This next section of chapter three covers The Eucharistic Canon in the Liturgy of Saint Basil the Great and the Change of the Holy Gifts, and how this rich liturgy holds the whole theological understanding of the anaphora and the eucharist in the eastern Churches. To make offerings is what humans do naturally and collectively, as we can see in history, and it’s how we find our identity. In the anaphora, Christ is both the offerer and the offered. Some of the names attributed to Christ in the liturgy are “Great God and Savior, “the image of the Father’s goodness,” “seal of equal type,” and “Living Word.” At the same time as these positive terms the names of Christ are described apophatically, or, negatively. He is also God “without beginning [cause].” The names attributed to the Holy Spirit in the liturgy are also scriptural. His name is “the Spirit of Truth” and “the life-creating power.” The Holy Spirit guides rational creatures “to offer up to the Father ever-existing doxologies [hymns of glory].” Angels and humans are created to do this common work that the liturgy calls an offering – an anaphora in Greek. Rationality calls us to offer up what has been given to us back to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The Eucharistic canon speaks of these realities. Anaphorical nature is eucharistic.
Human reason lives within the realm of the senses in the world. It helps to understand spiritual things — maybe only in parables. It has its own goals on earth that is bound in its scope. The use of reasoning requires analysis of things that can be separated and understood parts separately in time and space. To the degree that is possible with certain aspects of the liturgical life of the church, it is very helpful. But we learn from the Liturgy of Saint Basil the Great that there are some major limits to our understanding of God in his essence. The anaphora is worked out in a community led by the Holy Spirit who bestows names on us while we cry out in prayer during the divine liturgy the names that help us and heal us. Our opposite natures then meet at that very point. The mystery of the ever-existing one gives us existence, the ever-living one dies on the cross and resurrects, the perfect meets the imperfect, humanity mingles with divinity, the beginningless one comes into flesh that began when God created us. God doesn’t change. Only our view of Him can change, since necessarily a viewpoint or worldview must look from one angle at a time while God sees all things at once. The anaphora is the point at which divinity and humanity meet. Rather than viewing apophatic (negative statements) and cataphatic (positive statements) about God as only opposites, they provide the means for different natures and energies to commune, as Dionysius the Areopagite teaches about the divine names of God in the Celestial Hierarchy. For example, the space of worship in heaven is filled up. The nine ranks of angels offer up to God praise with “unceasing voices” coming from all angles at once while they cover up “their faces and eyes” with their many-winged members. Anaphoras not only include the nature of all creatures but also it changes the whole environmental space and time of the universe. Offerings to the Holy Trinity fill the huge expanses of the cosmos with sounds of heaven. The doxologies surround God’s glory. So, the divine liturgy and eucharistic offering is a fully integrated and all-encompassing experience of eternal life that surrounds and fulfills every spiritual sensation like an amphitheater captures the sound of voices from every corner simultaneously. The Eucharist unites the deified flesh of Christ with our flesh so that we can save both our soul and body.
The “change” (metabolon Gk.) of the Changeless One, when the bread and wine turn into the Body and Blood of Christ, the Holy Eucharist, is another theological aspect that differs somewhat from western Christianity. How and when that happens has occupied the attention of theologians and it has been approached from many sides. The Orthodox Church has not defined when that change occurs visually or textually during the anaphora prayers from a human understanding. Although we cannot visibly see the change happen, we can hear the praises and prayers acoustically as a way of exercising our faith in God’s power. Western theologians, however, have attempted to pinpoint where and when, in fact, there is a change in terms of logic, visual rituals, and the pronouncement of specific words and phrases in liturgical texts as the true cause of this mystery. The eucharist becomes the Body and Blood of Christ, and He becomes our “food,” Metropolitan Hilarion teaches. We cannot just symbolize what is substantial – what is “our daily bread.” If Christ didn’t become our sustenance, our source of life for body and spirit, then the problem of sin remains and the way we abuse materiality and our own bodies through our passions. We would only return to the original starting point in the garden of the physical food as the material for temptation and the soul would still be tied to flesh that hasn’t been deified and uses it to continue sinning.
The fruit would continue to be “merely fruit” instead of divinized food touched by the Holy Spirit just as in the first creation read in the Book of Genesis. It can be fruit and spirit; what was uncovered was recovered. Fruit and food are no longer just “bare elements” when they are offered rightly to the Holy Trinity. We take all our resources and nourishment on faith in general. We experience it, wait for it, and over time we are persuaded to follow a path to gaining life that is worth the risks and unknowns. All human action must be grounded on the assumption of faith to begin its orientation toward its goal. St. Cyril of Jerusalem teaches his catechumens. He says, are we not allowed to drink enough from the river to satisfy and nourish us? Are we to go away thirsty because we cannot drink up the whole river? Faithful people who go to the liturgy live within a body that has a nous, a gift of God. Humanns require the use of reasoning to understand animals, atoms and the atmosphere, and we proceed and probe these areas of creation from a kind of hope to gain and gather more from them to improve and grow in life.
Contrary to the principal of philosophic doubt leading to new discoveries and truths in science, a kind of reasoning method applied to the world of natural laws, persuasion and faith are enough to find truth, not fully seen here. That road of faith is also a common work of humankind. For example, we created the use of bread from what God has made – the plants, trees, and seeds of the earth. Metropolitan Hilarion calls bread and wine “our custom.” God receives this customary food as an offering to make it holy and deified, which will deify our own bodies. Out of bare elements, Christ ties himself into our way of making food and drink. He puts his life into creation and into our bodies, who are also part of the particles that are “never lost.” Food, then, is never really eaten without some degree of faith, and it cannot be merely symbolic, otherwise the characteristic of substantial is lost.
The Latin school of theology emphasizes the visual aspects of this “change.” When western Europe received Greek texts, many of them from non-Christian, classical antiquity, they developed an approach to explaining the relationship between God, creation, and mankind. Their view was built largely on the logical and literate world of the alphabet and law, much like Byzantium. Rather than taking a broad understanding of the effects of the eucharist on the whole of creation, Latin theologians used Platonic and Aristotelian principles to help defend and preserve the change of the Eucharist into the Body and Blood of Christ. They explained that change through “transubstantiation” and they linked that to the specific and obligatory “words of institution” spoken by Christ in the New Testament at the Last Supper. The words themselves, then, became of primary importance in western European culture around the late Middle Ages, and especially later in the Renaissance. Greek philosophy, which some Byzantine refugees brought to Italy, helped Latins and other far western Europeans formulate their theology of the eucharist. The classical Greco-Roman literature itself, not necessarily the Greek Byzantine characters, influenced Italians and French to coagulate into what would become the Enlightenment and the “Age of Reason” – a deification of the abstract mind and reasoning powers of humanity — in fact, a fragmentation and separation of the senses of sight and sound through private reading. What is common between Roman Catholics and Protestants, even though one holds to the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist and the other denies it, is that the words themselves take on a greater meaning than other aspects of theology. For Roman Catholicism, transubstantiation is framed carefully with Thomistic and Aristotelian terms and a keen focus on the wording of the anaphora – only specific words can be used to make the Eucharist change. Rome made transubstantiation a dogma in a few councils in the 13th c. and 14th c. In it, the meaning of that term outlines a distinction. The bread and wine are called accidents, outer characteristics, while the essence, is what it in fact is and becomes. They teach that the elements of bread and wine disappear while visibly they still look like normal food.
The Orthodox Church understands this change of the Changeless God in a similar way to the Transfiguration at Mt. Tabor and Theophany of Christ in the Jordan River. The eucharistic change could be understood as a transfiguration. When the Holy Spirit came down on Christ as St. John the Forerunner baptized Him, Christ was still both God and man. When the Father spoke on Mt. Tabor, who was heard audibly and remained unseen, Christ shone in Light, but he was still both God and man in the flesh. In the Orthodox canon of the eucharist, unlike the Latin Mass, there is no “loss” of substance, either spiritual or physical. Latin theology explains that the bread and wine no longer are bread and wine. The earthly elements disappear. But the Holy Eucharist is
“supersubstantial.” Our food becomes more than in addition to what we are offering to God the Father. The meaning of anaphora is to take what God created and given to us, and to make something more, and then offer that back to God in a new form while retaining some of the original. God can receive it and sanctify and unite to Himself and to us. The strange effect – maybe illogical humanly speaking – of sacrificial offering and anaphora to the Holy Trinity is that nothing is lost in giving something up, but even more abounds because of faith. The Orthodox faith grasps both the accidents and the essence of in Platonic-Aristotelian terms simultaneously and mystically. In this way, Orthodox anaphora makes sense of Latin transubstantiation. The change – the metabolon – is an all-at-once happening, not segmented through history, not limited, or separated by points. The logical order of liturgical life and anaphora remains extremely important, but the change of the Changeless One is beyond what humans can do to make sense of our earthly experience of space and time and language. Despite that theology found in the Liturgy of St. Basil the Great, some Russian theologians still accepted Latin theology. For example, Peter Mogila wrote a Catechism in the style of today’s Roman Catholic Catechism and he used transubstantiation as well as many other Orthodox theologians to defend the Eucharist against Christians who doubted it. But many recent Russian theologians rejected this western conception of the eucharistic canon. For example, Ouspensky, Schmemann, and Meyendorff helped to revive a truly eastern understanding of the Holy Eucharist. When transubstantiation is pushed to an extreme, it becomes a kind of modalism that might come close to untying the two natures of Christ by association. If the elements do disappear, and we are not consuming deified food in our nature, then there is a risk of the bread and wine becoming symbols, not deified and unified food – the very conclusion that was meant to be avoided. Reasoning relies on mental perception through the senses. Faith rests in the heart, the nous in the body, through an integrated experience and understanding of the world. Socrates said, people cannot call themselves happy until they have ended their life. There is enough wonder in ourselves, nature, history, and the cultural traditions of wisdom to understand and be persuaded that we have a body and a soul, that eternity and death are realities, and those facts have the most persuasive connection in the Orthodox teaching of the Eucharist that link with the doctrines about Christ Jesus. The Holy Eucharist is two one; Christ Jesus has two natures united in one person. Humans find their identity in the body with the soul. Christ is perfect God and perfect man. St. John of Damascus teaches that Christ has two natures in one like “bread united with divinity.” Anaphora transfigures the “plain stuff” into something higher without loss but increase. Like “coal united with fire isn’t plain wood” so too bread and wine united to Christ’s Body and Blood is supersubstantial food that we eat for our deification in body and blood, healing our souls. If transubstantiation means that Creator and creatures have restored a link and bridge to go across to each other and abide with each other while we maintain our own substances, then eastern and western Christians could agree with each other’s use of that term. The Russian emigres theologians didn’t receive this Roman dogma as a teaching that would fit into the liturgical life of the Orthodox Church.
Every particle participates in the total renewal of creation. Faith is a holy gift of preparation and an element of “change” toward the Changeless God in our prayers during the divine liturgy, not in ratiocination, that seeks to perceive the eternal “utterance” in the echoes of our flesh and noetic heart. The next section discusses the Prayer of Intercession, Preparation for Communion, and Communion.