as well as after him accepted the realism of the Church’s Eucharistic worship as a matter of course. Despite the supposed discovery by Protestant scholars of a century past in Irenaeus, with the current agreement of Catholic scholars such as Francis Reine, Klaus Gamber, and William Jurgens, Batiffol’s judgment still stands: there is no persuasive evidence of Eucharistic impanation before the eleventh century (op. cit., at 423). Durandus of Troarn, about 1053, in De corpore et sanguine Domini (P.L. 149:1375-1424), charged Berengarius with what amounts to impanationism. The charge was repeated, using that term, by Guitmund of Aversa some twenty years later. F. Vernet, notes that Guitmund was the first to use use the word: he did so arguing in defense of the conversion doctrine, thus labeling the Berengarians: see "Eucharistie du ixe à la fin du xie siècle," Dictionnaire de théologie catholique vol. ii (1913), 1209-1233, at 1224; see also J. de Ghellinck, "Eucharistie au xiie siècle en occident," ibid., 1234-1302, at 1286, and. also Pierre Batiffol, Études d'histoire et de théologie positive, 2e série, L'Eucharistie, la présence réelle et la transubstantiation, 10e édition (Paris: Librairie Lecoffre, J. Gabalda, 1930), at 176 ff., 503, citing Charles Gore, The Body of Christ: An Enquiry into the Institution and Doctrine of Holy Communion (New York: Scribner's, 1901). Gore had argued that Irenaeus and Augustine had both taught an impanationism. As remarked above, some Catholic scholars agree as to Irenaeus: Klaus Gamber, "Die Christus- und Geist-Epiklese in der frühen abend-ländischen Liturgie," Praesentia Christi: Festschrift Johannes Betz zum Geburtstag dargebracht von Kollegen, Freunden, Schülern. Herausgegeben von Lothar Lies (Düsseldorf: Patmos Verlag, 1984); Francis J. Reine, The Eucharistic Doctrine and Liturgy of the Mystagogical Catecheses of Theodore of Mopsuestia (Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 1942). The debate turns on whether Irenaeus, speaking of the advent of the word, “logos,” within a Eucharistic context, is to be read as, in effect, capitalizing the word, thus referring it to the Christ, or not, thus referring it to the Eucharistic Words of Institution. See Jurgens, Early Fathers I, 104, n. 68, commenting on Adv. Haereses 5, 2, 3―a flimsy ground for such inference.
[294] Already in theOld Testament, as early as Hoseah in the eighth century, the Covenant assumes a nuptial symbolism; thereafter this symbolism becomes more explicit, even insistent, especially in the post-Exilic books, notably Ezekiel and Deutero-Isaiah. This fact poses questions left unresolved within the Old Testament, wherein the Hebrew abreaction to the Canaanite cult found the notion of a divine marriage abhorrent. Its New Testament resolution is of course the New Covenant, but not, as McKenzie asserts, “between the covenant parties, God the Father and the Christian (sic).” (op. cit., 156B.). The parallel between Ex 24 and the New Testament Institution Narratives would seem to demand the plural, “Christians,” but here McKenzie may wish to maintain the Old Testament’s nuptial order in the Covenant by invoking the supposed nuptial relation of the Christian soul to the risen Christ (or to the nonhistorical Verbum). In any case, the sole immanence of God the Father in history is Trinitarian: viz., by his Mission of his Son, his Image, Jesus the Christ, to give the Spirit. It is the Jesus the Christ, not the Father, who is the Lord of the Covenant, the Head of the Church; the one Mediator between the Father and his creation, whose mediation is the full, sacrificial outpouring of the Spiritus Creator, effected by his One Sacrifice, his obedience unto death, his institution of the One Flesh of the New Covenant in his Blood, on the cross and on the altars of the Church.
[295] It hardly need be stressed that the baptismal entry into the sacramental order of salvation can be in voto. This Latin tag does not describe a psychological state, but an historical one: it denotes the objectively historical personal existence that has accepted the offer of freedom inherent in the creation of all humanity in Christ. This offer, the Augustinian-Thomist “trahi a Deo,” is a universally distributed grace, equivalently the illumination of the Augustinian theology, which can be refused but not avoided, for it is existentially given by our creation in Christ. The concretely historical affirmative personal response to it, a matter of conversion to the freedom of the good creation, is decisive for salvation.
Clearly, this interpretation of the universal salvific will of God is theology merely; it is without dogmatic standing. Nonetheless, its equation of God’s universal salvific will with the Father’s Mission of the Son to give the Spirit, and thus with the sacramental economy of salvation in Christ, is an inference difficult to avoid: it has the further advantage of removing “the universal salvific will” from the realm of abstraction to that of history, to the economy of salvation. The topic is discussed at greater length in Vol. I, Chapter 1, 125ff., 176ff., endnotes 24, 33, and 71; in Vol. II, Chapter 5, 414ff., and Chapter 6, passim.
[296] The triumphalist exploitation of autonomous reason found its formal expression in the Kantian Critiques, which set the stage for the Hegelian dialectic, and so for the utopian reconstruction of humanity whose parade illustrations are Marxist. The despair of metaphysics which crowned the fourteenth century has its current expression in the phenomenological method which, since Duns Scotus, has felt no need for the illumination that grounded the Augustinian phenomenology: the quest for the “Beauty, ancient and forever new” whom Augustine knew as his intus magister, “intimius intimo meo:” see Vol. II, Chapter Six, endnote 223, supra. The result is the Modern and Post-modern fragmentation of historical experience to the point of nihilism: the death of God entails the death of reason. The fragmented, sarkic mind can know no other finality. The impact of this mentality upon the free unity of the Church’s liturgical worship is everywhere evident.
[297] William James popularized this instrumental criterion of truth, stating it explicitly in his lectures on pragmatism; e.g.:
What, in short, is the truth’s cash value in experimental terms?
William James, Pragmatism: Lecture VI, “Pragmatism’s Conception of Truth,” Writings, 1902-1910; ser. The Library of America, 38 (New York: Literary Classics of the United States : Distributed to the trade in the U.S. and Canada by Viking, 1987), 572-590 at 573.
297 Cardinal Mahony’s notion of liturgical renewal is dealt with in endnotes 124, and 137, supra and in endnotes 302, 310, 323, and 340, infra.
[299] Thomas Groome’s ideological reduction of Catholic religious education to the utopian dimensions of “shared praxis” has achieved an enormous popularity, particularly among the dissident catechetical advisors of the local ordinaries of most of the Anglophone dioceses, which melancholy fact goes far to confirm a recent indictment of the U.S eopiscopacy as a radically corrupt organization, viz., one incapable of reforming itself. Eamonn Keane, an Australian scholar, in A generation betrayed: Deconstructing Catholic education in the English-speaking world (Hatherleigh Press, 2002) has provided a meticulous survey of the malign impact of Groome and his allies upon the teaching of religion in those supposedly Catholic precincts.
[300] “Liturgical renewal” has been marked since its inception by efforts to dragoon the laity into conformity with liturgical novelties approved by local ordinaries as advised by their liturgical consultants without reference to or apparent interest in the wishes of the laity, but nonetheless supposedly for their own good, liturgically speaking. Of the consequent innovatians, “inclusive language” is only the most notorious. The rationalized egalitarianism of their political and indeed ideological thrust has become increasingly apparent: cf. the preceding endnote. This adventurism has presumed to find its warrant in an innocuous paragraph in Sacrosanctum Concilium recommending “full and active participation by the laity” in liturgical celebrations. What the conciliar Fathers may intended by this language was not further spelled out in Sacrosanctum Concilium; in fact, the emphasis of the immediately following paragraphs of that document is upon the liturgical training of the clergy. One might suppose this training to include, indeed to rest upon, an adequate theological formation. However, in the event, the seminary resources previously allotted to theological formation were reduced in order to allocate them to “liturgical” formation. The result, which has been before us for more forty years, may be summed up as “liturgy lite,” disjunct from and in fact disdaining its sacramental significance; see the following endnote.. This poverty has been noticed even by liturgists: e.g., the article by Rev. Edward Foley in the F.D.L.C. (Federation of Diocesan Liturgical Commissions) Newsletter, vol. 30, no. 1, (February-March, 2003), 1-7. Unfortunately Fr. Foley’s effort therein to “heal” the liturgical damage caused by the untutored enthusiasms of the past four decades offers no nourishmment whatever to the starveling theological insight responsible for most of the current liturgical abuses.
Throughout the U.S., in mid-September, 2003, press releases announced a further regimentation of the dwindling remnant of the laity who continue to attend Sunday Mass. The recent revision of the General Instruction for the Roman Missal (G.I.R.M), whose current version, published in 1975, soon to be supplanted, had been announced by the U.S.C.C.B as scheduled for full implementation in the U.S. by the beginning of Advent, 2004. Prompted by this announcement, reporters for the daily press, after interviewing the local diocesan liturgical authorities, announced the imposition of yet further conformities upon those taking part in Eucharistic liturgies, as though these were demanded by the new G.I.R.M. In fact, the changes in the new edition were quite minor, requiring only a reverent bowing of the head to the Host immediately before the reception of Communion as a minimal sign of respect for the Eucharistic Presence of the Risen Lord. The other innovatians mentioned in the new G.I.R.M., widely heralded as similarly required, are entirely optional. Nonetheless, we continue to read, for example, that communicants in a number of dioceses are now required to stand when receiving Communion; we may be sure that many more U.S. ordinaries, advised by their liturgical staffs, will do their best to mandate that and other burdensome inventions as though they were duties rather than free options.
These options were all Vatican concessions to requests by U.S. bishops (which is to say, by their liturgical advisors) for variances from the Eucharistic discipline as prescribed universally by the Vatican text, which itself mandated one change only in Eucharistic practice: the minimal sign of reverence mentioned supra: viz., the reverent bowing of the head before the Body and Blood of Christ by the communicant prior to reception of the Eucharist. Two other entirely optional liturgical modifications were recommended, not mandated: both were changes sought and now obtained by the American liturgists. No polling of the laity nor any published apologia underwrote their supposed desirability. The changes recommended included reciting the “Our Father” with arms outstretched (the so-called “orans posture”) and, as a substitute for shaking hands at the “sign of peace”―itself optional―some sort of unspecified embrace of whomever may be selected for this attention. The media announced the latter two options as though mandated equally with the reverencing of the Real Presence before Communion. In fact, the local press releases were sufficiently uninformed on these and other points as to require a careful correction by at least one local ordinary: the web site of the Cleveland Archdiocese, intending to reassure a laity already sensitive to the impact of this liturgical triumphalism, published “An Explanation” to correct the media’s promulgation of a yet further rigorism, the news of which the reporters had garnered from their interviews with the local liturgists.
[301] One may hope the revisionist nadir to have been reached by the publication of I.C.E.L.’s Third Progress Report on the Revision of the Roman Missal (Washington: I.C.E.L., 1992). This anonymous piece of bureaucratic insolence simply ignored the Sacrifice of the Mass, and proclaimed ex parte the institution of deacons as ordinary ministers of the Eucharist in the Mass as thus “revised”: see pp. 128-150 of the Report, whose concluding section, entitled “order of mass,” under the subheading, “the assembly and its ministers,” proceeds in §7 to reduce the office of the ordinary minister of the Eucharist to that of a distributor of Communion, thus allowing the deacon to be included, along with the bishop and the priest, among the “ordinary ministers” of the Eucharist, in flat violation of the 1983 Code of Canon Law. The sola fide solution to questions of biblical exegesis still drives the I.C.E.L. loyalists: Austin Ivereigh, writing for the London Tablet, cites one of them of them, a Fr. Andrew Cameron-Watt, approvingly:
Fr. Cameron-Watt believes it is a myth that the Latin of the Roman rite has a fixed meaning, or is in some way an ideal: “It is impossible to understand what the Latin text means unless we translate it into what we think it means,” he argued at the Heythrop conference in December. “And let’s be honest: much of the Latin in the Roman Rite itself is inelegant, repetitive, hard to speak out loud.”
Austin Ivereigh, “A War of Words,” The Tablet, 17 January, 2004, 6-8, at 7c.
Fr. Cameron-Watt’s observations parallel those of a contemporaneous editorial in the Church of Sweden's periodical, Kyrkans Tidning, written by Dr. Hanna Stenström, an editor of the new Lectionary recently imposed upon the Lutherans in Sweden: a quotation from Dr. Stenström’s editorial is pertinent:
The point is that we agree about the principle that we should select what is read in our worship services and thus in reality what will be our canon, and that this focuses on what is important. The issue is whether we should cover this up and pretend that Christian faith is something unambiguous and given, or whether we should take the Lectionary as a reason to speak out about what we know: Christian faith is something we are continuously creating in many ways in the tension between tradition and renewal, where it is necessary to make conscious selections and where the Bible is not a homogeneous word of God. Then we must also dare talk about power and preferred interpretation.
Hanna Stenström (1963) is doctor of Theology and teaches New Testament at the Faculty of Theology, University of Uppsala and at the University of Linköping (Sweden). She is ordained in the Church of Sweden and lives in Bromma, a suburb of Stockholm. She wrote her dissertation on The Book of Revelation. A Vision of the Ultimate Liberation or the Ultimate Backlash? A Study in 20th Century Interpretations of Revelation 14:1-5, with Special Emphasis on Feminist Exegesis (Uppsala, 1999, unpublished). At the time of this writing (2006) Dr. Stenström’s editorial was available from the Church of Sweden’s official website: "http://www.svenskakyrkan.se/svk/englang.htm"
In the end when, as inherent in an exegetical method which imposes meaning on the liturgical canon rather than taking it sufficiently seriously to discover the historical meaning to which its very existence testifies, we abandon the historical concreteness, the specificity, the sacramental, doctrinal and moral density of the Catholic liturgical tradition. All that remains, as Dr. Stenström admits, is power and the will to power, at which point Christianity becomes one more political movement, one more expression of the “flesh which profits nothing.” But here again, ancient misapprehensions support the current distrust of the liturgical mediation of the tradition. Until quite recently it was commonly taught that the determination of the authentic meaning of the liturgical text required a Thomist hermeneutic. This notion was put in issue by Paul VI in Mysterium Fidei (1965) and finally laid to rest, one may hope, by John Paul II in Veritatis Splendor: see endnote 275, supra.
[302] In 1997, Cardinal Mahony published the pastoral letter launching his version of “liturgical renewal”; it is discussed and criticized in endnotes 125 and 137 supra, and 323 and 340, infra. That letter ("Gather Faithfully Together:" A Guide for Sunday Mass. Roger Cardinal Mahony, Archbishop of Los Angeles. Feast of Our Lady of the Angels September 4, 1997), and its sequel (“As I Have Done For You:” A Pastoral Letter on Ministry. Cardinal Roger Mahony and the Priests of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. Holy Thursday, April 20, 2000), are heavily influenced by the dissident theology imbuing the Liturgy Training Publications, a publishing house owned by the Archdiocese of Chicago and placed by Cardinal Bernardin under the direction of Gabe Huck who, between 1997 and 2001, was able to increase by tenfold the quantity and variety of its publication, if not the quality. E.g., Huck’s edition of the translation of the Psalter was condemned by the Vatican. Huck was and remains a leading exponent of the notion that the Second Vatican Council introduced a historical discontinuity between the pre-conciliar and post-Conciliar Church, the latter being the Church envisioned by Sacrosanctum concilium, whose fourteenth Section is read by liturgists and catechists of Huck’s views as a warrant for their dragooning of the laity into the messianic new age, in which fidelity to liberal politics and to Catholicism are at one. The full flowering of this severance of the Church from her tradition is I.C.E.L.’s Third Progress Report on the Revision of the Roman Missal (1992). Thomas Groome’s reduction of Catholic catechetics to a “shared praxis” of the liberal agenda antedates Huck’s politicization of the faith by a decade and a half, and is a likely influence upon it. Huck summarized his liturgical and ecclesiological dissent in an interview published in the National Catholic Reporter for 10 August, 2001.
[303] The first volume of John Meier’s A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, i.e., The Roots of the Problem and the Person (New York: Doubleday, 1991), offers a stellar instance of this triumphalism: Meier’s anti-sacramental methodology trumps sacramental history, which is to say, history understood, as by the Catholic tradition, to possess an intrinsically free significance. See the present writer’s review in The Fellowship of Catholic Scholars Newsletter, June, 1992.
[304] This project has been nobly advanced by Henri de Lubac’s four-volume Exégèse médiévale (1958), whose first two volumes have been published in English translation as Medieval Exegesis: see endnotes 20, 35, 52, 103, 119, 218, and 248, supra. This truly monumental work is at bottom an examination of the patristic application of the medieval exegetical axiom with which De Lubac opens the Introduction of its first volume: in its English translation in Medieval Exegesis it reads as follows:
The distich with which our own Latin Middle Ages slowly established its doctrine relative to the senses of Sacred Scripture is well known. Its form was meant to act as an aid to memory and was at once popular and quasi-scholastic; the Latin reads as follows:
Littera gesta docet, quid credas allegoria
Moralis quid agas, quo tendas (quid speres) anagogia -.
which in the Medieval Exegesis’ translation reads as follows :
The letter teaches events, allegory what you should believe;
Morality teaches what you should do,
Anagogy what mark you should be aiming for.
De Lubac, Medieval Exegesis I, 1. De Lubac here credits Augustine of Dacia (d. 1282) with the authorship of this distich.
De Lubac has established, through his magisterial familiarity with the patristic tradition, the free association of these elements within the hermeneutical unity of the Church’s liturgical reading of Scripture.
However, he appears not to have remarked that their free participation in this historical-liturgical unity is precisely that of the medieval sacramental paradigm, sacramentum tantum, res et sacramentum, res tantum, notably in that the allegorical and the moral senses, in analogy to the res et sacramentum, stand to the historical-literal sense, the analogous sacramentum tantum, as its res gemina, the duplex res sacramenti of the patristic sacramental analysis, even to the point of the priority of the allegorical to the moral sense in that duplex res sacramenti as it was later developed by the medieval theologians. The anagogic sense of scripture is of course the analogue of the res tantum Eucharistiae, “that mark you should be aiming for:” viz., personal union with the risen Lord in ecclesia. De Lubac has from the outset of his remarkable career emphasized the Eucharistic foundation of all exegesis, for valid exegesis is indissociable from the Church’s Eucharistic worship: the authentic interpretation or “breaking” of Scripture is at one with the “breaking of the bread:” thus the patristic reading of Luke’s account of the meeting of the two disciples with the risen Christ on the road to Emmaus. Cf. Corpus mysticum, at 81-2.
[305] De Lubac has in many places stressed the patristic datum that the Eucharist is the concrete, historical unity of the two Covenants:
Pour toute l’ancienne tradition de l’Église, l’idée des deux Testaments, de leurs oppositions et de leurs inclusions mutuelles, est une categorie fundamentale. Elle intervient partout, et, plus qu’ailleurs, dans le doctrine sacramentaire. . . .
Car de même que la réflexion des Pères sur le mystère eucharistique est inséparable de leur réflexion sur toute l’économie chrétienne dont ils trouvaient la révelation dans l’Écriture, de même leur réflexion sur cette Écriture déborde beaucoup le cadre d’une exégèse: elle veut saisir en esprit la totalité de l’œuvre de Dieu dans le monde.
Corpus mysticum, at 77-78; see also endnote 44, supra.
The unity of the two texts is the historical development of the Trinitarian immanence of the Lord of history, a presence first to the elect people of the Old Covenant, mediated by the Prophets, especially Moses, by the Torah, and by the Wisdom literature, and then to the elect people of the New Covenant, mediated by the New Moses, the Lord Jesus. Benedict XVI, writing as a private theologian, has spelled out this historical revelation of the Lord of history with impressive clarity and profundity in Jesus of Nazareth: From the Baptism at the Jordan to the Transfiguration; tr. Adrian J. Walker (New York: Doubleday, 2007); for his discussion of the “Ego eimi,” see esp. 345-55, where Benedict understands the “ego eimi” of Ex 3:14 to be the Father. On the other hand, in the same context, Henri Crouzel has written:
For all the ante-Nicene Fathers the theophanies or appearances of God in the Old Testament, sometimes in the form of an angel or a man, are regarded as appearances of the Son, since He is, for Origen, in his divinity even before the incarnation the mediator between God and man, the One in whom the Trinity acts externally. Thus He appears to Abraham at the oak of Mamre, prevents him from sacrificing Isaac, wrestles with Jacob, shows Himself to Moses in the burning bush.
Henri Crouzel, Origen, at 70. But see also p. 95, where Crouzel notes a passage in which Origen understands “the One who is” of Ex 3:14 to refer to the Father. Origen’s exegesis is here inconsistent for; at 193, Crouzel cites another passage in which Origen refers Ex 3:14 to the pre-existent, i.e. primordial Jesus.
[306] For a signal instance of this error, see John Zizioulas’ Being as Communion: Paul McPartlan comments approvingly upon its ecclesiology and Eucharistic theology in The Eucharist Makes the Church, and in Sacrament and Salvation. An Introduction to Eucharistic Ecclesiology (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1995). In the latter volume, we find the usual consequence of the lack of a historical event-foundation for this “dialectic,” the intimation of a “gathered church” ecclesiology” whose Eucharistic foundation can be personally appropriated only sola fide:
In the Eucharist, Christ is giving himself to the Father and gathering the Church . . . . If we remember that the purpose of the Eucharist is to transform those who are assembled, we shall better understand the transformation of the bread and the wine that they receive. The Orthodox liturgy marvellously maintains the proper perspective when it hails the consecrated gifts as ‘Holy things for the holy’ (CCC 948), a perception mirrored in the following words of the Catholic and the Orthodox Churches, speaking together in recent times: ‘The Spirit transforms the sacred gifts into the Body and Blood of Christ in order to bring about the growth of the body which is the Church.’
McPartlan, Sacrament and Salvation, at 57.
This is at best loose language, obscuring the crucial issue: viz., whether the Church is constituted by the gathering together, the synapsis, of the baptized, or is constituted by the Eucharistic representation, in persona Christi, of Jesus the Christ’s One Sacrifice, in such wise that the reality of the Church is pre-existent to the gathering of the baptized, who are baptized into the pre-existing Church in order that they may communicate in the body and blood of the One Sacrifice. The latter is the Catholic doctrine, spelled out per longam at latam by de Lubac; the former is not, nor is the Didache to be read as though it were. Basic to the Catholic celebration of the Eucharist is the recognition that it is the offering in persona Christi of Jesus’ One Sacrifice. It is this Offering that is the cause of the Church, with the consequence that any supposed metabolë of the bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ which does not effect the Real Presence as objectively historical, viz., as the Event in which Jesus Christ, at once the High Priest and the Victim of the One Sacrifice, offers himself to the Father for the redemption of those for whom he died, has no historical objectivity and cannot cause the historical Church.
[307] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/1: The Doctrine of Creation; tr. J. W. Edwards, O. Bussey, and Harold Knight; eds. G. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 1961).
[308] See note 3, citing John Paul II’s final affirmation of the nuptial imaging of God, in his "Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Collaboration of Men and Women in the Church and in the World," published July 31, 2004, less than a year before his death.
[309] We find St. Thomas’ assertion that the Eucharistic corpus verum is “figurative” of the Corpus Christi mysticum in his commentary upon the patristic tradition summarized by Peter Lombard in the Sentences:. However, in this early work, the figuratio appears to have been little more than nominal; see endnote 16 supra.
[310] Cardinal Mahony’s pastoral letters on liturgical renewal, cited in endnote 302 supra, would exploit that dehistoricizing Christ-Church “dialectic” as though it were (a) the authentic doctrine of St. Augustine, and (b) essential to liturgical renewal. Both assumptions are false, as the present writer has shown in “An Extended Theological Critique of “Gather Faithfully Together:” A Guide for Sunday Mass. The Pastoral Letter Published by Roger Cardinal Mahony, Archbishop of Los Angeles on the Feast of Our Lady of the Angels, September 4, 1997.” This critique, an otherwise unpublished monograph, was delivered to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith by the late John Cardinal O’Connor, a member of the Congregation, in the spring of 1997. Together with a similarly unpublished 45-page condensation, it is available for examination from the present writer.
[312] De Lubac, Corpus mysticum, at 205, n. 85.
[313] We have seen (Vol. I, Introduction, endnote 35) that Louis Bouyer considers the Didache to provide the most ancient form of the Eucharistic liturgy still using the Jewish berakah formulae: see his Eucharist: Theology and Spirituality of the Eucharistic Prayer; tr. Charles Underhill Quinn (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968) at 115ff; see also the discussion in Enrico Mazza’s The Eucharistic Prayers of the Roman Rite; tr. Matthew O’Connell (New York, Pueblo, 1996), passim, of the influence of the Didache upon the development of the Eucharistic liturgy (but see also Bouyer, op. cit., 146ff, on the antiquity of the Anaphora of Addai and Mari). De Lubac, in Corpus mysticum, at 122, affirms, as integral to the patristic tradition and to the medieval tradition as late as Wycliff, the doctrine that the historical Church is “aggregatus” by the worthy reception of Communion. He found that at the end of the twelfth century the Church, not the risen Christ present in the consecrated species, was understood to be the subject of the Roman liturgy’s formula, “Jube haec praeferri in sublime altare tuum.” De Lubac thus cites Simon of Tournai, ca. 1200. It is evident that the Catholic liturgical tradition has always understood Christ and the Church to be present together in the Mass, inseparably; equally evident is the corollary, that their nuptial union is the presupposition of the “aggregatio” of the Church by the faithful reception of Communion.
[314] See Moriones, Enchiridion, 2071-83; pp. 599-603.
[315] John L. McKenzie, S.J., “Eucharist,” Dictionary of the Bible (1965), at 252B.
[316] Ibid., “Body,” at 102A.
[317] Ibid.
[319] See “Mysticism and mystery,” Theological Fragments, 60ff, and endnotes 122, and 253, supra; Augustine contrasts the Christian’s union with the Church and his union with a prostitute in De civ. Dei, 21:25 (P. L. 41:0742-43); cf. I Cor. 6:15-16.
[320] Karl Rahner, The Trinity. Rahner’s assignment of substantiality to the individual human person, and consequently the imaging of God to this substantial person, is at one with his modalist reduction of the Trinity to a single Self; cf. endnote 1. Rahner is hardly a pioneer in this reductionism: Theodore of Mopsuestia anticipated him by fifteen centuries. If St. Thomas did not accept Theodore’s final inference, it is nonetheless implicit in his view of our imaging of God.
[321] Batiffol’s discussion of St. Augustine’s Eucharistic doctrine, in the second volume of his Études d’histoire, §6, 422-51, begins with an assertion of its difficulty, a difficulty that led critics such as Loofs and Gore to reduce Augustine’s sacramental realism to mere subjectivity. Relying upon Sermo 227, supplemented by Sermo 272, the first of which he considers to be one of the most complete of Augustine’s Eucharistic statements, Batiffol undertakes a preliminary examination of Augustine’s entirely traditional notion of sacramentum as an efficacious sign, inseparable from its effect, its “virtus:” Augustine stresses the distinction between the sacramentum and its virtus, an emphasis traceable to Tertullian as we have seen. The concrete and objective efficacy of the sacramentum is derived from its intrinsic significance, which is given the sacramentum by the prayer or consecration or sanctification that is integral and indispensable to it and apart from which it is a nullity. Applied to the Eucharist, this sanctification is that by which the bread and wine of the Church’s offering become the intelligible but invisible reality of the body and blood of Jesus the Christ. By worthy communion in this Eucharistic sustenance, the communicant becomes what he has received. Here we encounter the familiar assimilation of the ecclesial body to the sacramental body upon whose truth de Lubac has been so insistent. This said, Batiffol passes on to his first major topic, that of the Eucharist as the cause of the unity of the Church, a point of no small confusion. We have already read, in Sermo 227, that “Efficimini panis, quod est corpus Christi. Et ideo unitas quodam modo significatur.” That unity’s ‘mode of being signified’ is here in issue. In the first place, it is a very ancient symbolism, not simply Augustine’s, that is in view; Cyprian had stated it in nearly the same terms, as earlier still had Tertullian. Batiffol stresses that it is not to be read as a summary of Augustine’s Eucharistic faith. For Augustine,. the Eucharist is a sacrament of unity in two ways: in the order of sacramental signing, the bread and wine, seen as the union of grains of wheat and of drops of juice, suggest a unity analogous to a cooking accomplished in the recipient by the fire of the Spirit: thus the faithful, open to this signing, should learn from it a detestation of all schismatic division in the Church. But there is a more profound sense in which the Eucharist is a sacrament of unity: its reception accomplishes the continually greater unity of the members of the Church, and so of the Church; here Batiffol quotes Augustine, who invokes the authority of Paul:
Norunt fideles corpus Christi, etsi corpus Christ esse non neglegant…Inde est quod exponens nobis apostolus Paulus hunc panem: « Unus panis, inquit, unum corpus multi sumus ». O sacramentum pietatis! O signum unitatis! O vinculum caritatis! qui vult vivere habet ubi vivat, unde vivat. Accedat, credat, incorporetur ut vivificetur.
In Joann. tract. xxvi, 13.
Batiffol pursues Augutine’s development of this insight:
Voyez Epistul. clxxv, 50: « non quaerant [les Donatistes] Spiritum sanctum nisi in Christi corpore, cuius habent foris sacramentum, sed rem ipsam non tenent intus, cuius est illud sacramentum, et ideo sibi iudicium manducant et bibunt. Unus enim panis sacramentum est unitatis » Cf. De civ. Dei, xxi, 25 (éd. Hoffmann, ii, p. 565): « qui est in eius corporis unitate, id est in christianorum compage membrorum, cuius corporis sacramentum fideles communicantes de altari sumere consuerunt, ipse vere dicendus est manducare corpus Christi et bibere sangunem Christi. »
There is then an analogy between, and not an identity of, the body that is the Church and the sacramental body of the sacrifice. Batiffol concludes this consideration by saying, reproachfully, “Ne peut-on pas dire cependant que, pour avoir trop appuyé sur l’analogie, Augustin a prêté à une confusion?” Camelot has rejected Batiffol’s criticism of Augustine on this point: see endnote 339.
We have already seen Batiffol emphasize the second major topic: it is that the bread and the wine become the body and the blood of Christ on the altar only by the prayer, the blessing, the consecration, that is the recitation by the priest of the Words of Institution. The efficacy is God’s, not man’s.
Secondement, one fois expliqué ce symbolisme du sacramentum mensae dominicae, la pensée centrale d’Augustin se dégage. Sur l’autel, on a placé les éléments, le pain et le vin: ce pain et ce vin sont sanctifiés par la parole de Dieu. L’expression qui a été prise par nous au Sermo ccxxvii, « Panis ille quem videtis in altari, sanctificatus per verbum Dei corpus est Chrsti » n’est pas, tant s’en faut, une expression isolée chez Augustin.
Batiffol goes on to cite others texts to the same effect, among them some cited in endnote 125, supra. He observes that the rite of the Mass used by Augustine is not known; all that we know of it is what is found in Augustine’s letters and sermons; these are entirely clear that with the consecration or blessing of the Words of Institution, the elements become the body and the blood of Christ, but we do not have from Augustine, as we do from Ambrose and Gregory of Nyssa, any exploration of the “unde vel quomodo conficiatur”. This may be less of a disadvantage than Batiffol supposes, given the failures of such inquiries down to and including those of St. Thomas. It is enough for him to affirm that the bread and the wine become the body and the blood of Christ; to go beyond this to inquire into the manner of this “conversion” is inevitably to seek out the conditions of its prior possibility, which simply do not exist: the Eucharistic fieri is ex nihilo and no inquiry can transcend that mystery; trespass upon it is far more likely. Efforts to enlist Augustine in such failed efforts are common, but groundless; his disinterest in that subject cannot be interpreted, as by Johannes Betz, as a failure of Eucharistic realism.
The third major point to be considered bears upon the real presence of Christ upon the altar immediately upon celebrant’s recitation of the Words of Institution. Augustine affirms rhis very clearly; e.g., no one is to eat the flesh of Christ unless and unril he has first adored it. The reality of the Presence of Christ could not be more sharply underlined. Batiffol notes that Augustine and Ambrose are in complete agreement on the duty of the adoration of the Eucharistic Real Presence: by way of contrast he adds, “on n’adore pas l’eau baptismale,” he might have added, “on n’adore pas l’église.” Batiffol then proceeds to quote a famous text of Augustine:
Augustin se demande comment David pouvait bien se porter lui-même dans ses propres mains:
Quis enim portatur in manibus suis? Manibus aliorum potest portari homo, manibus suis nemo portatur. Quomodo intellegatur in ipso David secundum litteram non invenimus, in Christo autem invenimus. Ferebatur enim Christus in manibus suis, quando commendans ipsum corpus suum ait: « Hoc est corpus meum ». Ferebat [enim] illud [corpus] in manibus suis. Nonne erant tanquam infantilia verba, manducate carnem meam et bibite sanguinem meam! Sed ista infantilia tegebant virtutem ipsius.
Puis, plus loin, résumant la consideration ci-dessus:
Quomodo ferebatur in manibus suis? Qui cum commendaret ipsum corpus suum et sanguinem suum, accepit in manus suas quod norunt fideles, et ipse se portabat quoddam modo cum diceret: « Hoc est corpus meum. » 2
2. Enarr. in Psalm xxxiii, i, 10. Les mss. ne donnent ni enim, ni corpus.`
Op. cit., at 436-37.
In an extended footnote (n. 2, p. 437), Batiffol resumes the argument over whether the Real Presence of the body of Christ may be referred to the Church rather than to the sacramental body; he finds M. Adam to have refuted this view decisively by reference to the explicit language of Sermo 235, wherein Augustine himself distinguishes between the empirical absence of the Christ, and his real presence in the Eucharist, a presence known by faith, in ”the breaking of the bread.”
Batiffol now deals with a specific challenge to this Eucharistic realism: Protestant authors have attributed a merely subjective symbolism to Augustine’s Eucharistic doctrine, which interpretation they suppose to be justified by a letter to Bishop Boniface in which Augustine explains how it is that baptized infants have faith. In his reply, Augustine likens Eucharistic realism to baptismal realism. Batiffol quotes from the letter:
Sicut ergo secundumn quemdam modum sacramentum corporis Christi corpus Christi est, sacramentum sanguinis Christi sanguis Christi est, ita sacramentum fidei fides est.
Epistula xcviii, 9 (éd. Goldbacher, ii, p. 531).
Op. cit., 439.
His response to the subjectivizing interpretation of this passage points out first that Augustine distinguishes the sign from its effect, i.e, the sacramentum from the res sacramenti. We have earlier referred to Augustines stress on this distinction as proper to his phenomenological approach to sacramental realismm wherein the phenomenon is simply rhe sign which points to and realizes that which the sign in itself is not but which, by liturgical consecration, it can sign and, by that signing , cause or effect. Thus, the literal identification of the consecrated bread with the body of Christ which the liturgy asserts is not to be understood empirically, as though the phenomenon, the species, were identically its effect: Augustine insists, as we have seen, that the affirmation of the Words of Institution is to be “spiritually” understood: their truth is objective and historical, but it is not empirically verified: the Eucharistic body of Christ is not akin to the corporeal flesh one may find in a meat market.
There is nonetheless a phenomenological or experiential similitude of the sign to its effect; this is the subject of the very extensive commentary of the Latin Fathers upon the language of the Didache (c. 9, 4) which likens the unity of the members of the Church to that of the grains of wheat and drops of grape juice which are at one in the bread and the wine of the Offertory and which by the words of consecration become the body and blood of Christ, thereby signing and causing the unity of the Church. The similarity of the sacramental sign to its effect―which allow it to become the sign of that effect―are thus close as to warrant their literal identification by the liturgy. Batiffol notes here the enthusiasm for this text expressed by the Lutheran theologian, F. Loofs, in “Abendmahl,” Realencyklopaedie für protestantische Theologie und Kirche I: herausg. Albert Hauck; dritter Aufl. (Leipzig: J. H. Heinrichs, 1896-1913), 38ff., in which Loofs thinks to find a firm foundation for his symbolist reading of Augustine’s Eucharistic doctrine. Batiffol finds him begging the question by removing Augustine’s language from its historical context; he concludes his discussion of Loof’s exegesis of Augustine thus:
Augustin s’est assez appliqué d’ailleurs à distinguer le ministère de la parole et le ministère du sacrement 3, pour que l’on soit inexcusable de les confondre ici.
3. K. Adam, Eucharistielehre des heiligen Augustinus; ser. Forschungen zur Christlichen Literatur- und Dogmengeschichte, VII Band, 1 Heft (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1908), at 122.
Batiffol, op. cit., at 443.
Batiffol then proceeds to establish Augustine’s Eucharistic realism thus succinctly as to need no commentary:
Quatrièment, nous arrivons au point le plus délicat de l’enseignement eucharistique d’Augustin. Une fois acquis, en effet, que le corps eucharistique n’est pas proprement le corps mystique, et qu‘il n’est pas davantage un symbole du corps, un symbole vide, qu’est donc pour Augustin ce corps eucharistique du Christ?
Commentant le text “Nisi manducaverities carnem filii hominis » (Ioa. vi, 54) Augustin ecrit:
Corpus dixit (Dominus) escam, sanguinem potum, sacramentum fidelium agnoscunt fideles.
Puis il rappelle les murmures que la parole du Christ soulève parmi ses propres disciples, et il suppose que le Christ s’adresse à eux ces termes:
« Hoc vos scandalizat? Putatis quia de hoc corpore mea quod videtis partes facturus sum, et membra mea concisurus, et vobis daturus? Quid si ergo videritis filium hominis ascendentem ubi erat prius? »
Certe qui integer ascendere potuit, consumi non potuit. Ergo et de corpore ac sanguine suo dedit nobis salubrem refectionem, et tam magnam breviter solvit de sua integritate questionem.
Manducent ergo qui manducant, et bibant qui bibunt: esuriant et sitiant, vitam manducent, vitam bibant. Illud manducare, refici est: set sic reficeris, ut non deficiat unde reficeris. Illud bibere quid est nisi vivere? Manduca vitam, bibe vitam: habebis vitam, et integra est vita.
Tunc autem hoc erit, id est vita unicuique erit corpus et sanguis Christi, si quod in sacramento visibiliter sumitur, in ipsa veritate spiritualiter manducetur, spiritualiter bibatur. Audivimus enim ipsum Dominum dicentem: Spiritus est qui vivificat, caro autem non prodest quidquam. Verba quae locutus sum vobis, spiritus et vita sunt.1
1 Sermo cxxxi, 1.
Trois données doivent être soigneusement distinguees dans ce développement. 1° Le fruit de la communion, autrement dit, la vertu de l’eucharistie, la vie: nous étuderions ce donné plus loin, à part. 2o Le mode de manducation. 3o Le mode d’être du corps eucharistique.
La question du mode de manducation est connexé à celle du mode d’être. Augustin rejette aussi fortement que possible l’idée d’une manducation sub specie propria: manger ainsi la chair du Sauveur, c’est l’idée que les Capharnaïtes se faisaient, le sens qu’ils donnaient aux paroles prononcées devant eux par le Christ et don’t ils se scandalisaient si à contresens.
Quia dixi: Carnem meam do vobis manducare et sanguinem meum bibere, hoc vos nempe scandalizai. Illi enim putabant eum erogarurum corpus suum. Ille autem dixit se ascensuram in caelum, utique integrum … Certe vel tunc videbitis quia non eo modo quo putatis erogat corpus suum. Certe vel tunc intellegitis quia gratia eius non consumitur morsibus.2
2 Tract in Joa. xxvii, 3.
La chair eucharistique n’est pas une chair « quomodo in cadavere dilaniatur aut in macello venditur".2° Augustin insiste a mainte et mainte reprises sur ce que le corps eucharistique n’est pas. Le Christ, dit-il, a instruit ses disciples en leur disant (Ioa. vi, 63):
Spiritualiter intelligete quod locutus sum. Non hoc corpus quod videtis manducaturi estis et bibituri illum sanguinem quem fusuri sunt qui me crucifigent. Sacramentum aliquid vobis commendavi: spiritualiter intellectum vivificabit vos. Etsi necesse est illud visibiliter celebrari, oportet tamen invisibiliter intellegi1.
1 Enarr. in Ps xcviii, 9; (P. L. XXXVIII, 1265)
Ces affirmations demandent à être prises dans leur sens—le plus droit, rien ne serait plus contraire à la méthode critique que de leur appliquer des distinctions qui sont au delà la pensée d’Augustin. Elles reviennent à dire ceci uniquement, que le corps eucharistique n’est pas visible, tangible, étendu, mais appartient à la catégorie de l’intelligible: la distinction du sensible et de l’intelligible reparaît ici, mais elle seule. En voici un expression plus claire encore, s’il est besoin:
« Ego sum panis vivus qui de caelo descendit » Noli parare fauces, sed cor. Inde commendata est ista cena. Ecce credimus in Christum, cum fide accipimus. In accipiendo novimus quid cogitemus. Modicum accipimus, et in corde saginamur. Non ergo quod videtur, sed quod creditur pascit. 1
1 Sermo cxii, 5. Cf. Epistul. cxx, 8 (ed Goldbacher, ii, p. 711): « Habet fides oculos suos, quibus quodam modo videt verum esse quod nondum videt et quibus certissime videt nondum ne videre quod credit » Cf. Contra adr. leg. ii, 31.
Le corps eucharistique est un objet de foi, mais il n’en est pas moins réel. Il est si réel que les Manichéens, qui croient que la terre, par les forces du saint Esprit, conçoit et engendre Jésus, un Jésus passible, qui se retrouve dans les arbres, si bien que tout arbre est sa croix, les Manichéens font valoir en faveur de leur dogme le fait que les catholiques croient à une présence pareille du Christ dans l’eucharistie5. Il est si réel, que les petits enfants reçoivent le fruit de la communion, bien qu’ils soient encore incapables d’un acte de foi: la communion des enfants est aussi valide que leur baptême:
« Enfantes sunt, sed sacramenta eius accipiunt. Infantes sunt, sed mensae eius participes fiunt, ut habeant in se vitam6 »
Il est si réel, que les pécheurs, tout indignes qu’ils sont, « ipsam carnem manducent, et ipsum sanguinem bibant7 » Il est si réel, que l’abus s’est introduit de communier les morts, contre quoi le concile de Carthage de 397 proteste.8
Qu’est-ce donc que ce corps eucharistique qui est le corps du Christ « in ipsa veritate » et qui n’est pas ce corps à l’état perceptible, étendu? Comment ce corps est-il partagé entre les fidéles et reste-t-il intact dans le ciel? Le gênie d’Augustin n’a pas pu ne pas fixer cette « tam magna quaestio », comme il l’appelle, et nous voyons bien les solutions qu’il rejette, mais moins bien celle qu’il propose 9.
Ne peut-on cependant pas présenter dans quelle direction s’oriente sa conception du corps eucharistique? Le corps eucharistique » « invisibiliter intellegitur » il n’en est pas moins, nous l’avons vu dans la communion des petits enfants, efficace par lui-même. Or, il produit la vie, nous le dirons plus loin. Ne serait-ce donc pas qu’il est esprit? Non, mais il est et il agit a la manière de l’esprit 10. Entre la notion capharnaïte et la notion calviniste, qu’il répudie également, Augustin s’acheminerait à la conception d’un corps eucharistique qui n’est pas sous les espèces circumscriptive, et dont le mode d’existence est spirituel. Tel est du moins l’interprétation a laquelle, sur ce point très difficile, je me rangerais de préference.
2 Tract in Joa. xxvii, 5
5 Contra Faustum, xx, 11 (éd. Zycha, p. 468). Cf. id., 13, p. 552: « Cur autem arbitretur Faustus parem nobis esse religionem circa panem et calicem, nescio, cum Manichaeis vinum gustare non religionem, sed sacrilegium sit. In uva enim agnoscunt deum suum, in cupa nolunt. »
6 Sermo clxxiv, 7
7 Sermo lxxi, 17, Harnack, Dogmeng. 3, t. iii, p. 141, reconnait que les indignes reçoivent un sacrément valide, mais quo reçoivent-ils? C’est tout a fait obscur, répond M. Harnack. Cependant il ajoute qu’il ne peut souscrire a l’opinion de Dorner affirmant que « Augustin ne connait pour les incroyants aucune manducation du corps réel ». Cf. De baptismo, v, 9.
8 Can. 6: “Item placuit ut corporibus defunctorum eucharistia non detur. Dictum est enim a homine: Accipite et edite. Cadavera autem nec accipere possunt nec edere. Deinde cavendum est ne mortuos etiam aptizari posse fratrum infirmitas credat, quibus nec eucharistiam dari animadverterit. » (Ce nec n’est-il pas de trop?)
9 Et cela explique les erreurs de ixe siècle, comme l’a tres bien vue Franzelin, p. 142-143.
10 Il convient de la rapprocher de la conception que se fait Augustin du corps ressuscité et glorieux, car les deux conceptions sone connexes. Epistula ccv, 2: »sicut animale corpus non est anima, sed corpus, et spiritale corpus ita non est spiritus, sed corpus. Quia porro audeat opinari vel Christi corpus non spiritale resurrexisse, vel si spiritale resurrexit nonne iam corpus fuisse, sed spiritum? … Iam igitur illa caro spiritale erat corpus nec tamen spiritus erat, sed corpus. » Ibid.: « Caro secundum substantiam… possidet regnum Dei; caro autem cum secundum corruptionem intellegitur, non possidebit. » Id. 1: « Quaeris utrum nun corpus Domini ossa et sanguinem habeat aut reliqua carnis lineamenta. Quid, si adderes, utrum etiam vestimenta, nonne augeretur quaestio? Qua causa, nisi corruptione cogitare vix possumus, cum dininorum miraculorum quaedam documenta iam data sint, ex quibus liceat coniectare miora. » Cf. Epist. cxx, 17 (éd. Goldbacher, ii, p. 719.
[322] Joachim Jeremias' learned defense of the Lutheran rejection of the Sacrifice of the Mass appears in the concluding fifth chapter of his The Eucharistic Words of Jesus; see endnote 34, supra.
[323] Cardinal Mahony, in the “liturgical renewal,” set out in his Pastoral Letter of 1997, cited in endnotes 125, 137, 302, and 310, supra and 341, infra, is careful to affirm the dogma of transubstantiation in that Letter’s first footnote, but does not mention the Sacrifice of the Mass. The Cardinal is evidently unaware that the Tridentine definition of transubstantiation repeats the dogmatic defense of the Real Presence which had been denied by Berengarius, but affirmed in his final retraction, and given dogmatic standing by Innocent III at IV Lateran in 1215 (DS *802). Trent teaches that the Real Presence of Jesus Christ, the High Priest offering himself as the Victim of his One Sacrifice, is the product of the transubstantiation of the bread and the wine of the Offertory. Consequently the Real Presence is always historical, an Event-Presence, the Event of the High Priest’s offering of the Offering of his One Sacrifice, by a priest or bishop acting in persona Christi. Luther had little use for the doctrine of transubstantiation, but he concentrated his “reform” on the denial of the Eucharistic One Sacrifice as offered by a priest, acting in the Person of Christ, the High Priest, who alone can offer the “clean oblation” by which we are redeemed. Luther, in retaining the Eucharistic “real presence,” understood it as entirely nonhistorical, linked to no objective event, and therefore as reductively subjective and, in that sense alone, a presence “sola fide.” It must follow that Cardinal Mahony’s understanding of transubstantiation, as dissociated from the Event of the One Sacrifice, is comparably defective.
[324] Mt. 19:6.
[325] E.g., see the notes 55 and 58 in the extended passage from Corpus mysticum quoted in endnote 263, supra.
[326] Augustine intimates the substantial foundation of the imaging of God in the analogy between the unity of the One Flesh of Christ and the unity of the Divine Substance, in his likening the unity of Father and Son to the unity of Christ and Church, seeing in the latter that nuptial unity which elsewhere he has called the Whole Christ. He denies that Trinitarian level of unity to the hypostatic union of humanity and divinity in Christ: he limits the imaging to the whole Christ, with the implication that he does not look upon the Christ apart from that union, i.e., as distinct from theOne Flesh, the Christus totus, as imaging the Divine Substance. It follows that for Augustine, the imaging of God is historical and therefore nuptially ordered.
Iam ergo audiamus quid oret caput et corpus, sponsus et sponsa. Christus et ecclesia utrumque unus : sed Verbum et caro non utrumque unum ; Pater et Verbum utrumque unum ; Christus et ecclesia utrumque unus, unus quidam uir perfectus in forma plenitudinis suae : Donec occurramus omnes in unitatem fidei, in agnitionem Christi. 1
1. Eph. 4:13
Enarr. in Ps. 101, 2. 1, 23 (CCL 39: 1427.
St. Augustine provides a similar intimation of analogy betweeen the Headship of the Son and of the Father in another homily:
God could make no greater gift to men than to make his Word, through whom he created all things, their head and to join them to him as his members, so that the Word might be both the Son of God and son of man, one God with the Father and one man with all men. The result is that when we speak with God in prayer we do not separate the Son from him, and when the body of the Son prays it does not separate its head from itself: it is the on Savior of his body, our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who prays for us and in us and is himself the object of our prayer.
Enarr. in Ps. 85, 1: (CCL 39: 1176); tr. Liturgy of the Hours II, at 366-67.
This analogy has its foundation in analogous attribution of headship set out in I Cor. 11:3. The analogous unity in view is a free, communal unity, not a personal unity, for we have seen Augustine deny it to the personal unity of humanity and divinity in Jesus the Christ. The divine exemplar of this unity is then the divine Substance, the Trinity, whose created image is the One Flesh of Christ and the Church, of the Head and the Body, the free, substantial, Trinity-imaging unity that is the New Covenant, whose historically objectivity is its Eucharistic representation.
[327] Corpus mysticum, at 23.
[328] Jacques Chênevert provides a masterful exposition of Augustine’s doctrine of the interrelation of Christ and the Church in L'Église dans le commentaire d'Origène sur le Cantique des Cantiques; ser. Studia: Travaux de recherche: collection dirigée par les facultés de Montréal avec la collaboration de l'université de Sudbury, 24 (Bruxelles, Paris: Desclée de Brouwer; Montréal: Les éditions Bellarmin, 1969), 161, 219, 277; see also T. J. van Bavel, O.E.S.A., Recherches sur la Christologie de Saint Augustin. Le humain et le divin dans le Christ d'après Saint Augustin; ser. Paradosis: Études de littérature et de théologie ancienne 10 (Fribourg, Suisse: Éditions Universitaires, 1954), 79ff. With all due respect for Sermo 272, there are many other passages in Augustine's work where both the organic and the covenantal notions of the nuptial second Adam, second Eve imagery are in view with the latter predominant; e.g., throughout his homilies on the Psalms: Enarr. in Ps. 9, 6 (CChr.SL 38:61); Enarr. in Ps. 18, 2, 6 (CChr.SL 38:109); Enarr. In Ps. 2, 10 (CChr.SL 38:110); Enarr. in Ps. 26, ii, 2 (CChr.SL 38:155); Enarr. in Ps. 30, 2, 4 (CChr.SL 38:193); Enarr. in Ps. 101 s. 1, 3 (CChr.SL 40:142); Enarr. in Ps. 127, 12 (CChr.SL 40:18); Enarr. in Ps. 138, 2 (CChr.SL 40:1990).
Augustine's thought in this matter lacks the systematic clarity one would like, nonetheless a minimal rational consistency with his Christological faith obviously requires that elimination of Platonic dualism which he undertood wherever he found his philosophical predilections to conflict with the faith of the Church: see on this point Wilhelm Gessel, op. cit., 85-89; also L. Grandgeorge, Saint Augustin et le Néo-Platonisme [Paris: Minerva, 1896] and M. F. Sciacca, Saint Augustin et le Néoplatonisme: La possibilité d'une philosophie chrétienne (Louvain: Publications Universitaires de Louvain; Paris: Béatrice Nauwelaerts, 1956).
[329] Prof. Joyce A. Little, of the University of St. Thomas, Houston, in her unpublished monograph, The Patrick Papers: an exegesis of Gen. 2-3, offers a pioneering and most subtle analysis of the original sin as the primordial rejection of nuptial unity, which is to say, of substantial integrity. She has pointed out that the first Eve’s assumption of autonomous authority, together with the first Adam’s acquiescence, is the hallmark of the original sin by which the nuptially-ordered, free unity of the primordial good creation was refused, with the consequence of the necessary fragmentation of the primordially good creation, whose goodness was its free nuptial unity, and its only alternative the necessary fragmentation of the good creation. The One Flesh of the New Covenant is the “recapitulation” of the fallen creation by Him who alone, as the second Adam, as the Head, the Caput, can recapitulate it. No other theology of original sin has attained the depth of this exegesis, none can unless it recognize, with Dr. Little, the free, nuptial unity of the primordial good creation as that which the original sin of Adam and Eve rejected, with a consequent fall into the existential fragmentation that is sarx. This is the doctrine which Paul summarized in Rom.5, whose pneuma-sarx dialectic is otherwise unintelligible.
[330] For a more detailed examination of this naming of divine and human substance by the head, see the present writer’s Covenantal Theology (1996), I, Ch. 6, 670-676.
[331] Moriones, Enchiridion, §§2071-2083, at 599-603.
[332] Perhaps the clearest case for rejecting the analytic approach to Augustine’s metaphysics is made by Étienne Gilson in his Introduction a l'étude de saint Augustin; ser. Études de philosophie médiévale 11 (Paris: Vrin, 1929); Gilson refuses to read Augustine as a Thomist manqué: see esp. “Conclusion,” pp.293-307; to the same effect, see de Lubac, Corpus mysticum, at 287.
[333] We have seen this made evident in de Lubac’s discussion of Paschasius:
Toute en faisiant ces distinctions et en balançant ces formules, Paschase Radbert insistait à mainte reprise sur la vérité du corps sacramentel, qu’il appelait un peu plus haut « mysticum Christi corpus et sanguis »98 en même temps que sur son identité avec le corps historique et céleste: « proprium corpus », « vera caro », « una Christi caro », répétait-il99. D’autre part, l’unité réelle des trois corps ne lui tenait pas moins à coeur. Avec ces entrelacements subtils, la page qu’on vient de lire montre bien. Dans les lignes qui suive immédiatement, il s’en explique encore plus au clair: les « tria vocabula corporis » ne lui voilaient pas l’ « unum corpus »100. Il devait y revenir quelques années plus tard, vers 854, en commentait le chapitre xxvi de saint Matthieu. « Ut manifestius cognoscant quanta est unitas corporis », dira-t’il alors, et « qui vult vivere in unitate corporis, haec tria mystice unum sentiat esse corpus101 ».
98. C. 2 (P.L. 120:1273 A).
99. C. 4, 5, et 7 (1278 A, 1279 B, 1281 D, 1285 A). In Mattheum (896C), Lettre à Frudegard (1361 A) etc.
100 C. 7 (P.L. 120, 1286 A). Paschase adjoute: « Haec sunt totalia, haec mystica, ut Christus et ecclesia unum corpus solidius confirmetur ».
101 P.L 120 896 C et D. On notera comment l’épithète “mystique” tout en désignant surtout le corps sacrementel, est appliquée en fin de compte aux trois corps, même d’une certain façon au troisième, considerés par rapport à l’unité dernière et totale du Corps comprénant Tête et membres: non plus l’unité en train de se faire, ni seulement l’unité de l’Église corps du Christ, mais l’unité achevée du Christ et de l’Église « en caro una. » Telle est l’ultime et “solide” realité que tous les autres aspects du corps du Christ, si réels qu’ils soient en eux-mêmes, chacun dans leur ordre et selon leur mode propre, ont pour fin de procurer et de signifier “mystiquement”, en attendant de s’absorber pour ainsi dire en elle.
Corpus mysticum, at 40-41.
At the same time, de Lubac is well aware of the doctrinal weight accorded the traditional distinctions between the “corpus verum Christ,” that is the Real Presence, the “Corpus Christi mysticum” that is the Church, and the “una caro” that is the union of Christ with the Church:
Ainsi la considération de l’eau dans son double rapport au mystère eucharistique―mystère de la Passion et mystère de l’Église, mystère du corps déchiré et mystère du corps unifié―ouvrait une voie de plus par où l’on voyait se rejoindre l’idée de la virtus et l’idée de la res, l’idée de l’union la plus intime au Sauveur at l’idée de l’édification sociale de l’Èglise, l’idée de l’union de l’Église avec le Christ et l’idée de l’union des membres du Christ entre eux: una caro, unum corpus.
Unus panis, una caro, unum corpus. Cest tout cela, en fin de compte, ce sont toutes ces données de la tradition, c’est tout cet entrelacement mystique, que condense la brève formule: Caro mystica, unitas ecclesiae.
Corpus mysticum, at 207.
As has been earlier observed, nothing is achieved anagogically by the full Gift of the Spirit that is not achieved historically in sacramento, by the Eucharistic offering of the One Sacrifice. Catholicism knows nothing of an “extra Calvinisticum:” the grace of Christ, gratia capitis, is historically mediated in its plenitude. The historical Gift of the Spirit consequent upon the Eucharistic representation of the One Sacrifice is identically that Gift which the Son was sent to give: it terminates always in the One Flesh, the good creation whose goodness is the freedom of its nuptial unity.
[334] Moriones, Enchiridion, Caput III: “Eucharistia ut symbolum et causa efficiens perfectae incorporationis Corpori Mystico”: §§2084-2091, at 603-607.
[335] Here and there de Lubac perhaps attributes it to Augustine: after pointing out the contrast between Augustine’s understanding of corpus spirituale and that of Ambrose, he goes on to say:
La conception augustinienne des corps rendait en effet bien délicate l’application à l’Eucharistie du concept Ambrosienne de corps spirituel, et, en revanche, la mise au premier plan, comme chez Paschase et déjà chez Ambrose, du problème de la présence objective, n’entraînait pas de moindres difficultés pour qui voulait conserver à l’idée du corps ecclésial la place dominante qu’elle occupait dans la doctrine eucharistique d’Augustin.
Corpus mysticum, at 152.
The “dominant place” of the Church which de Lubac finds in Augustine’s Eucharistic theology, the “symbolisme ecclésiastique” mentioned earlier, is difficult to accommodate to Augustine’s understanding of the Christus totus, integer of Sermo 341, wherein the Bridegroom, certainly not “dominant” in the patriarchal sense, is most certainly the Dominus, the Lord, the Head, of the Church; his office as her Head is her liberation, fully achieved in her union with him in One Flesh. The intimation of an Augustinian “symbolisme ecclésiastique” is not far from supposing Augustine to believe that it is the Church that is the product of the consecration/sanctification of the elements, i.e., of what will much later be termed transubstantiation, and that it is the ecclesial body that is received in Communion. The reception of Eucharistic Communion certainly effects communion with the Church, but only by reason of her union in One Flesh with her Lord. Augustine’s assertion that the ecclesial body is received in communion is surely not to be read sensu negante, as the attribution of a “symbolisme ecclésiastique” to his Eucharistic doctrine would imply. “La présence objective” of the risen Lord in the Eucharist is inseparable from that of the Church; their union is irrevocable in its Eucharistic objectivity. De Lubac’s best statement of the emphasis of Augustine’ Eucharistic doctrine upon the Church remains that of the opening paragraphs of his Introduction to Corpus mysticum, and in the first chapter of Corpus mysticum, at 23: see endnote 270 supra.
[336] Corpus mysticum, at 207, n. 96, citing Augustine and Ambrose: we have seen Gottschalk use the same language: ibid., at 139, quoting Gottschalk’s De corpore et sanguine domini:
« Deus homo, Verbum caro, dat Ecclesiae suae sponsae suae, carni scilicet suae, manducandum carnem suam. » (Lambot, p. 335.)
[337] See “Jesus as Bridegroom: The Historical-critical Case for an Early Tradition.” A Research Report for the Catholic Biblical Association, a paper delivered by Fr. Earl C. Muller, S.J., on August 9, 1998, at the Catholic Biblical Association convention of that year, and “Una Caro: The Biblical Theme and its Place in the New Covenant,” delivered by Rev. John McHugh at the January, 1981 convention of the Institute for Theological Encounter of Science and Technology and published in the I.T.E.S.T. Proceedings of that year; see esp. §4.
[338] Paradoxe; suivi de Nouveaux paradoxes (Paris: Seuil, 1959); ET: Paradoxes of Faith; tr. respectively by Paul Simone and Sadie Kreilkamp, and by Ernest Beaumont (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987), and Paradoxe et mystère de l'église (Paris: Aubier, Éditions Montaigne, 1967); ET: The Church: Paradox and Mystery; tr. James R. Dunne (New York: Alba House, 1969).
