16. THE EUCHARIST

Thermal conservatism was one of the main features of Byzantine civilization, extending to both the secular and sacred aspects of life, and especially manifesting itself in the forms of the Liturgy. But if the intention to leave everything as it is was openly declared, if the structure of the Eucharist has not changed since the first centuries of Christianity and even today retains the form that developed in the ninth century, then the interpretation of words and gestures has undergone significant changes and development. Thus, Byzantine ritual conservatism was a tool for preserving the original Christian lex orandi, interpreted in the context of Platonic or moralized symbolism, which, however, sometimes happened. At the same time, this conservatism made it possible, when appropriate – the examples of Nicholas Cabasilas and the hesychastic theologians of the fourteenth century – to rigorously reaffirm the primordial sacramental realism in liturgical theology.

1. Symbols, images, reality

Early Christianity and the patristic Tradition understood the Eucharist as the Sacrament of authentic and real communion with Christ. Speaking of the Eucharist, Chrysostom insisted that "Christ is now present and now active"492; and Gregory of Nyssa, in spite of his inclination to Platonism, expounds the same view of the Eucharist in a different way – as the sacrament of real "participation" in the glorified Body of Christ as the seed of immortality.

By the distribution of His mercy, He sows Himself in everyone who believes through the flesh, the transubstantiated bread and wine, uniting Himself with the bodies of believers. And by this union with the Eternal, man can also participate in immortality. He grants this by virtue of the blessing by which He transforms [metastoicheiosis] the natural quality of these visible things into that imperishable thing.

Participation in these sources of immortality and unity is a constant concern of every Christian:

It is good and beneficial to partake of Communion every day [writes Basil] and to partake of the Holy Body and Blood of Christ. For He says exactly: "He who eats My Flesh and drinks My Blood has eternal life" (John 6:55). And who can doubt that often participating in life is the same as having a full life? I commune four times a week, on the Lord's Days, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, and on other days when a saint is commemorated.

As we have seen, this realistic and existential theology of the Eucharist came into conflict with the pastoral needs of the post-Constantinian Church: the gathering of large numbers of the faithful in large churches led to a decrease in the participation of the laity in the life of the community.

One can try to prove that the pastoral considerations behind such a development can be justified, at least in part; the eschatological meaning of the Eucharist implied the separation from the "world", the "withdrawal" from it of the "closed" community of consecrated participants. And now, when in the empire of Constantine and Justinian it had become difficult to distinguish between the Church and the world, because society seemed to be one, the Eucharist had to be guarded from the "crowd," which had ceased to be "the people of God." Most controversial, however, is the theological justification for this new situation preached by some interpreters of the Liturgy, who have begun to explain the Eucharist as a system of symbols to be "contemplated"; sacramental participation was thus gradually replaced by speculation. Needless to say, such a new approach fit perfectly into the Origenist and Evagrian understanding of religion as the ascent of reason to God, and the liturgical act is only a symbol of such an ascent.

The most effective instrument for the dissemination of such a symbolic understanding of the Eucharist was the writings of Pseudo-Dionysius. Reducing the Eucharistic "synaxis"496 to the level of a moralistic proclamation, the Areopagite calls its readers to a "higher" contemplation: