“It should also be noted how dependent Luther is here on the philosophical outlook of Ockhamism, despite all the protestations against scholasticism and philosophy. For Ockham there was no intelligible species in cognition as on the preceding epistemological models. On those models, the form or intelligible species of an object was actually grasped by the mind so that the mind took on or became the form or essence of an object. This incidentally was garnered from Aristotle who thought that the liquid in the eye was clear or translucent to take on all colors and so in a similar way the mind itself is formless. Knowledge was a two-place relation where the knower directly grasps the nature of the object even if there is a great difference in the sensible species or sensible qualities. Not all doors look alike, but they have the same form, which is communicated to and grasped by the mind. For Ockhamists though, there was no intelligible species and knowledge became a three place relation with the knower, the representation and the object. To make matters worse, the causal power of an object was insufficient to necessarily preserve the connection between the representation of itself and the object so that it was now possible that a representation or image could be caused to exist by something else other than that it was an image of. So an image of a palm tree could be produced in you without there being any palm tree present but instead caused in you by say God or the devil. An image then becomes causally diminished such that it can represent something totally opposed to it.”
http://energeticprocession.com/2009/07/03/hes-got-issues/
This description reminds me of transubstantiation. Indeed, it’s applicable to any version of the real presence.
Sacramental realists quote passages like “This is my body,” “This is my blood,” and “I am the bread” to prove the real presence.
One of the problems, though, is that if you take their prooftexts at face value, then their prooftexts prove too much. For it immediately generates a discrepancy between appearance and reality. There is the outward appearance of bread and wine, but the underlying reality of Christ’s body and blood. What you see is not what you get.
The doctrine of the real presence sets up a three-place relation between the communicant, the wafer, and the Host. The wafer is the representation. But there’s no intrinsic connection between the representation and the Host.
To the contrary, sacramental realism has to detach the secondary qualities of bread and wine from their primary qualities, detach the secondary qualities of a body and blood from their primary qualities, then attach the secondary qualities of bread and wine to the primary qualities of a body and blood.
Once you treat secondary qualities as detachable from primary qualities, then mix and match them, the underlying reality could be anything at all. It would be wholly undetectable. The secondary qualities would afford no indication of what you were actually encountering. Seems to me that any version of the real presence is subject to this consequence.
"To the contrary, sacramental realism has to detach the secondary qualities of bread and wine from their primary qualities, detach the secondary qualities of a body and blood from their primary qualities, then attach the secondary qualities of bread and wine to the primary qualities of a body and blood."
ReplyDeleteNo.
1) We don't believe in Transubstantiation. It is a Docetistic doctrine.
2) The Litury has an Eschatological reality. Christ's body is not "dragged" out of Heaven. Rather it is we who are lifted up to Christ and feed on Christ by the Holy Spirit
3) All the operations, attributes, qualities, and essence of bread and wine are intact.
Photios
The question is the sense in which you think that Christ is physically related to the (consecrated) communion elements.
ReplyDeleteClearly the bread and wine lack the sensory properties of Jesus body and blood. So that would create a hiatus between appearance and reality.
How do you translate your picturesque metaphors into literal propositions? What do your words actually stand for?
The Appearance <--> Reality dialectical opposition that you want to read into the Orthodox view of the Eucharist is a symptomatic problem of how you understand theology more broadly. I would argue that this comes from 'Augustinism' and the historiographical tradition of the West via Rome's canonical standards.
ReplyDeleteIt's not an either/or dialectical opposition. It's a both/and dialectic. The Bread and Wine, that really is bread and wine, is enhypostasized in Christ's Person, such that the idioms of the natures are communicated to each other by dint of the person (dia thn hypostasin). This is why, christologically, the bread and wine saves, is Christ's body and blood, and yet the 'substance' of bread and wine does not becomes something 'other' than bread and wine. It retains its integrity. Straighten out the categories of Person and Nature, understand that relationship in a particular order (the Ordo Theologiae), and that the properites of each natures are transferred to the other through the person, and then you have the basis of Orthodoxy's Chalcedonian Christology and Soteriology.
What I'm giving you might seem a little odd, but it is the older doctrine (e.g. Gelasius) prior to the scholastics and the pseudomorphosis of those terms.
A good example is Ratramnus of Corbie, a Hellenist par excellence, who could not see the connection between what he said about the filioque, predestination, and the Eucharist. But everything for him must be clarified and rarefied in those either/or dialectical opposites.
Photios
Dan,
ReplyDeleteYou and Perry have a bad habit of trying to shoehorn every discussion into a preexisting grid, even if what was said has nothing to do with your preexisting grid.
The discrepancy between appearance and reality I’m talking about isn’t based on some philosophical precommitment. Rather, it’s generated by the nature of the claim (the real presence) in contrast to human experience.
If you say the bread and wine are literally the body and blood of Christ, then how does a literal body or blood present itself in literal bread and wine?
The body of Christ was somewhere between 5-6 feet tall, give or take. He weighed somewhere between 150-200 lbs. give or take. Had a beard. Dark eyes. Fingernails. Toenails. Arms. Legs. Bones. Guts. And so on and so forth.
When Christians partake communion, is that what they perceive? No. All they perceive is bread and wine. And if we subjected the (consecrated) communion elements to chemical analysis, that is still what we would perceive. The chemical constituents of bread and wine.
Yet the body of Christ is physical. With its own set of physical properties.
Steve,
ReplyDeleteI do not believe it is a habitual, because Western theology understands the situation of categories in a rather either/or dialectical fashion.
Having said that, you're understanding of the Eucharistic mystery is couched in a way that an Orthodox would never accept. Your understanding is pretty much the same as what would happen in an 'alchemical' change. I don't blame you for understanding it that way and rejecting it, as it strikes you as what has been presented to you by Roman Catholics and perhaps the read of Byzantine 'scholasticism'. But that either/or dialectic is a legacy of Ratramnus and his dialetical opposite in the annhilationist view of Hildebert of Tours.
Luther, John Wycliffe, and in some sense Calvin with his eschatological understanding, are much closer to the authentic doctrine.
Photios
ENERGETICPROCESSION SAID:
ReplyDelete“I do not believe it is a habitual, because Western theology understands the situation of categories in a rather either/or dialectical fashion.”
Unless you’re a solipsist or a naïve realist, you understand the contrast between appearance and reality in the same way that everyone else does. Do Orthodox believers take the position that mountains really are smaller at a distance?
Do Orthodox believers take the position that if one observer has color vision while another observer is color-blind, there is no difference between the appearance of the object and what the object is like apart from observation?
This is not the imposition of theoretical categories on pretheoretical experience. Rather, pretheoretical experience gives rise to this discrepancy. A communicant does not and cannot perceive the bread and wine as the body and blood of Christ.
Therefore, if you’re going to assert that Christ is physical present in, or identical with, the communion elements, you automatically generate a hiatus between appearance and reality.
“Having said that, you're understanding of the Eucharistic mystery is couched in a way that an Orthodox would never accept. Your understanding is pretty much the same as what would happen in an 'alchemical' change.”
I haven’t taken a position on what happens–or whether anything happens at all. I’m simply discussing the implications of the real presence on its own terms.