[339] Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, I-III (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951, 1957, 1965), esp. vol. I, 8-94. For Tillich, the Augustinian hermeneutic is not a theological option, but a necessity: he rationalizes its methodological postulate, viz., that discursive rationality, i.e., that of Aristotle or St. Thomas, amounts to a voluntaristic distortion of existence by way of its submission to an immanent logical necessity which cannot but falsify the ambiguous character of fallen existential reality. Although Tillich develops the implications of this stance within a Lutheran perspective, his exposition of the Augustinian use of paradox casts light upon de Lubac’s use of it in his development of the Augustinian Eucharistic theology. The predominance of Thomist analytics in Catholic theology has lent―paradoxically―a particularly Catholic interest to Tillich’s exposition of Augustine’s use of dialectic, as witnessed by his numerous Catholic commentators.
The writer has pointed out heretofore (Ch. 6, supra; see also Thomism and the Ontological Theology of Paul Tillich [Leiden: Brill, 1971], passim) the rationalist temptation, peculiar to the Augustinian theology, to reconvert its properly historical Pauline hylemorphism of sarx-pneuma to the Platonic dualism of matter and form. The Augustinian hylemorphism is the conversion of the Platonic idealism to salvation history: the Platonic morphe, ‘form,’ becomes pneuma, ‘spirit,’ while the Platonic hyle, ‘matter’ becomes sarx, ‘flesh.’ In this conversion, “spirit” does not entail immateriality but entry into Jesus’ victory over death (I Cor. 15:45); “flesh” does not mean corporeality as such, but personal involvement in the fallen dynamic of disintegration that leads to the ultimate disintegration, the “dust” of death. Of themselves, ‘flesh’ and ‘spirit’ are radically opposed, irreducible to any intelligible unity. Like all else in the fallen world and its fallen history, they lack substantial integrity: their factual integration is ex nihilo, an antecedent impossibility, but achieved ex nihilo by the Eucharistic institution of the One Flesh of the New Covenant, the Pauline new creation.
The restoration of this free integrity by One Sacrifice of the second Adam is his institution, as its head, of the One Flesh of the New Covenant, whose historical appropriation is at one with personal participation in the Church’s Eucharistic worship. Jesus’ sacrificial liberation of humanity, and of creation as such, from fallen servitude to sin and death, reveals human integrity to be primordially free, primordially nuptial, viz., free “in the Beginning’ which “Beginning” Paul, in Col. 1:17, identifies as Jesus the Christ, the second Adam whom the Apocalypse names the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End. This freedom is nuptially ordered: it is appropriated by baptism into the Body that is the bridal Church, and into the One Flesh of the Church’s union with her risen Lord. In fallen history, this union is sacramental, radically Eucharistic. As has been set out at length in Volume 2, Chapter Six, the prime analogate of human integrity, i.e., that by which our sarkic and dichotomous selves are re-integrated in sacramento, can only be the Eucharistic representation of the One Flesh, for this causes the Church, and thus underlies our baptism into the Church, and our entry into the freedom of the One Flesh, than which there is no other: the free unity of the Good Creation that is in Christ, the Beauty, ancient yet forever new, who enabled Augustine to hear the voice of him whom he had long loved.
[340] The point warrants elaboration in some detail. In the opening page of an article several times cited by de Lubac in Corpus mysticum, (see endnote 11, supra), Fr. Th. Camelot stresses the need to transcend the apologetic concern, the polemic mentality, which he thinks to mar Batiffol’s Eucharistic theology; and to be evinced by Batiffol’s allusion to the confusion prompted by literal reading of Augustine’s paradoxical Eucharistic language. Camelot finds the remedy in what amounts to an approfondissement of the Augustinian “analogies,” underlying that supposed confusion which recognizes their fruitfullness and explores it without the preoccupations which Camelot believes to lessen the value of Batiffol’s exposition of Augustine’s Eucharistic doctrine. Thus Camelot stresses the irreplaceable value of those Augustinian “analogies” which Batiffol thinks have caused confusion but which in Camelot’s view, possess “une richesse qu’il ne saurait négliger.” There is no reason to suppose that Batiffol disputes their value: rather, he criticizes their undeniable difficulty, which Camelot also recognizes at the outset of his essay.
Batiffol’s concern for the defense of the orthodoxy of the patristic Eucharistic doctrine is patent throughout the two-volume study whose second volume he has devoted to that subject: it is a concern by no means limited to his treatment of Augustine. Writing a generation earlier than Camelot, with the Counter-Reformation orientation then still typifying Jesuit theology, he finds in the exploitation of the Augustinian paradoxes practiced by Protestant theologians such as Loofs and Harnack, in service of a symbolist rejection of Eucharistic realism, a danger to the faith sufficient to require a Catholic response. It is in this context, openly apologetical and controversial, that he speaks of a confusion having arisen out of Augustine’s homiletical explanations of the Eucharist, particularly in Sermones 227 and 272. He can hardly be blamed for speaking of “confusion;” nearly a century later it is again manifest in the view of liturgical renewal set out in Cardinal Mahony’s Pastoral Letters, nor is his confused and confusing reading of Sermons 227 and 272 a solitary instance of Catholic reliance upon their anti-sacramental Protestant exegesis.
Camelot’s development of the Augustinian Eucharistic doctrine out of those same texts is entirely admirable. Free of all polemic, expository rather than apologetical, it invites the Catholic faithful to appropriate the wealth opened to them precisely by those Eucharistic “analogies” in which Batiffol found a source of confusion. Yet in abstaining from apologetics and polemic, Camelot prescinds also from any clarification of the historical foundation of the “analogies” he finds in Augustine’s Eucharistic doctrine. E.g., while it is true that for Augustine, the Eucharistic sign is identified with that which it signs, it is also true that Augustine distinguishes between the sign and the signified, between the res and the sacramentum. Their historical―because liturgical―unity in diversity, in sum their “analogy,” is then unclear, implicit rather than explicit. The same obscurity attends, and has long troubled, the patristic and theological comprehension of the comparable Augustinian “analogy” between the Christ and the Church. At a homiletic level, wherein Augustine is relied upon as a preëminent doctor of the Church, such explication is unnecessary, for homiletics rests upon the liturgy, upon the tradition whose heart is Eucharistic: it does not depend upon theological analysis and in fact would be burdened by being so. Nonetheless, the absence of such theological clarity in the homilist can easily be a bar to his paraenetic communication of the full value of, for example, nuptial symbolism, as we have seen in Amalarius’ famous analysis of the “triforme” Pauline use of “body”. In fact, this crucial “analogy” receives little attention in Camelot’s discussion of Augustine’s Eucharistic doctrine, although it is basic to an understanding of the unitas corporis that is the res sacramenti of the Eucharist for Augustine and the Latin Fathers.
Thus the reliance of homiletics upon the liturgy cannot dispense theologians from their preoccupation with the quaerens intellectum proper to systematic or dogmatic theology: This quaerens is of itself an untroubled inquiry into the Eucharistic mystery; it is not per se a defensive or polemical task. At the same time, by force of circumstance, dogmatic theology cannot avoid that task and in fact is typically involved in it, for the truth of the Church’s worship in truth is proclaimed in a world often intent upon its negation, a negation that cannot go unanswered without an abdication of responsibility in and for the worship of the Church. Nonetheless, the theological quaerens does not depend upon the presence of such distraction, however often, even perennially, it must proceed to recognize and respond to it.
When theologians do not meet this responsibility, the Eucharistic Words of Institution are put in issue by a methodological subordination to criteria uncritically assumed to transcend their truth: i.e., to transcend the significance, the sacramental signing, intrinsic to the Eucharistic liturgy. This subordination of the historical faith, whose historicity is its liturgy, to rational necessity, to “necessary reasons,” tempted Carolingians such as Ratramnus and Rhabanus Maurus, but began in earnest with Berengarius’ unqualified subscription to the logic of his time which, once taken to be autonomous and therefore immune to criticism, always looks to the dehistoricization of its subject matter. No Catholic theologian can accept that subordination of historical reality to rational necessity, for that project collapses as soon as its radical futility is recognized, but that recognition has required centuries. Even now, Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorems are little known in the theological community. At the same time, every Catholic theologian must recognize that the Catholic liturgy is historical, that it grounds theology as well as hermeneutics, and that qua theologian he must be conscious of the liturgical-sacramental historicity of his subject, the res Catholica, the liturgical-doctrinal-moral tradition. Today the Catholic tradition is chiefly threatened not by an explicitly symbolist hermeneutic, but by supposedly dialectical resolutions, quasi-Barthian, of the Eucharistic “analogies,” notably that analogy which would at once identifies and distinguishes between Christ and his Church. The proposed dialectical resolutions of these analogies all lack historical foundation for, invariably, they entail a flat rejection of the historical-sacramental concreteness of the One Flesh, which de Lubac has affirmed to be foundational for Catholic theology. The nuptial unity of this free reality, the New Covenant, cannot be foregone without a radical dehistoricization of the Catholic faith, whose foundational affirmation, “Jesus is Lord,” is Eucharistic, an assertion that his Lordship is Eucharistic. It is by his Eucharistic presence, immanent in and transcendent to history, that he is the Lord of history, for only in the Eucharistic Sacrifice does his historical immanence transcend history as its Lord and thus as its Redeemer.
This “dialectic” has begun to infect Catholic homiletics and catechetics, as is evident in Cardinal Mahony’s Pastoral Letters on liturgical renewal, while the distaste of academic specialists in liturgy for Eucharistic nuptial symbolism is reflected in, e.g., I.C.E.L.’s “Third Progress Report” cited in endnote 301, supra. That symbolism., it must be said again, is indispensable to Eucharistic realism and thus to the historicity of the Church. At the same time, those who uphold it often undercut its historicity by its entirely inconsistent attribution at once to the union of Christ and the Church on the one hand and, on the other, to a nonhistorical union of Christ and the individual “soul,” as though the latter were a “Church in miniature,” a proposition which, taken seriously, establishes an immediacy between Christ and the soul that obviates the ecclesial mediation of the grace of Christ. This mistake has profoundly damaged Catholic spirituality by ignoring its sacramental and finally Eucharistic sustenance.
It is the task of theology to defend as well as to assert the historical, Eucharistic and covenantal event-immanence of the Christ in his bridal Church. This task is inescapably apologetic, and all too often inescapably controversial, for the nuptial symbolism of the Catholic liturgy stands athwart the dualist romanticism that is Modernity. Further: Eucharistic theology cannot but be systematic, and thus in some measure academic, requiring precise statement: it will always have that tinge of the scholastic which scholars whose interest is in the more positive theological disciplines now often deplore, ignoring the while their own investment in the idiom of a school. Doubtless systematic theology can easily become pedantic, deplorable at least sub specie aeternitatis, but we all exist in fallen history and behave accordingly.
It is the great virtue of Augustine’s Eucharistic doctrine that it was developed in an age free of Eucharistic controversy. Although his presentation of it is defensive here and there, as in his vigorous rejection of Capharnaïtism, no threat to Eucharistic realism had arisen in his time. Nonetheless, his resumé of the covenantal unity of Christ-Church, bridegroom-Bride, Head-Body unity in the One Flesh of the Christus totus raised the properly theological problem of its metaphysical standing. No solution was then available: the monism of substance then taken for granted barred it outright.
We have pointed to this failure of theological coherence as posing the problem of systematically transforming the classic theological speculation by postulating the free substantiality, the free intelligibility, of the created order in its imaging of God: radically, this is inherent in its creation in Christ, in the Beginning. Augustine’s resolution of the dilemma posed by Paul’s affirmation of the Head-Body, Bridegroom-Bride ordo of the Christ Church unity received little patristic attention, and has received correspondingly little attention from the Carolingian and the scholastic theologians. It can hardly continue to be ignored when, as de Lubac has seen, the exploration by Catholic theologians of nuptial symbolism has become indispensable. However, this problem aroused little theological interest, until Pope John Paul II’s “theology of the body” began to focus attention upon the nuptial unity of our creation to the image of the Trinity, and of the consequent nuptial order of our imaging of God. The only possible systematic resolution of the problem of the free unity of the Eucharistically-objective One Flesh is that which the present work has proposed: the recognition of its standing as the prime analogate being as historical and therefore as free, a freedom that requires the nuptial order of its source, the One Sacrifice.
[341] We have seen the text from Sermo 341: it recites an Augustinian commonplace:
All of us are at once members of Christ and his body; not only those of us who are in this place, but throughout the whole world, and not only those of us who are alive at this time, but what shall I say? From Abel the just to the end of the world, for as long as men beget and are begotten, whoever of the just makes the passage through this life, all that now, that is, not in this place but in this life, whoever will be born in the future, constitute the one body of Christ, while they are each individually members of Christ.
Sermo 341, xi (PL 39:1499-1500); see the Migne Latin text in endnote 23, supra.
[342] De Lubac locates his treatment of the sacrificial institution of the New Covenant in the context of a rich patristic and liturgical commentary on Jn. 19:34:
Car cette eau du baptême, n’était-ce pas saint Jean encore qui la montrait coulant avec le sang―symbole de l’Eucharistie―du côté de Jésus ouvert par le lance?84 Bibitur quod de Christi latere manavit 85. Les liturgies ne manquaient pas de le rappeler, au moment où le prêtre joint l’eau dans le calice 86. Or, ce mélange mystique ne figurait-il pas en même temps, comme saint Cyprien l’avait longuement exposé, l’union nécessaire du Christ et du peuple chrétien par la Passion de Christ dans le sacrifice de l’Église?87.
84 Ce qu’on traduisait encore, symétriquement, en évoquant les eaux de la mère Rouge, Augustin, In Joannem, trct. 11, n. 4 (P. L. 35, 1477); tract. 45, n. 9 (1723), Sermo Wilmart 5 (Morin, p. 687), Hésychius (Pseudo-Athanase), In psalmum 136 (P. G. 27, 1272 B), Jérôme, In psalmum 105 (M., p. 174), Pseudo-Primasius, In Hebr : « Allegorice autem, mare rubrum baptismus est, rubore sanguinis Christi consecratus. » (P. L. 68, 769B), Remi d’Auxerre, (131, 225 C, 715 A), Atton de Verceil, InHebr. (134, 809 D), etc. Cf. Chrysostome, In Hebr (P.G. 63, 124).
85 Ambroise, In Lucam 1, 10, n. 135 (P. L. 15, 1838 C), Pseudo-Ambroise, De sacramentis (16, 447 A-B), Augustin, Contra Faustum (42, 265),Cyrille d’Alexandrie, In I Cor., x fragm. (P.G. 74, 880 B-C, Hésychius, In psalmum 35 (93, 1189 C). Historia mystagogica (The Journal of theological Studies, t. IX, p. 264). Liber seu definitio ecclesiasticorum dogmatum, c. 41 (ibid., T. VII, p. 97). Fauste de Riez (P.l. 30, 274 B-C). Raban Maur (107, 32-0 A). Florus, Expositio missae (Duc, p. 136). Pseudo-Augustin, Ad neophytos, cité par Paschase (120, 1352 C, 1354 A, 1355 A). Hincmar (125, 927-928). Jean de Fécamp, (101, 1091 A). Rupert (169, 520 D). Werner de St. Blaise, (157, 910 D). Hnororius (172, 555 A). Hugues de Saint-Victor, De sacramentis (175, 425 DE). Herman, Epitome (178, 1742 A). Speculum Ecclesiae (177, 367 C-D). Hervé, (181, 935 C). Anselme d’Havelberg, (188, 1243 B-C). Pierre de Blois (207, 1145 B-C). Sicard de Cremone, (213, 117 et 146). Étienne Langton (Geiselmann, Die Abendmahlslehre…, p. 85), etc.
86 Liturgies ambrosienne, mozarabe, gallicane: « de latere Domini nostri Jesu Christi exivit sanguis et aqua. » Formule conservée à Lyon et chez les Chartreux.
87 Epistula 63 (Bayard, t. II, pp. 206-208). Les deux explications sont donées par le Pseudo-Germain de Paris: « Aqua autem ideo miscitur, vel quia decet populo unitum esse cum Domino, vel quia de latere Christi in cruce exivit sanguis et aqua » (P. L. 72, 93 B). De même par Théodulphe d’Orléans, Liber de ordine baptismi, c. 18 (105, 240), par le Concile de Tribur en 895, canon 19 (Mansi, t. VII, 131), etc.
Corpus mysticum, at 205. Cf. St. Augustine, De Trin. 4, 15; 4, 17; 4, 19.
[343] Again:
Facit haec quidem Spiritus Sanctus, sed absit ut sine Filio facit.
Contra serm. Arr. 32 (PL 42:704-705) at 705.
[344] The text translates the final sentence of Book 10, Chapter 20 of the De Civitate Dei, underlined below: Ch. 20 in its entirety reads as follows:
Unde verus ille Mediator, in quantum formam servi accipiens mediator effectus est Dei et hominum homo Christus Jesus, cum in forma Dei sacrificium cum Patre sumat, cum quo et unus Deus est, tamen in forma servi sacrificium maluit esse quam sumere, ne vel hac occasione quisquam existimaret cuilibet sacrificandum esse creaturae. Per hoc et sacerdos est, ipse offerens, ipse et oblatio. Cujus rei sacramentum quotidianum esse voluit Ecclesiae sacrificium: quae cum ipsius capitis corpus sit, se ipsam per ipsum discit offerre ,
[345] Augustine’s realism is spelled out in De Civitate Dei x, 20 (P.L. 41:0298 XXXX CCh), There the Priest and the Victim of the Eucharistic Sacrifice is Jesus the Christ. The translation in The City of God by the Anglican scholar Marcus Dods, D.D., published in the American Library edition of The City of God (New York: 1950) at 325, differs in no point of doctrine from the translation provided by Msgr. Jurgens’ Early Fathers, III, § 1745, at 99.
[346] We have seen de Lubac read De Civitate Dei x, 6, as making the Sacrifice of the Mass to be simply the Church, a reading he finds also in chapter 20 of that work: see Corpus mysticum 198-99, n. 52, quoted in endnote 268, supra. This exegesis is further discussed in the pages to which that endnote refers. It must be kept in view that de Lubac, especially in the pages of Corpus mysticum here cited, has stressed the need for a most subtle interpretation of Augustine’s theology, and especially of his Eucharistic doctrine: a failure so to read Augustine is a failure to understand him. The pertinent text of De Civitate Dei X, 20 should be before us:
Cum igitur vera sacrificia opera sint misericordiae, sive in nos ipsos, sive in proximos, quae referuntur ad Deum; opera vero misericordiae non ob aliud fiunt, nisi ut a miseria liberemur, ac per hoc ut beati simus; quod non fit, nisi bono illo de quo dictum est, Mihi autem adhaerere Deo bonum est (Psal. lxxii, 28): profecto efficitur, ut tota ipsa redempta civitas, hoc est congregatio societasque sanctorum, universale sacrificium offeratur Deo per sacerdotem magnum, qui etiam se ipsum obtulit in passione pro nobis, ut tanti capitis corpus essemus, secundum formam servi. Hanc enim obtulit, in hac oblatus est; quia secundum hanc mediator est, in hac sacerdos, in hac sacrificium est. Cum itaque nos hortatus esset Apostolus, ut exhibeamus corpora nostra hostiam vivam, sanctam, Deo placentem, rationabile obsequium nostrum, et non conformemur huic saeculo, sed reformemur in novitate mentis nostrae; ad probandum quae sit voluntas Dei, quod bonFum et beneplacitum et perfectum, quod totum sacrificium ipsi nos sumus: Dico enim, inquit, per gratiam Dei, quae data est mihi, omnibus qui sunt in vobis, non plus sapere, quam oportet sapere, sed sapere ad temperantiam; sicut unicuique Deus partitus est fidei mensuram. Sicut enim in uno corpore multa membra habemus, omnia autem membra non eosdem actus habent: ita multi unum corpus sumus in Christo; singuli autem, alter alterius membra, habentes dona diversa secundum gratiam, quae data est nobis (Rom. xii, 3-6). Hoc est sacrificium Christianorum: multi unum corpus in Christo. Quod etiam Sacramento altaris fidelibus noto frequentat Ecclesia, ubi ei demonstratur, quod in ea re quam offert ipsa offeratur (Sic manuscripti. At editi, quod in ea oblatione quam offert).
St. Augustine, De Civ. Dei, x, 20 (P.L. 41: 0283-84.
[347] De Lubac, The Splendour of the Church, 111-12.